Nick sat back and dragged air deep into his lungs.
Most of all, he was damned sure that none of his brothers lay awake at night, staring into the darkness and fighting the almost overpowering need to say to hell with all this, go to his wife’s room, fling open the door or break the freaking thing down if he had to, strip away the duvet that covered her and take her again and again even if she begged him not to do it, take her mercilessly until he’d worked her out of his system forever.
Or until she sobbed his name, wound her arms around his neck and told him that he was her lover, that he was more than that,
that he was her love….
“Merda!”
Nick shot to his feet, jammed his hands into his pockets and paced the big room.
What he needed was sex. Not with his wife. Sex with a woman who would respond to him with honesty rather than calculated pretense.
As for his unborn child… He loved that small life already, from the second he’d seen the sonogram of it, lying safely cocooned within his wife’s womb.
A week after they’d reached New York, he’d broken the silence between them to announce that he’d made an appointment for her with an ob-gyn recommended to him by his personal physician. Normally, he’d have asked one of his sisters-in-law to suggest a doctor but considering that none of them knew he even had a wife, much less a pregnant one, that had been out of the question.
He’d expected Alessia to argue but she hadn’t. Despite everything he knew her to be, he had to admit she seemed to have maternal instincts. She’d given up wine, ate carefully and, a couple of times, he’d seen her with one hand lying lightly over her belly.
Like the day he’d taken her for her ob-gyn appointment.
He’d stood by dutifully while she was examined, his eyes straight ahead, but his air of removal had vanished when the ultrasound technician appeared.
“Let’s see what we can see,” the woman had said cheerfully, and Nick’s gaze had been inexorably drawn to his wife, lying on the examining table, eyes wide, her left hand forming what could only have been a protective cover over her belly.
“Move your hand, please,” the tech had said and, without thinking, Nick had reached for Alessia’s hand and clutched it in his.
And there it was. A black speck that was their baby.
“Excellent picture,” the tech had said happily, pointing out features only she could see, and Nick had squeezed his wife’s hand and she had squeezed his, and then their eyes had met and he had remembered everything, how she had lied to him with her hands, her mouth, her body…
“Hell,” he growled.
Enough was enough. It was time to get his life back. See a lawyer. Discuss his choices. Legal separation. Divorce. The ways in which they would affect his demand for custody when his child was born because, without question, he would demand it.
He would not permit his son or daughter to be raised five thousand miles away by a woman with the same duplicitous morals of her fifteenth-century ancestors. She was not fit to be a mother. What he saw now…what he thought he saw now—her changed diet, the hand over the belly, even the tears he’d thought had glittered in her eyes during that sonogram—
Lies, all of it. But then, lies were her specialty.
Okay. He needed to make an appointment with an attorney. Not the ones Orsini Brothers retained, not until he told his brothers about Alessia, and then he’d have to let the entire clan in on his secret and he could imagine what a mess that was bound to—
His intercom light blinked. His PA was calling. Never mind. Whatever she wanted could wait. But the light kept blinking and finally Nick cursed and reached for the phone. Even as he did, the door burst open and his sisters, Anna and Isabella, marched into the room.
Nick forced a smile.
“Hey, girls. I’m glad to see you, but it’s polite to wait until—”
“We are not ‘girls,’” Izzy said, in a tone that dropped the temperature fifty degrees. “We are women.”
“Yeah. Right. I only meant—”
“But then, what do you know about women?” Anna said, eyes cold as ice.
“Listen,” Nick said, “whatever this is, I’m not—”
“What in the bloody, holy hell do you mean by getting married and then hiding the marriage and your wife from the rest of us?”
Nick blanched. He looked past his sisters, saw his PA just behind them, saw her mouth fall open.