‘Whose is it?’ he demanded.
‘Yours! Yours! Yours! Yours!’
Her mouth taunted her victory at him. The oldest trick in the book. Damn her! Damn her! And his anger transmuted into something else—something which was about as earth-shattering as he could imagine. The realisation that something of him would now be carried on into the next generation. His own little piece of immortality. She was carrying his child! His!
‘Mine?’ he questioned, but now there was a wondering note to his voice. ‘Mine, cara?’
‘Yes.’
With a dazed look in his eyes, he lowered his mouth irresistibly down on hers and began to kiss her in a kiss which was very close to tender.
But the kiss went the way of all their kisses, and the tenderness—was it real or imagined? wondered Kate heatedly—swiftly became desire, pure and sharp and undiluted.
She told herself not to respond, to push him away as he deserved to be pushed after the hideous accusations he had made, but her body would not heed her. It was too finely tuned to his sensual mastery to be able to do anything other than to spring into instant and urgent life beneath his touch. This was the father of her child, she thought weakly—the man who had created this new life growing within her, who could create all life in her.
‘Giovanni!’ The word came out in an exultant little whisper as he kissed her with a fervour which surpassed his normal kisses. And it was easy to forget the cruel things he had said to her when he kissed her like that.
Her thready little moan excited him even more, and without warning it was suddenly about much more than kissing. He was beyond thought, beyond reason, pursuing some blessed communion with her.
‘Giovanni,’ Kate breathed in disbelief, because now his hands were rucking up her skirt, and his fingers were snapping at the delicate lace of her panties, so that they fell uselessly to the floor. And with his other hand he was unzipping himself. ‘Giovanni!’ she whimpered, but the word sounded more like a plea than a protest, and it was. God, help her—it was!
He found himself driven on by a life-force so primeval that he could barely think, barely hear—all he could do was feel…feel her. He looked down at her mockingly as his fingers flicked enticingly against her molten heat. ‘You want me to stop, cara? I don’t think you do, but tell me yes, and I will.’
‘Yes! Yes! Oh, no!’ she sobbed as he touched her again, oh, so intimately, and she squirmed with excitement. ‘No, don’t stop! Please, don’t stop! Do it! Do it! Do it to me! Now!’
Her words incited him almost as much as the frantic movements of her hips and he pushed her against the wall and levered her legs up around his waist, gasping aloud as he entered her, thrusting into her again and again, losing himself in pursuit of that sweet destination.
This might be the very last time that the man she had grown to love might take pleasure in her arms, she realised. Heartache ripped through her, but somehow he banished it with every insistent movement of his strong, virile body.
Briefly she opened her eyes to see what a decadent picture the pair of them made—his trousers at his ankles, her skirt pushed up to her waist. How could he ever respect a woman who let him do something like this? But then she began to dissolve in the familiar ecstasy, and her greedy body began to convulse about his. She heard his helpless moan as he spilled his seed into her, and then let his head fall against her shoulder, his lips against her neck.
Kate closed her eyes. What had she done? She had let him take her like that, after his sickening reaction to her momentous news. Had she no shame where this man was concerned? No pride?
She let her feet slide to the floor and pushed him away, tired now. And weary. Impossibly and hopelessly weary. She was aware of the irony of what had just happened. The first time that he had ever made love to her without using any protection. Though it was a little late in the day for protection now.
She stumbled from the dining room and collapsed on the sofa, praying that he would just go. Go away and leave her alone with her fate, and she need never see him again.
She didn’t hear him come back into the room, the first time she became aware of his presence was when she found him standing in the doorway, studying her, his face shadowed. And grave. As if he had just received some very bad news, which, in a way, she supposed he had.
‘Are you all right?’ he questioned, but he made no move towards her.
All right? How could he ask her a question like that at a time like this? ‘I’m fine,’ she said, still with that flat, tired note in her voice. ‘Under the circumstances.’
‘Kate, we shouldn’t have…’ His voice tailed away, and it was the first time Kate had ever seen him look remotely uncomfortable.
‘Shouldn’t have what, Giovanni?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Made love like that, of course!’
‘That wasn’t called making love,’ she told him scornfully. ‘That was having wham-bam sex up against the wall!’
His mouth hardened. ‘Is that why you begged me to do it to you?’
Shuddering at the memory, Kate raked a hand to scoop the damp red hair which had fallen over her face. ‘It’s irrelevant now, anyway. It’s happened.’ It’s over, she thought, with a certainty which ached at her heart.
‘Yes.’ He found himself staring down at her flat belly. ‘How far gone are you?’
She stared up at him as she considered his reasons for asking this. ‘I’m going to keep the baby!’ she declared wildly. ‘You can’t stop me from having it!’
For a moment the import of her words remained unclear to him, and when he understood their true meaning he stared at her with a look of furious distaste. ‘Do you really think I would try?’ he asked.
Relief flooded through her, and she shook her head slowly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Then why say it?’ he demanded. ‘To hurt me? To insult me?’
‘We all say things under pressure,’ she returned. ‘You said a few pretty wounding things yourself.’
‘Yes.’ He narrowed his eyes as he looked at her, unexpectedly vulnerable in her new-found condition. ‘Kate—’
‘I want you to know that this isn’t some kind of trap to get you to commit to me,’ she interrupted proudly, before he had the chance to make the accusation himself. ‘Unless you think I somehow punctured one of the condoms with my fingernails when you weren’t looking!’
‘Of course I wasn’t suggesting that!’ he exploded. ‘I was just…shocked…taken off-guard. I didn’t know what I was saying.’
‘We’re both shocked. Naturally.’
He studied her pale features and wanted to take her into his arms and smooth away the troubled look on her face, but her body was stiff with tension. She did not want him near her, he acknowledged—and who could blame her? He forced out the unbelievable words. ‘You still haven’t told me how pregnant you are.’
There was a pause. ‘Eight weeks.’ She watched him doing sums in his head. ‘It must have happened in Rome,’ she added.
Giovanni nodded. Yes, Rome.
He remembered her arrival. She had not been nervous, as she had been initially during that first trip to Barcelona. She had been the independent and confident Kate of their very first meeting, and he had been swept away by her.
Her beauty had been almost incandescent—like a fiery light which had surrounded her, and he had bathed in it. So had he been careless? So eager to lose himself in her that he had neglected to protect himself properly?
Kate watched him. ‘But it doesn’t really matter where or when or how, does it?’ she asked heavily. ‘The fact remains that it happened. Is happening,’ she emphasised painfully, and placed the palm of her hand on a still-flat stomach.
‘Yes,’ he said, for what else was there for him to say? That he was delighted? No. She would scent his hypocrisy immediately—she was far too perceptive to be given platitudes which disguised his true feelings.
Kate sucked in a breath as she saw his expression of disquiet. Sh
e must tell him that she was not planning to use this situation to imprison him in a life not of his choosing. Her gaze was very level as she looked at him. ‘Listen, Giovanni. I want you to know that I’m going to go ahead with the pregnancy. I’m going to have the baby and bring it up myself.’
‘And me?’ he questioned savagely. ‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you? Don’t I feature in this whole scenario? Or are you planning to exclude me from this baby’s life, Kate?’
She tried to play fair, even though her heart told her how difficult it would be to cope with the occasional paternal visit from him. ‘You shall have as much or as little of this baby’s life as you choose to have,’ she said carefully.
‘And that’s what you want, is it?’
She didn’t answer that, not straight away. Of course it wasn’t what she wanted! What she wanted was the impossible—the happy little trio of a real family, with Giovanni the doting partner and the doting father at her side. But he hadn’t offered that, had he? Nor shown any sign of wanting it—certainly not before her announcement today—and even if he offered it now she could not contemplate a life with Giovanni staying beside her simply because it was his duty.
‘In the circumstances, there isn’t a lot else I can do,’ she answered quietly.
Her cheeks looked so translucent, as if her skin were made of rice-paper, and he felt his heart lurch as he realised how traumatic this all must have been for her. First of all finding out, and then having to tell him, fearing his wrath. And oh, he had given it, hadn’t he? Attacked her and blamed her when, in reality, she was blameless. ‘I’ll make you some coffee.’
‘I don’t want any coffee—’
‘You need something,’ he insisted forcefully. ‘You look terrible!’
She didn’t have the energy or the inclination to make a joke about that, and if the truth were known she felt terrible. Sick and troubled—and weren’t pregnant women supposed to feel glowing and radiant?
Maybe pregnant women whose futures did not look like some unknown black, gaping hole they were being forced to leap into.
He was in the middle of heaping coffee into the pot when he heard her strange, muffled cry, and the spoon fell unnoticed from his fingers—some terrible fear, some awful foreboding telling him that something here was very, very wrong.
He ran into the sitting room to find her doubled up, clutching at her abdomen, and rocking to and fro with tiny fraught cries coming from her lips.
‘Kate!’ He was by her side in an instant, and as she looked up at him he saw pain in her eyes. And terror. ‘Kate!’
He crouched down to her level. ‘What is it, cara?’ he questioned with soft urgency. ‘Is it the baby?’
‘I’m…’ Her fingers waved awkwardly to where she could feel the unmistakable warm flood of blood against her thighs. ‘Giovanni—there’s a pain! A bad pain!’ She reached out and clutched onto his arms, because right at that moment he seemed like the only sure foundation in her disintegrating world. ‘Help me, Giovanni,’ she whispered. ‘Please, help me.’
Her plea smote at his heart, and gently but swiftly he disengaged her fingers and went to the telephone, where he made a rapid call.
She lifted her head painfully. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Phoning the hospital.’
‘I don’t need to go to hospital—’
‘Kate, yes, you do,’ he denounced sternly. ‘And, what is more, you will go!’ He began speaking and gave the address, looking round at her as he did so, wishing that he could obliterate that look of agony etched all over her delicate features. He replaced the receiver. ‘The ambulance is on its way. Do you want me to tell your sister?’
Through the mists of pain she hesitated. Sometimes she and Lucy felt more like twins than sisters. She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And does she know? About the baby?’
‘What baby?’ she cried hysterically. ‘There isn’t going to be a baby, is there? But no, I haven’t told her.’ She hadn’t told anyone, as if by not doing that could make it not seem real.
Lucy arrived at the same time as the paramedics, who were carrying a stretcher. She took one wild look of disbelief at Kate lying huddled miserably on the sofa, with Giovanni stroking a cool cloth at her brow, and her mouth fell open in horror.
‘What’s happened?’ she demanded, her eyes flying accusingly to Giovanni. ‘What have you done to her?’
He flinched, but he stood up to face the venom on her face quite calmly. ‘Your sister is pregnant,’ he said quietly.
‘You bastard,’ hissed Lucy, so that only he could hear.
‘Lucy!’ called Kate weakly, and she looked up into her sister’s face, her green eyes swimming with the unbearable reality of what was happening to her.
She was losing Giovanni’s baby.
‘Oh, Kate, darling! Darling! What is it?’
‘I think I’m having a miscarriage,’ whispered Kate brokenly, and saying the hateful word made the first tears come—they slid freely down her cheeks and she made no move to dry them.
‘We’ll lift you onto the stretcher,’ said the paramedic.
She shook her head. ‘No, I’ll walk.’
‘Kate, either you go on the stretcher or I will carry you out to the ambulance myself,’ said Giovanni grimly. ‘Which is it to be?’
She heard the implacable note in his voice, and allowed herself to be lifted on.
‘And will your partner—’ the paramedic looked at Kate, and then to Giovanni ‘—be coming in the ambulance with you?’
Kate stared up into the blue gleam of his eyes, unable to read any emotion in that shuttered expression. She thought about how babies should be conceived. Planned. With love. And preferably within the confines of a happy marriage. Not as the result of a matter-of-fact affair during a passionate weekend when contraception had somehow failed.
Giovanni did not want to be a father, nor her to be a mother. He certainly did not want her to carry his baby—so why subject him to the indignity of seeing this brief, precious life come to a premature end? Why should he be witness to a heartbreak he would be unable to understand?
‘No,’ she said huskily. ‘I want my sister with me.’
He flinched again at the ultimate rejection. ‘Very well, Kate,’ he said flatly. ‘I will wait here.’
He kept a vigil, only just preventing himself from ignoring her request and tearing down to the hospital to sit there and wait, and to interrogate the doctors and the nurses until he had news that she was safe and out of danger.
But Kate had expressly said that she did not want him to accompany her, and he came from a culture which treated a pregnant woman as a jewel above all others.
Except, as he reminded himself bitterly, that the chances were that she was no longer a pregnant woman.
Resisting the urge to smash something, Giovanni sucked in a hot, dry breath of pain. She was losing his baby, he thought, unprepared for the wave of despair which rocked him.
He kept himself busy by clearing away the remains of their meal. He winced as he imagined her making his country’s most famous dish. Imagined her shopping for all the ingredients, knowing all the while what she had to tell him.
And what an unforgivable bastard of a man he had been.
He lifted the wine-stained tablecloth from the table and put it in the laundry basket, and settled down to wait.
He waited all night and well into the next morning.
He rang the hospital to be told that she had been ‘taken to Theatre’ and that her condition was ‘stable’. He had wanted to shout down the phone at that point, to ask what on earth such a bland word could possibly mean when applied to a woman who had had a new life torn from her body.
He assumed.
He allowed himself a brief fantasy. That her pain and the blood—for he had seen the hideous blush of crimson for himself—had all been some kind of false alarm. Nature’s way of warning her to take things easy. Perhaps the pregnancy was still viable.
&nb
sp; But, in his heart, he feared the worst.
They would tell him nothing more. He was not a relative. She had not named him as her next-of-kin—that honour had gone to her sister. In the bureaucratic world of hospitals, he did not have a role in Kate’s life.
She came home the following morning at eleven, accompanied by an even whiter-faced Lucy. The facts were stark and were spelt out to him by Lucy in the kitchen, whilst Kate slept fitfully.
There had been a baby, yes, but no more. The ‘spontaneous miscarriage’—more hospital jargon, he thought grimly—had been followed by a routine operation to remove all traces of the pregnancy from her womb.
‘Routine?’ he questioned incredulously.
‘That’s what they said,’ answered Lucy.
He saw how much she disliked him, and perhaps in a way he could not blame her, but, whatever the hospital thought and whatever Lucy thought, he did have a role in Kate’s life. If no longer as her lover, then certainly as the man responsible for bringing her to this.
‘I’ll look after her now,’ said Lucy fiercely.
He shook his head. ‘No.’ His voice was implacable. ‘I will stay with Kate until she recovers.’
In the bedroom, Kate stirred and his words penetrated her consciousness. Until she recovers. Then she heard Lucy speaking.
‘You think it’s that easy for her?’ Lucy was saying. ‘To recover from something like this?’
Kate pulled the duvet over her head to blot out the sounds of their voices. She felt weak and bereft as it was; she couldn’t even begin to contemplate that Giovanni was planning to leave her.
Giovanni looked at Lucy. ‘I will not share my thoughts with you, Lucy—they are for Kate’s ears and Kate’s ears alone.’
‘And you really think that she wants you here?’
He looked deep into her eyes. ‘Has she told you she doesn’t?’
‘How long will you be staying?’
He noted that she hadn’t answered his question. ‘Until her physical strength is such that she can fly,’ he said quietly.
The Sicilian's Passion Page 14
