The Italian's Christmas Child

At his touch, Holly turned rigid with discomfiture. ‘I meant friendly rather than—’

‘Maledizione! You want me to be friendly when I can hardly keep my hands off you?’ Vito shot at her with raw incredulity. ‘I don’t think I can manage that.’

‘But you have to. I wouldn’t be comfortable with anything else,’ Holly told him earnestly, convinced that only disaster would follow if she allowed any further intimacy to complicate an already tense relationship.

‘Have to?’ Vito queried, a flash of glittering challenge entering his searching gaze as he stared down at her. ‘Have you got someone else in your life…another man?’

Holly dealt him a startled glance. ‘No… Why are you asking that?’

Without warning, Vito moved forward, pinning her up against the wall behind her. ‘Because if there was I’d probably want to kill him!’ he muttered in a raw undertone.

In wonderment, Holly looked up into his lean, darkly beautiful face and then her view blurred as he hauled her up to his level and opened her mouth with the crushing dema

nd of his own. He tasted so good, all minty and fresh, and the strength in the arms holding her felt even better. Every hard, angular line of his long, lean physique was pressed against her as he braced her hips against the wall. The passion of that hungry kiss threatened to consume her and the anomaly between the cool face he showed the world and the uncontrolled hotness hidden beneath electrified her. The piercing ache she had almost forgotten tugged cruelly in her pelvis as his tongue tangled with hers. His mouth was sublime, the feel of his unyielding muscles, hard against her softer curves, incredible. Insane chemistry…insane behaviour, she translated, pulling back from him with shell-shocked abruptness because she knew with shamed horror that all she really wanted to do with him at that moment was drag him upstairs to her bed to rediscover the amazing pleasure he could give her.

‘No, this is not what you’re here for…’ she muttered in curt reminder, her spine stiff as she turned her back on him to walk into the small sitting room. ‘You’re here to meet Angelo and that’s all.’

‘You make it sound so simple when it’s anything but simple,’ Vito countered with a roughened edge to his voice because she had pushed him away and he had had to resist a powerful urge to turn caveman and yank her back to him.

‘If we both make the effort, we can keep this simple and polite,’ Holly stated with rigorous resolve.

‘I have something I need to explain to you first…’ But by that point, Vito could see over the top of Holly’s head and his attention zeroed in so quickly on the child in the infant seat that his voice literally trailed away.

And for Vito it was as though the rest of the world vanished. He focused in amazement on the baby who bore a remarkable resemblance to a framed photograph Vito’s mother had of her son at a similar age. Huge brown eyes from below a mop of black curls inspected him with sparkling curiosity. A chubby fist waved in the air and suddenly Vito froze, out of his comfort zone and hating it. He had never gone weak at the knees for puppies or babies, had put that lack of a softer side down to his grandfather’s rigid discipline. But now he was looking at his son and seeing a baby with his own features in miniature and he finally realised that the very thought of fatherhood unnerved him. His own father had been a hopeless parent. How much worse would he do with Angelo when he had no idea even where to start?

Holly paused beside the child seat to say awkwardly, ‘So…er…obviously this is Angelo. He’s a little bored at weekends because during the week I look after a pair of toddlers and it’s a lot livelier here.’

Vito tried to stand a little less stiffly but in truth he felt much as if someone had swung open the door of a lion’s cage and left him to take his chances. ‘Why did you call him Angelo?’

‘Because you’re Italian,’ Holly pointed out, wondering why he was questioning the obvious. ‘I looked up Italian names.’

Vito forced himself closer to the baby. His hands weren’t quite steady as he undid the belt strapping Angelo into his seat. As Vito lifted the baby, Angelo gave his father an anxious, startled appraisal.

‘You’re used to children,’ Holly assumed, rather taken aback by that deceptively confident first move.

‘No. I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to a child before. There are none in the family and most of my friends are still single as well,’ Vito told her abstractedly, wondering what he was supposed to do with the little boy now that he was holding him.

‘Thank you for having him,’ Vito breathed in a driven undertone. ‘You could have made a different decision but you didn’t.’

Nothing about this first meeting was going in any direction that Holly had foreseen. And she was even less ready to hear her baby’s father thank her for not opting for a termination. Her eyes prickled with sudden emotion.

‘I wanted him from the first, never had any doubts there,’ she admitted gruffly. ‘He’s the only family I have…apart from my friend Pixie.’

As Angelo squirmed and wriggled, Vito lifted him higher and swung him round in aeroplane mode.

The baby’s eyes grew huge and he let out a frightened howl before breaking down into red-faced, gulping sobs.

‘Let me take him,’ Holly urged in dismay as Vito lowered the squalling baby. ‘He’s not used to the rough stuff. There are no men in his life, really, just Pixie and me…’

Vito settled Angelo back into Holly’s arms with more than a suggestion of haste and relief. ‘Sorry, I upset him.’

‘He needs time to get used to you,’ Holly explained. ‘I’ll put him on the floor to play with his toys.’

Vito was tempted to back off entirely but that struck him as cowardly and he held his ground to crouch down on the rug. Finally recalling that he had brought a gift, he removed it from his pocket and tipped it out of a box. ‘It’s only a little toy.’

Holly winced as she noted a piece of the toy break off and fall. It had detachable tiny parts and was totally unsuitable for a baby. ‘You can’t give that to him,’ she told Vito apologetically. ‘He puts everything in his mouth and he could choke on those tiny pieces.’

In haste, Vito removed the toy and its parts again and grimaced. ‘I didn’t think. I really don’t know anything about babies.’