STEFANO had so much strain etched on his taut face he looked a lot older then he was. His hair was shorter now. He was a little too thin. His extrovert ebullience appeared to have deserted him. His dark eyes evaded both Milly’s gaze and Gianni’s.
Milly glanced at Gianni and just winced. The Sicilian side of Gianni’s brooding temperament was in the ascendant. He looked grim as hell, but kind of satisfied too, content that his kid brother should be nervous as a cat in his radius. Milly began to revise her assumption that she had been punished more than Stefano. The two brothers had once been pretty close. Stefano, for all his brash talk and swagger, had been heavily dependent on Gianni’s approval. And Gianni, she now recognised, had cut him loose from that support system.
Milly stood up. ‘Anybody want a drink?’ she gushed, to break the awful silence.
‘No, thanks…I need to talk,’ Stefano announced tautly.
‘We’ll talk elsewhere,’ Gianni drawled, smooth as glass, but he shot Milly a grim, assessing glance, evidently having expected her to be more discomfited by Stefano’s presence.
‘I don’t keep a hair shirt in my wardrobe,’ Milly told Gianni defiantly.
‘Milly has to be here,’ Stefano stated stiffly. ‘And you have to promise to hear me out, Gianni. I don’t care what you do afterwards, but you’ve got to give me the chance to explain things.’
‘Is there some point to that curious proviso?’ Gianni enquired very drily.
Stefano lowered his head. ‘You’re my brother and I’ve wronged you,’ he breathed tightly. ‘I’ve lied to you, deceived you, and I stood by and did nothing when I could have helped you. I followed the tabloid coverage after you got married. I found out what had happened to Milly…the hit-and-run and everything since…and I guess I just couldn’t live with myself any more.’
Milly sank back down into her chair because her knees were wobbling. As far as the two men were concerned she might as well not have been there, and if the knowledge of their marriage had scared Stefano into confession mode, she had no desire to distract him.
Gianni was very still. ‘How have you lied?’
‘About that night with Milly in New York,’ his brother said gruffly.
‘But you had no reason to lie. I saw the worst with my own eyes!’ Gianni shot back at him.
‘There’s no way you’d ever have forgiven me for what I did!’ Stefano burst out with sudden rawness. ‘You’d have thought I was some sort of pervert. I had to lie! It was me or her, surely you can see that?’
Gianni was now the colour of ash beneath his bronzed skin, his hard facial bones fiercely prominent. ‘Milly said you assaulted her…’
The silence hung like a giant sheet of glass, ready to crash.
Milly cleared her throat and spoke up. ‘Stefano told me he loved me. He was drunk. I was feeling sick and I told him to go home,’ she explained. ‘I heard the front door slam while I was in the bathroom. I thought he’d left…’
‘I opened the door and then I changed my mind,’ the younger man mumbled.
‘So I got into bed and went to sleep.’
Gianni scrutinised her taut face and then focused with mounting incredulity on his brother.
‘I saw her sleeping. I just wanted to kiss her. That’s all. I swear!’ Stefano protested, weak as water now beneath the appalled look of menace and disgust flaring in Gianni’s diamond-hard eyes.
‘I think maybe you thought that if you kissed me, you’d be able to prove that I could respond to you,’ Milly countered with contempt. ‘You were angry with me. I’d dented your ego, and just for that you frightened the life out of me!’
‘I was drunk as a skunk…I hardly knew what I was doing!’
Gianni’s hands coiled into powerful punitive fists, and as he absorbed his kid brother’s mute terror a look of very masculine revulsion crossed his lean, strong face. ‘Accidenti…I wonder how many sex offenders say that.’
Milly sprang upright again, her fine features flushed with turbulent emotion, and suddenly she was erupting like a volcano. ‘You needn’t sound so blasted pious!’ she fired bitterly at Gianni. ‘If Stefano had been a rapist, you’d have given him open house. You just walked out and left me with him!’
Beneath the bite of that derisive attack Gianni froze, to stare back at Milly with stricken eyes.
Stefano’s shoulders slumped as he too looked at Milly. ‘I didn’t mean to terrify you, but when you woke up you went crazy, like you were being attacked—’
‘She was being attacked,’ Gianni slotted in from between clenched teeth, his Sicilian accent thick as molasses as he visibly struggled to control his own rising fury. ‘When you touch a woman without her consent, it’s an assault.’
‘I panicked! When you saw us, I was only trying to hold her still until she calmed down—’
‘How the bloody hell do you expect me to believe that?’ Gianni roared at the younger man in savage interruption. ‘You are one sick bastard! Per meraviglia, you came to me that night in tears, sobbing out your penitence, telling me how you couldn’t resist her, insinuating that she had led you on. It wasn’t enough that you had assaulted a pregnant woman; you then chose to destroy our relationship to save your own useless hide!’
Stefano stumbled back against the desk for support. ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant then, Gianni. I’d never, ever have touched her if I’d known that! Dio mio…I pulled a crazy stunt and I frightened her, but I honestly didn’t mean to!’
Milly studied the younger man with unconcealed scorn. ‘I might be impressed by that defence if you’d thought better of your lies once you’d had time to appreciate what you’d done. But even weeks after that night in New York, you were still determined to keep on lying!’
Gianni’s winged brows pleated. ‘Are you saying that you saw Stefano after that night?’ Gianni looked dazed.
‘Gianni, once you asked me what I was doing in Cornwall three years ago. I’ll tell you now. I went there to confront Stefano,’ Milly stated crisply. ‘I took a lot of trouble to find him. In the end I had to contact his girlfriend’s mother and pretend to be a friend of hers to find out where they were staying.’
Stefano was now staring fixedly at the rug.
‘You went to Cornwall to see him? Why?’ Gianni’s open bewilderment told her that shock had deprived him of his usual ability to add two and two.
‘Milly wanted me to tell you the truth.’ Stefano spoke up again in a sudden rush. ‘She tried to shame me into it by telling me that she was pregnant, but I already knew that by then because you’d told me. I was furious she had tracked me down. I didn’t want anything to do with her in case you found out. You might’ve started doubting my story, maybe thinking that we’d been having an affair…’
‘Per amor di Dio…’ Gianni gazed with incredulous dark eyes at his trembling kid brother, and then he simply turned his back.
‘When I arrived at the cottage, Stefano had been drowning his sorrows again,’ Milly revealed ruefully. ‘He’d had a row with his girlfriend and she’d taken their hire car and driven back to London to fly home, leaving him stranded.’
‘It was too late to tell the truth! I was in too deep by then. There was nothing else to do but face it out!’ Stefano protested weakly.
Gianni’s dark, haunted eyes were fixed to Milly. ‘Tell me that the night you’re referring to was not the same night that you were hit by that car!’ he urged, almost pleadingly.
‘It was that night.’ Milly shrugged fatalistically. ‘I’d gone to the cottage in a taxi and then let it go.’
As Gianni rounded on Stefano, the younger man backed away, looking sick as a dog. ‘Until I read about the hit-and-run in the papers last week, I didn’t know what had happened to Milly that night! How could I have known? She just walked out on me. For all I knew she had a car parked further up the road—’
‘You didn’t give a damn either way,’ Milly condemned helplessly. ‘In a twisted way, you had started to blame me for the mess you were in with Gianni!’
‘I called a cab the next morning and flew back to New York,’ Stefano continued woodenly, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I had no idea that Milly had been injured after leaving the cottage.’
‘But within days you were well aware that I was frantically trying to find her.’ Gianni’s tone was one of savage disbelief. ‘Yet not one word did you breathe! You could have told me you’d seen her in Cornwall but you didn’t. I spent months searching France for her. By then she had been wrongly identified as another woman.’
‘I knew nothing about any of that,’ Stefano reiterated, perspiration beading his strained face. ‘And if I’m here now, it’s because I couldn’t stand all this on my conscience any more.’
‘No, you’re here now because Milly’s my wife,’ Gianni delivered with chillingly soft exactitude. ‘Because you assumed I might already know all this, and the idea of confessing all and throwing yourself on my mercy seemed like the only option you had left.’
‘That’s not how it was, Gianni.’ Stefano had turned a ghastly colour.
‘Your conscience got to you too late. You hurt Milly not once, but twice. You also cost me the first years of my son’s life,’ Gianni condemned with lethal menace. ‘But what I can never, ever forgive is my own mistake, Stefano. I put family loyalty first. And here you are, our father all over again. Weak, dishonest, unscrupulous. It’s a just reward for my stupidity, isn’t it?’
Looking at Gianni, Stefano seemed to crumple entirely. ‘I’m not like that. I’m not. I’ve changed a whole lot since then. I had to lie… I was so scared—’
Gianni said something cold in Italian.
Stefano was openly begging now. ‘How was I supposed to admit the truth, knowing that you’d kill me? Do you think I didn’t realise that she came first with you when I saw how you reacted at the apartment? It was her or me…you’ve got to see that!’
Milly did not feel sorry for Stefano, but she was squirming for him. His best quality had always been the depth of his attachment to Gianni. He had always been measuring himself up against Gianni. He had probably developed a crush on her for the same reason. But alcohol, arrogance and sheer stupidity had combined to tear Stefano’s privileged little world apart. He had been terrified that night in New York after Gianni had walked out on them both, terrified that Gianni, who had been more father than brother to him, would disown him.
‘Go home, Stefano,’ Milly suggested wearily.
Gianni said nothing. It was as if Stefano had become invisible. His brother slung him one last pleading glance and then hurried out of the room.
A hollow laugh that startled Milly was wrenched from Gianni then. ‘Porca miseria! To think I was jealous of that pathetic little punk!’
‘Jealous?’ Milly parroted in astonishment. ‘Of Stefano?’
Gianni half spread expressive brown hands and then clenched them tight into defensive fists, his strong profile rigid as steel. He swallowed hard. ‘Yes. Long before that night I saw you together at the apartment, I was very jealous,’ he bit out raggedly.
Milly was stunned by that revelation. ‘I can’t believe that… I mean, why on earth—?’
‘You had a bond with him. You talked about things I was totally out of touch with…house music, clubs. You used the same street dialect, shared the same in jokes,’ Gianni enumerated with harsh emphasis. ‘You were the same generation. I introduced you to dinner dates, antiques and art galleries, and occasionally you were bored out of your skull and I knew it.’
Milly was savaged by that shattering outpouring of feelings she would never have dreamt Gianni could experience. Insecurity, vulnerability concerning the age-gap between them. ‘You couldn’t expect us to share every taste, every interest…’
‘I didn’t feel that way until Stefano came into the picture.’
‘I thought you were pleased we got on so well.’
‘Sure I was pleased.’ Gianni’s agreement was raw with self-contempt. ‘I’d ring you from the other side of the world and in the background my kid brother would be cracking jokes and making you laugh. I was eaten with jealousy and there was nothing I could do about it.’ He moved restively about the room like a trapped animal, forced to pace round a too small cage. ‘But until that night I saw you with him I knew it was all in my own mind; I knew I was being unreasonable!’
Suddenly Milly was grasping why Gianni had been so quick to believe her capable of betraying him. Jealousy rigidly suppressed—a fertile and dangerous breeding ground for distrust and suspicion. Yet she had never suspected that Gianni was jealous. Once he had even told her that he was grateful she had Stefano for company. His ferocious pride had ensured he went to great lengths to conceal his own weakness.
‘I was planning to surprise you that night. I was in a really good mood. But I went haywire when I saw you on our bed with Stefano. That was my every worst fear come true. If I had stayed one second longer I would’ve torn him apart with my bare hands!’ Gianni asserted in a smouldering undertone, ashen pale. ‘I couldn’t stand to even look at you. So I didn’t.’
So I didn’t. He always protected himself from what he didn’t want to deal with emotionally.
‘As usual, you took the easy out,’ Milly sighed with immense regret.
The sudden silence seemed to swell.
‘It wasn’t the easy way out, cara mia,’ Gianni contradicted from between bloodlessly compressed lips, feverish colour scoring his stunning cheekbones.
Milly hardened herself to the distinct shock spreading in the dark, deep flashing eyes pinned to hers. Now that the truth had come out, she wasn’t prepared to allow him to duck that issue. ‘Gianni, most men would’ve confronted us there and then. It’s all right saying that you might have ripped Stefano apart. Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less what you did to him that night! No, it was what you did afterwards that destroyed us.’
Gianni’s breathing pattern fractured audibly. ‘His lies destroyed us.’
‘No. Your refusal to see me again did that,’ Milly countered painfully, her blue eyes saddened. ‘And I’m not interested in what you thought I’d done. I’d been with you for two years and I was carrying your child. I had the right to expect a meeting with you. But what did you do? You wouldn’t even take a call from me and then you took off to the Caribbean with another woman!’
Gianni latched on to that last condemnation with something very much like relief. ‘Accidenti, you don’t need to worry about that!’ he assured her. ‘We never actually made it between the same sheets. When it came down to it, I wasn’t interested.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Milly groaned, refused to be sidetracked into betraying the pleasure she’d received from that information. ‘The point is that you let me down by refusing to face up to the situation between us.’
‘Let me get this straight, cara mia,’ Gianni breathed raggedly, as if she had suddenly discharged a shotgun into his back, brilliant eyes burning in stark golden disbelief. ‘You’re accusing me…Gianni D’Angelo…of running away like a spineless little jerk!’
Milly winced.
‘Only you were trying to wrap it up a bit!’ Gianni grated, outraged by her silence.
‘Why did you take so long to tell Stefano that I was pregnant?’
Disconcerted, Gianni frowned. ‘It was private, no business of his.’
‘He’s your brother.’
‘When I hadn’t yet decided how I intended to resolve the situation, I wasn’t prepared to discuss it with anybody but you,’ Gianni framed impressively.
‘And not even with me if you could help it,’ Milly tacked on helplessly. ‘You spent that time trying to decide whether to keep me or dump me, didn’t you?’
Gianni glowered at her. ‘Dio…it wasn’t like that at all!’
‘The speed with which you grabbed the first excuse you had to ditch me isn’t in your favour,’ Milly informed him.
‘At the time, I was thinking of marrying you!’
‘Thinking?’ Milly repeated, unimpressed. ‘Only it never got further than that. I trusted you. I relied on you. I loved you for two years and yet it still wasn’t enough to convince you that we had something that it might have been worth trying to save.’ Feeling her eyes smarting with oversensitive tears, Milly started to twist away.
Gianni reached out for her and pulled her into his arms, refusing to be held at bay by her resistance. ‘Don’t tear us apart with this,’ he said unevenly. ‘I made some mistakes. OK, I made a bloody huge mistake, but the minute I found out that you’d left Paris, I began looking for you.’
Milly was mutinous, unreachable. ‘Because you had your child as an excuse. If it hadn’t been for Connor, I’d still be out there, lost!’
‘You’re getting very worked up about this. You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Gianni told her with stubborn conviction. ‘OK, I didn’t behave the way I should have after that business with Stefano, but once I came to terms with that—’
‘Can’t you even admit that you were hurt, like anybody else would?’ Milly demanded emotionally, watching his devastatingly handsome features freeze and aching at the knowledge that he still wouldn’t lower his barriers and let her in. ‘Or did you stick me in a little compartment and just close the lid? Did you even manage to deal with it at all?’
Gianni’s lean hands slid from her with a pronounced jerk. ‘I’m going out for a while.’
‘No, you are not! You walk out of this house now and you’ll find barricades up when you try to walk back!’ Milly warned him furiously.
‘You are really angry with me right now. I have got nothing to say in my own defence,’ Gianni spelt out thickly, rigid as a block of wood facing a very hungry bonfire. ‘You haven’t even given me the chance to apologise for misjudging you!’
‘I don’t want an apology. I accept that it looked bad for me that night. I accept that you were already jealous and so that much more likely to misinterpret what you saw. I even accept that Stefano is a convincing liar, and that you trusted him more than you could trust me.’
Gianni elevated an ebony brow with the kind of attitude that made her want to strangle him, stunning dark eyes coolly enquiring. ‘So what can’t you accept?’
‘An emotional vacuum when we could have so much more!’ she responded tautly.
‘Enough is never enough for you, is it?’
‘I’m not playing our marriage by your rules any more. Once I took all the risks, once I was the one who always went out on a limb…now it’s your turn. I think I might enjoy seeing how good you are at expressing anything without sex.’
‘Probably pretty hopeless,’ Gianni admitted, disconcerting her. ‘You want to humiliate me to pay me back for not believing in you three years ago.’
‘Gianni…do you really think I’d do that to you?’
Gianni swung on his heel and strode out of the room. Milly emitted a strangled sob, suddenly wondering where all those crazy demands had come from and whether there was a certain unlovely grain of truth in his contention that she was trying to extract revenge.
She rubbed her eyes, knew she was smearing mascara everywhere, and finally she went off in search of Connor to console herself. But Gianni had got there first. He was in the playroom, sitting on the carpet in front of their son.
‘Does she ask you how you’re feeling all the time?’ Gianni was asking broodingly while he set out Connor’s toy train set. ‘Does she want to know your every thought too?’
Connor gave him a winsome smile. ‘Biscuit?’ he said hopefully.
‘Yes, I suspect that when you share your thoughts with Mamma it works very much to your advantage. Instant wish-fulfilment,’ Gianni breathed reflectively. ‘Do you think it could work that way for me?’
Milly reeled back against the wall outside the room and struggled to contain her laughter. But they looked so sweet together. Gianni chatting away, Connor giving up on the biscuit idea and getting down to play trains with all the accompanying choo-choo noises.
An hour later, Gianni walked into their bedroom. Fresh out of the shower, wrapped only in a towel, Milly fell still. Gianni sent her a disturbingly wolfish grin, exuding confidence in megawaves. ‘Right, what do you want me to start talking about?’
‘Us?’ she practically whispered.
Gianni breathed in deep.
The silence was thunderous.
Milly couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Why did you keep the house in Paris?’
‘If you had ever decided to come back, you had to have somewhere to come back to,’ Gianni pointed out levelly.
‘But in all this time you hadn’t changed anything at all!’
Gianni shrugged. ‘Yes, I kept it like a shrine.’
Milly was poleaxed.
‘When I wanted to feel close to you, I went there and sat for a while. I never stayed over. I used a hotel. Next question,’ Gianni encouraged, as if he was competing in a fast and furious game.
‘If you weren’t able to talk to me like this before, how are you managing it now?’ Milly whispered, wide-eyed.
‘I’ve got to trust you. You’re my wife.’ Gianni breathed rather jerkily, as if that question had gone a little too deep.
Milly sighed. ‘I’ve been so stupid. You wouldn’t share things before because you thought I’d succumbed to Stefano.’
‘I was protecting myself. I’ve probably protected myself more with you than any other woman,’ Gianni admitted tautly, his strong facial bones now taut beneath his bronzed skin. ‘Right from the start, I was vulnerable with you. Every time I walked away, I seemed to double back. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t in full control.’
‘But you were when you kept quiet?’
‘It wasn’t deliberate.’ Gianni grimaced, his wide, sensual mouth tightening. ‘You’re always analysing emotions. I had learned to tune mine out and I was basically quite content like that. And when I met you you made it easy for me to go on that way. You knew what I wanted or what I didn’t want before I had to say it. I didn’t have to make an effort until you told me you were pregnant, and then you suddenly went silent and we were in trouble. One voice became no voice, cara mia.’
Milly was shaken by a truth she had never faced before.
‘I’d always tried to show you that I cared, but all of a sudden that didn’t seem to be enough. I really felt the change in you. I kept stalling on asking you to marry me,’ he confessed ruefully. ‘I didn’t want you to say yes just because of the baby. I could see you weren’t happy. That’s why I became so jealous of Stefano. The cracks had appeared before he came along.’
‘Yes,’ Milly acknowledged, shaken yet again by his ability to put matters in their proper context. She had been different those last few months. ‘I felt very insecure.’
‘So you stopped telling me you loved me.’ Gianni released a rather hollow laugh. ‘You got me hooked on you saying it all the time and then you stopped. Considering that I never returned the favour, you had remarkable staying power, but I did wonder what was going on with you. I thought possibly you blamed me for getting you pregnant—’
‘Oh, no!’ Milly was pained by that misconception.
‘So I tried not to mention the baby too much. I felt guilty. Of course I did,’ Gianni shared heavily. ‘I think I took those risks with you because on a subconscious level I was trying to push myself into making a real commitment to you.’
‘But you were so upset when I told you I was pregnant.’
‘I was scared I wouldn’t live up to the challenge of being a parent,’ Gianni admitted grimly.
‘Gianni, you’re a wonderful father,’ Milly told him hotly.
‘I’m learning.’ Gianni shrugged, as if she had embarrassed him, brilliant beautiful dark eyes glimmering. ‘You were right downstairs. I did let you down three years ago. I’m not proud of my behaviour. I’m ashamed that I listened to my brother instead of you. But I knew I could cope with him and I wasn’t at all sure I could cope with you. And that word “hurt” doesn’t cover what I was going through at the time.’
‘I know.’ Milly closed the distance between them to slide her arms round his lean hard body and feel her own heart beating as fast as a war drum.
‘No, for once I don’t think you do know,’ Gianni countered almost roughly, framing her cheekbones with possessive hands. ‘When I saw you with Stefano it was like somebody had taken my entire life and just blown it away. You had become so much a part of me that being without you was like being torn violently in two. And the half of me that was left was barely functioning afterwards.’
Milly stared up at him with mesmerised blue eyes.
‘It took me a long time to fall in love, and it took even longer for me to realise that I did love you.’ Gianni studied her with a raw intensity of unashamed emotion that touched her to the heart. ‘And by the time I got the message, you’d vanished.’
‘You loved me…’ A strangled sob escaped Milly. She was overwhelmed by the poignancy of that confession, three years too late. ‘Oh, that’s awful!’
Gianni stooped to lift her up into his arms and carry her over to the bed. ‘I’m only expecting to talk,’ he told her loftily. ‘I only want to comfort you.’
He held her close and her towel slipped. He watched the full swell of her pale breasts rise and fall with the rapidity of her breathing and an earthy groan was suddenly wrenched from him.
‘I haven’t really got that much more to talk about,’ Gianni added in roughened continuation. ‘You already know just how determined I was to get you back once I found you again.’
‘You wanted Connor.’
‘Behind every terrified male lurks a big liar,’ Gianni shared, splaying long fingers satisfyingly wide over her slim hips and easing her into the hard cradle of his long, powerful thighs. I told you it was Connor I was really after. I told myself it was only sex I was after. I kept on telling myself that I couldn’t trust you and then kept on forgetting it. But what I really wanted was everything back the way it was.’
‘Your proposal really offended and hurt me…’ Milly planted a fleeting kiss to his stubborn jawline.
‘So I was trying to be cool. I didn’t want to serve myself up on a plate. I certainly didn’t want you to know that I was desperate for you to agree because I still loved you. I was trying not to admit that even to myself at that stage.’
‘Oh, Gianni…’ Milly sighed ecstatically. ‘That’s all I ever wanted, you know.’
‘You put me through more hoops than a circus trainer,’ Gianni growled feelingly. ‘You really were that basic. When I did what you wanted, I was rewarded. When I didn’t, I got time out as punishment. The first six months I was with you was like living in an earthquake zone.’
Milly ran a hand with provocative intent along the extended length of one lean, muscular thigh and watched his wonderful eyes narrow to a sexy shimmer of wildly appreciative gold. ‘But I always loved you,’ she said winsomely in her own favour.
‘I adore you,’ Gianni groaned with a slight shudder. ‘You’re gorgeous and smart and sexy and demanding—’
‘Very,’ she asserted.
‘I’ll never let anything or anybody hurt you again.’ The most soul-destroyingly beautiful smile curved Gianni’s mouth as he looked down at her.
Her heart tilted on its axis, but she knew she still had something important to say. ‘But you still have to look after your brother,’ she told him gently.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Gianni demanded, staggered by that assertion.
‘He was acting like a guy on the edge of a breakdown today, and deep down inside you know he needs you to sort him out. I know the way he was behaving makes you cringe,’ Milly continued, with lashings of soothing understanding in her steady gaze, ‘but you’re all he’s got, so he’s your responsibility.’
‘You couldn’t possibly forgive him for what he did!’
‘Three years ago, for the space of a minute, he give me a really bad scare…but afterwards he was much more scared than I was. Really scared people are not naturally noble or strong or honest. Think it over.’
‘How come you’re so compassionate about him but so tough on me?’
‘You’re like a great big thriving jungle plant and he’s more of a stunted seedling that needs help and encouragement to grow.’
Gianni flung his well-shaped head back on the pillows, dark eyes glinting with appreciation and amusement. ‘You really know how to massage a guy’s ego, cara mia.’
‘Yours…oh, yes.’
‘Did you realise that I was incredibly hungry the night you dumped that apple thing in Paris?’
‘No, but I’m glad to hear it.’
‘You can make it again for me.’
‘Maybe…’ Milly parted her lips with a shiver of delicious expectancy as his sensual mouth drifted downward.
Gianni stilled. ‘I don’t think we’re likely to have a problem in the communication department again,’ he proclaimed with satisfaction.
Tempted to tell him that she’d listened to him rehearsing with their son, Milly reared up, pushed his powerful shoulders back to the pillows and moaned in near desperation. ‘Please shut up and kiss me!’
Six days later, on Christmas Eve, Milly watched Gianni finish reading a story about Santa Claus and his reindeer to Connor. He was able to answer all Connor’s questions. Not a bad performance for a male who had never known a real Christmas as a child, Milly reflected with shimmering eyes.
After tucking their drowsy son in, Gianni straightened with a wry grin. ‘We’ll never get him to bed this early next year. He’ll understand much more than he does now.’
They went downstairs together. Milly thought over the past week. It had been very eventful. All the publicity generated by their marriage and her mistaken identification as Faith Jennings had had stunning results as far as the Jennings family were concerned. Their long-lost daughter had written her parents a tentative letter from her home in the north of Scotland.
Divorced, and with three young children, the real Faith had admitted that the longer time went on the more difficult she had found it to get back in touch. They had since talked on the phone and were planning to meet in the New Year. Robin and Davina were anxious about how that reunion might go, but determined to be accepting of their adult daughter’s independence. Milly believed it would be a happy reunion, because Faith had sounded rather lonely in her letter.
Gianni had also gone to see Stefano. They had talked. Gianni had emerged from that discussion feeling rather guilty, never having quite appreciated just how much Stefano relied on his approval, or indeed how devastated Stefano had been when Gianni had stopped treating him like a brother and given him only financial support. It was early days yet, but Milly reckoned that the healing process had started.
Gianni surveyed the drawing room of Heywood House. All the formality and the cool elegance had been banished. In all the rooms Milly used seasonal throws, glittery embellishments, festive padded cushions, unsophisticated homemade log, autumn leaf and berry arrangements and streams of paper chains ruled. Gianni even had to suffer a large fluffy Santa Claus toy on his library desk.
And he just loved it all, he acknowledged with a rueful smile of appreciation. He just loved the rich colour and warmth she brought into her surroundings, her innate ability to transform a house into a real home. He set a small parcel wrapped in beautiful paper down in front of her. ‘You get your real presents tomorrow, but this is just a trifle I picked up ages ago,’ he admitted, half under his breath.
Milly ripped off the paper and found herself looking at a delicate golden angel inside a crystal snowstorm on an ornate base. ‘Oh, Gianni…’ she sighed extravagantly. ‘This is exquisite! Where did you get it?’
‘New York.’
‘But you haven’t been there since—’
‘Last year,’ Gianni admitted, bracing himself.
‘But you hadn’t even found me then!’ Milly gasped, instantly leaping up to envelop him in frantic hugs and kisses.
As desire flashed between them to instantaneous heat, Milly jerked back a step. ‘Sometimes I love you so much it just hurts, but we still have a sooty bootprint to make on the hearth, so that Connor can see which chimney Santa Claus used as an entrance,’ she explained apologetically.
‘Maybe with the number of chimneys we’ve got we should put a flag on the roof so that the old guy doesn’t get confused,’ Gianni suggested deadpan as he curved her smoothly back into the possessive circle of his arms, knowing that bootprints could be faked after midnight as well as before it.
‘Magic, doesn’t need flags, Gianni!’
Against the backdrop of the flickering firelight and the glittering tree, Gianni scanned her wide, loving smile with softened dark eyes and pulled her close. ‘You’re the magic in my life, cara mia. I love you.’