The Sicilian's Mistress

‘You can’t be…’ he said, turning visibly pale beneath his bronzed skin.

‘I am…no doubt about it. No mistake,’ she stressed, getting more and more apprehensive. ‘It was that night we—’

‘Let’s not get bogged down in details,’ Gianni interrupted, striding across the room to help himself to a very large brandy.

‘You don’t want to talk about this, do you?’ she muttered tightly.

‘Not right now, no.’ Quick glance at gold watch, apologetic look laced with a hint of near desperation.

‘You’ve got some calls to make?’

‘No—’

‘You have a business meeting at eleven o’clock at night? Well, some celebration this is turning out to be.’

‘Celebration?’ Gianni awarded her a truly stunned appraisal. ‘You’re pregnant and we’re not married and you want to celebrate?’

‘Since you’re the one who’s been playing Russian roulette with my body, maybe you’d like to tell me what end result you expected?’

‘I just didn’t think!’ he ground out, like a caged lion, longing to claw at the bars surrounding him, resisting the urge with visible difficulty.

Yet he thought about everything else…incessantly. He thought rings round her. He planned business manoeuvres in his sleep. He was seriously telling her that he hadn’t once acknowledged the likely consequences of making love without contraception?

‘I’m not having a termination. You might as well know that now,’ she whispered sickly.

‘Madre di Dio…why do you always think you know what’s on my mind when you don’t?’ he slashed back at her rawly. ‘I don’t believe in abortion!’

Only a little of her tension evaporated. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

‘I’m going out.’

‘I know.’ She closed the door softly, heard the brandy goblet smash and shivered. He was right. So much of the time she did not have one earthly clue what was going on inside him. But that night she believed she did. He might not believe in abortion, but he still didn’t want her to have his baby.

The next development shocked her rigid. Gianni walked out of the Paris apartment that night and vanished into thin air for thirty-six hours. He even switched off his mobile phone—an unheard-of development. His security staff went crazy the next morning, questioning her, checking the hospitals, considering kidnapping. They weren’t able to accept that Gianni should choose to deliberately take himself off without cancelling his appointments.

Milly convinced herself that he had gone to some other woman.

But Gianni reappeared, looking pale and grim as death, hiding behind an enormous bunch of flowers. And she didn’t say a word, behaved as if he had only stepped out an hour earlier. Patently relieved by that low-key reception, Gianni swept her up into his arms and just held her for the first time in his life, so tightly she could barely breathe.

‘You just took me by surprise. My own father…if he was my father,’ he qualified in a roughened undertone. ‘He was abusive. I don’t know how to be a father, but I don’t want to lose you!’

She had never loved Gianni more than she loved him at that moment. It felt like an emotional breakthrough: Gianni trusting her enough to refer to the childhood he never mentioned and actually admitting to self-doubt. Her heart and her hopes soared as high as the sky. Yet, just two short months later, Gianni had almost destroyed her with his lack of his faith…

Coming back to the present to gaze like a wakening sleeper round the library of Heywood House, Milly found that her cheeks were wet with tears. You’ve got to stop this, she warned herself angrily. There is life after Gianni. Three years ago she hadn’t felt able to cope with that challenge. But now she was older, wiser…only still as hopelessly in love with him as she had ever been.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘GIANNI…it’s me,’ Milly announced tautly, her grip so tight on the phone that her knuckles showed white.

‘I’m listening,’ Gianni responded softly.

‘Connor’s asking about you all the time.’ Milly’s troubled eyes were pinned to where her son sat listlessly swinging his feet. ‘When I asked you to leave, I overlooked the fact that he’s lost a whole life too. The last thing he needs right now is for you to vanish as well—’

‘I can be with you in two hours,’ Gianni interposed, smooth as silk, but she sensed the buzz of his satisfaction nonetheless. ‘Why did you wait four days to contact me?’

Milly tensed. ‘I needed some time to myself.’

Before he could ask her what she had decided to do about the marriage question, she finished the call. Then she breathed in very deep to steady herself.