Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: April 2018 Books 1 – 4 - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 15

CHAPTER SIX

‘I SAW IT at the airport,’ Vitale lied, because for some reason Jazz was staring at the very expensive snow globe he had bought her as though it had risen up out of hell accompanied by the devil waving a pitchfork.

Jazz could feel silly tears flooding her eyes, knew it was probably another side effect of pregnancy and inwardly cringed. Why now? Why now, this evening of all evenings, did he have to do something really thoughtful and generous? It was the snow globe to top all other snow globes too, she acknowledged numbly, large, gilded and magnificent, full of little flying cupids, whose wings looked suspiciously diamond-studded and, when you shook it, it rained golden snow rather than white. It put her Santa globe to shame, lowering it to plastic bargain-basement level.

‘It’s really, really beautiful,’ she told him chokily because it was, it was divine, but even if it had been hideous she would have said the same because she was so touched that he had bought her a personal gift. The globe, unlike the new wardrobe and the jewellery he had purchased and insisted she wear, had not been given to facilitate her leading role in a bet to be staged at a royal ball. All of that was fake, like the fake accent she had picked up from the elocution and the knowledge of how to curtsy to royalty that she had learned. She was to pretend to be something she was not for Vitale’s benefit.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Vitale demanded with a raw edge to his dark, deep voice. ‘And why did you send me that weird text?’

Jazz’s legs turned all weak and she dropped down abruptly on the edge of a sofa in the big imposing drawing room where she never ever felt comfortable because it was stuffed with exceedingly grand furniture and seats as hard as nails. ‘Something’s happened, well, actually it happened weeks ago although I didn’t know it then,’ she muttered in a rush. ‘You should sit down and take a very deep breath because you’re going to be furious.’

‘Only my mother makes me furious,’ Vitale contended impatiently, studying her with keen assessing eyes, picking up on her pallor and the faint bluish shadows below her eyes. ‘Are you ill?’

Jazz focused on him, poised there so straight and tall and gorgeous with his blue-black hair, arresting features and wonderful eyes, and she snatched in a very deep breath. ‘Not ill...pregnant,’ she told him with pained reluctance.

Vitale froze, engulfed in a sudden ice storm. He stared back at her, his eyes hardening and narrowing, and she watched him swallow back hasty words and seal his mouth firmly shut again.

‘No, you can say what you like,’ Jazz promised him ruefully. ‘No offence will be taken. Neither of us were expecting this development and I know it’s bad news as far as you’re concerned.’

‘Very bad news,’ Vitale admitted in shock, paler than she had ever seen him below his naturally bronzed complexion. ‘You said you were on birth control. Was that a lie?’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Jazz assured him. ‘But for whatever reason, although I didn’t miss taking a single pill, I’ve conceived and I’m about six weeks in.’

‘And we’ve only been together around seven weeks!’ Vitale thundered, cursing in Italian only half under his breath, his lean hands coiling with tension. ‘Right, the first thing we will do is check this out in case it’s a false alarm.’

‘It’s not a false alarm,’ Jazz argued but Vitale had already stalked angrily to the far end of the room to use his phone, where she listened to him talking to someone in fast and fluent Italian.

All of a sudden even the sound of his voice was grating on her because, within the space of a second, everything had changed in his attitude to her. His voice was now ice-cool and his gaze had blanked her because he was determined to reveal no normal human reaction beyond that ‘very bad news’, which really, when she thought about it, said all that she needed to hear and know. He had seemed so relaxed with her before and now that was gone, probably never to return.

Vitale studied Jazz while he spoke to his friend and discomfiture lanced through him. No, it wasn’t a deliberate conception, and he knew that because he trusted her, and there she sat as if the roof had fallen in on top of her and she wasn’t a skilled enough actress to look like that if that wasn’t how she truly felt. Pregnant? A baby? Vitale was shattered but, unlike his brother Angel, he wouldn’t make the mistake of running away from his responsibilities. He also knew that Jazz was a devout churchgoer from a rural Irish Catholic background and that a termination was a choice she was unlikely to make. He would be a father whether he liked it or not. But, before he agonised over that truth and its consequences, he was determined to take her to see a gynaecologist, who was a close friend and could be trusted to be discreet.

‘Giulio Verratti is a close friend, whom I’ve known since my teens,’ he volunteered stiffly. ‘He also has a private practice as a consultant gynaecologist here in London.’

In silence, Jazz nodded, resigned to his need for a second opinion.

‘I’ll feel happier if he confirms it,’ Vitale completed grimly.

Jazz thought that that was the wrong choice of words because the taut, forbidding lines of Vitale’s lean, strong face suggested he might never be happy again. Regret filled her to overflowing. Her announcement had destroyed their affair. It would have ended anyway after the royal ball, she reminded herself ruefully. There had always been a clock ticking on their relationship and the ball was now only a week away.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Vitale suggested as he steered her out to the waiting limo.

‘How can we?’ Jazz exclaimed.

‘How do you feel about this situation?’ he shot at her without warning.

‘I was devastated at first,’ Jazz confided. ‘But now I can’t help being a little bit excited too... Sorry.’

‘You don’t need to apologise,’ Vitale intoned. ‘Obviously you like children.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘It’s not something I’ve thought about. It’s something I assumed was light years away in the future,’ he breathed tautly.

He had defrosted a tad and she wanted to reach for his hand but resisted the temptation, recognising that it was not a good moment. Only two nights back, he had slept with her in his arms all night, but those days were over, she thought sadly. In a casual affair, a pregnancy was divisive, a source of concern rather than celebration. He would want their child to remain a secret as well, she mused unhappily. He wouldn’t want the existence of an illegitimate kid splashed all over the media. Would he want to be involved in their child’s life in any way? Or would he hope that giving her money would keep her quiet and persuade her to accept that he could not play any sort of active paternal role?

* * *

Giulio Verratti was a suave Italian in his thirties with prematurely greying hair. They didn’t even have to sit down in the waiting room before a nurse swept them into the consulting room and the gynaecologist explained the tests that could be done on the spot. The nurse shepherded Jazz off to perform the tests before Jazz returned to the plush consulting room where the results were passed to Giulio.

‘You’re definitely pregnant,’ he announced.

Vitale’s shuttered expression betrayed nothing to her anxious glance.

‘I’m a little concerned by a rather high reading in your hCG,’ he confided and he went on to offer her a transvaginal ultrasound, which could be more accurate at an earlier stage than a normal scan.

Vitale flinched. ‘No. We won’t put her through that unless it is strictly necessary for her health.’

‘Are there any twins in your family?’ Mr Verratti asked smoothly.

‘Several,’ Jazz volunteered. ‘My grandmother and some cousins.’

‘There’s a strong possibility that this could be a multiple pregnancy and I’ll do an ordinary ultrasound now to see if I can pick up the heartbeat or heartbeats yet,’ the older man informed them calmly and he called the nurse to help Jazz prepare for the scan.

Gel was rubbed on her abdomen and a hand-held scanner was run over her. Eyes wide, she stared at the monitor and then she heard the very fast sound of the foetal heartbeat and Mr Verratti laughed with satisfaction. He pointed at the monitor to indicate two blurred areas that he said were her babies. ‘You do indeed carry twins,’ he assured her.

Twins? Vitale had never worked so hard at controlling his expression. More than one child? The bad news just got worse and worse, he conceded helplessly. But every cloud had a silver lining, he instructed himself grimly. There had to be a plus side to even this disaster, although he had yet to see it. He would gain the heir his mother was so keen for him to produce but to achieve that he would have to marry Jazz, an alliance that Queen Sofia, the supreme elitist, would never agree to. But then he was fortunate that he did not actually require his mother’s consent to marry. She had always assumed that, somewhere in the Lerovian tomes of royal dynastic law, such a prohibition existed but Vitale knew for a fact that it didn’t. He was free to marry whomever he liked even if, at that precise moment, he hadn’t the slightest desire to get married to Jazz or any other woman.

And he blamed himself entirely for taking on that crazy competitive bet with his younger brother, Zac. What insanity had possessed him? Of all three of the brothers, Vitale was indisputably the sensible, steady one and yet look at the mess he was in now! Somehow, he had contrived to choreograph his own downfall by moving a young woman into his home, whom he couldn’t keep his hands off, he thought with raw self-loathing and distaste. He had known from the outset that Jazz attracted him and he had still gone ahead, believing that he had vast self-discipline and learning differently very, very quickly.

And it was hardly surprising that it threatened to be a multiple pregnancy, he conceded even more grimly, considering that they had been having sex every night for weeks on end. Not once had he used a condom as an extra safeguard. His own mistakes, his own indefensible errors of judgement, piled up on top of Vitale like a multiple road crash and plunged him into brooding silence.

Jazz lay awake alone most of that night. Vitale had barely spoken after leaving Mr Verratti’s surgery. He hadn’t even come to say goodnight to her, indeed had been noticeably careful not to touch her again in any way. It was as if she now had a giant defensive forcefield wrapped round her. Or as if her sudden overwhelming attraction had just died the very instant he’d realised she was pregnant with twins. The truth of their predicament was finally settling in on him and of course, he was upset. But she had kind of—secretly—hoped he would come to her if he was upset, as he had one other night after a more than usually distressing argument on the phone with his shrewish mother. He had shared that with her and she had felt important to him in a different way for the first time.

A little less fanciful now, she sat up in bed and put on the light to study her gilded and very ornate snow globe and her eyes simply overflowed again, tears trickling down her cheeks while she sniffed and dashed them away and generally hated herself for being such a drip. She had got attached to him, hadn’t she? She was more than fond of Vitale after so many weeks of living with him.

How had she felt as though they were tailor-made for each other when that was so patently untrue? She, a housekeeper’s daughter, he, a royal prince? Would he even continue with the bet now? He wouldn’t want her in the public eye again, she reckoned, wouldn’t wish to be associated with a woman who would be looking very pregnant in a few months’ time. When Mr Verratti had mentioned that provocative word, ‘twins’, Vitale had looked as though he had been hand sculpted out of granite. She had practically heard Vitale thinking that one child would have been quite enough to contend with. She recognised that she was getting all het up with no prospect of calming herself down again. Eventually sheer exhaustion made her sleep.

First thing the next morning, she found herself in the bathroom being horribly sick and that shift from nausea to actual illness felt like the last straw. Washing away the evidence, she examined her wan reflection in the mirror and decided she had a slight greenish cast that was not the tiniest bit attractive. The sore boobs squashed into a bra that had become too small didn’t help either, she thought miserably as she got dressed, selecting jeans and a colourful top in the hope of looking brighter and less emotionally sensitive than she actually felt.

She walked slowly downstairs. Vitale appeared in the dining-room doorway.

‘Breakfast... Join me,’ he suggested in that same hatefully distant tone.

‘I didn’t want this development either,’ she said in her own defence as she moved past him, avoiding looking at him quite deliberately.

‘I think I know that,’ he conceded curtly.

Her bright head flew up and she looked at him. ‘Do you?’

Exasperation flared in his forbidding gaze. ‘Yes, but it doesn’t change the situation.’

She supposed it didn’t. He accepted that she wasn’t guilty of intent but somehow she still felt that she was being held to blame. And possibly she was to blame, thinking about the instructions she had failed to read because at the time contraception had not been an issue she’d cared about or needed. She had assumed she was safe from conception when she wasn’t but he had made the same assumption. What did it matter now anyway? He was right. A lack of intent didn’t change anything.

She lifted a plate and helped herself to toast and butter, her unsettled stomach cringing at the prospect of anything more solid.

‘Shouldn’t you be having something more to eat?’

‘I’m nauseous. That’s why I went to the doctor in the first place,’ she admitted stiltedly as Jenkins poured tea and coffee while Vitale simply ignored the older man’s presence.

When the butler had closed the door on his exit, Vitale studied her and said flatly, ‘We have to get married and quickly.’

Jazz stared back at him wide-eyed and stunned by incredulity at that declaration. ‘That’s ludicrous!’ she gulped.

‘No, it isn’t. There is another dimension to this issue which you are ignoring but which I cannot ignore,’ Vitale imparted coolly. ‘The children you carry will be heirs to the throne of Lerovia with the firstborn taking precedence. If they are born illegitimate they cannot be heirs and I know that I don’t want a child of mine in this world that feels cheated of their birthright because I failed to marry you.’

He was quite correct. Jazz had not considered that issue in any depth or how any such child would feel as he or she grew up and realised the future they had been denied by an accident of birth. She swallowed hard but still said, ‘Be sensible, Vitale. You can’t marry someone like me. You’re a prince.’

‘I don’t think we have a choice. We’ll get married very discreetly and quietly in a civil ceremony and keep the news to ourselves until after the ball,’ Vitale informed her.

‘You’re still taking me to the ball?’ she murmured in surprise.

‘If you’re going to be my wife, why wouldn’t I take you?’

‘But you don’t want to marry me,’ she pointed out shakily. ‘And feeling like that it would be all wrong for both of us.’

Vitale dealt her a cool sardonic appraisal. ‘We don’t have to stay married for ever, Jazz. Only long enough to legitimise our children’s birth.’

‘Oh...’ Jazz reddened fiercely, feeling foolish for not having recognised the obvious escape clause in his startling announcement that they should marry. He wasn’t talking about a normal marriage, of course he wasn’t. He was suggesting a temporary marriage for their children’s sake followed by divorce, a relationship that would be, in its own way, as false as the role he had already prepared her to play at the ball as his partner.

‘And there is a plus side for me,’ Vitale continued smoothly. ‘I get the heir my mother so badly wants me to have and there will be no pressure on me to marry a second time.’

Jazz had lost colour as the true ramifications of what he was proposing slowly sank in, but pride made her contrive an approximation of a smile. ‘So, everybody gets what they want,’ she completed tightly.

Everybody but me, she conceded painfully, forced to listen to how he wanted to marry her and then get rid of her again after profiting from her unintentional fertility. She was seeing the side of Vitale that she hated, that sharp-as-knives, cold, calculating streak that could power him in moments of crisis. And it chilled Jazz right down to the marrow bone.

Inside her chest her heart felt as though he had stuck an actual knife in it. Over the past weeks, she had become attached but he had not. For Vitale, she had been a means to an end, a convenient lover, not someone he valued in any more lasting way. Now he planned to make the best of a bad situation and marry her to legitimise the children she carried. That would benefit him and it would benefit their children as well. But there would be no benefit for Jazz in becoming Vitale’s temporary wife. Continued exposure to Vitale’s callous indifference would only open her up to a world of hurt. And what on earth would it be like for her to become a member of a royal family? Ordinary women like her didn’t marry princes, she reflected with a sinking stomach. How the heck could she rise to the level of a royal?

But, seriously, what choice did she have? She didn’t have the luxury of saying no to what was surely the most unromantic proposal of marriage that had ever been voiced by a man. How could she deny her unborn twins the right to become accepted members of the Lerovian royal family? That would be a very selfish thing to do, to protect herself instead of securing her children’s future. And she could see that Vitale had not a doubt that she would accept his proposal, which made her want to throw a plate of really messy jelly at him. All those years being chased by princess-title-hunters hadn’t done him any favours in the ego department. Evidently, he believed he was a hell of a catch, even on a temporary basis. Below her lowered lashes, her green eyes flared with slow-burning anger. He was rich and handsome and titled. He put in a terrific performance in bed and bought a good snow globe. But really, what else did he have to offer? Certainly not sensitivity, anyhow.

‘We’ll be married within a few days.’

Vitale dealt her an expectant appraisal as if he was hoping she would jump about with excitement or, at the very least, loose an unseemly whoop of appreciation. Cinderella got her Prince Charming—not, she recognised angrily. He hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to marry him because he took assent for granted. And why not? The marriage wouldn’t last any longer than possibly eighteen months and then he would be free again, free of the housekeeper’s daughter and her baggage.

‘My babies live with me,’ Jazz declared combatively, lest he be cherishing any other sort of plan for their children. ‘I raise my children.’

Vitale lifted and dropped a broad shoulder, the very picture of nonchalance. ‘Of course. I believe you have an elocution lesson now.’

Jazz flushed in surprise. ‘I’m to continue with those lessons?’

‘Naturally. For a while at least you’ll have public appearances to make in your role as my wife. Your pregnancy, though, will eventually make it easier to excuse you from such events,’ he pointed out calmly.

‘You really do have it all worked out.’ Jazz rose stiffly from her seat and walked out of the room without a backward glance.

Vitale gritted his even white teeth in frustration. He would never understand women if he lived to be a thousand! What was wrong with her now? Why was she sulking? Jazz didn’t sulk. She was never moody. He liked that about her. So, what was the problem?

During a long, sleepless night he had contrived to find the silver lining in their predicament and he had been satisfied with the solution he had chosen. Why wasn’t she delighted? He was willing to marry her, jump through all the hoops he had always avoided, just for her benefit and the twins’. OK, his wide sensual mouth curled, he wasn’t saying that there wasn’t anything in the arrangement for him. Jazz officially in his bed would be a personal gain, a sort of compensation for the pain and sacrifice of getting shackled at a mere twenty-eight years old to a woman his mother would despise and attack for her commonplace background. Anger flooded him. What more could he do in the circumstances?

On the morning of Jazz’s wedding day, three days later, sunshine flooded into the apartment living area but she still didn’t feel the slightest bit bridal. Sworn to secrecy, her mother and her aunt were attending the ceremony, but the very fact that Vitale had not asked to meet her family beforehand only emphasised to Jazz how fake their wedding would be. Angel and his wife, Merry, were to attend as witnesses.

In the preceding three days, Jazz had gone shopping for the first time armed with a credit card given to her by Vitale. She had got fitted for new bras and had picked an off-white dress and matching jacket to wear. But it had not been a happy time for Jazz. Her mother, Peggy, had been distraught when Jazz had announced that she had fallen pregnant by Vitale. It had taken her daughter and her sister’s combined efforts to persuade the older woman that Jazz’s pregnancy did not have to be viewed as a catastrophe when Vitale was about to marry her. Naturally Jazz had not even hinted to either woman that Vitale was not planning on a ‘for ever’ marriage.

That, for the moment, was her secret, her private business, she thought ruefully, but pretending for the sake of her mother and her family that Vitale genuinely cared enough about her to want to marry her cost her sleep. Her bouts of sickness had become worse and when, the second evening, Vitale had walked into her bedroom and found her being horribly ill in the bathroom he had insisted on asking his friend, Giulio, to make a house call. Mr Verratti had told her that the excessive sickness was probably the result of her twin pregnancy, warned her about the danger of dehydration and given her medication that would hopefully reduce the nausea. None of those experiences had lifted Jazz’s low spirits or the horrible feeling of being trapped in a bad and challenging situation over which she had no control.

‘How do you feel?’ was Vitale’s first question when they met at the register office, because Peggy Dickens had begged her daughter to spend that last night at home in her aunt’s apartment, which had meant, traditional or otherwise, that Jazz had had very little sleep resting on a lumpy couch after having enjoyed the luxury of a bed of her own for weeks.

‘I’m fine,’ she lied politely, turning to greet Angel, who was smiling, and then be introduced to his glowing dark-haired wife, who was wonderfully warm and friendly. But Jazz went red, just knowing by the lingering look Angel gave her that he knew she was pregnant as well and she felt humiliated and exposed while wondering if Angel’s wife was being so nice because she pitied her.

‘I should have said that you look amazing in cream,’ Vitale said hastily, as if belatedly grasping that that was more what people expected from a bridegroom than an enquiry about her health.

Not so amazing that he had felt any desire to so much as kiss her since her pregnancy announcement, Jazz reflected bitterly. But then Vitale, trained from childhood to say the right thing at the right time, couldn’t always shake off his conditioning. In the future, she expected him to treat her with excessive politeness and distance, much as he had been treating her since she had told him she had conceived. And it hurt Jazz, it hurt much more even than she had thought it would to live with that forbidding new chill in his attitude towards her. It was as if Vitale were flying on automatic pilot and she was now a stranger because all intimacy between them had vanished.

If only she could so easily banish her responses, she thought unhappily, studying Vitale where he stood chatting with his brother and his wife. Vitale was a devastatingly handsome male distinguished by dark golden black-fringed eyes that sent heat spiralling through her pelvis, which made her avert her eyes from him uneasily. Her body still sang and tingled in his presence, all prickling awareness and sensual enthusiasm, and it mortified her, forced her to crave the indifference he seemed to have embraced with ease.

The wedding ceremony was short and not particularly sweet. For the sake of their audience, Jazz kept a determined smile on her lips and studied the plain platinum ring she had been fitted for only the morning before. She was also thinking about the very comprehensive prenup she had signed an hour after that ring fitting and her heart was still sinking on that score. That document had even contained access arrangements for their unborn children and a divorce settlement. Reading that through to the end had been an even more sobering experience. Vitale had thought of everything going into their temporary marriage and he had taken every possible precaution, so it was hardly surprising that any sense of being a bride escaped her.

‘Give him time,’ Angel urged her in an incomprehensible whispered aside before he departed with his wife, after a brief and extremely formal lunch at an exclusive hotel with her family. ‘He’s emotionally stunted.’

Vitale joined his bride in the limo that was taking them to the airport and their flight to Italy for a long weekend preceding the ball and said, ‘It’s completely weird seeing Angel like that with a woman.’

‘Like what?’ Jazz prompted.

‘Besotted,’ Vitale labelled with a grimace. ‘Didn’t you notice the way he kept on touching her and looking at her?’

‘I noticed that they seemed very happy together.’

‘They started out like us. Merry had Angel’s daughter last year and at first Angel didn’t want anything to do with either of them and now look at them,’ Vitale invited in apparent disbelief. ‘Already hoping for another child some day, he told me...’

Jazz perked up... Well, it was an encouraging story. ‘Fancy that,’ she remarked lightly.

‘I wouldn’t ever want to feel that way,’ Vitale admitted.

‘Why not?’ she asked boldly.

The silence dragged and she thought she had got too personal and that he wasn’t going to answer her.

But Vitale was grimacing. ‘I saw my father crying once. I was very young but it made a big impression on me. He explained that he wouldn’t be living with my mother and I any longer. They were splitting up. At the time, I didn’t really understand that but later, when I looked back, I understood. I don’t know why they divorced but I don’t think it was related to anything Papa did. He was heartbroken.’

Jazz winced but persisted. ‘Didn’t you ask him why they broke up?’

‘I never liked to. I was afraid of upsetting him. He’s a very emotional man.’

But Jazz was thinking of Vitale as a little boy seeing his father distraught over the loss of a woman. Had that disturbing glimpse put Vitale off falling in love? After all, he already had a mother in his life who must surely have damaged his ability to trust women. Exposed to Charles’s heartbreak, Vitale must always have tried to protect himself from getting too attached to a woman. After all, the very first woman he had been attached to, his mother, had rejected him.

‘I should have invited Papa today and he’ll be hurt that I left him out but I didn’t want to get him involved in our predicament,’ Vitale continued.

And that’s the reward you get for digging where you shouldn’t, Jazz told herself unhappily. Vitale knew their marriage would be a short-lived thing and that was why he had left his father out. ‘Did you tell Angel the truth?’ she asked, even though she felt that she already knew the answer to that question.

‘Sì...’ Vitale confirmed quietly. ‘I have no secrets from Angel.’

‘Apart from the bet,’ she reminded him.

And disconcertingly, Vitale laughed at that reminder with genuine appreciation. ‘I felt it was so juvenile to try and one up Zac that I was embarrassed. I don’t know what got into me that day at my father’s office. Or that day when you told Angel about the bet. I was in a very bad mood.’

In the days that followed that meeting with Angel at Vitale’s house Jazz had come to suspect that Vitale had been angry because he had misinterpreted her friendly ease with his older brother as flirtation, forgetting that when they were kids Angel had been as much her playmate as he had been. She had thought, even hoped that Vitale was possessive of her attention and jealous. Now she knew better, she thought wryly.

Feeling like a wet weekend, she stepped onto her first private jet, stunned by the opulent interior and the spaciousness of the cabin.

‘There’s a bedroom you can rest in at the far end,’ Vitale told her helpfully as he opened up his laptop, evidently intending to work.

‘I might just do that,’ she said tartly since it seemed to her that he was hoping to be left in peace.

She kicked off her shoes, and removed her jacket and lay down on the comfortable bed and slept like a log. Vitale remembered it was his wedding day when he was warned that the flight was about to land and he strode into the sleeping compartment to wake Jazz.

She looked so small and fragile lying there that he was taken aback because Jazz always seemed larger than life inside his head. Not since she got pregnant though, he reflected grimly. That had changed everything for them both as well as adversely affecting her health. Giulio had advised him to be very careful because a multiple pregnancy was both more dangerous and more likely to result in a miscarriage and one could not be too careful either with one’s wife or with children, one of whom would be the next heir to a throne. Blasted pregnancy, Vitale thought bitterly, because he could see how wan and thin she was already. Her appetite was affected...her mood was affected. Nothing was the same any more and he missed her vivacity and spontaneity.

Jazz wakened with a start to find Vitale bent over her, his stunning dark golden eyes grim as tombstones. In haste, she edged back from him and sat up.

‘We’re about to land. You’ll have to come back out,’ he warned her.

‘I must’ve been more tired than I appreciated,’ she muttered apologetically while wondering if her absence had even registered with him.