by Lynne Graham
Gianni had wanted a no-strings-attached affair, but Milly had wanted and needed something much deeper. Within the first week, she had recognised the disturbing intensity of her own emotional response to him. And the discovery that one kiss could set a bushfire burning inside her had been no more welcome.
Milly had tried to back off and protect herself by making loads of rules to ensure that she never emulated poor Lisa with Stevie. No man was going to turn her into a puppet on a string! So, if Gianni hadn’t called far enough in advance, she’d always been busy. If Gianni had just turned up without calling, she’d always been on the way out of the door to a pressing engagement. If Gianni had been late, she’d gone out and stayed out. And she had never, ever called him.
But then Gianni had gone over to New York for three weeks, and her whole world had turned gloomy grey. She’d begun marking off days on the calendar, hanging over the phone anxiously, and driving herself crazy with the suspicion that he might have other women in his life.
‘Have you?’ Milly had asked baldly, the first time she’d seen him again.
‘Of course I have,’ Gianni admitted without hesitation. ‘I travel a great deal. Anything else would be impractical.’
Feeling as if she had been slugged by a sack of coal, Milly cleared her throat. ‘But if we have an affair, that would change…wouldn’t it?’ she almost whispered.
Gianni lifted one broad shoulder in an infinitesimal shrug, too slick an operator to be entrapped by a verbal response.
But Milly had got her answer in that silence. And, having naively assumed that even Gianni would concede that intimacy should be accompanied by total fidelity, she was shocked and furious. ‘All I can say is, thank heaven I found this out before I slept with you!’ she slung as she rose from her seat and stalked out of the restaurant.
‘I don’t like public scenes. Nor do I admire jealous, possessive women,’ Gianni imparted chillingly, outside on the pavement.
‘Then what are you doing with me?’ Milly demanded. ‘I’m jealous and I’m very possessive, so get out of my life now and don’t come back!’
Gianni stayed away another full month.
Milly lost a stone in weight, but she didn’t wait by the phone; she didn’t ever expect to see him again. But Gianni was waiting for her to come home one evening when she finished her supermarket shift.
One look and she was sick with simultaneous nerves and sheer, undiluted joy. Gianni took her back to his Park Lane apartment. He dropped the news that she no longer had competition. She asked him how she could be sure of that. Gianni could freely admit that he didn’t trust anybody, but, faced with her lack of faith in him, he was outraged. They almost had another fight.
She was in tears, and then he kissed her—a standard Gianni response when things got too emotional. And the wild passion just blazed up so powerfully inside her she finally surrendered. He was astonished when he realised he was her first lover.
Making love with Gianni was glorious; staying for breakfast feeling totally superfluous while he made calls and read stockmarket reports was something less than glorious.
So Milly drew up a new set of rules. No staying overnight. No asking when she would see him again. Always saying goodbye with a breezy smile. By then, she knew she was in love with him, but she was well aware that he didn’t love her. He found her good company. She made him laugh. He couldn’t get enough of her in bed. But never once did he do or say anything that gave her any hope that their affair might last.
As part of her college course that year Milly had to spend two months gaining practical experience of working in a large garden or park. She was allotted a place on a big private estate far from London. When she informed Gianni that she would be going away, they had a blistering row.
‘How the hell am I supposed to see you up there?’ he demanded incredulously.
‘You’re out of the country at least two weeks out of every four,’ she reminded him.
‘Porca miseria…you can’t make a comparison like that!’
‘Don’t say what you’re dying to say,’ she warned him tautly. ‘It’ll make me very angry.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
So she said it for him. ‘You think your life and your business empire are one hundred times more important than anything in mine.’
‘Obviously they are,’ Gianni stated without flinching. ‘And, while we’re on the subject, I can think of a thousand more suitable career choices than a peculiar desire to go grubbing about in the dirt of somebody else’s garden!’
‘It’s what I want to do. It’s what I’ll be doing a long, long time after you’re gone. So really, in every way, it has to take precedence,’ Milly retorted shakily.
‘Over me?’ Gianni breathed chillingly. ‘Haven’t I offered to find you a decent job?’
‘I’m happy with the career choice I’m training for.’
‘Fine. Just don’t expect me to follow you north to the rural wastes!’
‘I never did expect you to. You’re far too used to people doing the running for you. You never, ever put yourself out for anybody,’ Milly pointed out with quiet dignity. ‘So that’s that, then. We’re at the end of the road.’
‘Spare me the clichés at least,’ Gianni ground out as she walked straight-backed to the door. ‘Tell me, am I being dumped again?’
Milly thought about it, and nodded.
‘This is a wind-up,’ Gianni drawled in icy condemnation. ‘This is a power-play.’
‘Goodbye,’ she said gruffly.
He did come up north. His limo got bogged down in a country lane. He was fit to be tied when he ended up lodged in a very small and far from luxurious hotel. And he was furious when she wouldn’t let him come to the estate to pick her up for the weekend. He didn’t appreciate being told that she didn’t want to shock the head gardener and his wife, who were letting her stay in their guest-room. By the time she had finished explaining that a humble student trainee couldn’t have a very rich, flash older boyfriend without her reputation taking a nosedive, and the all too human effect that might have on her receiving a fair assessment of her work, Gianni was not in a very good mood.
‘So I’ll buy you a big garden of your own,’ he announced, in the dark of the night.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Then I’ll buy the garden for myself. I’ll pay you to look after it for me!’
‘You’re embarrassing me,’ she groaned. ‘Stop living in fantasy land.’
‘When I’ve got free time, I’d like you to be available occasionally.’
‘I know how that feels. You’re away much more than I am,’ she complained sleepily, looking forward to spending two entire nights with him, snuggling up to him with a euphoric smile in the darkness.
‘Do you think the head gardener and his wife would be shocked if I delivered you back strangled?’ Gianni mused reflectively. ‘What am I doing here in this lousy dump with you?’
Sex, she reflected. Sex and only sex—and it was an ongoing source of amazement to her that her body could possibly have such a hold on him. It was a perfectly ordinary body. Slender, well-honed, but far from being centrefold material. Yet he kept on coming back to her. She was developing expectations on that basis. That worried her terribly. After all, some day soon he would lose interest and vanish for good.
He came up north three more weekends. She was so happy she couldn’t hide it from him. It was getting harder and harder to obey her own rules. It was as if he knew her rules and worked overtime to try and get her to compromise them. That next summer he was away a lot, and she pined, went off her food, couldn’t sleep. He gave her a mobile phone and she accepted it, and used it much more than she felt she should.
Then they had their six-month anniversary, and she was stupid enough to mention it. He frowned. ‘That long?’ he questioned with brooding coolness, and went silent on her for the rest of the evening.
He didn’t call her for a week after that. So she ca
lled him in a temper and told him he was history and that she was going to find a man who would treat her with the respect she deserved.
‘Tell him in advance how demanding you are,’ Gianni advised helpfully. ‘That you have a very hot temper, a habit of saying things you don’t mean and a stubborn streak a mile wide.’
‘I’m finished with you—’
‘I’ll pick you up for dinner at eight, and if you’re not there, I’m not waiting. It’s time to join the grown-ups and stop playing hard to get.’
Just before she started back at college, she suffered what appeared to be a really bad bout of tonsillitis, and instead of getting better she lost her energy and her appetite. Gianni was in South America. She told him that she thought she had the flu and soldiered on, exhausted, to her classes and her part-time job. By the time Gianni flew back to London she was so weak that walking from the bed to the door was enough to reduce her to a perspiring wreck.
Gianni was furious with her. He got another doctor. Acute glandular fever was diagnosed. She was told she would have to rest for weeks. She wouldn’t be fit for her classes or for any other form of work—and by the way, the doctor added, physical intimacy was out for the foreseeable future too. That quickly, her whole world fell apart. At the time she just could not comprehend why Gianni, threatened by weeks of celibacy, should still seem so incredibly supportive.
Forty-eight hours later, she was flown to Paris in Gianni’s private jet and installed in a fabulous townhouse with a garden. When she was least able to oppose him Gianni made his move, at supersonic speed.
His every argument had been unanswerable. Who would look after her in London? How could he take care of her from a distance? And she loved Paris, didn’t she? If she couldn’t study and she couldn’t work, she might as well regard her lengthy convalescence as a vacation. And the sad truth was that she was so desperately grateful that Gianni wasn’t abandoning her she didn’t protest that much.
He was really wonderful when she was ill. She learnt that he liked to be needed, and that in constantly asserting her independence she had been missing out on probably the very best side of him. From that time on, Gianni became the love of her life, the centre of her existence. She stopped trying to contain her own feelings. The last barriers came down. She told him she loved him. He froze, but he didn’t back off. The more she told him, the less he froze, and eventually he even began to smile.
And she decided then that maybe if she absolutely showered him in love and trust and affection, if she gave and gave and gave, with complete honesty and generosity, she might break his barriers down too. Her only goal was that he should return her love. So she never did go back to complete her college course.
Gianni became her full-time occupation. He finally got everything the way he wanted. He got to buy her clothes and jewellery, to switch her between the house in Paris and the apartment in New York, according to what best suited his travelling itinerary. She became his mistress full-time without ever acknowledging what she had become. And he was right; she was deliriously happy—right up until the day she discovered she was pregnant.
In the heat of passion, Gianni had on several occasions neglected to take precautions. She knew that. He knew that. But, like so much else, they had never discussed the fact that he had taken that risk.
Yet the evening she broke the news Gianni went into shock, like a teenager who had honestly believed it couldn’t possibly be that easy to get a girl pregnant.
‘You can’t be…’ he said, turning visibly pale beneath his bronzed skin.
‘I am…no doubt about it. No mistake,’ she stressed, getting more and more apprehensive. ‘It was that night we—’
‘Let’s not get bogged down in details,’ Gianni interrupted, striding across the room to help himself to a very large brandy.
‘You don’t want to talk about this, do you?’ she muttered tightly.
‘Not right now, no.’ Quick glance at gold watch, apologetic look laced with a hint of near desperation.
‘You’ve got some calls to make?’
‘No—’
‘You have a business meeting at eleven o’clock at night? Well, some celebration this is turning out to be.’
‘Celebration?’ Gianni awarded her a truly stunned appraisal. ‘You’re pregnant and we’re not married and you want to celebrate?’
‘Since you’re the one who’s been playing Russian roulette with my body, maybe you’d like to tell me what end result you expected?’
‘I just didn’t think!’ he ground out, like a caged lion, longing to claw at the bars surrounding him, resisting the urge with visible difficulty.
Yet he thought about everything else…incessantly. He thought rings round her. He planned business manoeuvres in his sleep. He was seriously telling her that he hadn’t once acknowledged the likely consequences of making love without contraception?
‘I’m not having a termination. You might as well know that now,’ she whispered sickly.
‘Madre di Dio…why do you always think you know what’s on my mind when you don’t?’ he slashed back at her rawly. ‘I don’t believe in abortion!’
Only a little of her tension evaporated. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’
‘I’m going out.’
‘I know.’ She closed the door softly, heard the brandy goblet smash and shivered. He was right. So much of the time she did not have one earthly clue what was going on inside him. But that night she believed she did. He might not believe in abortion, but he still didn’t want her to have his baby.
The next development shocked her rigid. Gianni walked out of the Paris apartment that night and vanished into thin air for thirty-six hours. He even switched off his mobile phone—an unheard-of development. His security staff went crazy the next morning, questioning her, checking the hospitals, considering kidnapping. They weren’t able to accept that Gianni should choose to deliberately take himself off without cancelling his appointments.
Milly convinced herself that he had gone to some other woman.
But Gianni reappeared, looking pale and grim as death, hiding behind an enormous bunch of flowers. And she didn’t say a word, behaved as if he had only stepped out an hour earlier. Patently relieved by that low-key reception, Gianni swept her up into his arms and just held her for the first time in his life, so tightly she could barely breathe.
‘You just took me by surprise. My own father…if he was my father,’ he qualified in a roughened undertone. ‘He was abusive. I don’t know how to be a father, but I don’t want to lose you!’
She had never loved Gianni more than she loved him at that moment. It felt like an emotional breakthrough: Gianni trusting her enough to refer to the childhood he never mentioned and actually admitting to self-doubt. Her heart and her hopes soared as high as the sky. Yet, just two short months later, Gianni had almost destroyed her with his lack of his faith…
Coming back to the present to gaze like a wakening sleeper round the library of Heywood House, Milly found that her cheeks were wet with tears. You’ve got to stop this, she warned herself angrily. There is life after Gianni. Three years ago she hadn’t felt able to cope with that challenge. But now she was older, wiser…only still as hopelessly in love with him as she had ever been.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘GIANNI…it’s me,’ Milly announced tautly, her grip so tight on the phone that her knuckles showed white.
‘I’m listening,’ Gianni responded softly.
‘Connor’s asking about you all the time.’ Milly’s troubled eyes were pinned to where her son sat listlessly swinging his feet. ‘When I asked you to leave, I overlooked the fact that he’s lost a whole life too. The last thing he needs right now is for you to vanish as well—’
‘I can be with you in two hours,’ Gianni interposed, smooth as silk, but she sensed the buzz of his satisfaction nonetheless. ‘Why did you wait four days to contact me?’
Milly tensed. ‘I needed some time to myself.’
Before he could ask her what she had decided to do about the marriage question, she finished the call. Then she breathed in very deep to steady herself.
She had lunch with Connor, who could hardly eat for excitement. Leaving him in Barbara’s care, she then took herself off outdoors, keen to be elsewhere when Gianni arrived to spend time with their son.
An afternoon spent energetically digging in the walled kitchen garden which had been abandoned to the forces of nature for a good twenty years proved therapeutic. She was going to marry Gianni. Of course she was. If he married her, he could hardly use her recent past as a weapon against her in any custody battle. As a wife she would be safer. That way, and only that way, could she ensure that Gianni would find it extremely difficult to try and remove their son from her care.
And if she didn’t marry him mightn’t he eventually marry someone else? With sudden violence, Milly slashed a bramble out of her path. Once she would not have believed that possible. Once she would have sworn that Gianni would die single. But that conviction had died when Gianni had stunned her by proposing. Even if it was only for his son’s benefit, Gianni was finally prepared to offer commitment. If Milly turned him down, sooner or later he would end up marrying some other woman.
And that was a development which Milly knew she would not be able to bear. She was possessive. She was very possessive. Currently hating and resenting Gianni to the same degree with which she loved him did not blind Milly to her own vulnerability. To stand by on the sidelines and watch Gianni with another woman would be to tear herself to shreds. After all, she reflected painfully, she already knew what that experience felt like. So there was a lot to be said for choosing to be miserable with Gianni now that she had faced the fact that she would be even more miserable without him.
‘I really love it when you dress up for me like this, cara…’
Milly jerked, froze, and then slowly lifted her golden head. Silhouetted against the fading light of the afternoon, Gianni was poised several feet away, a faint smile on his wide, sensual mouth. His navy cashmere coat hung open to reveal a formal pinstripe suit cut to faithfully follow his powerful frame and his long, long legs. He looked spectacular. Her eyes widened, her mouth ran dry, her heart just lurched.