by Lynne Graham
Sergio, she learned, was the owner of a giant yacht called Diva Queen and he had thrown a stag party on board for his friend, Leonidas Pallis, the Greek billionaire. An exotic dancer talked of a ‘non-stop orgy on the high seas.’ Kathy studied the grainy photo of Sergio, shirt hanging open, engaging in dirty dancing with a pneumatic semi-naked blonde. Even drunk and carousing he still looked gorgeous and she swallowed hard. He really did like blondes, she thought dully. He also looked as if he was having fun. No doubt it beat the hell out of chess.
This was not a guy any woman would choose to have an unplanned baby with, Kathy acknowledged heavily. Yet, how could she fault him when he had already accepted responsibility and was ready to help her financially? At no stage had he told her how he actually felt about the prospect of becoming a father and now she realised that he didn’t need to tell her when his behaviour spoke so clearly for him. He was trying to ship her off to France to live under an assumed name where their paths would only cross at his instigation. And Sergio’s riotous partying was making headlines round the world, while prompting an anonymous source to admit surprise at the sheer scale of his recent bad-boy activities.
Kathy believed that Sergio was reacting to the situation he had found himself in. He didn’t want to be a father and he was even less happy that the mother of his child was a convicted thief. Those were the unlovely facts and it was time she learned to live with them and matched his independence. A good first move would be sorting out her immediate future on her own, for at this stage of her pregnancy there was no need for Sergio to be involved. In any case, a cooling-off period would probably do them both the world of good, she reflected painfully. She needed time and space to make her mind up about what she wanted to do after the baby was born. Hanging around in the hope that Sergio Torrente would somehow provide an answer for all her doubts and fears was a sure path to disappointment.
That evening she ate with Bridget at her apartment and outlined her intentions. ‘I’ll have to leave London. If I stop working at the café I won’t be able to make my rent,’ she confided ruefully. ‘And I don’t want to depend on Sergio for help.’
‘Why not?’
Kathy dug into her tote bag and passed the newspaper across the table.
Bridget perused the article, raised her brows and set it aside without comment. ‘If you don’t mind kids and cooking, you can go to my god-daughter in Devon,’ she said abruptly.
‘Your god-daughter?’ Kathy repeated with a frown. ‘The estate agent?’
‘Nola’s energetic and practical just like you. You’ll like each other. Her husband’s a journalist and hardly ever at home. She’s heavily pregnant with her fourth child and desperate for help,’ the other woman said. ‘Her nanny got married, and in the past two months two au pairs have come and gone. The first was so homesick she couldn’t stop crying and the second quit because the house was too far out of town. What do you think?’
‘I’ll consider any option,’ Kathy answered. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
KATHY had just walked into the estate agency where Nola worked when the first pain hit.
With a muffled gasp, she clutched the edge of a desk to steady herself. The fear that engulfed her was much worse than the slight cramping sensation that gripped her lower abdomen.
‘What’s wrong?’ Nola demanded, breaking off her conversation with another employee.
‘I think the baby’s coming!’ Kathy whispered shakily, white as the wall behind her. ‘But it’s too soon.’
Nola Ross, a sensible brown-eyed blonde in her thirties, pressed Kathy down into a chair. ‘Breathe in and out slowly. It may just be a Braxton-Hicks contraction.’
But the pains kept on coming and the two women decided that Kathy should go to the local hospital. There, Kathy insisted that Nola went back to the agency because she knew that the other woman had clients to meet. The doctor gave Kathy medication in an effort to stop the contractions and made arrangements to have her transferred to a facility with a neonatal unit. By that stage several hours had passed. As there was no bed free, she was kept on a trolley while she waited for the transportation to arrive.
Lying there, Kathy prayed and struggled to keep panic at bay. She was only thirty-five weeks pregnant and knew that her little girl would be at risk if she was born too early. The past seven months seemed to run on fast forward through Kathy’s mind. She had not worked as Nola’s domestic support for very long. No sooner had Nola had her own baby than her husband had taken off with another woman, plunging the Ross family into chaos. During that testing time, Nola and Kathy had become firm friends. By now Kathy had recovered from her early pregnancy sickness and helped out at the estate agency while Nola was briefly on maternity leave. She’d discovered that she was a whizz at selling houses! It was now three months since Nola had engaged a full-time nanny and hired Kathy as a saleswoman instead. In every way that mattered, Kathy’s move from London to a small market town in Devon had proved an unqualified success.
But now Kathy was fast sinking into a pit of dread and self-blame. Determined to establish a secure base for herself and her child, she had worked hard because a career with prospects was the best possible safety net for a single parent. But had she worked too hard? Stressed too much? Rested too little? Once those preliminary bouts of nausea had melted away, she had felt amazingly healthy. Slowly but surely, her unborn baby had become the most important element of her world. The discovery that she was having a little girl had simply intensified her feelings. It had never once occurred to Kathy that her own body might let her down.
‘Kathy…?’
As she recognised that unforgettable dark-timbred drawl shock flooded Kathy’s taut length. She turned her head on the thin pillow, her apple-green gaze alight with astonishment. Sergio Torrente was poised several feet away just staring at her with sombre dark-as-night eyes.
‘Are you okay?’ he breathed tautly.
‘No…’ She squeezed out the word and it got tangled up in her vocal cords, and the next thing she knew she was sobbing as though her heart would break. In recent months, rigid self-discipline had prevented her from giving way too often to unproductive thoughts. His actual presence, however, was much more challenging at a moment when her defences were down and her emotions were out of her control. ‘Go a-away!’ she told him chokily.
In answer, Sergio made an unexpected move that had all the hallmarks of spontaneity. He smoothed her tangled hair off her damp brow and gripped her trembling hand in his. ‘I can’t leave you alone. Don’t ask me to do that again.’
Kathy made use of the hanky he had produced for her use. ‘How did you find out I was here?’
‘Right now that’s not important. I’ve already talked to the doctor. No doubt the staff has done their best, but you are lying unattended on a trolley in a corridor,’ Sergio murmured in a wrathful undertone. ‘That is not an acceptable level of care.’
‘It’s a small hospital and there’s nothing more they can do for me at present,’ Kathy mumbled unsteadily.
His hold on her fingers tightened. ‘I have an air ambulance on its way and an obstetrician waiting to take charge. Please let me help.’
Kathy did not even have to think about how to respond to that offer, because in terms of treatment it was superior to anything else immediately available to her. Her spirits also received an immediate boost from the obvious fact that he placed as much importance on the safe birth of their child as she did. ‘All right.’
His lean, darkly handsome features were tense and he made no attempt to hide his surprise. ‘I thought you’d make me sweat through every possible argument.’
‘All I care about is what’s best for my baby,’ Kathy admitted tightly. ‘At this moment our differences don’t matter.’
Everything moved very quickly after that. Attended by paramedics, she was stretchered onto the air ambulance. For the first time in months, she found herself actually worrying about what she looked l
ike and she couldn’t get over how silly and superficial she was being. How could she waste energy worrying that her eyelids and her nose might be pink and swollen? Or wondering if her large tummy equalled Mount Everest while she was lying flat? At best, she knew she had to look tired and tousled like most heavily pregnant women after a more than usually trying day. Even Sergio was a touch less perfect than usual, she reasoned in desperation. He had loosened his silk tie, dishevelled his black hair with impatient fingers and a blue-black shadow of stubble was beginning to define his stubborn jaw line and strong, sensual mouth. But he still looked totally amazing to her.
Just then he frowned with concern, visually questioning her lingering appraisal.
Cheeks reddening, Kathy shook her head to indicate that there was nothing wrong and shut her eyes tight. But the image of the guy she loved stayed with her. She loved him to bits, hated his guts for all sorts of reasons, as well, but she was still as possessed by a bone-deep longing for him as a starving woman sighting life-giving food. She knew he was bad for her, knew too big a dose of him was dangerous, but he was in her blood and in her mind and, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake free of his influence over her.
In what seemed to her a remarkably short space of time, and with impressive efficiency, she was transported to the opulent comfort of a private London hospital. There she was given an ultrasound scan.
‘I’d like to stay,’ Sergio said flatly.
An objection was brimming on her lips and a glimpse of his taut profile warned her that that was exactly the response he expected from her. She swallowed back her protest because he was doing everything within his power to help and excluding him yet again seemed unfair. As she steeled herself to have her tummy exposed another thought occurred to her and she tugged at the sleeve of his jacket to get his attention.
Sergio angled his arrogant dark head down to her.
‘We’re having a girl,’ she whispered.
Fine ebony brows drawing together, Sergio lifted his head and stared at her before comprehension sank in. Suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, a smile curved his wide sculpted mouth.
When the procedure commenced, she realised that she need not have worried about baring her swollen belly because Sergio’s fascination was wholly reserved for the images on screen. A shot of the baby’s face made him marvel out loud in Italian and reach for her hand. ‘Awesome,’ he finally murmured in roughened English. ‘She is awesome.’
Tears dampened her eyes and she blinked them back fiercely. Some tests were carried out and a foetal monitor was attached to her, before she was finally slotted into bed in a luxurious private room. The obstetrician soothed her worst fears by telling her that babies born after the thirty-fourth week of gestation had a high rate of survival and less chance of suffering long-term complications. Even so, there were no guarantees and the longer her baby stayed in the womb the healthier she was likely to be. With Kathy still at risk of going into labour, the treatment plan was bed-rest and hydration.
Minutes after leaving with the obstetrician, Sergio reappeared.
‘I thought you’d gone,’ Kathy commented.
‘Per meraviglia…I hope that’s a joke.’ Astute dark-as-night eyes rested on her. ‘But it’s not a joke, is it?’
Kathy sidestepped that issue, for she had not intended to annoy him. ‘Well, now that we’re on our own, at last you can tell me how long you’ve known where I was living.’
‘I found out today at the same time as I heard you had been hospitalised.’ Lean bronzed features bleak, Sergio studied her from the foot of the bed. ‘I was last in the chain. Nola—whoever she is—contacted Bridget Kirk, who decided to pass the news on to Renzo Catallone.’
‘Bridget told Renzo?’ Her brows pleated in surprise. ‘I didn’t even know they’d met.’
‘They’ve met all right. Evidently your friend is good at keeping secrets. When I spoke to her months ago, she swore that she had no idea where you were.’
Kathy was very much disconcerted. ‘She didn’t tell me you’d contacted her, either.’
‘Renzo kept in touch with her and finally it paid off. But he also believed that she didn’t know where you had gone.’
‘I’m surprised that Bridget chose to tell Renzo.’
‘Are you? With you on the brink of giving birth or possibly even losing my child, it was time to stop playing games.’
Kathy registered the cold core of his anger. The very fact that he was struggling to hide it, that his diamond-hard façade was no longer impregnable, warned her how deep his hostility had gone. ‘Bridget was only respecting my wishes and trying to protect me—’
‘From me?’ Sergio sent her an almost raw glance and strode over to the window, his broad shoulders radiating his ferocious tension, before he swung back to look at her. ‘Do I deserve that? Did I frighten you in any way?’
‘No,’ Kathy conceded.
‘Perhaps something I did upset you…’
The verdant green eyes resting on him veiled. ‘You’re fishing.’
‘I need to know. I don’t want you pulling another vanishing act,’ Sergio traded in a direct challenge.
Kathy contemplated the swollen mound of her tummy and opted for honesty. ‘You asked for it.’
The silence fairly leapt and jumped and throbbed.
‘Are you saying what I think you might be saying?’ Sergio was studying her in disbelief. ‘Was that a reference to the stag cruise I organised for Leonidas Pallis? That event was blown up out of all proportion by the press. But was that what upset you?’
‘Lose the word, upset,’ Kathy advised, a shade tart in tone.
His brilliant dark eyes shimmering scorching gold, Sergio spread lean brown hands in a gesture that expressed his incredulity. ‘You were so angry about the cruise that you took off and put me through more than seven months of hell?’
‘Angry isn’t the right word, either—’
‘How about…revenge?’
‘I suppose there was a degree of that, although I didn’t see it at the time,’ Kathy conceded ruefully.
Sergio bit out a humourless laugh.
‘I think I’d just had enough of you. I didn’t want to be shipped off to France,’ Kathy confided. ‘There I was, throwing up every day and so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open at work and you were partying—’
‘I can explain—’
‘Don’t waste your time. In any case you don’t owe me any explanations,’ Kathy fielded with resolute brightness. ‘It’s simple—I needed to get on with my life just the same as you were.’
Sergio dealt her a measuring appraisal. ‘You don’t just get mad, you get even, delizia mia.’
Kathy experienced a very strong desire to get out of bed and slap him for his arrogance. ‘It’s not all about you—why do you think everything is about you? Stop trying to twist what I said into a backhanded compliment! I had no good reason to stay in London.’
Lean, darkly handsome face taut, Sergio stared down at her with brooding force. ‘You can’t afford to get mad with me at present. You’re supposed to stay calm and avoid all stress.’
In a frustrated movement, Kathy pushed her copper hair off her brow. ‘Then rewind my life and wipe the bit where we met!’
‘Even if I could I would not,’ Sergio admitted without hesitation. ‘I want that little girl. I also want you.’
Kathy was hugely unimpressed by that claim. Her green eyes glinted, her full rose-pink mouth curled with disdain. She was very tempted to tell him that the boat had not only sailed, but also sunk with all hands on board. He hadn’t wanted her enough when it had mattered. He hadn’t wanted her enough when she had been as available as a free sample. She said nothing, though, for telling him that would only make her sound sad.
‘And whatever it takes, I intend to have you,’ Sergio delivered in the same even tone.
Kathy blinked, for she was not quite sure she had heard that. Her curling lashes lifted high. She collided with the hot gold c
hallenge of his gaze and it was like being hauled down into a whirlpool of heat and hunger. He made no attempt to hide the desire etched on his lean strong face and sheer shock paralysed her to the bed.
‘Okay. Glad we understand each other at last, delizia mia,’ Sergio murmured smooth as silk as he pressed the bell on the wall. ‘I asked for a meal to be brought and I’d like you to try to eat something.’
But when the meal arrived, Kathy was unable to oblige for she had no appetite at all. Sergio took a seat at the far end of the room and unfurled a notebook PC with a disturbing air of permanency, while she lay on the side she had been told to lie on and fretted. Why was it that every time she got her life back on track something happened to derail it again? She reminded herself that she had played a very active part in this particular derailment.
Frustration filled her at the awareness that the dependency she had been so determined to avoid was now being forced on her. Lying in bed in London wasn’t going to pay her bills. If her baby was born early and in need of specialist care, she would be even more dependent on Sergio’s goodwill and support to survive. She had planned to work right up to the last minute. How long would she be tied to London? For how long could she expect Nola to hold her job open? What about her rent? Her possessions?
‘Why are you frowning?’ Sergio enquired lazily.
‘Promise me that if I’m stuck in here for weeks, you’ll collect my belongings and keep them safe for me,’ Kathy urged abruptly.
With a wondering shake of his handsome dark head, Sergio sprang upright and strolled with lithe grace towards the bed. ‘What could possibly make you worry about something like that?’
‘I’m not fit enough to take care of it myself and everything I own is at Nola’s.’
‘But why on earth would you imagine that it could become a problem?’