The Italian Billionaire's Pregnant Bride

‘No, you’re throwing money at me and trying to ship me out to a foreign country where I am less likely to cause you embarrassment. If that’s what you call support, you can keep it!’ Kathy reached out to open the front door in an effort to end the confrontation.

‘Madonna diavolo! What about this? Will you do without this, as well?’ Sergio caught her into his arms and crushed her soft full mouth beneath his with a passion that devastated her resistance.

He knotted one hand into her copper hair to hold her fast and clamped her slender body to his like a second skin. His heart pounded against hers. Urgently aware of his masculine arousal, she quivered in that hard embrace and exchanged kiss for kiss with a hunger as fierce, hot and lethal as a fever. But nothing could assuage the sadness within her and the ache at the heart of her. When he let her go she staggered back against the wall.

‘I was supposed to drink the classic wine and go upstairs with you to celebrate, wasn’t I?’ Kathy was still fighting even though her knees didn’t feel up to the challenge of holding her upright. ‘But I’m not so desperate that I need to share a man and I never will be!’

Sergio was already using his phone. He did not deign to reply to that sally. His detachment was as effective as an invisible w

all. The silence was suffocating. She felt shut out, pushed away and she found it unbearable. Even when she was so mad with him that she could have screamed she wanted to be back in his arms. He flipped the key to the door. She gave him a tiny split second to speak. He said nothing. He did nothing to prevent her from leaving, either.

‘I hate you—I really, really hate you,’ she whispered fierily as she left and, in that instant, she meant every word of it.

The door snapped shut behind her. There was not even the suspicion of a slam.

Conscious that Sergio’s protection team were watching her every move and had to be wondering why she was leaving alone ten minutes after their arrival, Kathy endeavoured to look composed. Then suddenly, from the house behind her, she heard the unmistakable noise of glass smashing and splintering. The vintage wine bottle hitting the fireplace? Her narrow shoulders straightened, her chin came up. Eyes sparkling with satisfaction and with a new purpose in her step, she headed for the waiting car.

Over the next two weeks, however, Kathy grew steadily more exhausted. Tigger died in his sleep without fuss or fanfare and she was inconsolable at the loss of her elderly pet. While she fretted about the future and grieved for her cat, her morning sickness spread to other times of day and she began lying awake at night worrying. Being pregnant and ill was more of a struggle than she had expected and she had to cut back on her hours at the café. Aware that Kathy was already struggling to pay her bills, Bridget offered Kathy her spare room, but Kathy was determined not to take advantage of their friendship.

Kathy would have vehemently protested any suggestion that she was waiting for Sergio to make another move. But when she discovered that Sergio was fully engaged in making moves that had nothing to do with her whatsoever, she had a rather rude awakening to reality. Travelling into work on the bus, she caught an infuriating flash of Sergio’s face on a newspaper page. She wasn’t close enough to see what the article was about and, while she told herself that she shouldn’t care, she was only human. As soon as she got off the bus she bought the tabloid and paid the price for her curiosity.

Sergio, she learned, was the owner of a giant yacht called Diva Queen and he had thrown a stag party on board for his friend, Leonidas Pallis, the Greek billionaire. An exotic dancer talked of a ‘non-stop orgy on the high seas.’ Kathy studied the grainy photo of Sergio, shirt hanging open, engaging in dirty dancing with a pneumatic semi-naked blonde. Even drunk and carousing he still looked gorgeous and she swallowed hard. He really did like blondes, she thought dully. He also looked as if he was having fun. No doubt it beat the hell out of chess.

This was not a guy any woman would choose to have an unplanned baby with, Kathy acknowledged heavily. Yet, how could she fault him when he had already accepted responsibility and was ready to help her financially? At no stage had he told her how he actually felt about the prospect of becoming a father and now she realised that he didn’t need to tell her when his behaviour spoke so clearly for him. He was trying to ship her off to France to live under an assumed name where their paths would only cross at his instigation. And Sergio’s riotous partying was making headlines round the world, while prompting an anonymous source to admit surprise at the sheer scale of his recent bad-boy activities.

Kathy believed that Sergio was reacting to the situation he had found himself in. He didn’t want to be a father and he was even less happy that the mother of his child was a convicted thief. Those were the unlovely facts and it was time she learned to live with them and matched his independence. A good first move would be sorting out her immediate future on her own, for at this stage of her pregnancy there was no need for Sergio to be involved. In any case, a cooling-off period would probably do them both the world of good, she reflected painfully. She needed time and space to make her mind up about what she wanted to do after the baby was born. Hanging around in the hope that Sergio Torrente would somehow provide an answer for all her doubts and fears was a sure path to disappointment.

That evening she ate with Bridget at her apartment and outlined her intentions. ‘I’ll have to leave London. If I stop working at the café I won’t be able to make my rent,’ she confided ruefully. ‘And I don’t want to depend on Sergio for help.’

‘Why not?’

Kathy dug into her tote bag and passed the newspaper across the table.

Bridget perused the article, raised her brows and set it aside without comment. ‘If you don’t mind kids and cooking, you can go to my god-daughter in Devon,’ she said abruptly.

‘Your god-daughter?’ Kathy repeated with a frown. ‘The estate agent?’

‘Nola’s energetic and practical just like you. You’ll like each other. Her husband’s a journalist and hardly ever at home. She’s heavily pregnant with her fourth child and desperate for help,’ the other woman said. ‘Her nanny got married, and in the past two months two au pairs have come and gone. The first was so homesick she couldn’t stop crying and the second quit because the house was too far out of town. What do you think?’

‘I’ll consider any option,’ Kathy answered. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

KATHY had just walked into the estate agency where Nola worked when the first pain hit.

With a muffled gasp, she clutched the edge of a desk to steady herself. The fear that engulfed her was much worse than the slight cramping sensation that gripped her lower abdomen.

‘What’s wrong?’ Nola demanded, breaking off her conversation with another employee.

‘I think the baby’s coming!’ Kathy whispered shakily, white as the wall behind her. ‘But it’s too soon.’

Nola Ross, a sensible brown-eyed blonde in her thirties, pressed Kathy down into a chair. ‘Breathe in and out slowly. It may just be a Braxton-Hicks contraction.’

But the pains kept on coming and the two women decided that Kathy should go to the local hospital. There, Kathy insisted that Nola went back to the agency because she knew that the other woman had clients to meet. The doctor gave Kathy medication in an effort to stop the contractions and made arrangements to have her transferred to a facility with a neonatal unit. By that stage several hours had passed. As there was no bed free, she was kept on a trolley while she waited for the transportation to arrive.

Lying there, Kathy prayed and struggled to keep panic at bay. She was only thirty-five weeks pregnant and knew that her little girl would be at risk if she was born too early. The past seven months seemed to run on fast forward through Kathy’s mind. She had not worked as Nola’s domestic support for very long. No sooner had Nola had her own baby than her husband had taken off with another woman, plunging the Ross family into chaos. During that testing time, Nola and Kathy had become firm friends. By now Kathy had recovered from her early pregnancy sickness and helped out at the estate agency while Nola was briefly on maternity leave. She’d discovered that she was a whizz at selling houses! It was now three months since Nola had engaged a full-time nanny and hired Kathy as a saleswoman instead. In every way that mattered, Kathy’s move from London to a small market town in Devon had proved an unqualified success.

But now Kathy was fast sinking into a pit of dread and self-blame. Determined to establish a secure base for herself and her child, she had worked hard because a career with prospects was the best possible safety net for a single parent. But had she worked too hard? Stressed too much? Rested too little? Once those preliminary bouts of nausea had melted away, she had felt amazingly healthy. Slowly but surely, her unborn baby had become the most important element of her world. The discovery that she was having a little girl had simply intensified her feelings. It had never once occurred to Kathy that her own body might let her down.