Happy Mother's Day! (26 page)

B
Y THE
time the last of their party-throwers had taken their leave Erin couldn’t help but be glad that Francesco had taken direct action.

She still couldn’t believe that—after all her fears that she would struggle to adapt to a world so far removed from the one she knew, and that his family would think he had married beneath him—in the end they had gathered her to their collective bosom unreservedly. The thing she would always remember about today would be the incredible warmth of her welcome.

Her head was filled with faces and buzzing with names. It was small wonder that she had the beginnings of a headache.

Francesco had not been exaggerating when he’d said he had a large family.

During the party Erin’s thoughts had repeatedly returned to the moments in the garden before they had walked into their surprise party. She had kept thinking about the things he had said and the expression in his eyes. It had made it hard for her to concentrate on what people had been saying to her and being forced to wait to hear what else he had to say had been incredibly frustrating.

So many questions still remained unanswered. She had
felt so optimistic, so confident when they had walked through the door. But things had been left hanging in the air and during the frustrating delay doubts had crept in.

Maybe he didn’t even realise yet, but one thing was perfectly plain to Erin; Francesco hadn’t been in love with her when he’d married her. In lust, yes, but not in love.

She had been a diversion. If he had been kissing her he hadn’t been thinking about his brother. Was it possible that he had really fallen in love with her since they had married? Or was she succumbing to that most common of human failings and seeing only what she wanted to? Wasn’t it more likely that his new warmth and tenderness had more to do with the fact she was the mother of his unborn child and he wanted their marriage to work?

A moment later Francesco walked into the room massaging the back of his neck. ‘I’ve pulled up the drawbridge.’

And by the expression in her eyes as she looked at him it looked as if Erin had, too. He silently cursed his family’s timing. Things had been going in exactly the right direction until they had been ambushed.

‘And this is the family you thought you were not sophisticated enough to be part of,’ he said, removing a paper streamer from around his neck. ‘They like you.’

‘And I like them.’

‘The question is do you like me, Erin?’

‘You know I do, despite the fact you give orders and you issue decrees, you ride roughshod over people’s feelings and you think you’re always right!’

‘Is there more? Because I warn you my ego is feeling pretty fragile right now.’

A flicker of a smile crossed her face. ‘You’ve got an ego the size of Manchester.’

‘You think I will ever find a woman willing to overlook my failings?’

Only several million.

‘Are you worried you won’t?’

‘I wasn’t,’ he admitted. ‘In fact, I thought I already had. But suddenly I don’t sound like the template for anyone’s perfect man.’

Her eyes dropped from his. ‘That kind of depends on the woman,’ she mumbled, thinking that for her he would always represent the perfect man.

‘Erin!’

The urgency in his voice as he spoke her name drew Erin’s eyes upwards.

‘Just what happened … outside, I thought …’ A nerve clenched in his lean cheek. ‘Was I wrong?’

She shook her head. ‘No …’ She ran the tip of her tongue across the outline of her dry lips and lifted her chin.

Their glances locked, the tension vibrating between them like an overstrung violin string. Erin felt herself drawn in, mesmerised by the rampant hunger in the velvety depths.

The sexual inertia that started in her toes took a heartbeat to engulf her entire body. She closed her eyes, but could still see his face.

She wanted to be in his arms; he wanted her to be there.

‘No … no, this is …’ Breathing hard, he stepped away from her his hand held up as though to ward her off.

She reached a hand in confused protest and Francesco shook his head. ‘No, when you touch me it is like throwing a flammable liquid on a smouldering fire. Not something I have a problem with,
tesora mia,’
he admitted with a strained grin. ‘But right now we need to finish what we started. What we started outside before my family crashed our private party.’

Heart thudding like a hammer in her chest from a combination of anticipation and trepidation, she nodded and got to her feet. It was then she actually felt the blood slowly draining from her face; it really was the strangest sensation. She could see Francesco’s lips moving, but she couldn’t hear anything above the roar of the blood pounding in her ears.

Feeling strangely disconnected from what was happening, she was conscious that her knees were sagging and the floor was rushing up towards her.

The next second she found herself flat on her back on the sofa in the living room.

‘If you move an inch I will kill you!’

She turned her head in the direction of this fierce threat. ‘It wasn’t my fault I fainted,’ she protested weakly.

‘Nothing is ever your fault!’ he thundered. ‘You are taking years off my life.’

‘You look all right to me.’ He looked perfect and it wasn’t hard to see why other women were drawn to him.

Erin had experienced firsthand the magnetic charge of Francesco’s rampant masculinity. She was pretty sure that every female with a hormone in her bloodstream got a sexual buzz just looking at him.

And mostly they wanted to do more than look, she thought. They wanted to spear their fingers into his silky dark hair and breathe in the warm male scent of his body.

Once upon a time allowing herself to think this way would have sent her into a spiral of rage and pain, but now it didn’t.

Now she had total belief in his integrity. ‘I love you, Francesco …’ Why hadn’t she said this before? ‘I just wish that I’d told …’

‘Erin … you don’t have to say it. I already know.’

‘I.I don’t understand,’ she faltered, confused by his driven, strained manner.

His deep-set eyes slid from hers. ‘That day when I went looking for you … your mother, she told me.’

‘Told you what?’

‘We were apart for eight weeks, you were feeling vulnerable and alone. I.’ A nerve along his jaw clenched as his dark eyes slid from hers. ‘I really don’t need to know the details.’ That, he reflected grimly, would be more than he could bear. ‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is how you feel now. And I think … I think you love me?’

It was a wary question and not an arrogant pronouncement. This was not the Francesco Erin knew.

‘I do love you, Francesco,’ she admitted huskily.

A hissing sigh of audible relief escaped his clamped lips. ‘Then that is what matters,’ he announced, his mouth firming with determination. ‘Not things that … you may not think so now, Erin, but we have something very special, something which is incredibly rare. And if you are worried that I will throw this up into your face in the future, do not be.’ He moved his hands in a sweep designed to illustrate that a line had been drawn under the subject. ‘I swear on all that is—’

Erin, who had been listening to him with an air of bewilderment, cut across him. ‘I might be more relieved if I knew what you were talking about.’

He looked pained. ‘I understand, Erin—there is no need for you to lie to me.’

She could only assume that this
understanding
he claimed was responsible for the rigidity in his lean body and the nerve ticking like a time bomb in his hollow cheek.

‘I’m not lying, Francesco. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Please tell me what my mother told you.’

‘While you were in hospital she rang me and implied that after you left me … that you, that you met someone else.’

‘You think I had an affair?’ The sheer absurdity of the suggestion drew a laugh from her throat.

‘You don’t have to pretend, Erin …’

As her thoughts raced Erin’s eyes started to fill.

Seeing the sheen in the luminous depths, Francesco, misreading their cause, groaned. ‘We will work through this,’

‘Work through it?’ she echoed.

He had been thinking that she was suffering from a guilty conscience.

And he was prepared to forgive her!

If she had ever doubted the depth of his love she didn’t now. She could only imagine how hard forgiving such a lapse would be for someone with his pride.

It represented nobility of epic proportions!

‘You think I had an affair and you’re willing to take me back. You must love me very much?’ she said in rapturous wonder.

‘More than life,’ he confirmed, causing more tears to leak from her eyes.

‘That is so … oh, my God, Francesco, I don’t deserve you,’ she said in a choked voice. She took the tissue he handed her and blotted her face, smiling through the tears up at him. ‘My mother was stirring …'It would be a long time, she reflected, her expression momentarily hardening as she thought of her mother, before she would forgive her for this malicious meddling.

His dark glance sharpened and flickered questioningly across her face. ‘What are you telling me?’

‘I’m telling you she was lying. I had no affair.’
Please let him believe me.
‘I couldn’t,’ she told him simply.

‘You’re the only man I have ever been with. The only man I’ve
wanted
to be with. The idea of another man touching me
the way you do makes my skin crawl,’ she revealed with a shudder. ‘Before you I even thought I was not very highly sexed … frigid, I suppose.’

There was a long silence while he searched her face. Erin returned his gaze, her eyes glowing with her love for him, a faint smile making her soft lips quiver.

‘My God … can this be true?’ He sighed, a feverish shudder running through his lean body. ‘I have been through such agonies,’ he revealed, dragging a shaking hand through his hair. To think of another man’s hands on her had made him sick to the stomach and filled him with a murderous rage the like of which he had never imagined he was capable of.

‘Oh, I think I do.’ Erin pulled herself into a sitting position and tucked her feet under her. ‘I’m fine now,’ she said quickly as Francesco opened his mouth to reproach her. ‘An imagination can be a terrible thing, can’t it?’ she added softly.

He nodded. ‘It is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. Thinking of you with … I wanted to kill him, but the worst part was the knowledge that it was my own stupid fault if you had turned to someone else. I knew how insecure your parents’ relationship had made you. I should have made allowances. My God,’ he breathed, coming around to sit beside her on the sofa. ‘Your mother must really hate me.’

Her expression grim, Erin took his big hands between her small ones. ‘My mother rarely thinks of anyone but herself.’

‘But to say such a thing, it.’ For a moment Francesco relived his worst nightmare. Then he took a deep sigh and closed the door firmly on those terrible images. It was a place he never wanted to visit again.

‘You believe me?’

He looked indignant as he lifted her hands to his lips. ‘Of course I believe you.’

Joy exploded inside her.

‘If you thought I’d had an affair, did you not wonder even for a moment whether the baby …’ She lowered her hand to her stomach, carrying his hand with her. ‘Whether he was yours?’

Francesco curled his big hand protectively over her belly and smiled. ‘Not even for a moment!’

‘Well, it would be understandable if you had.’

He shook his head. ‘I knew that you would never try and pass off another man’s child as mine.’

His total confidence drew an emotional sob from her aching throat. ‘God, you’re so …’ She gave a teary sniff. ‘You’re a much nicer person than me.’

He levelled an amused grin at her face. ‘You are the only person who has ever called me nice—not even my own mother thinks I am nice.’ A frown contorted his face as he asked, ‘But if there was no other man, what is it that has been coming between us? You are not going to tell me that you have some stupid idea I only want you because of the baby.’ His face tightened with displeasure at the thought.

‘It did cross my mind, but, no, not now. It’s just I knew you didn’t love me when you married me.’

‘I didn’t love you?’

She shook her head.

‘You were in a terrible place after Rafe killed himself.’

Francesco flinched at the sound of his brother’s name. ‘I thought we had dealt with this idea before.’

‘Oh, I’m not saying you
deliberately
used me to ease the pain. But you were all over the place emotionally speaking … it was like, you know, turning up the radio to drown out the road drill.’

‘I didn’t turn to prescriptive drugs to dull the pain, I turned to you? Presumably you thought I would wake up one day fully healed and find you surplus to requirements.’

She nodded.

Succumbing to mirth, he threw back his head and laughed.

‘You thought I was having an affair,’ she pointed out when he had stopped.

‘Point taken,’ he conceded. ‘But,
per amor di Dio,
how could you think something so crazy? Rafe’s death had nothing to do with me marrying you! Except in the fact it made me appreciate that a man should grab happiness with both hands when he had it within his grasp … It is just a pity that my pride had made me lose sight of this for a while.

‘Pain is part of the grieving process. I felt pain when Rafe died and I still do. I suspect I always will. While I did not embrace that pain,
cara,
I never tried to escape it.

‘As for you being some sort of distraction, God knows,’ he said, tracing a finger down the sweet curve of her cheek with his thumb, ‘you are that, but it is total nonsense. I did think of Rafe when I saw you that first day, because I know that he would have recognised what you were immediately.’

‘And what is that?’

‘My soul mate, the one woman I was destined to spend the rest of my life with. My brother always was more intuitive and much better with words than me.

‘Me, I saw you standing there, the freckles on your nose, the hair like fire.’ He sighed and looped a strand around his finger. ‘I saw your belligerence, your bravery, your sheer bloody-minded stubbornness and I knew that I wanted to wake up every day looking at that face.’