SAM jerked back in her seat as though someone had struck her.
‘You still want me to marry you?’ She gasped hoarsely.
Cesare gave a fluid shrug. ‘Why not? You are carrying my child, Samantha. Nothing has changed except your ability to support yourself.’ He angled an enquiring brow and tilted his head to one side in a listening attitude.
Sam would have given anything to tell him it didn’t matter, that losing her job made no difference—but it did.
She glanced down at the hand laid against her still-flat belly. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ She chewed absently on her lower lip and sighed. ‘It’s ironic, really—I thought for a second you might have been here to suggest…’
Sam stopped, very conscious that he was alert to every nuance in her voice. He seemed to possess the disturbing ability to hear not only what a person said, but also what they didn’t say.
‘You thought I was going to suggest what?’
The admission came out in a defiant rush. ‘I thought you might not want me to go ahead with the pregnancy.’
He looked blank for a moment. ‘Not…’ Then he froze.
Sam watched the dark colour run up under his skin, deepening his naturally dark complexion and then receding, leaving him deadly pale.
With unwilling fascination she watched his chest lift as he struggled to contain the outrage that was written into every hard line of his expressive face.
When he finally spoke his low voice vibrated with the strength of his feelings. ‘Dio Mio, you thought that I would ask you to terminate the pregnancy?’ He broke off and slid into a flood of extremely angry-sounding Italian.
Sam stubbornly struggled to cling to the shreds of her defiance in face of his display of incandescent rage. ‘I can see how it would seem like a solution to you.’ She winced, thinking that she sounded like a sulky, petulant child. Why, she despaired, did she always end up feeling as though she was at fault where he was concerned?
Cesare’s nostrils flared as he sucked in a deep breath. It was nice to know what a high opinion she had of him. ‘You see nothing, cara!’ he ground from between clenched teeth. ‘Except what you wish to see! I am the bad man in your story, but this is not a story and if it was it would not belong to you alone.’
‘Very cryptic. Are you trying to make a point?’ she challenged.
He inclined his dark head in a jerky motion. ‘This is our story…our child. And a child needs two parents.’
‘They generally have two. It isn’t optional, unlike marriage.’ She jumped to her feet to put some distance between them and began to pace the room angrily.
‘There is no need to bounce around in that emotional way.’
‘I’ll be as emotional as I like,’ she retorted.
‘This marriage will be a paper arrangement…’
She cut across him shrilly. ‘You’re talking as if it is inevitable and, anyway, what are you talking about…paper arrangement?’
‘Marriages do not have to be for ever.’
His own parents’ marriage had not been. His father—a serial adulterer—had walked out on Cesare’s tenth birthday and the contact with his absent parent during the rest of his childhood had been limited to Christmas cards and the odd birthday present—usually a month or so late.
Cesare was determined that his own son would never be the little boy inventing the marvellous trips his father had taken him on to friends who had full-time fathers. His mother had done her best, but once she had remarried her new family—including three younger half-sisters—had obviously been the main focus of her attention.
Cesare had never quite belonged.
Sam stopped within a foot of his chair and said wistfully, ‘I’d rather thought my marriage would last the test of time. Of course a man who is willing to take on another man’s child might not be so easy to find.’
Cesare was silent as the words sank in—another man bringing up his child. Another man sharing a bed with Samantha.
The pressure in his temples increased, the dull throb became a deafening pounding.
But there was no hint of fury in his voice when he responded coldly, ‘I hardly think now is the moment to be emotional.’ The need to get his point across was more important than recognising the hypocrisy of the criticism. ‘I am offering you a practical solution. Life as a single parent is not a bed of roses.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ she snapped, angry because he had neatly tapped directly into the escalating anxieties that were giving her nightmares. She had no job, the rent on her flat was astronomical and the place was not suitable for a baby, let alone a small child. What Cesare was offering, as cold, clinical and unpalatable as it seemed, would solve all her immediate problems.
She was well aware that most women in her situation would not view being offered marriage by an eligible billionaire as a problem. She should be thinking of the baby as he was, not herself. It wasn’t as if he wanted to be saddled with a wife, but he was prepared to make that sacrifice.
‘You cannot support even yourself.’
She pushed aside her tortured reflections and threw him a humourless smile. ‘I see you prescribe to the kick-them-when-they’re-down school of thought.’ On anyone else the dark line scoring the razor-edged angle of his incredible cheekbones might have been suggestive of embarrassment, but he wasn’t anyone else and she seriously doubted if he stocked the sentiment. ‘Thanks for the concern, Cesare,’ she said, laying on the insincerity with a trowel. ‘But I’ll…we’ll manage.’ Even she could hear the note of hysterical uncertainty in her voice.
His lips curled as he directed a black stare of hauteur in her direction. ‘I do not wish my child to manage. I wish my child to have a stable upbringing, a father….’
‘And you think I don’t.’
His dark lashes lowered, brushing his cheeks. ‘A mother should put the needs of her child ahead of her own wishes.’
Sam gasped. ‘That is low, Cesare, even for you.’
He looked irritated and ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up at the front. ‘What do you expect? You won’t listen to reason, you’re too stubborn and idealistic and… Dio mio! Do you not realise how your life would change as a single parent? Job satisfaction would be very low on your list of priorities. You would be forced to take work that paid, but did not necessarily offer you the challenges you need.’
‘Challenges,’ she echoed bitterly. ‘I don’t need challenges, I need—’
‘Security,’ he finished for her smoothly.
‘Well, if I’m short of cash I can always do a kiss and tell. I still have contacts. Just imagine,’ she invited, ‘what the tabloids would pay.’
Cesare leaned back in his chair and Sam was irritated to see that he didn’t look too bothered by the idea of his name being splashed all over the tabloids. ‘Is that a threat?’ he asked in a conversational tone.
‘Could be.’
‘The trick with threats is to never make them if you have no intention of following through.’
She eyed him with intense dislike. ‘You would be the expert on threats.’
He smiled. ‘If I make one you can be sure that I will follow through.’
Sam lowered her eyes before the irony hit her. She was dodging the stare of a man who couldn’t even see her! He could intimidate her, though, without even trying. And Sam had no problem believing he would follow through with any threats he made—none at all.
Cesare was a dangerous man—she had known that from the moment she saw him. Her problem was she had a sneaking suspicion that that was part of his attraction for her. He was the forbidden fruit and to her eternal shame she couldn’t look at him without contemplating taking another bite out of him!
‘You have an original way of proposing, I’ll give you that.’
‘You wish me to go down on one knee and declare undying love?’
The sarcasm caught Sam on a raw nerve she hadn’t known she had and she covered her reaction with a display of flippancy. ‘Why not? I could do with a good laugh.’
Cesare ignored her mumbled facetious retort and turned his head so that all she could see was the pure, perfect lines of his patrician profile. ‘Laughing would not be out of the question. You are dwelling on the negative aspects of this marriage, but there are some more positive ones. Let us be serious for a moment.’
The suggestion filled Sam with deep foreboding.
‘You are an ambitious woman. I could help you.’
‘If I’m going to get anywhere it will be on my own merits!’
‘So we will leave nepotism aside for one moment. Marriage to me would give you the luxury of being able to pick and choose your next career move—on your own merits—or, on the other hand, should you wish you could take time out and spend time with the baby. The point is the choice would be yours.’
‘You’re a good salesman,’ she conceded, her expression abstracted as she dropped to her knees beside his chair. ‘But the thing about pacts with the devil is that they sound terrific until you read the small print and then you realise you’ve signed your soul away. So what do you get out of it? Why marriage?’
‘The devil—surely that is typecasting?’
Sam ignored the dry interruption. ‘Surely it would be a whole lot simpler to just make some financial provision for the baby?’
‘Possibly,’ he conceded. ‘But the legal rights of a father when he is not married to his child’s mother are, as I understand it, virtually non-existent, and I, cara, wish to have an equal say in how our child is raised.’
‘So that’s what this sudden desire to get married is about?’ It was totally irrational to find his motivation hurtful. It wasn’t as if she wanted him to love her or anything.
‘Partly,’ he admitted. ‘It is not a bad thing either that with a wife in the background I will hopefully not attract those women who wish to hold my hand while I cross the road.’
‘So that will be my job.’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll change the present arrangement, Paolo does not want to marry me. Besides, I suspect you would be more likely to lead me under a bus.’
‘Don’t give me ideas,’ she growled before she subsided into thoughtful silence. Although she could not seriously consider his crazy suggestion, she was starting to fully appreciate the vulnerability of her situation. Losing her job this way had served to emphasise the fact that she just couldn’t take anything for granted.
What if anything happened to her?
What if she became ill or worse…? What would happen to her baby then?
There was always her brother and his wife, but the young couple were struggling financially themselves and the last thing they needed was her adding to their problems.
‘What are you thinking?’ Cesare probed as the silence stretched and he struggled to hide his growing impatience. It frustrated him that he could not see her face.
‘You usually seem to know.’ Sam chewed on her lower lip and thought that sometimes he knew what she was thinking before she did. ‘Who is Paolo?’
‘Paolo is my driver and sometimes bodyguard should the need arise.’ Irritated by the diversion, Cesare added, ‘We are not discussing Paolo.’
‘And has it ever arisen?’ Sam found the idea that Cesare would ever be in a position where he needed someone to watch his back alarming.
‘Will you stop changing the subject?’
‘I was interested.’ She didn’t add that anything about him interested her. It might give him the wrong idea—or the right idea?
‘And I was thinking that if I’d not seen that article and I’d decided not to tell you about the baby and anything happened…’
‘Happened?’
‘Well, things do.’ She heaved a sigh and studied the pattern on the rug beneath her knees as she settled back onto her heels with a frown. It was a depressing thought and not one she, as a natural optimist, thought about often, but she couldn’t escape facts. Cesare’s comments had simply brought worries she already had into sharper focus. ‘People get run over and killed crossing the road every day of the week.’
The prosaic observation caused a bone-deep chill to settle over Cesare as his imagination provided flashing images of pools of blood on a road, a warm body growing cold and stiff… A choking sound dragged from some place deep inside him.
The strange noise sent a chill down Sam’s spine and brought her head up with a snap. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, deeply alarmed by the grey tinge to his normally vibrant skin. The Stygian blackness of his unseeing stare as he looked back at her suggested the things he was seeing in his head were not pretty.
‘Oh, you’re thinking the baby would have ended up in care,’ she said, seizing on what she believed was the cause of his visible distress. ‘Don’t worry, my brother and his wife would never let that happen.’
‘Madre dio, woman, will you focus and stop prattling?’ He raised a hand to his head; the pressure in his skull had grown to an explosive level as the truth he had been trying hard to avoid stared back at him.
Sam’s eyes flashed; she was offended by the snarling brusqueness of his tone. ‘I suppose when you make a decision you draw up a chart, work out statistical probabilities, weigh up the pros and cons all very scientifically,’ she retorted sarcastically.
‘Actually I am a great believer in following my gut instinct.’
And Cesare’s gut instinct was telling him right now to kiss her. Open her mouth and taste the sweetness that was on offer within.
He followed up the throaty statement so quickly that Sam had no hint of his intention until his fingers curled around her chin. She didn’t think of resistance as he tilted her face to one side to allow himself full access to her mouth. She just thought, Please—please kiss me!
Then he did. His mouth was on hers and his lips were moving with slow, sensual expertise that raised the feverish temperature of her overheated blood to a bubbling simmer.
He drew back fractionally, breathing hard—or was that her…? Sam struggled to separate herself from him, not just physically, but emotionally too, and failed.
Intense-sounding words of Italian fell harshly from his lips as he bent his head and kissed her again with a driving possessive hunger she felt all the way down to her toes. Like a firework display, desire exploded inside her, driving the last shred of resistance or sense to the farthest foggiest recesses of her lust-soaked brain.
The kiss ended and her heavy lids half lifted, a sigh of sheer longing snagging in her aching throat as she traced his lean dark face.
They were so close she could see the fine texture of his skin, the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes and bracketing his sensual mouth, the scar on his forehead that disappeared into his thick, glossily dark hairline.
She lifted a hand to trace the physical evidence of the accident that had robbed him cruelly of his sight. She felt as if a hand had reached into her chest, icy fingers tightening around her heart as she thought of him hurting, waking up alone and in the dark.
His long, tapering fingers skimmed her face, drawing it up to his as he breathed, ‘Open your mouth for me, cara.’
And she did, a little growl vibrating in her throat as she drew herself up onto her knees and wrapped her arms around his neck. She met his tongue with her own, breathing in the scent of him, the taste of him as her breasts were crushed against the hardness of his chest and her fingers slid over muscles that were hard and perfectly formed.
It was Cesare who drew back so abruptly that Sam fell back, only just stopping herself from tumbling onto her bottom with her hands.
She stared at him, eyes round, her pupils still hugely dilated, panting as she tried to suck air into her lungs.
She was filled with shame. ‘That was…that shouldn’t have happened.’
‘But you knew it would, we both knew it would…’
She opened her mouth to deny this ludicrous claim and stopped. She pulled herself up onto her heels and sighed.
Cesare spoke. ‘You know, if we’re going to keep on ripping each other’s clothes off every time we’re in the same room I think we should get married.’
Embarrassed colour flared in Sam’s cheeks as she smoothed down her top. ‘I have my clothes on,’ she replied with dignity. And so did he, she thought as her glance drifted to the V of golden skin visible where the top button of his shirt was unfastened. Her stomach quivered.
‘That situation can be changed.’
She sucked in an audible outraged breath, which seemed a bit crazy considering that he knew every inch of her body intimately… She tried not to think about how intimately. He was obviously of the same opinion as his rumble of laughter was wicked and warm.
‘You’re blushing, aren’t you?’
Her eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’
‘You have a very eloquent range of gasps and I can feel the changes in your body temperature from here.’ Without warning he reached out and placed his open hand against her chest. ‘From here it is easier—I can feel your heart trying to beat its way out. It’s ironic—I’m blind and I’ve never come across a woman who is easier to read than you. How do you go through life showing so much?’
Sam stared mesmerised at his fingers splayed against her breast and shook her head. Sometimes the truth was the worst thing to say and this was one of those times. She knew it yet still she said it.
‘It’s only with you.’
His eyes darkened as he rasped, ‘Come here.’
Sam’s heart was hammering so loud it blocked out everything else as without thinking she raised herself up on her knees and leaned in to him until their faces were almost touching.
His fingers speared deep into her bright hair as he inhaled the fragrance that came from the silky skein. ‘This is a side to the arrangement which would be most pleasurable for us both, cara,’ he husked, resting his nose beside hers.
‘The kissing…?’
His expression was solemn but his eyes fierce as he explained, ‘Obligatory for married people.’ He kissed the side of her mouth before dropping his head to trail a line of delicious damp kisses down her neck.
‘Oh, God!’ she groaned. ‘I don’t know why you can do this to me.’
‘That makes two of us, but who cares?’
Sam couldn’t approve of this reckless attitude and she said so, but he didn’t seem to take her seriously—possibly because she was already unfastening the buttons of his shirt with shaking but determined fingers.
A deep sigh of pleasure escaped her throat as the material parted and his gleaming torso was revealed to her greedy gaze. ‘You are just so beautiful… What?’ she asked suddenly in hoarse protest as he grabbed both her wrists and lifted her hands from his warm skin.
‘Marry me, Samantha.’
Her disbelief was tinged with indignation. ‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’
‘You mean will I withhold my favours if you don’t say I do?’ He laughed, but underneath the laughter the tension that pulled the skin taut against the magnificent bone structure of his face was visible. ‘Good idea, cara,’ he admitted. ‘Only one problem—I’m really not endowed with that sort of self-denial.’ Not where she was concerned anyway.
‘I don’t even like you,’ she whispered against his mouth.
‘Liking has nothing to do with it,’ he rasped, tracing the shape of her full upper lip with his tongue before sliding it deep inside her mouth. A groan was wrenched from Sam’s chest as she opened her mouth to increase the sensual penetration. ‘Why fight it?’
Sam wasn’t. Fighting was the very last thing she wanted to do. ‘Is this supposed to be the clincher? You think you can kiss me into agreeing to marry you? Cesare, you’re really not that good.’
But he was!
She found her fingers in his hair and kissed him on the mouth, the pent-up hunger she had been carrying around for weeks finding some release, but not enough.
‘There are more powerful, primitive instincts at work here. We have a sexual connection.’
‘I don’t want a sexual connection!’ she wailed.
His lips curved into a fleeting smile, but his expression remained intent as, with his heavy lids half closed, his fingers slid under her top.
‘But you do want this, don’t you?’ he slurred, lifting the cotton top she wore and skating lightly across the smooth skin of her midriff before moving to cup one breast through the thin light lace covering of her bra. His thumb moved across her nipple; the seductive motion of his lips on her neck made her head spin. She felt on fire, out of control and loved it.
She watched him as he peeled the top over her head and flung it to one side.
He bent his head and, with one arm wrapped around her narrow ribcage, applied his mouth first to one straining breast, pulling the nipple into his mouth, and then administering the same exquisite torture to the other. Sam clung to him, her fingers digging into the muscles of his shoulders as her head fell back.
Fingers splayed across her spine, he brought her upright until their faces were almost touching. There was a fine mist of sweat over his skin and he was breathing as hard as she was. ‘Marry me,’ he said thickly.