Alessandro and the Cheery Nanny

by Amy Andrews

  A few hours later Alessandro climbed the stairs to check on his patient. He’d just come off the phone from St Auburn’s, who had confirmed that Nat had indeed contracted swamp flu. Thankfully both his and Juliano’s swabs were so far negative.

  She was due some more tablets and he thought she might like to know. He pulled up short in the doorway when he realised Juliano, Flo in tow, was propped up on the pillow next to Nat, chatting away. Her eyes were closed but that didn’t seem to be bothering him.

  He opened his mouth to motion for Juliano to come away but then his son said something that rendered him totally powerless.

  ‘Please get better, Nat. I want you to be my mummy.’ Juliano stroked Nat’s forehead gently. ‘We love you Nat.’

  Alessandro’s heart thundered in his chest as his son’s innocent comments. Nat stirred at that point and murmured, ‘Love you too, matey,’ before settling back to sleep.

  Alessandro held his breath. Was she lucid? Had she heard Juliano? He wasn’t sure. A roaring in his ears threatened to deafen him as his chest filled with a feeling he was becoming all too used to. Except now he knew what it was.

  All that he cared about in the world was right in front of him and he’d been so blind.

  He was in love with Nathalie.

  He’d been so busy punishing himself for past mistakes he hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening in the here and now. When Nat had mentioned the ‘l’ word he’d run a mile because he’d still been looking back. But looking at his son and the woman in his bed—pale and ill and the best thing that had ever happened to him—he knew they were the way forward. He knew they were his future.

  If it wasn’t too late.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NAT slept for the rest of the day, waking only for water, medication and the odd rest stop. She took the news of the confirmed diagnosis with a sleepy shrug and a ‘Nice to know I’m a World Health Organization statistic now’.

  Alessandro was pleased for the time. It gave him time to think, to strategise. He knew he had his work cut out for him. He knew that she’d been betrayed by two men in her past over another woman and that this time round she wouldn’t be so forgiving. He knew she wouldn’t take any platitudes or settle for any slick proclamations.

  He was going to have to tell her the truth. The whole truth. Something he’d never told anyone. What was that old saying? The truth will set you free. Maybe it would. He hoped so. Maybe it was time to get it all out in the open instead of keeping it inside and beating himself up about it.

  Surely he deserved love too? Juliano certainly did. He knew he couldn’t let her walk out of his life without trying. Hiding in the past hadn’t done either of them any good. Maybe it was time to start looking forward, to start living for the future?

  Alessandro came to bed late again that night, having gone over and over in his head what he was going to say to her once she was well enough. He was nervous, a sick kind of feeling sitting heavily in his stomach, like a layer of grease, sludgy and stagnant.

  She didn’t stir when he joined her and he turned on his side and just looked at her. He wanted to reach out for her, pull her into him as he had last night, but resisted. He wouldn’t take advantage of her. Not when her defences had been knocked flat.

  But he hoped she’d allow him to share her bed every night of his life. If he played his cards right maybe she would.

  On that positive note he drifted to sleep

  Nat woke with a start early next morning. Again it took a while to orientate herself as a pale finger of daylight peeked through the gap in the curtains. Alessandro’s room. She became aware of him behind her, wrapped around her again, his strong forearm so close to her cheek she could have turned her face and pressed a kiss to it.

  Had she sought him out like the previous night or had it just been a natural position for their bodies to assume? The lovers within finding a way to be together if only subconsciously?

  She realised suddenly she actually felt quite good. She wriggled slightly. No aches or pains. Her headache had gone and her thought processes didn’t seem sluggish. She didn’t feel feverish and her throat no longer hurt. She certainly couldn’t run a marathon but it seemed as if the worse had passed.

  She wriggled again for the sheer joy of being able to do so without pain and suddenly became aware of a hardness pressing into her from behind. And she knew instantly it was what had woken her, as surely as she knew her own heartbeat. The lover inside had subconsciously responded to the signal from her beloved.

  ‘Alessandro?’ she whispered.

  Alessandro, who had been awake for fifteen minutes trying to quell his hard-on without waking her up, groaned behind her. He placed his forehead against her shoulder blade. ‘I’m sorry, il mio amore. My body betrays me.’

  A rush of desire slammed down low and she squeezed her legs together as a burst of heat tingled between them. He sounded in agony and she could definitely relate.

  Alessandro took a deep steadying breath. ‘If you let go of my arm, I’ll get up.’

  Nat realised his lower arm was trapped against her body. But suddenly she didn’t want to release him. They’d forged a new kind of intimacy the last couple of days and she didn’t want to let it go—not yet. She wanted to feel him around her, in her. Like before. Like old times.

  Maybe her illness had weakened her but suddenly her blood was boiling with lust. His aroma filled her senses and the lust surged around her body, filling up every cell, every heartbeat, every breath. It was crazy, she knew, but was it so wrong to want one last moment with him to cherish for ever?

  She reached behind her and slid her hand between them, seeking and finding his taut erection straining against his underwear.

  Alessandro shut his eyes, pressing his forehead hard against her. ‘Nathalie!’ he groaned.

  She gave him a fierce squeeze before burrowing past his waistband and touching his naked length, revelling in his guttural moan that echoed around the room. He sounded like a bull elephant in rut and she could barely see she was so inflamed with need.

  She grabbed his lower hand and brought it to her breast, crying out herself as he squeezed it. ‘Yes!’

  ‘Nat…’ Alessandro dragged in a breath as her hand slid up and down his length, sliding it enticingly against the cheek of her bottom. ‘I don’t think we should be doing this now. You’re not well.’

  Nat shook her head as his hand rubbed against the tortured peak of her nipple. ‘I’m fine. I need this, Alessandro.’ She moved her hand off him to push up her nightdress and shimmy her knickers down over her hips. She pressed her bare bottom back into him, rotating it against his erection.

  ‘Nathalie!’

  She reached for him again, wrapping her hand around his girth. ‘Please.’

  Alessandro was seeing stars in his efforts to hold back his desire while his body betrayed him. There was so much he wanted to tell her but he couldn’t now. Not in the middle of all this. She would think it was just pillow talk. Things people who didn’t love each other said in bed that weren’t necessarily true. And he didn’t want to diminish what he had to say.

  But he could show her. He could make love to her. Show her with his body, his touch, that she was more than sex, more than a substitute.

  His hand left her nipple and she whimpered. ‘Shh,’ he said, kissing her neck. ‘Just for a moment.’ His fingers dragged up her nightdress so he could touch her warm vital flesh. The nipple was hard against his palm and as his other hand slid between her legs her arched back told him he’d definitely hit the sweet spot.

  ‘Now, Alessandro. I need you in me now.’

  Alessandro’s hand stroked in unison. ‘Slow down,’ he whispered.

  Nat shook her head. ‘No.’ She knew she was ready for him and she rubbed her hot slickness against his rampant hardness. She stretched her arm over her head, slinging it around his neck. ‘Now,’ she demanded.

  Alessandro removed his hand reluctantly from between her legs and guid
ed himself to where she was wet and hot for him. He nudged his head in, angling his hips at the same time she pushed back, and he slid in to the hilt.

  Nat cried out at his decisive invasion, revelling in his thickness, his power. He pulled out and thrust in again as he squeezed her breast and she cried out, ‘More.’

  Alessandro’s other hand returned to the wet cleft between her legs, her corresponding whimper travelling straight to his groin. Her hand tightened on his nape as he stroked between her legs and he dropped his head and bit gently along the length of her neck.

  Her whimpers grew more frantic as he thrust deeper and stroked harder. Every frenzied noise drove him towards his own release. As she built he built too until she was trembling and clinging to him, crying out. When she shattered around him his own climax was tingling in his loins and surging through his abdominal muscles, rushing up to meet hers seconds later.

  ‘I love you,’ he called as the world fell apart around him.

  Alessandro’s unexpected declaration floated up to her in the surreal surroundings into which she had been flung. Maybe he hadn’t even said it? Maybe her post-feverish brain had just conjured it up in her strangely inert yet somehow gliding state. She let it pass her by, not wanting to interfere with the slow burn of ecstasy fizzing in her blood.

  It seemed to take for ever to bump gently back to earth, like feathers on a gentle breeze.

  ‘Nathalie.’ Alessandro nuzzled her neck, his hand resting possessively on her hip. ‘We need to talk.’

  No, she didn’t want to hear him trying to backpedal or justify his orgasmic slip. She just wanted to stay cocooned here for a bit longer, his arm around her, his body jammed tight against hers.

  ‘Shh,’ she whispered, tucking his arm snugly around her waist. ‘Later.’

  Then post-coital malaise and post-illness lethargy combined in a potent double whammy and sleep dragged her under.

  It was full daylight when Nat next woke. The clock said six-thirty and her bladder was making itself known so she gently moved out of Alessandro’s embrace. It was good to feel her legs strong beneath her as she padded to the en suite. Her stomach growled and she actually felt hungry for the first time in two days.

  Alessandro’s I love you played through her head as she used the toilet and then washed her hands. How could it not? She looked at her rather wan reflection, admitting to herself now how much it had hurt. Another pretty lie. Something he’d thought she wanted to hear.

  Which she did, of course. But not if he didn’t mean it. Not if he didn’t feel it.

  She steeled herself to go back out. To face him. To excuse what had happened with a cheery smile and get through the next few days with it firmly plastered on her face. Being ill had sapped her energy. And being angry required more energy than she possessed. She just wanted it to be over now so she could leave and lick her wounds far away from the man who had inflicted them.

  He was sitting on the side of the bed, waiting for her when she stepped out of the en suite. Her gaze hungrily ate up his broad shoulders and his long, bare, powerful thighs.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Nat faltered. Wanting to prolong their nearness, to hear his voice but not wanting it at the same time. ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to explain, Alessandro.’ She looked at the floor then at the bed then at the bedside clock. ‘I’m not going to hold you to anything you might have said in a moment of passion.’

  Alessandro caught her wandering gaze and held it. ‘I love you.’

  Nat shook her head, rejecting his words, the sincerity in his gaze. ‘It was a nice thing for you to say but you really didn’t have to and I understand where it came from.’

  Alessandro prayed for patience. ‘I love you,’ he said again.

  Nat refused to let his words affect her. Rob had said he loved her. So had her father. Neither of them had stuck around. ‘No. You’re still in love and grieving for your wife. And I remind you of her. I think they call it transference, don’t they?’

  Alessandro pushed off the bed and stalked two paces to the window, yanking back the curtain. This was the moment of truth. He placed his fists against the window ledge, the persuasive words he’d practised yesterday completely deserting him.

  All he had now was the bald truth. ‘I didn’t love her.’

  The silence stretched as Nat tried to figure out what he was talking about. She frowned. Who the hell were they talking about now? ‘Who?’

  ‘Camilla. My wife. I didn’t love her.’ The words he’d kept locked inside for so long were finally out and damn if it didn’t feel good. He turned to face her, leaning against the window sill. ‘I never loved her.’

  Nat blinked. ‘What?’ But the man she’d first met had been deeply mired in grief.

  ‘You’re right,’ he admitted. ‘You and she are very similar. I was shocked when I first met you. But it took me about two seconds in your company to realise that your physical similarities are where it ends. When I told you that you and she were nothing alike, I was deadly serious.’

  Nat wasn’t sure if her brain was still sluggish from her illness but she just couldn’t take in what he was saying. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Camilla was my lover. Before we met I was having a fantastic time playing the field. I never planned to marry. You grow up with parents who fought and spent more time apart than together, you don’t really see the point…’

  Alessandro couldn’t believe he’d ever been so stupid. ‘She was beautiful and sophisticated, from aristocratic stock. Witty and charming and looked fantastic naked. All the things I looked for in a date. And then she fell pregnant. So I did the honourable thing.’

  He paused waiting for the burn of bitter memories. For his internal censor to step in. But neither came.

  A first.

  ‘It was a huge society wedding and I was determined to make a real go of it. So, my life hadn’t gone exactly according to plan but I knew if we worked at it, we could succeed.’

  He shook his head at his naivety. ‘Valentino, who, I have to say, never really liked her anyway, overheard her at the wedding talking to her best friend about how she’d trapped me. Deliberately fallen pregnant because she’d wanted to marry me. I told him he was mistaken and confronted her about it later, in the honeymoon suite.’

  His lips twisted into an ironic smile. ‘She admitted it. She looked straight at me and said, “But, darling, you wouldn’t have married me otherwise.” It was like the blinkers had been ripped away from my eyes and I could finally see the person Val had always seen. The cold, calculating socialite out to marry a doctor.’

  Nat watched him closely as Alessandro fell silent, his matter-of-fact retelling betrayed by the turmoil in his sable gaze. To say she was horrified was an understatement. ‘I didn’t know,’ she murmured.

  He nodded. ‘So I told her it was going to be a marriage in name only. Which apparently suited her down to the ground. Initially anyway. So we entered into this strange existence where we smiled publicly but slept in separate beds. And then Juliano was born and I was crazily busy at the hospital, working long hours, and she suddenly realised being married to a doctor wasn’t so glamorous after all.’

  He gave a stiff laugh. ‘I think she thought I’d give up the emergency lark and become a Harley St specialist.’

  Nat shook her head. She’d known Alessandro for only a matter of days when she’d realised he was a gifted emergency physician.

  ‘She wanted a divorce. But she wanted me to file. Couldn’t have that stain on her family’s reputation. I knew I’d never see Juliano again if I agreed. As it was, she was already using him to get to me. Don’t get me wrong, she was a great mother and they had a close bond but she deliberately alienated him from me. Rationing our already scant time together. Insisting I only speak English with him. And…I let her. I felt guilty about our relationship and it was easier to give in and play by her rules. Juliano was happy and healthy and loved. And work demanded so much of me. It was easier that way. I gues
s I turned into my father…’

  He trailed off and Nat waited for him to start again. She sensed this was something he needed to get off his chest.

  ‘By the time she died, Juliano and I were relative strangers.’

  Nat nodded. ‘I noticed.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘A car accident. We’d argued and she’d squealed off in the flash BMW she insisted I buy for her—another guilt gift.’

  Nat shut her eyes. No wonder Alessandro had looked so wretched when she’d first met him. He obviously blamed himself for Camilla’s death. Guilt and remorse were powerful emotions. ‘What did you argue about?’

  ‘The divorce. What else? We didn’t argue often, I didn’t want that for Juliano. I didn’t want him to experience the type of childhood I’d known. It was easier just to give in to her. And Camilla was much too passive-aggressive for it anyway.’

  He swallowed, parched from talking and the burn of memories. ‘But we rowed that day. I couldn’t believe I was in a marriage like my parents’. But Camilla had a way of picking a fight.’

  The ugly words taunted him to this day. ‘She said she’d taken a lover and wanted to be free to marry again. I told her over my cold dead body and that I would fight her every inch of the way. Fight her for Juliano. That she’d made her bed and she was just going to have to lie in it.’

  He went silent and Nat finished the story for him. ‘So she hared off in the car and crashed it?’

  Alessandro nodded and her heart went out to him. She rose from the bed and went to his side, leaning her body in to him, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Alessandro.’

  ‘I know that. Rationally, I know that. But…’

  Nat nodded, dropping another kiss in the same spot. ‘You’ve been beating yourself up about it anyway?’

  Alessandro felt the warmth of her seep into him and he began to hope. ‘I looked on it as my punishment. For insisting on a marriage on paper only and then for keeping her in the marriage. A marriage neither of us wanted. If I’d only forgiven her and gone on from there. Tried to make a real go of it instead of drawing the battle lines right from the start. But I was proud and angry.’