by Lynne Graham
Caught unprepared by that turbulent entrance that was so uncharacteristic of the calm, controlled male she knew, Hilary stared at him. He was ashen, his proud cheekbones tight with tension. Fierce dark eyes locked to her. ‘Have you any idea what it was like for me the last time?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you know what I went through?’
Numb in the face of a display of more emotion than he had ever shown her he possessed, Hilary shook her head slowly in dumb negative.
‘Santo cielo! That first week before I regained my memories just about killed me. One minute you were there and the next you were gone and I hadn’t a clue why. You walked out on our marriage and left me a four-line-long apology like you’d cancelled a dinner date,’ he breathed in raw wonderment. ‘It was unreal. I didn’t even know where to find you. I almost went out of my mind with worry!’
Hilary was aghast at what he was telling her. ‘I never thought…I didn’t even suspect that you would feel like that—’
‘It should have been you who told me the truth about our marriage.’
Recognising the justness of that censure, she hung her head. She had been a coward and she had made excuses for herself. But what all those excuses came down to in the end was the simple fact that she had chosen to save face at his expense. How too could she have been so insensitive that she had not foreseen how her disappearance would affect him?
‘I had complete trust in you.’ Roel ensnared her troubled gaze when she would have evaded his scrutiny. ‘Admittedly that was my only option at first. But our relationship developed fast and I let my guard down with you. I believed we were a couple. I learned to think of you as my wife. Then it all blew up in my face.’
Hilary’s throat ached. Ever since he had brought her back from London she had refused to consider how much her own behaviour must have contributed to his angry and cynical distrust. She was ashamed. ‘I must have seemed very selfish to you…but I honestly didn’t think you’d miss me that much—’
Roel released a humourless shout of laughter. ‘Inferno! What do you think I am? A block of wood?’
‘Ice,’ she countered unevenly. ‘Very self-contained and disciplined and proud of it too.’
His beautiful mouth twisted. ‘I was brought up to be strong and well warned never to make myself vulnerable with a woman. Their failed marriages embittered my father and my grandfather. By the time Clemente changed his tune, it was too late for him to influence me. That was why he made that insane will. It was his last-ditch attempt to persuade me that if I would only make the effort and take the risk I could rewrite family history and end up in a happy marriage.’
‘Well…’ her nose wrinkled as she fought back the awful tickle of threatening tears ‘…so much for that hope but at least the castello is still in the family.’
‘I want you to know that I was already on my way home to see you when Paul contacted me—’
A mortified flush lit her creamy complexion. ‘Why do guys always stick together?’
‘Mutual terror?’ Roel quipped in a roughened undertone, level dark golden eyes welded to her. ‘When I understood what sort of agreement you were seeking, I was ashamed. I knew instantly that I had driven you to it.’
Hilary surveyed him with wide, bewildered eyes. ‘What is it with you? Why weren’t you pleased? Why would you be ashamed? I was willing to sign a declaration saying I would never make a claim on your wealth or anything else you owned!’
‘But that would have been wrong because you have every right to share what I have—’
‘It would have shown you once and for all that I don’t want or need anything from you!’
Roel drew in a ragged breath and squared his broad shoulders. ‘I accused you of being a gold-digger because that way I could avoid dealing with how I really felt about you.’
Her brow indented. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘When I had amnesia, I got used to having you around. After I got my memory back, I was furious with you because you had made one hell of a fool of me!’
That frank condemnation leeched colour from below Hilary’s skin. ‘That wasn’t my intention and it isn’t how I see what happened between us,’ she protested.
‘But it changed everything. You’d fooled me successfully and I had no confidence in my own ability to read you after that.’ Savage tension emanating from his lithe, powerful frame, Roel swung away from her. ‘But no matter how great my distrust of you was, I still wanted you back and not only because the sex was dynamite.’
Hilary perked up at that promising confession. ‘But you were quite happy for me to think that it was just that.’
His bold bronzed profile clenched as she put him on the spot yet again. ‘I was covering up…I was—’ He bit off whatever he had been about to say and raised and dropped a broad shoulder in visible frustration. ‘I was…’
‘You were…what?’ she prompted.
‘Scared! OK?’ He shot that reluctant admission at her as if she had turned a gun on him. ‘I was scared. I was feeling stuff I’d never felt before and it spooked me. But even by the time we arrived in Sardinia I had simmered down. I was relaxing and beginning to trust you again…’
Hilary opened dry lips. ‘Then I admitted I was pregnant—’
‘Once again you’d been secretive. If only you had shared that news with me immediately. All that week we had been together and we had been closer than I had ever been with any woman but, throughout it, you’d been hiding the fact that you were carrying our child. That hit me hard, made me wonder what else you might be hiding,’ he confessed heavily.
‘I was afraid of how you’d react.’ But her attempt to defend herself was half-hearted for she could now see that keeping Roel in the dark about her pregnancy had damaged his view of her all over again.
His stunning dark golden eyes held her strained gaze levelly. ‘I needed you to be honest. You weren’t and I had lost faith in my own judgement. From that point on, everything went haywire—’
‘You…went haywire,’ Hilary slotted in unhappily. ‘But I’m not holding that against you. It’s not a hanging offence if you don’t want a baby you didn’t plan to have with me—’
‘I do want our baby very much. But I was afraid that you were taking me for another ride,’ Roel breathed with suppressed savagery. ‘I’ve been at war with myself ever since. Although I was determined to hang onto both of you I hated the idea that you might stay with me solely because you were expecting my child. Does that sound crazy to you?’
‘No…I felt the same way,’ she muttered ruefully.
‘I was trying so hard to stay in control that I went off the rails…’ Roel spread lean brown hands in a gesture that denoted honest remorse, dark colour accentuating his hard, handsome features. ‘I ended up accusing you of things I didn’t even believe. I knew the baby was mine but I didn’t want you to suspect that you had hurt me again, so I decided to hurt first.’
In receipt of that surprising admission, Hilary listened with even greater concentration. She had hurt him? Had he really said those words?
‘I’ve been fighting what I feel for you ever since and I can’t do it any more,’ Roel confided hoarsely. ‘I’ve been trying to work up a resistance to you—’
‘I’m not a disease…’ Hilary whispered.
‘Not seeing you was the only thing that worked. Then you came down in that kimono thing for breakfast and…I realised I was failing badly in the resistance stakes—’
‘You were offensive—’
‘I’m sorry. I was angry with myself, not with you. I was furious that I could not control my desire for you. I took refuge in sarcasm. It’s an unfortunate defence mechanism.’
‘It was the last straw—’
‘It won’t happen again,’ Roel intoned urgently. ‘I’m new at all this and it’s not easy. Do you think you could give me another chance?’
Her eyes misted over and she shook her head, too worked up to manage a verbal negative.
Roel reached for her clenched hands. ‘Ple
ase…’
Again she shook her head. ‘I don’t want a guy who’s just making the best of things with me,’ she confided on the back of a sob. ‘Or a husband who thinks I’m so much of a second-class citizen he has to fight even fancying me—’
‘It’s not like that. If it were only sex, I wouldn’t have messed up to this extent. I’m at home with sex…it’s all this other stuff I’m useless with. Don’t you realise how much you mean to me?’ Roel held fast to her hands, brilliant dark eyes pinned to her with fierce appeal. ‘You said it in Sardinia. You said I was perfectly happy living in your fantasy fairytale marriage. You were right…in fact I have never been happier.’
Hilary was so shaken by that admission she gaped at him.
‘So possibly you can imagine how I felt when the fairy tale turned out to be a fantasy. I had thought you loved me. I had learned to like that idea—’
‘Really?’ Her voice came out all squeaky.
‘I fell in love with you. But I’ve never been in love before and, unfortunately, I didn’t recognise what was wrong with me—’
‘What was right with you,’ Hilary corrected with helpless stress, hanging eagerly on his every word.
‘Well, it didn’t feel right at the start,’ Roel asserted feelingly. ‘You were coming between me and work…’
‘Oh, dear…’ she said chokily. ‘Do I really?’
Roel looked very grave. ‘Sometimes my mind wanders to you even in important meetings.’
‘That’s more than I ever hoped for.’ Unashamed tears in her eyes, Hilary slid her arms up round his neck. ‘I love you too. I love you so much and I’m going to make you very, very happy.’
He crushed her into an emotional embrace that spoke far louder than any words could have done. For a long time they just stood there wrapped tight in each other’s arms, each of them savouring that closeness that they had both feared was gone for ever.
‘You make me feel good, amata mia,’ he muttered a shade gruffly.
‘You see—loving me is not all bad news,’ she said warmly.
‘It is when you keep on disappearing and threatening to leave me,’ Roel disagreed.
‘I won’t ever disappear again and I will never—no matter how mad you make me—threaten to leave you again,’ she promised solemnly.
He bent his handsome dark head and stole a single, almost unbearably tender kiss that made her entire being light up with loving feelings. His lustrous golden eyes clung to her upturned face. ‘I think on some level I knew four years ago that you could be very dangerous to the single lifestyle I cherished, cara mia.’
‘I was a bit immature for you then. But I did fall for you the first time I saw you.’
‘I never admitted it even to myself but I was very strongly attracted to you. That’s why I kept on coming back to the salon where you worked.’ He kissed her again and her eyes slid dreamily shut. ‘Once we’d been through that wedding ceremony, though, I couldn’t trust myself anywhere near you—’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. Marrying you put you off limits but I’ve been carrying your photograph in my wallet for four years,’ Roel murmured ruefully.
Big grey eyes opened wide to take full appreciative note of his discomfiture. She glowed with pleasure.
His lean, intelligent face tender, he looked down at her with immense appreciation. ‘I’d love to see you wearing a wedding dress for me. We need to make more of the occasion. We should renew our vows and have our marriage blessed.’
‘I’d love that…’ she muttered, touched to the heart. ‘But you’ll have to wait until after the baby’s born.’
‘Nonsense,’ Roel contradicted without hesitation.
Eleven months later, Hilary and Roel renewed their vows in the atmospheric little chapel only a mile from the Castello Sabatino.
Hilary carried yellow roses and wore a beautiful boned brocade bodice teamed with a frothy skirt. The happy couple only had eyes for each other. A superb meal and a lively party followed the ceremony. Her two closest friends, Pippa and Tabby, attended with their husbands, Andreo and Christien. Paul and Anya Correro shared the top table, for over the past year Anya and Hilary had forged as good a friendship as their respective husbands now enjoyed. Her sister, Emma, was also present. The guest of honour was indisputably Pietro, the smallest and newest member of the Sabatino family. But being barely three months old and quite unimpressed by the festivities, he slept through most of the day.
Later that evening, Hilary settled her baby into his cot in the beautiful nursery, which she had had great fun furnishing for his occupation. Her son had his father’s black hair and an adorable smile that ensured he got loads of attention. In that she reckoned he was rather like his father as well.
She found it hard to credit that she and Roel had almost reached their first unofficial anniversary and she smiled to herself, relishing her own sense of security and contentment. They spent a lot of time at the castello where the slower pace of life was more relaxing. Roel had started travelling less during her pregnancy and he spoilt her like mad.
‘Gorgeous…’ Roel pronounced huskily from several feet away.
Hilary bestowed a proud look upon their sleeping son. ‘I know he’s ours but he really is a good-looking baby, isn’t he?’
Roel closed his arms slowly round his wife and turned her to face him. ‘It wasn’t Pietro I was referring to, amata mia.’
‘No?’ Looking up into his darkly handsome features and the sensual appreciation in his golden eyes, she felt her heartbeat quicken and her mouth ran dry.
‘You looked incredibly beautiful today. I was so proud that you are my wife.’ His dark, deep drawl exuded unashamed satisfaction. ‘Do you realise that this is the equivalent of the wedding night we never had?’
Her knees felt weak and she leant up against him, shamelessly angling for the intoxicating heat of his mouth on hers. With a sexy groan of masculine compliance he kissed her before he carried her down the corridor into their bedroom.
‘Still love me?’ she whispered, breathless with excitement.
His charismatic smile flashed over her with the special warmth that was hers alone. ‘I love you more every day.’
Joy in her heart, she matched those loving words and, lacing her arms round him, she drew him down to her.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-1459-4
Copyright © 2008 Harlequin Books S.A.
The publisher acknowledges the copyright holders of the individual works as follows:
The Frenchman’s Love-Child
Copyright © 2003 Lynne Graham
The Italian Boss’s Mistress
Copyright © 2003 Lynne Graham
The Banker’s Convenient Wife
Copyright © 2004 Lynne Graham
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