Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: November 2017 Books 1 - 4 - Эбби Грин, Julia James - Страница 20

CHAPTER TEN

SHE HAD TO say something. She had to. She couldn’t keep pretending nothing was wrong or that there weren’t still a million questions buzzing around in her head which needed answering.

Keira turned her head to look at the face of the man who lay sleeping beside her. It was a very big bed, which was probably a good thing since Matteo Valenti’s naked body was taking up most of it. Morning light flooded in from the two windows they hadn’t bothered closing the shutters on before they’d tumbled into bed the night before. From here she could see the green of the landscape which spread far into the distance and, above it, the endless blue of the cloudless sky. It was the most perfect of mornings, following the most perfect of nights.

She hugged her arms around herself and gave a wriggle of satisfaction. She’d never thought she could feel the way Matteo had made her feel. But the clock was ticking away and she needed to face reality. She couldn’t keep pretending everything was wonderful just because they’d spent an amazing night together. He’d said he wanted to explore the possibility of them becoming a couple but there was more to being a couple than amazing sex. How could they keep ignoring the gaping hole at the centre of their relationship which neither of them had addressed? He for reasons unknown and she...

She turned her attention from the distraction of the view to the dark head which lay sleeping beside her. Was she too scared to ask him, was that it?

Because the most important thing was all out of kilter and the longer it went on, the worse it seemed. Matteo acted as if Santino didn’t exist. As if he didn’t have a son. To her certain knowledge, he’d never even cuddled him—why, he’d barely even asked after him.

It didn’t matter how many boxes the Italian ticked—she could never subject Santino to a life in which he was overlooked. And trying to compensate for his father’s lack of regard with her own fierce love wouldn’t work. She’d grown up in a house where she had been regarded as an imposition and no way was she going to impose that on her darling son.

Which left her with two choices. She could carry on being an ostrich and ignore what was happening—or rather, what wasn’t happening. Or she could address the subject when Matteo woke and make him talk about it. She wouldn’t accuse him or judge him. Whatever he told her, she would try to understand—because something told her that was very important.

Quietly, she slipped from the bed and went to the bathroom and when she returned with brushed teeth and hair, Matteo was awake—his black gaze following her as she walked back towards the bed.

‘Morning,’ she said shyly.

‘Is this the point where I ask whether you slept well and you lower your eyelids and say, not really?’ he murmured.

Blushing like a schoolgirl, Keira slipped rapidly beneath the covers so that her naked body was no longer in the spotlight of that disturbingly erotic stare. It was all very well being uninhibited when the room was in darkness but the bright morning light was making her feel awfully vulnerable. Especially as she sensed that Matteo wasn’t going to like what she had to say, no matter how carefully she asked the question. He drew her into his arms but she gave him only the briefest of kisses before pulling her lips away. Because he needed to hear this, and the sooner, the better.

‘Matteo,’ she said, rubbing the tip of her finger over the shadowed angle of his jaw.

His brows knitted together. ‘Why does my heart sink when you say my name that way?’ he questioned softly.

She swallowed. ‘You know we have to go back to Umbria soon.’

‘You think I’d forgotten? Which is why I suggest we don’t waste any of the time we have left.’

He had begun to stroke a light thumb over one of her nipples and although it puckered obediently beneath his touch, Keira pushed his hand away. ‘And we need to talk,’ she said firmly.

‘And that was why my heart sank,’ he drawled, shifting his body to lie against the bank of pillows and fixing her with a hooded look. ‘Why do women always want to talk instead of making love?’

‘Usually because something needs to be said.’ She pulled in a breath. ‘I want to tell you about when I was growing up.’

The look on his face said it all. Wrong place; wrong time. ‘I met your aunt,’ he said impatiently. ‘Over-strict guardian, small house, jealous cousin. I get it. You didn’t have such a great time.’

Keira shook her head as uncomfortable thoughts flooded into her mind. She needed to be completely honest, else how could she expect complete honesty in return? Yet what she was about to tell him wasn’t easy. She’d never told anyone the full story. Even her aunt. Especially her aunt. ‘I told you my mother wasn’t married and that I didn’t know my father. What I didn’t tell you was that she didn’t know him either.’

His gaze was watchful now. ‘What are you talking about?’

Keira flushed to the roots of her hair because she could remember her mother’s shame when she’d finally blurted out the story, no longer able to evade the curious questions of her young daughter. Would her mother be appalled if she knew that Keira was now repeating the sorry tale, to a man with a trace of steel running through his veins?

‘My mother was a student nurse,’ she said slowly, ‘who came to London and found it was nothing like the rural farm she’d grown up on in Ireland. She was quite shy and very naïve but she had those Irish looks. You know, black hair and blue eyes—’

‘Like yours?’ he interrupted softly.

She shook her head. ‘Oh, no. She was much prettier than me. Men were always asking her out but usually she preferred to stay in the nurses’ home and watch something on TV, until one night she gave in and went to a party with a group of the other nurses. It was a pretty wild party and not her kind of thing at all. People were getting wasted and Mum decided she didn’t want to stay.’ She swallowed. ‘But by then it was too late because someone had...had...’

‘Someone had what, Keira?’ he questioned as her words became strangled and his voice was suddenly so gentle that it made her want to cry.

‘Somebody spiked her drink,’ she breathed, the words catching like sand in her throat because even now, they still had the power to repulse her. ‘She...she woke up alone in a strange bed with a pain between her legs, and soon after that she discovered she was pregnant with me.’

He gave a terse exclamation and she thought he was going to turn away in disgust but to her surprise he reached out to push away the lock of hair which had fallen over her flushed cheeks, before slipping his hand round her shoulder and pulling her against the warmth of his chest. ‘Bastardo,’ he swore softly and then repeated it, for added emphasis.

She shook her head and could feel the taste of tears nudging at the back of her throat and at last she gave into them, in a way she’d never done before. ‘She didn’t know how many men had been near her,’ she sobbed. ‘She had to go to the clinic to check she hadn’t been given some sort of disease and of course they offered her...’ She swallowed away the tears because she saw from the tightening of his jaw that she didn’t actually need to spell it out for him. ‘But she didn’t want that. She wanted me,’ she said simply. ‘There wasn’t a moment of doubt about that.’

He waited until she had composed herself before he spoke again, until she had brushed the remaining tears away with the tips of her fingers.

‘Why are you telling me all this, Keira?’ he questioned softly. ‘And why now?’

‘Because I grew up without a father and for me there was no other option—but I don’t want the same for my baby. For... Santino.’ Her voice wavered as she looked into the hardness of his eyes and forced herself to continue, even though the look on his face would have intimidated stronger people than her. ‘Matteo, you don’t...you don’t seem to feel anything for your son.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Why, you’ve barely touched him. It’s as if you can’t bear to go near him and I want to try to understand why.’

Matteo released his hold on her and his body tensed because she had no right to interrogate him, and he didn’t have to answer her intrusive question. He could tell her to mind her own damned business and that he would interact with his son when he was good and ready and not according to her timetable. Just because she wanted to spill out stuff about her own past, didn’t mean he had to do the same, did it? But in the depths of her eyes he could read a deep compassion and something in him told him there could be no going forward unless she understood what had made him the man he was.

He could feel a bitter taste coating his throat. Maybe everyone kept stuff hidden away inside them—the stuff which was truly painful. Perhaps it was nature’s way of trying to protect you from revisiting places which were too dark to contemplate. ‘My mother died in childbirth,’ he said suddenly.

There was a disbelieving pause as the words sank in and when they did, her eyes widened. ‘Oh, Matteo. That’s terrible,’ she whispered.

Matteo instantly produced the self-protective clause which enabled him to bat off unwanted sympathy if people did find out. ‘What is it they say?’ He shrugged. ‘That you can’t miss what you’ve never had. And I’ve had thirty-four years to get used to it.’

Her muffled ‘But...’ suggested she was about to disagree with him, but then she seemed to change her mind and said nothing. Leaving him free to utter the next words from his set-piece statement. ‘Maternal death is thankfully rare,’ he bit out. ‘My mother was just one of the unlucky ones.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve established that.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘I’ve never come into contact with babies before. To be honest, I’ve never even held one, but you’re right—it isn’t just inexperience which makes me wary.’ His jaw tightened. ‘It’s guilt.’

‘Guilt?’ she echoed, in surprise.

He swallowed and the words took a long time in coming. ‘People say they feel instant love for their own child but that didn’t happen to me when I looked at Santino for the first time. Oh, I checked his fingers and his toes and was relieved that he was healthy, but I didn’t feel anything.’ He punched his fist against his heart and the words fell from his lips, heavy as stones. ‘And I don’t know if I ever can.’

Keira nodded as she tried to evaluate what he’d told her. It all made sense now. It explained why he’d thrown a complete wobbly when she’d kept her pregnancy quiet. What if history had grimly repeated itself and she’d died in childbirth as his mother had done? Nobody had known who the father of her baby was because she’d kept it secret. Wasn’t it possible that Santino could have been adopted by her aunt and her cousin and grown up without knowing anything of his roots?

She felt another wrench as she met the pain in his eyes. What must it have been like for him—this powerful man who had missed out on so much? He had never experienced a mother’s love. Never even felt her arms hugging him in those vital hours of bonding which followed birth. Who had cradled the tiny Matteo as the cold corpse of his mother was prepared for her silent journey to the grave, instead of a joyous homecoming with her newborn baby? No wonder he’d been so reluctant to get close to his little boy—he didn’t know how.

‘Didn’t your father make up for the fact that you didn’t have a mother?’

His mouth twisted and he gave a hollow laugh. ‘People cope in their own way—or they don’t. He left my care to a series of young nannies, most of whom he apparently slept with—so then they’d leave—or the new stepmother would fire them. But it didn’t seem to matter how much sex he had or how many women he married, he never really got over my mother’s death. It left a hole in his life which nothing could ever fill.’

Keira couldn’t take her eyes away from his ravaged face. Had his father unconsciously blamed his infant son for the tragic demise of his beloved wife—would that explain why they weren’t close? And had Matteo been angry with his father for trying to replace her? She wondered if those different stepmothers had blamed the boy for being an ever-present reminder of a woman they could never compete with.

And blame was the last thing Matteo needed, Keira realised. Not then and certainly not now. He needed understanding—and love—though she wasn’t sure he wanted either. Reaching out, she laid her hand on his bunched and tensed biceps but the muscle remained hard and stone-like beneath her fingers. Undeterred, she began to massage her fingertips against the unyielding flesh.

‘So what do we do next, now we’ve brought all our ghosts into the daylight?’ she questioned slowly. ‘Where do we go from here, Matteo?’

His gaze was steady as he rolled away from her touch, as if reminding her that this was a decision which needed to be made without the distraction of the senses. ‘That depends. Where do you want to go from here?’

She recognised he was being open to negotiation and on some deeper level she suspected that this wasn’t usual for him in relationships. Because this was a relationship, she realised. Somehow it had grown despite their wariness and private pain and the unpromising beginning. It had the potential to grow even more—but only if she had the courage to give him the affection he needed, without making any demands of her own in return. She couldn’t demand that he learn to love his son, she could only pray that he would. Just as she couldn’t demand that he learn to love her. ‘I’ll go anywhere,’ she whispered. ‘As long as it’s with Santino. And you.’

She leaned forward to kiss him and Matteo could never remember being kissed like that before. A kiss not fuelled by sexual hunger but filled with the promise of something he didn’t recognise, something which started his senses humming. He murmured something in objection when she pulled back a little, her eyes of profondo blu looking dark and serious, but at least when she wasn’t kissing him he was able to think straight. He didn’t understand the way she made him feel, but maybe that didn’t matter. Because weren’t the successes of life—and business—based on gut feeling as much as understanding? Hadn’t he sometimes bought a hotel site even though others in the business had told him he was crazy—and turned it into a glittering success because deep down he’d known he was onto a winner? And wasn’t it a bit like that now?

‘I will learn to interact with my son,’ he said.

‘That’s a start,’ she said hesitantly.

The look on her face suggested that his answer had fallen short of the ideal—but he was damned if he was going to promise to love his son. Because what if he failed to deliver? What if the ice around his heart was so deep and so frozen that nothing could ever penetrate it? ‘And I want to marry you,’ he said suddenly.

Now the look on her face had changed. He saw surprise there and perhaps the faint glimmer of delight, which was quickly replaced by one of suspicion, as if perhaps she had misheard him.

‘Marry me?’ she echoed softly.

He nodded. ‘So that Santino will have the security you never had, even if our relationship doesn’t last,’ he said, his voice cool but certain. ‘And so that he will be protected by my fortune, which one day he will inherit. Doesn’t that make perfect sense to you?’

He could see her blinking furiously, as if she was trying very hard to hold back the glitter of disappointed tears, but then she seemed to pull it all together and nodded.

‘Yes, I think marriage is probably the most sensible option in the circumstances,’ she said.

‘So you will be my wife?’

‘Yes, I’ll be your wife. But I’m only doing this for Santino. To give him the legitimacy I never had. You do understand that, don’t you, Matteo?’

She fixed him with a defiant look, as if she didn’t really care—and for a split second it occurred to him that neither of them were being completely honest. ‘Of course I understand, cara mia,’ he said softly.