The miserable grey day faded into gathering nightfall, and she drooped around the house, ignoring all phone calls and making sure to switch off her cellphone—because Alessandro would phone again, and she just needed time without hearing his voice.
She hadn’t expected to see him. Not when he should have been thousands of miles away. And she was lying on the sofa in the sitting room, nursing the start of a headache, when she felt rather than heard his sudden presence in the room.
He was standing in the doorway and she wondered how long he had been there, looking at her with the strangest expression on his face. The least he could have done was announce his presence by making some noise!
Megan scrambled into a sitting position, the onset of her headache forgotten as she absorbed the deeply sexy man around whom she now felt she had spent years orbiting, like a lost little planet trying to fight a gravitational pull that was too powerful for her.
‘Wha…what are you doing back here?’
Alessandro looked at her white stricken face and knew that he had been right to have dropped everything and returned.
‘You said that you wanted to talk.’
‘You flew back here because I said that we needed to talk?’
Alessandro was quick to spot the fact that she had replaced wanted with needed.
‘I’m glad,’ he asserted, moving towards her.
Before he had left for New York she had been all over him. Now she was watching him cautiously, and he felt a film of perspiration break out over his body. He didn’t know what had engineered this change but time apart, not to mention long, hellish hours on the Red-Eye, had put everything into perspective.
‘Because I want to talk too.’ He swung his long body onto the sofa with her but maintained a certain distance, because he didn’t want to be distracted by the proximity of her body. She was looking at him, holding her breath, and Alessandro wondered why it had taken him so long to wake up to the obvious. ‘I’ve been a fool,’ he muttered in a low, raw voice, which meant that she had to lean towards him just to catch what he was saying. ‘We should never have been apart.’
‘You had meetings in New York….’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ he said, waving aside her interruption with an impatient gesture that was so eloquently him. ‘I mean…’ There was a confusing jumble of words inside him, and a panicky desperation for her to hear them. ‘Seven years ago…I made a mistake…’
‘You did?’
‘I was a young, ambitious fool.’ He was facing up to a stark truth which he had known from the very first minute she had walked out of his digs at the university, and it felt good to get it off his chest. ‘I thought I knew what I wanted.’
‘You were never a fool. Maybe young and ambitious, but never a fool.’
‘I was a fool to let you walk away from me.’ His dark, mesmeric eyes held hers, and Megan felt her heart swoop. This was hardly the conversation she had envisaged, but she was liking it, and hungry to discover where it would lead.
‘I thought…’
Alessandro paused, travelling back to a time when he had figured he knew all the answers. From the fluctuations and vagaries of living hand to mouth he would have a life over which he could exercise control—a life which would leave no room for the unpredictable. Megan had been unpredictable. That had been his plan.
‘I thought…’ He refocused on her. ‘I thought that you weren’t what I needed. I…I grew up seeing my parents struggle with poverty. It was their constant companion. I was determined never to find myself caught in the same trap, and I thought that the only way to avoid it was to accumulate enough power and wealth to make me invincible. Only then could I be happy. I was wrong. Power and wealth don’t bring happiness, and the idea of being in control of every aspect of your life is an illusion. And thank God for that. The thing is, I forgot the one thing I should have had branded in my head from my parents. They might have been broke but they were happy. You were always there, Megan, at the back of my mind and in my heart, and now…’
He shook his head, as if mystified by the inaccurate assumptions he had made. ‘I can’t live without you,’ he told her simply. ‘I tried to wrap it all up in something that made sense and I didn’t stop to think that when it comes to you—’ this time he smiled crookedly ‘—it’s all about winging it. It’s not supposed to make sense.’ He took her fingers in his hand and idly played with them. ‘I know you want to talk about us…maybe tell me that you’re having second thoughts about this situation…’
He didn’t dare say what else he had thought—that maybe she might want to tell him that he had messed her around just a little too much, that living with him had perhaps opened up her eyes to the fact that she valued her freedom more than she valued his continual presence in her life as a man who refused to commit any further than he thought strictly necessary. Maybe—and this had been the darkest fear of all—she had wanted to tell him that she would rather work on the loser who would probably stick a ring on her finger after the second date than stay around for the man who had resolutely refused to.
Megan was guiltily aware that when it came to second-guessing her motivations he wasn’t precisely on cue, but that confession about his childhood had left her breathless. She had only ever had snippets of information about his background, and in a strange way she felt as though a barrier had been breached.
‘I don’t want to lose you,’ Alessandro told her urgently. ‘You think I’m a bad bet, but I’m not. I’m…’ A good bet? Having pretty much told her that he only wanted her around so that he could get her out of his system? Was there a brain cell in his head? ‘I’m in love with you, and you can’t even think of leaving me.’
‘You’re in love with me?’
‘I think I always have been.’
‘You’ve never, ever said…’ Megan was trembling as she looked at his starkly vulnerable face. She felt a lifetime of love swell inside her, and she touched his cheek as if discovering it for the first time.
‘Like I said, I was a fool.’ He trapped her hand in his and held it tightly. ‘I never stopped to ask myself how it was that work became secondary the minute you appeared on the scene. You make me lose focus.’
‘And that’s a good thing?’ Megan asked tremulously.
‘It’s a very good thing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever known.’
‘Are you sure?’
The look he gave her answered that question, and she smiled, her face lit up with joy.
‘Because I love you too. I never stopped. Why do you think I agreed to move in with you? It went against reason, but you make me feel…helpless….’
‘And that’s just the way I like it,’ Alessandro told her with immense satisfaction. There was a lot more that he wanted to tell her, and he knew that he would, in time. For the moment he was content to revel in the perfection of the moment. ‘But I’d like it even more if you tell me now that you’ll be my wife.’
‘Yes!’ She drew his head towards her and kissed him, and only when she at last opened her eyes once again did she remember why she had needed to talk to him. How on earth could she have forgotten something that had consumed her for the past three days?
‘I’m so happy,’ she whispered. ‘Because…’
‘Because…?’ Oh, yes, she wanted to have a talk. But Alessandro knew himself to be unassailable. ‘You told me on the phone that you wanted to talk to me…?’
‘I do…and brace yourself for a bit of a shock…You’re going to be a father….’
‘I still think that you tricked me when you got me catching the first flight from New York because you wanted to talk,’ Alessandro told her several months later, as he gazed at her lying next to him in the bed, with their beautiful baby daughter between them. ‘You had me worried sick that I might be losing you, and here I am. Not only do I have you, my darling, but I have this miracle lying between us.’
Isabella, whose name they had promptly shortened to Bella, caught his finge
r and instantly drew it to her mouth.
‘If only I was that clever. I would have pulled that trick a lot earlier.’ Megan smiled.
It was nearly a year now, and each day was better than the one before. They still lived in the house they had bought in leafy London, and she had continued working right up to the last possible moment—even though he had fussed and fretted like a mother hen, and would have wrapped her in cotton wool for the duration of her pregnancy if he could have. She had stood her ground—something which she now did, safe in the knowledge that it was just one of the things he loved about her. Even more of a revelation had been his admission that he loved her when she was argumentative and stubborn, and he had also told her that if she wasn’t possessive with him then he might just be inclined to feel unloved.
So now Megan was the person she was, never hiding anything of herself or editing her personality in any way.
She had even begun buying him the occasional wild item of clothing—and he, a further miracle, had actually worn a few.
‘You could, of course, do it again.’ He reached across to stroke her face, his dark eyes tender. ‘I think it’s time I came home and you surprised me with the news that there’s another little Bella on the way…’
‘Because you’re still aiming for that football team…?’
He grinned at her, and they laughed, and Bella’s eyes flew open so that she could deliver a glaring reprimand to them both for waking her up.
A private joke. They shared lots of those now, but this one was the dearest held. For Robbie and Victoria had been married around the same time as they had, and they had been the ones to move out to the country, where Victoria had taken up a much less stressed job working for a small firm of lawyers, spending lots of time with Dominic. Right now she was pregnant, with a brother or sister for Dominic, and Robbie had been rash enough to bet that he would be coaching his own personal football team before Alessandro. Something which Megan and Victoria had found very amusing, considering they would be the ones giving birth to those amazing prodigies-to-be.
‘I would never dare to suggest such a thing, my darling…’ He leant across to kiss her on the lips—a feathery kiss that made her tummy flutter.
‘But you’re crazy enough to.’
Yes, he thought. This was his life and he loved it. Crazy, in the end, made sense.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-4800-1
THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE’S VIRGIN MISTRESS
First North American Publication 2010.
Copyright © 2009 by Cathy Williams.
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