The Italian's Love-Child

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘And have you missed me, too?’

  ‘Stop fishing for compliments!’

  He laughed. ‘So when am I going to see you?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether we have corresponding free dates in our diaries.’

  Even cooler! ‘You mean you wouldn’t cancel something if it meant seeing your Italian lover?’ he murmured.

  Oh, the arrogance! ‘Certainly not,’ said Eve. ‘Would you?’

  Curiously enough, he thought about jettisoning his proposed trip to the States, but for no more than a moment.

  ‘Probably not,’ he agreed, and then paused. ‘So when?’

  ‘Suggest some dates and I’ll see if I’m free.’

  ‘I have to go to New York next weekend—how about the weekend after that?’

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘Where? In London?’

  ‘Why don’t you fly out to Rome?’ he suggested casually.

  Eve had never been to Rome before, and a city was never more beautiful than when you saw it through the eyes of someone who actually lived there. Luca on his home territory.

  His penthouse apartment was on the Viale Trinita dei Monti, close to the Spanish Steps and it was to-die-for. Minimalist and modern—all stainless steel and frosted glass. The floors were mahogany and there was Carrara marble in the bathrooms. The rooms were almost all white, but the lights could be adjusted to create different colours and moods and the floor-to-ceiling windows showed the most amazing views over the city.

  Outside was a terrace with tall terracotta pots with lemon trees growing and smaller ones with rosemary, sage and lavender plants—so that the warm air was scented with their fragrance.

  It was, thought Eve as she stood and looked at Rome, the apartment of a man with no ties, nor room for any.

  He showed her colonnades and palaces and churches until she was dizzy with the splendour of it all and so he drove her out of the city to the picturesque town of Tivoli, perched on a steep slope amid pretty woods and streams.

  ‘This is just so beautiful,’ she murmured as she gazed across at the twisted silvery olive trees of the Sabine Hills.

  He touched her hair. ‘So are you,’ he said softly, and took her back to his apartment, where he spent the rest of the afternoon making long, slow love to her.

  That evening, in a restaurant off one of the narrow, cobbled streets of Trastevere, they ate the simple, delicious tonnarelli cacio e pepe by candlelight, and drank wine as rich as garnets.

  They lingered over coffee and Eve felt utterly relaxed. ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ she said lazily. ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘I am a Roman,’ he said simply. ‘I was born here.’

  ‘And you never wanted to live anywhere else?’

  He gave her a slightly mystified look and a very Latin shrug of his shoulders. ‘Why should I? Everything I want is here.’

  It gave her an insight into his fierce love for his country, his city.

  ‘And your family? Where are they?’

  ‘My sister lives in Rome also. My parents are both dead.’

  Eve dropped a lump of sugar into her espresso. ‘Mine are, too,’ she said, though she noticed he hadn’t asked.

  ‘Then we have much in common,’ he murmured, and his eyes glittered a sensual message all of their own. ‘Apart from the very obvious.’

  It was a blatant, sexual boast and she supposed it should have pleased her, but oddly enough it made her feel insecure. Because surely sexual attraction was a very ephemeral thing?

  ‘Come, Eve.’ He signed the bill which the waiter had placed in front of him, and looked at her. ‘I think it is time to go home now, don’t you?’

  But once they were back in the apartment, Luca rubbed a finger at the tiny crease between her brows. ‘Frowning, always frowning—ever since we left the restaurant! You know what happens when you frown?’ he teased. ‘Lines appear and there they stay, and no woman likes lines on her face.’

  For some reason, the remark rankled. ‘And when lines do appear, then we magic them away with surgery, isn’t that right?’ she questioned acidly. ‘For while lines on a man’s face denote experience—on a woman’s they damn her with age!’

  ‘Cara, cara—that is your judgment, not mine. You work in an industry which is defined by age.’ He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘And I am certainly not advocating the use of surgery!’

  She thought that he wouldn’t have to. She turned to look out over the glittering lights of the city. Men like Luca prized beauty, and wasn’t youth synonymous with beauty? He would always have his pick of young, firm and unlined flesh.

  ‘Eve?’

  His voice was deep and low and beguiling and she closed her eyes as he began to rub his fingertips over her shoulders, pulling her back into the hard, lean contours of his body. Why spoil this? she thought as his hands moved round to cup her breasts? ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You are angry now? Fiery?’

  She laughed and turned to him, smoothing her hand down over the chiselled outline of his jaw. ‘Not angry, no, but fiery, yes.’ Her eyes glittered him a teasing provocation. ‘Always fiery.’

  ‘Then come here and show me,’ he breathed as he saw her mouth curve in a look of hunger. ‘Show me.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll show you all right,’ she said unsteadily as she began to unbutton his shirt.

  That night she played the dominant role, undressing him and teasing him until he groaned for mercy. She kept her stockings on and straddled him as her hair flailed about her shoulders and she thought that she had never felt quite so uninhibited with a man.

  And afterwards he lay there in silence for a little while, before eventually opening his eyes and giving her a rueful look.

  ‘Wow,’ he breathed.

  She felt flushed and brimming over with confidence and with life. ‘You liked that?’

  He gave a lazy smile. Caught a lock of her hair and pulled her head down so that their lips were a whisper apart. ‘Oh, sì, cara. I liked it. I liked the way you were so wild and so free.’ He slipped his hand between her legs and she gasped. ‘And you like that?’ he murmured.

  She began to squirm with pleasure. ‘Oh, God—yes. Yes! Please don’t stop.’

  The smile became a growl of a laugh, like a lion. ‘Stop? Let me tell you, cara mia, that I haven’t even started yet.’

  But the weekend came to an end all too quickly and at the airport he kissed her with a passionate goodbye which left her reeling.

  ‘Stay an extra day,’ he murmured into her ear.

  The temptation almost overwhelmed her. Reluctantly, she withdrew a body which felt as though it could quite happily stay glued to his for ever.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said regretfully. ‘I have an early studio call in the morning.’

  He nodded, dropped a kiss on the top of her head. ‘I am away in the States for a month,’ he said. ‘And I will call you. Very soon.’

  ‘Do.’ She squeezed his hand and walked away, clutching her overnight bag.

  Was that the irony of life? he wondered as he watched her sashaying towards the departure lounge with just a careless wave and a smile as she disappeared. That you always wanted what you couldn’t have? If she had been living in the same city, there was no way he would have asked her to stay an extra day! Protectively, he would have wanted and guarded his own space.

  He turned and began to walk away, oblivious to the women who watched him as his mobile phone began to ring and he slid it from his pocket and began to speak.

  Eve arrived home in time to run herself a bath before bedtime, which she enjoyed by candlelight, dreamily and rather sentimentally listening to some Italian opera as she soaked in the lavender-scented suds.

  And she was as bright as a button the next morning, despite a weekend of very little sleep, handling a sulky teenage pop star with aplomb and cleverly questioning the local Member of Parliament about why so little was being done about local traffic congestion.

&nbs
p; In fact, she was on cloud nine, not really living in the real world but existing instead in the perfect world of the imagination, where life was like that weekend all the time. Until she reminded herself that life was never that good. It couldn’t be, could it? Because it wasn’t real.

  Maybe it was because when you took a lover, he dominated your normal routine and drove everything else into the shadows. Especially when it was someone like Luca.

  Was that because he lived so far away, and therefore the bits of him she got were the exciting, glamorous bits, with none of the everyday drudge bits in between, which usually made you view a relationship much more realistically?

  If he were living up the road in the same village and they had settled into a grinding routine, then would she still feel this crazy floating-on-air feeling?

  It was a couple of weeks later that she happened to glance up at the calendar on the kitchen and her eyes stayed fixed on it with a mounting sense of disbelief, her heart missing a beat of very real fear.

  She was late.

  Very late.

  She carried on preparing her stir-fry, even though her hands were trembling, but when the fragrant rice and prawns were served out on a pretty plate decorated with sunflowers, she pushed it away, her appetite gone.

  She was never late. Never, ever, ever. Not once in her life—why, she could have set her clock by it. Was that why she hadn’t noticed it before, because she took it so much for granted? Or was it because her thoughts and her senses had been so full of Luca?

  But she couldn’t be pregnant. They had used condoms and they had been careful.

  She tried to ignore it, but couldn’t, clicking onto the search engine of her computer, to discover that there was a three percent chance the contraception could have failed. She felt sick, until she told herself that the odds were still hugely in her favour.

  For a while longer she allowed herself to hope, but it was a hope which became increasingly forlorn.

  The days became a series of long, agonised minutes while she waited and waited for something to happen which stubbornly refused to happen.

  Luca rang and she tried to chat normally, but inside her head was screaming with the terrible reality of her situation. They hadn’t even made a definite arrangement of when to meet, but where last week that would have bothered her, this week it barely even registered.

  Seeing Luca was the furthest thing from her mind. She just wanted the confirmation that this was nothing but a hiccup, a bad and scary dream and that she wasn’t pregnant.

  But she was an intelligent woman who could not hide from the truth, however unpalatable. Fearful of discovery and wagging tongues, she drove out of the village to the nearest large, anonymous chemist to buy herself a pregnancy kit, and by the end of the day uncertainty became fact.

  She stared at herself in the mirror as if expecting to see some outward sign that she had changed, but there was nothing. Her cheeks were still tinged with roses, her eyes bright and shining. Perhaps a little too bright and shining.

  Didn’t they always say that pregnant women looked the picture of health?

  And that was her. Healthy and yet terrified out of her tiny mind, because she was pregnant with Luca Cardelli’s baby.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EVE tugged at the crisply clean duvet cover with a little more vigour than was necessary and then looked round at her bedroom, checking the room like a chambermaid. Luca was coming to stay and she had felt honour-bound to go through the motions of welcoming him.

  Clean linen, fresh flowers and scented candles waiting to be lit. Would it resemble some kind of over-the-top boudoir?

  She sank down onto the bed and promptly creased the cover. She didn’t care. In fact, she didn’t care about anything. How could she, when she was privy to a piece of news which was about to change the whole course of her life?

  Listlessly, she glanced at her watch. Luca would be here within the hour and she had better get her act together. She was going to have to tell him, she decided, and sooner rather than later. And besides, she doubted whether she would be able to keep it secret from him. How could she look into his eyes and pretend that nothing had changed?

  It was such a big secret that it seemed to have taken over her life—she had half expected people at work to stop her in the corridor and congratulate her, because she felt so obviously pregnant.

  But if people did know—then they were hardly going to congratulate her, were they? A woman who found herself unexpectedly pregnant, without a steady, loving partner, tended to find herself an object of sympathy—even in these enlightened times. Oh, women made the best of it, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t make her life—and the life of her child—a wonderful, glittering success. But there was no doubt that at the beginning, at least, it wasn’t exactly news to send champagne corks flying.

  How the hell was she going to tell Luca? Should she blurt it out straight away, or wait for the ‘right’ moment? And if such a moment existed, it would soon disappear, for she could predict what his reaction would be.

  He was going to be furious. What man wouldn’t? To find that they were going to become a father to the child of a woman who was ‘nearly a stranger’?

  She heard the sound of a car approaching, of a door slamming and murmured words carried on the wind. Through the antique lace of her bedroom curtain, she saw the tall, dark figure as he paid the taxi driver.

  He was here. She should have been excited but her heart felt numb, with fear and dread the only emotions she was capable of feeling.

  Luca glanced up at the cottage, his eyes narrowing. Had that been Eve up there, watching him? And if so, why hadn’t she pulled back the curtain and waved?

  His mouth hardened. You met a woman you thought was sexy and intelligent and uncomplicated and suddenly she started playing the diva. She had sounded strained on the telephone, the way a woman sounded if you forgot her birthday. Was she sulking already? And if so, why?

  He lifted his hand and banged on the brass knocker. He was here now. He thought of her slender, tight body, the way she had ridden him to heaven and back, and felt the corresponding throb of desire. Who cared if she was sulking? He would kiss away her pique and make her sigh with pleasure for two whole days. And after that?

  Almost imperceptibly, he shrugged.

  The door opened and Eve fixed her brightest smile onto her face. ‘Luca!’ And flung her arms around him, mainly so that her eyes would give nothing away. Not yet. Not yet.

  He smiled against her hair and dropped his bag to the floor. Better. Much better. ‘Have you missed me, then, cara mia?’

  Act as you usually would, she told herself as she drew her head away, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth. ‘Missed you? I’m a very busy woman, Luca Cardelli—I don’t have time to miss anyone!’

  It was what he would have once deemed a textbook answer. A woman who did not make him centre of her universe. A woman with a life of her own. Perfect. But oddly, it did not please him. He wanted her to tell him that she had missed him. Break through her cool patina of sophistication. To conquer her, he realised, with a grim kind of shock. He liked to conquer his women. And once he had conquered them, he moved on.

  ‘Come in. What would you like to do first? I could make us some tea and then we could go for a stroll down by the sea—’ But her words were blotted out by his kiss, the seeking splendour of his lips, and she froze, like a block of ice in his arms.

  Not yet. She couldn’t. Not yet.

  ‘Luca!’ She pulled away. ‘Anyone would think that you had come here with only one thing in mind,’ she teased remonstratingly, her heart pounding, still with that terrible constricting fear.

  ‘You don’t want to take me straight upstairs and make love?’ he demanded. ‘You want tea?’

  ‘Well, don’t you? You’ve been travelling all day! Come on, I’ll put the kettle on!’ As she marched towards the kitchen she was acutely aware that she was coming over like a cross between a domestic drudge an
d a schoolmarm.

  He followed her into the kitchen, his eyes narrowed with irritation. What kind of a greeting was this? Did she think that he had flown all the way here to be marched into her kitchen like a hungry schoolboy?

  ‘You know, an Italian woman would never treat her lover so,’ he observed, on a sultry note of caution.

  Slowly, Eve turned around. ‘Then I suggest you find yourself an Italian lover, instead of an English one.’

  ‘Tell me, do you give all your men such a careless greeting?’

  His silky question made it sound as though she had a line of lovers stretching as far back as the eye could see! Eve felt sick and the sickness reminded her of the secret—such a tiny secret at the moment—which was growing inside her belly.

  And suddenly she realised that her instinct had been correct all along and that there wasn’t any such thing as a ‘right time’ to tell him. To wait would be to perpetuate the deception and to let him make love to her first would be unthinkable. And much too poignant. Tell him when he was naked and she was vulnerable? She couldn’t.

  ‘Sit down, Luca,’ she said heavily.

  Luca’s eyes narrowed. Something did not add up. He had been given an inkling that something was not right from the moment he had arrived, but he had put it down to nerves, even though there had been no nerves during that deliciously enjoyable weekend in Rome. She wasn’t the kind of woman to be shy at showing him her home—for a start, he had already seen some of it and she wasn’t insecure enough to need his approval about where she lived.

  So what was it?

  Silently, he pulled out a chair and sat down, stretching out his long legs, his expression pokerfaced and shuttered.

  Eve’s nerve suddenly failed her. ‘I’ll just finish making the tea,’ she blustered

  Still he watched and waited.

  Eve tipped boiling water in the teapot, making a drink that she knew neither of them would touch, but it seemed important to be going through the motions of doing something. And why didn’t he say something? Why was he just sitting there, like a brooding dark and golden statue? Why wasn’t he asking her what was wrong and then she could have blurted it out, instead of having to say it cold, searching for words to cushion it and knowing deep down that there were none.