Rather surprisingly, he laughed again. ‘Magdelena does rather tend to look for the easy option where most things—and particularly children—are concerned. However, I give you my word that there will be no bribing or obsequious petting while I’m around.’
‘But you won’t always be there, will you?’ Romano, please!
He’s my son. Don’t do this!
She had to bite her lip to stop herself crying it out. He might think that she was pleading with him not to marry the woman for her own sake, and never in a million years was she going to humiliate herself by giving him the satisfaction of thinking that.
The cane protested again as he got up, came over and stood looking out over the poolside, his features as strongly carved and distant as the dusky hills.
Of course he would marry, and marry well. It was just unfortunate that she couldn’t stand his choice of wife, and that she felt as though the universe had just collapsed around her.
‘I do have an alternative proposition.’
Libby shot him a sidelong glance, her lashes concealing the pained bewilderment in her eyes.
‘I think we should get married,’ he stated phlegmatically.
‘What?’ His startling statement, delivered as casually as if he were talking about the price of lemons, had such a weakening effect on her that she had to grab the post of the pergola behind her to steady herself. She wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly.
‘You and I,’ he clarified, assuring her that she had.
‘But…I—I thought that you and Magdelena…’
‘Are not an item,’ he responded succinctly.
‘But I thought…’
‘It seems you do too much thinking, cara,’ he chided softly, coming to stand only a heart-stopping distance away from her.
‘But it’s what I saw! In the courtyard. Just now. With my own eyes. You were kissing her!’
‘She was kissing me.’
‘Is there any difference?’ she retorted hotly, colour staining her cheeks, her pulses leaping in response to his dangerous proximity as she strove to convince herself that this wasn’t all some sort of sick joke.
‘Magdelena knows the score,’ he said.
Which was why she had looked so desperate just now, Libby realised. Because he was probably telling her that it was over between them!
She swallowed, shook her head in an attempt to clear it. ‘Are you trying to tell me…you’re in love with me?’ It took a lot of courage to ask him that. But for what other reason, she wondered giddily, would he even be considering embarking on such a monumental step with her?
‘Is that what you’re expecting me to say?’ His eyes were hard and clear and penetrating and, like his voice, totally unfathomable.
‘Of course not,’ she uttered, hurting, realising she’d been a fool to imagine that his feelings were anywhere approaching what for a few seconds she had dared to hope they might be. The type she harboured secretly—agonisingly—for him.
‘If we marry,’ he went on in that cool, impervious voice, ‘then Giorgio gets his mother back and we…’ That hard mouth curled wryly. ‘Well, as you so rightly pointed out yourself two or three weeks ago, our chemistries pack a pretty explosive punch—’
‘That doesn’t make a marriage!’
Beneath the fine tailoring of his shirt his powerful torso stiffened. ‘And what are you imagining does?’ he suggested coldly. ‘The sort of treacly affair you had with my brother? Which proved too cloying for you both when the first test of endurance and temptation came along?’
‘That’s not true!’
‘Don’t kid yourself, Libby. If Luca hadn’t died you would have been in the divorce court before Giorgio had reached kindergarten!’
He didn’t want to be throwing things like this at her. Deep down he knew he was being unfair. She had loved his brother. He wasn’t in any doubt about that.
‘Your son needs a mother,’ he stressed, inexplicably resentful suddenly of her feelings for Luca. He knew, though, that he was going to have to start putting the pressure on if he wasn’t able to convince her of the rightness of their being together in any other way. ‘I’m offering you the chance to be there on a permanent basis. If you’re my wife, no other woman need ever be involved.’ And when she didn’t answer, too stunned, too bewildered by this whole scenario, he demanded, ‘Is that what you want? Another woman caring for your child? Because if it isn’t you—then yes, it will be someone else eventually.’
‘And if I don’t agree to marry you?’ Her features were lined. Pained. Troubled.
‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ he said. ‘There isn’t any doubt that Giorgio thinks you’re going to be around forever. What do you think it will do to him when you force me into the position of telling him that you aren’t? In view of the problems he was having before you came here, I think it will do him more harm than good to have a mother who only has time to fit him around her busy work schedule. I won’t allow you to walk in and out of his life, Libby. You either go or you stay. And if you stay, then you do so as my wife.’
Of course. The obvious bait with which to reel her in. He knew she would move heaven and earth to stay with her son. But could she achieve that by martyring herself? Marrying a man who didn’t love her? Because there was no doubt in her mind now that he didn’t.
‘Well?’ His sensuous mouth curved with the satisfaction of knowing that he had the upper hand. ‘Do you not agree that it’s the best solution all round?’
Libby turned away from his devastatingly handsome features. For him marriage was a solution. She was the best solution. And perhaps he was right, she thought. She was sure that little Giorgio had grown to love her as much as she loved him, and he idolised Romano, while she loved Luca’s brother with an intensity that hurt. In different circumstances, she thought, marrying him would have seemed like the answer to a million prayers. Yet now all she could feel was a gaping chasm of longing beyond the dangerous excitement which she knew would only result in her ultimate sexual and emotional humiliation.
‘Can a marriage work,’ she breathed tremulously in one last attempt to save herself, ‘if it’s only been arranged to provide a solution to something else?’
‘It can—if both parties concerned try very hard to see that it does,’ he averred, closing the gap between them, saying with a husky quality overlaying his rich, deep voice, ‘Something which I think we should start by attending to right away.’
She wanted to push him away. To tell him that she hadn’t given him her answer and that she needed time to consider all its implications, but the feel of his sleeve around her bare midriff was already sending overtly sensual messages through the layers of her skin.
As his other hand slid under her hair and he brought his mouth down on hers, any resistance she might have entertained was wiped away by the hard possessiveness of his kiss.
She wanted this! Had wanted and craved it since she had given herself to him first that day in his villa. She had known then that no other man would ever be right for her, and all she could do now was lean into his hard warmth and acknowledge it fully.
She would be Romano Vincenzo’s wife whether her brain wanted it or not. Because it was right for Giorgio. Because, as Romano had said himself, it was the best solution all round. And because, whether she liked it or not, it was written in the stars.
Sensing her acquiescence, Romano groaned into her mouth. His need of her was a throbbing ache pulsing through his body.
This hunger they had for each other was something wilder than mere desire. She didn’t know it yet, he realised, but she would. And, with only the smallest gram of guilt to pierce his bubble of success, he knew without doubt that he had been right to push her.
‘Carissima…’ In his own language he whispered his feelings and what it was exactly that he needed from her. He knew she wouldn’t fully grasp its meaning and felt unashamedly excited by it, especially since he was just discovering how much those murmured phrases turned h
er on.
His voice was driving her crazy, Libby thought, while those hands were suddenly doing all that she had been imagining them doing earlier and sliding up under her top.
She uttered a low, guttural sound of wanting as he massaged her aching breasts. Why did she have to be so weak? she despaired. So feeble?
Yet as he pulled her back against him and she felt the hard evidence of his arousal, her hips ground uninhibitedly against his.
‘Romano…’
Her leg moved suggestively against his, the feel of his muscled thigh beneath the smooth fabric of his trousers heightening her own arousal. But when the fingers moving urgently over his chest slid down to his narrow waist his hand slammed over hers, but only so that he could sweep her up into his arms.
‘I think, carissima,’ he murmured above the thrumming in her ears, ‘I had better warn the kitchen that there will be two less for dinner.’
She didn’t know how he managed to carry her through the house without anyone seeing them, only that he had and that even if they had encountered anyone else, they were far too desperate for each other for either of them to care.
They were both breathing heavily by the time he kicked open the door to his suite—carried her through to his bedroom—and he wasted no time in dispensing of her clothes or his own, or with any further preliminaries. But that didn’t matter because she wanted none—only this man, here and now, inside of her.
Mindless as he came down to her, she was already parting her legs for his hard penetration, and she gave a wild cry of abandon as she took him into her.
He might not love her, but she had enough love for both of them, she thought, wanting to give him every part of herself; wanted every part of him.
She had always wanted him.
In the darkest corners of her mind she had known it, even though consciously she would have recoiled from any suggestion of it—as she had with the way he affected her—during those increasingly miserable months of her marriage. The reminder that she might be embarking on another loveless union raised itself, but only for a second, before being obliterated by the driving, throbbing swell of a blinding orgasm.
Much later, as he lay fondling her in the warm aftermath of their passion and telling her, unaware of her misgivings, of his plans for an immediate wedding, he suddenly weighed one firm breast in his palm and remarked, ‘You’ve gained a little weight since we last did this.’ Moving his position slightly so that he was lying above her, gently he lifted both breasts in his strong brown hands to allow his tongue to circle first one dark pink aureole and then the other. ‘I approve.’ His voice was sexily husky. ‘I like it very much indeed.’
Libby groaned as his thumbs replaced his tongue in its exquisite torture of her nipples. She had never known them to be so sensitive, she thought, and would have been lost in sheer ecstasy if that realisation, coupled with Romano’s comment, hadn’t sent shock waves rippling through her.
She hadn’t had a period since that first time they had made love, she reflected as his tongue was sliding down her ribcage to prod the gentle dip of her navel. Which in itself wasn’t anything to be concerned about. Her periods had sometimes been erratic, and the lack of one this time she had put down to all the emotional upheaval in coming here. Apart from which, Romano had been careful to use protection that day, just as he had this evening. This morning, though, she had woken up feeling nauseous, which again she had attributed to her state of mind. But now that Romano had actually commented on the weight she had gained…
She dragged in her breath, suddenly rigid with pleasurable anticipation as his tongue continued on its rapturous journey and found the tight, tense bud of her femininity.
I’m pregnant! she thought, amazed by how even now—with that shocking possibility—her body was still responding to the slow, warm caress of his tongue. She felt the familiar tingles spread along her thighs, making her breathing rapid, her skin become flushed with building excitement as he tasted her heightening desire. And the second before she was caught up in its throbbing, intensifying swell, she thought, I’m pregnant. I must be. I’m going to have his baby on top of everything else!
CHAPTER TEN
‘YOU seem to hold some fatal attraction for both my sons,’ Sophia remarked unkindly to Libby, clearly disenchanted by their intention to marry. Romano had made it his business to tell his mother while both he and Libby were present, but he had gone now, off to meet the everyday demands of his thriving empire, leaving Libby to fend off the woman’s jaundiced snipes alone. ‘You do realise, of course, that he’s doing what he thinks best for Giorgio. My grandson’s interests have always ranked highly among his priorities.’
‘I had hoped that you might be pleased,’ Libby returned quietly, refusing to give Romano’s mother the satisfaction of knowing that she was right as she watched the woman working on her regular flower arrangement in the large vase that stood between the two long windows in the sitting room. ‘And we’ve both naturally got your grandson’s best interests at heart.’ She chose her words carefully, trying to show Sophia that in no way would her marrying Romano exclude his mother from the role she had always played in Giorgio’s life. ‘I’d hoped,’ she uttered, in a final attempt to secure the woman’s approval, if not her affection, ‘that at least we could forget the past and try to be friends.’
A sprig of foliage suspended in her hand, Sophia swung round, her golden eyes pained—hard as glass.
‘Forget the past? You destroy my younger son’s life—and now you’re taking away everything I have left! I might be forced into a position where I have to try to forgive you, but there is no way at all that I will ever forget!’
‘Then there isn’t any more I can do, is there?’ Libby said, defeated by Sophia’s refusal ever to accept her as she left the woman to her flowers and went back to her room to make some necessary calls.
Both her agent and her manager were pleased when she told them she was getting married, although they both expressed regret at her immediate plans to become a full-time mum.
Fran, however, couldn’t have been more delighted when Libby gave her the news.
‘I told you he was behaving like a lover, didn’t I?’ her friend conveyed rather smugly. ‘You tried to deny it, but I knew there was more to that man than met the eye! I’m so pleased for you, Blaze, I really am. I was getting worried that you were never going to let yourself get involved with anyone intimately and settle down with someone. But you couldn’t have wished for anything better to happen, could you?’
Only for him to love me, Libby supplied achingly, and resolved there and then that she would make it happen if it was the last thing she did.
Giorgio was ecstatic when Libby and Romano told him later that day that they were getting married and that there was going to be a wedding.
‘Can I come?’ He was jumping excitedly up and down on the lawn, where he had been playing with the remote-control aeroplane that Libby had bought him for his birthday. ‘Please! Please say I can!’
Laughing despite her concerns, Libby dropped down and hugged him to her. ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing it without you being there,’ she promised. ‘You can be my page-boy.’
‘And will you sleep in Zio’s room? Married people always sleep together and then they have babies. My friend Pietro’s older brother said so. Will you have a baby? Can I have a little brother to play with?’
The six-year-old’s innocent questions made Libby tense imperceptibly. Although as she glanced up and her eyes clashed with Romano’s, she saw the line knitting his thick brows before he answered his nephew. ‘I think we’d better take it one step at a time, Giorgio.’
Disquieted by his response, Libby looked away. Had he noticed her reaction? And if so, did he think it was because she wouldn’t want his baby?
She wondered how he’d react if she told him that she suspected she was already pregnant. She didn’t know whether or not he would be pleased. He would probably consider that making her pregnant would have
reduced her chances of backing out of this marriage if he thought she had half a mind to do so, although he knew she would do anything to keep Giorgio, so he had to be pretty certain that there was absolutely no risk of that.
What he didn’t know, however, was that she wanted his child more than anything else in the world and that—crazily!—she’d feel cheated if the test proved to be negative.
Which just went to show how hopelessly in love with him she was, she realised, despairing at herself as she watched Giorgio flying his plane with added gusto now that Romano was there to share the fun with him, his laughter ringing with a new contentment, his young mind free of the uncertainties that were clouding Libby’s. And that had to be worth every sacrifice, she thought.
The ring Romano bought her was a stunning diamond cluster that graced her slim hand with such a mega-statement of everything that was about to happen that she couldn’t stop looking at it as they came out of the prestigious jewellery store.
‘If you don’t stop doing that,’ Romano commented drily, with an arm snaking out to steer her round a lamppost, ‘you’ll wind up with a bump on your head ten times the size of that diamond and the paparazzi will latch on to our little secret, as they are going to soon enough.’
Libby laughed uneasily, her mind still plagued by insecurities, especially since she was hugging a very special secret of her own.
The test she had done the day before had confirmed all her suspicions. She was pregnant with Romano’s Vincenzo’s child! The unmistakable proof of it, on top of everything else that was going on, was almost too much for her to contain, but she was keeping it to herself for the time being. There was so much to think about—do—what with the wedding—which Romano had wasted no time in scheduling and which was to take place as soon as possible—arranging for the shipment of some of her belongings from England and discussing with her agent and her manager which prospective assignments she could easily refuse and which she had to honour, that telling Romano about the baby, Libby decided, was something she was going to do at some quiet moment when they weren’t so engulfed by everything else.
Blackmailed For Her Baby (Bought For Her Baby Series Book 4) Page 15