Hot-Blooded Italians: Sicilian Husband, Unexpected Baby / A Tainted Beauty / Marriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby!

‘But—’

‘I said, leave it.’

Her breath caught in her throat, Emma watched as Vincenzo walked slowly to the side of the cot, ducking his dark head and only narrowly avoiding missing the animal mobile which was swirling madly around above it.

For a moment Vincenzo just stood there, staring down—as motionless and as formidable as a statue constructed from some cold, dark ebony.

Emma felt her fingernails digging into her palms, wanting to break the spell of this terrible and uneasy situation, but somehow not daring to. This was his right, she realised—to take as long as he liked.

With a fast-beating heart, Vincenzo committed the scene to memory. The riot of dark curls and the rather petulant curl of the sleeping mouth, which was so like the one which stared back at him from the mirror each morning when he was shaving. Though the light was dim, nothing could disguise the unmistakably goldenolive glow of the child’s perfect skin—nor the hint of height and strength lying dormant in his baby frame.

Vincenzo expelled a long breath of air—the harsh sound penetrating the stillness in the room like an over-pumped tyre which had just been punctured. And then, without any kind of warning, he turned and walked from the room.

Emma fussed around, straightening the covers and feathering her fingertips through the silken mop of Gino’s hair—almost as if she were willing him to wake up. But he was deeply asleep—worn out, no doubt—and she could not continue to hide here like some kind of fugitive, just to escape Vincenzo’s wrath.

And you haven’t done anything wrong, she told herself.

She walked back into the sitting room, where Vincenzo was standing waiting for her with the grim body language of an executioner, his black eyes filled with a cold look of rage.

His mouth twisted as the word was wrenched from him like bitter and deadly poison. ‘Puttanesca!’

As an insult it happened to be grossly inaccurate—but Emma knew that it was the macho insult of choice whenever a woman was considered to have wronged.

‘I am not a whore,’ she answered quietly. ‘You know that. That’s a cheap slur to make.’

His voice was equally quiet. ‘Maybe I knew it was the only one you would understand.’

Their eyes met in the most honest moment of communication they’d had all day and Emma could have wept at the way he was trying to hurt her. This whole scenario had been intended as a solution—and yet it seemed to have spawned a rash of unsightly problems of its own along the way, and she couldn’t for the life of her work out how they were going to come to some sort of compromise.

Vincenzo had dragged his gaze from her white face and was looking around him now, as if barely able to believe the surroundings in which he found himself. The faded sofa with a faint white frill where some of the stuffing was spilling out. The tired paintwork and the pale rectangles on the wall where pictures must once have hung and then been removed. The overriding sense that this was simply somewhere temporary—a place for life’s losers.

‘You…dare to bring my son up in a place like this?’ he questioned unsteadily. ‘To condemn him to a life of poverty.’

So he had not disputed the paternity claim! Relief washed over her but was quickly replaced with fear. And curiosity.

‘So you accept that he’s yours?’

Vincenzo chose his words carefully. He had expected to walk into the nursery and to see a baby—and to feel nothing more than he would feel for any baby. And perhaps there would have been a flare of jealousy, too—at being forced to confront the physical evidence that the woman he had married had been intimate with another man.

But it had not been like that. In fact, it had been like nothing he could ever have imagined. Because he had known immediately. On some subliminal level it had been instant—as if he had been programmed to recognise this little boy. He had seen photos of himself as a baby—and the similarity between himself and this infant was undeniable. But it was more than that. Something unknown had whipped at his heart as he’d looked down at that sleeping infant. Some primeval recognition. Some bond stretching back through the ages, as well as a blood line to take him into the unknown future.

‘What is his name?’ he demanded as he realised he didn’t even know his son’s name.

‘Gino.’

‘Gino,’ he repeated softly. ‘Gino.’

He said it quite differently from the way she did—pronounced it as it was probably intended to be pronounced—but the expression on his face belied the slight sense of wonder in his tone. There was something so forbiddingly unfamiliar about the way he was looking at her—something so icy cold and critical as his gaze swept over her. And Emma knew that she had to be strong—hadn’t she told herself that first thing this morning, at the beginning of a day which seemed to have stretched on for an eternity? She must not let him intimidate her.

‘So where do we go from here?’ she asked.

His eyes narrowed. She was still wearing her coat. So was he—but only a fool would remove it in these sub-zero temperatures. Was his son warm enough? Gino. This time he tried the word out in his mind and a dark swirl of unknown emotion began to weave distorting patterns around his heart.

Suddenly he stepped forward, his hand snaking out to bring her up close and hard into the heat of his body, her fragility sending his senses into overdrive. His free hand roved over her bottom, feeling its faint curve beneath the soft wool, splaying his fingers there as his heart began to pound, his arousal soaring as he ground its hard heat against her. ‘Feel how much I want you?’ he grated.

‘Vincenzo!’

There was a bleak and glittering look of finality in the black eyes before he drove his mouth down on hers and this time his kiss was punishing; angry. If kisses were supposed to be demonstrations of love, then this was their very antithesis. But that didn’t stop her responding to it—Emma couldn’t seem to prevent herself, no matter how much the voice of reason screamed in her ears to try.

And wasn’t there some primeval sense that the man who held her was the acknowledged father of her child? Now that he had seen Gino, seen him and accepted him—hadn’t that somehow forged some kind of unbreakable bond between the three of them? Some ancient, golden trinity which had been completed by Gino’s birth. Oh, you fool, Emma, she told herself. Inventing fantasies because they’ll make you feel better about doing…this…

‘Vincenzo!’ she moaned, opening her mouth beneath his—feeling his masculine heat and sensing the urgent tang of his desire. He had started to unbutton her coat now, and she was letting him. Just letting him push the fabric aside and skim his palms down over her hips. And now he was rucking her dress up, brushing his way negligently up to the apex of her thighs, and Emma felt herself wriggle impatiently, scraping her own hands across the broad reach of his shoulders, wanting to rip the coat away from him. Wishing that all their clothes could disappear, as if by magic. ‘Vincenzo,’ she said, again—more urgently this time.

He felt the plunder of his mouth on hers, the fierce thunder of his heart—his body so hard that he felt he might die if he didn’t plunge deep inside her molten softness. For a second he responded to her. Circled his hips against hers in a provocative and primitive enticement as old as time, and she swayed against him, as if he were sucking her towards him with some magnetic and irresistible force. He could rip her panties off as she liked them to be ripped, could straddle her until she screamed and bucked beneath him.

And then, as abruptly as he had caught her close to him, Vincenzo dropped his hands and let her go—not reacting when he saw her knees buckle, her hand reach out to grasp the arm of the sofa, to steady herself.

‘What am I thinking of?’ he questioned, as if speaking to himself, his voice distorted by the sound of self-disgust. Hadn’t he been tempted just then to do it to her one more time—despite the fact that she had kept his son hidden from him? To maybe dismiss the driver and take her to bed for the night and wake up in the morning to the sound of his son?

But wouldn’t that weaken his bargaining position if she sapped his appetite with her sweet sexuality tonight? And if he left her now, he would leave her aching, and wondering… For Vincenzo knew that surprise was the most effective element of all when you were bargaining hard for something.

‘Ah, Emma,’ he said in a voice of molten steel. ‘Too many times I have listened to my body where you are concerned, mia bella. Too many times have you used your pale sorcery to ensnare my body and to make me so hungry with need that I cannot think straight, but not now. For this is too important. Now I need to think with my head, instead of with my…’

His mouth twisted as a quick, downward glance indicated the source of his discomfort and he saw the flush of colour which flared along her cheekbones. How could she still blush like an innocent virgin, even while she had just been writhing in his arms like a red-hot alley cat? He stepped back from her, further away from her temptation, his face growing shuttered. ‘I shall return here tomorrow morning, at nine.’

Something in his voice alerted her to trouble. Real trouble. ‘Return for what, exactly?’ questioned Emma, trying to keep her own voice calm.

He raked his hand back through his tousled black hair. Wouldn’t she just love to know what was going on in his mind? ‘You’ll just have to wait and see,’ he declared softly.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_713b5bd9-25f1-539e-bdc4-8bb5cc9ee395)

EMMA spent a long, sleepless night—wondering how she could have been so stupid as to let herself be seduced by Vincenzo and lay herself open to all kinds of misinterpretation. She knew what his whole crazy, Sicilian attitude towards women was like. He would have considered her to have behaved wantonly—hadn’t that much been obvious in the icy way he had looked at her? From the way he had dropped his hands from her body as if he had been holding something dirty and contaminated?

He clearly felt nothing but contempt for her, and if she continued to behave in a way which would only increase that view, then she was just weakening her own position.

Because she should never for a moment forget who she was up against; a man who represented the full might of one of the richest and most powerful families in Sicily. She had seen the light of battle flare in his black eyes—and Emma wasn’t stupid. She had something which Vincenzo had yearned for all his adult life—his son and heir—and if they were no longer together as man and wife, then wouldn’t he go all out to try to win custody?

As the pale light of dawn crept through the curtains she pulled the duvet close round her shivering body wondering how she could ever have been so naïve not to have anticipated this. Had she thought when she first went to him that Vincenzo might behave like a civilised human being—when he had never behaved with a shred of civility in his life? Because everything was black and white in Vincenzo’s world. Women were sluts or they were virgins. Mistresses or wives. And she was never going to be able to change that.

So what would he do next?

As she climbed wearily from her bed, she tried to put herself in the mindset of her estranged husband. Would he try to prove her as an unfit mother? Would he attempt to use against her the very thing that she had gone to him for help with?

Pulling on a pair of old jeans and the thickest sweater she could find, Emma washed her face and hands and then went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee before Gino awoke.

He slept later than usual. Which was absolutely typical, she thought. The one time she could have had a bit of a lie-in and here she was—prowling around the cottage, her nerves stretched tight as an elastic band, unable to settle to anything until at last Gino woke and she was able to hug his warm little body close to her.

She was mashing up some banana for his breakfast when the doorbell rang and she suddenly realised that she hadn’t even brushed her hair properly. Still, at least Vincenzo wouldn’t think that she was going on an all-out effort to…to… Emma frowned. How had he put it? To use her pale sorcery. But that was the trouble with Vincenzo—even when he was insulting you, he put it in such a way that it made you want to melt when you thought about it afterwards.