The Italian's Bride

Scorn lifted her chin a fraction higher, narrowed her eyes. So now he was asking? Because she’d called his bluff and stated her intention of leaving? Never once had he expressed an interest in her side of the sorry story. He had just decided in that intimidating, arrogant way of his that she’d got pregnant on purpose, was out for all she could get from his family.

‘You don’t want to know!’ she replied as haughtily as she could. ‘It might put a stain on your precious family escutcheon!’ Then she spoiled the effect by giving a noisy sniff and scrubbing at her face, where the hot sun had dried all those tears to itchy rivulets.

‘Here—’ His long mouth twitched as he reached in a back pocket for a pristine handkerchief, shaking out the folds before handing it to her. ‘Blow your nose properly,’ he ordered mildly—as if he were talking to a small grubby child, she thought on a stab of sharp annoyance as she did as she was told.

He, of course, was as immaculate as ever, she noted on a surge of spiky resentment. Not a dark hair out of place, his cool pale grey collarless silk shirt and toning chinos almost painfully elegant, while she was a hot sweaty mess, her cheap T-shirt sticking to her body and her workaday jeans a complete stranger to anything approaching a designer label.

‘So tell me,’ he urged quietly as she stuffed the handkerchief in a side pocket of her jeans. Her soft mouth, mutinously pouting, looked oddly appealing and he wondered, not for the first time, what it would taste like.

Impatience with himself for giving headroom to that line of thought unconsciously sharpened the edges of his voice, ‘Lunch looms and Nonna is anxious to meet you. We don’t have much time. Tell me what you think would upset my father. Or do I have to drag it from you?’

Troubled grey eyes met the dark incisiveness of his and her thick lashes fluttered. She didn’t want to say hurtful things about his dead brother but he certainly did look as if he would drag the truth from her if he had to. Shakily, she said, ‘You won’t like it, and you probably won’t believe it, but I never dreamed Vito was already married.’

He let that pass for the moment, asking, ‘How did you meet?’

How cold his voice. In spite of the heat, Portia shivered.

‘In the café where I worked. He’d been sitting there for a good hour. He looked really fed-up.’ She gave a tiny sigh, a shrug of her neat-boned shoulders. ‘He was at one of Betty’s tables, and she’d already had a word with him—Mr Weston, the owner, didn’t like it when customers sat over just one cup of coffee for ages.’

Betty had said, ‘Quick, you go and talk to him, find out what’s wrong. He looks as miserable as sin. Besides, he’s too gorgeous to be tossed out into the street in this rain. I’ve already told him you’re a push-over when it comes to people with problems! Take him another coffee before the boss asks him to leave.’

Remembering how it had all started made Portia feel so miserable, and duped. Her voice wobbly, she said out loud, ‘I did go and talk to him. He said he’d been on his way back to London when his car had broken down. He’d phoned a friend who was coming to pick him up.’

If she hadn’t talked to him, tried to cheer him up for half an hour, until her stint had ended, then none of this would have happened. But she couldn’t really regret it, because if she hadn’t met Vito then Sam wouldn’t have been born and her baby was the most wonderful thing in her life.

‘I never thought I’d see him again, but he turned up a week later, just as I was getting ready to leave. He insisted on taking me for supper—just a bar snack in the pub over the road—as a sort of thank you for getting him out of the doldrums when his old banger had died on him.’

Noting the way her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her, displaying her inner agitation, Lucenzo felt a knot of something beyond his powers of description tighten inside him. Some ‘old banger’! He recalled his brother’s fury and disgust when he’d recounted the way the latest sports car he’d paid a small fortune for had broken down on its first outing.

‘And?’ he prompted heavily. ‘You went to bed with him?’

‘No!’ Her denial was immediate, horrified. ‘We just talked. He told me all about himself. Said he was half-Italian, that he was working in a restaurant in London but he wanted to open his own in the town where I lived. That was why he visited now and then—to look for a suitable affordable property. And, well,’ she confessed uncomfortably, ‘we met up whenever he was in the area. I really liked him, and admired the way he was working so hard to make something of himself. And he said he loved me, that we’d be married when he had a place of his own. We even got engaged—’

She lifted doleful eyes to him, not expecting him to believe a word of what she was saying because he wouldn’t want to think badly of Vito, who was no longer here to defend himself. ‘I wouldn’t let him spend any of his savings on a ring, but I did agree to spend a night with him.’ Her face turned scarlet. ‘He said it would seal our betrothal, that wanting me so much and not having me was burning him up,’ she explained wretchedly. ‘I swear I didn’t know he was married. I knew nothing about who he really was until I saw the report of his accident in the morning paper.’

Lucenzo tugged in a harsh breath. Tears were glittering in her eyes again and her soft mouth was trembling. Everything she’d said rang true. Suddenly, without reservations, he believed her.

He knew exactly what his half-brother had been like and could see why he’d been attracted to her. She was all soft, womanly curves, her eyes were beautiful and when she smiled she was utterly lovely. She would have been a challenge his womanising half-brother would have been constitutionally unable to resist.

She was light years away from his usual bits on the side. Naive, soft-hearted, eager to please. But, in old-fashioned phraseology, she was a good girl—and that would have made the challenge more exciting. A fancy dinner, a ride in a flashy car, a bucket of champagne and a gift of jewellery wouldn’t have got her into his bed.

It had taken a lot more effort. A line in sympathy-seeking, a load of lies and happy-ever-promises he’d had no intention of keeping.

His own attitude towards her hadn’t helped the poor scrap. He’d given her a mountain of aggro. Learning the truth about Vittorio, in the most shocking way possible, must have shattered her. Yet, heavily pregnant with the child his half-brother would have surely disowned had he lived, she’d attended his funeral. Because she’d felt it her duty to pay her last respects to the father of her unborn child? It would have taken a great deal of courage.

And he hated to see her cry. A tide of sympathy, of self-disgust for the way he’d given her such a rough ride, blocked the air in his lungs. Expelling it slowly, he reached out his hands and cupped her face, hating the distress he saw in the wide grey eyes.

‘Don’t cry, Portia,’ he murmured unevenly. And kissed her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WAS like being swept into paradise, and Portia gasped inwardly as a wave of something too sublime to be recognised engulfed her.

The tingling ribbons of delicious shock that had invaded her entire nervous system when his mouth had first closed over hers were taking ages to die down, making her feel light-headed, incapable of moving, of doing a single thing except simply stand there, drowning in liquid fire, drawing raggedy little breaths as his fingers twined slowly through her hair, his lips moulding the contours of hers.

Every thought was blanked out, all her senses were wholly seduced, fiercely concentrated on the way his mouth felt against hers—just that. The way his lips were gently parting hers, the tip of his tongue moving languorously inside. And she was simply letting it happen, because it was so utterly and completely wonderful.

The first sign that he might be breaking the kiss, withdrawing this irresistible magic, made her give a throatily protesting moan, made her suddenly cling to him, press her lush body against the hardness and heat of his, wanting to lose herself in him, in this heady, needy sensation of entering a paradise she had never known existed.