The Sicilian's Mistress

by Lynne Graham

  Milly leant on her spade for support. Her tumbled hair was roughly caught back with a piece of twine. She wore ancient jeans, a warm but shapeless sweater and workman-like boots. Her lack of elegance didn’t trouble her. But she could see it was troubling Gianni, who was reading all sorts of deeper messages into her appearance. Women wore make-up in bed with Gianni. Women spent hours dressing to go out with him. He never had known quite how to handle her unconcern at letting him occasionally see her just as she was, bare of both fashion and artifice.

  ‘You lost track of time. You didn’t realise I’d arrived,’ Gianni decided instantly.

  Milly was not in a conciliatory mood. ‘I could hardly have missed the helicopter landing, and that was what…two, three hours ago?’

  ‘Your phone is switched off. Barbara Withers told me where to find you.’ Gianni couldn’t quite conceal his irritation that he had been reduced to asking such a question. ‘You shouldn’t be working outdoors in this weather.’

  ‘You’re annoyed I wasn’t waiting for you at the house,’ Milly interpreted without the slightest difficulty. ‘But why come all the way down here to get an answer you don’t need? The last time you were here you made it clear that you saw my answer as a foregone conclusion.’

  His lean, strong face darkened, brilliant eyes veiling to reveal only a watchful glimmer of gold.

  ‘And,’ Milly continued flatly, aiming a particularly vicious jab of the spade at the undergrowth surrounding her, ‘as usual you were right. How can I say no?’

  ‘You’re going to marry me.’ Ignoring the hostile undertones with the practised ease of a male who never looked for trouble with a woman unless it rose up and slapped him smack in the face, Gianni surveyed her with a slow smile curling his expressive mouth. He retained his cool like a cloaking device, but his eyes glittered like the heart of a fire.

  ‘But I have certain conditions,’ Milly extended gently.

  Caught off guard, Gianni strode closer, stepping off the path to mire his polished Italian leather shoes in mud. ‘Conditions?’

  Milly threw back her slight shoulders like a boxer about to enter the ring. ‘To start with, I’d like you to have a medical, so that I can be assured that you have a completely clean bill of health.’

  His winged brows lifted. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Whether you choose to believe it or not, I have not been intimate with anybody but you,’ Milly stated, watching his strikingly handsome features freeze, his big, powerful body stiffen. ‘However, you can’t offer me the same reassurance, and I feel I have the right to ask.’

  Gianni drew himself up to his full height, dark eyes blazing derision. ‘Porca miseria! You think that you can make me believe that you didn’t sleep with your fiancé?’

  ‘I don’t really care what you believe…’

  ‘Then what kind of nonsense is this? I have never been promiscuous…why the hell are you looking at me like that?’ he demanded in fierce condemnation.

  Milly returned to her digging, thinking with inescapable bitterness and pain of the speed with which he had turned to another woman three years earlier. ‘You shouldn’t need to be told.’

  The tense silence thundered and shouted and snarled. Flailed by pain and anger, Milly hacked at winter-bare brambles. ‘I have cause to know that you’re not always careful with—’

  ‘I have never taken risks like that with anybody but you!’ Gianni shot back in a savage undertone.

  ‘Then why with me?’ Milly glanced up enquiringly.

  His lean brown hands closed into powerful fists. He swung restively away from her. ‘That was different…’

  ‘How was it different?’

  He didn’t answer her. ‘A clean bill of health,’ he ground out instead, as if he was spitting tacks, apparently choosing to settle for the lesser of two evils. ‘OK. I already have that. My most recent medical was less than a month ago.’

  But if Gianni thought he was getting off the hook that easily he was mistaken. Milly wasn’t finished yet. ‘I will also expect total fidelity.’

  His eyes shot like flaming golden arrows into hers, his incredulity unfeigned. ‘Accidenti…where do you get the nerve to demand that of me?’

  ‘I’m thinking of Connor’s need for stability.’ Cheeks burning, because her own needs had risen first and foremost to her mind, Milly focused on the distant wall.

  ‘Connor?’ Gianni repeated rawly.

  ‘You must set Connor a good example. Our son must be able to respect our marriage. So you can’t have a mistress,’ Milly informed him, warming to her theme by the second. ‘And if I were to discover that you had been unfaithful, I’m afraid I would have to divorce you. I won’t have Connor damaged by a destructive relationship.’

  All tight-mouthed tolerance now fully breached, Gianni slashed a savage hand through the air. ‘You are lecturing me about…fidelity?’ His Sicilian accent was so thick she had to strain to comprehend that final word.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a lecture to state what I want up front,’ Milly responded stubbornly. ‘And, after all, you did say that you had put the past behind you…’

  Sheer rage turned Gianni pale beneath his vibrant bronze skin. In seething silence he studied her, as if he just could not believe that she had dared to remind him of that statement.

  ‘And finally,’ Milly added not quite steadily, watching the ice front settle over him like her most dangerous old enemy, ‘I’m not prepared to sign a pre-nuptial contract.’

  At that provocative announcement Gianni appraised her with eyes that would have chilled a polar bear, aggression emanating from every dangerously still and silent inch of him.

  ‘Not because I have any desire to get my hands on a larger share of your wealth,’ Milly explained heavily. ‘But because I believe that the absence of a pre-nuptial contract will make it easier for you to respect our marriage. You see, you don’t respect me, but I think you will respect what a divorce might cost you.’

  Gianni stared at her with cold, brooding menace.

  Milly shook her head in a sudden helpless gesture of despair. ‘Gianni…when I left Paris, I also left everything you ever gave me behind. The clothes, the jewellery, the credit cards. I took nothing. Doesn’t that at least prove that I’m not the mercenary type?’ Her own voice emerged with a quality of pleading that embarrassed her, and hurriedly she compressed her lips.

  Eyes black and reflective as mirrors, Gianni simply swung on his heel and started to walk away.

  Milly suppressed a groan.

  ‘Gianni!’ she called.

  He didn’t even pause.

  She hurried after him and then forced herself to a halt, watching in frustration as he receded from her with every impossibly long stride. ‘Gianni, if you agree to my conditions…I’ll try really hard to make everything the way it was!’

  Abruptly he stopped dead, but he didn’t turn round.

  ‘It’s going to be very difficult, but I’ll try to learn to trust you again,’ Milly completed huskily, tears thickening her throat as she thought of what they had once had and had so brutally had taken from them.

  Gianni swung back. He sent her a scorching look of rampant disbelief. You will try to trust me again? Speech wasn’t necessary. A split second later, he turned his arrogant dark head away and strode through the crumbling gateway out of sight.

  Well, you handled him like a real pro, didn’t you? Never had Milly seen a satisfied smile die faster. And her own emotions were all over the place. Until Gianni had appeared, she honestly hadn’t appreciated the depth of her own bitterness. But three years ago Gianni had hurt her so much. In a blaze of publicity, he had taken off to the Caribbean with a supermodel, infinitely more beautiful than Milly could ever be. And Milly had immediately to her house in Paris, and had sat waiting, torn apart but struggling to understand what he was going through, and still hoping against hope that their unborn child would eventually bring Gianni back within talking distance, even if it only meant he lifted th
e phone.

  With deeply troubled eyes, she watched the helicopter take off again as she walked back towards the house. She hadn’t meant for that to happen. She hadn’t meant to drive him away again. Connor would be upset. Oh, for heaven’s sake, why didn’t she just admit it? She was upset!

  The following morning Milly’s portable phone, switched on since Gianni’s departure, buzzed at seven. She had just got out of the bath. She leapt for the phone.

  ‘You drive a hard bargain,’ Gianni murmured softly. ‘But so do I…’

  Sinking down on the carpet, huddled in a towel, Milly nodded without speaking, tension strangling her ability to respond.

  ‘You promise me that the past stays buried—’

  ‘I can’t do that!’

  ‘And you don’t ever tell me you love me again.’

  Milly gritted her teeth and bowed her head over her knees.

  Gianni loosed a cynical laugh. ‘I thought you’d be able to manage that one…’

  ‘I’m damned if I do…and I’m damned if I don’t, aren’t I?’ Milly countered painfully.

  ‘Only a week ago you were madly in love with another man—’

  ‘And then I got my memory back and everything changed!’ Milly argued vehemently. ‘Judging me on that isn’t fair… I—’

  She snapped her mouth shut in despair, for she knew now that she had never loved Edward. She had wanted to love him and had convinced herself that she did. The illusion had vanished the instant she got her memory back. But even before that point she had been responding to Gianni. Dear heaven, she had gone to bed with him again! Was it any wonder that he saw that wanton surrender as yet more evidence that her emotions ran only skin-deep?

  ‘Gianni…think what you want,’ Milly sighed.

  ‘I always do. I also want to celebrate my way,’ he murmured silkily. ‘I’ll need you tonight at the house in Paris—’

  She stiffened in astonishment. ‘You still have the house?’

  Aware that Gianni had only bought that house for her occupation, and equally aware of the ruthless efficiency with which he usually cut loose from the past, she was genuinely amazed that he hadn’t long since sold it.

  ‘Around seven,’ Gianni continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘You’ll be picked up this afternoon and you’ll be back with Connor early tomorrow.’

  ‘But I don’t have a passport!’ Milly was wildly disconcerted by his proposition. ‘I lost it three years ago and I never applied for one as Faith Jennings, so if you’re thinking that I—’

  ‘You didn’t lose your passport, cara. You left it behind in the townhouse and I eventually took it back to London with me. Fortunately it’s still current, and it’ll be waiting for you to collect at the airport. How did you contrive to get back into the UK without it?’ Gianni enquired drily.

  ‘I was a ferry passenger. I didn’t realise I didn’t have my passport until just before I got off. I was ready to panic, but in the end I wasn’t actually challenged,’ Milly recalled ruefully. ‘In the crush I managed to slip through. But I’ve never been so nervous in my life and it’s not something I’d ever try again. I felt like a criminal, waiting for a hand to fall on my shoulder.’

  ‘I wish Immigration had picked you up and thrown you in a cell until I caught up with you,’ Gianni confided grimly. ‘I wasted a lot of time searching France for you!’

  ‘I don’t want to come to Paris tonight,’ Milly admitted in a taut undertone.

  ‘It’s not negotiable. I’ll see you later,’ Gianni countered, and finished the call.

  Celebrating his way? In Paris, where they had been happiest? Stefano had never set foot in the townhouse. The moment Gianni’s brother came into her mind Milly tried to push him out again, but her bitterness rose simultaneously and it was impossible to evade her memories…

  Gianni had kept Milly and Stefano in separate compartments. If Stefano hadn’t chosen to breach those boundaries, Milly believed she would never have met him. Throughout their entire relationship Gianni had maintained his own homes in New York and London, and although he had occasionally mentioned Stefano, he had never once suggested that they should meet.

  Stefano was Gianni’s half-brother, born of his putative father’s relationship with his stepmother. At the age of eleven, Stefano had been taken to Sicily and Gianni had become his legal guardian. Milly had first met Stefano at the New York apartment which Gianni had purchased for her use. By then Stefano had been studying at Harvard. He had just arrived on the doorstep one evening when Gianni was staying.

  ‘I hardly see Gianni any more. Now I now why!’ Stefano had laughed.

  Initially, Gianni had been uneasy about his kid brother’s descent, but, knowing how fond he was of Stefano, Milly had been pleased. It was so hard now to remember that she herself had once liked Stefano.

  He had been immature, and pretty spoilt by Gianni’s indulgence, but he had been easy company. During the final months of her relationship with Gianni, Stefano had called in whenever she was over in New York. Sometimes Gianni had been there; sometimes he hadn’t been. Registering that Gianni had actually been enjoying the fact that he was seeing more of his brother, Milly had made every effort to be welcoming.

  ‘If my brother really cares about you, he should marry you,’ Stefano had said once, seriously embarrassing her.

  But at the time she’d thought little of that comment—certainly hadn’t registered that Stefano’s interest in her had become rather too personal. After all, Stefano had had a live-in girlfriend of his own. And Milly had been very wrapped up in Gianni and her own concerns. It had been shortly after first meeting Stefano that she had discovered that she was pregnant.

  Even after Gianni had told her that he didn’t want to lose her, Milly had gone on feeling insecure. He hadn’t ever said up front that he wanted their baby. And although he had been more tender and caring in all sorts of quiet ways she had feared that he was simply making the best of a bad situation. She had also waited for Gianni to tell his brother that she was pregnant. When Gianni had stayed silent, Milly had become more and more uneasy about his attitude.

  The night that her world had fallen apart, she had been alone when Stefano dropped in to visit. He had been drinking, and for the first time Milly had felt uncomfortable with him, although even at that late stage she hadn’t understood why—until he’d spoken, and shattered the casual camaraderie she had believed they’d had.

  ‘You just don’t see me, do you?’ Stefano launched at her bitterly, his darkly handsome features flushed as the condemnation simply erupted from him. ‘I don’t exist for you except as Gianni’s brother. I come round here to see you and all we ever talk about is him.’

  ‘I don’t understand…what—?’

  ‘I’m in love with you!’ Stefano shot at her accusingly. ‘You haven’t even noticed, have you?’

  Milly was aghast, exploded out of her self-absorption with a vengeance. ‘You’ve had too much to drink…you don’t know what you’re saying—’

  ‘Don’t talk down to me like I’m some little kid!’ Stefano rounded on her furiously. ‘You’re not much older than I am. But Gianni’s years older. He’s almost a different generation! You’ve got much more in common with me—’

  ‘Let’s just forget you ever said this stuff,’ Milly cut in tautly. ‘You have to know how I feel about your brother—’

  ‘And how does he feel about you?’ Stefano slammed back, the words slurring. ‘He jets in, takes you to bed and jets off again. All he does is use you…can’t you see that?’

  ‘I won’t discuss our relationship with you,’ Milly said shakily, seriously stung by that assessment.

  ‘Don’t tell me I leave you stone-cold. I won’t believe you. I’ve never met a girl who didn’t think I was something special!’ Stefano launched at her like a spoilt little boy, needing to blow his own trumpet. ‘I’d treat you like a queen, Angel.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this, Stefano. I’ve only ever thought of you as Gianni’s brothe
r and I’m going to forget this ever happened, just like you’ll want to forget it tomorrow morning,’ Milly forecast witheringly. ‘Now I’m going to call a taxi so that you can go home.’

  ‘I’ll call my own cab when I’m ready to leave,’ Stefano informed her truculently. ‘This is Gianni’s place, not yours. I’ve got every right to be here if I want to be!’

  While he angrily paced the room, his clumsy gait telling her that he was a lot drunker than she had initially appreciated, a wave of sick dizziness ran over Milly. But the look of utter misery in Stefano’s brown eyes still hit her hard, making her feel responsible, even though she was well aware that she had never done or said anything which might have encouraged him. ‘Look, it’s just a crush, Stefano. That’s all it is—’

  ‘It’s not a crush! I really, really love you!’

  Nausea stirred in her stomach. ‘But I’m not attracted to you—’

  ‘You could be if you’d let yourself,’ Stefano had flung stubbornly. ‘I may not be the stud Gianni is, but I’m no teenage virgin!’

  Milly’s nausea grew suddenly worse. ‘Look, let yourself out. I’m not feeling well. I’m going to bed!’ she gasped as she raced like a maniac for the privacy of the bathroom that adjoined her bedroom.

  She was horribly sick. As she slowly recovered from that bout, she heard what she assumed to be the slam of the front door on Stefano’s departure. She meant to go and do up the locks and switch out the lights, but she ended up going for a shower instead. She was exhausted, and very upset. And her distress was exacerbated by the conviction that she would have to keep the whole messy episode a secret from Gianni.

  How could she confide in him without causing friction between the two brothers? She didn’t want to be the source of the smallest conflict between Gianni and his only living relative. And, although she didn’t acknowledge it at the time, she was also afraid to add any further stress to their own relationship.