The Italian Demands His Heirs

by Lynne Graham

  Yes, she took time out to shop with Elisa and Arianna, both of whom she got on with very well. They had dined several evenings with Tomas and Arianna, who occupied a very smart house in Florence. Zoe had come for a visit and had shared their grandad’s marital plans for her with remarkably little concern, insisting that she would easily cope with living abroad in a palace as a princess for a few months, which was evidently all that was to be required of her. Winnie and Eros had stayed as well for a weekend, Winnie confiding that she had not suffered nausea anything like as badly as Vivi was.

  Viv’s fingers spread fondly over her stomach as she wondered if she was carrying a little girl, having read somewhere the possibility that a female baby could increase morning sickness in a mother-to-be.

  ‘You’re drifting off to sleep,’ Raffaele murmured, long brown fingers stroking the back of her hand. ‘Let’s go in. You need to get ready to go for your scan.’

  Vivi lifted her head and collided with sunlit dark golden eyes, and a spasm of pure lust that made her feel wanton gripped her. Almost every time she looked at Raffaele, she wanted him with an instinctive hunger she couldn’t suppress. He was fantastic in bed, that was all it was, she told herself; it was perfectly normal to crave pleasure. They shared his museum piece of a bed every night, for it was a lot more comfortable than it looked and she was as guilty of luxuriating in his body as he was in hers. Just good clean fun—well, maybe not quite clean, she conceded, thinking of some of the stuff they did, her mind drifting drowsily over X-rated imagery that once would have shocked her. And the most amazing thing about Raffaele, she thought wonderingly as he tugged her off the sunlounger, was that, in spite of that conservative, conventional vibe he put out so strongly, he was wildly and wonderfully uninhibited in bed.

  ‘You’re miles away...what are you thinking about?’

  Her cheeks warm, Vivi grinned at him as he tugged her up the rear staircase that led to their rooms.

  ‘Seriously?’ Raffaele stressed, reading her expressive face, arousal pulsing through him instantaneously. ‘If this is what being pregnant does to you, bella mia... I hope you appreciate that I’m likely to want to keep you pregnant.’

  ‘No, not with the sickness and all the rest of it. You get one child off me and that’s your lot!’ Vivi laughed.

  As she melted into the heat of him in the privacy of their bedroom, Raffaele recognised the joy that Vivi brought into his life and marvelled at that startling revelation, for it was not a sensation he had recognised or even expected to find since leaving childhood behind.

  * * *

  The obstetrician watched the screen as the nurse worked the wand over Vivi’s exposed stomach. Standing up, she addressed the nurse and the wand lingered while Raffaele’s hand tightened on Vivi’s, sending alarm kicking up through her. Was something wrong with her pregnancy? Had something worrying been spotted?

  The older woman smiled down at Vivi’s anxious face and indicated the screen. ‘I can tell you that you have one healthy boy here and behind him his twin, who may or may not be another boy. We can’t get a good enough view yet to tell the second child’s gender.’

  ‘Second child?’ Vivi gasped in alarm. ‘You mean...there’re two of them?’

  ‘Twins,’ Raffaele confirmed not quite steadily. ‘We are going to be the parents of twins. Dr Fanetti suspects that that is what is causing your extreme nausea and may also explain why your pregnancy appears to be developing faster than normal.’

  The rushing fast pulse of their babies’ heartbeats filled the room and, blinking, Vivi rested her head back in shock. Twins. Two babies. The very concept silenced her when adjusting to the prospect of even one baby had demanded so much from her.

  ‘This is really exciting news,’ Raffaele intoned. ‘We have never had twins in the family.’

  ‘A twin pregnancy is riskier,’ Vivi reminded him nervously, because she had listened to the obstetrician’s strictures, which warned that she had to be more careful carrying twins than she would’ve had to be with a singleton pregnancy. She would grow larger, get more tired and there was a greater chance of premature birth. ‘I’m stunned. Two children, not one, that’s a massive jump from having no children at all.’

  ‘We’ll have a team of nannies,’ Raffaele assured her soothingly. ‘You will have extra check-ups, more frequent scans and tests. Every possible precaution will be exercised on your behalf.’

  Vivi was thinking that she could never ever have managed two babies alone and was belatedly grateful that she had agreed to give their marriage a fair chance. And it was working brilliantly, wasn’t it? Her heart was touched by his unashamed excitement about their children. How could she look past that? Any woman would value that in the father of her kids. Kids? Raffaele was so supportive and she hadn’t expected that from him, in truth hadn’t expected many of the things he had done. She got flowers all the time, she got gifts, was now the proud owner of several valuable and very beautiful pieces of jewellery. She was beginning to understand why Arianna adored her big brother and marvelled that she had misjudged him to such an extent when he had misjudged her two years earlier.

  In retrospect the speed with which he had reached that misjudgement still surprised Vivi, because Raffaele was usually a much more controlled and cautious individual, yet he had leapt in to make positively clumsy wrong assumptions about her.

  ‘We could go out tonight to celebrate,’ Raffaele murmured, grabbing her hand and bringing it to his lips to press a kiss there, his beautiful eyes locked to her with undeniable appreciation.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ Vivi teased. ‘One child was a shock and two is a—’

  ‘A miracle,’ Raffaele slotted in cheerfully.

  ‘You really do like children.’

  Raffaele grinned, pure masculine charisma in the sunlight. ‘If they’re ours, a mix of us both...sì.’

  Vivi only just resisted the urge to stop in the middle of the street and kiss him. She wasn’t the demonstrative type, never had been, but sometimes there was something about Raffaele that made her want to hurl herself into his arms like a homing pigeon. Oh, go on, she urged herself, why not admit it? She was besotted with him because he made her so happy, made her feel beautiful, irresistible and special. Two years back she had been on track to falling for him for all the most superficial reasons: his looks, his sophistication, his charm. Two years on she looked for more from a man and Raffaele delivered on every front. She wasn’t ashamed of loving him. In fact, loving Raffaele made her feel whole, as if she had come full circle from the youthful insecurities that had frightened her off getting too attached to anyone beyond the safe circle of the sisters she trusted.

  As they climbed out of the limo outside the palazzo, Amedeo came hurrying out to address his employer in a flood of Italian. Raffaele glanced across the lawn to where a large helicopter was parked, the pilot standing beside it. ‘Your grandfather’s here.’

  Her brows rose. ‘Oh...that’s unexpected.’

  Raffaele expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘And he’s probably in a rage, so let me handle him.’

  ‘Why would he be in a rage?’ Vivi asked blankly.

  ‘Actions I took as payback for something he did to me but, now he’s in the family, we’re rather stuck with each other and it wasn’t the brightest idea... I admit,’ Raffaele admitted tautly. ‘You go upstairs and I’ll deal with him.’

  ‘No, he’s my grandad and a shocking old grouch,’ Vivi countered. ‘I’m not leaving you alone to deal with him.’

  Raffaele grimaced. ‘Vivi...there’s stuff you don’t know and this is not the moment for you to find out. Stay out of this...please.’

  In shock at that admission, Vivi fell back a step, her tense face pale below her mop of curls. She still hadn’t had those curls straightened, she acknowledged absently as the giant mirrors in the hall threw back a myriad reflections of her hurrying figure. Why not? She hate
d her curls but Raffaele adored them, genuinely adored them, was forever trailing his fingers through them, rearranging them and admiring them.

  But what didn’t she know? What did Raffaele not want her to find out? She hovered outside the grand salon they rarely used and even through the solid wooden door she could hear the roar of Stamboulas Fotakis shouting about losing millions of pounds. Millions of pounds? How was that possible? And what could Raffaele possibly have to do with that loss? Taking a deep breath, Vivi opened the door and walked in...

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘TELL ME WHAT’S happening here,’ Vivi urged, stalking deeper into the room, a tall slender figure in a turquoise sundress that floated round her long shapely legs. Both men turned to look at her.

  Stam Fotakis was flushed and furious. ‘I’ve lost millions of pounds thanks to your husband! He set a trap for me.’

  ‘A trap that wouldn’t have worked had you not been tracking my every move in the financial markets and buying where I bought,’ Raffaele pointed out levelly.

  ‘Why would you track what Raffaele does?’ Vivi pressed her grandfather.

  ‘He’s a financial genius, Vivi. I’m not the only one doing it,’ the older man growled angrily. ‘But this time he laid a false trail and I bought into it and now I’ve lost a pile of money.’

  ‘Explain,’ Vivi told Raffaele, her soft mouth tightly compressed.

  ‘I showed interest in a company that I knew was about to go bust and, now that it has, Stam is blaming me for his reverses,’ Raffaele countered tautly.

  ‘And you did it to him deliberately,’ Vivi registered in shock at her husband’s behaviour, visibly paling.

  ‘It was nothing more than a slap on the wrist,’ Raffaele ground out in exasperated dismissal. ‘Stam may be howling as though he is mortally wounded but what he’s lost is a drop in the bucket in comparison to his wealth.’

  Vivi continued to stare at her husband in bemusement. ‘But why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you warn him? I get that he shouldn’t be spying on what you do but, if you knew it was happening, why weren’t you just blunt with him? Why would you want him to lose money?’

  ‘Leave it, Vivi,’ Stam said abruptly, guessing where the dialogue could be heading and deciding to back off rather than expose a secret that would do him no credit in his grandchild’s eyes. ‘What’s done is done.’

  ‘No, you don’t get to come storming in here shouting without explaining yourself,’ Vivi interrupted, her violet eyes flaring off the older man to rest instead on the younger. ‘And you don’t get to do what you appear to have done to my grandad without explaining why.’

  Raffaele stalked across the room, all flaring energy and anger, swinging back to face her from the window, his lean dark features hard and grim. ‘I was...eventually planning to tell you but at the start of all this I didn’t trust you with secrets that could damage my sister.’

  ‘Arianna?’ Vivi queried, more confused than ever, but gutted by his declaration of distrust even if she was struggling not to betray the fact. ‘What the heck does Arianna have to do with any of this?’

  Raffaele compressed his lips. ‘Stam compiled a very harmful dossier on Arianna’s biggest mistakes in life and threatened to release the information to the media. The dossier contains embarrassing revelations that would enrage her fiancé’s very old-fashioned family. I was afraid that publication of that dossier would destroy her future with Tomas.’

  Vivi was appalled by what she was hearing. ‘But why would you do such a thing?’ she began asking Stam in horror, but even as she spoke the picture was falling into place and making a dreadful kind of sense. ‘You blackmailed Raffaele into marrying me! Both of you lied to me! Both of you allowed me to believe that it was some kind of business deal. How could you threaten Arianna like that, Grandad? She never did anything to harm me...’

  Raffaele watched in amazement as Stam Fotakis lowered his head in shame, his eyes evading the younger woman’s. ‘It was the only lever I had with Raffaele, Vivi. He had to pay for the damage he had done to your good name and I had to have a means of pressure to use. I didn’t relish that means but I was prepared to use it, for your sake.’

  ‘My sake?’ she whispered sickly, a shudder of revulsion and denial racking her slender frame. ‘You blackmailed Raffaele by threatening his sister’s future. That’s disgusting and unpardonable. Where is this dossier now? Destroyed, I hope.’

  ‘Not yet. I was to receive it at the wedding but Stam refused to part with it,’ Raffaele broke in harshly. ‘He was planning to continue holding it over my head and I couldn’t live with that option.’

  ‘You broke the terms of our deal!’ her grandfather barked angrily. ‘Vivi is pregnant.’

  ‘You forced us together again. You can carry the can for that!’ Raffaele slammed back rawly at the older man. ‘And now you’ve hurt Vivi, which I can’t forgive.’

  Vivi parted bloodless lips because sheer shock at what was unfolding was making her feel a little sick and dizzy. ‘You’ve both hurt and disappointed me.’

  The terms of our deal?

  The phrase rhymed over and over again in her head as she left the room and headed for the stairs. Her marriage was a deal, the cruellest of deals. How had she ever contrived to forget that reality? But she had forgotten, had buried the awareness deep that Raffaele was supposedly marrying her to make a fat financial profit. Although, knowing what she did about his character, that explanation had never made much sense to her, she had still accepted it and questioned it no further. Really, when she had buried her head in the sand to such an extent, it was her own fault that she was now being slapped in the face by the unsavoury truth.

  Raffaele had been blackmailed into marrying her, forced to gain her agreement to marry him by the threat to Arianna’s future. She knew how much Raffaele loved his kid sister and knew there was little he would not do to protect her from harm. She was also aware from some of the things that Arianna had told her in the past that her sister-in-law had made mistakes she regretted. For goodness’ sake, who hadn’t done that? But Arianna was a wealthy and beautiful heiress and what she did was less likely to go unremarked.

  Looking back, Vivi could see how she had wilfully misinterpreted Raffaele’s behaviour before their marriage. In her mind she had somehow contrived to view his very persistence in seeking her agreement to marry him as a backhanded compliment related to her attraction. Without even thinking about it, she had also freely forgiven Raffaele for attempting to use blackmail on her by threatening redundancies at Hacketts Tech.

  In the end that concern had been wiped out by the much more personal fact that she was pregnant and that was why she had married him. She had, however, allowed nothing to get in the way of her developing feelings for Raffaele, the love she had denied even to herself for so long. On a deep-down level she had always wanted Raffaele and, having finally got him, she hadn’t asked too many awkward questions about what had first brought him back into her life.

  The terms of our deal.

  That was the foundation of the marriage she was so happy in, not exactly a solid basis for a relationship in which to raise children, she conceded, stricken. As she sat down on the foot of the bed, she felt like a rag doll that had been shaken so hard its stuffing was about to fall out. As a wave of nausea assailed her, she raced for the bathroom. Afterwards, she hung onto the marble vanity unit to stay upright and freshened up with trembling hands. Feeling physically weak and sick only made her feel worse because she was seeing how she had lied to herself all along, trying to conserve her pride by refusing to admit how much she loved Raffaele even when it was painfully obvious.

  How much worse was it to be forced to accept that, even though she had believed she and Raffaele had grown close, the guy she loved, the father of her twin babies, still hadn’t trusted her enough to share the truth with her? The unfortunate fact was that he was the real victim here. No, th
at reality wouldn’t have sat well with Raffaele’s fierce pride. Indeed, being forced to do anything would go against the grain for Raffaele, but he had still sacrificed his pride for his sister’s sake. And why did that make her love him more when she ought to hate him for all of it? In despair, Vivi pressed cooling hands to her tear-streaked cheeks, struggling to hold in the intensity of her warring feelings.

  The bedroom door opened without warning and framed Raffaele’s tall dark silhouette in the doorway. ‘Stam’s gone. He’s going to return the dossier to me and then I’ll destroy it and hopefully that will be the end of that,’ he breathed in a raw undertone. ‘Thank you for that.’

  Vivi’s eyes looked bruised against her pallor, her vivid hair making the contrast all the more striking. In that moment, she looked so frail and vulnerable he wanted to scoop her up and wrap her in cotton wool to protect her. But, sadly, he couldn’t protect her from the fallout of his own mistakes and his sins had truly come home to roost now, he acknowledged unhappily.

  ‘Why are you thanking me for anything?’

  ‘Stam was ashamed to have you know what he had done and he doesn’t want anything more to do with that threat,’ Raffaele clarified wryly.

  ‘Does Arianna know about this business?’ Vivi demanded.

  ‘Nothing about any of it,’ Raffaele admitted. ‘She would’ve been devastated and it wouldn’t have been fair. I should’ve looked after her more carefully when she was younger and ensured that she didn’t get into situations she couldn’t cope with. That she did is on me.’

  ‘In our marriage you were the victim but you let me go on thinking that I was,’ Vivi muttered tightly. ‘You never even hinted that you were being...constrained. You may not believe it but if you’d told me what Grandad was doing I would have intervened.’

  ‘At the beginning I didn’t trust you. I still harboured all those wrong convictions about you,’ Raffaele reminded her ruefully. ‘Arianna had ditched you as a friend. Why was I going to assume that you would be sympathetic in any way towards her?’