Having never had to woo a woman, his attempts had not always met with resounding success. A constant conveyor belt of expensive meals out had met with a brick wall. So staying in had become the preferred option. And the kitchen, she had informed him, was a shared domain. She had bought him a recipe book and he had clumsily found himself cooking the occasional meal while he had wondered what his mother would have made of the arrangement.
Details such as those he had tactfully omitted when he had broken the news to his family. He had glossed over the lack of marriage, vaguely hinting at it as something that would happen down the line. He may even have let slip that Bethany was keen to walk down the aisle after she had given birth, when she had regained her figure. His mother had bought it but he still hoped to avoid learning what Bethany would make of that little white lie. It made no difference that the size and volume of her own lies would have put his tiny insignificant one in the shade.
Cristiano put this level of concern about her down to the fact that she was carrying his child. Under normal circumstances there was no question that things would have turned out very differently. He would have confronted her, as befitting any man who didn’t like being duped. Had she not been pregnant, she would never have been able to gain the luxury of the moral high ground. The pregnancy had been the ace up her sleeve. Without it, she would doubtless have been duly repentant, would probably have thrown herself at his mercy and from that point, who knew what would have happened? It was highly likely that he would have exorcised her out of his system and returned to life as he had always known it.
As it stood, memories of his previous life seemed to belong in a very distant place.
He shopped. He was fascinated by her rapidly expanding stomach and the football games that seemed to take place inside it. He had read, cover to cover, a book on what to expect when you were expecting, which had a lot more allure, much to his bemusement, than his usual evening pastime of working. He thought about her when she wasn’t with him. It seemed unnatural but he had grown to accept it.
Despite the cataclysmic change to his lifestyle, Cristiano was proud of the way he had handled the situation.
He rang the doorbell of her apartment. It was more and more ludicrous with each passing day that this was the arrangement that existed between them. Although he had settled her into the closest apartment to his that he could lay his hands on, the fact that she not only refused to marry him, for reasons which defied logic and which he couldn’t begin to fathom, but insisted on separate living arrangements was a constant source of low-level dissatisfaction.
No one could tell him that she didn’t enjoy sleeping with him, in positions that were frankly ingenious, taking into account her advancing pregnancy, and with penetration not always on the cards. He knew women and she wasn’t faking it.
He had tactfully stopped trying to bludgeon her into an answer that made sense to him, but it still played on his mind constantly. Was this her way of keeping her options open? Was she deluded enough to think that she wasn’t tied to him now? Did she really think that she could temporarily appease him, have the baby and then resume her hunt for Mr Perfect?
He was so busy scowling at the train of his thoughts that it was a few seconds before he realised that she hadn’t answered the door and, at a little after seven, he couldn’t think of any reason why she should be out.
He had been away for the past two days but he had spoken to her several times on the phone and she knew that he was coming over. So where the hell was she? He buzzed the bell again, this time more insistently, and at the lack of response immediately dialled her mobile. It was the most up to the minute mobile and one he had bought for her when she had moved down to London with him because he had been worried that her ancient cellphone might cut out at any given time when he might need to get in touch with her or vice versa.
He let it ring a few times, killed the connection and tried again. Worry was beginning to kick in. He raked his fingers through his hair. His instinct to break down the door was swiftly replaced by the realisation that there wasn’t a hope in hell of him achieving that. The door was as solid as a slab of lead. In fact, he had had a new, exceptionally robust one put in to replace the flimsier original because, in London, you just never knew. He cursed his foresight, tried her phone again and was about to hit Plan B, which involved a locksmith, when she answered in a voice he barely recognised.
‘Where are you?’ was his opening demand.
‘I’m here!’ Bethany croaked. The doorbell had failed to wake her but the shrill ringing of her mobile had done the job. She glanced at her bedside clock and realised that she had been sleeping off and on for most of the day and into the evening.
‘Where’s here?’
‘Here! In the apartment!’
‘Then why the hell haven’t you answered the door? And what’s the matter with your voice?’ He was aware of the locks being turned as he finished asking his questions and the worry which had come from nowhere and which had been dispelled the minute she had picked up her mobile slammed back into him as he took in her deathly white pallor, the shadows under her eyes and her tousled hair.
He stared down at her and panic, an emotion that was alien to him, hit him like a freight train at full speed.
‘I don’t feel very well.’ Bethany stated the obvious as she turned and began heading back to the bedroom.
Having come straight from the airport, Cristiano grabbed his overnight bag and followed her, dumping his stuff on the ground. His heart was beating fast—too fast.
‘I just need to sleep.’ Bethany flopped down onto the bed and curled up under the quilt, pulling it over her head so that only her bright copper hair was visible on the pillow.
‘Forget sleep. You need a doctor.’ Cristiano flipped open his phone while he gently pulled down the covers so that he could feel her face. ‘You’re burning up. Why the hell didn’t you get in touch with me?’ He paused briefly to say something rapidly down the phone in Italian before snapping shut his cellphone so that he could devote one hundred per cent of his attention to her.
‘You were fine when I spoke to you last night!’ he told her accusingly and Bethany shot him a baleful look.
‘I don’t need a doctor, Cristiano.’
‘Let me do the deciding on this one.’
‘It’s just a cold! A twenty-four hour bug.’ She groaned and tried to submerge herself back into her warm cocoon under the duvet but he was having none of it. ‘I just need to rest. And I was fine yesterday. I just got up this morning feeling a bit off-colour…’
‘I spoke to you this morning and you didn’t say anything.’
‘You were in New York, Cristiano. What could you have done? You might think that you’re capable of everything but you’re not Superman. You couldn’t have put on a red cape and flown across the Atlantic.’
‘That’s not the point.’
Bethany grunted indistinctly.
‘I deserve to be kept abreast of your health at all times.’ The thought of her alone in this apartment, too ill to drag herself out of bed, engendered a feeling of sick anxiety that bordered on the physical. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he finished, standing up so that he could pace the room while cursing his friend for not already having arrived. Hadn’t he told the man to get over to the apartment immediately?
The warm glow that had filled her at Cristiano’s obvious concern dissipated like mist on a summer day. Of course he was concerned! He was concerned because she was pregnant, because she was carrying his precious cargo. The past few weeks had lulled her into a false sense of security, had seduced her into thinking that his solicitousness had been about her. Now those two words were a timely reminder that Cristiano only ever acted with an agenda and the agenda was about coaxing her into his way of thinking, about getting her to the point where she agreed to every proposition he ventured. She had stuck it out with insisting on having her own place, thinking that the formality of the arrangement would ensure a certain amount of essentia
l emotional distance between them. She hadn’t banked on the way he had managed to creep under all her defences.
He went shopping at the supermarket with her and he didn’t complain. He bought her little things and she knew that thought had gone into the purchases. Twice he had cooked with the aid of the recipe book she had bought for him and, although the end results had borne no resemblance to the colourful, glossy pictures on the pages, he had tried. Again, without complaint. Most noticeably, he had just been around. She had no point of comparison on that score, but she would have put money on him being the sort of guy who always, but always, put his work ahead of everything and everyone. But he had been as regular as clockwork with her, there at the apartment by early evening, except on the occasions when he had been abroad for a couple of days and when he had been abroad he had called with unnerving regularity.
It had taken Herculean efforts to maintain her defences in the face of this aggressively silent onslaught but she had managed to convince herself that she had succeeded. What a fool she had been! Her crushing disappointment at the realisation that everything he had said and done had been because of their situation rather than because of her was ample proof that there was nothing reasonable or containable about her love.
She peeped at him from under her lashes. The sight of him literally took her breath away. It was shameful to admit, but he brought out the driven and the obsessed in her. In the middle of staring at him, he paused in his restless pacing to lock gleaming eyes on her.
‘I can see that my trips abroad are going to have to be put on hold until the baby’s born.’ Cristiano never thought he’d see the day when his working life would take a back seat to a woman, but it appeared that that day had come. He needed to know that she was all right at all times and he knew that if he set foot out of the country then it would play at the back of his mind, like a record stuck in a groove, that some catastrophe or other might have happened about which she was keeping silent to spare him the inconvenience.
She was so obstinate and independent, despite the fact that he had managed to coerce her into moving back to London and for a few disconcerting seconds it occurred to Cristiano that those traits in her were less than ideal.
He didn’t want her obstinacy, nor did he value her independence. He had always abhorred clingy, needy women but right at that moment he couldn’t think of anything more rewarding than having her in a position where she would automatically turn to him for support in any crisis.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
In less than two strides, Cristiano was by the side of the bed. He didn’t want to stress her out but it was suddenly imperative that he made her aware of his concerns, his very reasonable concerns.
‘I’m not being ridiculous, Bethany. I’m being sensible. One of us has to be.’
Bethany gave an elaborate sigh that turned into a yawn. ‘And naturally that role falls to you.’
Cristiano gave her a slashing smile and sat on the side of the bed so that he could half lean over her. He smoothed some of her damp hair away from her face. ‘Two minutes out of the country and look what happens.’
Bethany reminded herself that this touching outpouring of concern for her welfare was just gift-wrapping around the more basic reality that he was only concerned for her because she was carrying his child but, lacking the energy for a fight, she contented herself with saying sourly, ‘Like I told you, Cristiano, you’re not Superman and you’re not a miracle worker either. I would have got this cold whether you’d been in the country or not. I think I caught it when we were at the supermarket a couple of days ago. I stopped to chat to that little girl and she had a streaming nose. It happens.’
‘You should be staying as far away as possible from anyone carrying germs!’
‘What do you suggest? Maybe you could keep me locked up for the next couple of months.’
Cristiano was interrupted from informing her that it was not an unreasonable idea by the sound of the doorbell and the arrival of his friend, who he introduced as Dr Giorgio Tommasso, a man in his late thirties who, Bethany translated from the rapidly spoken Italian, was then unfairly subjected to an irate cross-examination on the lateness of his arrival.
‘Just ignore him,’ Bethany murmured as he sat on the bed next to her, which elicited a grin of wicked delight.
‘At last,’ Dr. Tommasso said, ‘a woman who is capable of standing up to this brute of a friend of mine. Now, I’m going to have a listen to the baby, make sure that everything is all right…’
Like a brooding sentinel, Cristiano stood by the door and watched as his friend asked questions in a low voice, said something apparently amusing because Bethany smiled, which nearly made him remind the good doctor that he was here to examine her and not play the stand-up comic and, finally, when the examination was over, he walked towards the bed.
‘Well? Diagnosis?’
‘The baby’s fine, Cristiano.’ Dr Tommasso smiled and patted his friend gently on the arm. ‘No need to get frantic.’
‘I think you’re confusing being concerned with getting frantic,’ Cristiano said coldly. It was obvious that, even in a state of pregnancy, she was still able to charm the birds from the trees. Giorgio had a grin on his face a mile wide. What the hell was so hilarious?
‘My mistake, in that case.’ He struggled not to laugh as they moved towards the door. ‘Bethany’s got a simple case of a miserable cold. She’ll feel rough for a couple of days but she’s young, she’s strong and she’ll be fine. Her blood pressure is good and the baby’s heartbeat is strong. Nothing to worry about. How are you at making soup?’ His eyebrows shot up in astonishment at Cristiano’s grudging reply that he saw no reason why he couldn’t do that, considering his skills in the kitchen were getting better by the day.
‘I might be tempted to relay that back to your mother, Cristiano. She won’t believe that her son is finally becoming domesticated!’
Spoken in jest but a salutary wake-up call for Cristiano. One step forward had, without him really noticing, entailed two steps back as far as Bethany was concerned. No more.
He found her in the bedroom sitting up, having just taken some mild medication which Giorgio had told her would make her feel better and would not affect the baby.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ she said, setting the glass of water down and folding her arms. ‘A simple cold. Bed rest for a couple of days. Everything back to normal.’
Cristiano didn’t reply. Instead, he went across to her wardrobe, opened it up and cast his eye over the range of clothes hanging up. On a shelf at the top of the wardrobe, she had stashed her suitcase and he proceeded to remove it in silence while Bethany watched him, open-mouthed.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ He looked at her briefly over his shoulder. ‘Don’t even think of getting up. Bed rest.’
‘You can’t just start packing my case!’
‘Watch me.’ He strolled over to her chest of drawers and scooped up a handful of underwear, which he proceeded to pile on top of the clothes in the suitcase. This was followed by some random jars from her dressing table and unidentifiable make-up, not that there was much as she used precious little of the stuff. Task completed, he turned around and faced her with folded arms.
‘Now listen to me very carefully,’ Cristiano said in a voice as hard as granite. ‘I’ve given this arrangement a go and it’s not working.’
‘It’s not my fault that I picked up a cold!’ Either the tablets she had taken had begun working with supersonic speed or else the adrenaline rushing through her body was powerful enough to disperse all her aches and pains.
Cristiano ignored her interruption. ‘First and foremost, whether you like it or not, you’re in no fit state to look after yourself here. You could barely make it to the front door earlier on. What if you had collapsed here on your own? Think about the consequences.’
‘I would never…never do anything…’ Bethany spluttered, but she paled at the
picture he had cleverly painted. He had no key to her front door. She had stubbornly refused to give him one because she wanted to maintain her independence, but what if something had happened and he had been unable to enter the apartment? Was she so busy fighting him and fighting herself that she would risk jeopardising this baby? Was she really protecting herself or was she just punishing him because he didn’t love her?
‘I can’t take your word on that.’ He slammed shut the suitcase and yanked the zip around. ‘Instead of getting in touch with me the minute you began feeling ill, you took to bed, pulled the duvet over your head and pretended that the outside world didn’t exist. If you’d called, sure, I might not have been able to get here from New York in minutes, but I would have called Giorgio and he would have come over at a point when you would have been up and able to let him in. Do you see where I’m going with this? Am I spelling it out loudly and clearly enough?’
‘I hate you!’ Tears of bitter frustration filled her eyes. Gone was the warm man who had been worming his way through her defences. Back in his place was the cold-eyed stranger who had showed up on her parents’ doorstep with a truckload of accusations.
‘That’s not the feeling I get when we’re in bed together.’
‘Is sex the only thing that matters to you?’
‘It tells me that you don’t hate me.’ Cristiano shrugged and took out his cellphone.
He was calling his driver. Bethany listened as he directed him to collect them and from there on she would be staying at his apartment. She told herself that her stay was going to be of the minimum duration but not even that bracing thought could still the nerve-racking sensation of a net closing in around her.
‘My driver will be here in an hour. Now, I think you should have a bath. It’ll make you feel better.’
‘I don’t want a bath.’
‘And you can quit sulking. It’s not going to change anything.’ He sauntered off in the direction of the en suite bathroom and Bethany ground her teeth together in frustration as she heard the sound of running water.
The Italian's One-Night Love-Child Page 13