“OB-GYN, and must you announce it to the world?”
“I should have thought of it sooner. Dio, for all I know, you should not have taken such a long flight.”
“For goodness’ sakes,” she said, glaring at him, “I’m pregnant, not—”
Aimee heard a loud gasp. She looked around. The palazzo doors had swung open on an enormous entrance hall….
And she had made her announcement to six, God, to seven people, all of them staring at her and beaming.
“Buona notte,” Nicolo said pleasantly. “Aimee. This is my staff.”
He rattled off names and duties. A housekeeper. Two cooks. Three maids. A gardener. They curtsied, bowed, smiled. Aimee, trapped in Nicolo’s arms, wishing the floor would open so she could drop through it, did her best to smile back.
“And this,”
he told the little assemblage, “is mia moglie. My wife.”
A gasp. A giggle. A hand quickly clapped over a mouth.
“As she has already told you, she is pregnant with my child.”
Aimee started to bury her face in his throat but the sound of his voice stopped her.
Since she’d told him she was pregnant, Nicolo had gone from disbelief to shock to a stern acceptance of responsibility.
Now—now, his words resonated with pride. He sounded like a man who was happy his woman was having his baby.
She tilted her face up to his. For a heartbeat, they looked deep into each other’s eyes.
Then the staff of the Barbieri palazzo broke into wild applause.
Aimee blushed. Nicolo laughed and dropped a light kiss on her lips. Then he carried her up the stairs.
A sweet moment, she thought in surprise, after a day of darkness…
But it didn’t last.
He carried her down the hall, through another pair of massive doors, put her on her feet…
And everything changed
They were in a bedroom. His bedroom. You didn’t need a sign on the wall to tell you that.
The room was huge and handsome, assuming your idea of “handsome” involved a marble fireplace big enough for an ox roast flanked by a pair of burnished-by-time leather sofas, a—a thing on the wall that was surely a crossbow…
And a bed the size of Aimee’s entire apartment back in Manhattan.
Nicolo had already shut the door and tossed his jacket on a chair. Say something, she thought, searched frantically for something clever and instead blurted, “This is your room.”
He looked at her as if she were a not-terribly-bright five-year-old.
“How clever of you, cara.”
She needed to be calm. After all, he’d been very civilized just a few minutes ago.
“And where—” She cleared her throat. “And where is mine? I told you—”
“My memory is excellent,” he said coolly. His hands were at his belt buckle. “I know what you told me. That we would have—what is it called? A marriage of convenience.”