Antonio swallowed the lump of grief that had risen in his throat. ‘Can you get Claire a drink and show her to our room? She is tired from the journey. She almost passed out coming through Customs.’
Claire felt her face flame with guilty colour all over again. She was sure Mario thought she had been putting it on, but she did still feel horribly faint and nauseous. A long-haul flight and crossing time zones, even if in the lap of luxury, was not conducive to feeling one hundred percent even without the suspicion of being pregnant. Even the sudden heat after the cool winter in Sydney took some getting used to. Antonio himself looked ashen and tired beyond description, with dark shadows underscoring his eyes like bruises, but then he was facing the sadness of losing his mother so soon after the death of his father.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Mario asked as he led the way to the salotto.
‘Do you have fresh orange juice?’ Claire asked.
He gave her his playboy, teasing smile. ‘Does Australia have bush flies?’
A reluctant smile tugged at Claire’s mouth. She had to admit that Mario, when he let his guard down, could be utterly charming. It was no wonder Antonio would not hear a bad word said against him.
Mario handed her a glass of icy cold orange juice. ‘So,’ he said, running his gaze over her speculatively, ‘you are reunited with my brother.’
Claire lowered her gaze. ‘Yes…’
‘Let’s hope it lasts this time around,’ he said. ‘He has not been the same since you left.’
Claire took a deep breath and met his hardened gaze full-on. ‘I love him, Mario. I know you probably don’t believe it, but I do. I’ve been so stupid. I can’t believe how stupid I was back then. I know he wasn’t having an affair. I feel so sure of it now. I have never stopped loving him. Not for a moment. I love him so much.’
‘Have you told him that?’ Mario asked, stalling in the process of lifting his glass to his mouth.
‘Have you told me what?’ Antonio asked as he stepped into the room behind her.
Claire swung around to reply, but before she could get the words into some sort of order she began to wobble on her feet, her vision blurring alarmingly. She tried to concentrate, to hold on to consciousness, but her extremities were already fizzing with the sudden loss of blood pressure. She felt herself falling, saw the marbled floor coming towards her with frightening speed. The glass she was holding slipped out of her grasp, shattering into a thousand pieces.
She vaguely registered Antonio’s voice calling out, ‘Catch her!’ but if Mario did so in time she was totally unaware of it….
Claire woke in a darkened room. Her aching forehead was being stroked with a cool damp cloth by Antonio. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked through dry lips. ‘Where am I?’
‘Cara, you hit your head when you fainted,’ he said, concern thickening his voice. ‘I want you to go to hospital to have it X-rayed. The ambulance is on its way. You could have fractured your skull.’
She felt her vision blurring again, and his words seemed to be coming from a long way off. Her head was pounding as if a construction site had taken up residence inside. She felt a wave of sickness rise in her throat, but managed to swallow it down just as the sound of a siren approached on the street outside.
As the ambulance officers loaded her into the back of the vehicle, Claire turned her head to look at Antonio, whose face was grey with anguish. ‘I don’t need you to come with me,’ she said. ‘You should be with your mother. How is she?’
‘She is fine for now,’ Antonio said, gently squeezing her hand before tucking it back under the cotton blanket. ‘She has even been asking for you.’
She blinked at him, even though it sent another jack-hammer through her skull. ‘She’s been asking for me?’ she asked in a shocked whisper. ‘She…she knows I’m here…with you?’
‘I told her we were together again,’ he said. ‘I think she wants to say goodbye and to apologise.’
Claire felt her heart contract even as her consciousness began to waver alarmingly again. ‘Tell her…tell her to wait for me…’
‘I will,’ Antonio said, leaning forward to press a soft kiss to the paper-white skin of her brow just as her eyes fluttered downwards.
‘Come è lei?’
Claire heard Antonio’s voice ask how she was. But the answer from the doctor he was speaking with, even though delivered in the rather stilted manner of a non-Italian speaker, she found hard to follow in her disordered state, apart from the words for ‘mild concussion.’
‘Commozione minimo…um…er…Ma non è tutto…Lei è incinta…er…’
‘How far along?’ Antonio asked next—in English this time, clearly in an attempt to put his struggling colleague out of his misery.
Claire felt a prickly sensation go through her, as if all of her corpuscles had been injected with tiny bubbles of air, each one containing a particle of joy.
So it had been confirmed at last.
She was pregnant.
‘Two weeks—maybe three,’ the doctor answered Antonio in English, his lilting accent giving him away as a Scot, obviously on a foreign medical rotation. ‘She is obviously sensitive to the change in her hormones. Some women are more so than others, making the symptoms kick in much earlier than normal. The knock on the head will not help the morning sickness, of course, but with adequate rest she should pick up in a few days. I’ve had a quick look through her records. She will have to be closely monitored, given what happened last time, but it’s entirely possible she will have a safe delivery of a healthy wee one this time. We have come a long way in the last five years in maternal health management.’
Claire felt her heart turn over inside her chest as the joy she was feeling began to spread right through her. If everything went right, she would in a matter of months be holding a baby in her arms—alive and breathing. Up until now she hadn’t dared think too far ahead. It had been enough to suspect she was carrying Antonio’s baby. To find out there was every reason to hope for a healthy delivery was nothing short of a miracle to her.
‘Grazie,’ Antonio said with a hitch in his voice. ‘I mean—thank you.’
‘No trouble. I am sorry to hear your mother is not well,’ the doctor added. ‘Perhaps news of a grandchild will be just the tonic she needs right now?’
‘You could be right,’ Antonio said. ‘Thank you again. You have been very kind and attentive. It is greatly appreciated.’
Claire waited until the sound of the doctor’s footsteps had faded into the distance before she opened her eyes. Antonio was looking down at her, his dark brown eyes meltingly soft.
‘Cara.’ His tone was gentle. ‘The good news is you do not have a fracture of your skull.’
‘And…and the bad news?’
He smiled. ‘I do not consider it bad news at all. The doctor attending your admission has found you are pregnant. He took a set of routine blood tests and it came up positive. You’re pregnant.’
Claire felt the tears rising until they were streaming down her face. She sniffed, and Antonio quickly reached over and plucked a tissue out of the box by her bed. He began to gently mop at her cheeks. ‘And here I was, thinking you had gone on the pill,’ he said in mock reproach.
‘I was going to,’ she said. ‘I was about to call to make an appointment when I realised I was a couple of days late. I decided to wait and see.’
He began to frown. ‘You were planning on telling me, were you not?’
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘Surely you don’t think…?’
He gave a rueful grimace. ‘It would be no less than I deserved. I have not exactly been the best husband to you, have I?’
Claire lowered her gaze, plucking at the sheet with her fingers. ‘I haven’t exactly been the best wife…’
He picked up her hand and brushed his lips against her bent fingers. ‘I cannot tell you how thrilled I am about the baby,’ he said. ‘It is the best news I could have hoped for.’
She gnawed at her li
p for a moment. ‘It’s not just about keeping your inheritance?’
‘It has never been about my inheritance,’ he said, his eyes warm and soft as they held hers. ‘I love you, il mio amato uno. I have been so stupid not to have recognised it for all this time. I was too proud to admit the woman I loved had left me. I should have fought for you, Claire. I realise that now. I should have moved heaven and earth to bring you back to me.’
Claire’s heart swelled to twice its size as she fell forward into his arms. ‘I love you too,’ she sobbed against his broad, dependable chest. ‘I’ve been such a fool. I can’t believe I left you. It was so immature of me.’
‘Hush, cara,’ he soothed, stroking her back with a gossamer-light touch. ‘You were still hurting. Losing Isabella was…’ His voice caught but he went on. ‘It was like being locked inside an abyss of grief so thick and dark it was all I could do to get through each day without breaking down completely. People were depending on me—my patients, my colleagues—and yet in all of it the most important person I should have supported was you. But I was too shell-shocked to face it at the time. Every time I looked at the pain in your eyes I felt my heart being ripped open. In the end I just could not bear to think what I had done to you. I got you pregnant. I did not support you the way you needed. And when Isabella did not make it I felt…I still feel…it was my fault.’
Claire lifted her eyes to his dark moist ones. ‘You said her name…’ Her voice came out on an incredulous whisper of sound. ‘For the first time ever you said her name…twice…’
Antonio’s throat moved up and down as he fought to control his emotions. ‘I have wanted to so many times, cara,’ he said. ‘But every time I tried to I felt as if a giant hand had grasped me by the throat, squeezing until I could not breathe.’
Claire hugged him tightly, allowing him the chance to let out the grief that in her own ignorance and pain had not been allowed purchase.
It was a long time before either of them could speak, but when they finally came apart she looked into his red-rimmed eyes and felt a rush of sheer joy for the first time in five long, lonely years.
‘My mother wishes to apologise in person for misleading you,’ Antonio said. ‘She really felt she was doing the right thing at the time. She thought you no longer loved me. That is why she gave you the money—to help you get back on your feet. She thought it might help you to cut loose by hinting Daniela and I were still involved. I hope you will find it in yourself to forgive her. I know it is a lot to ask. I am finding it hard to forgive her myself.’
Claire smiled as she stroked his raspy jaw. ‘Of course I forgive her—and you must too. I do not want any bad feelings to get in the way of our happiness. Not after so long apart.’
He smiled and kissed her softly on her lips. ‘I am the luckiest man on earth,’ he said. ‘I am over the moon about you being back in my life, about the baby, about being together again, about being a family.’
‘Speaking of family,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it time you got back to yours at the palazzo?’
‘My family is right here,’ he said, kissing her passionately. ‘And I am not going to be separated from it again.’
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3777-7
THE MARCOLINI BLACKMAIL MARRIAGE
First North American Publication 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by Melanie Milburne.
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