‘I didn’t have enough confidence to do that. It seemed to me that, no matter what happened, it would be my family that suffered, so it seemed wiser just to keep quiet. I love your eyes…’ Glory confided, her mind travelling off in another direction entirely as he rearranged her against the cushions. She was blissfully lost in the smouldering dark golden depths trained on her with hungry but tender intensity. ‘We’re going to be married in forty-eight hours and I can’t wait—’
Rafaello stilled as though something in that reference to time had ensnared him, and then he froze and levered himself back from her. ‘Dio mio…what am I doing?’
‘Nothing I don’t want you to do,’ Glory was quick to assert, slim fingers closing round the parted edges of his suit jacket as she attempted to ease him back to her.
Rafaello surveyed her beautiful expectant face and the inviting curve of her pink mouth and groaned out loud in frustration. ‘I have to fly straight back to New York—’
‘What?’ Glory sat up fast and linked imprisoning hands round his neck, fingers spearing into the thick black silk of his hair.
‘This was a literal flying visit, cara mia. I only came over because I realised my father was set on approaching you this evening and I knew you were scared of him—’
‘Not any more…don’t go,’ she begged.
‘I have to.’ He drew her hands down, pressed a fervid kiss of regret to one of her palms and then sprang upright again. ‘We’ve got Sam in the house too. We really can’t consider cavorting on a sofa like randy teenagers—’
‘No…’ she agreed in some embarrassment at that reminder, but her voice wobbled, for she could not stand letting him go.
Rafaello made it to the door and then he swung round, hauled her into his arms and claimed a passionate kiss which sent her temperature rocketing. ‘Forty-eight hours…’ he reminded her raggedly, pulling away again and backing across the hall in the general direction of the front door, not removing his attention from her for a second.
‘Are you all right?’ Glory gasped as he banged his shoulder off the edge of the marble hall fireplace.
‘Aching more in places I wouldn’t like to mention, bella mia,’ Rafaello groaned.
He departed and she went off in search of Sam, but the kitchen was in darkness. Only when she went back up to the ground floor again did she hear her brother laughing.
Closer investigation revealed that Sam was in the games room. Benito had not departed as she had assumed. His jacket doffed and a cue in one hand, he was instructing Sam in the noble art of billiards. After a covert glance in at father and son getting on so well, she tiptoed away again, leaving them in peace.
Well, she told herself dizzily, Rafaello had been in love with her when she was eighteen and that was really encouraging to find out. What he had managed once he could, with careful encouragement, manage again. Now that she had time to think about it, she was even more heartened by his admission that he had been devastated when they broke up back then. He had cared, really cared about her after just six weeks…and no sex. Maybe if she had contrived to stay out of his bed in Corfu for more than an hour after her arrival she might have reanimated those warmer feelings.
So, in retrospect, even though she would have been very willing to make love on the sofa, she was frantically grateful that the demands of business had made that impossible. Maybe resisting him was the secret, maybe he needed a challenge, only it was rather difficult to work out how she could meet that expectation once they were married…
CHAPTER TEN
THE next two days were incredibly busy for Glory. She tidied and aired the cottage for her father’s return from hospital. She visited the vicar who was to conduct the service, enjoyed half a dozen lengthy visits from former schoolfriends, who were surprised and delighted at their receipt of wedding invitations, and finally she welcomed her father home.
‘Sam’s taken to Benito Grazzini, then,’ Archie Little gathered within ten minutes of his return, having learned that Rafaello’s father was still staying at the Park.
‘Does it bother you?’ Glory asked awkwardly.
‘It’s only what I expected. Sam’s been one of them from birth,’ the older man remarked with a wry smile of acceptance. ‘I tried to make him into a Little, goodness knows I did, but even as a little kid he had all his own ideas. But it’s not his fault he was a cuckoo in the nest.’
He was a practical man and she supposed it was just as well, for there was already talk of Sam going over to Benito’s home in Tuscany for his half-term break, and Benito was talking about the possibility of buying a house in London. For the foreseeable future, Sam was going to be dividing his time between two families and two very different lifestyles.
Rafaello got back to Montague Park on the night before the wedding. He was not overjoyed to discover that Glory was spending her last night of singledom at the cottage and much, much too busy even to see him. ‘See you at the altar!’ she told him cheerfully on the phone.
‘I just want to see you for five minutes—’
‘No, I’m sorry. I promised Dad I would devote myself to him tonight and if I see you, well, you know it’s not going to be for just five minutes.’
Ten minutes later, the knocker on the cottage door went. Rafaello was on the doorstep.
‘Wedding gift,’ Rafaello drawled, shoving a slim parcel into her startled hands.
‘Oh…oh—er—thanks!’ she exclaimed in surprise, momentarily deflected from literally eating him up with her eyes.
‘Engagement ring.’ Rafaello settled a small box on top of the first package and then a second box as well. ‘Eternity ring—felt I might as well get it all over with at once,’ he imparted as he met her astonished gaze.
Glory thrust the gifts on the dresser to one side of the door and was just within an ace of throwing herself exuberantly into his arms when he backed off in an exaggerated step, both lean hands rising as if to hold her at bay.