by Lynne Graham
‘Love? What are you talking about?’
‘I’m just asking a question.’
‘Love has nothing to do with this arrangement,’ Luca said matter-of-factly.
‘Poor woman.’
‘Isabella?’ His voice held surprise.
‘Does she know what she’s letting herself in for?’
‘We are tremendously well suited.’ They were. They looked the part and they certainly belonged together. That was a given.
Yet his thoughts sped back to those heady three weeks when he had been just an ordinary person with no expectations weighing on his shoulders, free to enjoy life in all its wonderful simplicity. Free to enjoy the woman staring at him as though she didn’t quite recognise the man sitting in front of her.
Cordelia was hearing him but she had stopped taking in precisely what he was saying.
He was getting married. There were no rings on fingers yet, but he was getting married and he’d known that when they had slept together. He had truly only seen what they’d enjoyed as something passing and she knew that, while she had said all the right things, while she had assured him that she, likewise, knew the rules of the game, in her heart she had started hoping for more.
Maybe he didn’t love the woman whose finger was destined to wear his ring, but they were tremendously well suited. Cordelia wasn’t sure quite what that meant, but there had been affection in the tenor of his voice and affection was only a heartbeat away from love.
At any rate, it was a heck of a lot more than he felt for her. She thought of the baby she was carrying.
In her enthusiasm to get to Italy and tell Luca about the pregnancy, Cordelia had not been thinking straight and she could see that now. She’d never, of course, thought that Luca might have been lying to her. She’d also, she now realised with dismay, nurtured a certain excitement about seeing him again, even though he hadn’t glanced back in her direction. She’d cherished the wild hope that they might recapture what they’d had, that he might actually want the baby she was carrying. She’d been swept away by happy-ever-after fantasies and now that all those fantasies had been exposed for what they were, she was desperate to leave.
She was going to keep this secret to herself. She would never hide his identity from the child they shared and in due course, if he or she wanted to meet him, then she wouldn’t prevent it. By that time Luca would be happily married and a child he had sired as a youthful mistake before getting married would not be the catastrophe it would be now.
She stood up, keen to leave, thoughts in a confusing, sickening muddle, and felt the ground sway gently under her.
She held the back of the chair to steady herself and was vaguely aware of him shooting to his feet as she turned away, eyes fixed on the door.
‘Cordelia…!’
When she looked up it was to find him standing right in front of her, his eyes filled with concern.
‘You’re as white as a sheet.’ He placed his hands on her arms and she shrugged them off but she didn’t say anything because her mouth was refusing to co-operate. ‘Look at me,’ he commanded, tilting her head so that she had no option but to do as he’d asked although her eyes, when they met his, were mutinous. ‘I want you to sit back down. Have you eaten anything in the last few hours? I get that all this will be a shock to you but there was no point in keeping anything back, in giving you false hope.’
‘Leave me alone, Luca. I just want to go. I should never have come here in the first place.’
‘If things had been different…’ he said roughly.
‘If things had been different…what, Luca?’
‘The time we spent together was special to me.’
‘I’m thrilled to hear that,’ Cordelia told him acidly. The swaying had stopped but she still felt giddy, as though she’d been flying on a roller coaster and now the ride had stopped but her head was still spinning.
He had softened his hold on her and as their eyes tangled he gently and absently began to massage her shoulder with his hand, slow rhythmic motions that shot straight to every nerve ending in her body with devastating effect. Her eyes widened in horror at her treacherous body and she began to take a step back to break the connection that had sprung up between them, but she just couldn’t seem to do it. Her feet were nailed to the ground. It was a struggle to do anything. Breathing was proving a problem, never mind anything else.
‘I have never been the man I was with you, with any other woman,’ he said in a roughened undertone. ‘I have never wanted any other woman the way I wanted you.’ His eyes dropped to her full mouth and the connection she was desperately trying to sever took on a life force of its own.
He traced the outline of her mouth with the tip of his finger and she breathed in sharply.
He was going to kiss her. She could feel it in the simmering intensity of his gaze. It was the last thing she wanted! She opened her mouth to protest and her whole body shuddered as his lips touched hers, gently at first but then with increasing hunger.
Cordelia curved against him. His lean, hard muscularity felt so wonderfully familiar. He’d been her first and only lover and she had traced the contours of his perfect body with such awe that he used to laugh at her enthusiasm.
It took more willpower than she knew she even possessed to flatten her palms against his chest and detach herself from his devouring caress.
She was shaking when she stepped back. She could barely look him in the eye and he seemed to have as much of a problem holding her gaze. As he should, she thought bitterly. She’d succumbed to a moment of uncontrollable desire but she was free, single and unattached. It went utterly against the grain but she wasn’t the one about to go shopping for engagement rings!
‘I have to go,’ she half muttered.
‘I still want you.’
‘You’re practically married!’ She flung him a look filled with accusation.
What did his fiancée-to-be look like? she wondered. It was an arranged marriage, if he was to be believed, and who could believe a guy who’d lied once? She drew some comfort from the thought that the woman in question might just be nothing much to look at and then hated herself for allowing her thoughts to travel down that uncharitable route.
Since Luca could hardly deny that reality, he maintained a tactful silence. The taste of her mouth was still on his, though, sending his thoughts into wild disarray. He didn’t want to notice anything about her but he was noticing everything, from the slight tremor rippling through her long body to the strands of white-blonde hair escaping to brush against her cheek. He wanted to touch so badly that he had to bunch his hands into fists to stop himself from reaching forward.
‘Are you in love with her?’ Cordelia whispered, hating the way she wanted an answer to that question, even if the answer might be as painful as having a knife twisted in her gut.
Luca remained silent. Where was the point in going down this road? It was as it was.
‘That question is inappropriate,’ he finally said, when she continued to look at him with huge, accusing, wounded eyes.
Cordelia shrugged. The giddy feeling was sweeping over her again. Of course he loved the woman. He just didn’t want to come right out and admit it because to do so would have been conclusive proof of the cad he really was and there wasn’t a man in the world who would voluntarily have chosen to hang that description round his neck if he could avoid doing so.
The picture building in her head was not an attractive one.
He’d gone sailing in his expensive toy on one last adventure as a free man before he tied the knot. She’d happened to walk slap bang into his path and he’d thought… Why not?
She’d utterly and completely misread him. She knew that she could no longer weakly try and give him the benefit of the doubt. The fact that he refused to deny that the woman he was betrothed to marry was more than just a convenient wife said i
t all.
She had to get out of his great big palace of a house because it was pressing down on her, making her feel nauseous.
She thought of the baby inside her and the utter mess she had walked into and suddenly, without warning, she could feel herself falling and it was the most peculiar sensation.
It was as though she had left her body and was looking down at herself. Looking at the way her legs began to weaken and her eyes began to droop and her shoulders slumped and then her whole body went limp and slowly, oh, so slowly, she crumpled to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
He caught her before she hit the ground. Even as she briefly lost consciousness, she was aware of his arms around her waist and of him carrying her urgently over to a sofa.
Her eyes fluttered open and she shrank back because he was so close to her that the smell of him filled her nostrils and made her feel faint all over again.
‘You’re in shock,’ he said. She began sitting up and he gently kept her still, his eyes anxiously scanning her face. ‘You’re not going to be getting up just yet. I don’t want you fainting again.’
‘I never faint.’
‘I’m going to argue with that statement, considering I’ve just caught you before you hit the ground. Wait here. I’ll be back in five.’ He vaulted to his feet but stayed where he was for a few seconds, as though making sure she obeyed him.
Much as Cordelia wanted to run as fast as she could to the door and then make a bolt for it, she felt as weak as a kitten.
She was in shock. He was right. She sighed and lay back, closing her eyes and blocking out the sight of his tall, commanding figure.
She only opened her eyes when she heard the soft pad of his returning footsteps. In his hand he carried a glass of amber liquid and he positioned himself on the very edge of the sofa and gently placed his hand under the nape of her neck.
‘You need to drink this.’
‘What is it?’ she whispered.
‘Brandy. It’ll do the trick.’
Cordelia whipped her head to one side.
‘Drink it, cara. It’ll make you feel better and then I’ll make sure you have a bed here for the night. I know this is probably not the outcome you envisaged when you began your trip over here, but…like I said…’
‘I’m not drinking any of that stuff.’
‘For God’s sake. I’m trying to help you. You’re deathly white!’
‘I can’t drink it!’ The words were out before she could claw them back and he stared at her, puzzled.
‘Why not?’
‘Because…it wouldn’t be a good idea…’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m pregnant.’
She hadn’t meant to say that. She’d decided, just as soon as she’d heard about his soon-to-be engagement to the woman who came from the same background as him and was his perfect match, that silence was the only option, but here, on his sofa, with legs like jelly, staring at a glass of brandy, the admission could not be stopped.
Maybe in her heart, she thought, she’d come to tell him about the pregnancy and she would have ended up doing so, whatever the circumstances.
A silence, thick with unspoken questions, settled between them as he stared at her with narrowed, incredulous eyes.
He wasn’t taking any of it in and she could hardly blame him. In all those scenarios he had concocted explaining why she had travelled to Italy, none of them had touched on what should have been a likely contender.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think I heard what you just said.’
‘I’m sorry, Luca. I didn’t come over here to try and resurrect a relationship with you because I discovered you had money and I didn’t come to resurrect it because I stupidly decided that I just couldn’t live another minute without you. I apologise if I’ve dented your ego. I came because I found out that I was pregnant a few days ago and I thought I owed it to you to tell you that you were going to be a father.’
The silence continued to coalesce. She couldn’t look at him. She didn’t want to see the horror there.
‘You’re lying,’ Luca said hoarsely. ‘That can’t be…true.’
Cordelia sneaked a glance. He was ashen. He was also staring at her but she could tell that he wasn’t really seeing her. He was seeing the nightmare scenario in his head. She watched as he sprang back to begin pacing the room, his movements, for once, lacking their usual grace.
Still muggy, she heaved herself into a sitting position and took a few deep breaths to steady herself.
His restless pacing was making her dizzy and yet, while he was walking, he wasn’t talking and she dreaded hearing the dark, disbelieving and horrified timbre of his voice.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he finally said, pausing to stand in front of her, then dragging a chair towards the sofa so that he could sit, interrogation style, directly in her line of vision. ‘You can’t be. We…were careful. We took all the necessary precautions. This can’t be true.’ He narrowed his eyes and stared at her and she could almost see the way his mind was working, shying away from the truth, finding other paths to follow.
She wasn’t entirely surprised when he said, bluntly, ‘Is this some kind of ploy to get money out of me? Because if it is, then it’s not going to work.’
‘We’re back to that, are we?’
‘A fake pregnancy is the oldest trick in the book.’ But she wasn’t lying. Luca knew that in the very depth of his being. She wasn’t like that. She was achingly honest and if she had travelled all this way to tell him that she was carrying his baby, then carrying his baby she was.
Right in front of him, the world was falling apart at the seams.
‘Remember that first time?’ Cordelia asked. She felt too tired to argue with him about whether she was pretending to be pregnant or not. It was ridiculous that he would even allow his thoughts to travel along those lines but, then again, who was to say how he really thought? Who he really was?
‘I remember.’
‘We were on the beach. Well, we weren’t exactly careful then, were we?’
‘I… Jesus… I… We… No, I took chances. I took a chance.’ He flushed darkly as he relived every second of that mind-blowing experience. He’d been so turned on—and she’d been lying there, as tempting as a siren and he’d thought…that he would get away with it. No, that was a lie. The truth was that he hadn’t thought at all. Her tightness had wrapped around his erection, rubbing it into a frenzied state of arousal, and he had exploded inside her.
His groin ached as he thought about it and he could feel his libido shoot into the stratosphere without warning.
Utterly inappropriate.
‘You show up here, out of the blue…naturally, I would want confirmation…’
Cordelia shrugged. ‘Why would I come all the way over here to lie to you about something like that? Don’t you think that it’s something that could be easily disproved if I were making it all up? One trip down to the local chemists would be all it would take.’ She sighed and cast her eyes around the lavish room, so in keeping with the lavishness of the house and the stunning splendour of the limitless vineyards stretching into the blue horizon.
The giddiness had eased and her mind felt clear for the first time since she had found out that she was pregnant.
‘What happened between us was a mistake,’ she told him quietly. He was so ridiculously good-looking that she could barely allow her gaze to settle on him for too long. Look for too long and her mind started playing cruel tricks on her, started travelling down memory lane, and that was never going to do. ‘You swept into my life and I guess it was just the extraordinary nature of the circumstances that brought you there, and the fact that you were so…so different from everyone and everything I’d ever known, that combined to undermine all the principles I’d lived by. I’d longed for adventure and, suddenly,
there you were, just about as adventurous as they came. I admit that I was a little sad when you left, Luca…’ she paused and took a deep breath, making sure that, whatever happened, she left with her dignity intact ‘…but not sad enough to come all the way over here in an attempt to seduce you back into a relationship.’
Luca scowled. Contained in that explanation was an insult although he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, or on why he should feel so piqued.
‘So you said.’
‘It’s understandable,’ she mused softly. ‘You were my first lover.’
‘Your first lover?’ Luca wanted to scoff, because, in his world, virgins were as rare as hen’s teeth, but then he remembered the feel of her, that tightness. And more than that, he remembered what she had been like, skittish and shy, giving and then retreating, at once eager and timid. ‘I would have known.’
‘There’s no point talking about that.’ She waved aside his interruption. ‘I came here because I thought you ought to know. I never expected to find what I did and I certainly never thought that I would be sitting here, explaining this situation to a guy about to tie the knot.’
Luca shifted uncomfortably. He thought of Isabella and the neatly parcelled future that had been lying in store for him.
‘This is a mess,’ he muttered.
Cordelia reddened. ‘Not for you,’ she said coolly.
‘How so?’
‘I’m not asking anything of you. I plan on going back to Cornwall and, of course, if you ever want to come and see your child, then you would be welcome, but that’s as far as it goes when it comes to my expectations of you.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ he said incredulously.
‘No, Luca, I’m not. In fact, the minute I heard that you were about to get married…’
‘No one’s bought a hat yet! Isabella has always been destined to be my wife. I am now thirty-four years old and the time has come. At this point it is an understanding rather than an arrangement with a fixed date.’
‘Whatever. The fact remains that the minute you told me about…about… Isabella…’ she could barely get the name out ‘… I made up my mind to leave without saying anything at all, but then I fainted and when you offered me that brandy, I thought of the baby and out it all came.’ She shifted. ‘But I don’t intend to stick around here, messing up your life. I’m going to head back home and, like I said, you can do whatever you want to do.’ She began getting to her feet.