Hilary went pink to the roots of her hair.
‘I shall get you out from under my skin or die in the attempt, cara,’ Roel murmured huskily.
‘Then what?’
In the silence that fell she was too enervated even to take the breath she needed lest it somehow obscured his answer.
‘I fly you home and return to my free and uncomplicated former life as a single male.’
It took immense courage but she did not flinch at that comeback. ‘So why wait? Why not do that now?’
‘Right now I’m still enjoying you. You’re different from my usual lovers.’
‘Does how I feel come into this in any way?’ Hilary snapped.
‘I make you feel incredible and you know it,’ Roel reminded her with merciless cool and the cruel intimacy of a lover, well aware of his own ability to turn her inside out and upside down with sheer longing.
Hilary subsided back into the pillows and closed her mortified eyes. Sometimes forbearance was the better part of valour, she reminded herself. Sometimes there was nothing wrong with just going with the flow. He might never need to know that she had conceived his child. Did she really have to tell him? When they parted, she would never see him again. She wanted their baby so much and she had loads of love to give. She was prepared to work incredibly hard to give their child a decent home. How could she be such a coward that she was already trying to excuse herself for not immediately telling Roel that she had fallen pregnant?
‘I told you I didn’t want anything,’ Hilary whispered urgently under her breath the instant the unctuous salesman moved out of hearing. ‘What are we doing in here?’
Roel dealt her a look of warm amusement. ‘You have no jewellery. It’s time I bought you some.’
Hilary stretched up on tiptoe to murmur with forced amusement, ‘It’s not wise to take the mistress idea out of the bedroom…the joke wears thin—’
‘This time the joke’s on me. No decent gold-digger would miss out on an opportunity of this magnitude.’ As Hilary flinched in surprise and pain her eyes flew wide and darted up to lodge on his lean dark chiselled features. He curved an imprisoning arm round her slight, taut figure to prevent her from pulling back from him. ‘Think about what I just said,’ he urged in a husky tone of intimacy. ‘In fact maybe you should be capturing this on film. I’m admitting that I misjudged your motives four years ago…’
Hilary snatched in a stark breath. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Never more so.’ Taking advantage of her shock, Roel manoeuvred her down onto the elegant stool by the counter. ‘Some sad individuals say sorry with flowers—’
‘Is that a fact?’ she said breathlessly, hardly able to think straight because he had plunged her from hurt straight into a disconcerted state of relief and happiness.
‘Some never say sorry at all and some will even buy you diamonds in the hope that you will not expect any action that could be interpreted as grovelling.’
Her easy smile broke out like the sun at dawn and she almost laughed out loud, for she had never forgotten him saying that grovelling was only for peasants.
An hour later, when they had returned to the villa, she wandered out onto the terrace where he was enjoying a drink. A giant ancient fig tree provided shelter from the sultry heat of the Sardinian sun. Even late afternoon, it was very hot. Lush planted terraces and steps ran down the steep hillside to the private beach below.
‘It obviously pays to catch you out,’ she teased Roel, angling up her wrist so that the platinum watch glittered in the arrow of light breaking through the leafy canopy above her. And all the while she was doing that she was still watching Roel, luxuriating in his proximity, his bold, uncompromising masculinity and even that fierce will of his, which she had dared to cross in that exclusive jewellery store.
As always attuned to her scrutiny, Roel elevated an ebony brow, his brilliant dark eyes full of reproof for she had been adamant about accepting only that one gift. ‘I wanted to cover you in diamonds.’
‘I’d have looked downright silly,’ she quipped.
‘Naked you would have looked like a pagan goddess, bella mia.’
Her tummy flipped. It took Roel to imagine her as nobody else ever would. Self-conscious beneath his molten appraisal, she muttered unevenly, ‘You still haven’t explained why you changed your mind about me being greedy for money?’
His lean, strong face tensed. ‘When you claimed in London that you’d paid most of the cash settlement I gave you back into the account from which you originally received it, I didn’t believe you. But I had it checked out. That money has been lying unacknowledged in that account for well over three years—’
‘But what happened to the letter I wrote to Paul Correro?’
‘It never arrived. Around that time he moved into new legal offices. Your letter would have been sent to his old address and it must have gone astray. Paul is very upset about all this.’ His handsome mouth compressed in acknowledgement. ‘He knows he is the broken link in a chain, which has led to much misunderstanding between us.’
Hilary was grateful that the subject of that cash settlement could finally be freely discussed. ‘I never meant to take money from you but I did, so you can hardly blame him for having a low opinion of me—’
‘He had no right to make that judgement—’