NIC THREW HIMSELF back into the chair behind his desk in his office, his face still thunderous. But his anger was at himself now. How had he lost it like that? What help was that? To let rip as he had?
He swore, descriptively and crudely, and was glad no one could hear him.
Yet for all the anger targeted at himself for losing his rag like that, and the guilt that he had done so to a pregnant woman, he knew that his hackles were still up. And he could find no way to lower them.
He didn’t want to marry her.
Correction, I don’t want to marry the woman she is—Donna Francesca di Ristori! Who comes with a whole baggage train of relatives I want nothing to do with, who’ll be appalled and dismayed at her marriage to me.
His face tautened. It was who she was that was the problem. The very person she was....
In his head, fleetingly, like smoke from a campfire, memory caught. Once she had not been that person. Once she had been someone quite, quite different.
He pushed it away. She had never been that person—never. She had only ever been the person she was. The person he deplored, wished with all his being she was not.
Grimly, he stared out into the emptiness of his office, at the papal splendour he’d acquired second-hand, with money. In his mind’s eye he saw the Marchese’s grand apartment, resplendent with historic inherited possessions, each one ramming home to him the difference between them—between the Marchese’s daughter and the self-made billionaire from the back streets of Rome.
Privilege—the privilege of birth and an effortlessly inherited right of wealth and nobility and social prominence, taking it all for granted.
That was her world. Not his.
Roughly, he reached for his computer, flicking it on. What point was there in dwelling on what could not be changed? He had work to do.
His mouth twisted and he started to bury himself in the day’s business.
How long he worked he was not aware. He was aware only that his PA was coughing nervously at his office doorway.
‘Signor Falcone, there is a visitor.’
His head lifted from his focus on his screen, brows beetling. A sense of déjà vu hit him—how his PA had a mere forty-eight hours ago announced the illustrious Conte di Mantegna, who had come strolling in to blow his world apart.
‘Who?’ he demanded tersely.
‘Dottore Ristori,’ his PA said cautiously, reading his grim mood.
Nic stilled. OK, so she wanted to play it that way, did she? Pretend she wasn’t who she was.
He sat back in his chair, curtly indicating that she be shown in.
Fran walked in, still in the same outfit she’d had on when he’d arrived at the Marchese’s apartment. But her face was set and strained.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said without preamble.
He’d risen to his feet automatically and now came around his desk, indicating the pair of gilded fauteuils that flanked a small ormolu table where he received his informal appointments. He became conscious that he was feeling as warily constrained as he had been when her ex-fiancé had walked in as if he owned the place.
His expression closed, guarded, he waited to hear what she had to say. Giving nothing away until she had spoken.
She sat herself down on one of the chairs, set her handbag on the delicate table. He took the other chair. For a moment, a measurable passage of time, she said nothing. But her face was still drawn.
Something moved in Nic, but he quelled it. He wanted to know what she had to say.
A moment later she had said it—and it silenced him.
‘Why do you hate me so much now, Nic?’
The words fell into the space between them.
He stiffened, and frowned. Whatever he had been expecting, it had not been that.
‘I don’t hate you.’ His voice was clipped and tight.
She shook her head, rejecting his denial. ‘Nic, your hostility to me is radiating off you like a star going supernova. I might think it’s just because I’m pregnant, and the news is as unwelcome to you as I always knew it was going to be. Which is why I’m cursing Cesare for interfering, telling you what I knew you would not want to know. But it’s not just that, is it? It’s been like that ever since Cesare and Vito did their Begone, lowly peasant! routine on you at that wretched roof party.’
She took a razored breath. It had taken all her nerve to come here and confront Nic like this, but she was making herself do it. If their marriage—if it ever happened!—was to have any chance at all, she had to confront him now, not let it fester.
I won’t have that! I won’t have him bristling at me, blaming me, resenting me.
‘So tell me, Nic. Tell me to my face. Why are you so damn angry with me?’ She took another shuddering breath, leaning forward now. ‘That night you blame me for—I wasn’t damn well throwing myself at you. All I wanted, Nic, was to make peace with you. Because, like I said to you at the time, we had parted friends. So I don’t see why discovering that both of us have other identities has made everything so damn difficult between us. I want you to explain that, Nic, I really do.’
She fell back, breathless, lungs heaving.
He’d heard her out, but she could see in the tense, taut features of his face that a nerve was ticking at his cheekbone, indicating the self-control he was exerting. She didn’t care—she was beyond caring. She’d forced herself here and now she wanted answers. Answers she hadn’t got that night at his hotel. She wanted to give a hysterical laugh. The night that had resulted in her presence here now.
He looked at her. Looked with those blue, blue eyes that had once poured all his hot desire into hers, but now which were as chill as Arctic ice, as remote as the upper layers of the atmosphere before it dissipated into black frozen space.
‘It’s very simple,’ he said. ‘I don’t like who you are.’
She stared at him. ‘I don’t understand...’ she said faintly.
He gave a rasp in his throat. ‘I don’t like everything you stand for!’ he spelt out. ‘I don’t like the world you come from. I don’t like the world any of you come from. I don’t like your precious ex-fiancé, the illustrious Conte di Mantegna, and I don’t like the man his wife is related to—that pampered playboy Vito Viscari, who had everything handed to him on a plate without working for it, without effort, without anything other than being born to it. I don’t like anything about that world and I want nothing to do with it. But I’m going to have to.’ His voice hardened. ‘Because I have to marry you.’
She was silent, hearing him out. Then, in a low, emotional voice she said, ‘I can’t help who I am, Nic, any more than you can.’ Her gaze flickered. ‘And if you want my reply, I can tell you something as well.’ She took a breath. ‘I don’t like the man you are, Nicolo Falcone. I don’t like him at all, and I don’t want to marry him.’
She got up, her hand splayed over her abdomen in an instinctive protective gesture. She could feel her blood surging in her veins, feel adrenaline pushing it around, and there was a tightness in her lungs, a sickness in her very being.
She looked at him. He hadn’t stood up when she had, and he seemed to be frozen in his seat. Her eyes rested on him. It was strange... He looked so like Nic, the man she had known long ago. Nic Rossi, with his easy laugh and his laid-back charm and the teasing humour in his smile. But he wasn’t that man at all.
‘We’re strangers,’ she said quietly. ‘And strangers should never marry.’ She took a breath. ‘Goodbye, Nic.’
Her hand pressed on her body, where their baby, secret and silent, lived and grew. She would have to sort something out eventually, but not now.
‘We’ll share custody, Nic—somehow, when the time comes. But I can’t cope with that right now. I can’t cope with anything.’
She looked at him, and something like a shard of glass pierced her. She did not let herself feel it.
‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘Please don’t try and stop me.’
He didn’t. He let her go. Let her walk out of his office, his space, his life.
Taking their child with her.
And he could not move. Not a muscle.