Nicolo: The Powerful Sicilian

And yet—and yet, she thought on a dizzying rush of despair, she knew how he could think it.

She had gone into his arms after knowing him for a couple of hours, slept with him a day later. She had given herself to him fully, nothing held back. She had done things with him she had never imagined she would ever do.

But he could know nothing of that.

She knew he’d had many women; a man like him would. He moved in a world where people tumbled into bed casually, without regrets. She didn’t—or maybe it was more truthful to say such things did happen in her world.

But not to her.

He couldn’t possibly know that her friends teased her about her pathetic sex life. He couldn’t know she hadn’t been with a man in almost four years. So, no, she couldn’t blame him for asking if the life growing within her womb was his.

She could blame only herself for being foolish enough to have thought, even fleetingly, that what they’d found was not just sex but love.

“I asked you a question. Are you sure I’m the man who—”

Alessia’s despair gave way to anger. It was a safer emotion. How dare he accuse her of lying about such a thing or, at the very least, of having gone from someone else’s arms to his?

“No,” she said coldly, “no, I’m not. It might have been the butcher. Or the man from the cleaning service. And then there’s the concierge at my apartment building in Rome and the headwaiter at a restaurant where I had dinner last week, and if not him, the drummer from a punk rock band whose publicity I have handled or—”

Nicolo covered the distance between them in four strides and grasped her by the shoulders.

“You think this

is funny?”

“I think I was stupid even to tell you about this.” Her eyes flashed fire. “Forget that I said anything, signore. This is not your problem, it is mine.”

“Hey. I never said—”

“I am accustomed to taking care of myself. I do not require your help or anyone else’s.” Angrily, she shrugged free of his hands. “I would not have told you anything if you had not intruded on my privacy.”

His dark eyebrows rose. “Excuse me?”

“The bathroom door was closed. I asked you not to open it but you did. And you found me at the worst possible moment. I was—I was surprised by what I had just learned.” It was the understatement of the century, but he didn’t have to know that. Alessia lifted her chin. “So, if you had not intruded—”

Nick cursed. His hands bit into her flesh as he hoisted her to her toes.

“That’s rubbish and you damned well know it!” he said, his voice rough with anger. “You’re pregnant. I got you that way. That makes this my problem as much as yours.”

His words should have warmed her. They didn’t. The pregnancy was, indeed, a problem—but she didn’t like hearing him call it that. Stupid, she knew, but that was how she felt. Her mother had been her father’s “problem” all his life, or so he claimed. There wasn’t a way in the world she was going to be seen as a “problem” by Nicolo Orsini or any other man.

“Let go of me,” she said with icy calm.

“Don’t talk to me about intruding on your privacy, not when that so-called ‘privacy’ involves something that’s bound to change both our lives forever.”

“I do not take orders from you, Mr. Orsini!”

Sweet Mary, Nick thought, what kind of nonsense was this?

First, she dropped a bomb of nuclear proportions in his lap. Then she all but told him what he could do with his help. Okay, maybe he’d left something out, the part where he’d demanded to know how in hell this could have happened and was she sure the kid was his—if you could call a two-week-old clump of cells a kid—but, dammit, what man wouldn’t ask?

The lady had more attitude than any woman he’d ever known. It made him want to shake some sense into her…or maybe kiss some sense into her. One or the other and it didn’t much matter which because sense was what she needed.

Did she think he’d walk away from what was as much his responsibility as hers? Yes, she’d said she was on the pill. So what? He was always a responsible lover. He should have used a condom. He always did.

Except with her.

Hell.