“That’s better, isn’t it?” Ava cooed softly. She looked up to find Nico watching her. “She needs feeding every two hours.”

“She does.” A half-smile settled on his face as he looked out of the kitchen window.

Did the sight of her breastfeeding put him off that much?

She couldn’t dispute that he was attentive and caring but she was still silently disappointed.

She had expected more.

She had expected him to have been more hands on, warmer and more considerate. She had tried to be the same for him. Outwardly nothing had changed much, but she sensed a subtle shift in him which was getting harder to blame on his accident and business problems.

“She was crying for a while,” he said. “Where were you?”

“In the shower.” Where were you? “Helena was here when I left. She’s probably sorting out the laundry.” Having their housekeeper around, as well as her mother meant more eyes and ears on the baby.

“I was on a call with Bruno,” he explained.

“More updates?” He was always on the phone to Gina or Bruno; most of the time it didn’t feel as though he was really here for her.

“You know how it is,” said Nico. Yes, she knew exactly how it was. He was here in body but he might as well have been at work for the amount of time he spent brooding and mulling over business matters. “I’ll need to go to Ravenna on Monday.”

“Don’t you think you’re taking too much on?” But even as she posed the question she knew it was futile to ask this of a man who always took too much on. The fact that he was recovering from his accident hadn’t seemed to slow him down in any way. “I mean you’re still not—”

“I need to go in, Ava. I can’t sit around waiting for the business to collapse.”

“Nico,” she murmured softly, sensing his resentment and trying to make him see that things weren’t as dire as he thought. “Your business isn’t about to collapse. You need to get well first.”

“I am well.” He tapped his fingers on the worktop. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t take this time off and spend it with them without worrying about his hotel. Too much had happened in the last few months and while she understood his anger and frustration, she had expected that the arrival of their first child would have made him realize that there was much to be thankful for.

She’d hoped to have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and while it had been different, having a new baby and being in a different country, the festive season hadn’t quite lived up to her expectations. Her husband didn’t make a good patient and his obvious frustration which stemmed from work matters made him moody.

He wasn’t the same Nico she knew, the man she had fallen in love with. These days he seemed more of a desperate man constrained by the limitations of his healing body and eager for the hotel to be operational as soon as possible.

It was as if he couldn’t make allowances for his recovery, nor see the point of slowing down and obeying the doctor’s orders.

In the days after they’d come home from the hospital, he had been a walking, barely talking, simmering well of resentment. She understood that the root of his anger had been his former girlfriend, Silvia Azzarone, and her new lover, the ageing dinosaur of a politician, Armando Vieri. Nico blamed them for meddling in his affairs, for somehow influencing the decisions of the safety department and of having a hand in failing the safety check on his soon-to-be-opened spa hotel.

She didn’t know what to believe and many times she feared that her husband was becoming obsessed by his ambitious grand plans.

What she resented the most was that he seemed to take out his frustrations on her. She didn’t like this side to him, and it unnerved her, as a new mother who was herself frazzled and overwhelmed by the demands of a new baby. She, too, was busy with her online business. Sales had exploded and she could no more shut down her business than Nico could walk away from his hotel problems, but she didn’t let her business pressures determine her moods.

“Can’t you take it easy for one more week?” she pleaded. “Work part-time hours again, if only for this week.” That’s all she was asking. He’d been going into work for one to two days each week before Christmas, but he also spent most of the time conducting business from home.

Like her, he never switched off completely. He usually spent the mornings in his ground floor study, while she brought her laptop into the kitchen and flitted around, tending to the baby while keeping an eye on things. But in the afternoons, once the US office opened, she moved her laptop to her own study upstairs and tried to work there, stealing pockets of time while Elisabetta napped.

“I can’t sit around any longer, Ava. I have a business to run and I can’t leave it all to Gina. We open next month and I can’t have another delay. I can’t. I need to be there.”

Elsa kept telling her that a lack of sleep and tiredness from tending to a new baby would be difficult, that it would bring out the worst in her if she wasn’t careful and that it would cloud her judgment, but Nico’s sour moods were beginning to wear her down. She tried to remember her mom’s advice, but it wasn’t always easy, especially when her husband always seemed more concerned about his business than his wife and child.

“Sit around?” Her indignation flared. “You say it as if it were a prison sentence, spending time at home with me and the baby.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He took a step towards her as she switched her baby to the other breast.

He cleared his throat and turned his head away. “You’re busy. I’ll let you feed her first.” Once more she felt as if the sight of her feeding Elisabetta repulsed him and the thought upset her even more. “Do you want to do the next feed?” she offered. “I expressed some milk earlier.” She wanted to see if he would turn and look at her again but he continued to stare at the floor instead.

“Okay.” But his voice was flat, and she feared that he had no interest. It left her feeling even more disillusioned. What had she been hoping for? That there would be lots of time for them to talk and grow closer? That they would spend their days counting their blessings and being thankful for this beautiful new chapter in their life? Here she was, a frumpy woman in a loose-fitting maternity top and she felt increasingly insecure, unsure and unattractive. Once more she came back to the thing that gnawed at her the most whenever she felt low; she’d only known Nico a year and in that year they’d already had more life changes than most people experienced in five. She’d known Connor for years before he’d shown his true colors.

Could it be that she was seeing Nico’s true colors now? Worse, had she made the same mistake again?

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