by Penny Jordan
There was no decision to make, she reassured herself determinedly, standing up and taking hold of the buggy, preparing to take Ollie back inside. She was happy as she was.
* * *
She was happy as she was. Was she? Then why was she repeating those words to herself as though they were some kind of mantra she needed to use to reinforce her belief in her own words? Annie asked herself later than evening as she prepared for bed. She wanted to escape from the disconcerting pressure of the increasingly rebellious thoughts that were trying to undermine the sensible decision she had already made.
Although thankfully she had no memory of Antonio’s abuse, he had stolen something from her. And that was her right to give her body freely to the man of her own choice for that first special time. Deep down inside it did hurt to know that her body’s only experience of sex was such a cruel one. If she was honest, didn’t she feel cheated of something very special? Of something that could have been and should have been very sweet? Nothing and no-one could give her back what she had lost, but what Falcon was offering her could be a very special gift to her body. Didn’t she owe herself that for what Antonio had taken?
Falcon was man enough to offer to recompense her—was she woman enough to accept? A frisson of something that could have been dangerously close to excitement raced down her spine.
Falcon. Even his name sounded strong. He was strong. Strong enough to conquer her past and her pain? Could she afford to let him try?
For Ollie’s sake, could she afford not to?
She felt so restless and on edge—so buoyed-up and...and filled with conflicting feelings.
It was only half past nine. No doubt in Florence Falcon’s evening would only just be beginning, Annie acknowledged as she ran a bath for herself, hoping it would soothe her and help her to sleep.
Falcon might be stepping into the shower, before going out for the evening. Unbidden and definitely unwanted, out of nowhere she had a mental image of him standing beneath the shower, water cascading down onto his broad shoulders, and from there down over his chest, smoothing and flattening the dark hair on his body, running in rivulets that arrowed downwards.
Annie gasped, and tried to sink beneath the water of her bath to hide her shocked chagrin. What was the matter with her? She had never thought about a man like this before—imagining him naked, imagining him aroused, imagining that arousal giving her a feast of varied sensual pleasures. It was an imagining which now had a very real physical effect on her own body, in the tightening of her nipples and in the slow, grinding ache that had taken possession of her lower body.
What would Falcon think of her body? Would he think it attractive? Would it arouse him? Her breasts were firm and full. She had been so embarrassed when she had been the first girl in her class to need a bra—and even more uncomfortable when Colin had started asking her if boys ever tried to touch them. After that she had taken to wearing tops that were big and loose to disguise them.
If she accepted Falcon’s offer he wouldn’t expect her to do that. He’d want her to take pride in them. He’d want to see them and touch them—kiss them, perhaps. What was she doing, allowing herself to think like this? She’d already decided that she wasn’t going to accept his offer—hadn’t she?
She tried to think about something else—anything else. She didn’t need to rediscover her lost sexuality. She was happy as she was. She had her adored son, and she felt she was on the verge of making a good friend in Julie. She and Rocco were so obviously happy together, and they loved one another very much. Anyone could see that. Every smile and every touch they exchanged showed their feelings for one another. Wouldn’t she secretly like to be like that? To have a partner, someone with whom she shared that kind of bond of love and commitment? No, she wouldn’t.
They might be lucky enough to love one another, but couples made commitments to one another every day of the week and then regretted them. She didn’t need anyone else in her life, she didn’t need Falcon to teach her to let go of the past, and most especially she didn’t need Falcon to show her how to reawaken her suppressed sexuality. Because it was already awakening of its own accord. And she was afraid that if it awakened any more she might be in danger of enjoying her lessons way too much.
That was ridiculous.
But so was trying to lie to herself that she would be happy to spend the rest of her life alone. Everyone needed and wanted love.
She had Ollie.
Who one day would want to live his own life, find his own personal happiness. How would she feel if he was unable to do that because of her?
Her bathwater was growing cold, and her head was beginning to ache with the weight of her confused and contradictory thoughts.
Don’t think about it any more.
She wasn’t going to.
She stepped out of the bath and reached for a towel.
What was Falcon doing now? Was he thinking about her at all?
Why should he be thinking about her. She didn’t want him to be thinking about her. Because if she did then that would mean...
What? What would it mean? Certainly not that she had some private ulterior motive for wanting to agree to his suggestion. Those almost forgotten frissons of sensation that had stoked her body into renewed sensual life from the first minute she had seen him meant nothing other than that her body was one step ahead of her head, that it was already eager to become the body of a woman who knew and understood her own sensuality.
Freedom was beckoning her. It was freedom that was causing such an intoxication of her senses, overwhelming the barriers of her anxiety and fear.
There was nothing personal in those unsettling little surges of sensation that pulsed through her and gripped her every time she allowed herself to acknowledge that Falcon was a very male man. It was just the same kind of natural response to a situation as the tingling that came from blood returning to numbed flesh.
Pulling on her bathrobe, Annie walked through her own bedroom and into the nursery, where Ollie lay peacefully asleep in his cot.
With a mother’s instinct she knew it wasn’t just her imagination that her son was thriving in his new environment. He had put on weight. And already his skin—despite the copious amounts of sun protection cream in which she smothered it—was warming to what she suspected was really its natural colour. It hadn’t escaped her that the colour was closer to Falcon’s skin tone than it was to her own. Already he seemed to be taking a much greater interest in his surroundings, smiling more readily at the strangers who had come in to his life than he ever had at strangers in London. Did he somehow, with his baby instinct, sense that these new people were his people, of his blood?
What she would be doing if she accepted Falcon’s offer wouldn’t be so much for herself as for Ollie. Annie felt love for her baby gripping her heart. When he grew up she wanted more than anything else what surely every loving parent wanted for their child. She wanted his happiness and his joy in life. She wanted him to know and share love, and to build good relationships out of that knowledge. She wanted for him all that she had not known but must for his sake learn.
But could she do it? Could she find the strength to thrust herself into the fire and endure more, much more, of what she already felt when Falcon touched her?
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I’VE BEEN THINKING,’ Falcon announced, leaning forward across the wrought iron table on the terrace, where they’d been sitting, drinking a pre-dinner aperitif.
He had arrived back from Florence just over half an hour ago. Annie had seen him drive up to the castello and then into the paved courtyard. She had watched him uncurl his lean height and muscular shoulders from his car, and then reach back inside it to gather up his suit jacket and a small laptop case, hooking the jacket over his shoulder before mounting the flight of marble steps that led up to the main entrance of the castello.<
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His shirt had been unfastened at the throat, just by one button, but the brilliance of the late-afternoon sun had struck through his shirt so clearly that she could almost have traced the dark shadowing of male body hair that crossed his chest and bisected his flat six-pack. There was something very sensually male about that dark shadowing. Something so strongly intimate that it had set off a reaction inside her that curled mockingly round her prim self-consciousness, silencing the voice that had said it was wrong for her to watch him and be so aware of his masculinity.
It wasn’t as though she had been waiting for him to return. The only reason she had been on the first floor of the castello, and thus able to witness his arrival through one of the windows of the line of formal salons on this side of the building, was because Maria had insisted on giving her a tour of them.
The castello was enormous, with cellars and attics and three and sometimes four full floors in between. It had three towers, a huge ballroom, and was in fact a combination of the original castello and an eighteenth-century palazzo which one of Falcon’s ancestors had built to extend the original building.
He’d changed out of his suit now, and was wearing a pair of faded, well-washed jeans and a soft white linen shirt, his bare feet thrust into soft shoes. He looked casually relaxed, whilst she felt tensely uncomfortable in one of her new dresses. She didn’t want him to think that she had deliberately tried to make herself look more attractive for him. That wasn’t the case at all. She had simply grabbed the first dress that had come to hand after he had strolled into the salon where she had been with Maria, to ask her to join him on the terrace for a drink before dinner.
Tonight would be the first time she had had dinner with him since she had come here. Previously she had eaten alone—and happily—she assured herself, in her room, content to be safe and with Ollie, and not wanting anything or anyone else.
It wasn’t her fault that the dress she had grabbed turned out to be a sleeveless tube of honey-coloured jersey. It had looked so nondescript on its hanger that she hadn’t given its suitability a second thought when she had pulled it on over her head, before slipping on a pair of kitten-heeled sandals. As the mother of a six-month-old baby she had no intention of wearing high stiletto heels in case she stumbled and Ollie came to harm.
She hadn’t even looked at her full-length reflection before leaving her bedroom, simply running a brush through her hair and then sliding on a soft slick of lipgloss, before spraying herself with the admittedly delicious light scent the personal shopper had recommended, and scooping up Ollie.
In fact, it had only been when she had been about to leave her bedroom that she had caught sight of herself in the mirror and had realised how very slender the jersey dress made her look—how faithfully it followed the lines of her body, despite the stylish pleated ruching that swept from the bust right down to her hip, which she had naively assumed meant that the dress would be suitably unrevealing.
It had been too late to go back and get changed, but she had comforted herself with the thought that she would be sitting down and the dress’s neckline, whilst slashed across her throat, did not reveal very much flesh.
That had been before she had realised that Falcon was already on the terrace and waiting for her—or realized that he would come towards her to take Ollie from her, and then survey her in such a silent and yet at the same time very meaningful way. Her heart kicked off in a flurry of little beats now, just thinking about the way he had smiled at her before he had come to put Oliver in the highchair that was pulled up at the table, waiting for him.
It wasn’t the way Falcon had smiled at her five minutes ago that she ought to be concentrating on, Annie warned herself. It was what he had just said to her. What had he been thinking? That he had changed his mind about his plan to turn her into a fully functioning modern sexual woman? Of course, if that was the case she would be relieved in many ways. Very relieved. Wouldn’t she?
She took a quick sip of her drink. She didn’t normally touch alcohol, but the chilled light rosé wine Falcon had persuaded her to try was delicious. She could feel it relaxing her tense cramped stomach muscles as she tried to breathe evenly, as though she wasn’t in the least bit apprehensive and most particularly as though she hadn’t hardy slept at all last night for thinking about what he had said to her, what she would say to him, and how she felt about...about everything.
‘Whilst I was in Florence I was speaking with a member of my late mother’s family. One of the old family houses is currently being emptied of its treasures, including the books from its library and a great many family letters. He has asked me if we could house the books here, to which of course I have agreed.
‘My mother’s family history is an interesting one. They were originally silk merchants in the fifteenth century, who bought themselves into the nobility and ultimately became very wealthy and well connected. The marriage between my parents was one brokered between my father and my mother’s uncle, for reasons of mutual financial benefit and social prestige. However, my father never allowed our mother to forget that, whilst his family line descended directly from nobility, hers descended from the merchant class.’
‘Your mother must have been so hurt,’ said Annie sympathetically.
‘She suffered very badly because of my father’s cruelty to her. As children we all felt that our mother must not have loved us enough to want to live, but of course that was not the reality. The reality is that she died from complications after Rocco’s birth.’
Annie could see the three bereft children, desperately longing for their mother, all too easily. Her heart ached for those boys, and inside her head she saw herself as a mother, gathering them close—especially Falcon, who she knew would have been proud and brave and determined to hold back his own tears in order to comfort his brothers.
‘Growing up without your mother must have been awful for you.’
‘As growing up without your father must have been for you. The understanding of what that means is something we share. It may be that, should you decide to learn Italian, you will one day read the story of my parents’ families for yourself. The library here at the castello holds many personal diaries.’
Immediately Annie’s eyes lit up with excited anticipation.
‘There’s nothing I’d like to do more,’ she admitted.
‘Then I shall make some enquiries and find a teacher for you. Or if you prefer you could take a language course in Florence. My apartment there is large enough to accommodate you and Ollie.’
He was being so kind. Whilst she had been listening to him she had, she realised as Falcon reached for the bottle of rosé and leaned across to top up her glass, almost emptied it.
‘Oh, no. No more for me. I don’t drink at all normally—’ she began, but Falcon ignored her and continued to pour.
‘I am most certainly not in favour of anyone drinking more than they should, but it is important that you learn to drink a couple of glasses of wine without it going to your head. It will give you confidence in social situations. Now, I have also been thinking about you and Oliver whilst I was in Florence.’
Annie’s heart gave another furious flurry of too-fast beats, so she took another sip of her wine. It did taste good, and a lovely warm, mellow and relaxed feeling was beginning to creep over her.
‘If you are to have any quality of life of your own then you will need someone who you can trust to look after Oliver in your absence.’
‘I don’t want anyone else to look after him,’ Annie protested. ‘I love him and I want to be with him.’
‘It is not healthy when mother and child have only one another. Normally in Italian families there is always someone for a mother to turn to for help. She is not left alone to bring up her child. I have spoken with Maria already, and she has a cousin who trained as a nursery nurse. She and her husband have recently returned to live on th
e island, and I have arranged for her to come up to the castello when you feel ready to speak with her. You can interview her. If you decide she is suitable then you will be doing her a favour, as well.’
Noblesse oblige, Annie thought ruefully, but she knew that what he was saying made sense, so she nodded her head and then said, ‘Ollie’s falling asleep. I’d better take him upstairs and put him to bed.’
Falcon’s answer—‘I’ll carry him for you’—had her denying that there was any need for him to do so, but Falcon simply stood up and went to lift Ollie out of his chair.
‘I have a distinct feeling that if I let you disappear upstairs alone you won’t come back down again. And as you know we have an outstanding matter to discuss,’ he told her.
Annie was glad she wasn’t holding Ollie, because she suspected that if she had been she would have been in danger of dropping him, so great was the effect of Falcon’s words on her.
It didn’t take her long to put Ollie to bed. He was such a good baby. She smiled lovingly as she kissed his forehead, and then gave a small gasp as she realised that Falcon had come from the small sitting room that opened off her bedroom into the nursery, and was standing watching her.
‘Oliver is a very lucky child to have such a devoted mother.’
Was he thinking of his own mother, and how he and his brothers as children had mistakenly felt that she had not loved them enough to fight death to be with them?
Instinctively moved to comfort him, she told him gently, ‘I’m sure your mother did love you all, Falcon—and that she wanted to be with you. Even though to you as a child it must have seemed that she had chosen not to live.’
She had lifted her hand to his sleeve as she spoke, touching his arm in the kind of tender gesture that came unbidden and naturally, but now—as he moved closer to her and she felt the hard, muscular warmth of his flesh beneath her fingers—a very different feeling from the one that had originally motivated her surged through her, causing her to snatch back her hand and quickly turn towards the door, her face hot.