by Lynne Graham
And there it was, exactly what she had expected: a positive.
Warm acceptance diametrically opposed to the furious self-loathing she had just been dealing with flooded Maya. No matter how she felt about Raffaele or her reactions to him, Maya wanted her baby and was excited at the prospect of becoming a mother. Yes, it was happening to her when she was younger than she had planned but Maya had always wanted children and could not be anything other than happy with such a result. Pausing only to brush her teeth and run a brush through her tumbled blonde hair, Maya walked back into the bedroom.
‘Well?’ Raffaele shot at her expectantly.
The sight of him when she was unprepared still left her short of breath and on the edge of the most ridiculous sense of excitement. But there Raffaele stood, sheathed in black jeans and a black shirt, tall, powerful and strong, and the very air in the cabin hummed with the vibrant energy that he radiated. He had been waiting for her to emerge.
‘Don’t keep me in suspense,’ he told her.
Maya blinked in astonishment as she realised that he had somehow guessed exactly what she had been engaged in doing. ‘How did you guess?’
‘You stopped drinking wine two weeks ago. You’ve been feeling dizzy. You went to a lot of trouble to make elaborate excuses about why you wanted to visit a pharmacist yesterday. And I watch you like a hawk,’ Raffaele countered with a wry smile. ‘It’s a yes, isn’t it?’
‘At least you didn’t put a spy camera in the bathroom,’ Maya breathed, her clear gaze pinned to his lean, darkly handsome face and the smile already pulling at the corners of his beautiful stubborn mouth. ‘Yes, I’m pregnant...’
‘I didn’t expect it to happen so fast,’ Raffaele confessed then, crossing the cabin in one long stride to reach for her, linking his arms loosely round her shoulders as he gazed down at her. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Excited, weird, pleased, all sorts of crazy things.’
‘You’re happy?’
‘Yes. I love babies,’ she admitted a little self-consciously.
‘And why shouldn’t you?’ Raffaele replied lightly.
‘How do you feel about this?’ she pressed with intense curiosity.
‘Delighted,’ Raffaele said quietly. ‘I wrongly assumed that this result would take a lot longer to achieve.’
And at least one of the happy bubbles inside Maya burst because ‘achieve’ wasn’t the kind of word she wanted him to use. It wasn’t an emotional word; it was a businesslike word that went best with other words like target and goal. It was a reminder that she wasn’t in a typical marriage, a reminder that, indeed, her marriage as such was probably already winding to an end even as they spoke because that had been what they had agreed.
‘And now you’ve got your freedom back just like you wanted,’ Maya pointed out, because she could not resist the urge to speak out loud her greatest fear. She would get used to the idea that he was no longer a real part of her life, she told herself fiercely; she would forget that he had ever begun to mean something more to her.
Raffaele tensed, stunning dark golden eyes suddenly narrowing and veiling, curling black lashes concealing his expression. In silence, he nodded, a faint frown line etched between his ebony brows. ‘It’s a little soon to be thinking like that,’ he murmured tautly. ‘In fact, it’s kind of insulting. I have more respect for you than you seem to think.’
But Maya wanted much more than respect, she thought painfully, hoping that what she felt for him wasn’t really love but some lesser affliction like a teenager’s overwhelming crush, which could often be short-lived. She could swiftly recover from a crush, after all. For the sake of her own peace of mind, she knew that she had to start moving on from their relationship as fast as she could.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BARELY FORTY-EIGHT HOURS later, Maya suffered a miscarriage.
The day before, Raffaele had insisted that she should see a Greek doctor to have the test result confirmed and have the usual health checks. Maya would’ve preferred to wait until they returned to London in a week’s time but she had given way in the end because she wanted to follow all the rules. She had told the doctor about the incredible tiredness engulfing her and he had smiled and advised her that that was normal in early pregnancy.
That evening when they were sailing towards the island of Sicily, sheer exhaustion persuaded Maya into having an early night. Cramping pains in her abdomen wakened her after midnight and she sat up with a start, switching on the bedside light and pushing back the sheet to check that her misgivings were correct.
‘What’s wrong?’ Raffaele demanded.
‘I’m bleeding,’ she whispered sickly. ‘I’m having a miscarriage.’
In a matter of seconds, Raffaele leapt out of the bed and lifted the phone to wake his pilot and instruct him in urgent Italian. As if she were standing somewhere outside herself, Maya watched him as he pulled on jeans, reluctantly appreciating his extreme cool in a crisis and the way he took charge. ‘There’s no point in taking me to a hospital,’ she told him ruefully. ‘There’s nothing they can do to stop what’s happening at this stage of a pregnancy.’
‘You must receive medical care,’ Raffaele sliced in fiercely. ‘And don’t take that pessimistic attitude. It may be something else amiss, something that can be treated.’
He wouldn’t let her go for a shower, wouldn’t even let her stand up or walk. He bundled her up in a towel and a sheet and carried her up to the helipad where the helicopter was already powering up. Maya stopped arguing. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her what had happened, and she knew how common early miscarriages were. Her baby, barely more than a tiny bunch of cells, was already gone. Rationally she knew that even then, but her brain was having a much harder time coming to terms with the knowledge.
The cramps became more severe during the flight and she struggled to hide the fact that she was in pain because there was nothing anyone on the flight could do about it.
Watching her, Raffaele felt sick and powerless, not sensations he was used to feeling. Her eyes were dark with strain in the white taut triangle of her face and her breathing was erratic, her hands clenching in on themselves. He knew she was in pain and he reached for her hand. ‘Maya—?’
‘I’m totally fine. Let’s not fuss about this,’ she told him briskly, snatching her fingers free of his and turning her head away, tears burning free of her lowered eyelids to trickle down her rigid face in silence.
Naturally, Raffaele didn’t want her to lose the baby because that would mean starting all over again, she thought painfully. Just when he had been on the very brink of reclaiming his freedom, his neat little plan had fallen apart and they were being thrown right back to where they had begun. He couldn’t possibly be feeling what she was feeling. The baby itself wasn’t real to him the way it was to her. On his terms, their precious little baby had only been a means to an end, and she hated him for that, simply couldn’t help hating him for it.
The helicopter ferried her to a private hospital in Sicily and she was whisked away from Raffaele. Once she had been examined and scanned, she was given pain relief and finally tucked into a bed in a quiet room where a doctor came to tell her what she already knew: her pregnancy was gone. She had thought she was prepared for that news, but it seemed that she was not and that somewhere deep down inside she had still cherished a dim and foolish little hope that her worst assumptions could yet be proved wrong. Only, unhappily for her, her pessimistic outlook had been correct.
And she felt gutted, absolutely gutted with hurt and disappointment. In the silence of the night, broken only by occasional quiet footsteps of the staff in the corridor beyond her room, she lay wondering if she had done anything that could have contributed to the miscarriage. Maybe she had eaten something she shouldn’t have or caught an infection, maybe she shouldn’t have had the occasional glass of wine after the wedding, maybe she had been too active s
crambling over rocks and along goat paths in Raffaele’s energetic wake while they were exploring, maybe her body just wasn’t fit enough to host a healthy pregnancy. Stop it, stop it, her brain urged her as all the things she could have done wrong tumbled together in a crazed shout of self-condemnation inside her aching head.
It was so pointless to think that way because none of it could change anything: her baby was gone as though it had never been and that absolutely broke her heart. The tears she had struggled to hold back surged then in a blinding, stinging flood and she buried her convulsed face in a pillow to muffle her sobs.
‘I’m so sorry...’ Raffaele breathed stiltedly from the doorway because he knew how thrilled she had been about the baby.
In fact, he had been sincerely startled by her sheer enthusiasm at the idea of becoming a mother because the kind of women he usually mixed with invariably felt the need to deny the maternal urge as though it were a weakness or an unattractive trait likely to scare off eligible men. But not Maya, no, not Maya, who was who she was without fear or concern as to how she might appear to others and who wanted what she wanted without apology.
Tragically, he didn’t know what to say to her and that felt like an enormous failing to him at that moment. He had spoken at length to the medical personnel, had heard every empty cliché that had ever been voiced on the topic of miscarriage and he didn’t want to trot those same words out for Maya’s benefit. I’m sorry, an expression of regret, seemed the only appropriate response.
In dismay at his appearance, Maya rolled over and sat up to focus on him through swollen eyes, angry resentment shooting through her in a heady rush of sudden energy. ‘Of course, you’re sorry...this development sets back your plans!’
‘As of this moment I have no plans,’ Raffaele intoned, moving forward, all lithe grace and self-containment. ‘We need time to grieve.’
Maya looked at him and truly hated him. Grieve? We? She was an emotional wreck and he was calm and assured, which was only to be expected from a man who had no more feelings than a lump of concrete! As she tried to suppress the tumultuous surge of her resentment she studied him, her heart hammering somewhere in the region of her throat, it seemed, teaching her all over again, and when she least required the reminder, how weak she could be around him.
It was the middle of the night and, for once, Raffaele looked tired and under strain, the sculpted lines and angles of his lean dark features clenched taut and shadowing his dark deep-set eyes. But he also looked drop-dead gorgeous and vibrant as if no adversity could do him down for long. His bronzed skin still had the gleam of burnished gold like his eyes, his untidy blue-black hair remained glossy as silk, his arrogant head was high, the athletic flow of his lean, muscular body fluid. She wanted to reach out a hand to him and hold on tightly and she hated herself for that betrayal, for that need for comfort that made her so achingly vulnerable.
‘This baby was never real to you the way it was to me!’ she condemned bitterly instead. ‘You didn’t think of our baby as a little girl or a little boy, a child who would be a mix of us both, you only saw our baby as a device to be used to acquire a multimillion-pound company! You didn’t see anything wrong with using your own flesh and blood that way! Even though you suffered because your parents broke up when you were a baby, it didn’t bother you that you were cursing our child to grow up in a divided family as well!’
‘You’re right. I saw what I wanted and went for it. I’ve never had to think about moral boundaries or consequences such as this before and now that I have, I see that I went wrong. But I didn’t realise that until I met you,’ Raffaele bit out in a rasping undertone. ‘Unhappily, I can’t change anything I did now. It’s too late.’
Maya wasn’t even listening properly to him. ‘Yes, too late,’ she agreed sadly, lying back down and turning her face away. Aware of him hovering at the foot of the bed, she frowned. ‘Go back to the yacht, Raffaele.’
‘I’ll get right on that,’ Raffaele breathed through gritted teeth of restraint.
Was she kidding him? His wife suffered a miscarriage and she still expected him to just walk away? Getting it wrong wasn’t an excuse to keep on getting it wrong. It meant he had to stop and think about what he was doing, but he didn’t actually need to think about what to do next. Every fibre of his being told him that he needed to stay with his wife to support her after such a loss, even if she didn’t want him with her.
It had been his loss too, he reflected, striding from the room and finding a corridor window that overlooked the car park to stare out. And he wasn’t quite as callous as Maya appeared to believe because he too had been thinking about the child she carried as an individual. He had pictured a little boy with her fair hair and his eyes and then a little girl with his hair and her eyes, before accepting that genes weren’t that easy to forecast and that their child might look more like one of their parents or not very like them at all. But the child would still have been their child, their flesh and blood. Not, however, a cross between a possession and a plaything, as his late mother had viewed him, not a sacrifice for financially foolish parents, as Maya had become. No, their child would have been safe from such unreasonable demands and expectations, their child would have been left free to become whoever and whatever he or she wanted within safe boundaries. Divided family or not, he would have made it work for their child, no matter what the cost.
But, regrettably, Maya was correct in that he had not started out thinking along balanced, reasonable lines that took a child’s needs into consideration. He had simply seen an opportunity to expand his business empire and had leapt on that fresh challenge to alleviate his boredom. He hadn’t cared about the position he was putting Maya in, nor had he thought in any depth about the child he was planning to bring into the world with her help. He had been selfish, callous, possibly even cruel, he conceded grimly, and he had few excuses to make for himself. He didn’t need that technology company or Aldo’s business holdings and properties because he was already richer than sin. He should have thought more than twice about dragging an innocent woman and a child into his bleak, self-indulgent existence.
All of a sudden he was no longer surprised that the situation he had created had blown up in his face. It was what he deserved, after all, for being irresponsible and lacking in compassion. But it wasn’t what Maya deserved, he thought heavily, and Maya was devastated by the loss of their child. Maya had been ready to love that baby from the instant it was conceived. Her heart, unlike his own, was open and giving.
* * *
The dawn light was brightening the room when Maya wakened from her restless doze. Almost immediately the events of the night flooded back to her and her eyes stung afresh, the heaviness in her heart weighing down on her again. A slight sound behind her made her flip over and stare in consternation at the sight of Raffaele slumped in a graceful sprawl of long limbs in the chair beside the bed. Unshaven with dark stubble framing his strong jaw line and accentuating his mobile mouth, he looked unnervingly familiar and precious to her. ‘Why are you still here?’ she exclaimed.
‘Where else would I be?’ he parried levelly. ‘I’m part of this too. I couldn’t leave you alone.’
‘Even though I gave you permission to do exactly that?’ Maya glanced away from him again, disturbed by how welcome she found his presence and the sense of security it gave her. The gut reactions Raffaele stirred were misleading and annoying. She always wanted to trust him even when she knew she shouldn’t.
‘You don’t always know what’s best for you,’ Raffaele fielded.
‘And you do?’ An embarrassed flush lit her heart-shaped face as she heard the edge of scorn lacing her voice.
‘I think we both know that if I had ever once considered what was best for you, I would never have met you in the first place and offered you the choice that I did,’ Raffaele countered drily, sharply disconcerting her.
Maya stared at him in astonishment
. Even if he had chosen not to approach her, her family’s debts would still have been called in. Aldo would have seen to that. Her parents would have been made bankrupt and homeless and that was not a development she could have faced any more easily. Raffaele had given her a choice. It might not have been a choice she relished but at the time it had seemed the lesser of two evils.
‘I suppose you never thought of something like this happening,’ she muttered.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he agreed quietly. ‘It didn’t occur to me that I was taking a gamble on real life and that that is likely to be messier and less predictable than a business transaction.’
‘But then you’re too accustomed to controlling developments and people and it’s made you reckless,’ Maya murmured, her heart jumping in her tight chest as he looked up at her through his lashes, his eyes a butterscotch gold that were like a shard of sunlight against his bronzed features.
‘When it’s a question of how I’ve treated you, reckless is an acceptable criticism,’ Raffaele bit out grudgingly, his lean dark face stormy at having to make that concession. ‘I didn’t allow for the human factor.’
Involuntarily, Maya smiled. It was only a small smile, just a slight turning-up at the corners of her mouth. ‘Who are you and what have you done with Raffaele Manzini?’ she quipped.