Claudia wanted them to build a supportive relationship for their baby’s sake but she would never trust him again.
‘We need to get you a dressing table.’
She gave a small scream. So lost had she been in her thoughts she hadn’t heard Ciro enter the bedroom. ‘You startled me!’
When their meal had finished the semi-easy atmosphere between them had suddenly changed. Conversation had become stilted. Eye contact had ceased. And the charge in her veins...
She’d got up from the table abruptly, frightened of all the feelings rampaging through her. ‘I’m going to bed now.’
He’d still had half a glass of wine to drink. He’d looked at her briefly before swirling the dark liquid and giving a short nod. ‘Sleep well.’
She hadn’t asked if he’d be joining her in the bed. She hadn’t known which answer she most wanted to hear.
This was the first time he’d entered the bedroom with her in it since her first morning.
She met his eyes in the reflection of the mirror. A faint smile tugged on his cheeks. ‘I’ll call out next time.’
Breaking the eye contact, she continued working on the French plait and pretended not to notice Ciro watching her from the dressing room’s threshold. She couldn’t pretend the butterflies weren’t flapping and dancing in her belly or that her usually steady hands didn’t have a tremor in them.
Ciro knew he needed to move. The longer he stood watching Claudia plait her beautiful hair, the stronger his yearning to stand behind her and unplait it as he’d done on their wedding night and run his fingers through those silky strands. The stronger his arousal.
When she’d finished the plait, she used a band she’d had wrapped around her wrist to secure it. Her eyes found his again.
He inhaled deeply through his nose. ‘I’m going to brush my teeth.’
She answered with a nod but didn’t move.
Forcing his body to co-operate with his brain, he performed an abrupt turn and walked to the en suite. Before he stepped in his senses were assailed with the scent of Claudia’s shower gel and the mintiness of her toothpaste. His chest closed so tightly he could hardly breathe. He opened the bathroom cabinet, saw her toothpaste and toothbrush in a glass together on the top shelf, and almost smiled to remember her quip about craving toothpaste on toast.
Ciro had personally designed his bathroom. Not once in the planning had he imagined he would one day walk into it and see a woman’s toiletries neatly arranged in his cabinet and feel that his heart could pound out of his chest. The cabinet had four shelves. Claudia hadn’t moved any of his stuff, her own carefully placed so as not to intrude.
Placing his hands knuckles-down on the sink, he took some more deep breaths. He must get a handle on this. He’d decided on the flight back to New York that he couldn’t sleep on the library sofa again. He’d torn a muscle in his back a few years ago, one of those injuries that could easily recur without warning. Two nights on a sofa followed by two nights on his firm LA bed had reminded him of the importance of sleeping on a decent mattress.
Claudia was going to live with him for the foreseeable future. He’d agreed they would share a room for a few weeks and it was time to bite the bullet and do it. He had no doubt he was in for some nights of torture but it wasn’t for ever, only a few weeks, and then she’d move into a guest room far away from him.
Face washed and teeth brushed, he stripped down to his boxer shorts. No more sleeping nude for him. He’d always assumed he’d have retired before he started thinking about wearing pyjamas. Maybe it was time to bring those pyjama-related retirement plans forward.
Claudia had drawn the curtains and was curled up in bed when he left the en suite. Not until he climbed in beside her did she speak. ‘You’re sleeping with me?’
‘Yes.’ He turned the light out.
Plunged into darkness, they lay backs turned, the bed large enough for them both to stretch out without encroaching on the other’s space.
The distance wasn’t enough. There was not a single cell in his body not alert to Claudia’s presence beside him. The thudding of his heart was deafening.
Claudia was afraid to breathe...no, she couldn’t breathe. From the moment the mattress had made the slight dip to accommodate Ciro’s hulking form, her lungs had closed. She was afraid to move. One small movement might find her brushing against him. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, trying to block out the tingling warmth growing low in her pelvis. She still couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t hear Ciro breathe either. They both lay with the rigid stillness of one of his statues. They could be a couple of statues, lying there as a form of modern art.
Her left arm, tucked at an awkward angle under her pillow, started to ache. But she didn’t dare move.
She felt her temperature rise, heating from the inside, the waves flowing to her skin. The four nights she’d already spent in this bed had been without any issue whatsoever. Ciro kept his apartment at a Goldilocks temperature, which she’d found, until this moment, to be just right. The mattress was firm and comfortable, the duvet soft yet heavy, the two cocooning her to sleep as if they’d been designed with her needs in mind. She’d slept better in this bed than she’d ever slept before. But that was then.
Ciro kept as firmly to his side of the bed as she kept to hers. There had to be a foot of empty space between them but her whole body was as hot as if he’d draped himself over her. Her heart thrummed as madly as when he’d kissed her.
Eventually, she could bear it no longer and slowly poked her foot out from under the duvet. It brought a welcome coolness to her foot but the rest of her still burned and her awkwardly placed arm was now killing her. With a burst of impetus, she shoved the duvet off and rolled onto her back. She didn’t know which was the greatest relief: the chilly air on her skin or the blood flowing through her left arm and shoulder.
Ciro shifted beside her.
She held her breath. She was quite certain he was still awake.
Awake or not, he didn’t make any further movements, not in all the time it took for her to eventually drift into sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
CIRO SLIPPED OUT of bed, slung a pair of shorts on and headed straight to his gym. He needed to work these awful, conflicting, heady feelings out of his system.
He’d woken with an erection to rival the Empire State Building and had been on the verge of waking Claudia with a kiss to the nape of her neck before sanity had washed through the last of his sleepiness.
He’d never known torture like that existed. To lie beside Claudia and not touch her had been as close to hell as he’d ever experienced.
He wished he had the power to accelerate time to the birth of their child. He’d buy her an apartment close enough that he could have easy contact with the baby but far enough away that he wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into Claudia.
That day couldn’t come soon enough. She hadn’t even been here a week and already he could feel himself unravelling at the seams.
Claudia didn’t think she’d had a worse night’s sleep in her life. The only mercy came when she woke to find Ciro already up and gone. She showered and dressed quickly then wandered to the kitchen to make herself a hot chocolate. She was sipping it on the terrace when he finally appeared, dressed in a black T-shirt and faded jeans and carrying a mug of coffee. She had no idea where in the apartment he’d been hiding.
She tightened her hold on the mug and hoped his eyesight wasn’t good enough to see the sudden clatter of her heartbeat.
His eyesight could have been the best in the world and he wouldn’t have noticed. He took the seat furthest from her, nodded a tight-lipped greeting without meeting her eye, and swiped his phone on.
‘Have you got laryngitis?’ she asked after a few minutes of being ignored.
He raised narrowed eyes. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because you h
aven’t said a word since you joined me. I thought things went pretty well between us over dinner last night but here we are now and you’re sitting there ignoring me again. You blow hot and cold...it’s hard,’ she finished with a shrug.
He put his phone down. So many differing emotions flared in the green of his eyes that, for once, it was difficult to judge what he was thinking. A pulse throbbed on his temple. When he spoke his rich voice was curt. ‘I don’t know how to be around you.’
‘Just be yourself. Isn’t that the whole point of this? For us to be honest about who we are? For us to try and forge something that will allow us to be parents together?’
The pulse on his temple seemed to go haywire. ‘I’m trying but it’s harder than I thought it would be. Much harder. I look at you and see this beautiful, innocent woman who I’ve treated appallingly and then I remember you’re the daughter of the man who killed my father. My heart tells me you were ignorant of his criminal ways, but my head can’t see how you lived with someone your entire life and remained blind to his true nature. Forget your dyslexia, you’re a smart woman and you’re observant. You notice everything. So tell me how I’m supposed to believe you were ignorant to who your father really was.’
No one had ever called her smart before but she couldn’t savour this unexpected compliment because too many other emotions were swelling inside her.
‘There was no one there to contradict him.’ Agitated, she put her mug on the table and gathered her hair together. ‘I wish I could make you see what it was like for us growing up. I was three when Mamma died. I don’t remember anything before that and I don’t know if her death made Papà more protective than he would have been.’ As she plaited her hair, Claudia wished with all her heart that her sister could be there with her. She missed her badly. Imma would know the right words to say. ‘I never had any freedom. Whenever we left the villa it was always with armed guards protecting us, even at school—and our school was probably the smallest and safest in the whole of Sicily. I was never allowed to go to friends’ homes like the other girls were. I never mixed with boys. The only people we mixed with were paid by my father. They weren’t going to tell us the truth, were they?’
‘But you must have known there was something crooked about him. You believed me when I told you what he’d done to my father. If someone had told me something like that about my father I would have laughed in their face because he was a good, honest man with scruples. You believed it without question.’
‘It was...’ She thought frantically for the right way to explain it. ‘I wasn’t completely blind. I always knew there was a darkness to Papà and it’s something that’s scared me since I was a little girl. It’s partly what made me so obedient. When you told me what he’d done...something clicked into place. Things I’d been too afraid to talk about, feelings I’d had, things I’d seen and heard that made no sense, the fear that’s always lived in me... Like a giant jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces suddenly slotting together. I knew in my heart you were telling the truth. One of the reasons I went to the convent when I left you was because those nuns educated me. They’ve known me since I was six. Many of them educated my mother. I learned things from them that made other things click into place too.’
‘What things?’
‘Like my dyslexia. Like the whole of Sicily being frightened of him. That it’s not just your family he terrorised. That the home I grew up in comes from money that’s been paid for by other people’s blood. For you to think I’d be complicit in any of that...’ She blinked back hot tears. ‘Whatever happens between you and me, I will never go back to him. I’d rather live on the streets.’
Her plait done, she went to pull the band off her wrist to tie it together but her wrist was bare.
For the longest time the only sound was the heaviness of Ciro’s breaths. His frame was stiff, his features rigid, his green eyes intent on her face.
And then, slowly, his shoulders loosened and the expression in his eyes softened.
‘I’m sorry.’ He gave a laugh that sounded rueful rather than humorous. ‘I keep having to apologise, don’t I?’
She thought of what her father had done to his family and a fresh burn of tears set off behind her eyes. She swallowed them away and croaked, ‘This isn’t easy for either of us.’
His Adam’s apple moved. ‘I’m making it harder than it should be. I’ll try harder. I promise.’
Their gazes lingered before he drained his coffee. ‘I promised to show you around the city. Is there anywhere in particular you’d like to go?’
Relief blew through her veins at the change of subject. Much more of it and she wouldn’t have been able to hold the tears back any longer. She didn’t want to cry in front of Ciro. She pointed at the sprawling canopy of trees and cleared her throat. ‘I’d like to go there.’
‘Central Park?’
‘That’s Central Park?’ Old childhood movies flashed in her mind. ‘Don’t they do horse and carriage rides there?’
‘They do. Would you like to go on one?’
A sliver of excitement unfurled in her. ‘I’d love to.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I keep thinking I see a castle...’
‘That’s Belvedere Castle.’
‘Can we go there too?’
‘We can go anywhere you like.’
Ciro left the elevator and expelled the air he’d been holding the whole way down. Every time he inhaled Claudia’s scent his senses ran riot and his fingers itched to touch her. He was grimly determined that however their weekend panned out, he would be cordial and engaging. He hadn’t meant to be cruel and ignore her earlier but when he’d walked onto the terrace, the urge to haul her into his arms had been so potent that he’d needed to drag his focus away from her until he’d regained control of himself.
None of this was Claudia’s fault. She hadn’t asked to be played in his game of vengeance. It wasn’t her fault that she intoxicated him.
He had to accept that he’d got her wrong. Everything about her. All wrong.
And now he owed it to her and their baby to try. To really try. And that started now.
His vow almost shattered a moment later when they went to step outside the building to begin their sightseeing tour and Claudia suddenly grabbed hold of his hand.
The jolt of electricity that rushed through his veins was more powerful than when she’d patted his hand over dinner, but her hold was too tight to shake off.
‘Look at all the people,’ she breathed, eyes wide.
Feeling the fear vibrate through her, and seeing the golden colour of her skin turn ashen, he felt a wave of something like compassion join the electrical rush. And anger.
Cesare had done this to her with his horror stories.
He’d never believed his loathing of the man could increase but in that moment it did.
Relaxing his clenched jaw, he forced a smile to his lips. ‘You have nothing to be frightened of. These people are just going about their business, the same as we are.’
‘What if I lose you?’
‘I’ll stick to you like glue.’
She kept her eyes on his for the longest time before taking a deep breath. Dropping his hand, Claudia lifted her chin and stepped onto the bustling street. There was a bravery to her movements that made his heart twist unbearably.
Ciro stepped into the apartment at the same moment Claudia reached the bottom of the stairs. She was still in her pyjamas. Judging by the puffiness of her eyes, she’d only recently woken.
‘Good timing,’ he said, holding up the paper bag in his hand. ‘Breakfast. Shall we eat on the terrace?’
She gave a wide yawn and blinked vigorously, then followed it with a smile.
He walked behind her up the two flights of stairs to the bedroom and through the French doors. Her bottom was only inches from his eyeline...
&nbs
p; Claudia, he suddenly realised, had the peachiest bottom in the world. As she normally wore long, loose-fitting tops over slim jeans or trousers, her bottom was usually hidden, but the silk of her pyjamas accentuated its peachiness. It took real effort not to let his gaze lock on it.
‘What have we got?’ she asked as she sat on the wrought-iron chair with its soft cushion to pad her bottom.
Damn, he was thinking about her bottom. Again.
But how had he not noticed its divine peachiness before?
‘Bagels.’ He opened the bag and removed the contents. ‘This one is egg, cheese and bacon.’ He pulled the second bagel out. ‘This is avocado, bacon and cream cheese. Take your pick.’
She smiled, enthusiasm and gratitude flashing in her eyes. ‘These smell delicious. I’ve never had a bagel before.’
He popped the lip of his coffee lid then remembered the carton in his pocket. ‘I got you peach juice.’ The one real pregnancy symptom Claudia was suffering was her stomach recoiling from coffee.
‘Peach juice? Is that a thing?’
‘Orange juice,’ he corrected, silently cursing himself for his slip of the tongue. ‘I meant orange juice. Please, take your pick of the bagels.’
‘Which one do you want?’
‘Stop being polite and take one.’ She went for the avocado. Her lips parted and she took a generous bite. As she chewed, her eyes met his, beaming her pleasure at him.
Arousal, which he’d been fighting since following her up the stairs, broke free and shot through him like a heated blade.
Damn, damn, damn.
Mercifully, the table hid the discomfort he was experiencing in his trousers. Thank God he’d be leaving for the office soon and could put some distance between them. He needed it. Three nights spent trying to sleep beside Claudia coupled with two days showing her around their immediate neighbourhood and some of the sights New York had to offer had done nothing to dent his awareness. Familiarity had not lessened his attraction to her one iota. The opposite had occurred. Saturday night had been worse than Friday, the image of her delighted face when they’d taken the horse and carriage ride a continual flash behind his retinas.
A Baby To Bind His Innocent (Mills & Boon Modern) (The Sicilian Marriage Pact, Book 1) Page 10