by Lynne Graham
‘I need to be alone with you. I want you all to myself, cara mia,’ Gianni growled in the circle of her arms.
‘Well, you’re just going to have to wait.’
‘If we’d been able to take a honeymoon, we could have been out of here hours ago!’ Gianni ground out in frustration.
‘Why weren’t we able?’
‘Because we couldn’t have taken Connor abroad with us. He has no documentation right now—’
Milly frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
Gianni sighed. ‘Milly, you slipped right back into your true identity because it was already established. Our son, however, was registered at birth as the child of Faith Jennings. That has to be legally sorted out before he can be issued with a new birth certificate.’
‘My goodness, I never even thought about that!’
‘It’s in hand. Don’t worry about it. But as soon as Christmas is over I have every intention of finding a hot, deserted beach and bringing in the New Year—’
‘With Connor and a bucket and spade?’
‘I’m not listening. Fantasy is all I’ve got right now,’ Gianni muttered raggedly, whisking her deftly behind one of the marble pillars that edged the dance floor and hauling her up to his level again to repossess her soft mouth with hot, driven urgency.
Milly caught fire. ‘Gianni—’
‘You’re like too much champagne in my blood.’ He bowed his arrogant dark head over hers and snatched in a fracturing breath. ‘You push me to the edge. Sometimes I need you so much it hurts.’
Already dizzy with desire, Milly experienced a joyous flare of sheer happiness. Had he noticed what he had said? Not want but need. Gianni, who prided himself on never needing anybody or anything, whose belief in self-sufficiency was legendary, had admitted that he needed her.
And yet a few hours later, when they were finally in the privacy of their own bedroom, surprisingly Gianni was patience personified. He removed her wedding dress with gentle, almost regretful hands. He told her how gorgeous she had looked all day. He made sweet, tender love to every sensitised, shivering inch of her he uncovered. He took his time—oh, yes, he took his time—until she was twisting and begging, lost in incoherent urgency. And when he at last sealed his lean, bronzed body to hers, and possessed her with aching sensuality, it was the most sensational experience they had ever shared.
Two weeks later, Gianni watched Milly turn on the lights on the big Christmas tree she had sited in the drawing room of Heywood House.
She smiled like a happy child when the lights worked first time. But then she’d had plenty of practice, Gianni conceded. This was the third tree she had dressed within as many days. Several shopping trips to Harrods and other well-known retail outlets had yielded a huge collection of ornaments and other necessities. It was a very big house, she had pointed out, in an apparent attempt to convince him that she was just doing what had to be done. But the truth was that Milly adored the festive season, gloried in every single tradition, no matter how naff, and still left out refreshment for Santa Claus as an adult.
‘What do you think?’ she prompted expectantly.
‘Spectacular.’ Gianni looked past the glimmering lights to Milly, her fantastic hair tumbling round her shoulders, eyes bright as sapphires in her beautiful smiling face. ‘Christmas just wasn’t the same without you, cara mia.’
Milly stilled, veiling her eyes, not wanting to seem too conscious of that easy reference to the past. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Like Scrooge, I stopped celebrating it,’ Gianni admitted.
‘Oh, Gianni!’ Milly groaned, troubled by the imagery summoned up by that confession and heading towards him like a homing pigeon.
‘And, like grumpy old Ebenezer, I took particular pleasure in doing it.’
Milly linked her arms tightly round his narrow waist. ‘We’re about to have the most wonderful Christmas ever!’
And it would be, Milly thought with warm confidence. They had spent every hour of the past two weeks together, loving and laughing. She had never been as happy as she was now. She had never known Gianni so relaxed or so content. She loved watching him with Connor, revelling in the rough-housing that little boys enjoy, but she loved him most of all for his acceptance of their son’s occasional tantrums.
In fact, from that morning in Paris Gianni had been fantastic in every possible way. He had changed over their three years apart, she now acknowledged. He was more tolerant, more kind, less volatile, less driven. For Milly, it was deeply ironic that Gianni should be capable of showing her more caring tenderness now than he had shown her before he’d seen her wrestling on a bed with Stefano! And, unfortunately, that presented Milly with a major problem.
Every hour, on the hour, Gianni was proving that he could successfully put that sordid little scene behind him. As long as the subject was never broached, as long as it was left buried. She still couldn’t really understand how he could contrive to achieve that miracle. Could it be because he knew that sexually nothing had really happened that night? Gianni had accepted his brother’s lying explanation in its entirety. That she had been lonely and he had been drunk, that just for a few foolish minutes desire had overwhelmed decent boundaries.
Certainly Gianni had never doubted her guilt. She had been condemned for playing the temptress and punished much more heavily than Stefano. She was still very angry and bitter about that fact. But now she feared the risk she would be taking in challenging Gianni again. She might destroy everything they had recently regained; she might wreck their marriage.
And she still couldn’t prove that she was innocent. To believe her, Gianni would have to accept that Stefano was an out-and-out liar, capable of behaviour that might well have landed him in court in any other circumstances. That was a very tall order. But, even as Milly confronted that truth, she knew that it wasn’t possible for her to remain silent. She would just have to deal with the fall-out when it happened.
That same afternoon, Milly was coiled in Gianni’s arms in front of the log fire in the library, telling him between kisses about the new rose garden she was planning, when a knock on the door interrupted them.
With a groan of annoyance, Gianni settled her into an armchair. Milly closed her eyes sleepily.
‘Wake up, cara mia. We have a visitor.’
Something in Gianni’s flat delivery spooked her. Her drowsy eyes opened very wide in dismay when she focused on the young man hovering in the centre of the magnificent rug. It was Stefano.
CHAPTER TEN
STEFANO had so much strain etched on his taut face he looked a lot older then he was. His hair was shorter now. He was a little too thin. His extrovert ebullience appeared to have deserted him. His dark eyes evaded both Milly’s gaze and Gianni’s.
Milly glanced at Gianni and just winced. The Sicilian side of Gianni’s brooding temperament was in the ascendant. He looked grim as hell, but kind of satisfied too, content that his kid brother should be nervous as a cat in his radius. Milly began to revise her assumption that she had been punished more than Stefano. The two brothers had once been pretty close. Stefano, for all his brash talk and swagger, had been heavily dependent on Gianni’s approval. And Gianni, she now recognised, had cut him loose from that support system.
Milly stood up. ‘Anybody want a drink?’ she gushed, to break the awful silence.
‘No, thanks…I need to talk,’ Stefano announced tautly.
‘We’ll talk elsewhere,’ Gianni drawled, smooth as glass, but he shot Milly a grim, assessing glance, evidently having expected her to be more discomfited by Stefano’s presence.
‘I don’t keep a hair shirt in my wardrobe,’ Milly told Gianni defiantly.
‘Milly has to be here,’ Stefano stated stiffly. ‘And you have to promise to hear me out, Gianni. I don’t care what you do afterwards, but you’ve got to give me the chance to explain things.’
‘Is there some point to that curious proviso?’ Gianni enquired very drily.
Stefano lowered his head. �
��You’re my brother and I’ve wronged you,’ he breathed tightly. ‘I’ve lied to you, deceived you, and I stood by and did nothing when I could have helped you. I followed the tabloid coverage after you got married. I found out what had happened to Milly…the hit-and-run and everything since…and I guess I just couldn’t live with myself any more.’
Milly sank back down into her chair because her knees were wobbling. As far as the two men were concerned she might as well not have been there, and if the knowledge of their marriage had scared Stefano into confession mode, she had no desire to distract him.
Gianni was very still. ‘How have you lied?’
‘About that night with Milly in New York,’ his brother said gruffly.
‘But you had no reason to lie. I saw the worst with my own eyes!’ Gianni shot back at him.
‘There’s no way you’d ever have forgiven me for what I did!’ Stefano burst out with sudden rawness. ‘You’d have thought I was some sort of pervert. I had to lie! It was me or her, surely you can see that?’
Gianni was now the colour of ash beneath his bronzed skin, his hard facial bones fiercely prominent. ‘Milly said you assaulted her…’
The silence hung like a giant sheet of glass, ready to crash.
Milly cleared her throat and spoke up. ‘Stefano told me he loved me. He was drunk. I was feeling sick and I told him to go home,’ she explained. ‘I heard the front door slam while I was in the bathroom. I thought he’d left…’
‘I opened the door and then I changed my mind,’ the younger man mumbled.
‘So I got into bed and went to sleep.’
Gianni scrutinised her taut face and then focused with mounting incredulity on his brother.
‘I saw her sleeping. I just wanted to kiss her. That’s all. I swear!’ Stefano protested, weak as water now beneath the appalled look of menace and disgust flaring in Gianni’s diamond-hard eyes.
‘I think maybe you thought that if you kissed me, you’d be able to prove that I could respond to you,’ Milly countered with contempt. ‘You were angry with me. I’d dented your ego, and just for that you frightened the life out of me!’
‘I was drunk as a skunk…I hardly knew what I was doing!’
Gianni’s hands coiled into powerful punitive fists, and as he absorbed his kid brother’s mute terror a look of very masculine revulsion crossed his lean, strong face. ‘Accidenti…I wonder how many sex offenders say that.’
Milly sprang upright again, her fine features flushed with turbulent emotion, and suddenly she was erupting like a volcano. ‘You needn’t sound so blasted pious!’ she fired bitterly at Gianni. ‘If Stefano had been a rapist, you’d have given him open house. You just walked out and left me with him!’
Beneath the bite of that derisive attack Gianni froze, to stare back at Milly with stricken eyes.
Stefano’s shoulders slumped as he too looked at Milly. ‘I didn’t mean to terrify you, but when you woke up you went crazy, like you were being attacked—’
‘She was being attacked,’ Gianni slotted in from between clenched teeth, his Sicilian accent thick as molasses as he visibly struggled to control his own rising fury. ‘When you touch a woman without her consent, it’s an assault.’
‘I panicked! When you saw us, I was only trying to hold her still until she calmed down—’
‘How the bloody hell do you expect me to believe that?’ Gianni roared at the younger man in savage interruption. ‘You are one sick bastard! Per meraviglia, you came to me that night in tears, sobbing out your penitence, telling me how you couldn’t resist her, insinuating that she had led you on. It wasn’t enough that you had assaulted a pregnant woman; you then chose to destroy our relationship to save your own useless hide!’
Stefano stumbled back against the desk for support. ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant then, Gianni. I’d never, ever have touched her if I’d known that! Dio mio…I pulled a crazy stunt and I frightened her, but I honestly didn’t mean to!’
Milly studied the younger man with unconcealed scorn. ‘I might be impressed by that defence if you’d thought better of your lies once you’d had time to appreciate what you’d done. But even weeks after that night in New York, you were still determined to keep on lying!’
Gianni’s winged brows pleated. ‘Are you saying that you saw Stefano after that night?’ Gianni looked dazed.
‘Gianni, once you asked me what I was doing in Cornwall three years ago. I’ll tell you now. I went there to confront Stefano,’ Milly stated crisply. ‘I took a lot of trouble to find him. In the end I had to contact his girlfriend’s mother and pretend to be a friend of hers to find out where they were staying.’
Stefano was now staring fixedly at the rug.
‘You went to Cornwall to see him? Why?’ Gianni’s open bewilderment told her that shock had deprived him of his usual ability to add two and two.
‘Milly wanted me to tell you the truth.’ Stefano spoke up again in a sudden rush. ‘She tried to shame me into it by telling me that she was pregnant, but I already knew that by then because you’d told me. I was furious she had tracked me down. I didn’t want anything to do with her in case you found out. You might’ve started doubting my story, maybe thinking that we’d been having an affair…’
‘Per amor di Dio…’ Gianni gazed with incredulous dark eyes at his trembling kid brother, and then he simply turned his back.
‘When I arrived at the cottage, Stefano had been drowning his sorrows again,’ Milly revealed ruefully. ‘He’d had a row with his girlfriend and she’d taken their hire car and driven back to London to fly home, leaving him stranded.’
‘It was too late to tell the truth! I was in too deep by then. There was nothing else to do but face it out!’ Stefano protested weakly.
Gianni’s dark, haunted eyes were fixed to Milly. ‘Tell me that the night you’re referring to was not the same night that you were hit by that car!’ he urged, almost pleadingly.
‘It was that night.’ Milly shrugged fatalistically. ‘I’d gone to the cottage in a taxi and then let it go.’
As Gianni rounded on Stefano, the younger man backed away, looking sick as a dog. ‘Until I read about the hit-and-run in the papers last week, I didn’t know what had happened to Milly that night! How could I have known? She just walked out on me. For all I knew she had a car parked further up the road—’
‘You didn’t give a damn either way,’ Milly condemned helplessly. ‘In a twisted way, you had started to blame me for the mess you were in with Gianni!’
‘I called a cab the next morning and flew back to New York,’ Stefano continued woodenly, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I had no idea that Milly had been injured after leaving the cottage.’
‘But within days you were well aware that I was frantically trying to find her.’ Gianni’s tone was one of savage disbelief. ‘Yet not one word did you breathe! You could have told me you’d seen her in Cornwall but you didn’t. I spent months searching France for her. By then she had been wrongly identified as another woman.’
‘I knew nothing about any of that,’ Stefano reiterated, perspiration beading his strained face. ‘And if I’m here now, it’s because I couldn’t stand all this on my conscience any more.’
‘No, you’re here now because Milly’s my wife,’ Gianni delivered with chillingly soft exactitude. ‘Because you assumed I might already know all this, and the idea of confessing all and throwing yourself on my mercy seemed like the only option you had left.’
‘That’s not how it was, Gianni.’ Stefano had turned a ghastly colour.
‘Your conscience got to you too late. You hurt Milly not once, but twice. You also cost me the first years of my son’s life,’ Gianni condemned with lethal menace. ‘But what I can never, ever forgive is my own mistake, Stefano. I put family loyalty first. And here you are, our father all over again. Weak, dishonest, unscrupulous. It’s a just reward for my stupidity, isn’t it?’
Looking at Gianni, Stefano seemed to crumple entirely. ‘I’m
not like that. I’m not. I’ve changed a whole lot since then. I had to lie… I was so scared—’
Gianni said something cold in Italian.
Stefano was openly begging now. ‘How was I supposed to admit the truth, knowing that you’d kill me? Do you think I didn’t realise that she came first with you when I saw how you reacted at the apartment? It was her or me…you’ve got to see that!’
Milly did not feel sorry for Stefano, but she was squirming for him. His best quality had always been the depth of his attachment to Gianni. He had always been measuring himself up against Gianni. He had probably developed a crush on her for the same reason. But alcohol, arrogance and sheer stupidity had combined to tear Stefano’s privileged little world apart. He had been terrified that night in New York after Gianni had walked out on them both, terrified that Gianni, who had been more father than brother to him, would disown him.
‘Go home, Stefano,’ Milly suggested wearily.
Gianni said nothing. It was as if Stefano had become invisible. His brother slung him one last pleading glance and then hurried out of the room.
A hollow laugh that startled Milly was wrenched from Gianni then. ‘Porca miseria! To think I was jealous of that pathetic little punk!’
‘Jealous?’ Milly parroted in astonishment. ‘Of Stefano?’
Gianni half spread expressive brown hands and then clenched them tight into defensive fists, his strong profile rigid as steel. He swallowed hard. ‘Yes. Long before that night I saw you together at the apartment, I was very jealous,’ he bit out raggedly.
Milly was stunned by that revelation. ‘I can’t believe that… I mean, why on earth—?’
‘You had a bond with him. You talked about things I was totally out of touch with…house music, clubs. You used the same street dialect, shared the same in jokes,’ Gianni enumerated with harsh emphasis. ‘You were the same generation. I introduced you to dinner dates, antiques and art galleries, and occasionally you were bored out of your skull and I knew it.’