If Loving You is Wrong

8: Vows

It was a quarter to seven before Antonio got back to his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where he lived with his wife and housekeeper Mrs. Barnes.

He had bought the five bedroom, four and half bathroom brownstone when he had won his first major corporate case and had had such plans for it.

He'd spent the first few years after the purchase renovating it to his tastes and once he'd got married, he and Olivia had started to get it ready for the family that they would one day have.

He stepped out of his car, bid a quiet goodbye to his driver and climbed the steps to his house.

On entry into the large foyer, he took of his coat and placed his keys on the dresser before walking into the Reception room where Mrs Barnes wiping down a small coffee table,

"Oh, Mr. Sabbatini, you're home."

"Looks that way...where is my wife?"

"Mrs Sabbatini is upstairs with Miranda."

"Thank you," he said before turning to leave and head to his office.

"Dinner will be in ten minutes," she said gently just as he disappeared around the corner.

Antonio took refuge in his office for the moment and collapsed into his desk chair. He had a few emails to reply to and calls he could make, but he knew it would only put off what he knew he had to do.

He had bottled out of telling Olivia in the car on the way here but as he was finally in their marital home; the need to confess was back with a vengeance. This was the home he had built for her even before he'd met her.

Olivia was everything to him, he had sacrificed so much for her surely she would forgive him for this.

Could he blame her if she didn't?

Even as he thought it, Antonio knew that Olivia might be able to forgive him for sleeping with someone else but she wouldn't for the thoughts that continued to plague him.

He still wanted Liana, no matter how wrong it was and that made him a monster.

All he could think about was her beautifully delicate face and her beautiful body stretched out beneath him like a sacrifice.

He'd watched her in the restaurant, mesmerised by the beautiful stranger sat meters from him but she was exactly that, a stranger. He wasn't about to introduce himself to her and put temptation directly in his path. So, he had sat watching her, drinking his fill of her beautiful face, knowing he would never see her again.

He had been wrong on that account of course and when he had seen her standing on the helipad of Asahd's soon to be father in law's yacht, he could have passed out from the surprise.

She was just as gorgeous as he'd remembered her, even more so in her barely there black bikini, curly hair blowing in the warm wind around them. She had proved intelligent, funny and insightful during dinner and he found himself drawn to her not only physically. He wanted to know more about the young woman studying at Harvard who he could tell, even across a dinner table; wasn't impressed that her friend was giving up education for marriage. Was she a feminist? Did she not approve of Asahd for some reason?

Who knew?

All he did know was that he wanted to know more about her and it killed him that he'd never be able to.

So, he'd been rude to her, dismissive; just to keep her away from him and out of his senses but nothing had worked.

The first night he'd kissed her simply because he felt compelled to. He had to kiss her, he'd told her as much when she asked even though he knew she wouldn't understand. He'd tossed and turned in his bed that first night thinking of her; so much so he'd got drunk to get the demons out of his head and the lust out of his groin. He'd fallen asleep drunk in the small reading room and had been shocked to hear her voice on a call.

He'd avoided her for the rest of his time on the yacht but that had proved a terrible decision as his need to see her only heightened. By the time he'd got to her door, his need for her was at a fever pitch and it was ultimately his undoing.

He'd never felt like this about anyone, not even Olivia and that terrified him.

Antonio rose from his seat and made his way into the dining room where Mrs Barnes was; this time arranging two settings for the dinner table. He poured himself a stiff drink and took a seat at the head of the table when a familiar sound caught his attention.

He hated that he hated it; that he resented it and had to arrange his face so that Olivia wouldn't see and be upset by it. It was a sound he'd had to get used to for ten years but still it grated him.

It was as though every time he heard it, it reminded Antonio of what he had lost; of what had been taken from him.

Antonio braced himself as he always did and soon enough, Olivia appeared around the corner in her wheelchair.

Olivia Sabbatini had been an Olympic Equestrian and while riding a horse on their honeymoon in Costa Rica; she had been thrown from her horse and shattered her first and second vertebrae causing her to become quadriplegic.

While she could speak after months and months of rehabilitation; his beautiful, perfect, energetic wife was a shell of her former self and Antonio had to figure out how to tell her, that for the first time in ten years; he had been unfaithful.

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