Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 2 of 2

by Lynne Graham

  She would not be the one flashing the enormous diamond on her finger and accepting congratulations.

  What Cordelia was looking at was a love that would never be fulfilled because of her and a pregnancy Luca had never banked on.

  She felt sick. She also couldn’t move because her feet seemed to have become cemented to the square foot of carpet on which she was standing.

  Luca was the first to notice her presence and she saw him still, and his body language must have transmitted something to the woman in his arms because she, likewise, looked up, and now they were both looking at her in complete silence.

  ‘I’m guessing—’ at long last she found her voice, and she was pleased that it didn’t shake or wobble or worse ‘—that I’ve interrupted a special moment between you two?’

  ‘Cordelia…’

  Luca’s voice was hoarse, emotional in a way she had never heard him be emotional before and, more than anything else, that brought the sting of tears to her eyes.

  Isabella was untangling herself from his embrace, making a move to come towards her, and Cordelia, horrified at the prospect of having to listen to some love-struck platitudes, was suddenly galvanised into action.

  She began backing away. The high heels were an encumbrance. She wanted to run as fast as she could, but all she could manage was a fast-paced hobble, one hand lifting the long red dress, the other clutching the little bag so tightly she suspected it wouldn’t survive the vice-like grip.

  She was aware of Luca saying something in Italian behind her but she was oblivious to his approaching steps until she felt his hand circle her arm, pulling her to a stop.

  Heart beating like a sledgehammer, Cordelia swung around to look at him and spied Isabella standing hesitantly in the doorway of the office, as dainty and as fragile as spun glass. Her eyes were red from crying but, even so, she remained a beautiful woman, with dark, chocolate-brown hair upswept and a long black dress accentuating a gamine figure. There was a glittering choker at her neck, a string of diamonds that would have cost the earth, befitting the woman who, as Luca had once told her, was his appropriate match.

  It was obvious that, along with that understatement of the year, there were a million other things he had failed to mention.

  ‘Cordelia…’

  ‘I don’t want to hear, Luca.’ Her eyes were dark with disappointment, anger and hurt. ‘How could you?’

  ‘How could I what?’

  ‘I don’t know…’ Her voice was laced with biting sarcasm but underneath the acidity she was all too aware of the gathering storm as her mind flew off in all sorts of directions. ‘Hmm…let me think…how could you what, I wonder? Abandon your own stupid gala so that you could have a final intimate moment with the woman you always wanted to marry? Is that a good beginning to your question, Luca?’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘No, Luca…’ She tugged at the exquisite diamond on her finger, remembered when it had been chosen and what she had felt when, only a couple of days ago, after it had been sent away for refitting, it had been slipped onto her finger. ‘This…’ she handed him the engagement ring ‘…is ridiculous.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You’ve got to be joking!’

  ‘Take the ring, Luca, because I don’t want it.’

  ‘You’re overreacting and interpreting something in completely the wrong way.’

  ‘Am I? I don’t think so. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was Isabella, wasn’t it? The old family friend you were always destined to settle down with? One wealthy family marrying conveniently into another wealthy family?’

  Luca remained silent.

  He was put on the spot, all the years of never explaining himself coming to the fore. He clenched his jaw. He wasn’t going to take the ring, which was lying in the palm of her outstretched hand. Intense frustration washed over him.

  ‘You’re wrong in whatever assumptions you’re making, Cordelia. You need to trust me on this.’

  His words hovered between them. For a second, Cordelia stopped to consider what he had just said, but only for a second because, as far as she was concerned, if she’d misread the situation, then it was up to him to clarify.

  How hard was that? More to the point, was this what marriage to Luca was going to be? What had she agreed to take on? What would be the role of a convenient wife? Exactly?

  Part of her wanted to curl her fist round that ring and shove it back on her finger because when she projected to a future without him, she literally quailed with fear.

  But a greater part was forced to ask the question—would marriage mean hugging to herself a love that could never be brought out into the open? A love that turned her into someone so emotionally dependent on Luca that it was okay for him to do exactly as he pleased without explanation? Would she be facing a life of having to take his word for everything?

  He’d reassured her that he would be faithful, but then he would have, wouldn’t he? It would be in his interest to tell her what he knew she would want to hear.

  But she had seen what she had seen and if her interpretation had been off target, then he wouldn’t be standing there in front of her now, still as a statue, with eyes as cool as an Arctic blast, expecting her to just blindly believe him. He would be defending himself.

  She shoved the priceless diamond at him.

  ‘I can’t go through with this. I’m sorry. When Dad comes, we’ll leave. Right now, I’m going to pack my bags, and don’t worry. I won’t be taking anything I didn’t come here with.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  WOULD SHE SKULK out of the house? Slip back into her jeans and tee shirt? Shimmy away from the clutter of guests, excitedly sipping their expensive drinks and tucking into expensive canapés and exchanging notes on what had happened since the last annual charity gala had brought them together?

  Everyone in the neighbouring towns would be there, from the great and the good to those way down the pecking order. No discrimination, as Luca had told her with some satisfaction a few days previously, when she had been fretting about it.

  She shuddered when she thought about running away. The guests would not have started arriving if her father arrived on time but if his flight was delayed, then she ran the risk of doing a runner in the most awkward of situations.

  How on earth was Luca going to deal with it? What would he say?

  She closed her mind off to any weakness and focused on flinging clothes into her suitcase, the one she had brought with her.

  When everything was packed, she stood back, breathing hard, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t see herself. Instead, she saw Luca in that darkened office with his arms around Isabella, comforting her, his face soft with affection.

  Without stopping to think too hard, she climbed out of the designer dress that had made her feel like a million dollars, and crept back into the loose leggings she had adopted ever since her stomach had started expanding and a baggy white tee shirt.

  These were the clothes she belonged in.

  She sat on the bed and waited. Eventually, her mobile pinged with a text from her father that he was in the taxi and would be with her in under an hour, at which point she agitatedly paced the room, only emerging to head downstairs when she was sure that he would be about to arrive.

  There was no sign of Luca.

  She wondered whether he had disappeared back into the office with Isabella. Perhaps he was explaining the situation. Maybe he had decided that he would revert to his original plan and marry the girl he had been destined to marry in the first place. It wouldn’t take him long to realise that joint custody worked.

  Cordelia didn’t think there would be any begging by him for her return. He was a proud man and she couldn’t have dented his pride more successfully if she’d spent a year planning it.

  The fact that he hadn’t bothered to find
her said it all.

  For a moment, she’d stepped into a world as dazzling as a fairy tale. Her prince had stepped forward and, okay, so it might not have been ideal happy-ever-after material but, deep down, she’d figured that there was enough love inside her for both of them. Deep down, when she looked close enough, she’d flirted with the tantalising hope that, with a ring on his finger and a baby on the way, the love he claimed he could never give her would find a way out.

  For all she had told herself that the only way to deal with what was on the table was to apply cold logic and reason, she had still succumbed to the notion that things might change because nothing ever remained the same.

  She’d been a fool.

  Leaving the suitcase in the bedroom and with no clear plan as to what she would tell her father or how, exactly, she would make her exit, she headed down the stairs, slipped into the sitting room closest to the front door, and waited by the window for the taxi bringing her father to arrive.

  * * *

  She wasn’t going to do it. Not really. Surely not. The world would be gathering at the villa in under two hours. There was no way she was going to rock the boat at the eleventh hour. She’d reacted with all the emotionalism he knew her to be capable of but she would cool down.

  Wouldn’t she?

  ‘Go and find her,’ Isabella had urged, her pretty face anxious and distressed.

  Luca wasn’t going to do any such thing.

  She would calm down. At any rate, he refused to go down the road of explaining himself to anyone. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask for trust in a relationship? He had told her that there was nothing going on between Isabella and himself and he didn’t see why she couldn’t take him at his word. Had he ever, since she had shown up, given her any reason to think that he was the sort of guy who couldn’t be trusted? No, he had not!

  Skewered with uncertainty, Luca thought of her, her open, trusting face clouded with doubt and accusation. Something inside him twisted and, like a dam bursting, thoughts that had been pushed to the side now broke through in a tumultuous rush.

  A rapid succession of images darted through his head, images from the very first time he’d laid eyes on her in that little room in the cottage she shared with her father to that mind-blowing moment when they had made love for the first time.

  And along with those images came other things, feelings he had stashed away, emotions he had never thought he would have.

  Galvanised into action, Luca took the stairs two at a time, up to the bedroom, where he saw her packed suitcase on the bed.

  It was small, a relic from her dad’s days in all probability. The sight of it made him feel sick.

  At least he knew she hadn’t left the villa.

  Heart hammering, he raced through the rooms, impatiently brushing aside several employees who wanted to talk to him, ask his advice on something or other. He barely noticed the way the house had been transformed. He certainly had no time to stop and make polite noises about all the work that had been put into turning his mansion into a wonderland of lights and candles.

  He’d started his search in the vast hall but the room she was in was the last he actually looked in. She was gazing out of the window with her back to the door. She hadn’t turned on the light and she was a shadowy figure, perched on the window seat.

  For a second, Luca had a vivid image of the girl she must have been over the years, sitting just like that, gazing out of a window, dreaming of adventure.

  ‘Cordelia,’ he husked, moving quickly towards her. ‘No, please don’t turn me away. I’ve come…you’re right…’

  Luca, she thought, heart leaping, an instinctive reaction to seeing him, to hearing the deep, velvety tone of his voice.

  ‘What do you want?’ She edged away from him because he’d perched right next to her, crowding her and sending her nervous system into frantic free fall. She wished she’d turned the lights on because it was too dark in the room. It had, somehow, felt more comforting to be in the dark when she had entered the room half an hour previously.

  ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘You surprised me. I… I wasn’t expecting you…when you walked into my office…’

  ‘So I gathered,’ Cordelia said icily. ‘As you can see, I don’t want to have anything to do with you or this gala. I just want you to leave me alone. Dad is going to be here pretty soon and I shall tell him about the pregnancy and then I intend to get a taxi to the nearest hotel for the night. You want to have fun with your ex? Then, by all means, go ahead, but don’t think that I’m going to be hanging around in the background, putting up with unacceptable behaviour. I’m very sorry if this means you’re going to have to do what most modern-day couples do who share children but aren’t together. You’re going to have to arrange visiting rights and get a lawyer to sort out maintenance payments. Apologies for putting you in the terrible position of having to behave like a twenty-first-century man, but that’s life.’

  ‘I… I’m sorry, mi tesoro.’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘But it’s what you are,’ Luca said softly. ‘You’re my treasure.’

  ‘Don’t!’ She looked away quickly and made a determined effort to staunch her foolish desire to burst out crying.

  ‘Look at me. Please.’

  ‘Go away, Luca.’

  ‘You think I was doing something in there with Isabella?’

  ‘Why would I think that?’ Her voice dripped sarcasm. It hurt. It hurt looking at him and it hurt not looking at him. Everything hurt but she knew that this was a turning point. She had to stick to her guns and walk away or else get lost in a relationship that would eat her up and spit her out.

  ‘What you saw…’

  ‘I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘I was comforting her, my darling.’ He reached for her hand and, predictably, she snatched her hand away and he couldn’t blame her.

  He honestly couldn’t blame her if she walked away and never looked back. He had lied to her about his identity when they had first met; he had questioned her arrival on his doorstep, immediately suspecting the worst. He had lectured her with monotonous regularity on his inability to give her anything beyond what was demanded by duty. He had held himself aloof when he had known that what she wanted and what she deserved was a guy completely committed to her for all the right reasons.

  He had presented her with marriage, a union shorn of all the things that should define it, and he had blithely expected her to fall in line.

  And then tonight…

  When Luca thought about what she must have felt when she’d walked into that room, he wanted to punch something.

  And his reaction when she’d pinned him to the spot? He’d brushed aside her very valid concerns because he hadn’t seen why he had to explain himself.

  On every level he had laid down the rules and expected her to fall in line because that was what everyone did. What he’d seen in her was an opportunity for getting hurt. He’d fallen for her but, instead of facing up to it, he’d rejected it and pushed her back because he’d been afraid.

  How could he now expect her to hear him out and give him one last chance?

  Why would she not react the way anyone would react and assume that he was fabricating a story simply to get things back to where he wanted them to be?

  Why wouldn’t she treat whatever he had to say with the cynicism he so richly deserved?

  Luca went from pale to sickly ashen as his mind began running away with possible outcomes.

  She’d wanted love and marriage and all that stuff he had spent a lifetime writing off as unreasonable nonsense. It was hers for the taking now, but would she believe him or would it be too little, too late?

  ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you refused to listen to a word I have to say,’ he told her with wrenching
honesty. ‘And even if you did hear me out, I wouldn’t blame you if you sent me packing, but I really…need…to…explain myself.’

  ‘But I thought you never explained yourself to anyone, Luca,’ Cordelia said coldly. ‘I thought that if you said “believe me” it was my duty to ask no more questions.’

  ‘Once upon a time, I may have thought like that. I gave orders and people followed them without question,’ Luca said quietly, ‘but then I met you and it seems that everything changed. I don’t know when and I’m not sure how, I just know that I am not the man I once was.’

  ‘Oh, please.’ She turned to look away because she could feel his words dragging her back to a place she didn’t want to revisit, but he placed one finger on her chin and tilted her back to look at him and she couldn’t resist.

  ‘You are the best thing that ever happened to me and I was an idiot for not realising that sooner.’ He looked at her and breathed in deeply. This was foreign territory and he had to grope his way to find the right words. ‘I met you and I was a different man with you. I was the man I was meant to be and not the man I had been conditioned into becoming. You freed me, my darling, but I didn’t pause to analyse why that had happened or what it meant. I just assumed that I acted differently with you because you didn’t know me as the billionaire who could have whatever he wanted. I left but my mind kept returning to you and, again, I never asked myself why. I simply ploughed on because that was what I did and what I’d always done. I faced my destiny and my destiny was to marry Isabella and I didn’t question it because…that was how it was.’

  Cordelia stiffened. The mention of Isabella was a timely reminder of what she had witnessed and, as if sensing her withdrawal, he leaned forward, his body language imparting a searing sincerity that held her spellbound against her better judgement.

  ‘Then you came. You showed up. In all your stunning glory.’

  ‘Don’t, Luca,’ she whipped back.

  ‘Don’t what?’