The silence continued to coalesce. She couldn’t look at him. She didn’t want to see the horror there.
‘You’re lying,’ Luca said hoarsely. ‘That can’t be...true.’
Cordelia sneaked a glance. He was ashen. He was also staring at her but she could tell that he wasn’t really seeing her. He was seeing the nightmare scenario in his head. She watched as he sprang back to begin pacing the room, his movements, for once, lacking their usual grace.
Still muggy, she heaved herself into a sitting position and took a few deep breaths to steady herself.
His restless pacing was making her dizzy and yet, while he was walking, he wasn’t talking and she dreaded hearing the dark, disbelieving and horrified timbre of his voice.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he finally said, pausing to stand in front of her, then dragging a chair towards the sofa so that he could sit, interrogation style, directly in her line of vision. ‘You can’t be. We...were careful. We took all the necessary precautions. This can’t be true.’ He narrowed his eyes and stared at her and she could almost see the way his mind was working, shying away from the truth, finding other paths to follow.
She wasn’t entirely surprised when he said, bluntly, ‘Is this some kind of ploy to get money out of me? Because if it is, then it’s not going to work.’
‘We’re back to that, are we?’
‘A fake pregnancy is the oldest trick in the book.’ But she wasn’t lying. Luca knew that in the very depth of his being. She wasn’t like that. She was achingly honest and if she had travelled all this way to tell him that she was carrying his baby, then carrying his baby she was.
Right in front of him, the world was falling apart at the seams.
‘Remember that first time?’ Cordelia asked. She felt too tired to argue with him about whether she was pretending to be pregnant or not. It was ridiculous that he would even allow his thoughts to travel along those lines but, then again, who was to say how he really thought? Who he really was?
‘I remember.’
‘We were on the beach. Well, we weren’t exactly careful then, were we?’
‘I... Jesus... I... We... No, I took chances. I took a chance.’ He flushed darkly as he relived every second of that mind-blowing experience. He’d been so turned on—and she’d been lying there, as tempting as a siren and he’d thought...that he would get away with it. No, that was a lie. The truth was that he hadn’t thought at all. Her tightness had wrapped around his erection, rubbing it into a frenzied state of arousal, and he had exploded inside her.
His groin ached as he thought about it and he could feel his libido shoot into the stratosphere without warning.
Utterly inappropriate.
‘You show up here, out of the blue...naturally, I would want confirmation...’
Cordelia shrugged. ‘Why would I come all the way over here to lie to you about something like that? Don’t you think that it’s something that could be easily disproved if I were making it all up? One trip down to the local chemists would be all it would take.’ She sighed and cast her eyes around the lavish room, so in keeping with the lavishness of the house and the stunning splendour of the limitless vineyards stretching into the blue horizon.
The giddiness had eased and her mind felt clear for the first time since she had found out that she was pregnant.
‘What happened between us was a mistake,’ she told him quietly. He was so ridiculously good-looking that she could barely allow her gaze to settle on him for too long. Look for too long and her mind started playing cruel tricks on her, started travelling down memory lane, and that was never going to do. ‘You swept into my life and I guess it was just the extraordinary nature of the circumstances that brought you there, and the fact that you were so...so different from everyone and everything I’d ever known, that combined to undermine all the principles I’d lived by. I’d longed for adventure and, suddenly, there you were, just about as adventurous as they came. I admit that I was a little sad when you left, Luca...’ she paused and took a deep breath, making sure that, whatever happened, she left with her dignity intact ‘...but not sad enough to come all the way over here in an attempt to seduce you back into a relationship.’
Luca scowled. Contained in that explanation was an insult although he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, or on why he should feel so piqued.
‘So you said.’
‘It’s understandable,’ she mused softly. ‘You were my first lover.’
‘Your first lover?’ Luca wanted to scoff, because, in his world, virgins were as rare as hen’s teeth, but then he remembered the feel of her, that tightness. And more than that, he remembered what she had been like, skittish and shy, giving and then retreating, at once eager and timid. ‘I would have known.’
‘There’s no point talking about that.’ She waved aside his interruption. ‘I came here because I thought you ought to know. I never expected to find what I did and I certainly never thought that I would be sitting here, explaining this situation to a guy about to tie the knot.’
Luca shifted uncomfortably. He thought of Isabella and the neatly parcelled future that had been lying in store for him.
‘This is a mess,’ he muttered.
Cordelia reddened. ‘Not for you,’ she said coolly.
‘How so?’
‘I’m not asking anything of you. I plan
