Pregnant with His Baby!: Secret Baby, Convenient Wife / Innocent Wife, Baby of Shame / The Surgeon's Secret Baby Wish

Gianfranco’s mouth tightened with frustration.

‘It’s stupid, really,’ Dervla observed, her voice high and shaky. ‘But when we got married I was actually nervous about being a step-parent.’ She saw the flash of something that might have been shock move in his eyes and laughed again. ‘That didn’t occur to you? It didn’t cross your mind that I was worried I’d mess up and disappoint you.’

‘Well, you didn’t.’

‘Of course I didn’t, how could I? You’ve got the parenting covered. Actually, when you think about it, for someone who refused to be your mistress my present job description is not so very different.

‘I’ve tried hard to fit into your world, Gianfranco, really hard, but it seems to me that, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be good enough.’

A stunned silence followed her quivering emotional outburst.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you felt that way? I thought you wanted to be part of a family.’

‘Haven’t you listened to a word I’ve been saying? I did, I do want to be part of a family, but I’m on the outside looking in where you,’ she accused, ‘put me.’

He looked genuinely shocked by her claim. ‘If that is true it was not my intention.’

‘You never do anything accidentally, Gianfranco. You manipulate people.’

‘Per amor di Dio, you act as though I planned everything …’ Releasing a hard laugh, he dragged a hand through his ebony hair and shook his head. ‘Since the moment I met you I have been playing catch-up; my life has been about as planned as a forest fire!’

The antagonism drained from Dervla as if someone had released an escape valve. They were just going around in circles. He didn’t love her and he wasn’t going to change, so what was the point in this?

‘Right, fine, well, it doesn’t matter any more,’ she said dully. ‘I’ll let you get on with doing your parent things. I’m staying with Sue just now and you’ve got her number.’

A look of astonishment spread across Gianfranco’s lean dark face. For a moment he just stared at her. ‘You expect me to stand here and let you walk away …?’

She shrugged, pretending a lack of interest she didn’t feel. ‘Why not?’

His sable brows twitched into a dark disapproving line. ‘What are you talking about? You are my wife, though you seem to have forgotten that.’

Dervla knew she was only his wife on paper. In his heart he would only ever have one wife and it wasn’t her. ‘I was your wife two days ago,’ she observed. ‘I didn’t see you going out of your way to see if I was all right.’

‘So I was meant to follow you?’ Eyes smouldering, he stepped down to her level and curved his hands possessively across her narrow ribcage, drawing her towards him until they stood barely an inch apart. The indentation above his aquiline nose deepened as his glance moved across her face.

‘You don’t look well,’ he accused, concern for her fragile appearance making his voice harsh.

‘I didn’t have much time to make myself presentable.’ She made no mention of the fact her brain had gone into meltdown the moment she had heard his voice. ‘You said it was urgent so I assumed a trip to the hairdresser’s was out of the question.’

The tart retort brought a fleeting smile to his dark eyes. The smile was not there when he said in an intense voice that made her sensitive stomach muscles quiver, ‘Your hair always looks beautiful.’

She wanted to lean into him and feel his arms close around her so much it hurt.

Gianfranco’s expression was distracted as he brushed a stray curl from her cheek with his knuckles. ‘Your skin is so soft!’ Silky soft … soft all over.

He sucked in air through his flared nostrils as his body reacted strongly to the jolt of lust the stray thought produced.

‘I simply meant that you look …’ he angled his dark head and allowed his narrowed gaze to travel over the sweet curves of her face ‘… tired,’ he decided, tracing the dark crescents beneath her eyes with the side of his thumb.

Dervla, her thoughts totally occupied with coping with the ache of longing—he was so damned close—had no energy in reserve for prevarication. ‘I’ve not been sleeping.’

Sleeping had become inseparably connected in her mind with the heat of his body, the warm, clean, masculine scent of his silky-textured skin. A sofa and a sleeping bag were just no substitute.

‘Neither have I.’

So Alberto had not been wrong about the pacing. ‘You haven’t?’ That was something. ‘Why?’

‘I was angry with you.’

‘Angry? I thought you might have missed me …?’

Dervla heard the pleading note in her voice and experienced a stab of self revulsion—where were her pride and self-respect? She was virtually begging.

‘Oh, God, this is my fault!’ She shook her head, her expression self-recriminatory as she admitted, ‘If I’d agreed to be your mistress things wouldn’t have got so complicated! I mean, all you ever actually wanted was sex and that’s not complicated.’

‘It wasn’t before I met you,’ he intoned grimly. Nothing in his life had been simple since he’d met Dervla.

‘Maybe you wish we hadn’t got married at all?’ A silence followed her words. It stretched and she wanted a hole to open up at her feet and swallow her.

‘When you left that way, I was angry, I was concerned, I was …’ He stopped, his smouldering dark eyes meshing with Dervla’s wide wary gaze.

He vented a frustrated-sounding expletive in his native tongue and pushed both hands into his dark hair before burying his face in his hands.

For what felt like a long time to Dervla he stayed that way. Then his hands fell away and he dragged a hand across his unshaven jaw as his head came up.

The action was so intensely weary that her tender heart took a direct hit. She had been so dazed to find him standing there she had missed the fact that he looked totally exhausted.

More than that, she realised, her troubled stare taking in the telling tension in the skin pulled taut across his chiselled cheekbones and the strain etched into the lines radiating from his deepset eyes, he looked like a man who had been to hell and made the return journey.