Читать книгу An Enticing Proposal - Meredith Webber, Meredith Webber - Страница 7

HOW to answer? Tell a man his wife had gestational diabetes mellitus when he didn’t know she was pregnant? And Marco wouldn’t know because Lucia hadn’t known herself—hadn’t even guessed what might be wrong with her. The diabetes was an added complication, one not usually occurring until late into the second trimester of pregnancy when the foetus was extracting more nutrients from the maternal source, but the trauma of leaving home could have triggered a possible predisposition to it, bringing it on earlier than usual.

The thoughts rushed through Paige’s head and she studied him as she decided what to say. He didn’t look like a man who’d give in easily and telling him Lucia was carrying his child, that would hand him an added incentive to force her to return to him. It would also betray Lucia’s trust. Again!

Hide behind professional discretion?

She didn’t think this man would take too kindly to this ethical solution to her dilemma but what the hell.

‘I need to speak to her before I can give you any information about her health or where she’s staying,’ Paige replied, already feeling the waves of his anger as it built again. ‘Give me an hour—or maybe two—and I’ll contact you, or, better still, you could phone me here.’

She opened a desk drawer to get a card for him then realised it would show this building as her home address as well as that of the health service. Bring him closer than she wanted at the moment. Pulling out a scrap of paper instead, she jotted down her number and pushed it across the desk.

He was standing opposite her, staring at her with an unnerving intensity.

‘I already have your phone number, Miss Morgan,’ he said softly. ‘What I don’t know is Lucia’s whereabouts. Now, are you going to tell me where she is or do I call in your police force?’

She did her straightening-up thing again, hoping to look more in control.

‘Lucia is an adult—able to make her own decisions. No police force in the world can compel a woman to return to a situation from which she’s fled.’

She wasn’t absolutely certain about the truth of this statement but he wasn’t to know that. Not that he seemed to be taking much notice. In fact he was laughing at her.

Derisively!

‘Fled, Miss Morgan? Aren’t you overdramatising the situation?’

Damn her cheeks—just when she wanted to appear super-cool they were heating up again.

‘You said yourself she ran away,’ she countered hotly. ‘And now you’ve arrived, like some vengeful gaoler, to take her back—threatening me with the police force! No, I think if anyone’s overdramatising, it’s you, Prince Highfaluting-whatever. Sweeping in here, making demands. I’m the one who’s being reasonable about this!’

OK, so she didn’t sound very reasonable right now, but he’d made her mad. And that superior expression on his carved-rock face made her even madder.

He ignored her rudeness, nodded once, stepped back a pace from his position near the desk and said, ‘I will give you an hour, Miss Morgan, but that is all. For some reason you are under the impression Lucia will not wish to see me. You are wrong. She will be glad and grateful that I have arrived to take care of her.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Paige muttered with as much cynicism as she could muster, though why his sudden switch to politeness was aggravating her more than his anger had she didn’t know. ‘Well, we’ll let her be the judge of that. Will you phone?’

His eyes scanned her face, as if he wanted to imprint it on his mind, and when he finally replied—saying, ‘No, I will return to this house,’—Paige felt a tremor of apprehension flutter down her spine.

And dealing with Lucia wasn’t any easier. When Paige confessed she’d found the number in the passport and had phoned it, her guest had pouted and turned her face to the wall, prepared to sulk.

‘I had to let someone know you were alive,’ Paige said desperately. ‘It wasn’t fair that all your friends and family should have been worrying themselves to death—imagining the worst of fates for you. I just didn’t expect him to come.’

The slim figure shot upright, delight and apprehension illuminating her usually pale face, giving her a radiant beauty.

‘He’s here? Marco’s here? Oh, why did you not tell me straight away? Where is he? Bring him to me! Now, Paige, now!’

One of the few things she had told Paige was that she’d only been married two months before she’d left. It hadn’t taken her long to learn imperious ways!

‘Are you sure you want to see him?’ Paige asked, mistrusting this swift change of mood. ‘He’s here to take you home.’

The beauty faded, leaving her visitor pale again.

‘Of course! He would have come for that reason. Trust him to do such a thing, thinking he would persuade me.’ She pouted again, then tossed the cloud of soft dark hair and added defiantly, ‘Well, I won’t go!’

There was another pause, and Paige could almost read the expressions that washed across Lucia’s face—hope, longing, doubt and confusion.

‘But I’d like to see Marco,’ Lucia continued tremulously. ‘Will you stay with me while he visits? Not let him bully me or talk me into going home?’

Paige sighed. The very last thing she wanted to do was play gooseberry between a man and his wife—particularly, for some reason, between the man in question and this young woman she’d come to like.

‘I think you should talk to him on your own,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you owe him that?’

Huge brown eyes gazed piteously into hers.

‘But he’ll talk me into going back,’ Lucia wailed. ‘Into doing whatever he wants. Marco always gets his way.’

I can believe that, Paige thought, picturing the man who’d invaded her office, but the idea of acting as a chaperone at this forthcoming meeting was making her feel quite ill. She patted Lucia’s arm and suggested she get up and have a shower before her visitor arrived.

‘I don’t know about staying with you while you talk to him, but I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.’ She watched Lucia stand and saw her slender frame silhouetted against the light from the window, a neat bulge showing the eighteenth week of her pregnancy but still far too thin to be healthy, and another idea occurred to her.

‘If he does want to take you home and you decide you’d prefer to stay, we can use your health as an excuse. In my opinion, you’re not yet stable enough, even on the insulin, to be undertaking an arduous flight and I’m sure your obstetrician would agree with me.’

From the new expressions on Lucia’s face, this suggestion was receiving a mixed reception. Paige came closer and put her arms around the woman’s narrow shoulders.

‘You’re not happy here,’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off at home? Perhaps not with your husband, but with family or friends? People you know and love? People who would care for you?’

Lucia shrugged away from her.

‘My family would say my place is with my husband,’ she said bitterly. ‘I can hear them now. My mother especially—and my sisters. It was their idea I marry, their fault, all of this.’

Paige hesitated. Lucia was emotional, but the words had more petulance than fear and, thinking of the handsome man with the dark blue eyes—remembering his genuine pain when he’d talked of Lucia’s flight—she pressed a little further.

‘Didn’t you want the marriage? Did you love someone else?’

Lucia shook her head and began to cry, silent tears sliding down her cheeks.

‘Love someone else?’ She sobbed out the words. ‘How could I when he was all I knew, the man I was destined to marry? I loved him, and only him—but he…He had different ideas about love—ideas Italian men of position held many centuries ago, not now, although I know many men cheat on their wives. When I told him I would not allow it, he laughed and said he would take a mistress if he wished for who was I to stop him?’ She sniffed, then finished with a tilt of her head, ‘So I ran away!’

Paige stared at her, unable to believe what she was hearing. Well, she could believe the arrogant man she’d met downstairs might have such antediluvian views, but that a vague and possibly teasing threat about some future indiscretion had made Lucia flee? She’d imagined assault—either physical or emotional—shuddered over her mental images of what the gentle, trusting soul might have endured. But to run away because he’d said he might take a mistress one day?

‘Go take a shower and get dressed,’ she said abruptly. ‘And while you’re in there make up your mind whether you want to see him or not. I’ll have lunch ready when you come out, then you’ll have time to see him before we do the next blood glucose test.’

Lucia grimaced but she left the sunny sitting room where she spent most of each day—lying on the couch watching soaps on TV—and turned towards the bathroom. Paige watched her go and wondered, not for the first time, what on earth had prompted her to take the girl-woman in.

Instinct.

Ironic that the same inbuilt warning system had sent up flares when she’d first seen Lucia’s husband! Only then they’d signalled ‘danger’ instead of ‘help’.

‘I will see him,’ Lucia announced when she returned, dressed in loose-fitting tan trousers and a golden yellow mohair sweater—looking stunning for all her poor health. ‘I will see him here and tell him I cannot go home.’

Paige sighed but didn’t argue, going downstairs to the kitchen and fixing a sandwich for the two of them, counting off the calories in Lucia’s meal and writing them down so she knew how many her patient-guest had eaten. In the beginning she’d tried to persuade Lucia to undertake this task for herself, but had finally given up, deciding it was more important to teach her to do her own injections and blood glucose tests.

Huh!

‘OK, your turn to do the injection.’ She said this every time and every time Lucia came up with some excuse for not taking the responsibility. Paige fitted a needle to the syringe, lifted the insulin out of the refrigerator and set it on the table. ‘Just try filling the syringe, Lucia. Pull down to the mark, stick the needle through the rubber top on the bottle and press the plunger in to release the air.’

‘I cannot touch that needle, I might injure myself!’

It was the usual argument—one they had four times a day—so both knew their part in it.

‘You can’t injure yourself if you hold it properly. Do you want to be dependent on someone else all through your pregnancy?’ Paige grinned to herself as she realised why this argument had had little effect on Lucia in the past. Given the princely husband, the younger woman had probably had swarms of servants catering to her every whim—being dependent on someone was a habit rather than a concern.

‘You do it, Paige, just today?’

The voice cajoled and the brown eyes begged.

Paige grumbled about her weakness in always giving in, and filled the syringe with the fast-acting insulin Lucia would need for her body to handle the meal she was about to eat.

‘But I’m not staying with you while you talk to him,’ Paige warned, determined to win one argument today. ‘You’ve got to see him on your own.’

Lucia didn’t argue. In fact, she smiled and looked excited, flushed with a soft and youthful radiance which made Paige feel older than her twenty-five years and unaccountably depressed as she tackled her own lunch with far less gusto than her guest.

And the depression wasn’t lifted by the stern expression on her next visitor’s face. She had sent Lucia upstairs to the sitting room and was waiting outside the house when the long black car with the consular plates drew up. Although the autumn sun was warm, she found herself shivering as he alighted. A fact that didn’t escape him.

‘You should be wearing a jacket,’ he chided, and moved towards her as if to wrap his arm around her shoulders. The cold was replaced by warmth and she dodged ahead, leading him towards the side door which led directly into her flat.

‘No wonder she ran away,’ she muttered, more to herself than him. ‘If you tell a stranger what to wear…’

‘Pardon?’

‘It was nothing.’ She reached the door and paused, then turned to face him, looking into his eyes—hoping to read his reaction to what she had to say. ‘Lucia has agreed to see you, but I’d like to say…’ The words petered out under the intensity of that blue gaze. Pull yourself together! Think of Lucia, not eyes that seem to drill into your soul. ‘She’s in a very fragile state, easily upset, both physically and emotionally. Will you remember that? Treat her gently?’

Or eyes that darken dangerously!

‘And what do you imagine I intend to do to her? Throw her over my shoulder and force her to return with me? Is that how an Australian man would behave, Miss Morgan? How you would like a man to act with you?’

Damn him—and her give-away cheeks! The image had made her go hot all over. Battling to regain control, she tried an imperious look of her own.

‘Australia has as many gentlemen as any other country, though they may not carry fancy titles, and, no, I wouldn’t expect any man to ride roughshod over a woman, but men can exert more than physical power.’

‘And women can’t?’ he countered, fixing her with a look so quizzical she wondered how she’d come to be arguing with him.

‘Just treat her gently,’ Paige said, turning abruptly away before her face betrayed even more of her inner chaos. She’d never felt such a physical reaction to another human being. For the first time in her life, she was beginning to understand what people meant when they talked about instant attraction. And sex appeal! Not only could she now accept its existence, but she had to acknowledge that this man had it by the bucket-load.

Yet his wife had run away from him.

The thought occurred to her as she walked up the stairs ahead of him, hearing his firm tread behind her, feeling his presence in the nerves down her spine, aware even of a faint whiff of some sophisticated cologne or aftershave—not a pungent or overpowering odour, but more a tantalising hint of something smooth and sleek but very masculine.

Help! Now it seemed her thoughts were doing the running away—straight into a fantasy land.

‘Lucia is inside.’

She knocked and was about to grasp the doorknob when the door flew open and a vision of loveliness in a bright mohair sweater flung herself into the waiting arms of the prince.

Which is how all good fairytales should end, Paige reminded herself as she returned to the kitchen to play Cinderella-before-the-ball, washing the lunch dishes, working out a dinner menu, wondering what she could do about arranging nutritious meals for Lucia to take on the plane if her prince insisted she return home immediately.

By the time footsteps sounded on the stairs, she’d not only organised what they’d have for dinner but had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly, written out a shopping list, contemplated polishing the silver and settled for washing the floor instead—anything to keep her mind off what might be happening upstairs.

And, no, she wouldn’t take that thought any further either!

She straightened up as the heavy footfall hesitated only fractionally at the bottom of the steps then turned unerringly towards the kitchen. One glance at the dark scowl on Marco’s face told her the reunion hadn’t gone quite the way he’d planned.

‘Lucia tells me you will explain her medical condition. She pleaded tiredness, a need to rest and, in fact, she does not look well. Is this a new game of hers or is she indeed ill?’

Paige felt the words jar against her brain.

‘She didn’t tell you?’

The scowl deepened.

‘Tell me what?’

Drat the girl? What was Paige supposed to do? Blurt out to the man that his wife was not only pregnant but suffering a complication which required a strict medical and personal regimen of care?

Marco watched the slim, pale-skinned woman pace up and down beside the kitchen table, leaving a trail of shoe prints on the floor she’d evidently just washed, and wondered what he’d said to cause so much agitation. Not that having Lucia as a house guest wasn’t enough to drive anyone to distraction. Spoilt, that’s what she was.

But this woman had seemed so sensible—so ‘together’ as he’d heard it described in English. And she’d taken Lucia in and cared for her, been kind enough to feel concern for her relatives—something which still wasn’t worrying Lucia over-much.

‘If you prefer to walk and talk, I would be glad to be outside for a while. I was cooped up in the plane, then the car journey and a hotel.’

She glanced up at him, as if surprised to hear his voice. Had she forgotten he was there—that he was waiting for an answer? Now she looked at her watch and frowned as if calculating something. How much time she could waste perhaps? How long she could procrastinate?

‘Actually, I have to be outside fairly soon anyway. I have some house calls to make, and as they’re close I usually walk.’ She smiled at him, and he caught an echo of it in her eyes and knew he’d misjudged the frown. That was a real smile, not the plastic version most women he knew could flash at will—trained by years of practice at society functions where a camera could catch any unwary facial grimace and reveal it in the daily papers.

He found himself hoping she’d smile some more during the short time they would have together.

‘I will walk with you,’ he announced, and saw her frown again, sigh, then shrug her shoulders as if she wasn’t happy about his presence but would accept it.

‘Most women would be happy to walk with me,’ he growled, riled by the reaction, but she appeared not to have heard his piqued comment. She slipped past him to the door, turning to say, ‘I’d better check on Lucia before we go.’ Then she disappeared into the passageway.

It was because he was tired that her patent lack of interest in him niggled. Although he’d had his share of attractive women as friends and lovers, he certainly didn’t expect every woman he met to fall at his feet. He glared at the empty doorway, then realised the futility of such an act and chuckled, turning his attention instead to the room where he waited.

It was attractive in a homely way—a big practical kitchen with tiled floors and stained timber cupboards and benches. A long wooden table was scarred by use, and the two comfortable armchairs pulled up close to the fuel stove hinted that this room was the real heart of the dwelling. It seemed to hold the faint echoes of happy family gatherings and the accumulated aroma of good hearty meals. Almost an Italian kitchen in its ambience, he decided, sniffing the air and touching the leaves of the herbs which flourished in pots along the windowsill.

Did this flat at the back of the health service come with Miss Morgan’s job? Did she live here alone—when she wasn’t bringing home stray runaways like Lucia?

He felt the now-familiar clutch of fear Lucia’s disappearance had caused, then said a silent prayer of thanks that she had fallen into such safe and apparently sensible hands.

‘OK, let’s go!’

The soft, slightly husky voice summoned him from the doorway. She’d pulled a padded jacket over her cream sweater and trousers and the dark green colour deepened the colour in her eyes, making them more green than gold. He’d read on the flight that green and gold were the colours of Australia, but she still didn’t match his mental image of an Australian any more than the streets she led him down, lined with trees bright with autumn leaves, fitted his notions of the land they called the sunburnt country.

He took from her the small bag she was carrying and matched her pace, walking silently, unwilling to prompt her again, thinking his own thoughts.

Paige said, ‘She’s pregnant.’

He stopped dead, forcing her to turn back to him as he stumbled into a mess of incoherent, half-formed questions.

‘She’s what? Madonna mia! How—? When—?’

Paige stared at him, unable to believe the man’s shock and disbelief.

‘How the hell do you think she got pregnant?’ she stormed. ‘And as for when, I presume it was shortly after you were married. One thing I did get out of her was the wedding date. How any man could be so insensitive as to speak of taking a mistress before he’d been married less than three months is beyond me.’

Now he looked plain bewildered.

‘Who spoke of taking a mistress?’ he asked, rubbing at his temples as if to massage his brain into working order.

‘You did—or you intimated as much!’ Paige retorted, then she looked at him again and wondered, having second thoughts. ‘Or Lucia understood that’s what you said,’ she amended.

Her explanation didn’t seem to help his confusion.

‘What, in the name of all that’s holy, have my mistresses to do with Lucia?’

It was Paige’s turn for bewilderment—only that was too weak a word. ‘Flabbergasted’ fitted better. She stared at him, carefully controlling a lower jaw which seemed inclined to drop to an open-mouthed gape of disbelief. She wanted to shake him—pummel him—felt her fingers tingle with an itch to belt some sense into him, but it was none of her business how he ran his life.

‘I’ve got patients to see,’ she muttered, turning away from him and striding down the road. He caught up in two paces, so she let him have a short blast of the anger churning inside her. ‘And if you don’t understand how a young sensitive woman like Lucia would view your behaviour—would suffer enormous anguish over it—then I’m certainly not wasting my breath telling you.’

They walked in silence for a few minutes, then he said, ‘OK, so she’s pregnant. Let’s forget the other nonsense and proceed from there. I know I reacted badly to that news. Anyone would.’

Another mind-boggling concept—and one she had to refute.

‘Not in Australia!’ Again she stopped and faced him, wondering how a man who looked so good could be so shallow and fickle and downright stupid. ‘Over here, prospective fathers are usually delighted to receive the news that their wives are pregnant. Most even put on a show of concern for them.’

His frown drew his eyebrows together in a slightly satanic manner.

‘Prospective fathers? What does the reaction of prospective fathers have to do with me?’

Paige shook her head. First a fairytale prince, now fantasy land! Did this man know nothing about the process of reproduction? Or was he assuming the child wasn’t his?

‘Lucia is eighteen weeks pregnant,’ she said carefully, wondering if, in spite of his beautifully correct use of English, he didn’t understand it as well as she’d assumed. ‘Given the date of your wedding, I would say she became pregnant in the early days of your honeymoon.’

It was his turn to do the flabbergasted act.

‘My wedding? My honeymoon? You think Lucia is my wife? That it was me she ran away from?’

Only he wasn’t flabbergasted at all. He was laughing, his head thrown back and the deep rumbles of sound echoing up into the trees.

‘Well, if you’re not her husband, who are you?’ Paige asked the question crossly, cutting across his mirth, shaken by this turn of events and by the effect of his glee on her already stretched nerves.

‘I am Marco,’ he said, with a funny little bow. ‘Lucia’s loving and long-suffering brother. And knowing that, Miss Morgan, shall we start again?’

He held out his hand in a formal gesture and, reluctantly, she took it.

‘It’s Paige, not Miss Morgan,’ she said, wondering where her voice had gone, leaving the words to falter out in a breathless undertone.

‘Now we are friends,’ he announced with complete assurance. He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. ‘Already I’ve delayed you so first we visit your patients, then we talk about Lucia, her marriage, her husband, her pregnancy and her flight. For the moment, it is enough to have seen her and know she is safe.’

Paige tried to think of some objection, considered removing her hand from the warm place where it lay—asserting her independence—but her mind had fled back to the fantasy land and it was only with a strenuous effort of will that she managed to dredge up one weak objection to his plan.

‘You can walk with me but you can’t visit my patients.’

He cocked his head to one side as he looked down at her.

‘They would not like a visit from a prince?’

His lips teased into a smile, and she shook her head, although she knew the three women she was about to see would all revel in a visit from a prince, no matter how ancient or meaningless his title was. All three were housebound and anything out of the usual could provide them with something to think and talk about for weeks to come.

‘These are medical visits,’ she said primly, not wanting to say no outright, but aware of the ethical considerations of taking strangers into her patients’ homes.

‘So a doctor could accompany you?’ he asked. ‘Even a visiting doctor?’

Her hand was feeling increasingly comfortable, and the close proximity of his body was creating havoc with her senses, so she didn’t place any importance on his questions, assuming he was making conversation. She struggled to keep her end of it going so he wouldn’t guess at her thoughts and feelings.

‘Of course, if the patients agreed to see him.’

‘Well, that is arranged,’ he said, satisfaction purring in the deep tones of his voice. ‘You will say I wish to see Australian medicine while in your country and ask if they will allow me in.’

She pulled her hand away and tucked it out of temptation’s reach in the pocket of her jacket.

‘I can’t pretend you’re a doctor just to get you inside a few Australian homes, however interested you may be. And why should you be interested anyway? The health service clients are poor people, not only poor financially but some are lacking the skills necessary to survive without help. This is not typical Australia you’d be seeing, and I don’t know that it’s right to put them…on display, I suppose, for you or anyone else.’

He didn’t reply immediately, but frowned off into the distance as if trying to work out his answer. Or perhaps thinking in Italian and translating into English. She looked at the strong profile, the dark hair brushed back but with one lock escaping control to fall across his temple.

She was glad he wasn’t married to Lucia!

Stupid thought!

‘We have poor people in Italy as well,’ he said, cutting into her self-castigation. ‘And those who are inadequately equipped in living skills as well. I would not judge your country on what I see, but, with that said, shouldn’t a country be judged on how it treats these very people? How it provides support so they can live fulfilling and worthwhile lives?’

She had to smile, having used the same argument so often herself.

‘I agree,’ she conceded, ‘but it still doesn’t make you a doctor.’

She walked on, because smiling at him—and having him smile back—had turned out to be a very bad idea.

‘But I am a doctor,’ he announced, catching up with her in three long strides and falling into step again.

Marco a doctor?

She glanced at him, at the erect carriage, the aristocratic head, and said, ‘Rubbish! You’re a prince. Mr Benelli said so, and even a girl from the back blocks of New South Wales can recognise royalty when she sees it!’

She spoke lightly, jokingly, although she half meant every word.

‘The “prince” is a an old title handed down through my family—inescapable if one is the eldest son—but it isn’t a job description, Paige Morgan, any more than “Miss” describes the work you do.’

‘You are a doctor?’

Disbelief ran riot through the question, but again he bowed just slightly in reply.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Now, should we continue this delightful chat here on the street or walk on to visit your patients?’

She walked on, remembering Lucia’s words… ‘Marco always gets his way.’