by Lynne Graham
‘And?’ Roel prompted.
‘Mandy and her boyfriend then fleeced us out of every penny they could lay their hands on. She got control of the money my parents had left. There wasn’t a lot but there would’ve been enough to keep Emma and I comfortable for a few years. When there was nothing more left to steal or sell, she just walked out one day and never came back.’
‘I assume you called in the police. Misuse of funds in a situation of that nature is a crime.’
‘The money was gone and nothing was going to bring it back. I had more important things to worry about—like finding somewhere cheaper to live and looking after my sister,’ Hilary countered defensively.
In an unexpected gesture of sympathy, Roel closed his hand over her clenched fingers. ‘You trusted Mandy because she was related to you. Her betrayal must have come as a considerable shock.’
‘Yeah…’ She was dismayed to realise that, far from receding, that dangerous and unfamiliar urge to burst into floods of tears was merely growing stronger.
‘When I had amnesia, I had no choice but to trust you,’ Roel murmured with husky bite, dark golden eyes resting on her with punitive force. ‘I believed you were my wife—’
Hilary yanked her hand free of his grip with positive violence. ‘You don’t need to say any more…I’ve got the message. But all I did was try and act like your wife. I did not go to bed with you with any ulterior motive, nor do I have any intention of trying to make money out of our marriage!’
‘Only time will prove the truth of that claim.’
‘Look, what’s your problem? You’re an incredibly good-looking, sexy bloke yet you seem to find it impossible to accept that any woman could want you just for yourself!’ Hilary slammed back at him chokily.
‘Or for my body,’ Roel countered in a tone smoother than silk.
With a suddenness that shook her, Hilary lost her head in an explosion of rage she could not control. ‘You see, that’s just one of those things I can’t stand about you. You always have to have the last word and it’s always a smart-ass remark. You’re so convinced that you never do anything wrong that you blame me for everything. If the sky fell down on us right this minute, you’d say it was my fault!’
‘Sì…’ Roel responded, impervious to attack, a bright glitter in his intent scrutiny. ‘Screaming has been known to cause avalanches.’
Hilary breathed in so deep in an effort to restrain herself that she was honestly afraid she might burst. But she was seeing his extravagantly handsome features through a mist of red. In that brief interim in hostilities, the chauffeur swept open the door.
‘I just want you to know that I hate you!’ Hilary was reduced to hissing shrewishly at him as he settled into the seat beside hers on the helicopter.
He meshed long brown fingers into her hair and held her still for the descending force of his mouth. She fell into that kiss much as if she had charged full tilt off a precipice. Down and down and down she went into the hot, wild, honeyed excitement of it. The stinging electrical charge of his seething sensuality took her prisoner and she revelled in every moment of his unleashed passion.
He drew back an inch, fierce golden eyes blazing over her. ‘We’ll stay only forty minutes at the party.’
She was out of breath and stunned by the frightening intensity of her own emotions. She saw inside herself, understood why she had been fighting with him and struggling to hold him at a distance. He had so much power to hurt her and hurt her he would while she still loved him. ‘Roel…’
‘You make me burn for you…I barely slept a night through while you were in London. But now you’re mine again and you will stay mine until I decide otherwise, bella mia.’
The helicopter delivered them to a huge, opulent yacht where they were greeted by their hosts like visiting royalty. Hilary was in a daze. All she was really conscious of was Roel, his big powerful frame taut and restless by her side, the possessive masculine arm anchored to her spine. Good manners took him from her when his host urged him over to meet an old friend.
Hilary clutched her untouched glass of wine. The music and the chattering voices seemed to be crowding in on her. Her hostess introduced a constant procession of strange faces to her. The bright dresses of the women and the glitter of their fabulous jewellery blurred in her gaze and she blinked. The slight motion of the yacht beneath her did not help. Clammy heat assailed her and she felt horribly sick and dizzy. Even as she turned in desperation to look for a seat it was too late and she slid down on the deck in a dead faint.
When she recovered consciousness, Roel was staring down at her with cloaked dark eyes. ‘Take it easy, cara. I’m taking you home.’
Lashes fluttering down again, she offered up a silent prayer that the nausea would evaporate. He lifted her up into his arms, exchanged a brief dialogue with their concerned hosts and carried her back up to the upper deck to board the helicopter again.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more immediate or magical performance,’ Roel informed her with mocking appreciation once the craft was airborne.
Belatedly she recalled his assertion that he was prepared to spend less than an hour at the party and only then appreciated that he honestly believed she had staged a fake collapse to please him and achieve an even earlier departure. The wheels and dips of the flight did nothing to settle her uneasy tummy and conversation was beyond her. At the back of her mind lurked worrying questions that increased her tension. Why had she fainted? She had never fainted in her life before, but she remembered Pippa telling her that dizzy spells were common in early pregnancy.
Vaulting off the helicopter as soon as it had landed, Roel swung back to assist her. ‘That was a most impressive faint.’ A wickedly sensual smile illuminated his lean dark features. ‘For a moment, even I thought it was for real.’
‘It was…I think I got seasick,’ Hilary mumbled, leaning against him because her legs still felt distinctly untrustworthy in the support department.
‘Seasick?’ Roel exclaimed.
‘I still don’t feel so great,’ Hilary added apologetically.
Roel groaned and bent down to lift her again. ‘Seasick,’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘You were only on board fifteen minutes.’
An hour later she was lying in bed, circumspectly clad in a nightdress. Roel was poised by the foot of the bed and surveying her with keen attention. ‘I don’t want to lie here like a corpse,’ she was protesting by then. ‘I feel great now.’
‘Healthy people don’t faint,’ Roel drawled in a censorious tone as if it were something she could have helped. ‘If the doctor says it’s OK, you can get up again.’
‘Doctor…what doctor?’ she gasped.
A knock sounded on the door. ‘That should be her now. I called her from the limo to request a home visit.’
In sheer fright, Hilary sat up. ‘I don’t want to see a doctor…for goodness’ sake, I don’t need to!’
‘Let me be the judge of that—’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘I’m your husband. I’m responsible for your well-being,’ Roel imparted grittily. ‘Even if you are ungrateful for my concern.’
Shame and embarrassment silenced Hilary. He opened the door to an older woman with greying dark hair swept up in a no-nonsense style.
‘I’d like to see the doctor alone,’ Hilary announced when Roel betrayed a nerve-racking reluctance to leave the bedroom.
She answered the doctor’s questions honestly and submitted to an examination. Afterwards, the woman smiled. ‘I think you already suspect the cause. You’re pregnant.’
Hilary lost colour because all she could think of at that instant was how unwelcome such an announcement would be to Roel. ‘Are you sure?’
The older woman nodded. ‘Certain signs are unmistakable.’
‘I don’t want to tell my husband yet,’ Hilary confided.
Her body had shocked her. She was going to have Roel’s baby. Maybe a little boy with black hair and an i
rresistible smile or a minx of a little girl with glorious tigerish eyes and a belief that she ruled the world. Yes, she was going to have Roel’s baby and, unless she was very much mistaken, he would hate her for it.
When Roel entered the room she couldn’t look at him and she scrambled out of bed. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘I was a little bit seasick and now I’m fine and I’m getting dressed.’
Roel scooped her up mid-step and deposited her back on the bed. ‘No. The doctor said you needed a sensible meal and plenty of sleep and I intend to ensure that you follow her advice.’
‘Benevolence doesn’t suit you,’ she told him waspishly while he stood over her to watch her eat the delicious food, which had been brought to her on a tray embellished with flowers.
Roel sent her a languorous smile that made her heartbeat quicken and her tummy flip. ‘I’m only thinking of my own needs.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘You’ll have to be one hundred per cent fit to meet my expectations over the next few days. I’ve decided to take a break—’
‘But you don’t take breaks—’
‘Give me you and a bed…and a PC connection and I can take a break.’
Hilary went pink to the roots of her hair.
‘I shall get you out from under my skin or die in the attempt, cara,’ Roel murmured huskily.
‘Then what?’
In the silence that fell she was too enervated even to take the breath she needed lest it somehow obscured his answer.
‘I fly you home and return to my free and uncomplicated former life as a single male.’
It took immense courage but she did not flinch at that comeback. ‘So why wait? Why not do that now?’
‘Right now I’m still enjoying you. You’re different from my usual lovers.’
‘Does how I feel come into this in any way?’ Hilary snapped.
‘I make you feel incredible and you know it,’ Roel reminded her with merciless cool and the cruel intimacy of a lover, well aware of his own ability to turn her inside out and upside down with sheer longing.
Hilary subsided back into the pillows and closed her mortified eyes. Sometimes forbearance was the better part of valour, she reminded herself. Sometimes there was nothing wrong with just going with the flow. He might never need to know that she had conceived his child. Did she really have to tell him? When they parted, she would never see him again. She wanted their baby so much and she had loads of love to give. She was prepared to work incredibly hard to give their child a decent home. How could she be such a coward that she was already trying to excuse herself for not immediately telling Roel that she had fallen pregnant?
‘I told you I didn’t want anything,’ Hilary whispered urgently under her breath the instant the unctuous salesman moved out of hearing. ‘What are we doing in here?’
Roel dealt her a look of warm amusement. ‘You have no jewellery. It’s time I bought you some.’
Hilary stretched up on tiptoe to murmur with forced amusement, ‘It’s not wise to take the mistress idea out of the bedroom…the joke wears thin—’
‘This time the joke’s on me. No decent gold-digger would miss out on an opportunity of this magnitude.’ As Hilary flinched in surprise and pain her eyes flew wide and darted up to lodge on his lean dark chiselled features. He curved an imprisoning arm round her slight, taut figure to prevent her from pulling back from him. ‘Think about what I just said,’ he urged in a husky tone of intimacy. ‘In fact maybe you should be capturing this on film. I’m admitting that I misjudged your motives four years ago…’
Hilary snatched in a stark breath. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Never more so.’ Taking advantage of her shock, Roel manoeuvred her down onto the elegant stool by the counter. ‘Some sad individuals say sorry with flowers—’
‘Is that a fact?’ she said breathlessly, hardly able to think straight because he had plunged her from hurt straight into a disconcerted state of relief and happiness.
‘Some never say sorry at all and some will even buy you diamonds in the hope that you will not expect any action that could be interpreted as grovelling.’
Her easy smile broke out like the sun at dawn and she almost laughed out loud, for she had never forgotten him saying that grovelling was only for peasants.
An hour later, when they had returned to the villa, she wandered out onto the terrace where he was enjoying a drink. A giant ancient fig tree provided shelter from the sultry heat of the Sardinian sun. Even late afternoon, it was very hot. Lush planted terraces and steps ran down the steep hillside to the private beach below.
‘It obviously pays to catch you out,’ she teased Roel, angling up her wrist so that the platinum watch glittered in the arrow of light breaking through the leafy canopy above her. And all the while she was doing that she was still watching Roel, luxuriating in his proximity, his bold, uncompromising masculinity and even that fierce will of his, which she had dared to cross in that exclusive jewellery store.
As always attuned to her scrutiny, Roel elevated an ebony brow, his brilliant dark eyes full of reproof for she had been adamant about accepting only that one gift. ‘I wanted to cover you in diamonds.’
‘I’d have looked downright silly,’ she quipped.
‘Naked you would have looked like a pagan goddess, bella mia.’
Her tummy flipped. It took Roel to imagine her as nobody else ever would. Self-conscious beneath his molten appraisal, she muttered unevenly, ‘You still haven’t explained why you changed your mind about me being greedy for money?’
His lean, strong face tensed. ‘When you claimed in London that you’d paid most of the cash settlement I gave you back into the account from which you originally received it, I didn’t believe you. But I had it checked out. That money has been lying unacknowledged in that account for well over three years—’
‘But what happened to the letter I wrote to Paul Correro?’
‘It never arrived. Around that time he moved into new legal offices. Your letter would have been sent to his old address and it must have gone astray. Paul is very upset about all this.’ His handsome mouth compressed in acknowledgement. ‘He knows he is the broken link in a chain, which has led to much misunderstanding between us.’
Hilary was grateful that the subject of that cash settlement could finally be freely discussed. ‘I never meant to take money from you but I did, so you can hardly blame him for having a low opinion of me—’
‘He had no right to make that judgement—’
A pained light had entered Hilary’s unguarded gaze for she was tempted to point out that Paul Correro had simply taken his lofty air of disapproval from Roel himself. ‘I’d like to explain a couple of things. When we first met, Emma and I were living in a rough area and her friends were kids who thought it was fun to shoplift. She was skipping school and I was having trouble controlling her.’
Roel was listening with grave attention. ‘I had no idea your home life was that grim. You always seemed so cheerful.’
‘A long face doesn’t change anything for the better. Your money gave us a new start. I rented the flat, opened up the salon and got Emma into another school. All the problems we were having vanished one by one,’ Hilary explained. ‘I didn’t have to work evenings any more, so she had to stay home and she studied. The next year she won her scholarship and she has never looked back since.’
‘You should be proud of yourself. I wish you had been more frank with me at the time—’
As she connected with his stunning golden gaze Hilary’s mouth ran dry and she looked away. ‘In those days, you didn’t want to know.’
‘I wouldn’t allow myself to get to know you and you paid the price for that. But that was then and this is now…’ Enclosing her hand in his, Roel pressed a slow, burning, sensual kiss to her palm.
She quivered, legs trembling, heat surging between her slender thighs. At a leisurely pace he undid her wrap top and flicked loose the clasp on the
silk bra she wore beneath.
‘It’s broad daylight…’ she muttered.
‘You shock so easily,’ Roel savoured, pressing her back against the sun-warmed wall and peeling off her sarong skirt. ‘Relax…I will do everything.’
And, shamelessly, she let him. There against the worn stone wall he stripped her naked. She was boneless, ready for him even before he scored expert fingers through the silvery blonde curls crowning her feminine mound to tease the swollen, sensitive, secret flesh below. He probed her passion-moistened depths with a carnal skill that made her sob out loud against her own fierce and unbearable longing.
‘Don’t stop…’ she cried hoarsely.
‘I love it when you’re out of control. It makes me want to drive you even wilder.’ Roel flipped her round and bent her over the wall, lifting her up to penetrate her with his hard male heat. Shock and overwhelming delight made her dizzy. He filled her to the hilt. She couldn’t breathe for excitement. Sensation made her forget everything but the fierce, desperately rousing surge of his demanding body into hers. His animal passion sent her flying into glorious frenzy of release.
In the aftermath, he gathered her limp body up into his arms and carried her into the shuttered cool of the bedroom. He discarded his own clothes. All rippling muscle and damp bronzed skin, he was magnificent. Coming down on the bed, he drew her back into his arms and smiled with slumberous satisfaction and approval down at her. She wanted to cry with love for him. She wanted that sweet moment of silent intimacy to last for ever. He smoothed her hair out of her eyes, kissed her, held her close and she felt as frantic as though she were trying to live her whole life out in those minutes when she was at her happiest.
‘I adore your breasts,’ Roel confided lazily, lifting her up to arrange her astride him and reaching up to cup the pert, firm mounds with unashamed masculine appreciation. ‘I swear they’ve got fuller since the first time we made love.’