by Tina Beckett
At least for now.
Once their daughter was old enough to travel on her own, they wouldn’t need to ever see each other again.
No. She’d already thought this through. There was always Anna’s wedding and, later, hopefully grandchildren.
She frowned. Why was she trying to find excuses to see him?
Probably because there was still a part of her that cared about him. That probably always would.
Not a good thing.
Because she was discovering that looking at something through the eyes of passion was a whole lot different than seeing it in the cold light of satiation. And as reality crept up over the horizon and shone down on them, Elyse wondered what this would look like to her tomorrow. The next day. And on the day she actually left Italy—and returned home to Atlanta.
* * *
Luca threw a bucket of water over the hood of his car, removing any evidence of what had happened last night. Not that they’d left any marks that he could find. Only the ones burned into his skull.
What the hell had he been thinking?
He didn’t know.
They’d wanted each other, there was no doubt about that. But he’d wanted women long before he’d known Elyse and had not acted on that desire. He’d never been one for casual sex that went nowhere. And as it stood right now, his relationship with Elyse would do just that: go nowhere. And tomorrow they were to leave for their trip to Rome.
Elyse had brought Annalisa out for breakfast, but would barely look at him, which was why he’d gone out to wash his vehicle down, thinking maybe the physical act would help him erase the thoughts clogging up his head. He rubbed the hood dry, trying to blot out the heady memories of having her in his arms.
Impossible. They were engraved on his nerve endings and written on his heart. But he was going to have to figure out how to live with those memories or find a way to bury them.
Elyse came into the garage unexpectedly and glanced at the car before looking back at him. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”
He threw the rag into the bucket and faced her. “Okay.”
“I’m not quite sure how to say this.”
His sense of foreboding grew. “I find the best way is to just say it.”
“About the trip tomorrow...”
“Yes?” Was she going to back out?
“I don’t want to share a bedroom with you when we get there.”
He sagged against the fender of the car, laughing. “Is that all?”
“I’m not sure why that’s funny, but yes.”
He glanced up to see a hint of anger in her face.
“No need to worry. My mother wouldn’t let us share a room, even if we wanted to. She’s multo old-school about things. In fact, she attends Mass every Saturday.”
Her eyes widened. “Is that what that whole marriage thing was about?”
“Marriage thing?”
“When you asked if it would be easier if we were married?”
This time the anger was on his side. “You think I’d ask you to marry me as a way to appease Mamma? I would never do such a thing.”
“I’m sorry, I just thought—”
“Listen. She would be disappointed if we married for anything other than love. I was wrong to have suggested it.”
Her shoulders relaxed. “I’m glad. Because I would be disappointed in myself if I let myself be talked into marriage just to give my child a mother and a father.”
He stiffened. “She has a mother and a father. Even without the piece of paper.”
And that had not been at all why he’d asked her. Although for the life of him he still wasn’t sure what his reasons had been.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” The words came out sounding stilted and formal, which wasn’t how he’d meant them to, but her words stung. She didn’t have to convince him that she no longer loved him. It had been obvious that day in the hospital staffroom, when she’d read that list of names and tossed him from her life. And it was obvious now.
“I was talking about sharing the same last name. Anna doesn’t care about any of that.”
“No. You’re probably right.” He went on so that she didn’t think he was overly bothered by the conversation. “I’m going to be heading to the clinic in about a half hour. Do you want to come with me, or would you rather stay here?”
She didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then she said, “Could I come and bring Anna with me? I can put a cot in your office and lay her down for a nap. I really would like to see more of what the clinic does.”
He smiled, a few of his muscles uncoiling. At least she hadn’t come out here to say that she’d booked a flight out of Italy. He’d call his parents and make his explanations seeing as he’d been too distracted by Elyse to phone them last night. Everything was still on track.
At least he hoped it was. Time would tell if it would stay that way.
“How soon do you need me to be ready?”
“I have rounds in around an hour, so...thirty minutes?”
“Sounds good, I’ll gather Anna’s things.”
His gaze skimmed her figure against his volition. If she noticed she gave no indication of it. “If you just put everything in the living room, I’ll load it into the car.”
“Thanks. Are you sure you don’t mind us coming with you?”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
Keep your enemies close, wasn’t that how the saying went?
Only he really hoped Elyse was no longer his enemy. Because by the end of her time here he hoped they could at least be friends.
* * *
She was ready in thirty minutes, just as she’d said. But unlike the mountain of things he expected to see on the living-room floor, there was only a collapsible crib and a diaper bag packed with supplies. He glanced at it. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave her with Emilia again for a few hours?”
She gave him a sideways glance and said, “No, I think I’d like her with me this time.”
Was she afraid he’d try to sweep everything off his desk and take her there like he had on her desk in Atlanta? Or the hood of his car?
He’d learned his lesson and wasn’t likely to repeat either of those mistakes. Only he wasn’t sure the latter had been a mistake. There was such a thing as closure. Something he hadn’t quite gotten before he’d left Atlanta. Maybe their encounter had been the formal goodbye he’d needed.
He didn’t like that idea. At all.
“We can set up the baby cam in my office or use the camera on my laptop to observe her.”
“I thought the same thing, so I have the baby monitor in the diaper bag.”
“Great. My office door can be locked, but I’d rather be able to check on her from time to time.”
“It’s just like leaving her to sleep in her room at home. The monitor will alert us to any peeps she might make.”
With that settled, he picked up the portable crib and the diaper bag and loaded them into the car while she picked Anna up from the baby blanket she’d spread on the floor.
Emilia came over to kiss the baby on the cheek. “You leave?”
“I’m taking them to the clinic with me. But don’t forget that Elyse and I are going to Rome in the morning,” Luca said.
“I no forget. But I miss Annalisa.”
He smiled. He was sure his housekeeper would probably miss the baby more than she would him.
“We’ll only be there a week.”
Elyse shifted and looked away. Maybe “only a week” to her seemed like an eternity. But, for his parents, it would fly by, and he wouldn’t be able to tell them when they’d be able to see their granddaughter again.
No, he was sure Elyse would want to work out some kind of schedule. But if he only saw Annalisa
once a year, that added up to just eighteen times before she was an adult. The pain that idea caused him was so deep he wasn’t sure it would ever go away.
That brought him back to the question he’d asked himself over and over again. If he’d known Elyse was pregnant, would he have still left America?
His response was the same as it had been last time. No. He wouldn’t have left.
But she hadn’t known at the time, and he had left, so asking those types of questions caused nothing but torment.
He needed to concentrate on the here and now and figure out a plan for the future. Or he would be left with nothing to look forward to, except recriminations—aimed solely at himself.
CHAPTER NINE
MARY LANDERS HAD had no seizures in the last two days. Elyse gave her hand a quick squeeze. “I’m so glad you’re doing well. I hear they’re releasing you today.”
“Yes, they are. We’re going to wait a couple of weeks and then we’ll head back to the States. School starts soon, and we don’t want our daughter to miss any of it.”
Annalisa was sound asleep back in Luca’s office. In fact, he’d stayed behind to watch her, not quite comfortable with leaving her alone, despite the baby monitor. She wondered if that was the real explanation or if he simply couldn’t get his fill of his daughter.
If so, she knew the feeling.
She couldn’t quite get her fill of him. And she was pretty sure she never would. She’d proved that by having sex with him on his car.
Her heart had cracked in two over him once before, and the way she was going, it could very well break all over again.
“What grade is your daughter going to be in?”
“Fifth. Bella starts at a new school, so we want to make sure we’re back.”
The couple only had the one child. Mary had shared that they’d tried to get pregnant again but couldn’t. And adoption took so long they’d opted not to go in that route, especially since her husband was in the military, and they might change locations before the process could be completed.
She understood completely. It was something she hadn’t told Luca, even after he’d used a condom the other day. In the beginning, she’d kept it to herself because she hadn’t thought it was any of his business.
And now?
She wasn’t so sure. When she’d gone out to the garage and looked at the car, it had been on the tip of her tongue to tell him. But she’d chickened out.
What would be accomplished by telling him?
“Is she excited?”
“She misses her friends, but since we moved locations and not just schools, it makes it easier. Military kids learn early to cultivate relationships where you find them, because you never know when life will drag you somewhere else entirely.”
“I can certainly understand that.”
Elyse had a lot in common with those families. Life had changed drastically for her in the space of thirteen months. Her relationship with Luca had ended. Then had come the pregnancy and the resulting hysterectomy.
That was about as drastic as it got without someone dying.
On the positive side, she still had her ovaries, so she hadn’t been thrown into premature menopause in the midst of everything else.
A hot flash might be a little difficult to explain, and since Luca hadn’t taken her skirt off he hadn’t even seen her hysterectomy scar, not that he would have surmised that she’d had her uterus removed from that scar alone.
Didn’t she owe it to him to tell him? She didn’t know. Everything was just a tangle of confusion right now.
“Elyse, could I see you for a moment?”
She whirled around, expecting Luca to be standing in the doorway, leaning sexily against the doorjamb, but no one was there.
“I think it came out of your pocket,” Mary said in response to her obvious confusion.
“My...oh, the baby monitor.” Luckily it had a two-way speaker feature. She pulled the receiver from her pocket and used it like a walkie-talkie. “What’s up, Luca?”
“Anna’s hungry. Or something.” She suddenly heard the sound of Annalisa crying over the speaker. Luca must have aimed it at the baby, or maybe he was holding her.
“I’ll be there in just a minute. Thanks.” She dropped the device back in her pocket, a sense of amusement going through her at the tinge of panic that had colored Luca’s voice. She remembered feeling that very same fear the first time Anna had cried, when all of the doubts she’d repressed during her pregnancy had come roaring back. What if she wasn’t enough for her baby? What if she couldn’t get her to stop crying? Or, worse, what if she couldn’t tell the difference between something simple and something serious?
So far, she’d dealt with each crying session as it came and had learned the difference between distress and simple hunger. Despite her difficult pregnancy, Anna had become a relatively healthy baby.
So far, anyway.
She went over and gave Mary’s arm a gentle squeeze. “If I’m not here when they release you, take it easy and have a safe flight back.”
“Thank you for everything.”
She actually hadn’t done anything, except to consult with Enzo and give the family some encouragement. But she could imagine how grateful she’d be for a visitor from her homeland if the situation was reversed.
“You and your doctors did all the work. I was only here in case they needed translation work, but Luca could have done that on his own, anyway.”
“Luca?”
Ugh, she’d used his first name rather than his title. “Dr. Venezio.”
“Oh, yes, of course. He did speak great English. Is Anna your baby?”
“Yes, she is.”
“With Dr. Venezio?”
Suddenly she realized that the patient had added everything up and come to the right conclusion.
Mary was leaving soon, though, so it didn’t really matter if she knew.
“Yes, he’s her father.”
“I thought so. There was something there between you. A couple of looks...”
Her brows went up in surprise. “You were a pretty sick lady when you came in here. I’m surprised you had time to notice anything besides what you were going through.”
“I think there was a need to know everything I could about my doctors before I underwent surgery.”
“Dr. Giorgino performed your surgery.”
“Yes, but Dr. Venezio played a pretty big role in diagnosing it.”
“That’s true.” She paused, then finished the story for her. “Luca and I broke up before I realized I was pregnant.”
Mary blinked. “That must be hard, especially working with him.” She reached out a hand and Elyse took it. “I hope everything turns out for the best for both of us. This is my husband’s last tour of duty and then he plans to use his engineering degree to go into architecture. So let me know if you want a house designed. He’s pretty good.”
“I will. And thank you.” She leaned down and gave the woman a quick hug. “Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
And then Elyse left and walked toward the elevators to see what was going on with Luca and her daughter.
When she entered the office, it looked like a tornado had hit. There were three diapers strewn on the floor and Luca was standing in the middle of the room with a big wet mark running down his shirt. “I thought you said she was hungry.”
“I thought she was too, but I tried to change her diaper first, like you told me.”
“And?”
“We never exactly finished Diapering for Beginners.”
Her eyes widened as she realized what the wet spot was. Annalisa had peed on him. She hurried to take the baby. “Oh, Luca, I’m so sorry. I was saying goodbye to Mrs. Landers and lost track of time. I thought the diapers were self-explanatory.”
“They
are. But trying to hold her and get the diaper situated were harder than I expected.”
“It’s okay. I remember how hard it was that first time.” She dragged the baby blanket over to the discarded diaper, laid her daughter down on top of the barrier and quickly strapped her into it. She glanced around. “Where are her shorts?”
“In the crib. That’s where I tried to change her first, then when I couldn’t figure it out, I put her on the desk to see if I could get it right.”
He hadn’t. “At least you tried.” She picked up the shorts and stuck one of Annalisa’s legs into it and then the other.
The baby stopped crying. Immediately.
Luca dropped into his office chair looking like he’d just been through a particularly difficult surgery. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have interrupted you if I’d realized.”
“It’s okay. We were done, anyway.” She hesitated, but then decided to come clean just in case Mary let it slip before she left. “Mary guessed that Annalisa was ours.”
He frowned. “So?”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want anyone here to know.”
“Since Lorenzo was holding her when you two walked into my office, I’m pretty sure someone already does. Besides, I’m not ashamed of her. Or of you. Better to admit everything than to have some twisted version of events travel down the gossip chain.”
Admit everything. Something she hadn’t exactly done.
Maybe she should take his advice and admit everything.
She touched his hand. “Hey, I think I should—”
There was a knock at the door, and Lorenzo stuck his head in, eyes taking in the scene. “Sorry, am I interrupting something?”
“No.” Luca stepped closer to the door. “Did you need something?”
The other man frowned but only hesitated a fraction of a second. “I sent a note asking for a read on a patient this morning, did you get a chance to do it?”
“What time did you send it?”