by Penny Jordan
‘She should be locked up with other madwomen, where she can’t hurt or harm my grandson.’
The Prince turned to his solicitor and said something to him in Italian, glaring at Annie as he did so.
Colin was responsible for what was happening to her. Instinctively Annie knew that. Somehow or other he had managed to put into action the train of events that had brought her here now, to this room and this horrifying situation.
‘I’m not signing anything,’ she told the three men firmly. ‘And I’m not going anywhere. Not until I’ve spoken to Falcon.’
Whilst the Prince and his solicitor exchanged looks that resulted in the solicitor giving a small shake of his head, Colin took a step towards her.
As though he sensed the danger they were in, Oliver started to cry in earnest.
‘Give me my grandson,’ the Prince demanded, setting his wheelchair in motion and heading for Annie. ‘He is a Leopardi, and there is no court in Sicily that would deny me my right to his guardianship. Especially when they know of the wickedness of his mother—a mother who tried to deny him life.’
‘That is not true,’ Annie protested.
‘Annie, it’s no use. I’ve already told the Prince everything. He knows that you wanted a termination, and that you tried to have Oliver adopted once you knew that Antonio wanted him.’
Annie gasped. ‘That’s not true.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
None of them had heard the doors open, but now all four of them turned to look towards them, to where Falcon was standing.
‘Falcon!’
Annie could hear the relief in her own voice. She could just imagine the way Colin was looking at her as she half ran and half stumbled across the room, all but flinging herself into Falcon’s arms, but she simply didn’t care.
‘They’re trying to take Ollie from me. They’re trying to say that I’m a bad mother.’
‘The child is a Leopardi,’ she could hear the old Prince insisting, ‘His place is here with—’
‘With me, Father.’ Falcon stopped his father in mid-rant. ‘And that is exactly where Oliver will be from now on. With me and with his mother—since she has agreed to be my wife and I shall be formally adopting him as my son.’
Falcon’s arm was round her, supporting her, tightening in warning as she made a small shocked sound of protest.
‘I should warn all three of you that there is no law in this land or any other that will remove from me the right to be the guardian of my stepson, a child of my own blood, and protector of both him and his mother.’
‘You can’t do this. You can’t marry her—a whore who your brother—’
Whilst Annie flinched, Falcon stood firm.
‘An innocent virgin whom your son—thankfully only my half-brother—abused and defiled, but who, out of the sweetness and goodness she possesses in abundance, has given to this family the sacred trust of a new life—a child that I will never, ever allow to be damaged and corrupted in the way that his father was. However, I cannot blame Antonio alone for his shortcomings. He inherited the weakness and the love of vice that eventually destroyed him from his mother. So Oliver will inherit from his mother great courage and true strength of character.’
As he finished speaking Falcon lifted Oliver from Annie’s arms, nestling him in the crook of his own arm, from where the baby smiled up at him. The look of love the two of them exchanged made Annie want to weep with gratitude.
Putting his free arm back around her, Falcon guided her towards the buggy and deftly secured Oliver in it, before straightening up to say calmly and evenly to his father, ‘I should hate you for all that you have done to hurt and harm those I love over the years, but instead I pity you, Father. For all that you could have had and have thrown away.’
Her ordeal was over and she and Oliver were safe. Safe here in Falcon’s apartment. Safe from the Prince and from Colin perhaps, but she was not safe from her own feelings—from her love for Falcon, deeper and burning even more fiercely now, after what he had done to rescue her.
‘I’m really grateful to you for what you’ve done,’ she told Falcon emotionally as she sat opposite him on the comfortable U-shaped arrangement of leather sofas. A coffee table on which she had placed her now-empty cup of restorative coffee was between them, whilst Ollie lay fast asleep on the middle sofa.
Falcon inclined his head in acknowledgement of her words. Her voice was still tremulous with the shadow of the fear she had been through. He couldn’t trust himself to speak as yet. His anger was still churning savagely inside him, twisting his guts and locking his heart against his father.
‘I’m so glad you came back when you did, earlier than you had planned. I was so afraid.’
‘I completed the business I’d gone to Florence to do earlier than I expected,’ Falcon told Annie brusquely.
It was a lie. He had been sitting in a café in the square next to his apartment when out of nowhere he had been filled, driven by a sudden conviction that he had to be with her. He’d tried to ignore it at first, but it had refused to be ignored and he had been forced to give in to it.
He’d telephoned his second brother Alessandro from the square, demanding and insisting that Alessandro organise a private jet to fly him back to Sicily, then driving as recklessly as though he had been Antonio and not his normal conservative self from the airport to the castello, shocking Maria with his unexpected arrival and learning from her not just where Annie was but also about the two men who were with his father.
After he had rescued her, Maria had fussed over Annie, bringing her the coffee he had ordered for her and staying with her behind the safely locked doors of his apartment while he had gone to speak with his father, demanding an explanation of his behaviour and piecing together what had happened.
Now they were on their own, just the three of them in the peace of his apartment. His suit jacket was flung across the back of the sofa, the top button of his shirt was unfastened.
This was how he wanted his life to be, Falcon realised; with Annie and Oliver, in the love he bore them both.
‘I have spoken with my father,’ he told Annie. ‘And I have demanded from him an explanation of his unforgivable behaviour. It seems that your stepbrother and he made contact with one another—and very quickly both of them realised that the other had a purpose that fitted in well with their own. My father wanted to gain control of Oliver’s life, and your stepbrother wanted to gain control of you.
‘I doubt that my father believed for a second that you intended any harm towards Oliver. However, it suited him to pretend that he did—just as it suited your stepbrother to claim that you were mentally unstable and therefore unfit to have control of your child.’
‘Colin tried to do that before. That was part of the reason why I tried to hide from him,’ Annie told Falcon. ‘He threatened to tell Social Services that I wasn’t fit to look after Ollie. It wasn’t true, but I was afraid that they’d believe him. That’s why I moved flats.’
Falcon nodded his head.
He’d already informed Colin that he would be taken to the airport in the morning and put on a flight. He had also told him that he, Falcon, would be taking legal steps to ensure that Colin was forbidden to make any future contact with Annie or Oliver, and that he would never again be allowed to put so much as a foot on Sicilian soil.
He would never tell Annie about the filth and innuendo that her stepbrother had come out with, or the accusations he had made against her: that she was a wanton flirt who enjoyed encouraging men and had done since her early teens, when she had first begun flaunting her body in unsuitable clothes and encouraging boys to take liberties with her; that Antonio had merely been one of a string of men she had led on; that he, Colin, had been asked by her distraught and shamed mother to do everything he could to put a stop to her promiscuous lifestyle. All were accusations Falcon would have known to be untrue even if the intimacy he had shared with her hadn’t already proved to him how innocent she was.
‘I expect you’ve told your father that he needn’t worry and that you aren’t really going to marry me?’
Annie had spent the last hour, whilst she waited for Falcon to come back from seeing his father, picking over and discarding a wide variety of ways in which she could bring up the subject of his statement about marrying her in a way that would let him know immediately that she fully understood his words had simply been a means of protecting her, and that they had not been intended to be taken as a genuine proposition on his part.
‘No. I haven’t told him that.’
Annie had sworn to herself that she would not look directly at Falcon, no matter what—because she was so afraid that if she did he would see in her eyes how much she loved him. But now she could feel her gaze being pulled towards his as though it was being moved by powerful magnets. Or as though he was somehow compelling her to look at him.
‘Well, I dare say he’ll find out anyway in time—once we don’t. That is to say, when he sees that we aren’t…’
Falcon briskly cut across her floundering. ‘I haven’t told him for the simple reason that I believe it would make very good sense for us to marry.’
Now Annie couldn’t have dragged her gaze from his, no matter what power had been put at her disposal—because she simply had to look at him and go on looking at him, just to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.
‘You think that we should get married—to one another?’ she questioned Falcon feebly.
‘Yes. It’s the best and simplest way of both protecting you from your stepbrother and securing Oliver’s future within your guardianship. Once you are my wife no one, least of all my father, can make any claim to usurp your role in Oliver’s life.’
‘But one day you will succeed your father. You are his eldest son. You will be Prince and head of the Leopardi family. You can’t marry someone like me.’
‘I can marry whoever I choose to marry,’ Falcon corrected her arrogantly. ‘And if you are worrying that some people might choose not to accept you as my wife, let me reassure you they will accept you—or risk losing their relationship with me.’
‘I can’t let you make such a sacrifice,’ Annie protested. ‘You should marry someone you love.’
Falcon hesitated. Should he tell her? Should he admit to her that he loved her? No! He had no right to burden her with his feelings—especially when she was still so vulnerable and upset by her confrontation with her stepbrother.
‘Doing my duty is more important to me than love,’ he lied firmly. ‘And it is my duty to protect both you and Oliver. I can think of no better way to fulfil that duty than to marry you. That does not mean that you have to say yes, though.’
He had at the very least to say that—offer her an escape route. He couldn’t leave her trapped and forced to accept him with no way out. His honour and the love he felt for her demanded that much.
Not say yes! When she loved him so much? But perhaps for his sake she should refuse. He might say that love wasn’t important to him, and she might have taken into herself in silence the pain that careless statement had caused her, but what if one day he did fall in love? How could she allow him to be trapped in a marriage with her when he loved someone else?
But if she left him where would she go? How would she ever be safe? Colin would hunt her down—she just knew he would. And Ollie—how could she protect her son from her stepbrother’s dangerous malice if she was on her own?
‘It does seem to be the sensible thing to do,’ she agreed.
Falcon felt his heart slam into his ribs in a mixture of relief and longing. Relief because she had said yes, and longing because right now more than anything else he wanted to take her in his arms and tell her how he felt about her—tell her how happy he wanted to make her.
Instead he forced himself to agree coolly, ‘It is the sensible thing to do.’
He started to stand up, and Annie’s gaze slid helplessly to the movement of the muscles in his thighs. Like sand washed clean by the tide, everything she had felt over the last few hours was suddenly swept away, leaving only that now familiar deep inner ache that told her how much she wanted him.
‘From now on you and Oliver will live and sleep here, in this apartment. I’ll give you a key, so that if for any reason I’m not here and you feel the need to do so you can lock yourselves in. Although you have my word that my father will not attempt a repeat performance of today’s events.’
She was going to share Falcon’s apartment. Her whole body quivered in something that was far more sensual than mere relief.
‘There is a spare guest suite,’ Falcon continued.
A guest suite!
‘Does that mean…?’ Annie stopped, her face going pink.
‘Does it mean what?’ Falcon invited.
‘If we are to be married, does that mean that we’ll be…erm…sleeping together?’
‘It is customary for married couples to sleep together,’ Falcon told her. ‘But if what you are really asking me is if our marriage will include a shared sexual relationship, as well as our shared love for Oliver, then the answer is that I would certainly like it to do so. But that decision must be yours.’
Hers? Well, she knew what she really wanted to say, of course. She loved him, and there was nothing she wanted more than for them to be lovers in every way there was.
She was hesitating—reluctant to give up her freedom of choice to share her life and her body with a man of her own choosing, Falcon recognised grimly. Well, what had he expected? That she would fling herself into his arms now, as she had done earlier, and this time tell him that she loved and wanted him?
‘There is no need to make a decision on that right now,’ he told her, as casually as he could.
‘Has…has Colin left yet?’ Annie asked, deliberately changing the subject just in case she burst out with what she was really thinking and feeling and embarrassed them both.
Falcon frowned as he was reminded of an issue that had irritated him.
‘No. The first flight I can get him on is not until tomorrow morning. I’m reluctant to allow him the freedom of the island in the meantime, for obvious reasons. Plus there is the matter of my lawyers applying to the courts for an emergency restraining order, to ensure that he is stopped from coming anywhere near you or Oliver ever again. Unfortunately he will have to stay here in the castello for now. You need not worry, though. You and Oliver will be safe in here, whilst he will remain in my father’s quarters. A fitting extra punishment for both of them, I think, that they should be forced to endure one another’s company.’
Falcon wanted to keep Colin here at the castello prior to his flight back to the United Kingdom in case Colin went to ground and was then free to hound her and threaten Ollie, Annie knew, so she nodded her head in understanding.
Could he win her love? Falcon wondered. Was it truly fair of him to even try? In marrying her, was he protecting her or imprisoning her just as surely as her stepbrother had done? Was he doing his duty or was he simply greedily and selfishly seizing what he wanted more than anything else?
He looked at Annie, who had leaned across the sofa to check on Oliver. The look of tender maternal love warming her face made his heart turn over in his chest.
He had to put her first.
‘It is my view that for Oliver’s sake it is necessary that we marry now. However, if our marriage doesn’t work out,’ he told her curtly, ‘or if at some future date one of us were to fall in love, then we can and will be divorced.’
Annie’s heart contracted with fiercely sharp pain. Only one of them could fall in love outside their marriage, and it wasn’t her. How would she be able to bear it if Falcon did fall in love with someone else? Was he perhaps already regretting his decision to marry her?
‘We don’t have to get married,’ she forced herself to say.
‘Yes, we do,’ Falcon corrected her. ‘Apart from anything else, there is also the chance that we may already have created a child together.’
&
nbsp; Annie swallowed hard against the tight knot of guilt blocking her throat. That had been her fault. He had wanted to take precautions but she hadn’t let him. Even more guilt-inducing was the knowledge that she was glad she had been able to enjoy the precious and wonderful sensation of his body filling her own without any barriers between them, however reckless that intimacy might have been.
‘I’m going to go and tell Maria that you’re moving into the guest suite here, so that she can get the maids organised.’
Annie nodded her head, but as soon as Falcon reached the door the knowledge that she was going to be left on her own filled her with so much panic that she stood up.
‘Could that wait until tomorrow?’ she begged. ‘I know that you said I could lock myself in here, but…But I don’t want to be on my own whilst Colin’s still here. He makes me feel so afraid.’ She tried to laugh and make a joke about her fear, adding, ‘I don’t even think I could sleep on my own.’
The minute she realised what she had said, her face burned.
‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just meant…’
‘I know what you meant,’ Falcon assured her. ‘And there’s no need for you to sleep alone. I am perfectly happy to share my bed with you.’
His bed, his body, his life, his heart and his love—everything he had to give, all of it. But of course, he couldn’t tell her that. It would only add another burden to those she already had to carry.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHY was being in Falcon’s bed tonight so very different from last night? Annie wondered miserably, as she lay alone. It was over an hour since Falcon had suggested that she must be tired—only to tell her that he had some work to finish the minute she had agreed that she was, but that she should go ahead and go to bed. In that time she had showered and dried herself and curled up in the large bed, her heart pounding with excitement and love, her body on fire with intoxicated longing and desire, but Falcon had not come to join her.
Now he was in the bathroom, where he had been for what seemed like for ever, and the unwelcome and unwanted thought was creeping over her that Falcon might be delaying coming to bed because he was hoping that she would be asleep when he joined her. After all, she was the one who had asked to sleep with him, not the other way round.