by Lynne Graham
She walked slowly downstairs. Vitale appeared in the dining-room doorway.
‘Breakfast... Join me,’ he suggested in that same hatefully distant tone.
‘I didn’t want this development either,’ she said in her own defence as she moved past him, avoiding looking at him quite deliberately.
‘I think I know that,’ he conceded curtly.
Her bright head flew up and she looked at him. ‘Do you?’
Exasperation flared in his forbidding gaze. ‘Yes, but it doesn’t change the situation.’
She supposed it didn’t. He accepted that she wasn’t guilty of intent but somehow she still felt that she was being held to blame. And possibly she was to blame, thinking about the instructions she had failed to read because at the time contraception had not been an issue she’d cared about or needed. She had assumed she was safe from conception when she wasn’t but he had made the same assumption. What did it matter now anyway? He was right. A lack of intent didn’t change anything.
She lifted a plate and helped herself to toast and butter, her unsettled stomach cringing at the prospect of anything more solid.
‘Shouldn’t you be having something more to eat?’
‘I’m nauseous. That’s why I went to the doctor in the first place,’ she admitted stiltedly as Jenkins poured tea and coffee while Vitale simply ignored the older man’s presence.
When the butler had closed the door on his exit, Vitale studied her and said flatly, ‘We have to get married and quickly.’
Jazz stared back at him wide-eyed and stunned by incredulity at that declaration. ‘That’s ludicrous!’ she gulped.
‘No, it isn’t. There is another dimension to this issue which you are ignoring but which I cannot ignore,’ Vitale imparted coolly. ‘The children you carry will be heirs to the throne of Lerovia with the firstborn taking precedence. If they are born illegitimate they cannot be heirs and I know that I don’t want a child of mine in this world that feels cheated of their birthright because I failed to marry you.’
He was quite correct. Jazz had not considered that issue in any depth or how any such child would feel as he or she grew up and realised the future they had been denied by an accident of birth. She swallowed hard but still said, ‘Be sensible, Vitale. You can’t marry someone like me. You’re a prince.’
‘I don’t think we have a choice. We’ll get married very discreetly and quietly in a civil ceremony and keep the news to ourselves until after the ball,’ Vitale informed her.
‘You’re still taking me to the ball?’ she murmured in surprise.
‘If you’re going to be my wife, why wouldn’t I take you?’
‘But you don’t want to marry me,’ she pointed out shakily. ‘And feeling like that it would be all wrong for both of us.’
Vitale dealt her a cool sardonic appraisal. ‘We don’t have to stay married for ever, Jazz. Only long enough to legitimise our children’s birth.’
‘Oh...’ Jazz reddened fiercely, feeling foolish for not having recognised the obvious escape clause in his startling announcement that they should marry. He wasn’t talking about a normal marriage, of course he wasn’t. He was suggesting a temporary marriage for their children’s sake followed by divorce, a relationship that would be, in its own way, as false as the role he had already prepared her to play at the ball as his partner.
‘And there is a plus side for me,’ Vitale continued smoothly. ‘I get the heir my mother so badly wants me to have and there will be no pressure on me to marry a second time.’
Jazz had lost colour as the true ramifications of what he was proposing slowly sank in, but pride made her contrive an approximation of a smile. ‘So, everybody gets what they want,’ she completed tightly.
Everybody but me, she conceded painfully, forced to listen to how he wanted to marry her and then get rid of her again after profiting from her unintentional fertility. She was seeing the side of Vitale that she hated, that sharp-as-knives, cold, calculating streak that could power him in moments of crisis. And it chilled Jazz right down to the marrow bone.
Inside her chest her heart felt as though he had stuck an actual knife in it. Over the past weeks, she had become attached but he had not. For Vitale, she had been a means to an end, a convenient lover, not someone he valued in any more lasting way. Now he planned to make the best of a bad situation and marry her to legitimise the children she carried. That would benefit him and it would benefit their children as well. But there would be no benefit for Jazz in becoming Vitale’s temporary wife. Continued exposure to Vitale’s callous indifference would only open her up to a world of hurt. And what on earth would it be like for her to become a member of a royal family? Ordinary women like her didn’t marry princes, she reflected with a sinking stomach. How the heck could she rise to the level of a royal?
But, seriously, what choice did she have? She didn’t have the luxury of saying no to what was surely the most unromantic proposal of marriage that had ever been voiced by a man. How could she deny her unborn twins the right to become accepted members of the Lerovian royal family? That would be a very selfish thing to do, to protect herself instead of securing her children’s future. And she could see that Vitale had not a doubt that she would accept his proposal, which made her want to throw a plate of really messy jelly at him. All those years being chased by princess-title-hunters hadn’t done him any favours in the ego department. Evidently, he believed he was a hell of a catch, even on a temporary basis. Below her lowered lashes, her green eyes flared with slow-burning anger. He was rich and handsome and titled. He put in a terrific performance in bed and bought a good snow globe. But really, what else did he have to offer? Certainly not sensitivity, anyhow.
‘We’ll be married within a few days.’
Vitale dealt her an expectant appraisal as if he was hoping she would jump about with excitement or, at the very least, loose an unseemly whoop of appreciation. Cinderella got her Prince Charming—not, she recognised angrily. He hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to marry him because he took assent for granted. And why not? The marriage wouldn’t last any longer than possibly eighteen months and then he would be free again, free of the housekeeper’s daughter and her baggage.
‘My babies live with me,’ Jazz declared combatively, lest he be cherishing any other sort of plan for their children. ‘I raise my children.’
Vitale lifted and dropped a broad shoulder, the very picture of nonchalance. ‘Of course. I believe you have an elocution lesson now.’
Jazz flushed in surprise. ‘I’m to continue with those lessons?’
‘Naturally. For a while at least you’ll have public appearances to make in your role as my wife. Your pregnancy, though, will eventually make it easier to excuse you from such events,’ he pointed out calmly.
‘You really do have it all worked out.’ Jazz rose stiffly from her seat and walked out of the room without a backward glance.
Vitale gritted his even white teeth in frustration. He would never understand women if he lived to be a thousand! What was wrong with her now? Why was she sulking? Jazz didn’t sulk. She was never moody. He liked that about her. So, what was the problem?
During a long, sleepless night he had contrived to find the silver lining in their predicament and he had been satisfied with the solution he had chosen. Why wasn’t she delighted? He was willing to marry her, jump through all the hoops he had always avoided, just for her benefit and the twins’. OK, his wide sensual mouth curled, he wasn’t saying that there wasn’t anything in the arrangement for him. Jazz officially in his bed would be a personal gain, a sort of compensation for the pain and sacrifice of getting shackled at a mere twenty-eight years old to a woman his mother would despise and attack for her commonplace background. Anger flooded him. What more could he do in the circumstances?
On the morning of Jazz’s wedding day, three days later, sunshine flooded into the apartment living area but she still didn’t feel the slightest bit bridal. Sworn to secrecy, her mother and
her aunt were attending the ceremony, but the very fact that Vitale had not asked to meet her family beforehand only emphasised to Jazz how fake their wedding would be. Angel and his wife, Merry, were to attend as witnesses.
In the preceding three days, Jazz had gone shopping for the first time armed with a credit card given to her by Vitale. She had got fitted for new bras and had picked an off-white dress and matching jacket to wear. But it had not been a happy time for Jazz. Her mother, Peggy, had been distraught when Jazz had announced that she had fallen pregnant by Vitale. It had taken her daughter and her sister’s combined efforts to persuade the older woman that Jazz’s pregnancy did not have to be viewed as a catastrophe when Vitale was about to marry her. Naturally Jazz had not even hinted to either woman that Vitale was not planning on a ‘for ever’ marriage.
That, for the moment, was her secret, her private business, she thought ruefully, but pretending for the sake of her mother and her family that Vitale genuinely cared enough about her to want to marry her cost her sleep. Her bouts of sickness had become worse and when, the second evening, Vitale had walked into her bedroom and found her being horribly ill in the bathroom he had insisted on asking his friend, Giulio, to make a house call. Mr Verratti had told her that the excessive sickness was probably the result of her twin pregnancy, warned her about the danger of dehydration and given her medication that would hopefully reduce the nausea. None of those experiences had lifted Jazz’s low spirits or the horrible feeling of being trapped in a bad and challenging situation over which she had no control.
‘How do you feel?’ was Vitale’s first question when they met at the register office, because Peggy Dickens had begged her daughter to spend that last night at home in her aunt’s apartment, which had meant, traditional or otherwise, that Jazz had had very little sleep resting on a lumpy couch after having enjoyed the luxury of a bed of her own for weeks.
‘I’m fine,’ she lied politely, turning to greet Angel, who was smiling, and then be introduced to his glowing dark-haired wife, who was wonderfully warm and friendly. But Jazz went red, just knowing by the lingering look Angel gave her that he knew she was pregnant as well and she felt humiliated and exposed while wondering if Angel’s wife was being so nice because she pitied her.
‘I should have said that you look amazing in cream,’ Vitale said hastily, as if belatedly grasping that that was more what people expected from a bridegroom than an enquiry about her health.
Not so amazing that he had felt any desire to so much as kiss her since her pregnancy announcement, Jazz reflected bitterly. But then Vitale, trained from childhood to say the right thing at the right time, couldn’t always shake off his conditioning. In the future, she expected him to treat her with excessive politeness and distance, much as he had been treating her since she had told him she had conceived. And it hurt Jazz, it hurt much more even than she had thought it would to live with that forbidding new chill in his attitude towards her. It was as if Vitale were flying on automatic pilot and she was now a stranger because all intimacy between them had vanished.
If only she could so easily banish her responses, she thought unhappily, studying Vitale where he stood chatting with his brother and his wife. Vitale was a devastatingly handsome male distinguished by dark golden black-fringed eyes that sent heat spiralling through her pelvis, which made her avert her eyes from him uneasily. Her body still sang and tingled in his presence, all prickling awareness and sensual enthusiasm, and it mortified her, forced her to crave the indifference he seemed to have embraced with ease.
The wedding ceremony was short and not particularly sweet. For the sake of their audience, Jazz kept a determined smile on her lips and studied the plain platinum ring she had been fitted for only the morning before. She was also thinking about the very comprehensive prenup she had signed an hour after that ring fitting and her heart was still sinking on that score. That document had even contained access arrangements for their unborn children and a divorce settlement. Reading that through to the end had been an even more sobering experience. Vitale had thought of everything going into their temporary marriage and he had taken every possible precaution, so it was hardly surprising that any sense of being a bride escaped her.
‘Give him time,’ Angel urged her in an incomprehensible whispered aside before he departed with his wife, after a brief and extremely formal lunch at an exclusive hotel with her family. ‘He’s emotionally stunted.’
Vitale joined his bride in the limo that was taking them to the airport and their flight to Italy for a long weekend preceding the ball and said, ‘It’s completely weird seeing Angel like that with a woman.’
‘Like what?’ Jazz prompted.
‘Besotted,’ Vitale labelled with a grimace. ‘Didn’t you notice the way he kept on touching her and looking at her?’
‘I noticed that they seemed very happy together.’
‘They started out like us. Merry had Angel’s daughter last year and at first Angel didn’t want anything to do with either of them and now look at them,’ Vitale invited in apparent disbelief. ‘Already hoping for another child some day, he told me...’
Jazz perked up... Well, it was an encouraging story. ‘Fancy that,’ she remarked lightly.
‘I wouldn’t ever want to feel that way,’ Vitale admitted.
‘Why not?’ she asked boldly.
The silence dragged and she thought she had got too personal and that he wasn’t going to answer her.
But Vitale was grimacing. ‘I saw my father crying once. I was very young but it made a big impression on me. He explained that he wouldn’t be living with my mother and I any longer. They were splitting up. At the time, I didn’t really understand that but later, when I looked back, I understood. I don’t know why they divorced but I don’t think it was related to anything Papa did. He was heartbroken.’
Jazz winced but persisted. ‘Didn’t you ask him why they broke up?’
‘I never liked to. I was afraid of upsetting him. He’s a very emotional man.’
But Jazz was thinking of Vitale as a little boy seeing his father distraught over the loss of a woman. Had that disturbing glimpse put Vitale off falling in love? After all, he already had a mother in his life who must surely have damaged his ability to trust women. Exposed to Charles’s heartbreak, Vitale must always have tried to protect himself from getting too attached to a woman. After all, the very first woman he had been attached to, his mother, had rejected him.
‘I should have invited Papa today and he’ll be hurt that I left him out but I didn’t want to get him involved in our predicament,’ Vitale continued.
And that’s the reward you get for digging where you shouldn’t, Jazz told herself unhappily. Vitale knew their marriage would be a short-lived thing and that was why he had left his father out. ‘Did you tell Angel the truth?’ she asked, even though she felt that she already knew the answer to that question.
‘Sì...’ Vitale confirmed quietly. ‘I have no secrets from Angel.’
‘Apart from the bet,’ she reminded him.
And disconcertingly, Vitale laughed at that reminder with genuine appreciation. ‘I felt it was so juvenile to try and one up Zac that I was embarrassed. I don’t know what got into me that day at my father’s office. Or that day when you told Angel about the bet. I was in a very bad mood.’
In the days that followed that meeting with Angel at Vitale’s house Jazz had come to suspect that Vitale had been angry because he had misinterpreted her friendly ease with his older brother as flirtation, forgetting that when they were kids Angel had been as much her playmate as he had been. She had thought, even hoped that Vitale was possessive of her attention and jealous. Now she knew better, she thought wryly.
Feeling like a wet weekend, she stepped onto her first private jet, stunned by the opulent interior and the spaciousness of the cabin.
‘There’s a bedroom you can rest in at the far end,’ Vitale told her helpfully as he opened up his laptop, evidently intending to work.
‘I might just do that,’ she said tartly since it seemed to her that he was hoping to be left in peace.
She kicked off her shoes, and removed her jacket and lay down on the comfortable bed and slept like a log. Vitale remembered it was his wedding day when he was warned that the flight was about to land and he strode into the sleeping compartment to wake Jazz.
She looked so small and fragile lying there that he was taken aback because Jazz always seemed larger than life inside his head. Not since she got pregnant though, he reflected grimly. That had changed everything for them both as well as adversely affecting her health. Giulio had advised him to be very careful because a multiple pregnancy was both more dangerous and more likely to result in a miscarriage and one could not be too careful either with one’s wife or with children, one of whom would be the next heir to a throne. Blasted pregnancy, Vitale thought bitterly, because he could see how wan and thin she was already. Her appetite was affected...her mood was affected. Nothing was the same any more and he missed her vivacity and spontaneity.
Jazz wakened with a start to find Vitale bent over her, his stunning dark golden eyes grim as tombstones. In haste, she edged back from him and sat up.
‘We’re about to land. You’ll have to come back out,’ he warned her.
‘I must’ve been more tired than I appreciated,’ she muttered apologetically while wondering if her absence had even registered with him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ONE OF VITALE’S security team drove the four-wheel-drive up what Vitale assured her was the very last twisting, turning road because Jazz was carsick and they had to keep on stopping lest she throw up. It made her feel like an irritating young child and the politer Vitale was about the necessity, the more exasperated she suspected he was. So much for the honeymoon she had assured her family he was taking her on, even if events had conspired to ensure they only got to take a long weekend in Italy before the royal ball in Lerovia. It would be the honeymoon from hell, she decided wretchedly.