‘Poor woman.’
‘Isabella?’ His voice held surprise.
‘Does she know what she’s letting herself in for?’
‘We are tremendously well suited.’ They were. They looked the part and they certainly belonged together. That was a given.
Yet his thoughts sped back to those heady three weeks when he had been just an ordinary person with no expectations weighing on his shoulders, free to enjoy life in all its wonderful simplicity. Free to enjoy the woman staring at him as though she didn’t quite recognise the man sitting in front of her.
Cordelia was hearing him but she had stopped taking in precisely what he was saying.
He was getting married. There were no rings on fingers yet, but he was getting married and he’d known that when they had slept together. He had truly only seen what they’d enjoyed as something passing and she knew that, while she had said all the right things, while she had assured him that she, likewise, knew the rules of the game, in her heart she had started hoping for more.
Maybe he didn’t love the woman whose finger was destined to wear his ring, but they were tremendously well suited. Cordelia wasn’t sure quite what that meant, but there had been affection in the tenor of his voice and affection was only a heartbeat away from love.
At any rate, it was a heck of a lot more than he felt for her. She thought of the baby she was carrying.
In her enthusiasm to get to Italy and tell Luca about the pregnancy, Cordelia had not been thinking straight and she could see that now. She’d never, of course, thought that Luca might have been lying to her. She’d also, she now realised with dismay, nurtured a certain excitement about seeing him again, even though he hadn’t glanced back in her direction. She’d cherished the wild hope that they might recapture what they’d had, that he might actually want the baby she was carrying. She’d been swept away by happy-ever-after fantasies and now that all those fantasies had been exposed for what they were, she was desperate to leave.
She was going to keep this secret to herself. She would never hide his identity from the child they shared and in due course, if he or she wanted to meet him, then she wouldn’t prevent it. By that time Luca would be happily married and a child he had sired as a youthful mistake before getting married would not be the catastrophe it would be now.
She stood up, keen to leave, thoughts in a confusing, sickening muddle, and felt the ground sway gently under her.
She held the back of the chair to steady herself and was vaguely aware of him shooting to his feet as she turned away, eyes fixed on the door.
‘Cordelia...!’
When she looked up it was to find him standing right in front of her, his eyes filled with concern.
‘You’re as white as a sheet.’ He placed his hands on her arms and she shrugged them off but she didn’t say anything because her mouth was refusing to co-operate. ‘Look at me,’ he commanded, tilting her head so that she had no option but to do as he’d asked although her eyes, when they met his, were mutinous. ‘I want you to sit back down. Have you eaten anything in the last few hours? I get that all this will be a shock to you but there was no point in keeping anything back, in giving you false hope.’
‘Leave me alone, Luca. I just want to go. I should never have come here in the first place.’
‘If things had been different...’ he said roughly.
‘If things had been different...what, Luca?’
‘The time we spent together was special to me.’
‘I’m thrilled to hear that,’ Cordelia told him acidly. The swaying had stopped but she still felt giddy, as though she’d been flying on a roller coaster and now the ride had stopped but her head was still spinning.
He had softened his hold on her and as their eyes tangled he gently and absently began to massage her shoulder with his hand, slow rhythmic motions that shot straight to every nerve ending in her body with devastating effect. Her eyes widened in horror at her treacherous body and she began to take a step back to break the connection that had sprung up between them, but she just couldn’t seem to do it. Her feet were nailed to the ground. It was a struggle to do anything. Breathing was proving a problem, never mind anything else.
‘I have never been the man I was with you, with any other woman,’ he said in a roughened undertone. ‘I have never wanted any other woman the way I wanted you.’ His eyes dropped to her full mouth and the connection she was desperately trying to sever took on a life force of its own.
He traced the outline of her mouth with the tip of his finger and she breathed in sharply.
He was going to kiss her. She could feel it in the simmering intensity of his gaze. It was the last thing she wanted! She opened her mouth to protest and her whole body shuddered as his lips touched hers, gently at first but then with increasing hunger.
Cordelia curved against him. His lean, hard muscularity felt so wonderfully familiar. He’d been her first and only lover and she had traced the contours of his perfect body with such awe that he used to laugh at her enthusiasm.
It took more willpower than she knew she even possessed to flatten her palms against his chest and detach herself from his devouring caress.
She was shaking when she stepped back. She could barely look him in the eye and he seemed to have as much of a problem holding her gaze. As he should, she thought bitterly. She’d succumbed to a moment of uncontrollable desire but she was free, single and unattached. It went utterly against the grain but she wasn’t the
