Читать книгу The Marriage He Must Keep - Dani Collins, Dani Collins - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

ALESSANDRO CAME BACK wearing a look she’d never seen, as if he was a warrior cast in bronze. On the surface he seemed remote, but he radiated such danger Octavia closed her arms protectively around their baby.

“Did you learn anything?” she asked, already overwrought, but needing to know. The sense of threat he projected tightened her throat, as if her body knew on a visceral level that he was in a lethal mood and she should be very still and quiet and not risk drawing his notice.

But he knew exactly where she was. His gaze caught at hers and drilled. The banked ember of fury in his eyes pushed her back in her chair.

It’s not my fault, she wanted to cry.

“They’re still questioning everyone.” His voice was both devoid of inflection, yet terrifyingly harsh. “I’ll be leaving with the administrator to see Primo.”

Good luck, Octavia almost said, but she always kept her opinions about Primo to herself. Even if he’d seen something, he would only speak up if he saw a benefit to his own situation. More likely he’d somehow turn this into her causing trouble for nothing. Fear of what he might say layered atop her exhaustion and despair, crinkling her brow and making her bite her lips.

“What are you thinking?” Alessandro demanded.

She started at the caustic edge on his tone. Since when did he notice she had any thoughts at all?

“Nothing.” She had to work to meet his eyes, disturbed to see he was watching her so closely. She didn’t want him seeing her animosity toward his cousin, though. She knew how close he and Primo were and didn’t want to create even more of an obstacle in their marriage.

Not that she lived with Alessandro. She lived with his mother and, quite ironically, thought Ysabelle was rather nice, despite all her gushing displays and disregard of propriety. Octavia wished the woman spent more time at her home in London, rather than hunting husbands on the Côte d’Azur.

So much left unspoken. It was disheartening if she thought about it, and made the future seem very bleak.

“Try to relax,” Alessandro said gruffly. “You’re safe here.” His hard voice and flat mouth belied what he was saying. “The hospital is bringing in extra security for the entire floor. So am I. Each baby will have a guard of his own until this is sorted out and so will you and Sorcha.”

Sorcha looked up at her name and Octavia wondered whether Enrique’s father was capable of this kind of dispassionate lockdown of lives. Did he also bury frightening news in the guise of comfort? Octavia was introspective, not stupid.

“You think this was deliberate.” Her limbs drained of feeling and her heart slowed to clumsy, disjointed bumps. “Who—?”

She looked to Sorcha, thoughts flying to who could possibly want to attack such a nice woman in such a subversive, evil way?

But the grim way Alessandro kept his gaze on her and Lorenzo told Octavia that Sorcha wasn’t the target. She was. They were.

All the air in her lungs dried up, leaving her sipping for oxygen.

“We have your blood types,” the administrator said, glancing up from a clipboard as he addressed both mothers. “I’d like to give you the results, even though they’re not conclusive.”

Not conclusive? Octavia instinctively cradled Lorenzo closer. The babies now wore additional tags reading Baby One and Baby Two, but this was her son.

“Ironically,” the administrator said, “we should have labeled the boys A and B, since that is the blood type they’ve come back with.” He smiled faintly.

“I’m a B. That was confirmed, si?” Alessandro said swiftly. His hawk-like gaze swooped onto Lorenzo with an avid light, making Octavia wonder if he’d been holding back attaching to his child until he knew irrefutably that this boy was his.

An electric jolt went through her as she sensed him reaching out in a preternatural claim in that moment. Recognizing. Accepting. It was bittersweet because it came on the heels of something dark and nefarious that he wasn’t sharing with her. If only she knew him well enough to see beneath that granite-like mask he wore.

“You are a B, Mr. Ferrante. And your wife is an A,” the administrator said, gaze on the form. “Ms. Kelly is an O and the baby she holds is A. At the moment, none of you can be ruled out as a parent for either of these infants. If Mr. Montero comes up as an A, however, we can rule out his fathering this baby.” He nodded at Lorenzo.

“Did you call him?” Octavia swung her attention to Sorcha, even though she hadn’t seen her new friend use a phone. But she was ready to beg. In some ways it didn’t matter to Octavia who had caused this misery or why, they both just needed their beliefs confirmed so they could move on with mothering in peace.

“We’ve been in touch with Mr. Montero,” the administrator said smoothly. “He was heading straight to the clinic and his results should be with us shortly.”

“Wait. What? You called Cesar?” Sorcha screeched.

* * *

The results came from Spain while Alessandro was still out. What the mothers had known instinctively, science had proven. The babies would be kept in the hospital until the DNA tests confirmed it, but everyone accepted that Lorenzo was hers and Enrique belonged to Sorcha.

Both she and Sorcha slumped in relief and Octavia finally returned to her room—where a bouquet the size of Sicily had been delivered with a card that read, “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, A.”

And yet he was still with Primo.

That bitter reality kept her awake despite her exhaustion. We have a baby, she mentally shouted. Don’t you care? She had texted the blood test results, had seen the notification that her message had been read, but all she heard back was radio silence.

She might as well be Sorcha, raising her baby alone.

The thought sliced a kind of agony through her, but she couldn’t keep doing this, either: waiting for Prince Sandro to arrive on his steed to make her feel worthy.

What she needed was to work on her self-esteem. It had never been particularly strong. Her childhood had been one of strict rules and sighs of tested tolerance, impelling her to press herself hard into the mold her parents wanted just to earn a shred of approval.

She might have kicked up at boarding school, but that had been as much about trying to fit in as proving to her parents she wasn’t under their thumb. By nature she was the bookish sort, so hanging with the party crowd, pretending she was into boys and fashion and drinking hadn’t felt right in the first place, but she’d loved the sense of freedom and independence in making risky decisions: sneaking out of her room at night, voicing strong opinions without caring what anyone thought of them.

Then someone had slipped her something and she would have been one more assault statistic, no doubt, if the party she was at hadn’t been discovered by the faculty as she was passing out. Having her stomach pumped and being suspended for a few weeks had almost been a relief at that point, becoming an excuse to eschew the rowdy crowd and their superficial pursuits if she wanted to return to school.

She had toed the line after that, scared of that spark of insurgence inside her, learning to get by with her own company and buckling to her father’s dictates because it felt safer than trusting her wild side. Eventually she’d attached loosely to a group of girls from Naples because they had geography in common, but she didn’t have a history of fancy vacations or brushes with celebrity to turn into engaging stories. She definitely didn’t have shocking sexual exploits to share.

The identity of her husband had been the first thing to cause ripples of reaction—mostly admiration—among her shallow social pool. To this day, Octavia didn’t understand why Alessandro had chosen her. She was supposed to have married Primo.

She thought back to that gala when she’d met the two men, searching for clues to what he’d seen in her when she’d been such a generic example of an heiress.

“That’s the man your father invited,” her mother had said, pointing out Primo. “The one he thinks might accept you. He would love a connection like the Ferrante family.”

“The one on the right?” Octavia had asked, intimidated and alarmed as she glanced toward the two men, both thirtyish. Primo’s boyish good looks hadn’t even registered beside the compelling Alessandro’s carved features and arrogant sweep of his stern gaze around the room.

“The left,” her mother had said. “The taller one is his cousin, the head of the family. He controls Ferrante Imprese Internazionali. He doesn’t look very approving, does he? I wonder if that’s why he’s here, to decide if we measure up.”

He didn’t look approving at all, Octavia had silently agreed, intimidated by his air of censure. She told herself she was relieved her father wasn’t aiming so high as to think Alessandro Ferrante would be interested. The second-in-command, Primo, would be enough of a coup. He looked arrogant in a different way. Smug almost.

“Make a good impression,” her mother had ordered.

Blowing out a surreptitious breath, Octavia had tried to imagine how one made a positive impression on a potential husband. It was the first time she was being forced to try, but she’d said she would marry the man they chose, so try she would.

Her father had introduced her to the men a few minutes later. Primo had looked her up and down like a buyer at an auction considering a broodmare. Alessandro waited for her gaze to come up to his and locked the contact into something unbreakable.

His air of dissatisfaction was stronger up close. The way he dourly took in every detail from her upswept hair, to the shade of her lipstick, to the scoop of her neckline across her breasts, suggested he was searching for flaws.

Her insides quivered under his inspection while she found herself holding her breath, waiting for his verdict.

“We should dance,” Primo had said in a hard voice, his words coming from off to the right. His hand had come out in her periphery, but she’d been unable to drag her gaze from the frosted moss of Alessandro’s irises.

Something flashed in Alessandro’s eyes as she turned her body to follow Primo without turning her head, only releasing her from her enthrallment when he broke their stare to ask her father something.

She had no recollection of what she and Primo had talked about while they danced, but she could remember every word and intonation of her conversation with Alessandro a little later, when he’d found her on the terrace off the hotel ballroom.

She’d excused herself to the powder room then slipped out there to escape disturbing thoughts of maybe not going through with an arranged marriage. It was cold feet, she told herself. The reality of what she had agreed to was hitting her with the meeting of a potential husband, but that didn’t mean all the reasons she’d accepted as good ones suddenly became bad, she tried telling herself.

She shivered. It was cool. No one else was out here, but it was pretty. The boat lights were streaked like finger paint on the rippling water of the Golfo di Napoli and she was always most comfortable with her own company.

Yet oddly not annoyed when Alessandro intruded.

He brought her champagne, asking, “How long have you known Primo?”

She shivered again, this time less from the chilly air, and more from a preternatural wariness of such a dynamic man. They touched glass rims and murmured, “Salud.”

“I just met him tonight,” she replied.

He paused on the way to taking his first sip, gaze still locked to hers. “Talking to your father, it sounds like they’ve had several meetings already.” Grimness edged his tone.

She choked a little as the bubbles went the wrong way and burned her throat. It wasn’t that she was surprised. Not really. Her father had made it clear all her life that he expected her to marry the man he chose for her, but she would have thought she would be consulted earlier in the process.

“You didn’t know that,” he guessed.

“No,” she murmured. But since one of her father’s other expectations was that she not question his decisions, she kept her reaction to that one disturbed response.

She had felt Alessandro’s gaze on her profile and her heart had pounded as though she’d run up a thousand flights of stairs. This was just a test, she’d told herself. He was a rich and powerful man heading a very rich and powerful family. He wanted to know if she—if her family—was worthy of joining his. She needed to be her most pleasant and conciliatory, reassure him that she’d make a fine wife for his cousin, but her throat could barely work to swallow, let alone make conversation.

“You’re willing to go through with an arranged marriage?” he asked. “You wouldn’t prefer a love match?”

Did he think she was gold digging?

“An arranged marriage makes sense to me,” she said, reminding herself as she spoke, even though her voice wasn’t quite steady. Until tonight, she hadn’t met a man who attracted her enough to consider the alternative.

Not that she would really consider a love match. She didn’t think of herself as the sort men fell for. She’d also been raised under the attitude that her uterus was the center of her worth, and only then if it delivered a healthy heir who could grow up to take possession of her father’s fortune. She didn’t believe that, but given her mother’s struggle to produce her, Octavia couldn’t help feel a duty to make her sacrifice worthwhile. She had agreed to follow through with her parents’ plans and hopefully, finally, earn their appreciation.

“Most women I know want to marry a man who is well positioned, but they try to find them in bars and at parties. Men at parties want to hook up, not settle down.” Octavia had watched hearts get tossed to and fro as her female acquaintances tried to make these potential mates fall in love and propose. It hadn’t seemed worth the heartache when all she really wanted was children. “There’s a disconnect.”

She glanced at him, thinking she sounded as if she was showing off, using fancy words. It disconcerted her to see she had his full attention.

“I want to have a family so why shouldn’t I let my parents find a good prospect to father my children? One who could provide well for them?” she finished in a mumble into her glass.

“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” he said.

She hadn’t wanted to do anything to jeopardize the negotiation, but she’d taken offense, challenging tartly, “It’s my future. Why wouldn’t I?”

“I’m not criticizing. Believe me, I’m impressed. I’d prefer an arranged marriage myself.”

Her heart had skipped under what sounded like a compliment. She searched his expression in the silvery moonlight, catching an impression of computation, as if he was realigning certain facts and developing a fresh strategy.

“Do you intend to run your father’s portfolio after you marry? Is that why you’re letting him choose your husband?”

As if her father would allow that! Mario had grudgingly yielded to her desire to finish school, disparaging her study of psychology and sociology, then had confined her work in his office to redecorating his lobby where he had consistently pulled rank on final decisions. She’d thought about striking out, taking a job elsewhere, but despite a dozen find-your-career quizzes she’d never identified anything that had sparked her enthusiasm enough to defy her father over it.

“My father has traditional views on a woman’s place,” she said dispassionately.

“Which doesn’t answer my question.”

“I thought I did,” she’d said truthfully. “Your own family’s fortune is managed by men, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely. I have three female cousins who head different departments. My sister runs an architecture firm I co-own with her and her husband, and my middle sister has a string of boutiques that I underwrote quite confidently. They’re all very successful, so I’m well aware that women make perfectly capable executives.”

His lack of sexism was refreshing, but if his remarks were meant to encourage her, they had had the opposite effect, making her think she wasn’t trying hard enough to reach her potential.

“If your cousin needed me to take on some of the management, of course I would be willing to learn,” she had assured him with manufactured confidence. “At least until children come along.” Octavia’s mother had been there, but she hadn’t been there. Octavia would do both. “But I’m sure my father will remain active in the role for a long time, so...”

She trailed off, heart snagged by a new look of intention in his gaze.

“What?” she prompted.

“I’ve had an idea.” A faint smile drifted across his lips—lips that were a sensual contrast against the rest of his starkly hewed features. His cheeks were hollow, his chin strong, his expression vaguely dismissive of what she’d just said. Reaching out, he’d stolen her champagne and set both glasses on the narrow rail. “Let’s dance, Octavia.”

He’d taken hold of her hand and tugged her back into the ballroom, his calm surety causing a wild chaos inside her. To this day, she could feel the way his hands had burned her through her gown, already taking on the possessive quality she had grown to revel in.

Across the room, where her parents stood with Primo, her mother was waiting to catch her eye to signal that Octavia should rejoin them.

“I think they want to talk to us,” she said.

Alessandro had continued dancing, saying almost casually, “What if my cousin was not your potential husband, Octavia? What if I was? Would you still rather be a full-time wife devoted to running our home life, which I’d prefer, I must admit, or would I have a part-time business partner whom I would sleep with, which I would settle for?”

“Are you serious?” She’d misstepped, forcing him to catch her close to keep her upright. The press of his body had flushed hers with sexual awareness—something that had never happened to her before. The heated glow had risen up and radiated outward from her center like an aura, sensitizing her skin, warming her cheeks, encasing her in a blush of excitement.

Something happened to him in the same instant. He flashed a look of reassessment at her, brows crashing together as though he’d been taken completely by surprise. For a moment, his hands tightened on her and a muscle ticked in his cheek. A question hung in the balance, but she didn’t know what that question was.