Page 43 of The Italian's Marriage Bargain

His hand tightened on hers, only this time it wasn’t tenderly. ‘When I thought about you and Matthew, when I imagined him making love to you, I felt this sick, churning loathing and I didn’t even recognise it. Didn’t understand that the emotion I was experiencing was jealousy. The same jealousy Anna was feeling. And, from my brief encounter with it, I am starting to understand how it can make you do strange things.

‘That first day when you were in my room, demanding your dress, heading back to him, all I knew was that I had to stop you. I would have done anything to stop you,anything, and that is what Anna was doing. In her mind she believed if she told everyone we were still together, if enough people—you included—thought it was happening, then perhaps it really would. She engineered things right down to the last detail. She drove enough of a wedge between us to ensure that doubt was there, and then stepped in like a vulture swooping on her prey. But I would never have slept with her.Never.

‘Walking into the hotel room, I was furious. I finally realised how right you had been to be suspicious, just how calculating Anna had been all along. I told her to get out; she just refused to accept it, kept on throwing herself on me, begging me to reconsider. That was when you walked in.’

Oh, she wanted to believe him, wanted to so badly it hurt, but she was too raw, too scared to just accept his story, to believe it could all be so straightforward.

‘I should hate Anna, but I don’t,’ Luca said more softly. ‘I pity her—and, more pointedly, I can understand her motives. Understand how jealousy can make you do the strangest things. How it can strike at the strangest times. How it can toss aside reason and make you act on impulse.’

‘Like asking a stranger to marry you?’ Felicity ventured, and Luca gave a tired nod.

‘In my mind I really believed that if I married you, loved you, told the world you were my wife, somehow one day you might end up loving me back. I love you Felice.’

‘No false declarations, remember?’ Pulling her hand away, she stared at the bland wall. His pity was the one thing she couldn’t take. But Luca’s hands were cupping her face, turning her to face him.

‘How can it be a false declaration when I am speaking from my heart? I love you. I have done from the second you fell into my arms, from the moment I held you and you wept. When you called out in your sleep and I came to lie beside you, I knew there and then that I never wanted to let you go again. I barely knew you and yet I would have done anything to keep you. You were right. I did sabotage your plans to study, did put off talking to the lawyer—but only because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. Couldn’t stand to see you walking out of my life before we’d even started.’

She lay there, his words washing over her, utterly floored as he carried on in that delicious faltering voice. This strong, beautiful man was telling her the one thing she needed to hear.

Luca Santanno loved her.

And it should have helped; only it didn’t. The omission of any declaration of love in their relationship had cost the life of their child.

The hope that had briefly invaded her war torn body dispersed then. Lying back on the starched white pillow, she closed her eyes, retrieving her hand from his grasp.

Love seemed small compensation for such an overwhelming loss.

‘You knew about the baby, didn’t you?’ His voice was soft, thick, and laced with uncertainty. Slowly she nodded, the tears sliding down her cheeks into her hair. ‘That is why you were so sick, why you were so—so…’

‘Difficult?’ Felicity finished for him. ‘I’ve never been so scared in my life, never felt so sick, and I just didn’t know what to do—how to tell you.’

‘I wish you had,’ he said, but with not a hint of reproach in his voice. ‘Surely I’m not that unapproachable?’

‘You are.’ Felicity sighed. ‘But not enough to keep me from loving you. And you made it very clear from the start that you didn’t want babies.’

‘Ididn’twant babies,’ Luca agreed. ‘Frankly, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I’d watched friends and family turn from competent professionals to neurotic parents, discussing unmentionable things at the dinner table, debating for hours the merits of breast-feeding versus bottles, then you came along and suddenly there I was wondering if we’d have blonde or dark-haired children, children with your reserve or my fiery temper. But how could I tell you that? I was sure you would run away, laugh in my face. I had to be so very careful not to scare you off.’

The nub of his thumb was wiping her tears away, but it couldn’t keep up with her inexhaustible supply. His soft lips were shushing her now, dusting her cheeks like velvet paws, and she ached to press her cheek into his hand, to take the comfort he was imparting, but still she couldn’t.

‘We understand each other now; that is all that matters.’

‘No, Luca.’ Her words were strangled in her throat, and he fought to reassure her.

‘From this we will learn, move forward together. It might not seem like it now, it might seem scary and overwhelming, but in time you will see it is surely for the best.’

‘For the best!’ Her eyes opened to a stranger. ‘How can you say that it’s for the best? How can you just dismiss our baby? But then I guess you’ve had some practice. Anna told me how you demanded she have an abortion when she thought she was pregnant…’

His face darkened. The hand on her cheek stilled as he let out a low hiss.

‘Never!’

‘Signora?’A pretty nurse was at the bedside, her eyes smiling, her surprise at Felicity’s sudden re-entry to the world evident as she blew up a blood pressure cuff around her arm.

Felicity lay there, feeling the impatience emanating from Luca, the tension in the room as the nurse chatted away, checking her temperature, her pulse, oblivious to Luca’s increasingly mounting irritation.

‘Never,’ he repeated, once they were alone again. ‘She could never have been pregnant by me. I took care of that—made sure it would never happen!”

‘You weren’t so careful with me!’ Felicity retorted. ‘You didn’t stop to think of the consequences whenwemade love.’

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