Phantom Marriage

It shocked Veronica how quickly her feelings for Leonardo could go from uncontrollable desire to outright dislike.

He reared up onto his elbows with a strange look on his face. Was that shock in his eyes? Or just confusion? Clearly, he wasn’t used to losing control as he just had.

‘I think I should go,’ he said and suddenly withdrew, scrambling up off the bed and reaching for his clothes.

Tears of hurt and humiliation stung Veronica’s eyes. Suddenly, she felt both used and very cheap. She must have a made a sound because he turned and saw her distress.

‘No, no,’ he said hurriedly, sitting back down and pulling her up into his arms again. ‘You were lovely. I am just not used to acting so foolishly. It has thrown me. There was this girl once. But no,’ he said with a bitter laugh. ‘I will not bore you with the details. Needless to say, it is a case of once bitten, twice shy when it comes to risking an unwanted child.’

Understanding dawned. He’d been targeted once before by a gold digger, some girl who’d tried to trap him with a pregnancy.

‘I would not try to trap you with a baby, Leonardo,’ she said gently, and stroked the back of his head, feeling suddenly tender towards him. Thank God she was certain there would be no unwanted pregnancy from tonight’s mistake. ‘It’s a rotten thing for a girl to do.’

‘It is.’

‘Did she have a baby, this girl?’

He drew back and smiled a relieved smile. ‘Happily, no. She wasn’t pregnant at all. She just said she was.’

‘What a wicked deception.’ Veronica knew all about wicked deceptions. They scarred people. This girl had scarred Leonardo, trying to trap him into marriage before he was ready. And no doubt without love involved.

Leonardo sighed heavily, then stood up and started dressing. ‘I would have married her,’

he confessed as he zipped up his trousers.

‘But why, if you didn’t love her?’

‘It is a question of honour,’ he said, pulling on his shirt. ‘The baby would have been mine.’

‘That is a little old-fashioned, Leonardo. Honestly, an Australian man wouldn’t have felt obliged to marry such a girl.’

‘But to walk away from your own child,’ Leonardo said, frowning. ‘That is not right. I could not do that.’

‘You didn’t have to walk away. You could have paid child care and demanded visiting rights. Why marry when there’s no love involved? To do that is not right, either.’

His smile was wry. ‘Italians feel differently on the subject.’

Veronica shook her head. ‘Then you are different, all right.’

‘Apparently so. Now, I really must go, or Mamma will start getting ideas. She already likes you enormously,’ he added, laughing. ‘If I stay any longer she will be planning our wedding before the weekend is out.’

Veronica laughed too. ‘Then you’d definitely better go.’

‘I’ll pick you up at ten tomorrow morning. Don’t wear a dress or a skirt. We’re going in a helicopter, remember?’

‘Okay.’

‘Ciao.’

She watched him leave, thinking that perhaps she should have told him she was afraid of helicopters. But she didn’t want to sound like a scaredy-cat. She liked it that he saw her as a bit of an adventuress. Which she had been, once. She’d thought nothing of travelling to the snowfields in Europe on her own every year when she’d been doing her uni course. She would save up all year from her two part-time jobs and splurge the lot every January, backpacking from one ski resort to the next. It wasn’t till the last year of her course that she’d been able to make it a working holiday, using her qualifications to get a job as a remedial masseuse at one of the top ski resorts.

That was where she’d run into Leonardo.

Who would have believed what fate had had in store for her when she’d rejected him that night? Veronica would never have imagined that she would actually have sex with Leonardo several years later. Or that she would jump into bed with him so quickly and so shamelessly. For years after the night of that party, she’d told herself firmly that she’d imagined how turned on she was at the time, and how difficult it had been to resist him. But she’d known, the moment he’d introduced himself over the phone two weeks ago, that he was the most dangerously attractive man she’d ever met.

Yes, she’d come to Capri to find out about her father. But she finally admitted that she’d also come because of Leonardo. To meet him again and see if all her sexual feelings about the man were just fantasies or the real McCoy. Well, now she had her answer, didn’t she? The desires he could evoke in her—oh, so effortlessly—were real. Very real.

Not dangerous, though. Unless she did something stupid, such as fall in love with him.