by Lynne Graham
Overhead she heard the irritating thwack-thwack of a helicopter and she winced, her head aching from a troubled night of sleep. Ironically she had fled to what had once been her home in search of peace only to discover that peace wasn’t available to her anywhere because she could not run away from the repercussions of her angry decision not to marry Raffaele. Even now, at this late stage, she was listing them...the loss of Liz and John’s home, not to mention the upheaval that would cause for the children dependent on them, whose security would be torn away.
And she knew the cost of that, she knew the cost of constantly changing foster homes better than anyone, she reminded herself in anguish. Then there would be the jobs lost at Hacketts Tech, the devastation that would engulf so many lives. And her grandfather would probably never forgive her for her defiance, not that she craved his good opinion and affection that much. In short, she had reached the conclusion that only a totally selfish cow would refuse to marry Raffaele in such circumstances. In temper, she had dug herself into a corner and now she didn’t like herself very much.
Emerging from that despairing flood of reflections, Vivi belatedly recalled the pregnancy test and checked her watch before standing up to check the result. And the result sent a wave of dizziness currenting through her like a stinging electric charge. Dry-mouthed, she read the positive result and tottered down onto the edge of the bath because she didn’t think her legs would hold her up any longer.
Panic filled her. A baby...her as a mother with a baby. That alien concept shattered what remained of her composure. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and scanned the result again but it didn’t change. She thought of her little nephew, Teddy, and her tense face softened because she adored her sister’s little boy. Were she to have a Teddy or a female equivalent of Teddy, she would love her baby, protect and nurture her child. She had a big heart and plenty of love to offer even though she couldn’t currently see a way through the practical difficulties lying ahead. But should she even be considering bringing this child into the world when the world offered other more convenient options?
But no, she could not face a termination because she believed she would be haunted for ever by such a choice. Teddy would not have existed had Winnie chosen that route and the idea that she might never have had the opportunity to know her little nephew appalled Vivi. No, she would have her baby, whatever the consequences, not least her foster parents’ disappointment that she could have been so irresponsible, her grandfather’s rage and her sisters’ distress that she had refused to do what she was supposed to do.
‘Vivi!’ Liz shouted up from the ground floor.
Wondering how long she had been sitting in a daze contemplating her radically altered future, Vivi stood up and disposed of the evidence of the pregnancy test before going downstairs into the kitchen, where she stopped dead, frozen into shock at the sight of Raffaele sitting at the table with a cup of coffee.
‘Vivi...you have a visitor,’ Liz Brooke greeted her with a smile. ‘I wish you’d told us what was going on.’
‘Going on?’ Vivi queried in bewilderment.
‘That you were supposed to be getting married the day after tomorrow but that you and Raffaele had a terrible row and you broke it off,’ Liz supplied ruefully. ‘I knew you were unhappy but I also knew that when you were ready to talk, you would let me know what was bothering you.’
Caught on the hop by the startling revelation that Raffaele had broken the story of the wedding to her foster mother, Vivi stiffened even more. What on earth was he doing here? How the heck had he even found out where she was staying?
Unaffected by either her dismay or self-consciousness, Raffaele slid fluidly upright, brilliant dark golden eyes welded to Vivi. In jeans, ankle boots and a long-sleeved green top, she was casually clad and bare of make-up. Her corkscrew curls were caught up at the back of her small head in a clasp, stray tendrils curling colourfully round her pale heart-shaped face. Her beautiful blue eyes were shadowed, the faint scattering of freckles across her nose starkly defined by her pallor, her soft mouth taut.
‘I’m hoping you’ll talk to me now that you’ve had a chance to think things over,’ he murmured softly.
A heady combination of self-loathing and regret attacked Vivi and her eyes prickled with tears, making her blink rapidly. What an awful mess she had made of her life! Raffaele di Mancini was the father of her unborn child and, not only did he not love her, he also didn’t care about her in the slightest. She was ashamed of that reality.
Two years ago, she had started out with a crush on Raffaele that had ended with her hating him. She wasn’t very good at dealing with losing people she cared about or rejection, she acknowledged sickly. She had missed the loving arms of her parents even though she had been too young to recall their actual faces once they had gone. There had also been foster homes that were great that she had been moved on from, leaving her wondering constantly if there was something bad about her that people didn’t like and hammering what little confidence she’d still retained.
Raffaele’s reappearance in her life had awakened all sorts of conflicting emotions because when he had turned his back on her after that scandal, he had hurt her. And Vivi always remembered pain more easily than pleasure. Her self-esteem had been destroyed once she’d realised that the man she was falling in love with had readily believed that she was a prostitute. Time and time again she had dissected her own behaviour with him, asking herself what she had done or said wrong to give him such a false impression of her.
‘Some breakfast, Vivi?’ Liz prompted.
‘No, thanks.’ The thought of food made Vivi feel nauseous while she tried to prevent herself from staring at Raffaele, all sleek and dark and sensationally handsome in a business suit that would have looked more at home in a fancy office than in her foster parents’ battered old kitchen. Her chest tightened, her ribcage striving to expand to draw in breath. Her mouth was dry as a bone. ‘I’ll make myself some tea,’ she said, desperate to occupy herself.
‘No, let me,’ Liz overruled, switching on the kettle. ‘Evidently you two have a lot to talk about.’
Yes, they did, Vivi acknowledged with a sinking sensation, thinking of the child she had conceived. Much as she might want to, she couldn’t conceal that from him. All sorts of complications had arisen from Winnie’s decision not to tell the father of her child that she was pregnant and Vivi was determined not to make the same mistake. Evading Raffaele’s questioning gaze, she grasped the mug of tea that Liz extended to her.
‘Let’s go out into the garden while it’s still sunny,’ she urged tautly.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I CAN’T BELIEVE you told Liz about the wedding,’ Vivi admitted, sinking down on the home-made seat below the flowering cherry tree where she had once spent her most peaceful hours.
‘I can’t believe that you didn’t,’ Raffaele traded. ‘Were you hoping it would all just go away if you vanished?’
Vivi flushed miserably and set her teeth squarely together. She wasn’t proud of her behaviour but the whole situation had simply become overwhelming. Finding herself trapped between her grandfather’s demands and Raffaele’s, not to mention the demands of her own conscience and her sisters’ expectations, she had buried her head in the sand about the potential consequences and fled.
‘All the arrangements are still in place,’ Raffaele informed her quietly.
‘I can’t believe that you would still want to go ahead after what you said to me the last time I saw you!’ Vivi countered tartly.
‘I’m guilty of creating this situation by not maintaining a more businesslike relationship with you,’ Raffaele breathed in a driven undertone, a faint edge of dark colour accentuating his exotic cheekbones. ‘I blurred the lines between us, brought down the boundaries. What I said to you was offensive and my only excuse is that I became angry at the idea of you being with another man.’
‘I bro
ke things off with Jude that night,’ Vivi muttered wearily, letting her luminous blue eyes linger on his strong dark face to appreciate his classic bone structure. ‘I told him that I’d met someone else and even though he was generous about it, it was a very uncomfortable couple of hours.’
Raffaele stared down at her where she sat, slender thighs outlined by tight denim, delicate breasts defined by her stretchy top. On edge, conscious of the thrumming pulse kicking off at his groin, he lifted his gaze up only to linger on the ripe full curve of her mouth instead and his brain, which usually lacked imagination, suddenly flashed up a fantasy image that sent an unbearable stab of hunger coursing through his lean, powerful body. He swung away and walked over to the low hedge that divided the garden from the field beyond.
‘This isn’t a working farm any more, is it?’ he remarked tightly, wondering what it was about her that aroused him to feats of fantasy he had always believed lay far beyond the reaches of his logical mind.
‘No. Liz’s grandparents were the last generation of farmers. The land was sold off before she was born. Her husband, John, is a plumber and he set up a business here. It went well and then he had a stroke and everything fell apart until he had recovered enough to work again,’ she told him ruefully, thinking that that was where her foster parents’ problems had begun—with ill health and the subsequent reduction of their income. Through no fault of their own they had fallen behind with their mortgage.
Vivi heaved a sigh and stared stonily down at her clasped hands. Tell him, her inner voice urged, tell him and get it over with! But why wasn’t he giving her the opening she had expected? What about the doctor’s appointment that had never taken place? Wasn’t he still concerned about the risk of conception? Or were women more inclined to worry about such things? Or, more probably, was his omission a sign that he had never really expected anything to come from their unwise encounter? After all, hadn’t he already expressed his regrets on that score? Declaring that it never should have happened? That they should have maintained a businesslike relationship? Her mind boggled at that concept. Businesslike? Really?
‘How did you find out where I was?’ she asked baldly.
‘I dug it out of Zoe,’ Raffaele admitted. ‘But she only told me to get rid of me.’
‘I hope you didn’t upset her!’ Vivi snapped.
‘No. She asked me if I thought I could bring you home and admitted that she missed you.’
‘And what did you say?’ Vivi pressed.
‘That I intended to try...what else?’ Raffaele shrugged a broad shoulder in graceful dismissal.
Vivi swallowed hard, mentally searching for the right words with which to make her announcement until it dawned on her that there were no right words, no magical way of making what he couldn’t possibly want to hear more palatable. ‘I might as well tell you and get it over with,’ she framed stiffly. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Raffaele swung back to her, dark eyes, shaded to the colour of melted caramel, widening, a faint frown line etching between his ebony brows as if he wasn’t quite sure he had heard her correctly.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Vivi said again, shattering the sudden silence that had fallen. ‘I waited until today to do the test because I wanted to be absolutely sure of the result.’
‘There is no room for error?’ Raffaele’s spectacular bone structure had pulled taut below his bronzed skin, the smooth planes of his hard cheekbones prominent.
‘None whatsoever,’ she whispered, intimidated by his lack of comment.
A baby? Momentarily, Raffaele felt as though he had been gut-punched and he compressed his lips because he wasn’t ready to be a father. He had naively assumed it wouldn’t happen, that the same golden strand of luck that had eased his path since birth would hold true. And it hadn’t, which was a major shock to his system. Vivi was pregnant with his son or daughter, years before he had planned such an event would take place. The concept shook him badly because nobody was more conscious than him that a child was a permanent feature in one’s life, not something that could be shuffled aside while he focused on his goals and taken up again at a more convenient date. Even more pertinently, he had planned to handpick the future mother of his children, had even mentally prepared a brief checklist of the kind of woman he would choose because in his private life he was highly averse to risk. And Vivi screamed risk on every sane level...
‘Raffaele?’ Vivi almost whispered in the lingering silence.
But while Vivi emanated dangerous vibes, she also excited the hell out of him and, Dio mio, she was an incredible beauty, Raffaele savoured, studying her with shimmering dark golden eyes while pitching his careful checklist of desirable maternal and wifely attributes into a mental drawer to be buried deep and forgotten. Prima di agire pensaci...look before you leap had been one of his father’s favourite sayings and Raffaele was supremely aware that he had neither looked nor considered consequences in anything he had ever done with Vivi. And yet, bafflingly, everything with her always felt seductively, inexplicably natural.
‘At the very least, my child will have my name when you marry me the day after tomorrow,’ Raffaele breathed, kicking his brain back into gear to assume that that was one obstacle already cleared.
Vivi’s soft mouth opened and closed again and she bent her head, her brain buzzing with thoughts. ‘Is that really all you’ve got to say right now?’ she queried helplessly. ‘I haven’t got a recording device playing. You’re not in a court of law either. You can be honest about your feelings.’
Raffaele’s lush black lashes dipped low over his glittering gaze. ‘Honesty can be a much-overrated trait. I am shocked, but I am also very much of a practical nature. A child changes everything. Even you must acknowledge that.’
‘Even...me? Do you really think that I am that irresponsible?’
His shapely mouth quirked. ‘Perhaps not irresponsible but you do like to defy conventional expectations.’
A tiny bit of her hostility drained away. ‘Yes. My child will be as proud to have my name as yours but I don’t see how marriage—’
Raffaele shifted a fluid brown hand to cut in. ‘A child’s needs and rights are best protected within the law. We have to be married for our child to inherit my estate without challenge.’
Vivi frowned. ‘And that’s important to you?’
Raffaele gritted his teeth. ‘Some day it will be important to our child as well.’
Vivi studied him in near wonderment because he was so deadly serious. She told him that she was pregnant and Raffaele’s brain zeroed straight to matrimonial law and their child’s inheritance rights, leapfrogging over more immediately pressing matters. ‘Money isn’t everything,’ she said quietly.
‘It is a much more complex question than that and you know it,’ Raffaele parried. ‘Obviously we will go ahead and marry now because to do anything else would be foolish in the extreme.’
Vivi pondered that controversial statement and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. At that moment it seemed to her that every pressure that could be brought to bear on her to marry Raffaele was weighing her down and shredding her every argument. ‘I wasn’t expecting this attitude from you,’ she admitted in a rush. ‘I thought you would be furious.’
‘What right would I have to be furious?’ Raffaele incised. ‘We took the same risk together. Why would we waste our time now lamenting the outcome?’
His outlook was, as he had warned her, innately practical. Parting her lips uncertainly, Vivi said, ‘I could’ve considered a termination.’
‘Which I would undoubtedly never have known about. But you did not choose that path. Instead you are telling me openly and honestly and I am grateful for that,’ Raffaele intoned tautly. ‘This is something we must share.’
‘Yes,’ Vivi acknowledged, dropping her copper head, the slender column of her neck below her ponytail looking disconcertingly vulnerable to his wary gaze. ‘I
couldn’t entertain a termination after getting to know and love my sister’s little boy, Teddy. I don’t think I could give a child up for adoption either. But I still can’t imagine becoming a mother...’
‘I would say the same about becoming a father, except that in many ways for the past decade I have acted as Arianna’s father,’ Raffaele admitted in a rueful undertone. ‘I was a twenty-year-old student when her mother died. Arianna was twelve and in boarding school. I’m ashamed to say that I initially tried to avoid the responsibility, leaving her to spend her holidays with schoolfriends and ignoring her need to have a settled home.’
‘So, what changed?’
Raffaele looked pained. ‘She sent me a letter asking me why I didn’t like her because, according to her, if you like someone, you want to see that person. I was ashamed. I had always thought of her as my unpleasant stepmother’s child, not as my father’s daughter, not as my half-sister, and even with both our parents dead I had gone on looking at her in that light. She was lonely and unhappy at school and I was her only close relative. I had to man up fast but the lesson stayed with me. Wishing things could be different doesn’t change facts. It’s better to face trouble head-on.’
A glimmer of rueful amusement lightened Vivi’s eyes and her head lifted. ‘Is that what I am? Trouble?’
‘From the very first moment I saw you and wanted you,’ Raffaele confirmed without hesitation. ‘You were my sister’s friend and that alone should’ve restrained me.’
Faint colour warmed her pale cheeks. ‘Together we’re not very good at restraint.’