The Ranieri Bride

Enrico crossed the room with the silent tread of bare feet on thick-pile carpet, carefully shrugged out of his bathrobe and laid it aside, then lifted up the duvet and eased himself carefully into the bed.

Freya stirred as the weight of his body disturbed the mattress. Reaching out for her, he drew her in.

‘Enrico,’ he heard her whisper. That was all.

At least it was his name.

‘Shh.’ He kissed her softly. ‘Go back to sleep.’

To his surprise she did, sinking back down to where she had drifted up from, her cheek pillowed in his shoulder and her long legs unconsciously tangling with his.

Freya came awake to the sound of rattling crockery and the vague, stomach-sinking feeling that she had been abducted by aliens. She opened her eyes to find Sonny standing over her holding a breakfast tray.

‘Ciao,’ Sonny greeted. ‘Orange juice, tea and toast for breakfast,’ he listed, ‘as instructed this morning by your much more amiable son.’

Nicky. A second stomach-sinking feeling hit her with a punch of reality. ‘What time is it?’ She sat up with a jerk. ‘Where is Nicky?’

‘The time is eight-thirty,’ Sonny provided. ‘And your son is, as we speak, on his way into the City with his papa and Fredo, affording you a well-deserved lie-in.’

The tray arrived across her lap, thereby effectively trapping her to the bed before she could leap out and start yelling.

‘Enrico said to tell you to eat, shower and calm down before you ring him at Hannard’s.’ Sonny pointed to a slip of paper lying on the tray. ‘His private mobile number to cut out the middle man,’ he explained drily. ‘Oh—and I thought you would like to read this…’ A newspaper arrived and was propped up against the teapot. ‘Enjoy!’

Sonny strode out, closing the door very firmly behind him. Freya stared at her breakfast, then at the newspaper already neatly folded open at, presumably, the relevant page. Enrico had walked off with her son again. She’d slept in for the first time in over two years and had not heard anything, not even Nicky’s good-humoured chatter, which had always, always been her early-morning alarm call and—

The print on the newspaper suddenly came into focus. With a sharp gasp she snatched it up and began to read. Thirty seconds later she was pushing the tray aside and diving out of the bed—it was only as she did so that she happened to notice the impression on the pillow next to hers.

Heat flooded into her, that stinging, stifling kind of heat which came with a half memory that could—should—have been the vague remnants of an old, familiar dream.

‘Oh,’ she choked and spun away to hunt down her handbag. Fishing out her mobile phone, she dived back onto the bed to pick up the slip of paper bearing Enrico’s telephone number. Having been left to dry of its own accord, her hair was a mass of tumbling, twisting spirals that she had to push out of her way so she could read the digits and punch them out on the phone. Enrico answered immediately, though by then she didn’t know which accusation to hit him with first.

‘Y-you slept in my bed!’ was the one that shot from her in a breathless shriek.

Enrico leant back in his chair and spun it round to smile at the view beyond his office window. ‘Ciao, mi amore,’ he murmured dulcetly. ‘You clung to me like a delightful but very possessive octopus, all arms and legs and—’

‘That’s a lie!’ she gasped out.

‘—made love to me as if I was your long-lost lover returned…’

‘I did not! I would never—’

‘…so wonderfully eager and so very insatiable…’

‘You’re just teasing me. Will you stop this—?’

‘Had I not been so afraid that our son might sleepwalk into the room at any moment I would not have been able to resist. However…’

‘I’m not listening!’ she breathed down the phone at him.

‘And miss out on the best part where I asked you who Nicolo’s father is and you said—You are, Enrico…?’

Silence came at him across the airwaves. Glaring grim triumph now, Enrico waited for Freya to recover from the shock.

‘I w-was asleep—’

‘And so honest you even instructed me where and how I was to touch you.’

There was a sound like someone sucking in their breath. Were her eyes shut tight the way they had been last night? Was she standing or sitting or still lying there in the bed remembering her hot dream that had been so vividly real?