The Italian's Token Wife

Rafaello lips pressed together. This was not something he had anticipated at all! He stood up abruptly, looking down into his aunt’s militant expression.

‘Very well,’ he said bitingly, and then suddenly found himself continuing, ‘But I must ask you to…to go easy on her.’

It was that stab of discomfort again, pricking at him. His aunt was a formidable woman—she would make mincemeat of that hapless creature upstairs in her bedroom. And suddenly he found that the thought of the girl ripped to shreds by his aunt’s sharp tongue was painful.

But as he spoke he found his aunt was looking at him with a strange light in her eye. As if he had surprised her.

‘I shall take into account her…unfortunate circumstances,’ she answered dryly. ‘Despite my brother’s histrionics as to her morals and background, from what Maria tells me—yes, I have had a talk with her as well, and very enlightening it was, too!—the girl is nothing more than a misfortunate single mother, of which a large number abound these days. She certainly seems to have convinced Maria she is nothing worse, and that is no easy task. I admit I am curious to see her for myself. Well, be off with you. Go and fetch your wife.’

His wife. As Rafaello strode away at his aunt’s imperious bidding, the words tolled in his brain. This was not supposed to be happening. The girl was not supposed to intrude into his life in this way—simply marrying her had been intrusion enough. And now here was his aunt, demanding that he fetch her as if she were his wife for real.

But she is your wife—you married her.

But I didn’t intend to get landed with her, he thought balefully as he took the stairs two at a time. He reached the door of her bedroom and rapped sharply.

Magda started. She’d been half dozing, watching the foolish moths fly in through the open window and head, unerringly and fatally, towards the bedside lamp she’d set carefully down on the floor so it gave enough light for her to read by but did not shine in Benji’s eyes as he slept beside her. As she watched, trying ineffectually to shoo them away from the lethal lure, she felt a frightening sympathy with them. Rafaello di Viscenti was like that light—beautiful, irresistible, and quite deadly. She could so easily let herself be like one of the moths…

The rap came again, and, casting a nervous glance at Benji lest he wake, she scrambled off the bed and went to open the door.

Her jaw fell open.

Rafaello was standing there, looking breathtakingly attractive in charcoal trousers and a dark blue shirt whose open collar in no way made him look casual but instead gave him an air of Latin cool that made her breath catch helplessly in her throat.

‘May I come in?’ He stepped inside even as he spoke, his glance taking in the sleeping baby. ‘Do I disturb you?’

Yes, screamed Magda inside her own head. You absolutely terrify me. You walk in here, looking like every woman’s fantasy, and you ask if you disturb me.

Belatedly she summoned her scattered wits. ‘No,’ she gulped. ‘Not at all.’

He nodded. The diffused light from the lamp on the floor turned his hair to sable and threw the planes of his face into edged relief. She felt her breath catch all over again.

‘Dinner will be served shortly. Can you be ready in time?’

She stared gormlessly.

‘One of the maids is coming to sit with the ch—’ he caught himself, and amended his words. ‘To sit with Benji. She will fetch you if he wakes.’

‘He usually sleeps through until after midnight,’ Magda said faintly, scarcely taking in what he had just said. ‘Then he wakes, usually.’ Except that last night, and the night before, Benji had slept soundly all night—exhausted, she fancied, after all the exertions and new experiences, as well as the silence of the Tuscan countryside. It had given her the first good sleep she’d had since he’d been born, and it had done her good, she knew. She was feeling far more rested than she usually did. Of course, she thought wryly, she was also living a life of total leisure at the moment. That helped as well…

‘Good.’ Rafaello was speaking again, and she forced herself to listen. ‘Then I will leave you to change. Please be as quick as you can.’

His gaze flitted over her saggy T-shirt disparagingly.

She acknowledged him faintly and, nodding briefly, he took his leave.

Downstairs, he joined his aunt and uncle in the drawing room, to be greeted by the news from a poker-faced Giuseppe that his father had declared he was too ill to eat and retired to his bedroom. Rafaello’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing about his father’s obvious refusal to sit at the same table as his unwanted daughter-in-law.