Claiming His One-Night Baby

by Michelle Smart

Had she been telling the truth on his yacht? Or was she trying to paint herself in a favourable light with him? And if so, for what purpose?

  He’d spent seven years telling himself he didn’t give a fig for her but the truth was her betrayal had lived in his guts like poison; he could feel it now, uncoiling inside him, the memories of his misplaced faith and trust in her biting into him.

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice, trying to read what emotion lay behind the blue eyes staring back at him. ‘Why did you choose him over me, Natasha? I always thought it was the money. Was it that? Was it the money and the lifestyle?’

  Her hands had balled into fists but there was no fight in her returning stare, just starkness.

  His chest rising heavily, Matteo took a large drink of his wine and stared hard at the anguish on her face. He should have ordered something stronger. ‘I need to know why. I want to put the past behind us but every time I think I have, something reminds me and it all kicks back in. You strung me along for months...’

  Her head shook but her lips stayed stubbornly stuck together.

  ‘Talk to me.’ Realising his voice had risen, he strove to lower it again. ‘Tell me, Natasha. Make me understand.’

  ‘Look...’ She relaxed her hands and took a gulp of her grape juice. Before she could say what she’d intended their meals were brought to the table and laid before them with a flourish.

  Natasha looked at her artfully displayed dish and struggled to hold on.

  In the space of a minute she’d completely lost her appetite.

  Matteo seemed in no rush to eat his food either. He didn’t touch his cutlery, just sat there, eyes fixed on her, waiting for her to speak and explain herself.

  She couldn’t blame him. This conversation had been a long time coming.

  She took another drink of her juice. How she wished the grapes had been fermented into wine. It would make this easier.

  ‘I know you don’t believe this but everything you and I talked about and the plans we made, I meant it all.’

  Natasha knew before the words had finished leaving her mouth that it was the wrong opening gambit.

  His eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘If you meant any of it then why were you seeing Pieta at the same time? Did you decide to string us both along until you worked out which of us would make the better husband and give you the better lifestyle?’

  ‘Do you want to hear my side or not?’

  There was the slightest flare of his nostrils before he inclined his head.

  ‘I didn’t string you along for months. The first time Pieta showed any interest in me was at my eighteenth birthday party. I didn’t even think he would turn up for it. I assumed a party like that would be beneath him.’

  She’d been devastated when Matteo had called to say he’d missed his flight and wouldn’t be able to make it. She’d known it wasn’t his fault and that his job wasn’t one he could drop—his job, back then, had been a case of life or death. So she’d put a brave face on her disappointment and instead turned her calendar over to the following month when they would both be in Pisa for his aunt and uncle’s wedding anniversary party, and drew a tiny heart in the corner of that date.

  His jaw clenched. ‘You strung me along for that long?’

  She shook her head. ‘I thought he was being polite.’

  ‘Polite?’ Disbelief etched itself on his face.

  ‘He was so much older than me...’

  ‘Pieta is—was—the same age as me.’

  Her heart twisted to see the pain that flashed over him at the utterance of his best friend’s name.

  ‘But I never felt the age gap with you. Pieta was so serious, he came across as older than his years. He took me to the theatre as a birthday present to see a political play. I hate politics. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was the most boring two hours of my life. Maybe if I’d told him the truth he would have seen me differently and things would have turned out differently too but I didn’t and things took on a life of their own. He was in England on business and took me out to dinner a couple of times but I swear I didn’t think they meant anything...’

  ‘If they didn’t mean anything then why didn’t you tell me about them?’

  ‘Because it was during the week you went to Washington for that conference. We hardly spoke that week, don’t you remember?’

  A pulse ticked in his jaw, his lips tightening.

  ‘Pieta took me to these wonderfully grown-up restaurants and spoke about politics and his humanitarian work. I admit, I was overawed by it all. He was this great man making waves across the world for his philanthropy... I was in awe of him and he knew it, but I swear, I never thought of those dates as dates. The first I knew that he was seeing me in a romantic light was when he asked my father’s permission to marry me that Friday, two weeks before his parents’ anniversary party.’

  ‘He asked your father?’

  ‘That was Pieta all over, wasn’t it?’ She smiled sadly. ‘He took his responsibilities very seriously. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to ask me for my views first. He saw the awe on my face and interpreted it as infatuation.’

  ‘And your father said yes?’

  ‘Of course he did. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was exactly what he wanted. Pieta was rich and connected and had royal blood in his veins. He was the dream son-in-law to brag about down at the golf club.’

  ‘I can understand why your father would have been keen but that doesn’t explain why you went along with it. You could have said no.’

  ‘I did say no.’ She squeezed her eyes shut as the memory of her parents’ fury played vividly before her eyes. ‘My parents knew I was serious about you...’

  ‘Really?’ he asked sardonically, finishing his wine.

  ‘Yes! I lived with them, remember? They knew how I felt but they didn’t care. They told me to keep my mouth shut about you or I would ruin everything. They told me it was my chance to make them proud after a lifetime of disappointment.’

  The scorn in his eyes diminished a little. ‘They said that?’

  ‘That and a whole lot of other things too. You had ancient royal blood too but they looked at the wealth Pieta was accumulating, looked at the estate he would inherit and knew that if I married him all their money problems would be over. They were terribly in debt. Pieta must have made promises to them because within months of our engagement their debts were gone and he’d paid for them to have an extension put on the house.’

  ‘You agreed to marry him for an extension?’ Matteo had picked up his fork and was running his thumb backwards and forwards over the prongs.

  ‘No! That came later. I went along with it because I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t stringing you along, don’t you see that? I was playing for time until you got to Pisa for the party and I could tell you to your face what was happening because I couldn’t think of a way out.’

  ‘You should have told me as soon as he asked your father’s permission.’

  ‘I know that now but at the time I thought it would make things worse. How could I tell you over the phone when you were thousands of miles away that your best friend and cousin wanted to marry me? My head was all over the place. I was only eighteen. I wasn’t some cosmopolitan woman with years of experience behind her. I was weak and spineless and I’d got myself backed into a corner I didn’t know how to get out of. I wanted desperately to please my parents but at the same time I wanted to be with you. I was waiting for you to get there because I convinced myself you would think of a way out of the mess.’

  Natasha took a deep breath and stared at her plate.

  Matteo stabbed a roasted shallot with his fork but made no effort to eat it. His eyes were as hard as the tone of his voice. ‘You did have the chance to tell me. You made no effort to tell me, remember? But you did let me kiss you.’

  She closed her eyes, remembering how she’d taken one look at him in the castello and her heart had beaten so hard she’d hardly been able to breathe.
After months of increasingly intimate correspondence and phone calls and only a quick snapshot of him on her phone to look at, seeing him in the flesh again...

  And then he’d kissed her, their very first kiss—her very first kiss—and there had been no breath left to steal. And then Francesca had come barging down the corridor, breaking the moment.

  What Natasha hadn’t known then was that it had been her last chance to tell Matteo the truth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  NATASHA OPENED HER eyes and forced herself to meet Matteo’s unblinking gaze. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to tell you later that night. I thought I had more time but it was too late. I have kicked myself so many times for not anticipating he would propose publicly like that but I swear I didn’t know he was going to do it.’

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ he said, not an iota of softening in his stare.

  She shrugged helplessly. ‘I went to your room in the castello that night. I still hoped even then that it wasn’t too late for us and that you’d be able to come up with some plan, but you’d gone. I called you but you’d blocked my number—you blocked it that very night. How would I know that if I hadn’t tried to call you?’

  He had blocked her number straight away, Matteo remembered. He’d said goodbye to his family, had managed to force his congratulations to Pieta, walked into the castello’s courtyard and into the waiting cab and had immediately blocked her every means of contacting him.

  Could she be telling the truth?

  ‘A part of me even hoped you would tell Pieta about us,’ she whispered into the bleak silence that had developed between them.

  ‘After he’d publicly proposed and you’d publicly accepted? I would never have humiliated him like that.’ He laughed bitterly, his mind reeling from everything she’d confessed.

  He looked in the blue eyes that held his. He read the pleading in them.

  But what was she pleading for? Forgiveness? Or for him to believe her?

  Right then he didn’t know what the hell to think or believe.

  ‘You were engaged for six years. You left your parents’ home and went to university. You had six years to end things with him.’

  ‘When I knew there was no way back with you I decided to stop fighting and just accept it. Accepting it meant pleasing my parents. I told you, back then I was weak and spineless.’

  ‘And you’re not now?’

  ‘No.’ He saw the defiance bloom in her. ‘No. I learned to grow a spine. I had to. And I’m glad I did because it will make me a better mother.’ She hung her head and rubbed her temples before looking back at him. ‘Just, please, believe my feelings for you were genuine.’

  His heart as full as he’d ever known it to be, he nodded slowly. ‘Did Pieta ever suspect your feelings for him weren’t?’

  ‘Why do you assume his feelings were any more genuine than mine?’ Natasha asked before she could stop herself.

  ‘Because he always told me he would know the perfect woman to marry when he found her.’

  She clamped down on a burst of her own bitter laughter at the notion. As if her husband had ever looked at her as perfect for anything but the façade he wanted the world to see and the estate he’d wanted to inherit. It didn’t matter how hard she’d tried, she’d never been good enough for anyone, not her parents and certainly not her husband.

  But she would be good enough for her child and she would do everything in her power to ensure her child never felt that he or she wasn’t perfect exactly as they were. She wouldn’t diminish them and make them think their best could never be good enough. She would celebrate what they could do and love them regardless of what they couldn’t. In short, she would adopt parenting skills at the opposite end of the spectrum to her own parents.

  She stared levelly at Matteo. ‘I tried very hard to be the best fiancée and then wife that I could be. Do you really think he would have married me if he’d had any doubts?’

  Before he could answer, their waitress came to their table and looked at their untouched plates with concern. ‘Is everything all right with your food?’

  Like a switch had been turned on, Matteo bestowed on her his dazzling smile. ‘Everything’s great, thanks.’

  Smiling, she bustled away.

  The interruption had been what they needed.

  When Natasha looked at him again he sighed deeply, his eyes boring into her but without the animosity of before.

  ‘We should eat before it gets cold,’ he said, finally popping the shallot into his mouth, his tone leaving no doubt that, as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

  He’d got the answers he was seeking. Whether he believed them or not, she had no control over.

  What difference did it make now, in any case? Whatever their feelings had been for each other, it was in the past and it had to stay in the past.

  * * *

  Matteo knocked on the guesthouse door. A minute later Natasha opened it, dressed in a pair of red pyjama bottoms and a black vest. Her usually sleek hair had an unkempt look about it.

  She greeted him with one of the smiles that always pierced him in so many different ways.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you today,’ she said, standing aside to let him in.

  ‘I had a conference call with my clinic managers. We were done sooner than I thought we’d be. Have I woken you?’ It was approaching midday.

  ‘I was reading.’ She held up the book in her hand. It was a pregnancy book the obstetrician had given her.

  ‘I thought you’d already read that.’

  She shrugged. ‘No harm in reading it again and there isn’t much else for me to do.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘What is it with you and my eating habits?’ she asked, the trace of a smile playing on her lips.

  ‘I like to be sure you’re taking care of yourself. Have you?’

  ‘I had breakfast a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘Then get dressed. I’m taking you out to lunch.’

  There was a definite brightening in her eyes. ‘Give me twenty minutes. I need to shower.’

  He bit back the offer he wanted to make of joining her in it, instead taking a seat at the dining table, following her retreating figure with his eyes. The pyjama bottoms emphasised her bottom, showing its rounded peachy shape beautifully.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.

  Since their meal at Key Biscayne ten days ago things had changed between them. It had been a subtle shift but one he felt in his marrow.

  He’d gone over her words from that night many times. As hard as it was to override seven years of conditioned loathing towards her, the more he thought about it the more he believed her.

  What disturbed him was how much he wanted to believe her, and not just because she was carrying his child.

  He looked at her now, seven years older, and saw all the things that had been missing before. She had been mature beyond her years but it was only now that he was with the fully grown-up Natasha that he realised her maturity back then hadn’t been that of a rounded woman with life experience under her belt. She’d been a wide-eyed innocent, blooming as she’d embraced womanhood, excited for her future and what it held. She’d also been a people-pleaser. She’d been almost desperate to please, never giving contrary thoughts or opinions. He remembered how delighted he’d been to find someone so like-minded but now he realised she would have agreed with his tastes and likes whatever they had been.

  They’d spent more time together these past ten days. She had no qualms about giving her opinion now and although her tastes did concur a great deal with his own, she never hesitated to voice her own thoughts when they disagreed.

  He’d taken her out to dinner a handful of times and to the theatre to watch a musical adaptation of a popular film. She’d clapped along all the way through it. When he’d asked her opinion at the end she’d said that she’d loved it but h
ad wanted to gag the leading lady for her annoying voice.

  She was far more interesting now. And somehow more desirable for it, which he hadn’t thought possible. He would gaze at her creamy skin and remember how it had felt beneath his fingers. He would look at the honey-blonde hair and remember how it had felt brushed against his shoulder. He would look in the blue eyes and remember the look in them when she’d come with him buried deep inside her.

  And he would remember that slight resistance of her body when he’d first thrust inside her and how he’d felt a warning shoot through his head that had been drowned out by the passion of her kisses and the ardour of her response.

  If he didn’t know better, he would have said that resistance had been the natural resistance of a body unused to being made love to. Which wasn’t possible.

  But it still nagged at him, playing in his mind like a distant but nearing wind, and though they’d both made a concerted effort not to speak of Pieta or the past since that first meal out, it was there too, hanging between them like a basket of dead flowers.

  Until he’d brought Natasha to Miami everything had been cut and dried. He knew who she was and what she’d done. He knew who he was and what he’d done.

  Now he was discovering that all his certainties were whispers in that nearing wind and the only thing with any substance to it was his desire for her. It was with him all the time, a constant thickening of his blood, a constant charge in his skin.

  When she reappeared thirty minutes later wearing a white summer dress with strappy sleeves and a pair of flat roman sandals, her hair damp around her shoulders, her perfume filling the room as vibrantly as she did just by her presence, he felt the air escape his lungs.

  Dio, was there nothing this woman wore that didn’t make him want to rip it off?

  He got to his feet, keeping his loins under control by the skin of his teeth. ‘Ready to go?’

  ‘Where to?’ she asked.

  ‘Downtown.’

  * * *

  Natasha strapped herself into the small sports car Matteo had chosen to drive from his vast collection while he pressed the button to put the roof down. The engine started at the press of another button, music pumped out and then he was driving them out of his garage, out of his estate and through the wide open streets of the exclusive gated community he lived in. Soon the verdant verges thick with trees thinned, the large, mostly hidden homes became buildings that steadily increased in height, and the open road filled with traffic.