The Italian's Bride

by Diana Hamilton

‘Can you manage the stairs?’ Lucenzo asked with level politeness, biting back his distaste for the whole situation. ‘Or shall I find someone to help you?’

  As it was, Vittorio’s baby was squirming vigorously, grabbing handfuls of his hair and tugging with surprising strength for something so small, and if Portia collapsed halfway up she could well fall all the way back again before he could do anything about it. A dark frisson of the soul almost paralysed him at the thought of that, and he took a deep breath as he waited for it to pass.

  Then he gritted his teeth, blocking out the memory, looking for the nearest chair to park her on. He could understand why there wasn’t a welcoming committee. His father would be resting, obeying his doctor’s and his own strict instructions, and his aunts and his sister-in-law wouldn’t be straining at the leash to come face to face with the evidence of Vittorio’s infidelity.

  At least, he consoled himself, he’d kept the worst of it from his family. They didn’t know that the infidelity had been the serial kind.

  ‘Of course I can manage.’ Portia pushed some backbone into her voice and with a reluctance that appalled her, and a feeling inside her that was verging on pain, pulled away from his supporting arm, the heated strength of his body. Very deliberately she put space between them, when all she really wanted to do was to lean against him, borrow strength from his lean and powerful body.

  It had been so long since she’d been held she’d forgotten how comforting it could be. Displays of affection had always embarrassed her parents and not even Vito, whom she’d loved, had made her feel so—so safe. And had her senses ever reacted so instinctively to Vito? Had she felt this sensual pull at his maleness?

  ‘No!’ She hadn’t realised she’d spoken aloud in fraught denial of the way this man who was her enemy could make her feel. The father of her child hadn’t come near to making it seem as if the world was spinning around her, leaving her out of control.

  ‘What is it?’ Lucenzo gave her a spearing glance from beneath lowered brows. At least she had some colour now. A bright wash of it stained her cheeks, and her grey eyes were huge, glittering with something that looked like the panic of a cornered young animal.

  ‘N-nothing—’ Flustered, she pushed her hands through her hair, dragging it away from her face, then sucked in a breath. Lucenzo’s eyes were held by the resulting thrust of her breasts, the nipples proud and prominent against the thin fabric of her top.

  Frowning, he dragged his eyes away, and a split second later Portia was leaping up the staircase, hanging on to the wrought-iron banister. Settling Vittorio’s child more securely in his arms, Lucenzo followed—and found his eyes annoyingly glued to Portia’s neat and curvy denim-clad backside.

  Five foot four of lushly delineated curves, shimmering blonde hair, lips like ripe cherries and that breathless, though obviously spurious air of ingenuousness—was that what had tempted his half-brother away from his wife, his normally ultra-elegant bits on the side?

  Disliking the road his thoughts were taking him down, he quickened his steps and caught up with her at the head of the sweeping staircase, where the upper hall gave onto corridors branching in three directions.

  ‘This way,’ he instructed tautly. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to connect with those wide, seemingly vulnerable eyes, recognise that elusive nameless something that had captivated his half-brother. He simply strode ahead.

  Portia followed, feeling unwanted and seriously unnecessary, wishing she’d never agreed to come here. When he paused by one of the carved oak doors that lined the seemingly endless corridor and flung it open, telling her tightly, ‘Your suite of rooms,’ she felt a deep and dreadful reluctance to cross the threshold.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  The childishly wailed words were out before she could swallow them and she cringed with super-charged embarrassment, reddening hectically as he remarked witheringly, ‘If that’s your opening salvo, forget it.’

  Vulnerable? How could he have thought that for one insane moment? Portia Makepeace was about as vulnerable as an armoured car!

  He reminded her stonily, ‘I’ve told you what will happen if you threaten to do anything to upset my father. Here—’ He placed Sam in her arms and took a backward pace, as if the air she breathed out was full of pestilence and plague. ‘Make Vittorio’s son comfortable. I will send Assunta to you to make sure you are behaving as my father would wish.’

  Holding her baby close to her heart, gathering much needed strength from the adored warm little body, Portia blurted, ‘I didn’t come here to be kept under house arrest! I came because your father wants to see his grandson. So when can I meet him?’

  Her chin came up, even though her voice held a disgraceful wobble. She was sick of being treated like dirt, ordered around. Her future relationship with Sam’s grandfather was all that counted. Lucenzo’s low opinion of her shouldn’t matter, but it did hurt, she acknowledged sickly, more than she knew it should.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he told her curtly. ‘I will let him know that Vittorio’s son has arrived safely. For tonight that will be enough. As I have already told you, my father is a sick man.’

  Watching him stride away, Portia felt her heart plummet to new depths, her mouth going dry. How sick was sick? Eduardo Verdi had sounded so kind in that letter he’d written her. He’d come across as being someone she could talk to with the ease and openness that came so naturally to her.

  All through her nightmare journey she’d been counting on him as head of the family to intercede on her behalf, to perhaps persuade Lucenzo that she wasn’t as downright bad as he thought she was.

  Portia shuddered, immediately hating herself for such selfish, unworthy thoughts. If the poor old man was ill then the most she could hope for was that seeing and holding his new little grandson would make him feel a whole lot better!

  She could stand up for herself where Lucenzo was concerned, of course she could. And one day, if he stayed around, she would force him to listen to her side of the story—even if, as he’d clearly demonstrated, he had no wish to hear it.

  And when she met Eduardo she would do nothing, say nothing to upset or tire him. Of course she wouldn’t.

  Annoyingly, her eyes pickled with compassionate tears. She blinked them rapidly away and forced herself to carry her now restless Sam over the threshold and into the most beautiful bedroom she’d ever seen.

  No time to take stock, except to note that her luggage, looking even tattier against a backdrop of unnerving opulence, was in an ungainly heap at the foot of a four-poster which was trigged out with the most fantastic cream-coloured gauzy drapes.

  Chattering consolingly to the baby, who was squirming in the crook of her left arm, she eventually located the changing mat, nappies and a fresh Babygro, scattering items not wanted at the moment over the soft blue carpet until she saw two shiny black shoes planted in the middle of the mayhem she’d created.

  Lifting her eyes above the level of the black flatties, she encountered thick black stockings, a pristine grey overall and a cheerful round face surmounted by dark, grey-streaked frizzily permed hair.

  Portia swallowed noisily. ‘Assunta?’

  Friend or foe?

  ‘I did knock but you did not hear.’

  Which wasn’t surprising, considering the racket Sam was making, Portia thought, eyeing the older woman warily.

  Her heart surged with relief when Assunta beamed widely. ‘Tanto bello! What is all this noise about, little one? May I hold him?’

  At Portia’s tongue-tied nod Assunta swept Sam up into her arms, clucking over him, ‘People say all babies look the same, but that isn’t true. This little one is just like his father and I should know. I looked after him from when he was born until his mother took him back to England when he was five years old. Mind you, he did spend his holidays here with his father; Signor Eduardo insisted on that. Now, shall we make the little one comfortable? This way—I will show you. We have everything ready.’

  Snatching
up everything she needed, Portia followed as Assunta marched through one of the two connecting doors and into a light and airy nursery that looked as if it had been designed by experts. Expensive experts.

  ‘I need to make up his bottle.’ Portia cut into the older woman’s explanation of where everything was, anxiously aware that it was well past Sam’s feed time, that his routine was going to pot, and got a straight look, a beat of silence.

  ‘Of course.’

  Was that condemnation, disappointment in Assunta’s dark eyes? At that moment Portia neither knew nor cared, and practically sprinted across the room when the other woman indicated an alcove fitted with a work surface, stainless steel sink, electric kettle and sterilising equipment. Someone had thought of everything.

  ‘We did not know whether the child was breast or bottle fed. Now—’ a lighter tone, quite definitely lighter ‘—shall I change him while you do that?’

  Suppressing maternal possessiveness, Portia murmured her thanks. While the kettle boiled she confided sadly, ‘I did so want to feed him myself, but I got this infection. It was a really awful time.’ Not just the pain, or the fever, though that had been bad enough, but the feeling she was failing her newborn. That had been the very worst part. ‘Then, when it had cleared up—’

  Her huge grey eyes glistened with retrospective tears. Her mother always said she lived too near the waterworks, and her mother, as always, was right. Portia sniffed, wishing she wasn’t so over-emotional, and finished the job of cooling the bottle under the cold water tap.

  When she was settled in the nursing chair Assunta plonked down comfortably on the wide windowseat and told her warmly, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. These things happen. You are a good mother—I have seen poor ones, so I know the difference. You do your best for your son; I can see that.’

  Portia beamed ecstatically. It was the first nice thing anyone had said to her in days! The way Assunta had said ‘your son’, instead of Lucenzo’s repressive ‘Vittorio’s son’, as if she herself were some sort of regrettable afterthought, warmed her heart.

  And she knew the Italian woman was on her side when she admitted, on a sigh of contentment, ‘It is good to have a baby in the house again after all this time. Vito’s mother took him away when he was barely five years old, and Lucenzo had already been sent away to school by then. Poor little mite. Christine, Vito’s mother, had been originally hired to teach Lucenzo English. Signor Verdi wished his son to grow up bilingual. But she set her cap at him—Signor Verdi, that is—and they were married. When Vito was born Signora Christine insisted that Lucenzo was sent away to school; he was only six years old.’

  Which made him thirty-two now, Portia thought, struggling with her mental arithmetic. ‘Vito’s mother wanted him to be the most important child in the house?’ she guessed, her tender heart melting for the poor, banished little boy.

  ‘But of course.’ Assunta’s round face set into lines of disapproval. ‘She had very little time for her baby, but he was her stake in the Verdi fortune. After the birth she had no time for her husband, either—only for spending his money and flirting with other men. After the divorce she returned to England with what she wanted—a fat settlement. I’m sure she would have left little Vito behind, but his father insisted the child needed his mother.’

  She gave a sigh that came up from the soles of her sensible black shoes. ‘Poor Vito might have made a better marriage if he hadn’t used his mercenary, cold-hearted mother as a blueprint. Even if he hadn’t met you and fallen in love his marriage wouldn’t have lasted. But you’ll know all about that. Such a tragedy.’ Her eyes filled with tears and Portia felt her own water in sympathy. ‘For him to be killed before he could make you his wife. You must have loved each other very much. And I want you to know—’ she sniffed loudly, struggling with emotion ‘—whatever the family thinks, I’m here for you.’

  Oh, heavens above! Portia scrubbed at her own brimming eyes as she gasped sincerely, ‘Thank you, Assunta. I do appreciate that.’

  She lifted Sam against her shoulder to de-burp him. Assunta was one very nice lady and had obviously doted on Vito. How could she tell her that Vito had never loved her, had lied to her more times than most people had had hot dinners? She simply couldn’t do it!

  Wanting to change the potentially awkward subject, she said the first thing that came into her head, asking, ‘What happened to Lucenzo’s mother? And was he dreadfully upset when he was sent away to school when he was so young?’

  It seemed really right to focus on Lucenzo. Instinctive, but puzzling, too. Hopefully Assunta would put the change of subject down to her unwillingness to be upset by talking about the father of her child, when the truth was that she was, oddly, far more interested in Lucenzo.

  Her cheeks warm, Portia rose and laid the sleepy baby in the cot—a wonderful confection of pale blue muslin and ivory-coloured lace and far more sumptuous than anything she could ever have afforded—to cover her discomfiture. Just why did Lucenzo occupy her mind so much? It wasn’t sensible and it probably wasn’t natural. So why did it feel as if it was?

  ‘That was another tragedy,’ Assunta sighed. Already back on her feet, she was rinsing out Sam’s bottle, and elaborated through billowing clouds of steam. ‘Lucenzo was just three months old when his mother died of some rare viral infection, so he never knew her. By the time Vittorio was born he was completely self-contained. If he was unhappy at being sent away to school he didn’t show it, not even to me,’ she confided sorrowfully. ‘Ever since Christine got Signor Eduardo where she wanted him she’d been doing her best to push little Lucenzo into the background. I saw it happen with my own eyes. But even then Lucenzo was too proud to show his feelings.’

  Assunta turned, wiping her capable hands on the towel that hung from a hoop above the stainless steel sink at the business end of the nursery. ‘I’m not telling you all this for the sake of it. You should understand about this family if you are to be a part of it. There have been too many tragedies. So if the family is cold towards you—most especially Lucenzo, because he has not been the same since what happened to his wife—it is because they are still trying to come to terms with Vittorio’s death.’

  Portia’s mouth dropped open and she blinked rapidly. Disregarding the bit about the family’s possible coldness because she had more or less expected something of the sort—except from Sam’s grandfather—she grappled with the unwelcome information that Lucenzo was married, scowling slightly because she couldn’t lie to herself and pretend it wasn’t unwelcome.

  And what exactly had happened with his wife? Had she, like his stepmother, done a runner? About to ask, she felt the words die in her throat as Lucenzo strode through the nursery door, his narrowed eyes lancing between the two now silent women as if he knew they’d been talking about him.

  He’d changed into a cream-coloured light jacket and narrow dark trousers and looked so detachedly handsome that Portia could only stare at him, feeling oddly light-headed.

  When his black eyes turned back to her and settled she could scarcely breathe, and could think of nothing at all to say when he told her with flat formality, ‘My father wants to see you. I suggest you make yourself presentable. I will return to take you to him in ten minutes. I don’t expect you to keep him waiting.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TEN minutes!

  Her feet firmly glued to the cream-coloured nursery carpet, Portia widened her eyes at the spot where Lucenzo had been standing, her heart thumping beneath her breastbone.

  She had been summoned.

  Unnervingly, she felt as if she’d just received a royal command. Should she practise her curtsey? It certainly felt like it! And was she supposed to take Sam along with her? Lucenzo hadn’t mentioned him, though introducing Sam to his grandfather was the only reason she’d been invited here. But the little darling was sleeping; she really didn’t want to disturb him—

  Assunta settled the matter with innate practicality. ‘I’ll stay with the little one until yo
u get back. I can make myself comfortable in your sitting room and send down for a tray, so don’t worry yourself about us.’ Her mouth curved wryly as she prodded gently, ‘Don’t you think you should hurry?’

  Portia conceded she should, but she moved reluctantly out of the nursery, her feet dragging. She hated the way Lucenzo issued his orders and made threats—some veiled, some right out in the open. Do this—don’t do that—or else!

  It was the ‘or else’ bit that made her blood run cold—the knowledge that if she put a foot wrong he would do his damnedest to make his father agree that they could do without the likes of her to sully the family name, and move heaven and earth to take her baby from her.

  They could afford the best lawyers money could buy, clever men who would blow her rights and objections clear out of the water.

  Apparently Assunta had seen nothing wrong in the way he’d spoken to her. Italian women pampered their menfolk from the cradle to the grave; in their eyes they could do no wrong.

  But ten minutes? She needed an hour at least before she could make herself look anything like presentable! She needed a shower to sluice away the stickiness of the long hours of travelling and she hadn’t even begun to unpack.

  Portia shrugged fatalistically and pulled a mutinous face at her less than pristine person in one of the ornately framed mirrors that reflected the gauzily hung four-poster back at her.

  A quick wash and brush-up would have to suffice; she hadn’t been given time to find something more suitable than these old jeans and her baby-dribbled T-shirt to wear, had she?

  The en suite bathroom made her eyes pop. Good grief, the sunken marble bath was big enough to swim in, the walls were floor-to-ceiling mirrors and there were enough classy bottles and jars displayed on the floating glass shelves to stock Harrods’ perfumery department!

  Feeling disturbingly out of her depth again, Portia hurriedly washed her face and grabbed the nearest towel. Still rubbing the moisture off her skin, she padded back to her bedroom to root in the depths of her handbag for a comb. She was dragging it through her hair when, after a decidedly perfunctory tap, Lucenzo walked through the door.