At the Italian's Command

by Cathy Williams

  ‘It’s out of the question.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I’m going to do!’ Sophie burst out. ‘You can’t drag me up an altar and force me to say I do!’

  ‘Try me.’ He leant forward, elbows on his thighs and gave her a cool, sideways look. ‘I mean it, Sophie. My baby will be born a Loro and he will have all the advantages that come with the name.’

  ‘But what about love?’ Sophie cried.

  ‘What about the alternative?’

  ‘What alternative?’

  ‘I can always fight for custody. Has that occurred to you?’

  It hadn’t, but it was occurring now, and she looked at him in dawning horror until he sighed and stood up.

  ‘I could, but I wouldn’t.’ He walked over to her and sat back down on the stool. ‘Not every marriage starts with fireworks,’ he said heavily, his green eyes settling on her face.

  ‘I know, but they should at least start with…with… You’re not the marrying kind, Rafe, and I couldn’t live with the responsibility of thinking that I’d tied you down when your heart wanted to be free. And I could never live with you leading an outside life.’

  ‘What makes you think that I would be the one who wanted to be free, and who needed to lead an outside life?’

  Sophie felt a flutter of something inside, just a second when her heart skipped a beat, and she told herself not to be foolish and start misinterpreting his question, turning it into something she wanted so desperately to hear.

  ‘Because I know,’ she said prosaically.

  ‘You might get bored.’

  ‘I might.’ Round about the same time as hell froze over. Disillusioned, yes. Hurt, certainly. But bored, never. If boredom was all she had to envisage being married to Rafe, then it would have been a very small price to pay.

  ‘However bored you get, there’ll be no looking around. You do realise that, don’t you?’

  ‘Separate rules?’ She smiled mirthlessly at him. ‘Not that it makes a difference, as the situation won’t arise.’

  ‘It’ll arise.’ Rafe got up and walked slowly over to the fireplace, leaning against it and looking down at her. He was still utterly composed, but something else. She couldn’t put her finger on it. An uncertainty that she felt, even though it wasn’t immediately evident from his expression. But over the weeks she had fine-tuned her ability to read him, even though she couldn’t work out what he could be uncertain about.

  ‘But there won’t be separate rules,’ he said.

  Sophie’s eyes widened.

  ‘Is it that inconceivable to take in?’ Rafe demanded irritably, a dull, dark flush spreading across his cheekbones. ‘If I thought that I would need to fool around with other women, then naturally I wouldn’t choose to get married.’

  ‘But…’ She frowned and tried hard to make the link between the things he was saying. ‘What about when you tire of me?’ she asked. ‘You’re not built for permanence. You know that. You’ve told me that before.’

  ‘Have I? I don’t recall.’

  ‘Of course you have, Rafe. It’s always been a given.’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you that I won’t be fooling around and you will just have to take my word for it.’

  ‘You’re saying that fatherhood is that important to you that you would sacrifice what you wanted to do for the sake of it?’

  ‘A child needs emotional stability,’ Rafe said darkly. ‘And anyway…’

  ‘Anyway?’ There it went again. That little flutter like a message being dangled in front of her that was very nearly legible inside her head, but not quite, a message that would thrill her to the very core.

  ‘Fun can lead to other things, deeper things.’

  ‘What does that mean? You’re talking in riddles.’

  For a man whose grasp of the English language never failed to astound her, he was certainly having a lot of trouble with it now. Either that or her brain had gone into partial shut-down.

  ‘We’ve had a good time together, Sophie. Sexually, we’re compatible…’

  ‘Which is fine when it’s all about sex!’

  ‘You had your chance to speak, now let me speak without interrupting.’ He waited a few seconds, as if making sure that the stage was his. ‘And we get along. You can’t deny that, can you? No, you can’t. So don’t tell me that we can’t make a marriage out of that, and a good marriage, something solid that a child of ours would thrive in. A lot of marriages start out with far less.’

  But you would still be trapped, Sophie thought. Sure, to start with, things might be fine. There would be the pregnancy, the excitement of being parents, and then what? Were liking her and getting along sufficient to fuel a rewarding marriage? It might be solid because they wouldn’t be bickering from dawn till dusk, but affection wouldn’t be enough. Couldn’t he see that? Not for her and certainly not for him. And, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he would eventually want to seek out newer pastures, because unless sex grew into something deeper and more encompassing it withered away. If they were to marry, it would wither away into resentment. And with the best intentions in the world, what red-blooded male would sit back and deal with resentment with a smile on his face?

  And she would have the double agony of watching that resentment bloom, knowing that her love was never to be returned.

  ‘Stop shaking your head!’ Rafe exploded. ‘I am appealing to your sense of logic, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We will be married!’

  ‘No!’ She stared at him in stormy silence for a second, then took a breath. ‘But I understand what you’re saying. I know it’s important to you that our…our child gets the benefit of both parents…’ Our child. Whatever kind of mess she was now in, she still felt a bubble of joy at the thought of being pregnant, of carrying the child of the man she loved. He was very still and turned away from her. ‘Which is why perhaps there’s a compromise…’

  Rafe didn’t say anything.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She wished that he would at least look at her while she spoke, but he didn’t. He stared in frowning concentration at the ground, only the inclination of his head indicating that he was waiting to hear what she had to say. It was an idea that hadn’t occurred to her before, but now it seemed to make perfect sense.

  ‘You’re right. We get along and that’s obviously important. So here’s my idea: I think we should perhaps think about moving in together.’ It felt shamefully brazen to be suggesting cohabitation, but she consoled herself with the fact that he had already proposed marriage, which was a much bigger step, and, really, what she was offering was the best of both worlds. He liked things to make sense and this made sense. ‘I mean,’ she rushed along, warming to the idea as she was released from the immediate pain of wrenching herself out of their relationship, ‘that way we would be both together when the baby’s born and it’s not as committal as marriage. If at any point you started to have second thoughts, there would be no divorce, no legal wrangles. I would even be happy to sign an agreement, so that you would be safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to ever consider fleecing you of any of your money…’

  ‘And all this because you don’t think that a marriage without love is worth anything?’

  ‘We would make each other unhappy in the long run. I’m just giving you a more reasonable option.’

  ‘And what if there’s love on one side?’ He looked directly at her although he remained very still.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It means that I don’t want a way out with you.’

  Sophie felt the blood rush to her face, and even then she was scared to read the obvious into what he was saying. That he loved her? What else could he mean?

  ‘You don’t have to tell lies, Rafe,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘You should know by now that I never feel obliged to do anything.’ There was some of the old arrogance there, enough to make her want to smile, because what she had discovered o
ver time was that his arrogance was of a particularly endearing nature. But he was still hesitant and she held her breath, waiting for him to continue and trying to stamp down the wild singing in her head.

  He walked over to her and resumed sitting on the stool. Sophie wondered whether she would ever be able to look at that stool again and not remember this evening.

  ‘I don’t know when it happened…’ He paused and Sophie hoped he wasn’t expecting her to interrupt him. Right now she just wanted him to keep on talking. ‘I realised early on that I was attracted to you, and I’m ashamed to say that I assumed it was because you were so different from any of the women I had ever dated before.’

  ‘You mean I was a novelty? Like a toy pulled out of a Christmas stocking?’ She struggled to feel insulted by this, but couldn’t. Not when he was staring at her in ways that were making her melt.

  ‘A rather wonderful toy, as it turned out. A toy that had the ability to turn into a million different things…’ He reached out and played with her fingers. ‘I started out wanting to sleep with you, then I found that I enjoyed talking to you, hearing what you had to say, and then you began to influence me. You are the reason I did that deal with Bob. You made me think, see things in a different way. I still told myself that really, underneath it all, I was a free man, but you were in my head night and day. When we came down to Cornwall… I jumped at the chance, and when we made love and were in the bedroom and my dearest mama knocked on the door…I made sure that I was the one to open it. I knew exactly what she would think and I wanted it. I didn’t look any further than knowing that I didn’t want to end what we had, nor did I want it to be something kept under wraps. It was only when I was away for these past three days that it hit me.’

  Sophie was riveted.

  ‘I never wanted you out of my life because I wanted you and needed you, and, somewhere along the line, I had fallen in love with you.’

  ‘You’ve fallen in love with me,’ she repeated in wonderment.

  ‘So, you see, I don’t want to marry you because you’ve announced that you’re pregnant.’ He stood up and walked over to his jacket, and then handed her another box, this one smaller. ‘I was planning on giving this to you tonight.’

  Sophie’s fingers were trembling as she opened the box and there it was. A ring. Small, sleek, with three diamonds set in a line at the top. The most wonderful thing she had ever seen.

  She looked at him and flung her arms around his neck. ‘Yes! Yes, yes, yes!’

  ‘You accept, then?’

  ‘Rafe, I love you. I’ve loved you for ages. I just never thought…never imagined that you could ever return my love and I so wanted you not to feel trapped into marrying me because you felt you had to…’ She drew back and tenderly traced the lines of his beautiful face. ‘I can’t think that there’s anyone else in the world happier than me at this moment.’

  ‘My darling,’ he murmured, capturing one hand in his and kissing her lightly on the mouth. ‘I will do my utmost to ensure that there never will be.’

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-5792-8

  AT THE ITALIAN’S COMMAND

  First North American Publication 2006.

  Copyright © 2005 by Cathy Williams.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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