A Sicilian Seduction

She nodded, and to his further relief stepped out behind the cases, then turned to shut the door securely before she joined him at the car.

They didn’t speak as they drove away. In fact they didn’t speak all the way back to his place, and the mood was heavy. He didn’t like it. It worried him yet he couldn’t seem to come up with anything to lighten it.

In the end he made a snap decision, and felt better for it because this was more like the man he always liked to believe he was, thinking on his feet and acting on instinct. So, instead of taking the car down to the basement, he stopped outside the front entrance.

‘Stay there,’ he told Natalia, then disappeared into the boot to get her luggage, took it into the foyer and told the concierge to deliver it upstairs. By the time he climbed back in the car he was beginning to feel more like himself—though he couldn’t say the same for Natalia.

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded warily.

‘We’re going out somewhere,’ he said, gunning the engine.

‘Where?’ she asked.

He didn’t answer simply because he had absolutely no idea other than they both needed a complete change of scenery…

They ended up in Brighton. Natalia couldn’t believe it. Yet, he couldn’t have come up with a better idea to help blow away the stresses and strains of the last twenty-four hours.

It was cold and the wind was sharp, and Giancarlo had to buy himself a sheepskin coat from the first shop they saw selling menswear. But they walked the beach for hours, and ate lunch in a sea-front fast-food café then walked the beach again on their way back to the car.

By the time they were driving back towards London, she’d relaxed, he’d relaxed—enough to actually look at each other without guarding their eyes.

Only once did he mention what had happened that morning, during dinner at a small restaurant they found as they hit the outskirts of London. He looked up from his plate and found her watching him. Not knowing what she was thinking tightened the muscle around his heart.

‘I apologise if I—offended you this morning in the kitchen,’ he said sombrely.

‘Edward said you could be ruthless when you wanted to be.’ She smiled a little wryly. ‘I should have remembered that.’

‘Edward would say that,’ he returned very grimly—and changed the subject. Apology over, she noted. Time to move on and leave the rest behind.

Well, she had no argument with that—not any more anyway. It was a decision she had come to when she’d watched him drive off down the street after dropping her at home, and she’d been suddenly drenched in the terrifying idea that she was not going to see him again.

Scares like those focused the mind remarkably, she’d discovered. She had been offered the chance of a few weeks of nothing but Giancarlo. After that—nothing, no matter what else might or might not transpire.

But she was determined now to enjoy those few weeks, and not allow anything whatsoever to spoil them.

So she smiled at him across the table, then very gently asked if they needed to buy a bottle of champagne on their way home…

CHAPTER NINE

THE stock market was having a bad day. Share prices were jumping all over the place, figures flashing blue and red on the screen with no clear reason as to why they were doing it.

Sitting there, staring at the screen in front of him, Giancarlo saw nothing. His eyes were glazed. He just wasn’t interested in what the world was panicking about.

For he had his very own panic button sitting not ten feet away. One quiet swing of his chair and he would be able to see her, happily getting on with her work with no idea what was going on inside his head.

Their time was up. Any day now—any moment, come to that—Natalia was going to turn to him and tell him that she was or was not carrying his baby.

Either result was going to cause problems, he knew that. But at least the former took care of itself to a certain extent. They would just have to get married. He could deal with that. Okay, so he would have to square it with Edward. Tell him the truth, and then seriously warn him off so much as remembering that Giancarlo Cardinale’s new bride had once been his mistress.

But—Dio, he cursed silently, that was not a conversation he was looking forward to! He might end up killing Edward just to remove those memories from his head!

And there was Alegra to consider. What self-respecting Sicilian introduced his sister to her husband’s ex-mistress? If Alegra ever discovered the truth about Natalia, she would never forgive any of them. It was in the genes. Forgiveness was not a word a Sicilian recognised, and, although Alegra might have been living in England for the last twenty-five years of her life, she was still a Sicilian.

He would lose his sister; he didn’t doubt that he would.

But even the prospect of that painful loss did not worry him as much as the prospect of a negative result to his and Natalia’s wild night of unprotected sex. For—where did they go from that point on? The positive result removed the need to make choices, but the negative provided a whole new set of problems he had no answers to.

Because he didn’t want to let Natalia go. Not today or next week or any week come to that—with or without their baby growing inside her. His problem here was trying to convince her of that, making her believe that he wanted to be with her—with or without a pregnancy.