Harlequin Presents--July 2021--Box Set 1 of 2

by Natalie Anderson

  Matteo’s touch seemed to read her flesh like someone reading Braille. He sensed all her erogenous zones, seemed to know exactly what pressure and speed she needed to feel maximum pleasure. And she knew it would be a long time, if ever, before she experienced such pleasure with anyone else.

  Matteo rolled her over so she was lying on her back, deftly disposing of the condom before taking her in his arms again. His eyes were dark and glinting, his hand coming up to cup one of her breasts. ‘I can’t get enough of you...’ He brought his mouth back down to hers in a skin-tingling kiss, his hand caressing her breast, at the same time sending her senses into overload. He raised his mouth from hers to gaze down at her again, one of his fingers moving in a slow caress along her bottom lip. ‘I have to go to Vienna next week for work.’ He captured her hand and brought it up to his mouth, his gaze unwavering on hers. ‘Come with me.’

  Emmie was a little shocked at how much she wanted to go. But was it wise to keep spending time with him? Intimate dinners, dancing cheek to cheek, making love, staying in luxury hotels, as if they were a normal couple. Nothing about their relationship was normal. It never could be. ‘Matteo...’ She aimed her gaze at his neck. ‘I have a business to run and I can’t keep flying off to—’

  ‘Look at me.’ He tipped up her chin with his finger. ‘Tell me what your heart is telling you, not your head.’ His eyes held hers in a tight lock, his expression grave.

  Emmie moistened her lips, her pulse suddenly unsteady. ‘My heart is telling me it would be dangerous to spend too much time with you. And my head is telling me exactly the same thing.’

  He frowned heavily. ‘Dangerous in what way?’

  She eased out of his hold and got off the bed, grabbing at his shirt in order to cover her nakedness. She slipped it on and did up a few of the buttons, her fingers barely able to complete the task. ‘I don’t want to blur the boundaries with you.’

  ‘We’ve stated the boundaries,’ he said, standing up from the bed and, unlike her, not seeming too bothered with his own nakedness. ‘We agreed on a short fling.’

  ‘I know, and I think the shorter, the better.’

  He ran one of his hands through his hair from his forehead backwards, his expression a road map of tension. ‘Emmie...’ There was a grave note in his voice and he came over and took her by the hands. ‘The thing is... I think we could make this more than a short fling.’ He gently squeezed her hands, his eyes holding hers. ‘And I think you do too.’

  Emmie pulled out of his hold and began to hunt for her own clothes. ‘We might be sexually compatible but that’s all.’ She found her knickers but couldn’t find her bra and pulled back the bed sheets to hunt for it. ‘Have you seen my bra? I can’t find it.’

  ‘Will you stop for a minute and listen to me?’ His frown carved a deep trench between his eyes.

  She scooped up her dress and wriggled back into it, twisting her arm behind her back to pull up the zipper. ‘I think it’s time for me to go home. I’ll call a cab.’

  ‘I’m not taking you anywhere until we’ve talked.’ Matteo pulled on his trousers and zipped them up. ‘We are more than sexually compatible. I enjoy being with you. I haven’t enjoyed someone’s company as much as yours before. I’ve talked to you in a way I have never communicated with anyone else.’

  Emmie shoved her feet into her shoes. ‘It’s my job to make you feel comfortable talking to me. You’re reading way too much into it.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s all contrived? That you tell everyone all the things you told me about your cancer and your sister and your parents’ divorce?’

  ‘Not everyone, but you’re a good listener.’ Too good a listener. Emmie had told him nearly everything. Shared so much that it was hard to imagine a time in her life when she wouldn’t be able to talk to him any more.

  He took her hands once more, his fingers wrapping around hers in a gentle but firm hold. ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re pulling away from me? Not just physically, but emotionally?’

  Emmie painted a false smile on her lips. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t talk about emotions in relationships, remember?’

  Matteo brought her a little closer, the warmth of his body reminding her painfully of the cold reality of her situation. ‘But I’m talking about them now. I’m asking you to marry me, Emmie. I know you said you didn’t want to marry but we could make a go of it. I know we could. We’re well suited. You surely can’t deny it?’

  Emmie wrenched her hands out of his and moved out of his reach, hugging her arms around her middle. ‘Please don’t do this...’ She could barely speak for the anguish rising in her throat. ‘We could never be happy.’ How could she ever make him happy when she couldn’t give him an heir? They might have a great sex life together but how could that ever be enough for a man who needed a wife and heir so badly? She would only hurt him the way she had hurt her family.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Matteo asked in a disbelieving tone. ‘Every minute I’ve spent with you has shown me just how happy we could be. I care about you in a way I have never cared about anyone else.’

  ‘You’re not saying you’re in love with me?’

  His throat moved up and down and a shutter came down in his eyes. ‘I’m saying I want to be with you for longer than a fling. I want us to marry and have a family. Not just because of my father’s will—although it’s part of it, of course—but because you and I make a great team. I know we can make a good life together.’

  Emmie raked one of her hands through her hair, her heart threatening to split in two. Pain spread throughout her chest, sending its stinging tentacles to every region of her body. ‘Matteo... I can’t marry you. It wouldn’t be fair to you.’

  ‘Look, I know my proposal is not the romantic declaration of love most women want, but—’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with your proposal,’ Emmie said. ‘Nor is it because you’re not in love with me...or me with you.’ Not quite true. She was more than halfway to being in love with him. Her feelings for him had developed robust wings and were desperate to fly free. But she would clip those wings so they couldn’t.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  Emmie met his gaze. ‘I can’t marry you because I am unable to have children.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MATTEO LOOKED AT her blankly for a long moment, his thoughts twisting and twirling into a tangled knot, strangling his hopes, choking his plans, blocking the pathway he wanted to be on.

  He wanted to marry Emmie.

  He needed an heir.

  Emmie was unable to have children.

  He needed an heir.

  He cared for Emmie. They were good together. A great team.

  He needed an heir.

  Emmie was infertile.

  He needed an heir.

  The whirling of his brain matched the churning in his gut. A strangely painful, burning churning unlike anything he had ever felt before. He wanted Emmie so badly, not just physically, but because the connection he felt with her made him feel whole for the first time in his life.

  But he couldn’t be with Emmie and keep his family’s estate.

  He had never felt more blindsided than by her revelation. How could he not have guessed before now? She had told him about her cancer but she had said she was cured. Cured but at a price—the price of her fertility. A huge price for a young woman to have to pay and one he could only imagine caused Emmie great sadness. Was that why she said she never wanted to marry? Was that why she concentrated on finding her clients their happy-ever-after but insisted she wasn’t interested in finding her own perfect match?

  But there were ways around infertility, many options available that hadn’t been there before for couples in their situation. And he wanted them to be a couple, damn it. They already felt like a couple. The camaraderie, the closeness, the connection was not just in his imagination.

 
He felt it.

  ‘But we can have IVF treatments.’ Matteo finally found his voice. ‘There are so many options these days.’

  ‘But it won’t be my child,’ Emmie said, pressing the heel of her hand against her heart. ‘It would have to be someone else’s egg. I will never look at a child and see something of myself in its features. None of my DNA will be passed on to him or her.’

  ‘I understand that would be difficult for you but—’

  ‘How can you possibly understand?’ Her voice rose in despair—a despair that was almost palpable. ‘You can father as many children as you like. You haven’t had cancer and had all your dreams and hopes taken away. You haven’t walked past a pregnant woman or a woman pushing a pram and felt your heart was going to shatter into a million pieces. You haven’t held a friend’s baby and ached with every fibre of your being because you know you can never hold your own baby in your arms.’

  ‘I might not understand totally but I have lost a child,’ Matteo said in a weighted tone. ‘And I have grieved every day since for him and for his mother.’

  Emmie’s arms were wrapped around her body as if she was trying to contain her emotional pain. A pain he recognised because he could feel it grabbing at his guts every time he thought of his late wife and child. His two closest companions were grief and guilt. They followed him wherever he went.

  ‘I know and I’m sad for you. It was a terrible tragedy and one you have to live with for the rest of your life. But, if I married you, I would only add to your pain. You’re under enough time pressure as it is. You have to be married and have an heir within a year. Even if I agreed to IVF, it would take far longer than that to become pregnant, let alone deliver a child, and there’s no guarantee that will ever happen for me. I don’t even know if my body could cope with a pregnancy after all it’s been through.’

  Emmie’s shoulders slumped and she added, ‘Even the most in-love couples struggle when going through fertility issues. We don’t have the magic ingredient to start with—love. We just have lust, and that is not enough.’

  The magic ingredient. Matteo had never been a fan of ‘the magic ingredient’ of love after the damage he’d seen it do to his father. The magic ingredient caused pain and heartache and vulnerability and he wanted no part of it. But that didn’t mean he didn’t care about Emmie. He did and he had hoped she would be the solution to his problem. He had started to see her as the only solution. But her bombshell revelation gave him pause. He needed an heir. There was no escaping that fact. He had to marry and produce an heir otherwise his family’s estate would be lost for ever. It was an impossible situation to be in, a torturous choice—happiness with Emmie and losing his heritage, or keeping his family’s estate and losing Emmie.

  Matteo picked up the shirt Emmie had discarded and shrugged himself back into it. He needed time to think. He needed a workable solution, one where he didn’t have to choose between the two things he wanted so desperately. But how could he think when his emotions were in a state of chaos? His brain was flooded with unfamiliar emotions, ambushed by feelings he didn’t know how to handle, let alone identify. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your infertility before now?’

  Emmie gave him a chilly stare. ‘I don’t usually discuss my health records with my clients and, at the end of the day, that is what you are—a client.’

  Her words were like a cold, hard slap in the face. But any offence taken on his part was hardly justified. She had always been clear about the boundaries. They had drifted into a fling and foolishly, misguidedly, he’d thought it could become something more.

  It couldn’t.

  Matteo searched her features but her expression was stony. The irony was he had used the very same expression many times in the past when a casual lover had asked for more than he was prepared to give. The drawbridge up, the shutters closed, the fortress secure.

  ‘So, it looks like this is the end for us.’ He delivered the statement in an impersonal tone. The same impersonal tone he had used many times before when ending a fling. But this wasn’t the same as ending any other casual fling. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. It wasn’t supposed to claw at his chest and shred his guts and make him ache to hold her in his arms and beg her to rethink her answer.

  Emmie gave a stiff nod. ‘I’ll be in touch with a list of potential dates for you.’ Her tone was as impersonal as his. ‘Thank you for dinner and...everything else.’

  Matteo only just managed not to curl his lip. ‘Everything else’ meaning the best sex he’d ever had. The most intimate lovemaking. Now it was over. Finished. He turned to pick up his car keys and wallet, determined not to show the turmoil of emotion he was going through. A turmoil that made it impossible for him to think of a future with anyone else. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘Please don’t bother. I can call a cab.’

  ‘It’s no bother,’ Matteo said, holding the bedroom door open for her.

  She moved past him without another word and every muscle in his body wrestled with the temptation to touch her. To hold her. To never let her go.

  But he wasn’t the sort of man to hold on, to never let go, to beg and plead and fall apart because someone didn’t want to be with him.

  He was the man who didn’t do emotion. He didn’t feel romantic love.

  And he wasn’t going to start now.

  * * *

  Emmie sat silently beside Matteo in the car on the way back to her house. What else was there to say that hadn’t already been said? His proposal had come out of necessity, not heartfelt love, and it had been promptly withdrawn as a result of her informing him about her fertility issues. She derided herself for having been tempted into a fling with him. It had only made things a squillion times worse. A fling with a client. How could she have been so stupid? So reckless and foolish to think there wouldn’t be a price to pay?

  There was always a price to pay.

  Emmie had taught herself not to want the things most other people wanted and she had been successful in suppressing those desires until she’d met Matteo Vitale. He had upended her life, tempted her into thinking she could have more.

  But she couldn’t.

  That option had been taken from her as a teenager and there was no way of getting it back.

  But if he had loved her...

  The thought drifted into her mind but she slammed the door on it. There was no way she could marry him knowing she would be stopping him from having what he most wanted. No amount of love could ever change that. In fact, it could even drive a wedge between them in the end. They might have formed a connection, grown closer than she had expected and had amazing sex, but the bottom line was he needed a wife and heir in a hurry and, while she could be that wife, she couldn’t provide the heir.

  And the biggest heartbreak of all was that Emmie wished with all her heart she could.

  * * *

  Over the next month, Matteo ignored the list of potential partners Emmie sent him via email. He wasn’t in the mood for dating. He began to mentally prepare himself for the loss of his family’s estate, knowing it would be impossible to find someone who would suit him more than Emmie. Even if she had said yes to his proposal, he couldn’t have Emmie and have the estate too. He loved the estate in Umbria—it was his birthright, the sacred place where his wife and child were buried—but, unless he could fulfil the terms of his father’s will, it would be lost. He needed an heir to secure the estate.

  But he wanted Emmie.

  He could not imagine a time when he wouldn’t want her. It was as if his body had decided she was the missing link to his. He couldn’t imagine feeling the same intense level of attraction to anyone else.

  Matteo threw himself into work but it failed to enthral him the way it usually did. He was in danger of letting down his clients if he didn’t pull himself together. He prided himself on his meticulous attention to detail, to finding out the tr
uth behind every account he cast his gaze across. But all he could think about was Emmie’s situation, how sad it was for her not to be able to have a child. How cruel life was that so many children were born to inadequate parents and ended up in foster care, while other people like Emmie could not have what they most wanted—their own child. He had seen his own flesh and blood on an ultrasound image, and then only a few months later he had held that tiny, lifeless body in the mortuary. There was no grief like that of losing a child, but close by was surely the grief of not being able to have a child in the first place, especially if it was what you most wanted.

  And Emmie did want a child—she wanted one desperately.

  Matteo pushed back his office chair, went over to the window of his London office and stared at the crowds of people walking in the streets below. Businessmen and women, people of all shapes and sizes, couples, families—all going about their daily lives while he was up here brooding in a new type of grief state.

  Loss and sadness were not unfamiliar feelings...but there was something else that was lurking in the shadowy corners of his mind. From the moment he’d met her, Emmie had encouraged him to talk about his feelings. But talking about them was not the same as actually feeling them. He could talk about anger without feeling angry. He could talk about happiness without feeling happy.

  But now, he couldn’t talk about love without feeling something...something that flickered with a faint pulse in his chest every time he thought of Emmie. As though his frozen heart was slowly thawing, the layers of ice melting away to reveal a confronting truth about himself.

  He was not incapable of feeling love.

  He had deluded himself into believing he wasn’t cut out for commitment. He had fooled himself into thinking he was only interested in casual encounters. He had convinced himself he was more profligate playboy than permanent partner.

  But it was all lies.