One Last Night (7 page)

She turned and looked at Gonzo, who was sound asleep and snoring on her bed. She gave her head a little shake and slipped in beside him, or at least as far as his solid presence would allow.

It was like trying to sleep on a corkboard, she thought as the minutes slowly ticked by. She was never going to be able to sleep, she was sure of it. But, somehow, the sound of the dog's rhythmic snuffles and snores and her own emotional and physical exhaustion took over. She rolled over, curling her legs into a comma shape to allow for Gonzo, and finally went to sleep…

THE doorbell pealed just as Maya had her head hanging over the basin in the bathroom. The nausea had caught her off guard. She had never felt anything like it before. It was like being on the worst sea voyage of her life. The world of her small rented flat was not stable; it was rocking all over the place. And it wasn't just the flat, it was the smell of things that assaulted her senses and sent them into revolt. She had opened a can of food for Gonzo at his insistence and then had to bolt upstairs to deal with the consequences. Her oesophagus felt raw, as if scraped by razorblades.

The doorbell rang again, this time with Gonzo's voluble accompaniment.

Maya groaned and wiped her whitewash-coloured face on the hand towel. Her eyes were like water drip holes in snow, hollow and shadowed with exhaustion.

She clung to the banister on the way down with a deathly grip, sure she was going to drop into a faint. But somehow she managed to get to the front door and opened it, bleary-eyed and sick as she was.

'Dio! What the hell?' Giorgio instantly sprang into action. He took her by the upper arms, holding her steady, sending a curt command to Gonzo to back off. 'Are you sick, Maya?' he asked, his frown so tense and serious it made his head ache.

'I've got the most awful nausea,' she said weakly. 'I've been sick for the last hour. Gonzo's food set me off…'

'Right, that settles it,' he said. 'I will send someone over to pack up your things. You need to rest.

I will feed Gonzo in the future. You need to concentrate on looking after this baby. The first thing that needs to happen is a doctor's appointment. Right now, as soon as I can arrange it.'

She pushed back her damp blond hair from her pale forehead. 'I don't want to be told how likely it is I'm going to lose this baby,' she said, her chin wobbling slightly. 'I don't have a great track record.'

Giorgio felt a hand clutch at his insides. 'You are not going to lose this baby, not if I can help it.'

She looked up at him with a pained expression. 'You can't control everything, Giorgio; surely you realise that by now?'

He refused to consider the possibility of failure. He set his jaw, pushing it forward indomitably.

'We have got this far, Maya,' he said. 'I know it is still early days but you are extremely nauseous. I think I read somewhere that it is a good sign of strong hormonal activity when a woman is so nauseous in the early days of pregnancy. We have to cling to that. To hope that this one will be the success we have hoped for all this time.'

She turned away from him, her shoulders slumped forward as if already preparing for defeat. 'I'm so frightened to hope,' she said in a whisper-soft voice. 'I feel like a gift has been handed to me but it's not quite in my hands. I can't help feeling it will be snatched away at the last minute if I get my hopes up.'

'You can't think like that, Maya,' he insisted. 'You have to remain positive.'

She turned and faced him. 'There are no guarantees, though, are there?' she asked. 'I know you don't like talking about it but you lost your sister when she was three months old. She was a living, breathing, interactive baby. This baby is a tiny embryo, not even independent of my body.

What hope is there that we won't lose him or her in the future, just like your little sister?'

A shutter came down over his face, just like a heavy curtain over a stage. Maya knew she had overstepped the mark. She had mentioned the unmentionable. But she longed to be reassured, she longed for the confidence she lacked-that this pregnancy would be the glue that would stick their marriage back into place.

'This is an entirely different situation,' he said in a flat emotionless tone. 'We have been down this path before. It is tricky and uncertain but there are things we can cling to in hope this time around. This is a natural conception, one that occurred a long time after your previous miscarriages. This is a totally different ballgame. We did this all by ourselves: no hormone injections, no temperature charts-we just got down and did what had to be done and now we are expecting a baby. We have to go with this; we have to take it as it comes.'

She pressed her lips together, making them as white as her face. 'And if we fail?'

He gave her a look of steely determination. 'We are not going to fail, Maya, not this time.'

Maya longed for his confidence, if indeed what he was exhibiting was confidence. She had a feeling he was as worried as she was, but he was not letting on. 'Giorgio…' she began uncertainly. 'What did you feel when I lost the other babies?'

He drew in a breath and let it out in a slow uneven stream. 'I was devastated for you and for me. I know I didn't show it, but it's what I've always done in a crisis.' He paused. 'I had to be strong so you could lean on me. I didn't realise until now how wrong that approach probably was.'

'I wish I had known that's how you felt…'

'Would it have made a difference?' he asked.

Maya let her shoulders drop. 'I don't know…'

He touched her cheek with two fingers. 'I didn't want to burden you with my own sense of failure. I felt you had enough to deal with. But now I see I should have shared more with you about how it felt for me so you understood that I knew at least some of what you were feeling.'

It explained a lot, Maya thought, and yet she was still worried about his motives for keeping their marriage on track. If she failed to deliver a live child, would he still insist on their marriage continuing? And, even if she did give birth to the heir he so dearly wanted, wouldn't she then have to live with the knowledge she was the mother of a Sabbatini heir and not the love of his life, as she so dearly longed to be?

'Have you told your grandfather about this pregnancy?' she asked.

He dropped his hand from her face. 'No, but I think we should tell him as soon as possible. It would boost his spirits no end to know he might be a great-grandfather again in a few months. I only wish he could live that long to see it eventuate.'

Maya felt the pain of his statement. It was as raw for her as it was for him. She still could not quite believe the vibrant, cheeky patriarch of the family was facing imminent death. She could not imagine life without him. It would be doubly hard for Giorgio. He would be expected to carry the family through the crisis while holding the Sabbatini empire in place.

'I wish he could live that long too,' she said softly.

'We'll tell him as soon as we get back from the doctor,' he said. 'Now, do you need a hand getting ready? I have my car outside. We can go straight to the surgery.'

Maya pushed a hand through her limp hair. 'I need to have a shower…'

'Have a quick one while I call the doctor,' he said, pulling out his mobile. 'I'll get one of my staff to come and collect Gonzo and your things and take them to the villa.'

It was all happening so fast that Maya could barely keep up. Giorgio was in organising mode and he was letting nothing stand in his way. After fighting to be independent for so long, she perversely began to feel the relief of having someone take control. It made her feel protected and sheltered from having to worry about things all on her own.

The shower did much to restore her equilibrium. The worst of the nausea had abated and when she came downstairs dressed in jeans and a rollneck cashmere sweater with a trench coat draped around her shoulders in case it was still cold outside, Giorgio was already waiting for her.

He gave her a rare smile, such a small movement of his lips but it still managed to contract her heart. 'You look a lot better. Not feeling so sick now?' he asked.

She shook her head. 'No, I'm fine now.'

He held the door open for her, commanding Gonzo to sit on his cushion in the laundry instead of bolting out of the door, as clearly had been the dog's plan.

'He is getting out of control,' Giorgio said as he led Maya to his car, parked illegally in front of her flat. 'You've clearly been too soft with him.'

She sent him a resentful little glare as he activated the remote control device to unlock the car.

'He's been upset by the change in living arrangements,' she said. 'Now I can understand how children misbehave for one or both of their parents when there is a divorce. It's very unsettling having to shift between two residences all the time.'

He held open the passenger door for her. 'I wasn't the one who instigated the divorce,' he reminded her with a speaking look.

'No, but you would have got around to it sooner or later,' she said.

He didn't answer other than to close the door and stride around to the driver's side, his expression dark and brooding.

Maya pulled down the seat belt with an angry movement of her hand. She waited until he was sitting in the driver's seat beside her before she said, 'I'm doing my best, Giorgio. I haven't deliberately spoilt Gonzo. He misses you, that's all. I didn't realise how much until we had separated.'

He looked across at her for a pulsing moment, his eyes inscrutable and impossibly dark. 'Well, he will not have to worry about that now.'

Maya tied her fingers into a knot in her lap. 'We haven't really discussed this properly,' she said.

'You said our marriage is to continue indefinitely, but that is not just up to you. I have some say in it, surely?'

He started the car with a rocket-fuel roar, putting it into gear with a savage movement of his hand. 'You, for once, Maya, will do as you are told. I am tired of being painted as the bad guy in all of this. I have done the best I could do under the circumstances. I know I am not the best husband in the world, but neither am I the worst. We've had some bad luck. Lots of people do, even worse things than we've experienced. We should both be mature enough to deal with it and move on.'

Maya clenched her teeth to stop herself from flinging an invective his way. He always made it seem as if she was the one who was being childish and petty, giving up in a pout when she should have pressed on. The nine-year age gap between them didn't help. It gave him an edge in experience that she couldn't see how she could ever make up.

'But we have nothing in common,' she said. 'I don't see how we can make our marriage work when it's already failed once.'

'We have more in common than you realise,' he said. 'We both love dogs, for instance.'

She rolled her eyes at him. 'Lots of people love dogs. It doesn't mean they would make a great life partner.'

'It's a start, Maya,' he said. 'And we're sexually compatible. You can't deny that now, can you?'

Maya turned her gaze away as she felt the stirring of her body. She quickly crossed her legs, hoping to suppress it but, if anything, it made her more aware of her need of him.

One of his hands reached across and squeezed hers. 'Just in case there are paparazzi around, put on a happy face, Maya,' he said. 'It's really important my grandfather believes this to be a genuine reconciliation.'

Maya glanced at him as he took his hand away to change gear. 'You don't feel uncomfortable about lying to him?' she asked. 'You've always been close to him. Don't you think he will see through this charade for what it is?'

He gave a little up and down movement of his shoulders. 'I don't see that I am lying to him at all,'

he said. 'This is what I want right now. A divorce is out of the question.'

She frowned as she studied his expression as he focused on the traffic ahead. 'You didn't exactly beg me to return to you when I instigated proceedings, though, did you?'

He sent her a quick inscrutable glance before turning back to the road in front. 'I knew I was making you unhappy. There seemed no point in continuing to make you miserable just to keep up appearances. Anyway, you should know me well enough by now to know it's not in my nature to beg.'

There was that damn Sabbatini pride raising its head again, Maya thought. 'So the only way to get me back was to blackmail me emotionally,' she said. 'You knew I wouldn't say no to Salvatore, so you used his illness to your advantage.'

'You make it sound as if I have engineered his illness for my own gain,' Giorgio said. 'I would give anything to keep my grandfather alive for another ten years but that is not what fate has decided.'

'All the same, this situation really works to your advantage, doesn't it?' she said. 'You get to stall a very expensive divorce for a few more weeks, if not months.'

He looked at her as if she was a small, disobedient child he was reprimanding. 'It could be years, Maya. You need to get your head around that. Sabbatinis do not take divorce lightly.'

She sent him a hot little glare. 'Do you think I care a fig for your black credit card lifestyle?

Money can buy you a lot of things, but it can't buy the most valuable thing in life.'

'You seemed to enjoy what came your way,' he said with a tightening of his mouth. 'I didn't hear any complaints about the holidays and jewellery and designer wardrobe.'

'You might not have noticed but I left a lot of what you gave me behind,' she said, 'including my rings.'

'I have them in safe keeping for you,' he said. 'They are in the safe at my villa. I want you to wear them from now on.'

Maya wanted to tell him exactly where he could put his rings, but she reminded herself that this was about making Salvatore happy in the remaining weeks of his life. It wasn't the time to be scoring points with Giorgio; it was the time for a truce, so he could prepare himself and the rest of his family for the sad end of his grandfather's long and productive life.