by Lynne Graham
‘I just love you saying that when you couldn’t wait to phone the man and talk me out of my job!’ Amber exclaimed, and then her shoulders slumped, the stress and strain of it all suddenly closing in on her, making her realise all at once how absolutely exhausted she was. ‘I’m almost asleep standing up.’
‘You should be in bed.’ Never in her life had she seen a guy leap so fast for an escape route, or at least she thought that until Rocco lifted her up into his arms and carted her over to the divan and settled her down on it with pronounced care and absolutely none of his usual familiarities.
‘Are you staying?’ she asked in a small tense voice.
‘Not if you don’t want me.’
Her teeth gritted. ‘Is this your bed?’
Rocco nodded slowly.
‘OK...you can stay so I can nag at you until I fall asleep,’ she muttered.
‘I can live with that.’
Filching a rarely worn nightdress from her case, she headed into the bathroom. Her head felt as if it were spinning with the number of conflicting thoughts assailing her, but one emotion dominated. She loved him. It didn’t stop her wanting to kick him but she couldn’t bear to leave him alone with his guilty conscience. Regret was just eating him alive and furthermore, on a purely practical side, Rocco was telling her things that torture wouldn’t have extracted from him eighteen months ago. If he wanted to talk more, she didn’t want to miss out on a single syllable. So he had planned to surprise her with a house and an engagement ring? Rocco and his blasted surprises! If only she had known, she would’ve crashed into his office in a tank and pinned him down to make him listen to her eighteen months ago.
She crept into bed, wondering if the nightie was overkill, but she knew that taking it off would be noticed. She listened to him undress.
‘How do you feel about getting married on Christmas Eve?’
Amber blinked and then came up over the edge of the duvet to stare at the male ostensibly entranced in the shape of his own shirt buttons, but so tense she was anything but fooled. Her heart hit the Big Dipper and kept on hurtling higher. Well, he had his flaws but...
‘Christmas Eve?’ Amber echoed rather croakily. ‘Well, I’m not doing anything else...’
‘Like I said to you before, you won’t regret it.’
It sounded like a blood oath. ‘What about you?’
‘I get you as my wife,’ Rocco murmured, smooth as silk. ‘I also get part-ownership on Freddy. Those facts will then become the only things in my life I don’t have to feel bad about.’
‘You’re just killing me with your enthusiasm.’
‘How much enthusiasm am I allowed to show?’
‘Major moving on to maximum,’ Amber muttered, leaning heavily on the encouragement angle. ‘Fireworks, Fourth of July, whatever feels right.’
‘Would you have married me eighteen months ago?’
She would have left a smoke trail in her haste to get to the church. ‘Possibly...’
Rocco slid into bed. She was waiting on him mentioning love; she was praying on him mentioning love.
‘You were such a workaholic then that we hardly saw each other,’ Rocco remarked tautly, dimming the lights but not putting them out.
‘It was such a boring job too—’
Rocco took her aback by hauling her across the bed into his arms and studying her with scorching dark golden eyes of disbelief. ‘You put that boring job ahead of me every time!’
Amber winced, shimmied confidingly into the hard heat and muscularity of his big, powerful body and whispered softly, ‘But I surrendered my wheelbarrow for you, didn’t I?’
He captured her animated face between long brown fingers, gazing down into dancing green eyes that had miraculously lost the dulled look of exhaustion. ‘Not without argument, cara.’
‘I had Freddy’s security to consider.’ She shivered against him, drowning in the sexy depths of his stunning eyes.
‘Of course...’ Something cool in Rocco’s agreement, a dry note, tugged anxious strings deep down in her mind, but then Rocco possessed her mouth with a raw and hungry sensual force that electrified her. He took precisely ten ruthless seconds to remove the nightdress.
‘Are you angry with me?’ Amber whispered, sensing a tension in him that troubled her and easing back with a furrowed brow.
‘With myself...only with myself,’ Rocco swore with roughened fervour, his spectacular gaze resting with an intensity she could feel but no longer read on her anxious face.
She edged back to him, weak not only with hunger but also with a desperate need for reassurance that everything was all right. It felt so much more than all right to her. She was so happy she could have cried. She didn’t want him to be angry with himself. But he curved an exploring hand over the straining rosy bud crowning one pouting breast and, that fast, she was sucked down into a place where thinking was more than she could manage.
It was as though the stressful day had built up an incredibly urgent need in both of them. There was a wildness in Rocco, a wildness that was gloriously thrilling and fired her every response to fresh heights. He slid down over her quivering length, pausing to make passionate love to every promising curve and hollow he encountered in his path. Before very long, all she was remotely aware of was the thunderous crash of her own heartbeat, her breath sobbing in her throat and a level of sensation which seemed to transcend earthly existence.
‘I want this to be amazing...’ Rocco rasped.
She was half out of her mind with an intensity of pleasure at that point, which made it impossible to tell him that amazing did not begin to cover the excitement of what he was making her feel. Writhing with utterly mindless and tormented delight, she moaned his name like a mantra, clutched at his hair, grabbed his shoulders and surrendered to her own abandonment while being pleasured within an inch of her life.
‘Amazing...’ she managed when she could speak again but only just.
‘It’s not over yet,’ Rocco husked in a tone of promise.
And if the beginning and the middle had been totally enthralling for her, the conclusion was an even more ecstatic and long-drawn-out affair. In the aftermath she was too weak to do anything but lie in his arms. She had a dazed sense of having seen, experienced and revisited paradise more than once and she was awash with tender love and wonderment that he was finally, actually and for ever hers.
That was the inopportune moment when Rocco shifted away from her and breathed flatly like a male to whom paradise was an utterly unknown place, ‘At least I know you’re not faking it now...’
I’m not going to say anything, screeched the alarm-bell voice inside her shaken head. She hadn’t got the energy for a row, she told herself weakly, and she curved into a comfy pillow like a hampster burrowing into a hiding place. They could row after they got married.
CHAPTER TEN
AMBER focused on her own reflection in the cheval dressing mirror.
It was Christmas Eve and it was her wedding day and she was wearing the most divine dress she had ever seen or ever worn. The delicate gold-and-silver-embroidered boned bodice hugged her to the waist, where the full ivory rustling skirt flared out, overlaid at the back by an elaborate train with matching embroidery. She pointed her toes to see her satin shoes adorned with tulle roses, tipped up her chin the better to allow the light catch the superb contemporary gold and diamond tiara and the elegant short veil that hung in a flirty froth from the back of her head.
But it was no use! No matter how hard Amber tried to lose herself in bridal fervour, she had to emerge again to be confronted by an awful truth: Rocco wasn’t happy! She was wilfully marrying a man who didn’t love her, but who very much wanted to be a father to their son. Her nose tickled as she fought to hold back welling tears. It had honestly not occurred to her until after she had said yes to
his marriage proposal that his most likely motivation had been sheer guilt and Freddy.
It had been days since Rocco had even kissed her—not since that very first night. The next day, she had returned from her shopping trip for her wedding outfit and a slight difference of opinion had resulted in her hot-headedly transferring her possessions into the guest room next to Freddy’s. She had kind of shot herself in the foot with that relocation: Rocco had neither come in search of her nor betrayed the slightest awareness of the reality that she had gone missing from his bed. Separate bedrooms and they weren’t even married yet, she thought wretchedly. Just when she had believed that every cloud on her horizon had vanished, a brick-wall barrier had come up out of nowhere and divided them. Since then Rocco could not have made it clearer that Freddy was his biggest source of interest.
He had spent that whole day with Freddy while she’d been shopping. When she’d got back, Freddy had been in his bath. Rocco had been dive-bombing Freddy’s toy boats with pretty much the same enjoyment that Freddy got from loads of noisy splashes and sound effects, but her entrance to the fun and frolics had cast a distinct dampener on the proceedings.
‘Did you find a dress?’ he asked with scrupulous politeness.
‘Yes...it cost a fortune. Thanks,’ she said with the semi-guilty, semi-euphoric response of a woman who had managed to locate her dream wedding gown, her dream veil and her dream shoes, not to mention a set of lingerie that had quite taken her breath away.
‘Odd how being a kept woman within marriage doesn’t seem to bother you quite the way it bothered you before I mentioned the wedding ring,’ Rocco drawled in a black-velvet purr.
Screening her shaken and hurt eyes at that cutting comment, which she was absolutely defenceless against, Amber murmured, ‘Would you like me to go and mow the lawn to justify my existence?’
‘You picked me up wrong, cara...’
Like heck, she had misunderstood! So that was why she had shifted into a guest room but doing that had made it even easier for Rocco to distance himself from her. There he was surging home every evening to spend time with Freddy, perfectly charming and polite with her, but the instant Freddy had fallen asleep, Rocco had excused himself to work. It was as if they had already been married ninety years and he had nothing left to say to her!
Amber straightened her bowed shoulders, took a last longing, lingering look at her reflection in her dream wedding gown and faced facts. Nearly all week, she had refused to let go of her fantasy of becoming Rocco’s wife. Hiding her head in the sand, she had shrunk from acknowledging that Rocco was showing as much enthusiasm for matrimony as the proverbial condemned man.
She could ring him on his mobile before he arrived at the church. Better a misfired wedding than the misery of a marriage that was a mistake, she told herself. Blinking back tears, Amber stabbed out his number and waited for Rocco to answer.
‘Rocco? Where are you?’
‘En route to the church. What’s wrong?’
‘I want to call it off,’ Amber whispered.
‘Call...what off?’ Rocco breathed jerkily.
Amber gulped. ‘I don’t think we should go through with the wedding. You’ve been so unhappy for days—’
‘And this is the magic cure? I’m a bloody sight more unhappy now!’ Rocco launched down the line at her with incredulous force. ‘You’ve got cold feet, that’s all. Now pull yourself together. We’re getting married today!’
‘But you don’t really want to marry me—’
‘Where did you get that idea? I really, really, really want to marry you,’ Rocco murmured intensely, changing both tack and volume. ‘I want to be stalked by you every day for the rest of my life—’
‘But you couldn’t even stalk me as far as one of your own guest rooms!’ A sob caught at Amber’s voice.
‘Cards on the table time,’ Rocco muttered with fierce urgency. ‘I somehow got the impression that you were only marrying me for Freddy’s benefit—’
‘Don’t be stupid...’ Amber winced and then confided in a small voice, ‘Actually I was thinking the same thing about you.’
‘Freddy’s wonderful, but he’s not so wonderful that I’d sentence myself to a lifetime with a woman I didn’t want,’ Rocco swore impressively.
‘I also thought that maybe you were just marrying me because you felt guilty—’
‘No, I think most guys run the other way if they feel that guilty. I can handle guilt, but I’m not at all sure I can handle not having you...’
Amber blossomed from a nervous wreck into a happy bride-to-be again. ‘See you at the church—’
‘You’ve made me really nervous now—’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have ignored me for so long in favour of Freddy,’ Amber told him dulcetly.
Neville was waiting downstairs to accompany her. Opal had arrived with her husband early that morning to help Amber into her bridal regalia and had then gone on to the church in company with Freddy and Freddy’s new nanny, a lovely friendly girl, whom Rocco had insisted on hiring to help Amber.
Amber negotiated the stairs with the housekeeper holding up her train. Her brother-in-law gave her a smiling appraisal. ‘You look incredible, Amber. Rocco won’t know what’s hit him.’
Amber rather thought Rocco would know what had hit him after that emotional phone call they had shared. They were each as bad as the other, she reflected ruefully. Neither of them had shared their deepest fears over the past few days. She had been pretty tough on Rocco that first night in London. But she was really surprised that a male as confident as he was had entertained the lowering suspicion that she might only be marrying him for Freddy’s benefit and for security. Somehow, she recognised, she had subconsciously assumed that Rocco knew she was still madly in love with him. Now she knew he didn’t know and was amazingly subject to the same insecurities as she was. A sunny smile spread over her face at that acknowledgement.
The church was absolutely miles away, right outside London. Amber thought Rocco had picked a very inconvenient location but then she had had nothing to do with any of the arrangements: Rocco had assured her that he had everything organised. Feeling that he could at least have consulted her about her own wedding day, she had rigorously refused to ask questions.
The Rolls finally drew up outside a charming rural church surrounded by cars. As Amber got out her emergence and her progress into the church were minutely recorded by a busy bunch of men wielding all sorts of cameras. The press? she wondered in surprise. Then she looked down the aisle and saw Rocco waiting for her at the altar and all such minor musings evaporated. There he was, six feet four inches of devastatingly handsome masculinity, and her heart started racing. She might have generously offered him his freedom back, but she had never been so grateful to have an offer refused.
Stunning dark golden eyes scanned her, stilled and just stayed locked to her all the way down the aisle. It wasn’t at all cool bridegroom behaviour, but Amber loved that poleaxed stare. He didn’t have to speak: she knew he thought she looked spectacular. He reached for her hand at the altar. She was so happy that her eyes stung a little. The plain and simple words of the ceremony sounded beautiful to her. Freddy, however, let out an anguished wail at the sight of both his mother and his father disappearing out of view to sign the wedding register. Amber darted back to retrieve their anxious son from his nanny’s knee and take him with them.
‘You look incredibly gorgeous,’ Rocco told her as he lifted Freddy from her arms to give him a consoling hug. Back where he felt he ought to be in the very centre of things, Freddy smiled.
Loads of photos were taken on the church steps and Rocco swept her off into the waiting limo as soon as he could.
Amber gave him a teasing look. ‘Do you think you could tell me now where we’re having our reception?’
‘Wychwood House.’
&nbs
p; A slight frown-line indented her brow. ‘I’ve heard that name before somewhere.’
‘Let me jog your memory.’ A wolfish grin was now tugging at the corners of Rocco’s expressive mouth. ‘When we were together last year, do you remember the way you always used to devour the property sections of the Sunday newspapers?’
A slow tide of hot pink crept up over Amber’s face, but she lifted her brows in apparent surprise. ‘No...’
‘Married an hour and already lying to me,’ Rocco reproved with vibrant amusement. ‘Did you think I didn’t notice that while I was deep in the business news you were enjoying a covert thrill scanning the houses for sale?’
Feeling very much as though an embarrassing secret habit had been exposed, Amber bristled defensively. ‘Well, just glancing through the property pages is not a crime, is it?’
‘Just glancing?’ Rocco flung his handsome head back and laughed out loud at that understatement. ‘You were in seventh heaven rustling through those pages. So when you finally went to the lengths of removing an entire page from a newspaper, I knew it was a fair bet that you’d found your dream house.’
Just then, Amber recalled ripping out that particular page while Rocco had been in the shower. A sudden, barely considered impulse after reading an interesting article about the history of a gorgeous country house that had been about to come on to the market.
‘So after doing some investigation to find out which house it was, I bought it for you.’
‘Honestly?’ Amber was going off into shock. ‘B-but I thought it was the house in London that you bought for us last year!’
‘No, that was a much more recent acquisition. I bought Wychwood for you a week before we broke up.’
‘But...’ Amber was just transfixed with disbelief.
‘I told you that I had a country estate,’ Rocco reminded her gently.
Recalling the context in which that statement had been made and taken by her as a most unfunny joke on her gardening status, Amber swallowed with difficulty. By then the Rolls was already powering up an imposing winding drive that led through a long sweep of beautiful rolling parkland adorned by mature oak trees.