Destitute Until the Italian's Diamond

CHAPTER TWELVE

HESTOODTHERE, motionless, for an endless moment.

Lana! I am seeing her again—here, now, in front of me!

She overwhelmed him, making his senses reel.

But she always had—she had always had that effect on him. From the very first moment to the very last.

His gaze swept over her. He was drinking her in like a man in a desert finding sweet, sweet water...

He looked her over from her golden hair, piled up loosely, to her perfect face—perfect even without make-up, for it was always perfect, could only ever be perfect—down over her fabulous body—

And stopped short.

‘Dio mio...’

The breath was exhaled from him and shock—naked and brutal—punched him in the solar plexus. Her pregnancy was blatant—unconcealed. The long sweater over leggings outlined her fullness.

Shock detonated in him again as he took it in.

He heard her say his name, shock whitening her face. Saw her slump against the door...

In an instant he had her, catching her before she fell. The weight of her body was heavy—heavier than he had ever known it. But then...

‘You need to sit down.’ His voice was brusque, terse with shock. Inside his head emotion was storming.

He guided her in, kicking the door shut behind him, going into a room opening off the hallway. It was a sitting room, warm from central heating after the chill of the English winter outdoors, and he got her to an armchair into which she sank like a dead weight.

He heard her say his name again, in the same faint voice, her eyes huge in her head, still blank with shock. Emotion was storming within him, and seeing her in that condition was like being inside a hurricane, turning him inside out. Everything he had come here to say vanished from him, torn away by the storm whipping through him.

He stood back, looking down at her. Then spoke, finding the necessary words. ‘Let me get you some water—’

His voice was clipped, and he did not wait for a reply, just strode from the room. Behind the sitting room was a kitchen, and he seized up a glass from the draining board, filling it from the tap, coming back into the room where Lana still sat, her face ashen.

‘Drink this,’ he told her, handing her the glass.

She took it, sipping from it jerkily until he removed it again, setting it down on a nearby side table.

Then he stood, looking down at her. The hurricane was still inside him, or he was inside it—he did not know. But he was calmer now, forcing himself to be so. Finding the words he knew he now must say.

He drew breath, steadying his voice. But it still came out harshly. ‘I should hate you for what you did to me—leaving me as you did, and for such a reason. But now—’

He stopped. She was staring at him, her beautiful face still ashen. Something moved within him, crossing the whipping maelstrom of the hurricane inside him and finding the still, small eye where the maelstrom could not reach. Where he now was. Where everything was clear to him.

‘I will stand by you,’ he said. He drew a breath, like a razor in his throat, ready to say what he must say next, where only truth could be.

When he spoke again his eyes never left hers. His voice was no longer harsh. It was filled, instead, with all he knew he must say to her.

‘Come back to me, Lana. It’s what I came here to say to you...’

He had known it from the moment he’d realised that whatever kind of reunion she’d had with Malcolm it was over—he’d gone back to Hollywood to marry a film star. Leaving Lana alone. Alone for him to say what he had just said to her.

His eyes went to her midriff and emotion knifed within him. Emotion that filled him with a certainty that made everything else irrelevant. For a moment there was silence, only the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece making any sound. Yet his heart was pounding such that surely it must be audible. As audible as the words echoing in his head now. The words he had said.

No man in his right mind would say them. What man could? In his head a memory flashed—seared—of his talking to Luc Dinardi about Stephanie. It had been unbelievable then, what Luc had said. But now—

Now I know. Know why he would say it. And why I have said it too.