The Italian's Baby Bargain: The Italian's Wedding Ultimatum / The Italian's Forced Bride / The Mancini Marriage Bargain

Jonny cleared his throat and nodded towards the closed French doors. ‘In private.’

You can have anything you want.

Her colour slightly heightened by her traitorous thought, Sam nodded placidly and reminded herself for the tenth time that afternoon that she was a strong, independent woman who didn’t need a man—and, anyway, she wasn’t the sort of person who would settle for second best.

In the alcove, where he had retreated to watch them, Alessandro Di Livio tightened his long fingers around the stem of his untouched glass of champagne as he observed his brother-in-law’s head move closer to the glossy copper one of the seated woman.

They were so close they looked like lovers about to embrace. He couldn’t give the man his sister had chosen a backbone, but he could make damned sure that he didn’t cheat and break his besotted little sister’s heart!

God knew what either woman saw in him. Maybe it was the surfing thing? He presumed, from the cabinet of trophies ostentatiously on show in his sister’s apartment, that the younger man had been more successful riding the waves than he was at business. Perhaps the younger man could have coped with one store, he conceded, but his rapid and reckless expansion over the past eighteen months had been nothing short of suicidal. The only thing that surprised Alessandro, who had been set to bail him out for the past year, was that he was still financially afloat.

His sensually sculpted lips formed a twisted, cynical smile as the Maguire woman lifted her hand in a fluttery gesture to her slender, pale throat. The action was as revealing as he had come to expect of her, but he couldn’t quite decide if she was as transparent as she appeared, or if it was all part of some sort of act.

Alessandro’s nostrils flared. If Jonny Trelevan didn’t know she was his for the asking the younger man was an even bigger fool than he’d taken him for. His eyes slid towards his sister, who had been talking too loudly and brightly all afternoon, and found she too was watching the couple. As he watched she turned her head, and he was sure he caught the glitter of tears in her eyes.

Whatever was wrong with his sister’s marriage, he would have laid odds that the red-headed little witch was responsible. What was her game? Alessandro wondered as he angled his dark head a little to one side and studied the slim figure.

If asked to classify her look he would have called it sexy, yet demure. Not to his taste, but he knew a lot of men went for the perennial virgin look. She was the sort of female who simultaneously aroused predatory and protective instincts in the opposite sex.

No wonder men got confused around her. They didn’t know whether to kiss her or protect her from a light breeze! He, on the other hand, knew what he wanted to do—namely shake her and tell her to display a little more discretion when she looked at Trelevan with those big hungry eyes!

Of course her dress sense was nothing short of a total disaster, but colour co-ordination wasn’t going to be high on your average male’s list of priorities when he heard her laugh—that low, husky, wicked chuckle.

It was the sort of laugh a man imagined hearing behind a closed bedroom door. Or is that just me…?

He had known from the beginning, of course, that she was in love with Jonny Trelevan—though astonishingly, as far as he could tell, he was the only person who did! Her friends and relations seemed uniformly oblivious to the intense misery behind the brave smile. He had suspected at that time that if you had taken away that smile and the screaming tension in every fibre of her slender body she would probably have collapsed.

He was neither a relation or a friend, but an objective observer, so her unrequited love was none of his concern so long as she represented no danger to his sister’s happiness.

He had decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

For starters, Trelevan had seemed to view her as one of the boys, and the only time he got physical was when he punched her playfully on the arm.

As for the girl herself…His eyes narrowed as once again they fell on Samantha Maguire, face buried in the hair of the baby on her lap, so that all he could see was the top of her copper head. If he had thought she represented a threat to his sister’s happiness he would have taken whatever action he deemed necessary. But two years ago he had decided that she did not possess the tempestuous nature that was meant to accompany her vibrant colouring.

She would look, but not touch. And there was no law against looking. He had done some of that himself. On every occasion since, when their paths had crossed, he had kept a watchful eye on her.

Of course he’d been glad that Katerina did not have the added complication of a jealous would-be lover in the background, trying to sabotage her marriage, but he’d felt a stab of contempt when he considered the Maguire girl’s passive acceptance of the hand fate had dealt her. It was lincomprehensiblle to him, but maybe, he mused, it had something to do with British stoicism—something which Alessandro with his more volatile Latin temperament had never been able to get a handle on. But then he never had understood people taking pride in being a good loser.

Now, though, he wasn’t so sure about his earlier assessment. Had he been mistaken in her? Had Samantha Maguire been playing the long game and waiting for her chance? Alessandro was not the sort of man who left things to chance, and this was a possibility he had to consider.

Jonny Trelevan wasn’t the husband he would have chosen for his sister—he was too weak and ineffectual to Alessandro’s mind—but Alessandro had accepted that his wishes were not the ones that counted. The younger man was the husband Kat wanted, and as her brother he would do anything in his power to give Katerina, deprived of the parental love and support he himself had enjoyed, what she wanted.

He stood listening to the inane prattle of the young woman at his side, catching only one word in three of what she was saying, and plunged headlong into one of the flashbacks which had been part of his life for the last ten years.

Chapter Two

A FLASHBACK implied that you’d lost sense of your surroundings, but for Alessandro it was more a sense of dislocation, of being in two places at the same time.

Like today—in the here and now he was saying something that made the plastic blonde girl giggle, while simultaneously he was back on the dark road of that night, pressing the brakes and feeling no response.

The only outward evidence of what was happening to him was the sheen of sweat across his brow.

He could hear the blonde listing her favourite haunts. The flickering images always followed the same rigid sequence. He knew that the next one involved being pretty sure he was going to die.

‘I don’t go to nightclubs,’ he replied, when she finally asked his own preference.

She could have looked no more shocked had he confided a predilection for women’s underwear. Alessandro might have laughed had he not been calling on every skill he had, and then some he didn’t, in a futile attempt to control the car. Knowing as he did so that nothing he could do would affect the outcome.

Looking at the card scrawled with a number, he nodded and murmured an ironic, ‘You’re very kind,’ as his guts tightened in anticipation of the car launching itself into space.

Then the blonde was gone, and so was the car, and they were falling on and on. He could hear the high-pitched female scream that seemed to go on for ever, and then the screech of metal as it ripped and tore. The foul stench of petrol filled his flared nostrils.

Wiping a hand across his damp brow, he looked across the room and saw Samantha Maguire on the point of stepping through the French windows with his brother-in-law. Watching the couple slip outside, Alessandro narrowed his eyes in speculative anger. Did they think nobody had noticed?

Maybe conducting their illicit relationship under the very nose of Katerina added spice? Or maybe the redhead wanted to be discovered?

In his head there was silence, an eerie silence broken finally by his own voice calling to his parents, asking, ‘Are you all right?’

Imprisoned in his seat, he could only imagine why there was no reply to the question he kept repeating, and all the time he had the knowledge that it would take only one spark and the car and its contents would become a raging inferno.

Dawn had been breaking before the first rescuers had arrived.

Alessandro had still been in hospital when the inquest was held. And, thanks to the irritating intransigence of the surgeon responsible for uniting the shattered fragments of bone in his right leg, he had been banned from attending.

His personality was such that going against expert opinion did not normally present him with an obstacle. Alessandro’s problem on that occasion was that the expert advice he wanted to flout came from the man who had saved his leg when the general consensus of medical opinion had been that the mangled limb was beyond saving. He figured that following his advice was the least he owed the man who had operated not once but three times to give him back his mobility.

The inquest had gone ahead in his absence, and had resulted in the total recall of a series of high-performance cars, all of which had shared the faulty braking system discovered in the one that had plunged off the side of the mountain with him at the wheel. The fact that no blame for the fatal accident had been assigned to him personally, that in fact the crash investigators had said nothing he could have done would have prevented the car going over, did not lessen the responsibility that Alessandro felt for the death of his parents.

He had relived the disastrous moments innumerable times since, sure that if he had done something differently his parents would still be alive. Not that it was in his nature to waste time indulging his survivor guilt. He’d had a sister to bring up—a sister who, thanks to him, had no parents.

His chiselled jaw tightened as, without waiting for his heart-rate to return to normal, he made his way towards the terrace doors. The expression on his face made several people get out of his way.

It was time to issue a warning—a warning that was long overdue. And if Miss Maguire knew what was good for her she would take notice. If not? Well, that was her decision. For his part, Alessandro had no doubts concerning his ability to make her see things his way.

The terrace was empty because, despite the brilliant April sunshine, the fluffy white clouds and the expanse of daffodils on the wide green lawns, the wind held a bone-biting chill.

Sam shivered as the wind cut through the beige linen suit she wore. The skirt length and A-line cut didn’t do her petite, narrow-hipped and high-bosomed frame any favours. As her mother had pointed out earlier, she should never, ever wear beige as it made her look drained and haggard.

Sam had agreed. And of course since then she had felt drained and haggard.

‘God, I’m going to get hypothermia,’ she said, hugging her arms around herself as a particularly harsh gust of wind cut through the fabric. ‘Couldn’t you say what you needed to say inside?’

‘Here.’

Sam looked from the envelope he had thrust into her hand to Jonny’s solemn face. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, making no attempt to open it. She knew what it was.

He ran a hand through his disordered fair curls, and the familiar gesture made Sam’s heart ache. ‘I said I’d repay the loan, Sam,’ he reminded her.