The Brabanti Baby

by Catherine Spencer

  As for admitting to fear…Dio, that would be the day! A man remained in control only as long as he presented an invincible front to the world. The instant he showed weakness or doubt, he left himself open to attack from his enemies—and although, in Gabriel’s case, they wisely remained hidden, that didn’t mean they weren’t there. No man who’d achieved his level of prosperity was ever free of the envy of others less fortunate.

  And yet, looking at the woman sitting across from him now, he wished it weren’t so. He envied her simple, straightforward philosophy. Wished he could share it. He didn’t pretend to know her well, but instinct told him she possessed a sincerity and integrity his ex-wife had never known.

  Eve Caldwell, he thought on a sudden surge of regret, was the kind of woman he should have married. She’d never have betrayed him the way Marcia had. And he wouldn’t now be in the position of playing second-fiddle father to his own child.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EVE didn’t like the way he sank into sudden silence. Gabriel Brabanti wasn’t the kind of man to stare aimlessly into space, content to do nothing but run his forefinger slowly around the rim of his wineglass. Something was brewing behind that handsome, impassive face. The probing questions he’d leveled at her in the last half hour attested to that.

  “Grazie,” he murmured absently, as Gismondo set a basket of bread and their first course before them.

  Caponata, Eve discovered, consisted of eggplant, celery, olives and capers, drizzled in olive oil. Nothing sinister about that. But Gabriel, who’d claimed this was one of his favorite trattorias, showed no interest in the food he’d ordered with such care. More evidence that his brain was engaged elsewhere.

  “What killed your appetite?” she asked. “Was it something I said? Did I offend you with my comments about men?”

  He shook his head, the way a person might if he’d nodded off in the middle of a conversation, and looked at her in faint astonishment, as if he couldn’t quite recall who she was. “Not in the least. But you have given me food for thought.”

  No great surprise in that! “Oh, dear!” she breathed in mock concern. “Should I be worried?”

  “No. You’ve helped me gain some perspective, that’s all.” Although he toyed with his fork, he still didn’t eat. Instead, he watched her. “You seem to be enjoying the caponata. Did I make a good choice?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She mopped at a drop of olive oil threatening to dribble down her chin. “In case you haven’t guessed, eating’s one of my favorite pastimes.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed from looking at you. You’re not carrying an ounce of extra fat.”

  “That’s because I usually run two miles a day.”

  He speared a sliver of eggplant. “What else do you like to do?”

  “Read, watch movies, cook.”

  “Do you like to shop?”

  She laughed. “Of course I like to shop! I’m a woman, aren’t I?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, holding her in a gaze so scorching that a shudder of sensation shot the length of her. “You’re very much a woman.”

  The laughter died in her throat. “It was a rhetorical question, Gabriel!”

  He shrugged. “So?”

  “So I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”

  “It never occurred to me that you were.” He turned his attention to his salad again. “We have many interesting shops in Valletta, everything from chic boutiques to street markets. Would you like to explore them?”

  “Maybe,” she said cautiously, “but not today.”

  And not with him. The more time they spent together, the greater the pull of that unearthly sexual awareness between them, and the weaker the safety barrier of guarded suspicion they’d once exhibited toward one another. The adversarial glint in his eye was gone, and if it weren’t completely ludicrous, she’d have thought he’d forgotten she was Marcia’s cousin and, by association, someone not to be trusted.

  And all that proved was that he’d been right in wondering if she’d had too much sun. Add wine to the mix, and small wonder her judgment was off.

  “Not today,” he agreed. “But very soon.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I imagine you’ll want to shop for different clothes.”

  She glanced around, hoping to catch their waiter’s eye. He lounged in the trattoria doorway, oblivious to anything but the sunlight streaming through the branches of a lemon tree. “What makes you think those I already have won’t suffice?”

  “Maybe they will,” Gabriel said. “Maybe Marcia warned you what to expect, and you came prepared.” His hand, coming down hard on hers and clasping her fingers in an unforgiving grip, jolted her attention back to him. “And maybe,” he said, imprisoning her startled gaze in his, “I need to make it clear that, when you are with me, Eve, you do not cast your eyes around at other men.”

  She snatched her hand away, refusing to acknowledge how, even though his voice washed over her in icy displeasure, his touch burned, filling her with delicious, forbidden heat.

  “I am not ‘with’ you,” she retaliated, a spurt of anger temporarily rescuing her from an attraction she neither needed nor understood, “and please understand that I feel in no way obligated to defend myself against your outrageous accusation. But, just for the record, I’m trying to catch our waiter’s attention because I’d like a glass of water.”

  He smacked the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Idiota! Forgive me, cara! I should have known better.” He turned to Gismondo and raised one sleek, dark eyebrow. It was enough. The waiter almost fell over himself in his eagerness to attend to the almighty Signor Brabanti’s bidding.

  “You didn’t have to go overboard,” she protested, when she saw that he’d ordered a bottle of sparkling mineral water. “What comes out of the tap would have been good enough.”

  “Not so,” Gabriel said. “Nothing cleanses the palate and aids digestion like San Pellegrino, bottled right where it gushes free, high in the Italian Alps. And it’s the very least I could do to atone for my stupidity.”

  “It is refreshing.” Cradling the chilled water glass in her hand, she regarded him curiously. “What did you mean, a moment ago, about my being prepared because Marcia had warned me what to expect? Prepared for what?”

  “The social life you’ll enjoy during your stay in Malta.”

  “I’m here to look after Nicola, not make an entrance into society.”

  “You’re my daughter’s blood relation and that makes you family. I will not allow you, or anyone else, to treat you like an employee. If you wish to spend most of your days taking care of Nicola, I won’t try to stop you. Heaven knows she can only benefit from such undivided attention. But I insist that you let Beryl or one of the other women on my staff take over for you in the evenings.”

  “So that I can do what? Paint my toe nails and watch television?”

  A halfsmile softened his mouth. “This is a small island and I have many friends and acquaintances, Eve. Word’s spread that you are here, and they are anxious to meet this stranger in their midst.”

  “How’s that possible? I arrived only a week ago, and took you completely by surprise.”

  “Ah, but servants talk—in the morning, when they meet at the bakery or in the fish market to look over the day’s catch, or when they pass one another in the park.” He lifted one broad shoulder in an amused shrug. “Or, failing all other means, when they have nothing else to do but pick up the phone and report the latest household gossip. And you, cara mia, are the flavor of the month, whether or not you like it. Already I’ve received several invitations, and even declined one on your behalf.”

  “Oh?” she said, bristling anew. Not that she cared to find herself the focus of his friends’ curiosity, but he had his nerve! “Shouldn’t that have been my decision?”

  “Possibly. But it was for dinner tonight, and issued at very short notice. You’re exhausted, even if you won’t admit it, and I didn’t want to put you in the awkward pos
ition of having to say no to people you’ve yet to meet. Also, you’d be more comfortable, I believe, if your first introduction to society was to take place on familiar territory. For that reason, I’ve arranged a cocktail party for Friday evening. You’ll be more rested by then.”

  And less likely to embarrass him by wilting into the lap of one of his “society” friends? “Don’t you mean, more presentable—always assuming I manage to find something halfway suitable to wear?”

  This time, he slapped the table and appealed to the sky. “I have offended her yet again! How is that possible?”

  “Oh, a couple of things come to mind,” she said. “Organizing my time without so much as a by-your-leave, for starters. Suggesting my wardrobe belongs in a recycling bin. Taking—”

  “I suggested no such thing,” he cut in. “From what I’ve seen, you have excellent fashion sense.”

  “I don’t know how you arrive at that conclusion, considering all you’ve ever seen me in is the sort of casual thing I’m wearing today.”

  “I’ve seen you in other things.”

  “I wasn’t including the suit I arrived in. I’m the first to admit it was a bit the worse for wear.”

  “I wasn’t including it, either.” He smiled in unabashed delight. “I was thinking of our supper together, your first evening here, and how charming you looked in your… nighttime ensemble.”

  To offset the surge of pleasure pricking her skin, she pinched her lips together in a grimace of distaste. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Flirt with me. It’s so…meaningless.”

  “I am Italian,” he said, as if that explained and forgave any and all transgressions. “Just as the French enjoy their wines and the Germans their bratwurst, so do Italian men enjoy their women.”

  “I’d have thought it would be pasta.”

  “Then you have much to learn, cara mia.”

  Thankfully, the arrival of their main course put an end to that subject, and for the remainder of the meal they discussed less personal topics. Gabriel explained that Malta had almost no natural water reserves, described the desalination plants built to compensate for this, and his involvement in developing treatment plants for polishing ground-water.

  Although he didn’t come out and say so, from his comments about his various other enterprises around the globe, Eve gathered he was enormously wealthy. Much more so than even the luxury of his villa suggested.

  Yet there was an unassuming other side to him, too; one far removed from the affluent world of high society and international tycoons. “My grandmother,” he boasted, over espresso and slices of a rich, sweet cake called cassata, “made the best meatballs in the world. They were the size of my fist. And her stromboli…!” He rolled his eyes. “Molto eccellente!”

  “What about your mother? Was she a good cook also?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, and Eve, more fascinated by the second, drank in the sight of him, feature by feature. His eyes were bluer than the midday Mediterranean sky, their lashes so dense and soft, they might have been spun from black silk. His teeth gleamed whiter than new-fallen December snow on the shores of Lake Michigan. The lean tanned planes of his face and powerful sweep of his neck were those of an aristocrat.

  His shirt, open at the throat, revealed a mist of dark hair and a suggestion of the broad chest beneath the fine, pale gray cotton. As for the rest of him…

  She swallowed and looked away. She could describe in minute detail the lean flat plane of his belly, the long muscles in his thighs, the prominent curvature of his masculinity nestled between them, and the way she hadn’t been able to tear her enthralled gaze away from any of it. Oh, yes, she knew more than she should about the rest of him.

  “Afraid not,” he chuckled, and it took her a moment to realize what he was referring to. “My mother came from a well-to-do Roman family where servants catered to her every need. She didn’t know one end of a rolling pin from the other, but my father didn’t care. He loved her just as she was. It drove my grandmother to distraction! I remember her standing in her kitchen, her hair hanging halfway down her back in a long gray braid, berating my father for being fool enough to marry a woman who wasn’t Sicilian and didn’t know how to boil water. Those two women had a love-hate relationship until the day my grandmother died.”

  “Sounds a little like Marcia and me,” Eve said. “We can’t live with one another, and can’t quite manage to live without.”

  “But the difference,” he said, sobering, “is that my mother and grandmother had one important thing in common: they both adored my father. With you and Marcia—”

  “We have Nicola in common, and we both adore her.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said, but where, a moment before, his eyes had been bright with laughter, they now were full of doubt. “I’m sure you care deeply for my daughter. But her mother…”

  “You really need to give Marcia more credit, Gabriel. I’d hoped everything I’ve told you would have eased your mind on that score.”

  “And I hope your trust in her proves well-founded. God knows, I’ll sleep easier at night if I can be sure she won’t tire of being a mother, the same way she tired of being a wife.”

  Brimming with curiosity, Eve tipped her head to one side and was on the point of asking what he meant by that, when his cell phone rang. A brief exchange followed from which she gathered he was talking to Beryl.

  “Better head back,” he said a moment later, turning off the phone and signaling for the bill. “Nicola’s awake and screaming, and Beryl can’t console her.”

  Just as well, Eve decided, following him to the car and tamping down on the swell of disappointment that their time together had come to an end. Too much undiluted Gabriel Brabanti wasn’t good for her. He made her wonder about things she’d be better off ignoring. Crazy things, such as what it might be like to be the woman in his life, when she already knew from her cousin that once he’d captured their hearts, he didn’t treat his women well.

  He made Eve uneasy, too, with his searching questions and unflattering innuendoes regarding Marcia. It was as if he were building a case against her; collecting evidence that she was unfit to care for Nicola.

  Unfit for anything, in fact. The distaste apparent both in his expression and tone of voice when he spoke of her suggested a deep and abiding hostility amounting almost to hate. And from everything her cousin had told her, Eve knew Marcia returned his feelings in full measure.

  Why? What had happened to turn a love affair into such bitter estrangement? To smash a marriage beyond repair, even though a child was involved?

  Angling herself against the side panel of the convertible’s passenger door, Eve studied him covertly behind the concealing lens of her sunglasses, looking for answers. He handled the powerful car with casual flair, weaving expertly in and out of traffic—a man completely in charge of himself and everything around him.

  Her gaze fastened on his profile and saw the contradictions imprinted there. The unyielding line of his jaw juxtaposed next to the passionate curve of his mouth; the clear-sighted purpose in his vivid blue eyes softened by the long sensual sweep of his lashes. Lover versus tycoon, with the balance of power shifting from one to the other depending on circumstance.

  “Why did you really marry Marcia?”

  The question burst out of her and she cringed at the bald bluntness of it. His reasons were none of her business. Yet she needed to know. Gabriel Brabanti wasn’t a man given to impulse, nor one naive enough to mistake brief infatuation for the depth of commitment that held a marriage together. So why?

  He took his time answering. “I’ve often asked myself the same question.”

  “Did you ever love her?”

  “No. But I wanted to. Badly enough to ignore all the reasons why we wouldn’t work as a couple.”

  “Why?” she said again. “It’s not as if you couldn’t have any woman you wanted. You’re….

  Handsome a
s sin, sexy, charming, sophisticated—and certainly rich, if money’s important.

  He lifted one eyebrow in amused inquiry. “What am I, Eve?”

  “…Eligible enough. So why Marcia?”

  “Because she came along at the wrong time. Both my parents had died the previous year, first my mother, from cancer—a horrible, lingering death—then, only weeks later, my father from what his doctors cited as ‘indeterminate causes’ which, in plain language, boiled down to his having lost the will to live without his beloved Ariana.”

  “He died of loneliness and a broken heart.” Eve nodded her understanding. “I’ve seen it happen often enough when two people have been together a long time and are especially close. One cannot survive without the other.”

  “Exactly. And in dealing with my own loss, I realized that though I was more successful than my father, and wealthy beyond even my mother’s expectations, I was infinitely poorer than either of them because I’d never known that kind of close connection with another person.”

  The grief etching his features tore at Eve. She knew the healing power of physical contact and wanted so badly to offer him the silent comfort of a touch. But he wasn’t looking for sympathy and he’d resent anything smacking of pity, so she slid her hands under her and sat on them until the urge passed, and said only, “I’m very sorry, Gabriel.”

  He made a helpless gesture with his hand, a sort of mea culpa for a weakness in himself that he despised. “So I went searching for it, instead found Marcia and, as I mentioned once before, was briefly blinded by her dazzle and her zest for life. But what at first seemed exciting very soon became exhausting because she was insatiable. No matter how much I gave, it was never enough.”

  “Do you think she loved you?”

  “She certainly did her best to convince me that she did. But it soon became apparent that what she really loved was the social standing and luxury which came of being married to me. And for that I blame myself. I should have seen through her devoted act sooner, because subtlety was never her strong point. Unfortunately, by the time I came to my senses, we were married—not for better, but most definitely for worse.”