Convenient Brides (8 page)

And what had she to give him in return? A secret grown so burdensome that she didn’t know how to divulge it with-out ruining everything. She’d let chance after chance pass her by, because she’d believed hoarding the truth about the children was her only weapon against the man she’d viewed for so long as her enemy. Now, her silence stood to rob her of her most powerful ally.

One way or another, she had to tell him the truth—and soon. To wait to do so until they were husband and wife would strike at the very foundation of what their marriage was all about.

Do it now!
her conscience urged.
Tell him, and beg his forgiveness for waiting so long! It’s not too late. Together you can make this work. He’s not the same man anymore. He’ll understand. See how he’s looking at you…feel the tenderness in his touch. Do it now, before you lose your nerve.

“Paolo,” she began, her voice quivering with apprehension, “I’m not exactly perfect myself. There are…things about me that you don’t know about. Secrets you deserve to—”

“I long since guessed as much, Caroline,” he said, stopping her with a finger to her lips, “but nothing you have to tell me will change the fact that you are a good woman who will make a fine surrogate mother to Clemente and Gina. And isn’t that what our marriage is really all about?”

“Yes, but—”

“No ‘buts.’” He drew her hand down his chest until it nested against his groin. “We sit here naked beside each other, on a bed large enough to hold both of us and impatient passion yearning to be fulfilled, yet we squander our time with talking? No,
la mia bella,
the talking can wait for another day.”

His erection had diminished somewhat, but at her touch,
it sprang up with renewed vigor. Hot, silken, urgent, it throbbed against her palm, and no amount of guilty conscience could hold her back from cradling him possessively.

“Yes,” he whispered, cupping her breasts and lowering his head to adore them with his mouth and his tongue. “Just so do we forge the bonds that will unite us.”

How could she disagree, when her blood surged with excitement, and her heart cartwheeled madly behind her ribs? How pretend she was unmoved by his attention, when his tongue dipped lower and slipped between the folds of her flesh to find her wet with need? And how in the world silence her smothered, frantic exclamations as the climax she’d denied herself for so long swept over her in a storm so violent that she almost screamed?

I love you…I love you…!

The words rang in her head, fighting to be aired aloud. “I want you,” she begged instead. “Paolo, I want you now, inside me…
please!
”

He reached for a small foil packet he’d tossed on the dresser, along with the door key, and the reason he’d briefly left the room finally hit home. “Give me a moment,” he replied, his chest heaving. “We have enough to cope with. Let’s not muddy the waters with a pregnancy neither of us wants or needs. If we remain married, it has to be from choice, not obligation.”

Too late,
she thought, the ecstasy he’d so easily induced evaporating in the dismal knowledge that he’d just made confession that much more difficult for her to accomplish.

He put on the contraceptive. Then, oblivious to the real reason he’d cast a cloud on the moment, took her in his arms again. “You look downcast, my lovely. Do you not agree that for us to make a baby would be unfair, both to the child, and to the twins?”

“Of course,” she managed.

She must not have sounded convincing enough because he reared back, the better to search her face. “Yet you remain downcast. You surely don’t believe a condom spoils the pleasure either of us gives to the other?”

“No,” she said miserably.

“Then what?”

“I just want you to make love to me. You said we shouldn’t waste the night in talk, yet that’s what we seem to be doing.”

“Worry not, Caroline,” he murmured, his hands molding her to him, “the night is still very young. We have hours to spend together, and I have come prepared to make use of every one.”

He did stop talking then, and devoted himself to confirming what she’d known for years: that all it took to bring her senses to sizzling life was the right man.

No hurried, impatient seduction this time, but a leisurely, erotic tour of her body conducted with minute attention to every curve, every indentation, every smooth, bare stretch of skin. His eyes, heavy-lidded with barely leashed passion, blazed a trail of heat from her head to her toes. His hands shaped her every contour with the tactile dedication of a blind man. His mouth and tongue left a wicked, heavenly trail of discovery from the outer shell of her ear to the high arch of her instep; from her throat to the back of her knees.

And yet, although with every touch, he stoked her to fever pitch, not once did he trespass between her thighs to the cloistered fold of flesh screaming for his possession. He knew how to tantalize, to torment, until she was begging incoherently—garbled, frantic words of pleading known only to lovers dancing on the brink of destruction.

Beside herself, she dragged his mouth back to hers. Tasted on him the perfume of her body lotion, of herself. Slid her hands down his torso until she found him, pulsing slick and hard and hot within the condom—so close to losing control
that the sweat gleamed on his forehead and left his lungs battered with the effort to withhold himself just a minute longer…another second. And in the end, as he’d always known he would, losing the battle.

With the deep, agonized groan of a man in agony, he plunged deep inside her. Held himself immobile, and clenched his jaw so hard, the veins stood out on his neck like ropes. A useless exercise, one he could never win. Because the demons of desire had too strong a hold—on him, on her.

Wrapping her legs around his waist, she imprisoned him and, for the first time since she’d conceived his children, she felt complete. Free to give, free to take, free to love with her whole heart and soul and body.

“Slowly,
tesoro,
” he whispered harshly, with a futile attempt to delay the inevitable.

But even if she’d been able to obey the plea, he could not. Driven by a hunger too long delayed, his own flesh betrayed him. He rocked against her, fiercely, urgently. Hypnotized by the consuming rhythm, she responded involuntarily and the storm prowling impatiently at the outer limits of her consciousness, let fly with the first distant roll of thunder.

A spasm clutched at her. Released her and retreated, to gather strength for its next onslaught. Clutched again, more tightly…and then again, this time so powerfully that she thought she might die.

Paolo stilled, tense as an overwound spring about to fly apart. “Ah, Caroline,
mia bella…mio amore!
” he muttered, dragging the words from the very depths of his being, then drove into her one last time, a deep, hard, hungry, merciless thrust.

It spelled the end, of order, of coherence, of life as she knew it. She dissolved, became nothing—a moonbeam caught in a spinning web of sensation. Sound filled her, rushing like the wind, lifting her. She heard a voice that once was hers crying
out as sensation rippled over her, carried her forward implacably, and hurled her past the point of no return.

She toppled, would have fallen off the edge of the earth, spun off into eternity, had Paolo not held her fast. His body shuddered, groaned; a mighty ship fighting an impossible sea. He was drowning, and so was she. And it didn’t matter, because they were together, welded limb to limb, body to body, heart to heart.

She surfaced a long time later, a new woman with a new life, in a new world, one composed of serene moonlight slanting through the windows to splash the dark purple shadows of her room with pale blue stripes. Paolo sprawled on top of her, spent and breathless. And she loved it. Loved the damp warmth of his breath against her neck, the exhausted weight of him.

Again, the words fought to escape.
I love you…I’ve loved you forever…

He stirred, lifted his head and regarded her from passionsated eyes. “I suppose I should go so that you can sleep in peace.”

“No,” she said, stroking his beautiful face. “You should stay. I want you to stay, Paolo. Don’t ever leave me again.”

“I hoped you’d say that,” he said, a sleepy smile curving his mouth, and still buried inside her, he rolled to his side and drew her close again.

When she next became conscious of time, the moon had slipped beyond the house and left her room in total darkness. But she didn’t need light to know that, in sleep, she and Paolo had lost their intimate connection. Now he lay with his leg flung over her, and the way his palm closed possessively over her breast told her he, too, was awake, and hungry for her all over again.

The sweet, lazy pace of their second loving stole her breath away.
This,
she thought, sinking her teeth into her lower lip
as the pleasure built to a slow crescendo,
is how it will be between us from now on. Sometimes fast and furious, and sometimes so unbearably tender that it will make me cry.

It won’t matter if he can’t say the words, because I’ll feel his love, just as I do now. Then I’ll be brave enough to tell him things I might not dare to say in the bright light of morning. Share secrets that won’t seem so frightening under cover of night. Tell him the truth about the babies. And he’ll forgive me, because he’ll see that I did what It hought was best at the time.

The past won’t matter anymore, because we’ll have the future, and we’ll have our children. We’ll make up for lost time, and accept the way fate has brought us together again. Vanessa and Ermanno’s deaths won’t seem such a terrible waste, but, rather, part of God’s greater, grander plan.

“Caroline,” he whispered urgently, straining against her.

Inflamed by the passion in his voice, she replied, “I’m here,” and contracted around him with a soft cry as his seed ran free.

H
AD
it not been for the perpetual shadow of Vanessa’s and Ermanno’s deaths, the next two weeks would have numbered among the happiest of Callie’s life. In line with Paolo’s wishes, everyone stayed the extra two weeks on the island, although she’d have preferred it to be just he, she, and the children, seeing it as the ideal chance to meld them into a foursome without any outside interference.

But, mindful of too many changes at once, Paolo asked his parents to stay behind, too. “Maintaining a sense of continuity with the familiar,” he reasoned, “will help the twins accept their new living arrangements more readily.”

His insight and obvious deep concern for them warmed Callie’s heart. How could she help but adore him, when he gave so much of himself to children he didn’t even know were really his? Coupled with her own love for them, it could only strengthen the odds in favor of the marriage.

She also suspected Paolo had spoken with his father; perhaps gone so far as to warn him to curb his hostility, because Salvatore grew, if not all warm and fuzzy toward her, at least not as openly antagonistic.

“It is good to see you getting along better with our grandchildren,” he decreed at breakfast, a few days after she’d accepted
Paolo’s proposal. “I believe they begin to feel some affection for you.”

Oh, she hoped so—she thought so! Certainly, they’d shown themselves more willing to include her in their activities. “Will you come, too, Zia Caroline?” Clemente wanted to know, the afternoon Paolo suggested a sunset cruise in thet hirty-nine-foot luxury cruiser moored in the protected marina below the villa.

“Of course,” she told him, and had to blink back a rush of tears at the smile that lit up his face.

Her baby boy…her son! Strong and handsome as his father, but with a gentleness that reminded Callie of Lidia, and of her own mother. How proud Audrey Leighton would have been, of both her grandchildren.

Another day, Gina decided the time was ripe for a game of hide-and-seek. “Zia Caroline and I will play against you and Clemente,” she ordered her uncle, shepherding everyone outside to an iron gate overlooking a formal garden in the grand Italian style, “and you will not cheat.”

“If you say so,” Paolo replied meekly, which made Callie smile.

Gina was definitely her father’s child, strong-willed, forthright, and independent. She made up her own mind about things, regardless of outside influence. “I didn’t much like you at first, even though Nonna said I must,” she’d announced bluntly the previous evening, while she allowed Callie to braid her hair,“but you’re actually quite nice now that I’ve got to know you better. I wouldn’t mind if you stayed with us forever. It’s not as good as when Mommy was here, of course, but it’s nice to have someone who knows how to do my hair. Nonna isn’t very good at it, and when Zio Paolo once tried, he made a terrible mess of it.”

“We’ll hide first,” she decided now, directing her brother and Paolo to cover their eyes and count to a hundred. Then taking Callie’s hand, she ran with her along a crushed gravel
path lined with marble statuary. “Follow me, Zia,” she said. “I know exactly the place to hide.”

Skirting a pond filled with lily pads floating around an elaborate stone fountain, she ducked between two stone benches and through an opening carved in a hedge. “Behind this,” she whispered, pulling aside a trailing vine to reveal a natural grotto filled with ferns. “They’ll never find us here. This is my secret place. I’ve never shown it to Clemente. Only Mommy knows about it…” Her voice wavered briefly. “And now you.”

“I’m very honored that you’d share it with me,” Callie said thickly, hearing the sudden desolation in the child’s voice, and desperately wanting to comfort her. But she knew well enough that Gina wouldn’t welcome a display of affection she hadn’t initiated herself.

“You won’t tell anyone else, will you, Zia Caroline?”

“No,” she promised. “Nor will I ever come here unless you invite me.”

Sighing, Gina wandered deeper into the grotto. “Mommy and I used to light candles sometimes,” she said, suddenly despondent. “Up there, see, in those little glass jars. Then we’d sit on cushions we brought from the house, and talk about private things that boys and fathers don’t understand. But I don’t think the candles would be a good idea today.”

“No,” Callie said softly. “That’s something special that belonged just to you and your mommy. Also, we don’t want to give ourselves away, and there’s enough light filtering through from outside that we can see quite well.”

In fact, in the dim green light and with the vine swinging gently in the breeze, sending waves of shadow rippling over the sandy floor, the effect was a little like being in an underwater cave.

Suddenly Gina tipped her head to one side, listening intently, then pressed a finger to her lips, her mood brightening.
“I can hear them coming,” she whispered. “Let’s hide at the very back. We can sit on the rocks.”

It was darker there, and much cooler. Enough that Callie shivered and wished she’d worn a jacket over her light sweater. Gina must have felt the chill, too, because without waiting to be invited, she curled up close beside her.

Callie held her breath, ever so casually draped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and braced herself for a rejection that never came. Instead, to her indescribable pleasure, Gina snuggled closer and said, “You feel nice and warm, Zia…just the way Mommy used to.”

Approaching footsteps ruled out the possibility of a verbal reply, and just as well. The aching lump in her throat would have prevented Callie from doing more than choke on any attempt at a response. Instead, she acknowledged the enormous compliment by tucking Gina more securely in the curve of her arm.

“They couldn’t have come this far,” Paolo said, from immediately outside the entrance to the cave. An inch closer, and he’d have stepped past the vine and found them. “There’s nothing here but a path to the beach, and we’d see them if they’d gone there.”

“Gina often comes this way. I’ve watched her, and even followed her once, but I lost her. Sometimes, she’s almost too smart for me,” Clemente said, an admission that left Gina snorting on a giggle.

Paolo cleared his throat, rather loudly, Callie thought. “We’d better double back, then. They might have run behind the hedge and are already waiting at the gate. If they’re not, we’ll look in the atrium. There are all kinds of places they could hide in there.”

Their voices faded as they hiked back toward the villa. “Boys are
so
easy to fool,” Gina crowed, once silence descended again. “They’re not a bit like us, are they, Zia Caroline?”

“No,” she said, tearful emotion still swirling dangerously close to the surface. To hold her daughter like this, to share confidences, and private jokes, were gifts beyond price, and she wouldn’t have traded them for all the riches in the world. “Should we make a run for the gate now, do you think?”

Gina shook her head. “I quite like just sitting here with you,” she said shyly, and just like that added the touch of perfection to an already extraordinary day.

Later, over predinner drinks, Paolo cornered Callie, and under cover of the general buzz of conversation, murmured, “Did you enjoy hiding out with your niece in the grotto?”

She laughed, taken aback. “You guessed we were there?”

“Of course I guessed! Even if I didn’t know this island like the back of my hand, I’d have been hard-pressed not to hear the tittering filtering through that convenient screen of shrubbery.”

“Then why didn’t you call us on it?”

Warming her to the core with his slow smile, he said, “The two of you seemed to be bonding. I decided it was best not to disturb you.”

Flustered at the way his gaze lingered on her, she averted her eyes and said, “You do that rather often lately, you know. Your parents will begin to notice.”

“Do what?”

“Smile at me, look at me, as if we’re up to something wicked.”

“But we are, Caroline. We’re secretly engaged.”

“The way you’re behaving, it won’t be a secret much longer.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. He frequently locked glances with her—across the dinner table, or while they were taking morning coffee with his parents in the solarium, or during an evening game of chess between him and his father—and the look in his eyes, the curve of his mouth, would send the heat rushing to her face. They were the smiles, the glances, a lover
bestowed on his lady—the kind that said he couldn’t wait to undress her.

And it seemed that he couldn’t. Every night without fail, after the rest of the household slept, he’d come to her. She’d lie in her bed, her body naked beneath the sheet and trembling with expectation. The door would open, and she’d see his silhouette outlined briefly against the night light shining in the upstairs hall before he stepped, silent as a shadow, into the room. A second later, the lock would snick softly in place, and he’d cross to the bed.

She’d rise up on the mattress to meet him, and they’d come together in a flurry of eager hands, and hungry lips, and labored breathing. He’d kiss her all over, bring her to orgasm with his finger, his tongue. Then, while she was still shimmering with ecstasy and he was thick and heavy with desire, he’d plunge inside her, and rock so urgently that she sometimes wondered how the condom he always used didn’t split apart.

Oh, yes! Regardless of whatever else might occur during the day, she could always count on the nights!

“Let’s take a walk on the beach,” he suggested, catching her as she finished lunch, toward the end of the second week. “We need to talk.”

Overhearing, the twins chimed in. “Us, too, Zio Paolo?”

“Not this time,” he said. “What I have to say to Caroline is private for now, but I promise to share the secret with you soon. In any case, you have to spend the afternoon catching up on your studies, otherwise when you go back to class, you’ll find yourselves behind your school friends.”

The minute they were out of earshot of the villa, Caroline asked, “Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” he said, curbing a grin at the anxiety printed all over her face. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, the other
day—about my parents figuring out what we’re up to—and you’re right. I don’t seem able to stay out of your bed, and sooner or later, I’m going to get caught. Quite apart from the indignity of such an occurrence, I resent having to sneak around like a teenager.”

“So what do you want to do about it?”

He clasped her hand and helped her over the low wall separating the gardens from the beach. “Announce our engagement and make it official.”

Her fingers tightened around his. “Do you think the children are ready to hear it?”

“I think there’s only one way to find out.”

She chewed the corner of her mouth uneasily. “What about your parents?”

“I don’t consider their reaction to be particularly relevant,
cara.
We did not reach this decision lightly, and hardly need their blessing.”

“It would be nice to have it, though,” she said wistfully. “It’s been a long time since I really felt part of a family.”

“You’ll be a crucial part of the one we make together, Caroline. The children and I will be your family. And you must know my mother will welcome you as a daughter.”

“It’s not your mother I’m worried about.”

This time he did laugh at the expression on her face, which reminded him of a child being forced to swallow bad-tasting medicine. “I’ll deal with my father. He won’t give you any trouble.”

She kicked at the sand, sending it spraying up around her ankles. She had very nice ankles. Very nice everything. “When are you thinking of telling them?”

“Tonight, before dinner. I’ve instructed Jolanda to prepare something special. We’ll toast to the future with champagne, although the children will have to make do with sparkling fruit juice.”

“And you’re absolutely sure you want to go through with the marriage?”

“Absolutely.” Surprised at the note of apprehension in her voice, he slowed to a stop. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes, Paolo,” she said. “After the way things have been between me and the children this last while, I think I have a fighting chance of making it work with them.”

“And with me?”

She lifted her shoulders in a faint shrug. “I want to make you happy.”

“You already do,
cara mia.
”

“I do?”

“Why else do you think I can’t keep out of your bed?”

Her blue eyes all at once alight with impish laughter, she said pertly, “Because you’re afraid of the dark?” and danced away from him when he tried to grab hold of her.

Prompted by a burst of desire as fierce as it was unexpected, he chased her behind a jutting pillar of sandstone and caught her to him, reveling in the feel of her body, pressed warm and soft against his; in the scent of her hair, her skin.

The idea of claiming her as his wife now seemed to him as natural as breathing. Without knowing exactly when or how it had happened, she’d wormed her way so thoroughly into his heart that he couldn’t imagine life without her.

Could it be that he, whom a previous mistress had tearfully dismissed as “unable to commit to anyone who wasn’t family” had finally met his match? It seemed so to him, because if what he felt for Caroline didn’t amount to love, then how else to describe the light that filled his spirit at the mention of her name, or whenever she walked into the room?

Unsure that she was ready to hear the words he longed to speak, he adopted a teasing tone and said, “Running away isn’t acceptable, Caroline. Now that you’ve agreed to make our engagement public, you officially belong to me.”

“Oh?” She lowered her lashes, flirting shamelessly with him. “Am I in trouble, then?”

“Most definitely. I shall have to devise some kind of punishment, to keep you in line.”

“Will you accept this as an apology, instead?”

Without warning, she rose up on her toes and kissed his jaw, then ran her tongue down the open neck of his shirt to the base of his throat. The response which jerked through him, sending the blood rushing to his loins, was so powerful and instantaneous that he almost came.