The Italian's Bride

Disliking the road his thoughts were taking him down, he quickened his steps and caught up with her at the head of the sweeping staircase, where the upper hall gave onto corridors branching in three directions.

‘This way,’ he instructed tautly. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to connect with those wide, seemingly vulnerable eyes, recognise that elusive nameless something that had captivated his half-brother. He simply strode ahead.

Portia followed, feeling unwanted and seriously unnecessary, wishing she’d never agreed to come here. When he paused by one of the carved oak doors that lined the seemingly endless corridor and flung it open, telling her tightly, ‘Your suite of rooms,’ she felt a deep and dreadful reluctance to cross the threshold.

‘I want to go home.’

The childishly wailed words were out before she could swallow them and she cringed with super-charged embarrassment, reddening hectically as he remarked witheringly, ‘If that’s your opening salvo, forget it.’

Vulnerable? How could he have thought that for one insane moment? Portia Makepeace was about as vulnerable as an armoured car!

He reminded her stonily, ‘I’ve told you what will happen if you threaten to do anything to upset my father. Here—’ He placed Sam in her arms and took a backward pace, as if the air she breathed out was full of pestilence and plague. ‘Make Vittorio’s son comfortable. I will send Assunta to you to make sure you are behaving as my father would wish.’

Holding her baby close to her heart, gathering much needed strength from the adored warm little body, Portia blurted, ‘I didn’t come here to be kept under house arrest! I came because your father wants to see his grandson. So when can I meet him?’

Her chin came up, even though her voice held a disgraceful wobble. She was sick of being treated like dirt, ordered around. Her future relationship with Sam’s grandfather was all that counted. Lucenzo’s low opinion of her shouldn’t matter, but it did hurt, she acknowledged sickly, more than she knew it should.

‘Tomorrow,’ he told her curtly. ‘I will let him know that Vittorio’s son has arrived safely. For tonight that will be enough. As I have already told you, my father is a sick man.’

Watching him stride away, Portia felt her heart plummet to new depths, her mouth going dry. How sick was sick? Eduardo Verdi had sounded so kind in that letter he’d written her. He’d come across as being someone she could talk to with the ease and openness that came so naturally to her.

All through her nightmare journey she’d been counting on him as head of the family to intercede on her behalf, to perhaps persuade Lucenzo that she wasn’t as downright bad as he thought she was.

Portia shuddered, immediately hating herself for such selfish, unworthy thoughts. If the poor old man was ill then the most she could hope for was that seeing and holding his new little grandson would make him feel a whole lot better!

She could stand up for herself where Lucenzo was concerned, of course she could. And one day, if he stayed around, she would force him to listen to her side of the story—even if, as he’d clearly demonstrated, he had no wish to hear it.

And when she met Eduardo she would do nothing, say nothing to upset or tire him. Of course she wouldn’t.

Annoyingly, her eyes pickled with compassionate tears. She blinked them rapidly away and forced herself to carry her now restless Sam over the threshold and into the most beautiful bedroom she’d ever seen.

No time to take stock, except to note that her luggage, looking even tattier against a backdrop of unnerving opulence, was in an ungainly heap at the foot of a four-poster which was trigged out with the most fantastic cream-coloured gauzy drapes.