The Brabanti Baby

by Catherine Spencer

  But now that the heat of the moment had subsided, reaction set in and left Eve ashamed. “I was very rude to your friends, Gabriel. That’s not something I’m proud of.”

  He deposited the bottle of champagne and glasses on a nearby stone birdbath. “They were mortally insulting to you, cara mia, and that’s not something I’m about to forgive or forget. What do you suppose started it all?”

  “You shouldn’t have put your arm around me when I came downstairs. It just gave rise to talk.”

  “Should I have done this instead?” Closing the distance between them, which hadn’t been very big to start with, he captured her mouth in a kiss which spoke of a hunger barely held in check.

  His lips quested over hers, searching for secrets she’d never intended he should discover. How was she supposed to withstand an assault delivered with such exquisite finesse that she all but melted in a pool at his feet?

  He sapped her strength. Left her without the will or sense to keep her lips together. So it was all too easy for him to slide his tongue between them and taste the pent-up desire she couldn’t repress. Easier still to stir her to even greater passion by sliding his hands the length of her spine to her bottom, gathering handfuls of her dress en route and pulling her hard against him.

  There was no mistaking his arousal, and if he’d continued inching her skirt up her thighs, he’d soon have learned he wasn’t the only one aching with unfulfilled longing. The heated rush dampening her underpants betrayed an embarrassing response to his touch.

  “Not that, either,” she said breathlessly, tearing her mouth free, but while her words denied him, her blood sang with pleasure.

  “Why not? Because what others think matters more to you than I do?”

  “No,” she said, stepping out of his hold, because to be so near him clouded her thinking and blotted out all the many good reasons why they shouldn’t allow the passion to run wild between them. “Because I’m afraid you’re attracted to me only because I’m not like Marcia.”

  He smothered a curse. “What the devil does Marcia have to do with any of this?”

  “I’m not sure. All I know is that Janine De Rafaelli isn’t the only one to imply that Marcia hurt you in some way. And I can’t help wondering if you’re trying to prove something by turning to someone less…dangerous.”

  “She didn’t hurt me,” he said, so coldly furious that Eve shivered. “She didn’t possess that power. Instead she embarrassed the hell out of me and dragged my good family name through the dirt.”

  “How?” Eve demanded, catching at his arm and trying to pull him back to face her when he went to turn away. She hated the closed expression on his face. A moment ago, he’d kissed her as if he could never get enough of her. Now he looked at her as if she were a stranger. “What did she do, Gabriel, that I’m now bearing the brunt of her actions?”

  He flung her off. Straightened his jacket sleeve and shot his shirt cuffs into place. “This is neither the time nor the place for such revelation. Please excuse me. I’m neglecting my guests.”

  “Don’t you dare walk away from me as if I’m some impertinent subordinate!” she cried, furious herself. “Damn it, Gabriel, I deserve an answer, and I deserve to get it from you. But if you can’t or won’t give me one, I’m not too proud to seek it from someone who will.”

  That stopped him in his tracks! Spinning around, he bore down on her in such a spate of anger that she flinched. “You’ll do nothing of the kind! If answers are what you want, meet me in my study when the party’s over and I’ll give you the whole sordid story. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear.” He let out an exclamation of disgust. “And for God’s sake, stop cowering like that! If I managed never to raise my hand to your benighted cousin, you can safely rest assured I’ll never strike you, or any other woman for that matter!”

  “I never for a moment thought you would, Gabriel,” she said in a small voice.

  But she was talking to the silent garden. Not waiting for her response, he’d disappeared back along the hidden path, as anxious now to escape her company as Janine De Rafaelli had been only minutes earlier.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “THERE was no need to knock,” he said, when she entered his study. “You live here. For now at least, this is your home.”

  A floor lamp in the corner shed a gentle light through the room and showed him sitting in a high-backed wing chair facing the open windows. He’d shed his jacket, pulled loose the knot in his tie and opened the top button of his shirt. A brandy snifter stood on the table at his elbow.

  When she didn’t reply and instead slipped quietly into the chair next to his, he said, “I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind and weren’t coming. It’s almost eleven. Our guests left hours ago.”

  “Nicola needed her ten o’clock feeding.”

  “And before that? Some people stayed for a cold buffet supper. Why didn’t you join us?”

  “I…had a headache.”

  He laughed unkindly. “Is that the best excuse you can come up with, Eve? I had a headache?”

  “Okay, I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Nor was I. The mere mention of my ex-wife’s name is enough to give me indigestion, let alone the idea of rehashing her antics in their every squalid detail. But common courtesy demanded that I not abandon my guests.”

  “All right, I let you down.” She bit her lip and hazarded a glance at him. Had something else happened, or was it really just the prospect of talking about Marcia that left him in such a foul mood? “If you must know, I’d had enough of your friends.”

  He picked up the snifter and took a mouthful of brandy. He hadn’t looked at her once since she arrived, nor did he do so now, preferring instead to stare out at the soft Mediterranean night. What did he see there, she wondered. The blanket of stars spread across the sky, their reflection littering the sea like dancing fragments of crystal, or ghosts of his unhappy marriage?

  “You found them universally unpleasant? There wasn’t one among them whose company you could tolerate a second time? That puts me in an awkward position. The Ripley-Joneses have invited us to the theater on Wednesday, and the Santoros to dinner next Monday. What am I to tell them? That you’d rather—?”

  “Not universally unpleasant, Gabriel. I liked the Santoros very much. The other couple I confess I can’t quite place.”

  “He’s in the diplomatic corps and she’s the former opera singer.”

  “Ah, yes. Now I remember. They, too, were very charming.”

  He permitted himself a small, bitter smile. “Then I’ve risked little in accepting both invitations? I don’t have to worry that you’ll embarrass me by walking out in mid-performance on Wednesday, or disappearing halfway through Monday’s dinner?”

  “Of course not!” Exasperated, she said on a sigh, “Is this why you asked me to meet you here, Gabriel? So that you could pick a fight with me?”

  He blinked and turned at last to look at her. “Is that what I’m doing? Forgive me. It’s not my intention.”

  So he said, but his mood change proved otherwise. Her lips still felt slightly swollen, proof that she hadn’t imagined his kiss. The imprint of his body lingered on hers, hot and hungry. Yet he spoke like a stranger, his tone chilly, his blue eyes cool. He was fire and ice, his passion swinging from love to loathing in the blink of an eye.

  “Then what is the matter?” she asked him.

  “I’ve discovered shrugging off the past isn’t quite as easy as I’d first thought. The last time I attended the theater with the Ripley-Joneses, Marcia was with me. Very much against her will, as it turned out. She wanted to leave at the first intermission. I refused to accommodate her.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged and swung his gaze back to the window. “Well, you know Marcia. When her demands aren’t met, she makes a scene, regardless of where she might be or who might witness her tantrums. I didn’t take well to being humiliated in public by the childish antics of a so-called adult and was n
ot, I’m afraid, very kind in expressing my distaste.”

  “And because I slipped away from tonight’s party, you think I’m cut from the same cloth as my cousin? That’s a bit of a leap, surely? For a start, nobody but you probably even noticed I was gone. Second, I did have a good excuse. The evening lasted much longer than you’d led me to expect, and I’d promised Beryl I wouldn’t keep her up too late. But all that aside, Gabriel, after my run-in with the contessa, I wasn’t in much of a party mood.”

  “You shouldn’t let her get to you. She’s not important.”

  “You shouldn’t let Marcia get to you, but even after all these months, you obviously still do.”

  “She left more lasting scars.”

  Eve waited a heartbeat, expecting he’d elaborate. When he didn’t, she said, “I assume they were caused by something more traumatic than a temper tantrum over a theater engagement?”

  “If repeated infidelity falls under such a heading, then yes.”

  Her mouth fell open in dismay. “Marcia had an affair?”

  “Several, by all accounts.” He shifted the angle of his shoulders. Settled more deeply into the wing chair until all she could see was the thrust of his jaw and nose, and the lock of dark hair falling over his brow. “The first—at least, the first that I was aware of—started four months after we were married. Before that, she merely looked, the way a starving woman might press her face to the window of a restaurant.”

  “Several affairs?” Dismay was turning into shock and, inexplicably, shame. As if, by association, Marcia’s disgrace had infected Eve and left her to carry the burden of her cousin’s actions. “Gabriel, I don’t know what to say, except that I’m horrified.”

  “You’re surely not implying this comes as news?”

  “Of course it does! I never suspected she’d behave so badly.”

  Never? her conscience niggled. Not even when she announced she was taking a second husband within months of ridding herself of the first?

  Shoving aside the disturbing question, Eve said, “Why did you wait so long to end things with her?”

  “Because divorce isn’t something I believe in. And because I blamed myself for her behavior.”

  “How could it possibly have been your fault? Did you push her into another man’s arms?”

  “Not literally, perhaps.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That I realized practically from the start that we were a match made in hell, and made no secret of my feelings. I tolerated her, turned a blind eye to her unhappiness. I gritted my teeth and tried to make the best of a bad situation when what I should have done was swallow my pride, admitted my mistake, and gone about rectifying it in the only way possible.”

  “But you didn’t seek comfort with another woman.”

  “No,” he said, his eyes still trained on the dark horizon. “I’m sure Marcia regaled you with stories of what a complete bastard I can be, but I do possess some standards. Honoring at least some of my marriage vows happens to be one of them.”

  “I don’t base my judgment of people on what others tell me, Gabriel. I reach my own conclusions and I believe you’re painting a much blacker picture of yourself than you deserve.”

  “I could change your mind on that very easily, Eve.”

  “How?” she said, the sudden sharp pain in his voice making her heart ache.

  Slowly he swung his head toward her again. “What if I told you that when I first heard Marcia was pregnant, I was appalled? I wanted to sever all connection with her, not find myself tied to her forever because of a child conceived out of lust or desperation, or a combination of both.”

  “I can see how you might feel that way. Every child deserves to be born of love, and it’s very sad that so many aren’t. But the point is, you didn’t turn away from the situation, you accepted it.”

  “Not gracefully. Plainly put, I did not want this baby. And that was why I didn’t make an issue of being there for her birth, or of visiting her sooner. I’d have preferred to ignore her existence.”

  He spat out the bald truth like a challenge, as if daring Eve to confront a sin of such magnitude and forgive him for it. He’d left it too late. A few weeks ago, she might have been fooled into believing he had no heart, but she knew differently now. “What matters, Gabriel, is that you weren’t able to follow through on that resolve. In the end, you couldn’t turn your back on Nicola.”

  “No. In the end, conscience and pity got the better of me, and I took responsibility—but from a distance. I didn’t feel like a father. Didn’t want to feel like one. Couldn’t, if truth be known, accept that I’d become one, which is why I eventually decided I had to see my child, before I’d left it too late to learn how to love her.” He passed a tired hand down his face. “I know now that if I hadn’t met Nicola until she was ten or twenty, I’d have loved her anyway. How could I not? She is part of me.”

  “Oh, Gabriel,” Eve said, with a catch in her voice. “I know you love your little girl. I’ve watched you with her, and sometimes, the look on your face when you’re holding her makes me want to cry.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Because I’ve seen so many babies who’ve had no one to hold them close. No one to rock them to sleep, or buy them pretty clothes and soft, cuddly toys. I’ve seen too many with bruises on their little bodies—with broken limbs, or head injuries because some angry man or woman has shaken them until their brains scramble.”

  His eyes flew open so wide with shock that his lashes flared like petals around the heart of a flower. “Per carita, how do you keep your sanity?”

  “Some days, I don’t. I leave the clinic and wander for hours along the lakefront, trying to find peace of mind. Sometimes I go nights without being able to sleep because the second I close my eyes, the pictures come back to haunt me and I want to kill the people who commit such atrocities. Other times, I feel so frustrated, so useless, that I just want to walk away from it all and never have to look back.

  “And sometimes,” she said, her voice quavering again, more violently this time, “all I can do is hold a battered child close to my heart, and watch helplessly as his life slips away.”

  “Dio!” Gabriel surged out of his chair, pulled her to her feet, and wrapped his arms so tightly around her that her ribs hurt. “Nobody should have to endure such torture— never a child, and never a woman like you!”

  Clutching his shirt, she muffled her grief against his shoulder. His hand stroked up her back. She was conscious of his fingers lacing through her hair, of his chin resting on the crown of her head. She felt his every agitated breath, and knew he wanted more than to hold her with tenderness. Knew that the passion was running strong in his blood, and the only reason he kept it in check was out of consideration for her fragile emotional state. She had never felt safer or more protected.

  “Who looks after you, cara?” he asked, his voice rumbling up from the depths of his chest. “Who holds you at the end of the day, and keeps you close in the dark when the nightmares strike?”

  “No one,” she said.

  “Then let me.”

  “It’s not your job.”

  “Not even if I want to take it on?”

  She lifted her face to his, saw with what decisive intent he watched her. “How can you be so sure it is what you want, and not just that you feel sorry for me?” she asked brokenly. “How do you tell the difference between pity and desire, Gabriel?”

  His mouth swept down on hers in soft urgency. “By this,” he murmured, allowing just enough space between their lips for the words to escape, “and by this.”

  He pressed her hand to his chest. She felt the invincible strength of him denounced by the erratic thunder of his heart. He was a man of immovable integrity, driven by unimpeachable scruples, yet touched by a capacity for gentleness not often found in other men. To be loved by him would endow a woman with something rare and magnificent.

  But to imagine for a second that she could be th
at woman was courting heartbreak of the worst kind. That he was grateful to her and found her attractive enough, she didn’t doubt. But they had no foundation on which to build a grand and lasting passion nor, in the few weeks she’d remain in his house, the opportunity to do so. It wasn’t time enough, not by a long chalk. The best—or worst!—they could enjoy was a brief affair. And in her case, it would be the worst. She wasn’t very good at short-term flings.

  So, “I’m going upstairs,” she said, attempting to wriggle out of his hold. “I’m too far away from the nursery to hear if Nicola wakes, and you’re too swept up in the moment to know what you’re saying.”

  He splayed his hand over her bottom and melded her to him. He was hard, his aroused flesh rebelling against the imposition of clothing coming between them. “But we have unfinished business between the two of us, cara mia, and running away will not resolve it.”

  “Your imagination’s getting the best of you, Gabriel.”

  He nudged her hips with his, a flagrantly intimate movement that left her gasping. “I am not imagining this, la mia bella, and neither are you.”

  Just for a moment, she allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to lie naked with him; to touch him all over, let him touch her, look his fill, kiss her wherever he chose. To be possessed by him. To feel all that hot, potent strength answering the quivering need of her own body.

  Imagination was a powerful thing. A slow and sensuous heat pervaded her limbs. Left her mouth dry and breathless, and the part of her pressed most closely against him wet and eager. Embarrassed, she wrenched herself free and took a step back. “Nevertheless, it’ll have to wait for another time.”

  She was gone before he could recite all the good reasons for her staying. Running like a frightened deer fleeing a hunter. But not so swiftly that he hadn’t read the longing in her eyes. Not fast enough that he hadn’t seen the hectic flush riding up her throat to suffuse her face, or felt the pebble-hard thrust of her nipples against his chest.

  But she was afraid; uncertain that she could trust him. Which left the next move up to him. The question was, with sanity slowing his heart rate to near-normal, and the painful ache in his groin subsiding, how well could he trust himself?