Rafaello's Mistress

‘Are you letting Maud stay here too?’ she asked as she entered the penthouse apartment, trying not to gape too obviously at the large expanses of polished floor stretching off in every direction.

‘No, I believe she has a sister in Clapham.’

‘Then why’s Sam staying with you and not with her?’ Glory watched him still and tense at that enquiry and her vague sense that something was not quite right was increased by his reaction to what she saw as a perfectly natural question. ‘Maud is going to be his stepmother—’

Rafaello gave her an expressionless look. ‘Maud has scarcely left the hospital since your father arrived there.’

He strode down a wide corridor, thrust open a door into a bedroom and told her where she would find a spare key for the apartment. She felt that he could not wait to get her out of his sight. She relived her own passionate response in his limo and let the tears come, the tears of stress, which she had held back for so many hours. Slumped on the bed, fully clothed, she fell asleep.

Wakening in the afternoon in her crumpled garments, she felt like an itinerant. The en suite bathroom was a dream of glossy tiles and spacious luxury but all too many mirrors. She grimaced at her shadowed eyes and tousled hair. A long shower made her feel much more human. A towel anchored round her, she rubbed at the ache in the small of her back. Ever-conscious of her changing shape in recent weeks, she had begun hunching her shoulders, aware that when she practised good posture her swelling stomach was much more obvious. But enough was enough, she decided ruefully, straightening her shoulders with determination as she padded back into the bedroom.

She stopped dead: Rafaello was in the act of walking in through the bedroom door. ‘I did knock…I assumed you were still asleep,’ he proffered. ‘Sam’s back and he tells me that your father is asking for you—’

‘Honestly?’ Glory exclaimed, touched and pleased by that news. Turning away from him, she headed straight for the case sitting at the foot of the bed. ‘I’d better get dressed and get over to the hospital.’

She heard Rafaello draw in a sharp breath. A frownline indenting her brow, she glanced at him again. Rafaello was as still as a graven image, his attention fully lodged to his view of her body in profile as delineated by the unforgiving cover of a fleecy towel stretched to capacity.

‘Per meraviglia…’ he breathed raggedly in the simmering silence. ‘You look like a fertility goddess.’

As a schoolgirl, Glory had once seen such a statue in a museum. Being compared with an extremely rotund female from prehistoric times was the kind of compliment she would have gone some distance to avoid. Cringing inwardly, her colour rising, she sucked in her tummy in an effort to make it meet her backbone and forced herself to laugh. ‘You’re not supposed to tell women when they’ve put on weight, Rafaello. But then, you know how much I enjoy my food and if I want to be big and beautiful—’

‘And…pregnant?’ Rafaello dragged his stunned gaze from the no longer visible swell and raked it up to her stricken face.

‘Pregnant?’ Glory parroted shrilly, most of her oxygen supply engaged in the effort it took to keep her tummy in. ‘Are you nuts?’

‘Let’s see. Take the towel off and start breathing again!’ Rafaello strode forward, looking very much like a guy with a mission to prove his point by any means available.

Glory backed off, aghast. Shorn of the towel, all would be revealed: her vanishing waist, her increasingly Rubenesque curves.

‘Glory…I want the truth,’ Rafaello growled, intent golden eyes clashing with hers.

Glory swallowed hard.

‘The baby has to be mine,’ Rafaello continued, fiercely scanning her pale, strained face for answers. ‘It’s got to be! You’re at least a few months along.’

‘OK…you win,’ Glory whispered through compressed lips, and she dropped her head because she could not bring herself to retain visual contact when she told him. ‘Or maybe I should say, mother nature won. Yes, of course it’s your baby—’

‘So why did you go out of your way to convince me that there was nothing to worry about in Corfu? Was that an honest mistake on your part?’ Rafaello demanded in a low driven undertone, his dark deep drawl no longer level. ‘Did you only discover that you were carrying my child after you’d walked out on me?’

‘No.’ Suddenly Glory was feeling very guilty and confused. ‘One of the days I said I was getting my hair done, I also went to see a doctor. It was confirmed then.’

Rafaello absorbed that confession with bleak, dark-as-midnight eyes. ‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

Tears gritted up her eyes and she blinked furiously. ‘You didn’t want to know—’

‘That is not true.’ The contradiction was lethally quiet.

‘I saw how relieved you were when you believed I wasn’t pregnant!’ Glory argued chokily.

Briefly Rafaello closed his eyes as if he was praying for patience and then he swung away, the bunched muscles of his powerful shoulders betraying the ferocious level of his tension. ‘I was relieved because that was not the way I wanted it to happen. History repeating itself…I didn’t want it to be like that between us—’

‘History repeating itself?’ Glory echoed, totally at sea as to his meaning.

Rafaello swung back to her, his darkly handsome features clenched hard. ‘Something similar once happened in my own family.’

‘Oh…’ Weak from stress, Glory sank down on the corner of the bed. ‘I really didn’t know what to do when I found out I’d fallen pregnant. Maybe I have a bad habit of wanting to tell people what I think they want to hear.’

‘That’s no excuse.’ Disconcertingly impervious to that mode of appeal, Rafaello shot her a look of angry derision. ‘You’re tough enough when you want to be. All over me like a rash one moment and doing a vanishing act the next. But this is something else again, this is my baby too. I would’ve married you in Corfu but you were quick enough to tell me that you weren’t that desperate!’