by Kim Lawrence
Kim Lawrence
CLAIMING HIS PREGNANT WIFE
ITALIAN HUSBANDS
TORONTO NEW YORK LONDON
AMSTERDAM PARIS SYDNEY HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM ATHENS TOKYO MILAN MADRID
PRAGUE WARSAW BUDAPEST AUCKLAND
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
F RANCESCO R OMANELLI had pulled into the outside lane of the motorway when the mobile phone in his pocket began to vibrate again. An impatient grimace furrowing the smooth olive-toned skin of his high, intelligent forehead, he studiously ignored it. However, the interruption did cause his attention to briefly stray to the empty passenger seat where another phone lay, this one switched off.
It was about the only thing that had survived his blitz, when he had gone through the home they had briefly shared and removed every item that had even remotely reminded him of his broken marriage and his wife. Or so he had thought.
If his diligent housekeeper hadnt been so thorough in her war against dust he would have remained ignorant of the phones existence, and, more importantly, ignorant of its explosive contents.
Which was presumably just what his wife had intended.
What else was he meant to think?
Francescos jaw clenched as he fought to contain the sense of molten outrage that threatened to overwhelm him every time he thought of the situation he now faced. In fact, he had thought of little else for the past four days and was now digging pretty deep into his reserves of self-restraint!
After the events of the previous months it seemed darkly ironic, he reflected, releasing a self-derisive grunt, that this time last year he had been complaining to his twin brother that his life had become too predictable!
At the time Francesco had just split from his current lover. It had been a civilised parting of the ways, much as their arrangement had been. Normally considered pretty perceptive, Francesco hadnt seen it coming. However, with the wisdom of hindsight he realised that the writing had been on the wall when she had asked him where he thought their relationship was going.
Francesco had been forced to admit that he did not see it going anywhere specifically.
It had not crossed his mind at the time that she would have any problem with his admission. Why would it? The lady in question, a corporate lawyer who was as smart as she was beautiful, had gone out of her way at the outset of their relationship to warn him that she had no time in her life for emotional entanglements. So it had come as some surprise to Francesco to hear her say, Nothing personal, Francesco, Ive actually never had better sex, but with my body clock ticking I cant afford to waste my time with a maneven one as lovely as youwho is commitment-phobic.
Francesco had not been offended by her comments or lost any sleep over them, but they had made him wonderDo you think Im commitment-phobic? he later asked his twin.
Rafes response was tactful. Of course not, but maybe if you put as much effort into your personal relationships as you do work?
Thats the problem. I dont have to put that much effort into worksome days, he admitted. I find myself hoping that there will be a disaster just so that I can fix ittheres just no buzz. My life is totally predictable. There are no real challengesnothing to get the adrenaline pumping.
Maybe theres a life-changing surprise around the corner, Francesco, his brother suggested, looking amused.
Dio mio , I hope so.
What did they say? You should be careful what you wish for because it might come true!
Maybe, Francesco speculated darkly, life-changing scenarios were like busesafter a long drought when they did come they came thick and fast!
And they rarely took the guise you anticipated.
In his case in the space of a few months he had suffered the devastating loss of his twin brother in tragic circumstances and, while still coming to terms with that loss, had discovered love at first sight was not merely confined to the pages of romantic fiction.
Though maybe marrying the person you fell in love with within five days should be!
As Francesco looked down at the brown finger on his left hand that was encircled by the heavy gold band his grip tightened on the steering wheel. His upper lip curled contemptuously: love! It hadnt been love, he told himself grimly. It had been a combination of lust and blind infatuation.
Some people might have suggested that his reaction to the letter that had arrived a week earlier from Erin suggested something more than infatuation or lust. But they didnt understand the extent of his problem with failure, and wasnt that essentially what divorce was?
Admittedly, walking out of the office two minutes before an important meeting without telling anyone where he was going, getting onto a plane and heading for England with the intention of explaining to his wife in person that he would never give her her freedom was a pretty strong reaction to the suggestion of failure.
But he would have explained to these doubters that failure was a word that had never been in his vocabulary. Failure was something that happened to other people. His premise in life had always been that if you wanted something badly enough you made it happen, you fought for what you wanted.
The plane had been landing when the thought had hit him. Why should he even try and fight for her? He didnt want her.
What would I want with a woman who doesnt trust me?
Francesco knew that Erin might even construe his arrival as the first move to reconciling their relationship, and that just wasnt going to happen. She was the one in the wrong.
The one he had expected to come crawling back.
His gaze shifted back to the empty passenger seat. When the phone had surfaced the information it contained had changed everything.
Who made the first move was suddenly no longer important. There was no decision to make; divorce was quite simply no longer an option. If Erin had been halfway adult she would have realised this, too.
The situation required immediate action. Cool, clear-headed action.
Francescos dark glance slewed once more towards the phonea muscle along the angle of his jaw clenched as he wrenched his straying attention back onto the road ahead. At this moment he felt neither cool nor clear-headed.
But he did feel grimly determined.
It was sobering to acknowledge how close he had been to throwing the phone away. Fortunately something had made him switch it on before he had done so.
Erin had one message.
His steelily determined eyes fixed on the road ahead, Francesco recalled the moment when he had heard the polite voice on the machine apologise, and explain that the date of Mrs Romanellis next antenatal appointment had been brought forward a week.
His normally sharp, analytic mind numb, he had replayed the message three times before it had finally clicked.
He was going to be a father!
A man was meant to feel elation and joy at such a moment, but Erin had robbed him of that. Just as it now appeared increasingly likely she had planned to rob him of his child. He wondered how he would ever be able to forgive her for that.
Had she ever been going to tell him?
Even though over the last few days he had analysed the situation from every angle countless times, weighing up the possible explanations for her silence, no matter how hard he tried h
e still couldnt come up with any halfway adequate excuse.
He had even given her the benefit of the doubt and accepted that she might not have known that she was pregnant when she had left, but she must have known for weeks now.
Weeks during which she hadnt made any attempt to contact him except with that one letter expressing her wish to divorce as soon as possible. Erin had made a definite choice not to tell him he was going to be a father. The knowledge stuck in his throat like bitter bile.
She had taken a unilateral decision as though he were irrelevant. Even if she had decided they had no future together there were things to discussarrangementsoptions! Not that there was more than one option as far as he was concerned. Francesco was firmly of the belief that there was only one way to bring up a child, especially his, and that was with two parents.
And it wasnt as if she had had to contact him. He had tried to contact her and given her every opportunity to tell him, but had simply been given the runaround, fobbed off by her wretched, manipulative mother.
Did Erin really imagine for one moment that she could have his baby without him finding out? The hard laugh that was drawn from his throat was cut off as the phone in his pocket began to ring againwhoever was trying to contact him was not giving upand with a sigh of irritation he indicated to leave the motorway.
Erin had been surprised when Francescos cousin Valentina had contacted her and invited her to spend the weekend at the country home where she and her English husband Sam ran a stud farm.
It crossed her mind that Valentina did not know that she and Francesco had split up. She didnt want anyone running away with the idea she felt as though her heart had been ripped out and in her most casual tone she had asked, You do know that Francesco and Ithat were not together?
Yes, I know, and Im really sorry, replied the Italian woman. But it doesnt mean we cant still be friends, does it?
Erin had been reluctant to accept the invitation, but Valentina had been so enthusiastic about seeing her that in the end Erin had felt it would be churlish to throw her kindness back in her face.
Erin had arrived the previous evening and Valentina had explained that the other weekend guests were not expected until today. She glanced at her watch and wondered if anyone had arrived yet.
It was the distinctive sound of horse hooves that drew Erin to the window of the sunny sitting room. Outside in the courtyard almost beneath her window a groom was having problems holding the leading rein of a black, snorting stallion that was dancing on his hind legs.
The first time she had seen him, Francesco had been sitting astride an animal not unlike the one outside. There had been more dust and sweat, but the creature had possessed that same untamed quality so had his rider .
A haziness clouded Erins cornflower-blue eyes as her thoughts, as though responding to the tug of some invisible magnet, drifted backwards.
She could hear the sound of a horses hooves clicking on the worn cobbles as it trotted up the steep incline she had had to get off her bike to ascend.
The relief that had rushed through her at the time had been tempered by caution. She was a woman alone. And whose stupid fault was that?
The manager at the hotel had tactfully advised caution when she had explained her intention of hiring a bike to explore the area. When he had realised that none of her three companions was accompanying her he had abandoned tact and expressed his outright disapproval of her plan.
Signorina , it is not a good idea for a woman to travel alone. It is easy to get lost.
Erin smiled politely, waved her maps at him, and ignored his well-intentioned, and, as it turned out, pretty damned good advice.
She could have explained that she wanted to be alone, she absolutely needed to be alone; she doubted he would have understood. She didnt really understand herself how women whose company she enjoyed at home could try her patience so totally on holiday. How she had ever imagined they had a lot in common was an even greater mystery!
The fact was if she didnt escape her friends, she might end up telling them what she thought of them, which, although tempting, was out of the question.
They were nice people at home. It was only on holiday they turned into monsters who talked incessantly about their tans and looked at her as though she were insane when she suggested taking a picnic and hiking to the next village.
However, being alone lost its appeal pretty quickly when you found yourself lost with a flat tyre, a burnt nose and aches in muscles you hadnt known you had.
Panic was there just under the surface. A stray thought like, Ill be a government statistic of tourists who disappeared without trace, and it would come rushing to the surface.
Well, she wasnt alone anymore.
Erin lifted her hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the strong evening sun. With the sun behind him the figure in the saddle appeared as a dark silhouette outlined by a corona of golden light.
The man saw her and slowed his mount as they approached. The wild-eyed animal, nostrils flared, pawed the ground. Erin, with a mental image of those hooves coming crashing down on her unprotected head, took several hasty steps backwards.
The precaution proved unnecessary as without any apparent effort the rider controlled his animal with nothing more than a soft murmur in fluid Italian and brought it to an abrupt halt.
The horse stood there quivering and the rider sat astride him for what seemed like an age just staring down at Erin until she became frustrated by her inability to see his expression.
Dry-mouthed, she watched warily as he finally kicked his booted feet free of the stirrups and slid off the back of the horse. He patted the creatures quivering flank, sending up a puff of dust, and casually relinquished the reins. The animal pawed the ground restlessly but did not take the opportunity to escape.
Erin, her feet seemingly nailed to the ground and her body reacting at a basic and humiliating level to the undiluted raw sex this stranger exuded from every dusty pore, wondered if the horse, too, was held in thrall as she was.
As he straightened up to his full height it immediately became clear that what she had imagined was an illusion of height created by his vantage point on top of the towering animal was in fact reality!
This man was seriously tall. Tall she could deal with, but the rest was more of a problem! The animal and its master had a lot in commonnamely they were both magnificent and indisputably dangerous.
The danger should have repelled her but instead it made her heart beat faster, releasing a flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. She sucked in a shaky sigh, too awed in that moment to be sensibly wary of this large stranger who exuded a predatory, seductive quality that would normally have had her running for the hills.
She studied him covertly through the screen of her half-lowered lashes. Tall and lean with broad shoulders and narrow hips, he carried himself with the natural grace of an athlete and the casual arrogance of someone who knew that he was one of the beautiful people whose presence alone stopped conversations.
This was the sort of man that she was on principle unimpressed by.
Too good-looking, too sure of himself, he would have been treated from the moment of his birth as if the universe revolved around him.
Strangely as she watched the beautiful stranger peel the leather gloves off his hands she could summon none of the amused contempt she could normally tap into on these occasions.
Maybe it was the leather boots that ended midcalf that were distracting her.
For some reason Erin couldnt tear her eyes off the dusty leather. When she did her gaze travelled up bleached, torn denim and long, long legs. She watched, conscious of the sound of her own shallow breathing, as he banged the dust off his thighs. Below the rolled-up sleeves of the shirt he wore open the skin of his strong, sinewed forearms was a deep gold meshed by a dusting of fine dark hair.
He stood there, feet slightly apart, and hooked the leather gloves into the waistband of jeans that were fitted enough to reveal the taut musculat
ure of his powerful thighs and give Erin a hot flush. The black T-shirt he wore beneath his unbuttoned shirt was also snug enough to draw attention to his washboard-flat belly.
Her attention was riveted!
Erin knew she was staring but she couldnt stop. She wanted to move, but her body seemed strangely disconnected from her brain. Her limbs seemed not to belong to her, and inside her chest her heart crashed against her ribcage, almost drowning out the sound of his boots on the cobbles as he walked towards her.
CHAPTER TWO
E RIN swallowed, knowing that this was one of those scenes that would be etched into her mind for ever.
He stopped a few feet away from her but close enough for her to see the dust ingrained in the fine lines radiating from his eyes, extraordinary eyes, incredibly dark and fringed with equally dark curling lashes.
His expression was inscrutable though the groove above his aquiline nose deepened as he looked down at her. Erin felt a shudder chase its way down her spine. There was something almost cruel about the curve of his sensually moulded lips.
He fired a question at her in a deep voice that had an almost tactile quality.
Erin swallowed and lifted her shoulders helplessly to indicate she had no idea what he was talking about.
She saw something that could have been irritation flicker in his dark eyes as he dragged a hand through his hair, which was pitch-black and sheared off at collar level. It was river-straight and she imagined that under the dust it was silky.
Erin could feel her fingertips literally tingling, a disturbing sensation, as she imagined touchingsmoothing those dusky strands.
Appalled by the direction of her out-of-control imagination, she concluded that she must have been out in the sun too long. She was probably suffering from dehydration, too, having drained her water bottle an hour earlier.
Rubbing a finger across the bridge of her nose, she was relieved to find evidence to back up her theory. Despite the factor thirty she had plastered on earlier, her skin felt tight and tingly.