Page 138 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

‘There are practical advantages—’ he began.

‘No,’ she said. She wanted this conversation stopped—right now.

His dark eyes flashed angrily and he held up a hand. ‘Hear me out before you give me an infantile rejection! Marriage would regularise the situation...provide far more security both for yourself and the baby, and enable us to—’

‘I saidno,’ Siena ground out. Her own eyes flashed with anger. ‘Theonlyreason you want to marry me is to control me—and my baby. So don’t feed me any garbage to the contrary!’

For a moment she saw an expression on his face that almost silenced her. But she would not be silenced—she wouldnot! Emotions were boiling up in her, tangled and knotted, vehement and vicious.

‘It’s bad enough you feel you have any say about my baby—let alone expect me to walk into the noose you’re dangling in front of me. So get this, and get this once and for all—finally! I willnevermarry you! I willneverhave anything to do with you of my own free will. Because of this baby I am handcuffed to you—shackled to you! And I resent it and I hate it.Hateit—’

She broke off, churning inside. Heart thudding. She pushed her pallid, undrunk coffee aside. She got to her feet, looked down at him. Her face contorted with the emotion heaving inside her.

‘I can’tbear,’ she said, ‘that it’s you who got me pregnant.’

She walked away. Eyes blind. Crushed and hopeless.

Words went through her head—as crushed and hopeless as her spirit.

It’s all a mess—such a mess.

Such a hopeless, hopeless mess.

CHAPTER SIX

VINCENZOSATAThis desk in his office in Milan. He should be working, but he wasn’t. He was brooding. That was the only word for it. His expression was a study—a darkened one—and his hands were resting tightly on the arms of his custom-made leather chair. His eyes were seemingly fixed on a focal point that did not actually exist in the spacious, beautifully appointed and ferociously expensively decorated executive office, with its modernistic grey leather sofas facing each other across a low chrome and glass coffee table, backed by the floor-length plate glass window looking out over the city skyline.

In his head was circling the memory of visiting Siena two days ago. Baleful and benighted. What had it achieved? Nothing. It had only sunk them further into the impossibility of their situation. A situation neither of them wanted.

His mouth thinned.

Shackled to each other—that was what she’d said. And that was the blunt truth of it, all right. This baby, that neither of them wanted, was handcuffing them to each other. He could resent the fact that it was so all he liked—but it changed nothing.

Nothing could change the situation.

His hands tightened over the leather arms of his chair. He was trying, damn it. Trying to take the necessary responsibility, to make the necessary plans for the future. What else could he do? And for his pains she was stonewalling him totally. How did he get past that? How did he get her to drop her relentless hostility towards him? Because somehow he had to...

Resolve steeled in him. Anger, as he had said to her face, was her predominant emotion towards him—well, he had to defuse it. Bring down that wall of implacable hostility. Do whatever it took to do so.

He reached forward, lifted his desk phone, and spoke to his PA in the outer office. He told her to cancel the week’s appointments and book him a flight to London tomorrow morning.

He was going back. Whether Siena Westbrook liked it or not, wanted him or not, he was going back.

Not for him, and not for her, but for the one person who was overweeningly more important than anything he or she might want—who deserved better than a pair of angry, hostile, irresponsible adults throwing their resentment at each other.

The baby she carried.

The only thing that mattered in all this sorry mess.

Siena was kneeling on the floor, leafing through her portfolio, her spirits sinking as she did so. So short a time ago her future had been bright, finally taking off. And now it had crashed and burned. She had given up on her future once before—and now she was doing it again. Instead of looking forward to starting a new term she was scouring the Internet for affordable rental properties in places—anywhere at all—where she might want to live as a single mother of the baby that was on the way.

With a sigh she leant the portfolio back against the wall of her bedroom, then leaned back herself as well, stretching out her legs. Her hands went to her midriff. Already there was a change in her body—a rounding discernible to her, even if her clothes still hardly showed it. Within her body a hapless little baby was forming, day by day, its tiny body taking shape, limbs and organs and tissues and heartbeat...so desperately tiny, so desperately vulnerable...

So entirely and totally dependent on me.

A wave of fierce protectiveness went through her, and her fingers splayed out like a net to keep safe the tiny soul inside her.

Poor little mite... None of this is your fault, yet you are going to be the one who suffers—born to two irresponsible, selfish people who thought their own fleeting sexual pleasure so important...

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