A Ring for Vincenzo's Heir

After all the romantic days and nights together, gazing into each other’s eyes beneath the loggia and teasing each other with hot kisses behind the thick hedges of the garden maze, today’s beautiful courtyard wedding, presided over by Vin’s father, was the perfect end to such perfect days.

As she and Vin spoke their vows in the courtyard, surrounded by his family and friends, Scarlett looked up at him. She’d never seen such stark emotion in his dark eyes.

Was it possible Vin might be falling for an ordinary girl like her?

Scarlett’s voice trembled as she spoke her vows, but Vin’s voice was calm and steady and deep. She felt his lips brush softly against hers as a pledge of forever, and she thought she might die of happiness.

Then everything changed. The tenderness in Vin’s expression hardened, turned cold. As their family and friends came forward in the villa’s courtyard to congratulate them, her brand-new husband dropped her hand as if it burned him and backed away, loosening his tie, as if he could barely stand to look at her.

What had happened? Scarlett didn’t understand. She felt confused and hurt as she followed him into their wedding reception lunch, held immediately afterward in the great hall inside the villa. She tried to tell herself she was being too sensitive. They’d just gotten married, with a lifelong vow. That was what mattered. Not that he’d dropped her hand after he kissed her, and his eyes suddenly looked cold.

But it troubled her as she sat beside Vin at the head table through the elegant wedding lunch.

She looked around the great hall. Maria had outdone herself. The enormous room was filled with flowers and people and music. It was so warm with love, it barely needed the fire in the enormous stone fireplace. When the staff served a lunch of pasta and salad, Vin ate silently beside her. Scarlett smiled at him shyly.

He glowered back.

Scarlett’s cheeks turned hot with embarrassment as she looked away. Maybe it was the sudden tension between them, but her lower back and belly started to ache strangely. She sipped sparkling juice instead of champagne, one hand rubbing her belly over the knee-length, cream-colored satin dress.

She told herself to relax. Whatever was bothering Vin, they had hours to work it out before they left for Rome tonight. He would close the deal with Mediterranean Airlines tomorrow morning. Vin wanted to check them into a suite at the best hotel in Rome tonight, their wedding night. While he was signing the papers, she could meet her new doctor and prepare for their baby’s imminent birth. She was trying to convince him that they should skip the hotel and go directly to live in the home he’d grown up in, but he resisted.

“It’s a mess,” he’d said shortly.

Now, sitting at the wedding luncheon, Scarlett sighed. Pasting a smile on her face, she turned away from Vin, who was still glowering silently at nothing, and turned to chat with Giuseppe and Joanne and Maria and her fiancé, Luca. She laughed and applauded as their friends and neighbors offered champagne toasts, half of which she couldn’t understand, as they were in Italian, but they were lovely all the same. She just wished her parents could have been here to see her wedding day.

Tears rose to her eyes as her new father-in-law and mother-in-law and sister-in-law all hugged her and teased her and constantly asked if they could get her anything.

She had a family again. After all her years alone, she hated to leave them.

Rome was only three hours away, she comforted herself. She glanced at her handsome new husband. Maybe Rome would be even more amazing. The city where their baby would be born. Their first real home. It would be where their life together would begin.

Tears filled her eyes as she listened to Giuseppe’s emotional toast, as he praised his son and expressed his gratitude that he’d returned to the Borgia family after so many years apart. She was still wiping her eyes and applauding at the end of his speech when Vin suddenly growled in her ear, “We need to go.”

“Go?” Scarlett blinked. “But you said we could stay the entire day—”

“I changed my mind.” He tossed his napkin over his empty plate. “I want to be in Rome before dark. I still have a lot of work to do. We’ve wasted enough time here.”