Convenient Brides: The Italian's Convenient Wife / His Inconvenient Wife / His Convenient Proposal

“You?” Her laugh verged on the hysterical. “I hardly think so!”

“Why? Because, the first time I held you in my arms, I was too foolish to realize your true worth?” He expelled a huge sigh of frustration. “That was a long time ago, cara. Trust me when I tell you, I’ve changed for the better since then.”

Temptation nibbled at the edges of her resolve. Quickly, before it gained too powerful a hold, she replied, “Easy for you to say, Paolo, but where’s the proof?”

“Here.” He tapped a fist to his chest. “I admit that when I met you in Paris, I viewed you as a threat to my family, and was prepared to squash you flat at the first hint of sabotage. But I’ve watched you, this last week. I’ve seen your kindness to my mother, the way you sit with her and try to comfort her when your own heart is also breaking. I’ve seen how patient you are with the children, how loving, even though, more often than not, they rebuff your overtures.”

His hand strayed down her throat, stole around her neck. “If it were within your power to do so, I believe you would change places with Vanessa, just to give them back their mother. Yet something more than that is eating you alive. I know it, and it worries me, even as my heart tells me you’re incapable of sinister motives.”

“My heart hears your words and wants to believe them,” she countered tremulously, “but my head tells me actions are what count.”

“Then let your head be the best judge of this,” he said, and before she could guess his intent, let alone utter a protest, his mouth came down on hers and fastened there in a burst of heat that set her blood on fire.

Chapter Five

SHE’D felt faint stirrings of desire with other men since he’d initiated her into the art of love, nine years before. Kinder, less dangerous men. More sympathetic and deserving men. But always, Callie had withheld herself, even if her current love interest hadn’t known it. When it came right down to that moment of ultimate surrender, she hadn’t been able to let go. Not once, since the night she’d conceived Paolo’s children, had she permitted herself the freedom to respond without reservation or inhibition.

But if she’d spent the intervening years suppressing her sexual urges, Paolo had clearly spent the same amount of time fine-tuning his. The once-reckless womanizer had matured into a virtuoso seducer whose finesse laid instant waste to her resistance.

The very second his mouth touched hers, all thought of selfpreservation fled her mind. With just a kiss, he turned her world on its ear, and nothing mattered but to prolong the pleasure of being in his arms again; of awakening after a long and arid sleep, and feeling, with every cell in her body, every beat of her heart, the sweet, sharp trickle of desire permeating her blood. Without a moment’s pause, she was ready to sell her soul all over again, if that’s what it took to satisfy the raging hunger he inspired.

Her lips softened, parted. How else could she drink in the essence of him? When his tongue trespassed beyond the bounds of friendship and entered the forbidden territory of lovers, she held it prisoner, drawing it ever deeper into her mouth.

She cradled his cheek. Let her fingers steal up to knot fiercely in his thick, black hair. She swayed against him, arousing both him and herself by brushing her nipples lightly against his chest.

His hand skated from her throat to her ribs, and settled urgently, possessively, at her hip. For the first time in what seemed like eternity, she again experienced that scalding rush of heat between her legs. Sensed the distant tremors gathering strength within her, forerunners of a starving passion that would be satisfied with nothing less than complete fulfillment.

How disastrously it all might have ended, had he not exercised some restraint, was anybody’s guess. But again, with a discipline his younger self had never shown, he pulled them both back from the brink. “Forgive me, Caroline,” he said hoarsely, shoving her almost roughly into the far corner of the passenger seat. “I should not have done that.”

Dazed, disappointed, she swiped her hand across her mouth and injected a hard-won note of outrage into her reply. “Why did you then?”

“I couldn’t help myself.” He hesitated, and if she hadn’t known him to be the most confident man she’d ever met, she’d have thought him unsure he should utter his next words.

At length, though, he went on, “I find myself drawn to you. You touch me—against my will, I might add—with your selfcontained grief. I see the way you swallow when the pain almost gets the better of you, and I wish I could comfort you. But I forfeited that right a long time ago, and of the many things I regret having done, it’s that I’ve given you no reason to trust me now.”

Another silence, this one full of brooding frustration, before he burst out savagely, “Dio, if it were within my power, I would have us meeting here for the first time, with no painful history to sour your view of me!”

“We were both young and foolish, Paolo,” she said, an unsettling stab of guilt attacking without warning. She was the injured party, the one who’d given up everything—or so she’d told herself these many long years. Yet in line with other recent self-insights, as she watched him, listened to him, she suddenly wasn’t quite so sure.

“But I was the greater transgressor.” Fleetingly his hand ghosted over her hair and down her face. “You were little more than a child, Caroline, and so anxious to please that it disgusts me to remember how I took advantage of you. If I had a daughter, I would kill the man who dared to treat her, as I treated you.”

Tell him! Say the words: You do have a daughter, Paolo, and a son, as well! Then let the chips fall where they may. Dare to believe that the truth can indeed set a person free.

The urge to confess rose, as strong and surprising as her earlier guilt. She had to bite her tongue not to give in to what was surely the ultimate folly. A moment’s lapse in judgment could cost her everything because, no matter what he might say now, his repentance would surely turn to outrage when he learned the secret she’d kept from him all this time.

“You do not answer me,” he said, a world of weary regret in his voice.

“What do you want me to say? That I forgive you?”

“No. That’s asking for far more than I deserve.”

His candor was killing her! Too ashamed of her hypocrisy to look him in the eye, she stared again at the swath of moonlit sea. “No, it’s not. In the last week, we’ve both learned that life’s too short to waste it bearing grudges. So let’s forgive each other, Paolo, for the mistakes we’ve both made.”

“What are yours?” he asked, with just a trace of humor in his tone. “That you were too beautiful for your own good? Too sweetly appealing for mine?”

Humbled yet again by his selfderision, she said, “I chose to be a stranger to my own flesh and blood, just as you accused me of doing. I stayed away from my niece and nephew, when I should have made an effort to grow closer to them.”

“You’re here for them now, cara.”

Yes, but deep in her heart, she was terribly afraid she’d left it too late. Her children didn’t want to know her.

They turned to Lidia to dry their tears and sing them to sleep. They ran to Paolo when it hit them that Ermanno could no longer be there for them. Even Salvatore occupied a special place in their hearts, regardless of Callie’s belief that he was far removed from the typically warm, loving Italian patriarch they deserved. When all was said and done, the Raineros were her children’s true family, and she had only herself to blame for that.

Blinking away the persistent threat of tears, she said, “I mean nothing to them. You said so, yourself.”

“They are afraid to love you.”

Another wave of pain engulfed her. “Afraid? Why?”

“Because they have learned too early what it is to have the very foundation of their lives knocked out from under them. As they see it, their parents have abandoned them, and so might you. You are kind and tender with them, everything a loving aunt should be. But they are not, I fear, willing to risk another loss, so soon after the first.”

“So how do I rectify that?”

“By not turning their world upside-down with impossible demands. Do not ask them to open their hearts to you, just because you happen to be their mother’s sister. Don’t be in too big a hurry to rush back to America. Rather, stay here in Italy long enough to earn their trust. Do that, and their affection will follow.”

“That could take months.”

He shrugged. “So? You already said you’re prepared to take a leave of absence from your work. Have you had second thoughts, and decided Gina and Clemente aren’t worth such a sacrifice?”

“Of course not! But—”

“But you have your own life, one you share perhaps with a lover?”

“No.”

“Then what’s so important about your schedule that everything has to conform to it, regardless of how it might affect other people’s?”

Seeing herself through his eyes, she cried passionately, “You don’t understand!”

“Then make me,” he said. “You say you want what’s best for our niece and nephew—”

“I do! I want to give them the kind of security that comes from knowing that they are deeply and irrevocably loved, even though their parents have died.”

“Which is exactly what I also want for them. So why, if we’re in agreement, are we fighting each other?”

“I don’t know!” she cried, frustration spilling over. He knocked all the starch out of her convictions with his powerful line of reasoning. “I can’t think straight when you badger me like this!”

“Is that what I’m doing, Caroline? Badgering you?”