Chapter 3

Eliza shook herself , refusing to dwell on past events that she could not change and instead tried to focus on her present.

Breakfast passed with agonizing slowness, the silence broken only by the sound of Alpha's newspaper as he carefully perused the business section.

Eliza barely ate and hated her husband for being so unaffected by the tension that he could finish a hearty meal. Eliza picked up her own dishes and headed to the sink.

"You have to eat more than one slice of toast," her husband's voice suddenly growled unexpectedly. "You're getting much too thin." The fact that he had noticed what she'd eaten, despite having hardly glanced at her over his newspaper, startled him.

"I'm not that hungry," she responded softly, and placed the dishes in the sink.

"You barely eat enough to keep a sparrow alive." He lowered his paper and met her eyes for a few seconds before diverting his focus back to the mug of coffee on the table in front of him. The direct eye contact was so unusual that Eliza barely restrained a gasp.

"I eat enough," she responded halfheartedly. Normally she would have let it go, but Eliza wanted to see if she could goad Romano into meeting her eyes again.

No such luck.

Romano merely shrugged, neatly folded his newspaper, and dropped it onto the table beside his empty plate. He gulped down the last sip of his coffee before getting up from the table.

Eliza watched as Romano stretched, his black T-shirt rising to reveal the toned and tanned band of flesh at his abdomen.

Her mouth went dry at the sight of that dark flesh, and once again she was disgusted by her own reaction to her husband's physical presence.

She had spent the first year of their marriage believing that Romano would come to love her.

She had valiantly believed that if she loved him enough, he would go back to being the laughing, affectionate man she had known in the first few months after they had met.

Eliza still wasn't completely sure what had caused the change, but from the snide things Romano sometimes said in passing, she suspected it was her father's influence.

After nearly a year of marriage and two heats, that she spent alone in the cold bed, writhing and yearning for her husband who had refused to be bonded with her, she had been forced to face reality; Romano truly hated her.

He hated her so much that he couldn't bring himself to speak to her, kiss her, touch her outside of bed, or even look at her.

Eliza had finally realized that there would be no thaw; their marriage was a perpetual winter wasteland, and if she ever wanted to feel the warmth of the sun on her face again, she had to get out of it.

Unfortunately, escaping would be trickier than she had thought, she would have to find a way out that did not include hurting her cousin.

Nadia and Ryan were expecting their first baby, and while Nadia was having a fairly easy time of it, Eliza was concerned that anything that would upset her could be potentially harmful to Nadia or the baby.

Also, while Ryan’s advertising agency was fairly successful, Nadia had always prided herself on the fact that she held her own financially in their relationship.

Taking her bookshop away could put too much strain on their relationship, and she didn't want that on her conscience.

Eliza sighed heavily and started to do the dishes, she liked to do little household tasks despite the fact that her thirty-four-year-old husband, who had worked his way up from mailroom clerk to the president of the bank his father owned, "had more money than God," as her father had once put it.

Eliza had even enthusiastically insisted on doing some of the cooking herself. They employed a housecleaning staff, as was practical when one lived in a ten-bedroom, five-bathroom monster of a house.

Because their marriage united two prominent families, the press avidly followed the intimate details of their marriage, yet Eliza tried to cling to what she believed was a semblance of normalcy.

On Saturdays the staff had the day off and Eliza liked to pick up after herself and Romano rather than wait for the maids to get to it later.

She had never had a "normal" life, and she fondly imagined that these tasks kept her grounded in reality.

Romano didn't pretend to understand her need to have a hand in the everyday running of the house and had mockingly accused her of playing house once, shortly after their wedding.

He had never seemed to notice it again after that.

Eliza stared down at the dishes she had ready to be placed in the dishwasher and quite abruptly abandoned the task halfway through before heading upstairs and leaving Romano still in the kitchen.

Eliza changed her clothes from sweat suit to jeans and T-shirt, dragging her vibrant, hip-length chestnut brown hair into a ponytail and tugging on a denim jacket to ward off! the early autumn chill.

On her way to the front door, she passed by the den where Romano had retreated with his laptop.

"I'm going out," she casually called through the open door, and Romano’s head jerked up while his eyes flared with some indefinable emotion.

"Where...?" he began.

"I don't know how long I'll be gone." She dashed out before Romano could utter another syllable, grabbing her shoulder bag and car keys on the way out.

She had her reliable silver Mini Cooper fired up by the time he eventually made it down to the front door.

With a cheery little wave that she knew had to grate, she reversed out of the driveway and headed out.

Eliza had no clue where she was going and knew that there would be hell to pay when she got back—Romano liked to keep her in a little box labeled "his wife," to be brought out only for social occasions when he needed someone to act as his perfect hostess.

Any sign of mutiny from her was bound to have unpleasant and unforeseen consequences. Still, it felt good just to do something so defiantly out of character.

Her cell phone started ringing seconds later and when she stopped at a red light he switched it off and tossed her wedding ring, she didn't need it anymore.