Valentino's Love-Child

“I’m already there.”

“No.” He kissed her, sweeping her mouth with his tongue. He pulled back. “You can still talk.”

And then he set about taking care of that. He kissed his way down her throat, sucking up a bruise in the dip right below her clavicle bone. His mark.

She shuddered and cried out, like she always did when his hormones got the best of him and he gave her a hickey like he was still an adolescent learning his way around a woman. Maybe that’s why he regressed so often.

He moved to her breasts, taking one in his free hand and laving the other with his tongue. Eventually, after a lot of mewling and half-formed words from the dead-to-rights sexy woman below him, he zeroed in on her nipples. He didn’t play. He focused. He plucked. And he pleasured.

She screamed.

She arched.

She came, her body going rigid and then shaking.

He released her hands and rolled on top of her, using the head of his penis to tease the swollen nub of her clitoris. She cried out incoherently and he kept it up. Her legs locked around his and she pressed upward, forcing him inside. He rocked and kissed her until he was on the verge of climaxing himself.

It was only then that he remembered the condom he wasn’t wearing.

With more self-control than he thought he had, he pulled out and reached for the bedside drawer where he kept his supplies before surging back inside her.

When he came, she was screaming his name and convulsing around him in a second more-intense orgasm.

Remembering made him harder than a rock and twice as immovable.

That night had happened somewhere between two and three months ago. If he looked at his PDA, he could get an exact date. It was something he’d kept track of as zealously as he had their birth control itself. Only, the timing had never come to anything before. Maybe that was why he hadn’t been worried along these lines in this instance?

The possibility that Faith might be carrying his child had not even occurred to him. Why would it? A woman didn’t break up with the man whose child she carried.

He spit forth a vicious curse as he yanked the door open on his Jaguar. It was entirely too possible, though.

And rather than tell him, Faith had booted Valentino from her life.

Why? What was she thinking? Did she believe he would allow her to take his child back to America and raise it, ignorant of its Sicilian family?

Did she think he would not find out? That he would disappear from her life as easily as she dismissed him from hers?

She did not know him very well, if that was the case. It seemed they both had a great deal to learn about each other.

Something didn’t make any sense, though. If she had wanted to marry him as she had hinted, why had she kept this a secret? Surely she knew he would never deny his child the right to his name and heritage. What was the matter with her?

Then he remembered how irrational Maura had gotten on a few occasions while she was pregnant with Giosue.

Faith was no doubt suffering the same emotional fragility. He would have to get himself under control. He could not allow the fury coursing through him a vent. Not in her current condition. He would have to remain calm.

And he would have to remember she was not thinking clearly.

It was his responsibility to make things right and that was something he was good at. Fixing things for others. Had he not taken a slowly sinking vineyard, at risk of closing its doors before the next generation was old enough to take over, and made it a diversified, multinational company?

He had saved the Grisafi heritage and when his younger brother and their father were at loggerheads, Valentino had salvaged the relationship by sending his brother across the ocean to run their offices in New York. The two strong-headed men spoke on the phone weekly and rarely argued any longer.

The only thing he had failed to fix was his wife’s illness. He had not been able to save Maura, and he had paid the price for his inability, but he wasn’t going to lose another woman who depended on him.

Loud knocking startled Faith from a fitful doze. She sat up, looking around her small apartment in disoriented semiwakefulness.

The pounding sounded again and she realized it was coming from her door. She stumbled to her feet and made her way toward it, swinging the door open just as Tino raised his hand to knock again.

He dropped his arm immediately, a look of relief disparate to the situation crossing his handsome features. “Thank the madre vergine. I tried knocking quietly, but you did not hear me.” He reached out as if to touch her, but didn’t—letting his hand drop to his side once again. “Were you working? Is that safe now? Do the clay or glazes have dangerous fumes? This is something we need to look into. I do not wish to demand you give up your passion, but it may be necessary for these final months.”

“Tino?” Was she still too groggy to make sense of his words, or had her former lover lost his mind?

“Si?”

“You’re babbling.” She’d never heard him say so many words without taking a breath. And none of them made any sense. “You sound like your mother when she gets a bee in her bonnet.”

“Mama does not keep insects in her wardrobe and she would not thank you for implying otherwise.”

“It’s an expression, for Heaven’s sake. What is the matter with you tonight?”

“You need to ask me this?” he demanded in a highly censorious voice. His eyes closed and he groaned, just a little, but it was definitely a groan. “Excuse me, Faith.”

“Uh, okay?” she asked, rather than said.

He took three deep breaths, letting each one out slower than the one before. Then he opened his eyes and looked at her with this Zen-like expression that was almost as weird as his babbling. “May I come in?”

“You’re asking me?” Not demanding she invite him in. Not just forging ahead, assuming he was welcome? “What’s going on, Tino?”

He didn’t answer, simply giving the room behind her a significant look.

“Oh, all right. Come in.” She stepped back.

It wasn’t the most gracious invitation she had ever extended, but she was still disoriented from falling asleep after speaking to Agata on the phone. And Tino was acting strange.

Really. Really.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“I could use a whiskey,” he said in an odd tone. “But I will get it. You sit down.”

“You’ve only been here once before, Tino. You don’t know where I keep anything.”

His hands fisted at his sides, but then the Zen thing was back and he said in a very patient tone, “So tell me.”

She knew he wanted her back, but enough to sublimate his usually passionate nature? She would never have guessed.

“Why don’t I just get us our drinks instead?”

“You aren’t having whiskey, are you?”

She rolled her eyes. “I never drink hard spirits. You know that.”

But he’d never acted as if he thought she shouldn’t before. Though, considering how tipsy she got on a single glass of wine, perhaps his concern made a certain kind of sense. And honestly, she’d never implied she wanted to drink hard liquor before. But still. ?

??What’s the matter with you tonight?”

“We have things to discuss.”

“We’ve done all the talking that needs doing.” For right now, anyway. She was frankly too tired and too nauseous to rehash their breakup. She was feeling week and wishing he would just hold her.

She had to get a handle on these cravings. Or she was going to do something stupid, like ask him to fulfill them.

He didn’t bother answering. He simply guided her back to the small love seat she’d been dozing on and pressed her to sit down. Bemused by his insistence on getting their beverages, she did. He then picked up her feet and turned her so that they rested on the love seat as well.

Apparently not content with that level of coddling, he tucked the throw she’d been sleeping under around her legs.

He nodded, as if in approval. “I will get our drinks now.”

He was seriously working on getting back in her good graces. But no amount of tender care could make up for his refusal to see her as nothing more than a casual lover. Why couldn’t he see that?

“If you insist on serving, I’d like a cup of tea.” Something that hopefully would settle her tummy. “There is some ginger tea in the cupboard above the kettle. That’s where you’ll find the whiskey, as well.”

An unopened bottle she had purchased in the hope that one day he would break his pattern and show enough interest in her life outside their sexual trysts to come see her.

He went to the kitchen area, nothing more than an alcove off the main living area, really. She watched him fill the kettle and flip the switch to heat the water. The domesticity of the scene tugged at her helter-skelter emotions. It was so much like something she wanted to experience all the time—for the right reasons—that stupid tears burned her eyes before she resolutely blinked them away.

He pulled down the box of tea and the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard. “I’ve never had ginger tea before.”

She had. When she’d been pregnant before. And she was one of the lucky women it helped. “It’s not something I drink often.”