The Italian's Wife

Christabel’s career had been built on her clean, wholesome image. No risqué lingerie assignments, no media coverage of Christabel whooping it up like a ladette in the clubs, no bad-ass boyfriends. Christabel liked to pose for off-the-record interviews with fluffy animals and talk about how mad she was about children, not to mention how crazy she was about the man she was to marry and how much she was looking forward to giving up work to be a full-time wife and mother…

Rio reached out and lifted her bodily out of his path. ‘Dio mio…I won’t be talking—’

That fear overcome, Christabel cried in desperation. ‘Then why can’t you forgive me? Tammy means nothing to me. It’s not like she was another man or I’m in love with her. I love you, Rio—’

She loved him? Had she ever loved him? Or had she loved his enormous wealth most of all? His sculpted mouth tightening, he recalled that Christabel had expensive tastes that far outran even her own healthy earning power. Within a week of his marriage proposal she had confessed to a string of outstanding bills and had told him how hopeless she was with money. Impressed by her honesty, he had felt hugely protective towards her and had cleared her debts without even thinking about what he was doing.

Yanking himself free of her clinging hands in growing disgust at what her every reckless word revealed about her character, Rio left the apartment and made it into the lift. He raised one of his hands and watched it shake in disbelieving outrage. Balling his fingers back into an aggressive fist, he punched the steel wall with the full force of the rage and the pain splintering through him, the savage pain he had been struggling to deny. He had loved her, he had really loved her and wanted to marry her.

Santo cielo, he might have given his children a mother who thought three-in-a-bed sex was a wonderful thrill! A woman who had contrived to hide her true nature from him so successfully that the sheer shock value of what he had witnessed and heard would linger with him for a very long time.

Just sex? Hadn’t he been enough for her? Obviously not. As his bodyguards reared up from their seats in the ground-floor reception area, their surprise at his unexpected reappearance patent, Rio was blind to them, his darkly handsome features rigid and ashen pale. Outside, he drank in deep of the frosty night air before crossing the street to his limo. Had Christabel been lying back and thinking about other women in his bed? Had even her pleasure been faked? Had the eager desire she had shown for his lovemaking all been part of one giant con to ensnare a very rich husband? How could he have known so little about a woman he had been with for almost two years?

‘Your hand’s bleeding, boss. Are you OK?’

Rio angled a cursory glance down at his bruised and bleeding knuckles before meeting the troubled dark eyes of Ezio. The stockily built older man had been on his security team since Rio was a student and knew him too well.

‘Sì…’ But right at that moment Rio did not know whenhe was ever going to feel normal again. Like Saverio Lombardi, billionaire head of one of the proudest, oldest families in Italy and the driving force behind Lombardi Industries, one of the biggest, most successful companies in the world. He felt humiliated, sick and less than a man for the first time in twenty-nine years of existence.

How was he to explain this fiasco in acceptable terms to his vulnerable mother? Alice Lombardi was literally counting the days to her son’s wedding and was pitifully eager to cradle her first grandchild in her arms. She was a sick woman, crippled by arthritis, further weakened by a series of debilitating illnesses. Every week she survived was a literal gift from God and her poor health permitted her precious few pleasures in life. Now there would be no wedding, no prospect of a baby to fill the empty nursery, no bright and chatty daughter-in-law to occasionally enliven her dull, pain-filled days…

He had never openly acknowledged the reality before but he needed a wife.

‘Tammy means nothing to me…it’s not like she was another man.’ The insidious and seductive echo of Christabel’s husky voice made Rio’s hands clench into ferocious fists. No, he could not, would not forgive her, not for the sake of his own powerful libido, not even for the sake of the mother he adored. Christabel, the woman he had loved beyond belief, was a total sham. What did that say about his judgement? He had believed he knew his fiancée through and through, yet he had not even penetrated the surface of that calculating immoral mind of hers. He could not have chosen worse had he decided to marry a total stranger. He might as well stop and ask the first woman he met to be his bride…

With a harsh and bitter laugh at that insane idea, Rio Lombardi poured himself a large brandy from the bar in the back of the limo.

Holly was cold, hungry and scared.

It was barely one in the morning and the whole of the rest of the night hours still stretched ahead of her. For how long had she been walking? Her back and her legs ached and her vision was blurring with exhaustion but where could she possibly stop for the night that she would be safe? She had sat around in a train station for most of the day, moving seats every so often, striving not to attract the attention of anyone official, until the crude heckling of two youths had forced her to take refuge in the cloakroom. While she had been trying to freshen up there, her jacket, which had had her purse in the inside pocket, had been stolen. Her own fault for taking her jacket off, leaving it carelessly draped over Timmie’s buggy and turning her attention away for a minute.

No point approaching a policeman, not when awkward questions would be asked and an address requested. Her purse, which had had her last few pounds in it, was gone and that was that. Like so much else that had happened to Holly since her arrival in London so full of naïve hopes seven months earlier, it was just one more kick when she was down, one more piece of bad luck in a run of bad luck that seemed endless.

As she paused to check that her eight-month-old son was still wrapped up snug against the chilly air, she shivered violently and fingered the two battered carrier bags that now contained all that she possessed in the world. She had to be the ultimate loser and failure, she decided wretchedly. Useless at everything, not even able to put the shabbiest roof over Timmie’s head and look after him as he deserved. Here she was out walking the streets, homeless and penniless, next door to being a beggar…

Yet just twenty-four hours earlier she really had tried so hard to pick up her sagging courage and get a grip on her problems. She had gone to the Social Security office to report that her landlord had tried to break into her room twice during the night and that she was terrified of him.

‘We’ve never had any complaints about him before,’ the woman behind the protective barrier had said, coolly unimpressed, not even trying to hide her suspicion that Holly was simply trying to get her accommodation upgraded. ‘If you don’t return to the lodgings we arranged for you, you will be deemed to have made yourself intentionally homeless. I advise you to think long and hard before you make that mistake, as you have a young child to consider. I’ll inform your social worker that you’re having problems—’

‘No…please don’t do that,’ Holly had begged, in terror of what such an interview might mean where Timmie was concerned. Her baby might be taken away from her and put into care. The last social worker she had spoken to had started out sympathetic but had lost patience when Holly refused to name the father of her child. But Jeff had said that if she dared to tell anyone that he was Timmie’s dad he would make her sorry that she had ever been born…

Well, she was sorry enough herself about that fact, Holly conceded miserably. She had devastated the parents who loved her by giving birth to a baby outside marriage. When she had finally admitted that she was pregnant her father had cried. As long as Holly lived she knew she would never, ever forget the sight of her father crying…or her own sick sense of guilt and bitter shame.

Her eyes swimming with tears at that painful recollection, and lost as she was in her own thoughts, Holly did not even notice that she was approaching a junction. Staring blankly ahead of her, accustomed to the noisy flow of traffic down the main road as a background, she was equally unaware of the lights of a car coming from her right.

The sudden steep drop of the pavement down onto the road took her by surprise and sent the overladen buggy lurching off-balance. As she made a frantic effort to right it, the scream of car tyres striving to brake to a halt alerted her to the danger that she and Timmie were in. In the split-second at her disposal Holly thrust Timmie’s buggy away from her with all her might in the desperate hope that it would carry him out of the car’s path to safety. But her own shaken attempt to make it back up onto the pavement was doomed as her heels hit the kerb and she lost her footing. Falling backwards, she felt a sickening explosion of pain at the base of her skull and then blackness folded in and she knew no more.

Rio Lombardi leapt out of the limousine. ‘Did we hit her?’ he demanded.

‘No!’ Ezio, who could move at the speed of light when required, was already retrieving the buggy and drawing it back from the other side of the road to a safer resting place.

‘I didn’t hit her…I saw her; I was already slowing down. But she walked out into the road without looking and just fell over!’ Rio’s chauffeur exclaimed over the top of the driver’s door, his attention lodged in horror on the still figure lying in the path of the headlights.

‘Call an ambulance…a private one from the foundation hospital; it’ll be faster,’ Rio instructed harshly, his tone of command pronounced to steady his companions.

He crouched down on the road and lifted a limp wrist to feel for a pulse, drawing in a slow deep breath of relief when he found what he sought. Although her skin felt frighteningly cold to his touch, she was alive. ‘She’s not dead…’ Springing upright again, he peeled off his suit jacket and bent down to carefully drape it over her, surveying the face of the unconscious victim for the first time. ‘Dio mio…she’s little more than a child!’

A very pretty child too, Rio found himself conceding, scanning that delicate bone-structure and the mass of bronze-coloured ringlets rioting round her small head, their vibrant colour only serving to accentuate her pallor. ‘What is she doing out with a baby at this hour? Did you see what she did for the baby? She was ready to sacrifice her own life to give it a chance—’

‘She’s probably its mother, boss,’ Ezio suggested, lowering his mobile phone, having made the requested call for immediate medical attendance at the scene. ‘It’s depressing, but kids are giving birth to kids all the time these days.’

Rio found himself strangely reluctant to accept that opinion. After a second, lengthier appraisal, he was prepared to concede that the girl could possibly be seventeen or eighteen years old. But she looked so innocent and untouched, and he had already noticed that she wore no rings. Ezio stooped to retrieve his employer’s jacket.

‘What are you doing?’ Rio demanded.

‘I got your overcoat from the car, boss. It’ll keep her warmer. There’s no point you catching pneumonia.’ Ezio had to pitch his voice higher to be heard above the noisy sobs now emanating from the depths of the covers heaped on the buggy.

‘I’m OK. I wish we could risk moving her into the limo. Giovanni…you’re a family man; comfort the child,’ Rio urged his other bodyguard as he accepted the overcoat from Ezio but chose to lay it gently over the top of his suit jacket to provide an extra layer of warmth for the girl. ‘She’s frozen through.’

‘Timmie…?’ Her head pounding fit to burst, Holly surfaced and with a heroic effort raised her head, reacting to the sound of her son’s cries. Not a pain cry though, only an anxious cry, she recognised in instant relief. ‘My baby?’

Rio gazed down into huge anxious eyes as disconcertingly blue as a Tuscan midsummer sky. ‘Your baby’s fine. Lie still. An ambulance is on its way—’

‘I can’t go to hospital…I’ve got Timmie to take care of!’ Initially bemused by that deep dark drawl with its unexpected liquid foreign accent larding every syllable, Holly was startled when the man dropped down on a level with her and pressed on her shoulder to prevent her from lifting herself higher.

Mouth running dry, she stared up at him just as he turned his arrogant dark head away, presenting her with his bold profile and the impossibly smooth, proud lines of a high cheekbone to address someone else out of her view. ‘Have you contacted the police yet?’

‘No police…please,’ Holly broke in shakily. ‘Are you the bloke that was in the car?’

In silent response, he turned back to nod in confirmation, regarding her with dramatic dark golden eyes which could have turned a saint into a sinner overnight.

Shaken by that abstracted thought, Holly said, ‘We don’t need the police or an ambulance. I’m all right. I tripped and knocked myself out for a second…that’s all—’

‘Have you any family…a boyfriend I can contact on your behalf?’ he prompted, very much as if she hadn’t spoken.

Even though it hurt, she turned her head away in self-protection. ‘Nobody.’

‘There’s got to be somebody. A friend, a relative, surely?’ he persisted.

‘Well, maybe you’re coming down with them but I’ve got nobody,’ she muttered in a voice that wobbled in spite of all her efforts to control it.

Rio studied her in frustration. She wasn’t a Londoner. She had a pronounced country brogue with rounded vowel sounds but he could not place it, although he had a vague recollection of once hearing an exaggerated version of a similar accent in a stage comedy. First things first, he reminded himself. ‘What age are you?’

‘Twenty. I don’t want the police…do you hear me?’ Fear made her strident and she began to sit up in spite of the sick whirling sensation that engulfed her the moment she moved. If she went into hospital, the police would call in the authorities to take charge of Timmie and he would be put in a foster home.

When she swayed backwards, Rio shot a supportive arm round her narrow spine. ‘You must have medical attention. I promise you that you will not be parted from your child.’

‘How? How can you promise that?’ she gasped.