The Ranieri Bride

by Michelle Reid

  As if he saw it, too, Enrico shifted tensely. ‘Some coffee would be good,’ he prompted Sonny.

  ‘Sure.’ Flicking his gaze back to Enrico, Sonny kept his expression blank as he waved a hand towards a door. ‘Freya’s things arrived a few minutes ago. I was not sure what you wanted me to do with them, so I had them stashed in there…’

  ‘OK, gratzi.’

  The thanks doubled as a dismissal. After a final glance levelled at Freya, Sonny was nodding his dark head and disappearing back behind the door through which he’d appeared.

  Enrico’s hand arrived at the base of Freya’s spine, making it stiffen in rejection. Ignoring her reaction, he applied pressure to make her move forward. The tension between them only helped to cleave her dry tongue to the roof of her mouth.

  A few moments later and she was discovering that in there was a large drawing-room with French windows that opened onto a walled garden. The afternoon sun was streaming in through the glass, making the crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling sparkle its rainbow patterns across the pale walls.

  How the other half lived, Freya thought bleakly as she froze in the doorway to allow her gaze to drift over a designer’s dream of a room, with its luxurious soft furnishings and spotless French-polished pieces of European antique furniture.

  Enrico’s old apartment had looked nothing like this. That had been luxurious, of course, but state-of-the-art modern and relatively easy for her to get used to, whereas this…

  She tried to imagine letting loose a barely housetrained two-year-old in here and just couldn’t. She was beginning to feel like a bag lady herself.

  Enrico propelled her a few more steps forward, oblivious to his surroundings because he had always lived surrounded by the best. In fact, this room could have been picked up and transferred to here from his beautiful country estate outside Milan.

  It was when he moved away from her to stride across the room that she saw the packing boxes stacked behind the door and froze yet again. For there stood her life, packed in what amounted to half a dozen boxes, plus a bright red-and-yellow child’s rider-truck that looked so out of place she felt as if the room were glaring at it for daring to show itself.

  ‘We can’t live here,’ she heard herself whisper.

  In the process of pushing open the French windows, Enrico swung around then went perfectly still when he too saw the boxes and the red-and-yellow truck.

  Something hit him hard in the mid-section of his body, insight into what Freya had been seeing when she’d whispered those words: her life packed into six damn boxes. Her small flat, the whole of which, he recalled, would fit into half of this room. She had no family left to call upon, no one but herself on whom to rely. Her cheap grey suit, scuffed shoes and hair that was in need of professional attention all seemed to make a mockery of the display of wealth that was on show here.

  Then there was that brightly coloured truck; he could actually visualise his son sitting on it and careering across aged oak floors and priceless rugs, and knocking into finely tooled legs belonging to priceless tables and chairs.

  Was the boy Luca’s?

  The question seeped like acid into his blood.

  Was he in the process of making one of the biggest mistakes in his life?

  Then—no, he thought, no.

  ‘It is what I want.’

  He said it oddly, as if the statement came to his lips directly from his suddenly aching gut. Maybe she heard it come from that deep place because she turned to look at him, green eyes big and so vulnerable he couldn’t make his mind up whether to curse her for making his insides crease up the way they were doing, or to curse her for bringing Luca back into this.

  ‘I have to go out…’ The decision arrived out of nowhere. Enrico was already crossing back to the door when Freya’s stare altered to one of surprise.

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘Get Sonny to show you around,’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘Choose some rooms to sleep in, unpack or—whatever. I will be back—later.’

  The door shut behind him, leaving Freya standing there and wondering what had caused his sudden change of mind and his couldn’t-escape-quick-enough exit.

  Was he feeling their presence as an intrusion already? Had he looked across at her and seen the bag lady with the penchant for taking other men to her bed and wondered what the hell it was he was getting himself into?

  Sonny appeared then, carrying a coffee tray and looking very wary.

  ‘If you have something to say to me about this situation, then say it and get it over with,’ Freya snapped at him. ‘If not, then don’t say anything at all and just—go away!’

  With that she sat down in the nearest chair and burst into tears.

  Sonny was good with tea and sympathy, though he probably thought privately she didn’t deserve either, if he believed what he thought he knew about her and Luca.

  And the tea was coffee…

  But he mopped her up in his own unique, offhand manner. Made her drink some coffee, eat a small piece of his famously delicious home-made chocolate cake, then picked up one of her boxes and offered to show her around.

  Enrico’s place was huge, with the formal drawing-room she’d already seen, a dining-room and a very impressive book-lined study, plus a much less ostentatious but still glaringly elegant family-room and kitchen, all on the ground floor. Upstairs, the luxury didn’t falter, she discovered. The master bedroom with its en suite bathroom was a work of art. Freya wanted to leave instantly—it was obvious that this was Enrico’s room by the possessions she could see scattered around it, and she had no wish to linger there longer than she absolutely had to.

  There were four further en suite bedrooms, one of which was already fitted out to accommodate a small child. When Freya quizzed Sonny about it, he reckoned that Enrico probably didn’t know there was a child’s room. In fact, Sonny was very forthcoming about how Enrico had bought the house—which apparently had a matching apartment on the two floors above them—unseen and fully furnished. He had moved in a week after he’d finished his relationship with Freya, and had spent only the odd night here since.

  She chose the room next to Nicky’s—it was the furthest away from the master suite. Sonny had her boxes moved upstairs and Freya unpacked them with a deep-boned reluctance that showed in her taut expression and kept Sonny’s tongue silent.

  Nicky arrived two hours later, carried in Fredo’s big arms. By the dark look on the bodyguard’s face, he’d had more than enough of playing the nanny to an energetic small boy.

  The moment Nicky saw Freya standing there in the hallway, he reached out to her with his arms and whimpered, ‘Mummy!’

  ‘Here, take him,’ Fredo muttered. ‘He’s…tired.’

  Tired didn’t really cover it, Freya observed as she took hold of Nicky and let him curl up in her arms. He was dirty, a little smelly and definitely bad-tempered by the frown on his face.

  ‘Had a good time, brown-eyes?’ she asked him lightly.

  ‘Fed the monkeys,’ he mumbled. ‘Daddy liked the tigers best.’

  Daddy…? Freya lifted questioning eyes to Fredo, who responded with one of his shrugs.

  ‘He came to find us after getting a child seat fitted in the car,’ he told her. ‘Then he dropped us off here before shooting back to Hannard’s to put in a couple of hours’ work.’

  None of which explained how her son happened to be calling Enrico Daddy.

  ‘You expected Nicky to call him Enrico?’ Fredo challenged, reading her expression.

  Freya honestly didn’t know. The whole thing was moving so fast now she could no longer keep up. The tension headache was still thumping away at the backs of her eyes, and the Daddy seemed to make it all so frighteningly official.

  ‘Want to go home now…’ Nicky muttered.

  And that, she thought heavily, started the next battle she had to wage before she could finally give in to misery and throw herself onto her chosen bed to indulge in a proper weep.


  Did Enrico really think that he could just uproot them and plonk them down here and everything would carry on as normal? Did he think that turning up at the zoo and getting Nicky to call him Daddy automatically made him into a father?

  ‘Let me show you what I’ve found upstairs first,’ she suggested to Nicky with yet more lightness she just did not feel. ‘Daddy has this huge house, with the biggest bath you’ve ever seen in your life!’

  The little boy’s curly dark head lifted off her shoulder. ‘I want my bath,’ he demanded sullenly.

  ‘But you can swim in this one if you want to,’ Freya said, winging a bright I’m-a-happy-mummy smile at her scowling son. ‘And it makes frothy bubbles…’

  Nicky didn’t like his new bedroom. He didn’t like the big bath. By the time—a couple of very long hours later—she had finally bathed, fed and lulled the over-tired, confused and fractious toddler into sleep in his new bed, it was all she could do to walk straight to her bedroom, strip off her clothes, take a quick shower then fall into her own bed.

  Enrico stood leaning against the door-jamb, looking across at the flood of Freya’s hair that streamed out across her pillows. She’d got into bed with wet hair, he saw, following the long trailing sections that looked heavy and darkened and damp. He could even smell the clean-scented shampoo from here.

  He lifted a hand to rake his fingers through his own recently showered and shampooed hair.

  He was tired and fed-up. Sonny wasn’t talking to him: his housekeeper had taken exception to being left to deal with the new arrivals without much notice. Not his job, he’d said, to mop up after Enrico’s women. It wasn’t his job either to watch the mini-monster run rings around her while she was too tired and depressed to cope.

  But now the mini-monster was sleeping the sleep of dark angels in a next-door bedroom.

  His son. Enrico had gone to meet Fredo and Nicolo at the zoo this afternoon, and had spent time with the small boy, reaffirming that he was his father. When he was with Nicolo he knew it—knew it with every fibre of his being. It was only when the boy was not in his sights that the doubts crept back in.

  Then he’d spent more time standing at his son’s bedroom doorway, reassuring himself of it yet again as he watched Nicolo sleep.

  Now here he was, standing here watching Freya and doing the same thing. A soft table lamp glowed beside her bed. A similar light was left on in the child’s bedroom next door; the interconnecting door had been left ajar—presumably so Freya could hear if Nicolo awoke in a strange place and needed her.

  He was on one hell of a steep learning curve here. The latest part of his ascent had been to learn that small children needed twenty-four-hour attention—to the extent that you tuned in even while you slept.

  Which meant he could not close this door. A sigh eased from him. He made a mental note to employ a nanny as soon as possible, then stepped further into the room. Time to get tough again. Time to keep the pressure on, despite the exhausted sleep Freya had clearly sunk into.

  Enrico crossed the room with the silent tread of bare feet on thick-pile carpet, carefully shrugged out of his bathrobe and laid it aside, then lifted up the duvet and eased himself carefully into the bed.

  Freya stirred as the weight of his body disturbed the mattress. Reaching out for her, he drew her in.

  ‘Enrico,’ he heard her whisper. That was all.

  At least it was his name.

  ‘Shh.’ He kissed her softly. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  To his surprise she did, sinking back down to where she had drifted up from, her cheek pillowed in his shoulder and her long legs unconsciously tangling with his.

  Freya came awake to the sound of rattling crockery and the vague, stomach-sinking feeling that she had been abducted by aliens. She opened her eyes to find Sonny standing over her holding a breakfast tray.

  ‘Ciao,’ Sonny greeted. ‘Orange juice, tea and toast for breakfast,’ he listed, ‘as instructed this morning by your much more amiable son.’

  Nicky. A second stomach-sinking feeling hit her with a punch of reality. ‘What time is it?’ She sat up with a jerk. ‘Where is Nicky?’

  ‘The time is eight-thirty,’ Sonny provided. ‘And your son is, as we speak, on his way into the City with his papa and Fredo, affording you a well-deserved lie-in.’

  The tray arrived across her lap, thereby effectively trapping her to the bed before she could leap out and start yelling.

  ‘Enrico said to tell you to eat, shower and calm down before you ring him at Hannard’s.’ Sonny pointed to a slip of paper lying on the tray. ‘His private mobile number to cut out the middle man,’ he explained drily. ‘Oh—and I thought you would like to read this…’ A newspaper arrived and was propped up against the teapot. ‘Enjoy!’

  Sonny strode out, closing the door very firmly behind him. Freya stared at her breakfast, then at the newspaper already neatly folded open at, presumably, the relevant page. Enrico had walked off with her son again. She’d slept in for the first time in over two years and had not heard anything, not even Nicky’s good-humoured chatter, which had always, always been her early-morning alarm call and—

  The print on the newspaper suddenly came into focus. With a sharp gasp she snatched it up and began to read. Thirty seconds later she was pushing the tray aside and diving out of the bed—it was only as she did so that she happened to notice the impression on the pillow next to hers.

  Heat flooded into her, that stinging, stifling kind of heat which came with a half memory that could—should—have been the vague remnants of an old, familiar dream.

  ‘Oh,’ she choked and spun away to hunt down her handbag. Fishing out her mobile phone, she dived back onto the bed to pick up the slip of paper bearing Enrico’s telephone number. Having been left to dry of its own accord, her hair was a mass of tumbling, twisting spirals that she had to push out of her way so she could read the digits and punch them out on the phone. Enrico answered immediately, though by then she didn’t know which accusation to hit him with first.

  ‘Y-you slept in my bed!’ was the one that shot from her in a breathless shriek.

  Enrico leant back in his chair and spun it round to smile at the view beyond his office window. ‘Ciao, mi amore,’ he murmured dulcetly. ‘You clung to me like a delightful but very possessive octopus, all arms and legs and—’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ she gasped out.

  ‘—made love to me as if I was your long-lost lover returned…’

  ‘I did not! I would never—’

  ‘…so wonderfully eager and so very insatiable…’

  ‘You’re just teasing me. Will you stop this—?’

  ‘Had I not been so afraid that our son might sleepwalk into the room at any moment I would not have been able to resist. However…’

  ‘I’m not listening!’ she breathed down the phone at him.

  ‘And miss out on the best part where I asked you who Nicolo’s father is and you said—You are, Enrico…?’

  Silence came at him across the airwaves. Glaring grim triumph now, Enrico waited for Freya to recover from the shock.

  ‘I w-was asleep—’

  ‘And so honest you even instructed me where and how I was to touch you.’

  There was a sound like someone sucking in their breath. Were her eyes shut tight the way they had been last night? Was she standing or sitting or still lying there in the bed remembering her hot dream that had been so vividly real?

  He got up, restless—angry now without knowing why, since he had managed to gain the upper hand over her in every way that he could. He could still taste her kisses on his tongue and feel her hands on his body, still feel her moving against him in that oh-so-sensuously pleading way and the warmth of her breath on his face as she’d whispered those soft, honest words to him: He’s your son, Enrico…

  ‘You begged me, cara,’ he informed her brutally. ‘You took hold of my hand and placed it where you wanted to feel it most. Then you came all over me in a sweet-scented, clingin
g rush and I—’

  The phone went dead. Enrico was not that surprised that it had. He swung round to glare at his office, then swung back to look out of the window again.

  Freya threw herself back on the pillows, eyes closed tightly, the racing thump of her heart locking up her chest so she couldn’t breathe.

  Her dream! The one she’d had so many times before. She’d thought she’d experienced it again so vividly last night. But it had been real!

  She’d been somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. She remembered everything now: he’d come to her bed and drawn her against him, then kissed her softly on her mouth. ‘Enrico.’ She could hear herself whispering. ‘Shh,’ he’d said. ‘Go back to sleep.’