Читать книгу Claiming His Pregnant Princess - Annie O'Neil - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHE SAW HER across the piazza. Jamie wondered now, having adjusted to the platinum blond hair, how he hadn’t noticed her instantly. He certainly had when she’d walked into Northern General. How could he not have when he’d entered the clinica?
Fathomless chocolate-brown eyes straight out of the Italian-nymph guidebook. Slender. The darkest chestnut hair he’d ever seen. Short, but thick enough to lose his hands in when he wanted to put his fingers against the nape of her soft, swan-like neck. Perfect raspberry-red lips. Olive skin. Carrying herself like royalty.
She was royalty.
He shook his head again.
Little wonder he hadn’t recognized her straight off. He hadn’t wanted to.
A bit of shock.
A splash of denial.
Hope, pain, love, despair... All those things and more made up the roiling ball of conflict burning in his heart. Most of all he just wanted to understand why.
He hitched his trousers onto his hips. She wasn’t the only one who’d lost weight in the past couple of years.
Stop apportioning blame.
The closer he got, the more he wondered what the hell he was doing.
No. That wasn’t true. Ripping off the bandage had become his modus operandi since she’d left. He might as well stick true to his course. Life wasn’t sweet. Might as well get used to it.
“Mind if I join you?”
Beatrice started, as if her thoughts had been a thousand miles away. When she’d pulled him into focus he watched as she searched his face for signs of enmity. He couldn’t say he blamed her. After his performance in the supplies room earlier in the day he’d hardly made a good show of the manners his mother had drilled into him.
“Please...” Beatrice pushed aside a small plate of antipasti and indicated the chair beside her. One from which he could enjoy the stunning lakeside view. One that would seat them side by side, where they wouldn’t have to look into the other’s eyes.
He sank into the chair, grateful for this reprieve from animosity. Perhaps a few hours apart had been what they’d each needed. Time to process.
“Is that a spritzer you’re having?” He pointed at the bright orange drink on the table, the glass beaded with condensation as the final rays of sunlight disappeared behind the mountain peaks beyond the lake.
“No.” She shook her head. “I never liked spritzers. Too...” Her nose crinkled as she sought the right word. “Aftertasty,” she said finally, her lips tipping up into the first suggestion of a smile he’d seen. “Orange soda is my new guilty pleasure. I don’t seem to be able to drink enough of it.”
He was about to launch into the lecture he gave all his patients—too many fizzy drinks were bad for the bones, bad for the brain, bad for the body—but just seeing the tension release from the corners of her eyes as she lifted the glass, put her lips around the red and white stripes of the straw and drew in a cool draught made him swallow it.
He hadn’t come here to deliver a lecture. He had questions. Thousands of questions.
A waiter swooped in, as they all did at this time of day, keen to get as many people as possible their drinks before the early-dining Americans began infiltrating the wide square in advance of the Europeans.
He and Beatrice both bit back smiles at the waiter’s terse “Is that all for signor?” after he’d settled on a sparkling water.
“Going back to the clinic?” Beatrice asked.
“That obvious?”
“Mmm, ’fraid so.” Beatrice looked out toward the square as she spoke. “It would be a glass of Gavi di Gavi if you were finished, wouldn’t it? If...” She hesitated. “If memory serves me right.”
He nodded. Surprised she’d remembered such a silly detail. Then again, there wasn’t a single detail he’d forgotten about her. Maybe...
He rammed his knuckles into his thigh.
Maybe was for other people. He was all about sure things. And Beatrice wasn’t one of them.
Jamie scrubbed a hand along his chin, then scraped his chair around on the stone cobbles until he faced her head-on.
“What are you doing here, Beatrice?”
“Well, that’s a nice way to—” She stopped herself and lifted a hand so that he would give her a moment to think. Say what she really meant to.
Despite himself, he smiled. She’d always been that way. A thinker. Just like him. The more they’d learned about each other, the stronger the pull had been. Interns hadn’t been meant to date residents—but try telling that to two people drawn to each other as magnetically as iron and nitrogen. Weighted and weightless. He’d felt both of those things when he’d been with her. Secure in himself as he’d never been before, and so damn happy he would have sworn his feet hadn’t touched the ground after the first time he’d tasted those raspberry-ripe lips of hers.
“You have read the papers lately, haven’t you?” Beatrice asked eventually.
“I have a hunch that world peace is a long way off, so I tend to steer clear of them.” Jamie leant forward in his chair, elbows pressed to his knees. “C’mon, Beatrice. Quit throwing questions back at me. Why are you in Torpisi?”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You are the one person in the world I wish had read the tabloids and you haven’t!” She threw her hands up in the air and gave a small isn’t-the-world-ridiculous? laugh.
When their eyes met again there was kindness in hers. A tenderness reserved just for him that he might have lived on in a different time and place.
“I never got married.”
She took another sip of her soft drink and looked away as casually as if she’d just told him the time. Or perhaps it was guilt that wouldn’t let her meet his eye.
Jamie blinked a few times, his body utterly stationary, doing its best to ingest the news.
Despite his best efforts to remain neutral, something hardened in him. “Is this some sort of joke?”
She shook her head, seemingly confused about the question.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” It was her turn to look bewildered.
“Oh, well...let’s see, here, love. Quite a few things, now that I come to think of it.”
He spread out his fingers and started ticking them off, his tone level, though his message was heated.
“Up and leave me for a man you didn’t love. Ruin the future we’d planned together. All that to never even see it through?”
He pulled his fingers into tight fists and gave his thighs a quick drumming.
“Is this some sort of cruel game you’re playing, Beatrice?”
He pushed back in his chair and rose, no longer sure he could even look her in the eye.
“If you’re here to rub it in and make sure you made your impact, you can count me out.”
* * *
“Jamie! Wait!”
Bea’s voice sounded harsh to her own ears. As quickly as she’d reached out to stop Jamie from leaving she wished she’d rescinded the invitation, tightly wrapping her arms around herself to brace herself against the shards of ice coursing through her veins.
She’d betrayed too much by calling out to him. Jamie would know better than anyone that there had been pain in her voice. The ache of loss. But what was she going to do? Explain what a fool she’d been? That she’d gone and got herself pregnant at an IVF clinic in advance of her wedding so her family, the press and the whole of Italy could coo and smile over the Prince and the Principessa’s “honeymoon baby”?
She was the only one in the world who knew that her fiancé—her ex-fiancé—was infertile, apart from a doctor whose silence had been bought. She was surprised he’d even told her. Perhaps their family get-togethers had begun to rely a bit too heavily on talk of children running around the palazzo, in order to cover up the obvious fact that neither of them were very much in love.
Their one joint decision: an IVF baby. Keeping it as quiet as possible. A private clinic. More paid-off doctors and nurses. An anonymous donor.
The less anyone knew, the easier it had been to go ahead with it.
Her sole investment in a relationship she had known would never claim her heart. A child... A child who had been meant to bring some light into her life.
Now it just filled her with fear. Confirmation that she’d been a fool to agree to the plan. She no longer had the support of her family and, worse, she would be a single mother in a world where it was already tough enough to survive on her own.
It hadn’t felt that way when she’d been with Jamie. With him she’d felt...invincible.
Relief washed through her when Jamie sat down again, pressing his hips deeper into the chair, his back ramrod straight as he drained his water glass in one fluid draught before deigning to look her in the eye.
“I’m in trouble, Jamie.”
As quickly as he’d tried to leave, Jamie pulled his chair up close, knees wide so they flanked hers, fingers spread as he cupped her face in both his broad hands, searching her eyes for information.
“Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”
No, but I hurt you.
He used an index finger to swipe at a couple of errant locks of hair so his access to her eyes was unfettered. Against his better judgment—she could see that in his eyes—he traced his finger along the contour of her jawline, coming to a halt, as he had so many times before, before gently cradling the length of her neck as if he were about to lean in and kiss her.
It was like rediscovering her senses all over again. As if part of her had died the day she’d told him she was returning home to marry another man.
She blinked away the rising swell of tears.
Part of her had died that day. The part that believed in love conquering all. The part that believed in destiny.
“Beatrice,” Jamie pressed. “Did he hurt you?”
I was a fool to have left you.
She shook her head, instantly feeling the loss of his touch when he dropped his hands, sat back in his chair and rammed them into his front pockets, as if trying to hide the fact that his long surgeon’s fingers were balled into tight fists. For the second time in as many minutes. Twice as many times as she’d ever seen him make the gesture before.
He’d aged in the years since she’d seen him last. Nothing severe, as if he’d been sick or a decade had passed, but he had changed. His was a proper grown-up male face now, instead of holding the hints of youth she had sometimes seen at the hospital, when he’d caught her looking at him and smiled.
It felt like a million years ago. Hard to believe it was just two short years since he’d been thirty-three and she twenty-eight.
“Just a young lass, you are,” he would say, and laugh whenever she whined about feeling old after a long shift. “Perfect for me,” he’d say, before dropping a surreptitious kiss on her forehead in one of the busy hospital corridors. They’d been little moments in heaven. Perfect.
She closed her eyes against the memory, gave them a rub, then forced herself to confront the present. It was all of her own making, so she might as well see it for what it was. Payback.
A painful price she knew she had to pay when all she really wanted was for him to love her again as he once had.
Impossible.
Sun-tanned crinkles fanned out from Jamie’s eyes, which she still wasn’t quite brave enough to meet. The straw gold of his hair was interwoven with a few threads of silver. At the temples, mostly. More than she thought a man of thirty-five should have.
But what would she know? When she grew her dyed hair out again it might all be gray after the level of stress she’d endured these past few weeks. It was a wonder she hadn’t lost the baby.
Her hands automatically crept to her stomach, one folding protectively over the other.
“Did he hurt you?” Jamie repeated, the air between them thick with untold truths.
“Only my pride,” she conceded. “He didn’t want me.”
The explanation came out as false, too chirpy. She hadn’t wanted Marco either. What she most likely really owed him was a thank-you letter.
“Can you believe it?” She put on a smile and grinned at the real love of her life, as if having her arranged marriage grind to a halt in front of some of Europe’s most elite families had been the silliest thing to have happened to her in years.
“He should be shot.”
“Jamie...” Bea shook her head. “Don’t be—” She huffed out a lungful of frustration, then unfolded her arms from their tight cinch across her chest, visible proof she was trying her best to be honest with him. Open. Vulnerable. “Mi scusi. I’m sorry. I don’t have any right to tell you what to feel.”
“You’re damn right you don’t,” he shot back, but with less venom than before.
Something in her gave. He deserved to vent whatever amount of spleen he needed to.
“Serves you right” was probably lurking there in his throat. Along with a bit of “now you know how it feels” followed by a splash of “what goes around comes around” as a chaser.
She deserved the venom—and more.
After a moment had passed, with each of them silently collecting their thoughts, Jamie reached across and took one of her hands in his, weaving their fingers together as naturally as if they’d never been apart.
A million tiny sparks lit up inside her. A sensation she’d never once felt with her ex-fiancé.
Obligation didn’t elicit rushes of desire. She’d learned that the hard way.
“Talk to me, Beatrice.”
His voice was gentle. Kind. His thumb rubbed along the back of her hand as his features softened, making it clear he was present—there just for her.
In that instant she felt he was back. The man she’d met and fallen in love with in the corridors of a busy inner-city hospital tucked way up in the North of England. Their entire worlds had been each other and medicine.
She vividly remembered the first time she’d seen him. So English! Male. He’d exuded...capability. So refreshing after a lifetime of worrying about etiquette and decorum and the thousands of other silly little things that had mattered to her mother and not one jot to her. Surviving finishing school had been down to Fran. Without her... She didn’t even want to think about it.
She glanced up at Jamie. His eyes were steady...patient... She knew as well as he did that he would wait all evening if he needed to.
She lifted her gaze just in time to see the topmost arc of the sun disappear behind the mountain peaks.
“Maybe we could walk?” she suggested.
He nodded, unlacing his fingers from hers as he rose.
She curled one hand around the other in a ridiculous attempt to save the sensation.
He pointed toward the far end of the piazza. “Let’s go out along the lake. Have you been to the promenade yet? Seen the boats?”
She shook her head. She’d had enough of boats and morning sickness over the past few weeks to last a lifetime. She agreed to the route anyway. It wasn’t as if this was meant to be easy.
* * *
Every part of Jamie itched to reach out and touch Beatrice. Hold her hand. Put a protective arm around her shoulder. There was something incredibly fragile about her he wasn’t sure he’d seen before. She was nursing something more than a chink in her pride. And all the rage he’d thought would come to the fore if he ever found himself in her orbit again... It was there, all right. It just wasn’t ready to blow.
Instinct told him to take things slowly. And then start digging. A verbal attack would elicit nothing. As for a physical attack... If that man had laid one finger on her—
“How are you settling in here? Everyone at the clinic helping you get your bearings?”
Beatrice nodded enthusiastically. “I love it. All one day of it, that is.”
He smiled at the note of genuine happiness in her voice. Excellent. The staff were making her feel at home. He fought the need to press her. To get her to spill everything. Explain how she’d found it so easy to break his heart.
“Your contract is...?”
“For the rest of the summer. I guess one of the early-summer staffers left before expected?”
“No.” He shook his head. “She had a baby. Worked right up until her due date.”
“Ah...”
Beatrice’s gaze jumped from boat to boat moored along the quayside. Families and groups of friends were spilling out onto the promenade to find which restaurant they’d eat in tonight.
“I suppose she’ll be coming back, then, after maternity leave. Although I did tell your colleague, Dr. Brandisi, that I would be happy to extend if the clinic loses any essential staff after the season ends.”
“It waxes and wanes up here. There’ll be a time when the summer wraps up where we hit a lull, and then ski season brings in another lot. It’s usually all right with just the bare minimum of hands on deck.”
Beatrice threw a quick smile his way, her lips still pressed tight, so he continued. “Mostly Italians to start, then Swiss, German, Austrian... A complete pick ’n’ mix at the height of the season.”
That was why he liked it. Nothing stayed the same. Change was the only thing keeping him afloat since he’d finally faced facts and left Northern General. Everything about that place had reminded him of Beatrice. And then, after Elisa... That had been the hardest time of death he’d ever had to call.
He swallowed and pushed his finger through a small pool of lake water on the square guard railing, visibly dividing it in two.
Everything leaves its mark. And nothing stays the same.
Those were the two lessons he’d learned after Beatrice had left. Now was the time to prove it.
He rubbed his hands together and belatedly returned her smile. “So! What sort of cases have you had today? Anything juicy?”
They might as well play My Injuries Were Worse Than Yours until she was ready to talk.
The tension in Beatrice’s shoulders eased and she relaxed into a proper smile. “Actually, all my cases have been really different to what I treated at home in Venice. With all the recreational sports up here I’m seeing all sorts of new things. It’s made a great change.”
He felt his jaw shift at the mention of “home.” Home—for a few months at the end of their relationship, at least—had been their tiny little apartment, around the corner from the hospital. The one they’d vowed to stay in until they could afford one of the big, rambling stone homes on the outer reaches of the city. One of those houses that would fall apart if someone didn’t give it some TLC. The kind of house where there’d be plenty of room for children to play. Not that they’d talked about the two boys and two girls they’d hoped to have one day. Much.
Let it go, Jamie. It was all just a pipe dream.
“Were you still working in trauma? When you came back to Italy?” he added.
“Off and on.” She nodded. “But mostly I was working in a free clinic for refugees. So many people coming in on boats...”
“With all your language skills you must’ve been a real asset. Were you based in Venice?” He might as well try to visualize some sort of picture.
“Just outside. On the mainland.” She stopped farther along the railing, where the view to the lake and the mountains beyond was unimpeded by boats, and drew in a deep breath, curling her fingers around the cool metal until her knuckles were pale.
The deepening colors of the early-evening sky rendered the lake a dark blue—so dark it was hard to imagine how deep it might be. Fathomless.
“It was relentless. Working there. The poverty. The sickness. The number of lives lost all in the pursuit of a dream.”
“Happiness?” he asked softly.
“Freedom.”
When she turned to him the hit of connection was so powerful he almost stumbled. It was as if she was trying to tell him something. That her moving back to Italy had been a mistake? That she wished she could turn back time as much as he did?
“Do you miss it? Working at the refugee clinic?” he qualified.
If she was going to up and leave again, he had to know. Had to reassemble the wall he’d been building brick by brick around his heart only to have the foundations crumble to bits when she’d walked back into his life.
She turned her head, resting her chin on her shoulder, and looked at him.
“No.” Her head shook a little. “I mean, it was obviously rewarding. But I don’t miss being there. Venice...”
Something in him gave. His breath began filling his lungs a bit more deeply.
“What drew you up here to our little Alpine retreat?”
He leant against the railing, unsurprised to see her give him a sideways double take.
Nice one, Jamie. Super casual. Not.
“I used to come up here to one of my cousins’ places. Skiing. The next valley over, actually,” she corrected herself, then continued, her eyes softening into a faraway smile. “One year I brought Fran with me. Remember Francesca? My mad friend from America? I don’t think you met her, but she was—” Beatrice stopped, the smile dropping from her eyes. “We saw each other recently. She’s getting married.”
“Ah.” Jamie nodded.
What was he meant to say to that? Congratulations, I wish I was, too? He elbowed the rancorous thoughts away and reharnessed himself to the light-banter variety of conversational tactics.
“Wasn’t there something about finishing school and a giggle-laden walk of shame before the term was out? Mussed-up white gloves or something?”
“We snuck away one day.” Beatrice feigned a gasp of horror. “Away from the ‘good’ set.”
“You mean the ‘crowned cotillion crowd’?” he asked without thinking twice.
Beatrice had been so contemptuous of them then. The group of titled friends and extended family who seemed to drift across Europe together in packs. Hunting down the next in place, the next big thing so they could put their mark on it, suck it dry, then leave. The exact type of person she’d left him for. Oh, the irony.
When he looked across to see if his comment had rankled he was surprised to see another small cynical smile in Beatrice’s dark eyes.
Huh. Maybe she’d softened. Saw things now she hadn’t before. Not that he and Beatrice had ever “hung with the crowd.” Nor any crowd, for that matter. They had been a self-contained unit.
It had never once occurred to him that she was keeping him at arm’s length from the affluent, titled set she’d grown up with. He’d never considered himself hung up on his low-income upbringing. The opposite, if anything. Proud. He was from a typical Northern family. Typical of his part of the North anyway. Father down the mines. Mother working as a dinner lady at the local primary school. Brother and sister had followed suit, but he’d been the so-called golden boy. Scholarships to private schools. Oxford University. An internship at London’s most prestigious pediatric hospital before he’d returned to the part of the country he’d always called home.
Meeting and falling in love with Beatrice had just been part of the trajectory. Local boy falls in love with princess. Only that hadn’t been the way it had played out at all. He hadn’t known about Beatrice’s past for—had it been a year? Maybe longer. Those two years at Northern General had been like living in a cocoon. Nestled up there in the part of the country he knew and loved best, hoping he’d spend each and every day of the rest of his life with Beatrice by his side.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry—you were saying about your friend?”
“Si—yes.” Bea gave her head a shake, as if clearing away her own memories. “She’s staying in Italy. Fallen in love with an Italian.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
Beatrice looked away.
He hadn’t meant to say that. Not in that way. Not with anger lacing the words.
“It’s a magical place up here. I’m glad I came,” she said at last.
He nodded, turning to face the view. Despite the summer, snow still capped the high Alpine ridges soaring above the broad expanse of blue that was one of Europe’s most beautiful high-altitude lakes.
“You know there’s a little island out there?”
“Really? Uninhabited?”
“Quite the opposite. There’s a group of monks. A small group living there... It’s quite a beautiful retreat. Stone and wood. Simple rooms. Cells, they call them.”
“Sounds more like a prison than a place of worship.” Beatrice’s eyebrows tugged together, but her expression was more curious than judgmental.
“No. The simplicity is its beauty. Gives you plenty of time to think.”
He should know. He’d spent long enough in one of those cells, just staring at the stone walls until he could find a way to make sense of the world again. The friary was the reason he’d chosen to come here in the first place. He’d needed to hide away from the world for a while and atone for—he still didn’t know what.
Failing himself?
Not fighting hard enough for Elisa’s life?
Not fighting hard enough for Beatrice?
Those two years they’d spent together in England felt like a lifetime ago. He’d felt...vital—full of the joys of life. In his prime. When she’d told him she didn’t want him anymore he’d just shut down. “Fine,” he had said, and pointed toward the door. What are you waiting for?
He sure as hell hadn’t found any answers when she’d taken him up on his offer.
And he was certain there hadn’t been any when Elisa had died.
He’d found a modicum of peace when he’d gone out to that tiny island friary.
When one of the monks had fallen ill he’d brought him to the clinic here on the lakeside, had accepted the odd shift and found himself, bit by bit, coming back to life. Part of him wondered if the monk had been faking it. And when the clinic “just happened” to mention they needed full-time staff he’d thrown his hat into the ring. He’d been there almost a year now and—as strange as it sounded for a village several hundreds of years old—he felt a part of the place.
“They make some sort of famous Christmas cake—a special sort of panettone. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”
“The Friars of Torpisi!” Beatrice clapped her hands together, her eyes lighting up as the dots connected. “Of course. I had some last Natale.”
Again that faraway look stole across her face.
What happened to you, my love?
Jamie scrubbed a hand through his hair before stuffing both hands into his pockets again.
Perhaps some questions were best left unanswered.
