by Penny Jordan
Having him inside her had felt so right—like nothing she could ever have imagined. He had filled her and completed her, and the pleasure had grown and kept on growing, leaving her so lost in the marvel of it that her orgasm had caught her unawares, overwhelming her so swiftly that she’d wanted to hold it back so that she could enjoy the sensation for longer.
The echoes of it had still been shuddering through her when Falcon had arched and tensed before thrusting one last time, the agonised joy of his male triumph reverberating through the silver night.
She had cried a little afterwards, for no good reason at all, and if that hadn’t been shameful enough she had then compounded her silliness by telling Falcon emotionally, ‘That was wonderful. I just wish that you had been the first.’
The first, the last and the only.
Ollie’s protesting wail as he and Josh reached for the same toy brought her abruptly back to reality.
‘When is Falcon due back from Florence?’ Julie was asking her.
‘Not until tomorrow evening some time.’
She saw the look that Julie gave her and tried not to blush. Her words had betrayed all too clearly that she was missing Falcon and wanted his return.
She’d only learned that he’d left the castello and gone to Florence when Maria had told her. Annie had returned to her own room to sleep, of course. After all, she and Falcon weren’t a couple in the normal sense. But her bed had seemed empty and cold after the warmth of his and his presence in it. The whole castello felt empty and cold without him, in fact.
Like the rest of her life would be without him?
Annie jumped as though she’d touched something that had given her a small electric shock. What kind of silly thinking was that? How could her life be empty when she had a son and now, thanks to Falcon, the ability to find herself a proper partner and to make a commitment to that partner? But the only man she wanted to make a commitment to and with was Falcon.
No! She must not think like that. She could not and would not. Having her fall in love with him had most certainly not been the purpose of Falcon’s plan to help her recover her repressed sexuality. He would be horrified if he were ever to discover how she felt. It had to remain her secret.
‘I worry about the Prince when Falcon isn’t here,’ she said, excusing her reaction to Julie. ‘Especially after your warning to me.’
It was the truth in one sense. She had felt distinctly anxious earlier in the day, when Maria had told her that the Prince’s manservant had said that his master wanted to see ‘the child’, and that he—the manservant—would come and collect Ollie, to take him to see his grandfather. Her presence was not required.
It was silly to feel so afraid and vulnerable because Falcon wasn’t there. After all what could his father do? He was a frail elderly man, and Ollie was her son.
Falcon pushed to one side the plans he had been studying. It was no use. He was only deceiving himself if he thought he was actually going to do any work. There had only been one place his thoughts had been since the evening Annie had shared his bed, and that had been with her.
Falcon had always considered his attitude—no, he corrected himself harshly, he had prided himself on his attitude to others and their needs, but now he recognised that he had been guilty of hubris. In his arrogance and his inability to recognise his own human vulnerability he had not seen the danger of what he was planning to do—for himself and, even more unforgivably, for Annie.
There was no point telling himself that his motives had been altruistic, based on a genuine belief that he had a duty to help her. He should have known and factored in the risk of his own weakness. He was human, after all. Very human—as the evening he had spent in bed with Annie had proved.
He had believed that he was doing the right thing, and that there was no risk to either of them. No risk? When he had broken the golden rule of modern sexual relationships by not using a condom? How much more evidence of his own reckless risk taking did he need to be confronted with before he admitted his fallibility and his error?
He had challenged fate, thoughtlessly and arrogantly, and now he was having to pay the price. But worse than that, with his behaviour he had broken the bond of trust he had assured Annie she could depend on. The plain, unvarnished truth was, as he had now been forced to concede, that he had wanted her from the minute he had first held her. Something had been communicated then, from the feel of her in his arms, that had seeded itself directly into his senses—and his heart. Wilfully he had ignored all the warning signs along the way, and deliberately he had encouraged her to believe that he would be her saviour.
Her saviour! He was no better than Antonio in what he had done, even if in his arms she had learned and discovered true sexual pleasure. Just as in hers he had learned and discovered what it was to love?
A shudder ran through his body, causing him to push back from his desk and stand up. From the window of his office in his Florence apartment, in the beautiful eighteenth-century palazzo that had come down to him through his mother’s family, Falcon looked down into the elegant courtyard garden.
He had stolen from Annie, abused her just as surely as his half-brother had done—even if Annie herself was not aware of that as yet; even if before she had finally fallen asleep in his arms she had whispered to him her joyful thanks for what they had shared.
Somewhere, somehow, during their intimacy, a line had been crossed that he had had no right to allow her to cross. He owed her an apology and an explanation. The former he could and would give her, but as for the latter…
What would he explain? That he had concealed the truth from himself and thus by default from her when he had not admitted to himself that his actions were in part motivated by his own desire for her? That admission should have been made, and with it a choice given to her. He had not been honest either with her or with himself, and Annie would have every right to treat him with anger and contempt. Those were certainly the emotions he felt towards himself. And was he really sure that his motivating need right now to be with her stemmed from a desire to admit his failings to her? Was he really sure that the reason he wanted to be with her wasn’t that he wanted to repeat the intimacy they had already shared?
What he had done was, in his own eyes, a gross violation of all that he believed his duty to Annie to be.
He had seen his brothers fall in love and find their love was returned, and he had envied them their happiness. Now he envied them even more.
Because he was falling in love with Annie?
He could not, must not, would not do that. He had after all promised her the freedom to make her own choice. He must never burden her with his feelings. From now on they must be his secret and his alone.
He had a dinner engagement here in Florence tonight, with a fellow architect and his wife.
But there was only one place he wanted to be right now, and one person he wanted to be with.
CHAPTER TEN
THEY were within sight of the castello when a taxi coming away from it passed them on the road, causing Annie to feel a fierce spiral of joyous anticipation, and the hope that it meant that Falcon had returned earlier than planned.
But after Rocco’s driver had dropped her off, she asked Maria if Falcon was back, and the housekeeper shook her head and said that no, the taxi had brought a visitor—the second that afternoon—for the Prince. She grumbled that she suspected Falcon knew nothing of these two visits, and that she hoped that two visitors in one day would not be too much for the elderly man.
Nodding her head, Annie was more concerned about the danger of her disappointed reaction to the fact that the taxi had not brought Falcon back to the castello, than curious about the Prince’s visitors.
Now, having fed and changed Ollie, she was walking round the enclosed courtyard garden adjacent to the terrace with him. He lay back in his buggy enjoying the warmth of the late-afternoon sunshine.
She was totally oblivious, until she happened to catch sight of her own refl
ection in the tranquil goldfish pond beside which she had stopped, of just how accustomed she had become to her new clothes, and how relaxed she now felt about the way they subtly enhanced her womanliness. It was a sweet moment of true female pleasure and one that made her smile.
She had Falcon to thank for that, of course. He had given her the confidence to accept that only she had the right to decide what she would wear, and to believe that she was perfectly capable of deciding for herself what was and what was not appropriate. Her skin had begun to develop a light tan, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. She lifted Ollie out of his buggy and, holding him securely showed him the goldfish pond, sitting down at the side of it with him on her lap and disturbing the smooth surface of the water so that he could see the fat goldfish swimming off. This was an idyllic place for him to grow up. He would have the company of Rocco and Julie’s little boy, and no doubt there would be other children to come. He would be surrounded by love, and best of all he would have Falcon to guide and protect him.
Falcon. She let her lips form his name, savouring the luxury of the heady pleasure of doing so, knowing that he wasn’t here to witness and object to her folly.
The evening stretched out ahead of her, lonely and empty without Falcon’s company, just like the previous two evenings had been. She missed him so much. It made no difference that she had known him for such a short space of time. How much time did it take to fall in love? No time at all. A mere heartbeat was enough to change the whole course of a person’s life. And Falcon had done that for her. She already owed him so much. She must not add another burden to those she had already given him. Motivated as he was by duty, and his sense of responsibility toward others, no doubt if he found out she loved him he would be concerned on her behalf.
She could see Maria coming towards her through the garden, no doubt to ask her what she wanted for dinner, Annie decided.
But when Maria reached her she announced breathlessly, ‘The Prince wishes to see you and Oliver in his apartment.’
‘What? Now?’ Annie questioned the housekeeper uncertainly.
‘Yes. Now.’
He asked for me too?
Previously it had been Falcon who had taken her son to see his grandfather, the Prince having shown no interest in her after their initial meeting.
‘You must hurry,’ Maria told her, looking anxious. ‘The Prince does not like to be kept waiting.’
Ideally, Annie would have preferred to be given an opportunity to freshen up—to make sure that both she and Ollie, especially Ollie, were looking their best before they were subjected to what she suspected would be a very critical inspection by the Prince. But Maria was making it very plain that there would be no time for that kind of luxury.
Indeed, the housekeeper had put out her hand to the buggy, quite obviously wanting to hurry them along.
There was nothing Annie could do other than go along with what was happening, and she wheeled Ollie in his buggy over the immaculately polished floors and priceless antique carpets of the castello’s succession of formal reception rooms until they reached the discreetly tucked away lift that went up to the Prince’s private apartments on the first floor.
Maria went up in the lift with them, and once it had stopped and the doors had opened handed them over to the manservant who was waiting for them.
The old Prince was a stickler for tradition, Annie had learned from Julie, and lived very much in the style of the early nineteen-hundreds, waited on by a formidable retinue of equally elderly retainers.
This part of the castello felt and looked very different from Falcon’s modern apartments. The decor of the two empty salons she was almost marched through was very baroque—the ceilings intricately plastered, gilded like the heavily carved woodwork, the wall panels hung with silks that matched those used for the curtains and the soft furnishings. These rooms felt more like a museum than a home, Annie reflected, shivering a little in her sleeveless sundress.
A liveried footman stood on guard outside the final pair of double doors which he and Annie’s escort drew back, so that she could enter the room beyond.
Here, if anything, the decor was even more imposing than it had been in the two previous salons. Huge paintings in sombre colours dominated the walls, whilst over her head the ceiling fresco could, she thought, have rivalled the Sistine chapel.
The heavy velvet curtains either side of the room’s four windows shut out almost all the natural daylight, so that the room was ablaze with chandeliers, whilst a fire burned in the enormous fireplace.
The air smelled of old age—both human and nonhuman—but Annie no longer had the luxury of assessing her surroundings. She was unable to drag her shocked, disbelieving gaze from one of the two dark-suited men standing beside the shrunken figure of the Prince, wrapped in a rug and seated in his wheelchair beside the fire.
Colin! What was he doing here?
Her heart started to jolt sickeningly inside her chest, thudding with familiar fear, and she began to shiver and then tremble as her stepbrother’s familiar disapproving gaze focused on her bare shoulders and arms.
How much she wished now that she had insisted on having time to go to her room and get herself a cardigan to cover herself with—or even better to change completely.
She knew—just knew from the way Colin’s lips were thinning—what he was thinking.
‘Colin. What…what are you doing here?’
The words were out before she could silence them. Uttering them, she recognized, angry with herself, had made her sound like an immature schoolgirl, caught out in some forbidden activity.
‘It’s all right, Annie.’
How soft and reassuring Colin’s voice always sounded. So kind and caring and reasonable. No wonder her mother had never understood her fear of him.
‘No one’s going to be angry with you. I’m here to make sure of that. You know I’ve always had your best interests at heart.’
No one was going to be angry with her? But he already was. She mustn’t let him do this to her. She must not slip back to being the fearful creature she had been before Falcon had rescued her. Falcon. If only he had been here…
‘I don’t understand why you are here,’ Annie told him flatly. She must be strong and firm. She must behave as though Falcon were standing at her side, guiding and guarding her.
‘I’ve come to take you home.’
Fire, like a petrol-soaked rag to which someone had just applied a flame, shot up inside her, ravaging and out of control.
But she must control it.
‘This is my home now. Mine and Ollie’s.’
Colin was smiling at her now—the triumphant, gloating smile she remembered so well, and which before he had only shown her in private. Her heart turned over in a sickening lurch of fear when she realised how confident he must feel if he was showing it to her now, in public….
‘This is Oliver’s home now, yes. But your home is with me, Annie. You know that. It always has been and it always will be.’
‘Let’s get this over with.’ The Prince spoke for the first time. His English was good but his voice was shaky and unsteady. ‘Where are the papers?’ he demanded turning to the third man, who had not spoken as yet. ‘She must sign them, and then he can take her away. He must take her away before she hurts my grandson. Bring the child to me.’
Hurt Ollie? What was the Prince saying? What was going on?
As the third man came towards her Annie snatched Ollie up out of his buggy, holding him tightly. As though her fear had communicated itself to him, Ollie suddenly started to cry.
‘See,’ Falcon’s father announced fiercely. ‘Her brother is right. She is not fit to have charge of the boy. He is afraid of her.’
Ollie afraid of her? Colin her brother? What was going on?
Confusion, horror and fear—she felt them all. Instinctively she tried to escape, turning towards the doors through which she had entered the room. But they were closed, with the two manservants standing in fr
ont of them.
Her fear increased, pounding through her, filling her and all but drowning out the courage Falcon had given her. Falcon. Just thinking his name steadied her, calmed her. Desperately she clung to it, willing herself to be strong and to remember that she was no longer a child in thrall to Colin; there was no need now for her to fear him.
But what about the Prince? He obviously wanted to take Ollie away from her, and Colin would encourage and help him to do that. Colin had never wanted her to have Ollie. She must not be afraid. She must try to be strong.
‘It’s all right, Annie,’ she could hear Colin saying, in his best kind voice. She struggled not to panic. ‘Everything’s all right. We know how much you love Oliver. But the best place for him is with his grandfather. And the Prince’s solicitor will ensure that the courts think that, as well. We all saw the way you held Oliver over the pond earlier, and I’ve already given testimony as to how you wanted to abort him before his birth. No one blames you for wanting to do that—not after what happened to you. It’s perfectly natural that there should be times when…when what happened to you overwhelms you. We’re only trying to protect you and Oliver. To protect you from doing something that you would later regret. It’s for your own sake and for his. Imagine how you would feel if you were to hurt him.
‘Now, if you’re sensible and sign these papers that the Prince’s solicitor has prepared, giving the Prince guardianship of Ollie, everything will be much easier for you. I’ll take you back to England with me and we can forget about all of this….’
‘No!’
The denial was ripped from Annie’s throat. Fear was crawling all through her. Surely she could only be imagining this? It couldn’t possibly be happening? But it was.
‘I’m sorry about this.’ It wasn’t her to whom Colin was apologizing, but the Prince. ‘As I’ve already confirmed to you, the breakdown Annie had after Oliver’s birth has left her very mentally and emotionally fragile. Which is why—’