His voice was grim and tight. He pushed his plate away. All appetite had left him. Hell, what a damnable mess this was. He stared across at the woman opposite him, his eyes hard. The woman he did not want to have to marry. The woman who came from a world he rejected and despised. The woman who so screamingly obviously considered it a massive problem for her, and for her precious aristocratic family, for her to be marrying him, a jumped-up slum kid.
His eyes targeted hers. She had paled, her face whitening, and for a moment—just a moment—it cut him to the quick. But then words were being spoken, and he could not call them back.
‘You will marry me, Donna Francesca.’ He deliberately used her title, incising each word so she could not mistake them. ‘Because I will accept nothing else. I will hear no more about single motherhood.’ His eyes were narrow shards of hardest sapphire. ‘Tell your parents whatever you want—it’s no concern of mine.’
He got to his feet, tossing aside his unused napkin—white damask, monogrammed.
‘My only concern—my only possible concern—is for the baby you carry. Nothing else.’
He strode from the room, heart pounding. Emotion thundered in his ears. Deafening him to everything else in the universe.
Behind him Fran sat shaking, staring blindly at the abandoned meal. It had been a disaster.
Emotion wrenched in her, crushing and tearing.
This was never going to work.
CHAPTER NINE
NIC THREW HIMSELF back into the chair behind his desk in his office, his face still thunderous. But his anger was at himself now. How had he lost it like that? What help was that? To let rip as he had?
He swore, descriptively and crudely, and was glad no one could hear him.
Yet for all the anger targeted at himself for losing his rag like that, and the guilt that he had done so to a pregnant woman, he knew that his hackles were still up. And he could find no way to lower them.
He didn’t want to marry her.
Correction, I don’t want to marry the woman she is—Donna Francesca di Ristori! Who comes with a whole baggage train of relatives I want nothing to do with, who’ll be appalled and dismayed at her marriage to me.
His face tautened. It was who she was that was the problem. The very person she was....
In his head, fleetingly, like smoke from a campfire, memory caught. Once she had not been that person. Once she had been someone quite, quite different.
He pushed it away. She had never been that person—never. She had only ever been the person she was. The person he deplored, wished with all his being she was not.
Grimly, he stared out into the emptiness of his office, at the papal splendour he’d acquired second-hand, with money. In his mind’s eye he saw the Marchese’s grand apartment, resplendent with historic inherited possessions, each one ramming home to him the difference between them—between the Marchese’s daughter and the self-made billionaire from the back streets of Rome.
Privilege—the privilege of birth and an effortlessly inherited right of wealth and nobility and social prominence, taking it all for granted.
That was her world. Not his.
Roughly, he reached for his computer, flicking it on. What point was there in dwelling on what could not be changed? He had work to do.
His mouth twisted and he started to bury himself in the day’s business.
How long he worked he was not aware. He was aware only that his PA was coughing nervously at his office doorway.
‘Signor Falcone, there is a visitor.’
His head lifted from his focus on his screen, brows beetling. A sense of déjà vu hit him—how his PA had a mere forty-eight hours ago announced the illustrious Conte di Mantegna, who had come strolling in to blow his world apart.
‘Who?’ he demanded tersely.
‘Dottore Ristori,’ his PA said cautiously, reading his grim mood.
Nic stilled. OK, so she wanted to play it that way, did she? Pretend she wasn’t who she was.
He sat back in his chair, curtly indicating that she be shown in.