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Shock: One-Night Heir
MELANIE MILBURNE
Sabbatini men play for keeps – losing is not in their vocabulary… When Maya met Giorgio Sabbatini, he rescued the penniless waif and stray despite her inferior breeding. So her decision to divorce him now is made with a heavy heart. Giorgio belongs to a notorious blue-blooded family, and their duty to maintain its lineage is unquestionable.Unable to give him the heir he craves, Maya knows she has to walk away. But the ink on their divorce papers isn’t given the chance to dry: after one last, reckless night of passion there’s a very shocking announcement…THE SABBATINI BROTHERS Three powerful playboys from the richest dynasty in Europe! Ruthless, irresistible…impossible to tame?
THE SABBATINI BROTHERS
Three powerful playboys from the richest dynasty in Europe! Ruthless, irresistible…impossible to tame?
Luca, Giorgio and Nicoló have Italian fire and passion coursing through their blood. And now they are looking for the one thing that money can’t buy…the love of a good woman!
This month Maya learns you don’t say no to Giorgio Sabbatini!
Hearing her say she didn’t need him any more triggered something deep and primal in his blood. He would not let her leave him without a fight—baby or no baby. ‘You have said this is my child, Maya,’ he said. ‘I am not going to walk away from my own flesh and blood. I have changed my mind—our marriage will continue indefinitely.’
Look out for notorious Nicoló Sabbatini, coming soon in Modern™ Romance
Shock: One-Night Heir
By
Melanie Milburne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
About the Author
MELANIE MILBURNE says: ‘I am married to a surgeon, Steve, and have two gorgeous sons, Paul and Phil. I live in Hobart, Tasmania, where I enjoy an active life as a long-distance runner and a nationally ranked top ten Master’s swimmer. I also have a Master’s Degree in Education, but my children totally turned me off the idea of teaching! When not running or swimming I write, and when I’m not doing all of the above I’m reading. And if someone could invent a way for me to read during a four-kilometre swim I’d be even happier!’
Recent titles by the same author:
SCANDAL: UNCLAIMED LOVE-CHILD
(#litres_trial_promo) THE MÉLENDEZ FORGOTTEN MARRIAGE CASTELLANO’S MISTRESS OF REVENGE BOUND BY THE MARCOLINI DIAMONDS
Did you know that Melanie also writes for Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance?
Chapter One
MAYA looked at the dipstick in shock. Her throat closed over as if a hand had locked around her neck as the two blue lines appeared.
Positive.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub, her legs shaking so much she had to clamp her knees together. Hope flickered brightly and then just as quickly waned.
It couldn’t be true.
She took a deep breath and looked at the stick again. She blinked once, twice, three times but the lines were the same as before.
The doorbell suddenly rang with an incessant peal and she sprang to her feet, her heart knocking against her chest wall like a pendulum pushed by a madman. She quickly stashed the test kit in the nearest drawer beneath the twin basins and took a long slow breath to steady herself.
Gonzo was already at the door, barking joyfully in greeting, but Maya didn’t need the dog’s behaviour to signal to her who was at the door. No one rang the doorbell quite the same way as her soon-to-be ex-husband Giorgio Sabbatini did. He always pressed it too hard and for too long. He was summoning her and he clearly would not be taking no for an answer.
Maya fixed a deliberately cool expression on her face as she opened the door. ‘G…Giorgio,’ she said, hoping the catch in her voice wouldn’t betray her. ‘I thought you were sending one of your staff to pick up Gonzo. Isn’t that the arrangement we agreed on?’
‘I decided to come in person this time.’ He bent down to ruffle the ecstatic dog’s ears before he rose back to his full height, his tall frame towering over her. His dark brown eyes glittered with a sardonic light as they met hers. ‘I am quite surprised to find you at home,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be out with your new Englishman lover. What was his name again? Hugh? Herbert?’
Maya bit the inside of her mouth, wishing, not for the first time, she hadn’t gone on that stupid blind date set up by a friend from her yoga class. ‘Howard,’ she said tightly. ‘And it wasn’t anything like the press reported it.’
One of Giorgio’s brows lifted in a cynical arc. ‘So he didn’t rip your clothes off in the hallway of his apartment and have his wicked way with you?’
Maya threw him a venomous look as she closed the door behind him with a snap. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That is more your style, is it not?’
He gave her an indolent smile which made every hair on the back of her neck lift up in reaction. ‘You were with me all the way, cara,’ he said in a tone that was gravelly and rough and so deep she felt a guilty shiver of remembered pleasure cascade down her spine and bury itself in that hot secret place between her thighs.
Maya turned on her heel rather than face him with her colour so high. She still cringed in shame at how she had behaved the night of his brother’s wedding. She still wasn’t exactly sure what had precipitated it. Had it been the champagne or the pain of finally letting go? Break up sex, that was what it was called. It didn’t mean anything, certainly not to him. He had probably bedded several women since they had separated. According to the latest press report, he was currently seeing a lingerie model based in London. Reading that had been like a dart to Maya’s heart but she would rather die than reveal that to him.
She felt him come up behind her, her skin prickling all over and her nostrils flaring as she breathed in his citrus-based aftershave overlaid with his particular male smell. All her senses—the ones she had sworn would always be switched to neutral when he was around—turned to full throttle. She felt her heart give a stutter when his hands came to rest on the top of her shoulders, her breathing stopping altogether when his tall body brushed against hers from behind.
‘You smell nice,’ he said, bending his head so his mouth almost touched the side of her neck. ‘Is that a new perfume you are wearing?’
Somehow she got her voice to work. ‘Get your hands off me, Giorgio,’ she said. Before I turn around and fall into your arms and make a complete and utter fool of myself all over again.
His hands tightened for a fraction of a second, long enough for her heart rate to go up another notch. ‘Our divorce isn’t final until the last of the paperwork is sorted,’ he said, his breath lifting the hairs that had come loose from her makeshift ponytail. ‘Maybe we can make the most of the time before the ink dries, hmm?’
Maya knew what this was about and it hurt much more than the lingerie model. It wasn’t their broken marriage he was fighting for, it was his fortune. The Sabbatini family was as good as Italian royalty. When she had married Giorgio five years ago there had been no prenuptial agreement prepared. It was an unwritten, unspoken law: their marriage was meant to last, as every other Sabbatini marriage had in the past. But Maya wondered if any other Sabbatini marriage had endured the heartache theirs had and survived.
She very much doubted it.
She turned to face him, her heart tightening all over again as she looked into his inscrutable dark-as-night eyes. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.
His thumbs started to knead her knotted shoulders until she was sure she was going to melt into a pool at his feet. She fought the response, clamping her teeth together as she put her hands against his chest to push him away. ‘Will you stop touching me, for God’s sake?’ she railed at him.
He captured her hands effortlessly, holding them in one of his as if they were a child’s. ‘It was good that night, si?’ he said. ‘I can’t remember a time when it was better, can you?’
Maya swallowed unevenly. She had tried so hard not to think of that night, how wonderful it had been to make love with such abandon. No temperature or ovulation charts, no hormone injections—just good old-fashioned bed-wrecking sex, except they hadn’t quite made it to the bed. But this visit: was it about a rerun of that passionate night or a truce to secure his assets?
‘Giorgio…that night was a crazy, stupid mistake,’ she said, not trusting herself to hold his gaze.
She pulled her hands out of his and moved away, crossing her arms over her middle. It was too soon to tell him, of course it was. It would jinx things just like before. How many times had she held up the dipstick in joy, only to have her hopes and dreams smashed like priceless porcelain on a pavement a week or two later? There were no guarantees this time would be any different. If it wasn’t meant to be, at least Giorgio would be free to move on with someone else who could give him what he wanted most. They would both be free to move on. She had wasted five years of his life, not to mention her own. He was thirty-six years old. Most of his friends and colleagues had two or three children by now.
She had given him none.
Giorgio followed her into the tiny salone. Maya felt his gaze on her, the heat of it, the slow burn of it peeling every layer of her skin until she felt raw and exposed. She had to hold herself together. She couldn’t come unstuck and get all emotional and needy in front of him. She was supposed to be over all of that now. She had worked hard at it, working out new priorities, new directions, none of which included Giorgio. Cool and in control was the only way to go with him. She had to prove to him that he no longer had any emotional or sensual power over her. She was her own person now, determined to move on with her life.
She was stronger now, much stronger.
The six-month separation had done that for her. She no longer lived in the shadow of Giorgio’s money and prestige. She was making a way for herself, providing for her future by restarting her career, which she had naively cast aside in order to fit in with what Giorgio and his family had expected of her. She was quite proud of what she had achieved in the time they had been apart. She had been looking forward to starting afresh until this latest hiccup had thrown her off course. Could he see the secret she was trying to hide from him? Was there some clue on her face or in her body, even at this early stage? He seemed to be looking at her so intently, his dark gaze so piercing she felt exposed and raw, as if he could see into her soul.
‘What is this I hear about you moving to London?’ he asked.
She faced him with a set mouth, her shoulders pulled back in determination. ‘I have an interview for a teaching position at a fee paying school. I am on the shortlist.’
A frown brought his brows together. ‘Are you going to take it if it is offered to you?’
She let her arms drop by her sides in an effort to look composed. ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, sending him a pointed look. ‘I have nothing to keep me in Italy.’
A muscle moved up and down in his jaw, as if he were chewing on something hard and distasteful. ‘What about Gonzo?’ he asked.
Maya felt her heart squeeze at the thought of saying goodbye to the dog she had brought up from puppyhood. But no pets were allowed in her apartment block in London, and she knew the big ragamuffin hound would miss Giorgio too much in any case. As it was, the dog had been like a naughty child ever since she and Giorgio had separated. ‘I have decided he is better off with you,’ she said.
His top lip curled. ‘That’s quite a turnaround. You were arguing the point for weeks over who should have him. I was about to get my lawyer to file a pet custody suit.’
Maya lifted one of her shoulders in a shrug of feigned indifference. ‘I am sure he will forget all about me once he moves into your newly renovated villa,’ she said. ‘When do you move back in, by the way?’
Giorgio raked his hand through his hair in a gesture that tugged on something deep inside Maya’s chest. There were so many of his mannerisms she had found herself thinking about lately: how he rationed his smiles as if he found life not all that amusing, how his brow furrowed when he was deep in concentration, and how his eyes glinted and darkened meaningfully when he was in the mood for sex. She skirted away from that errant thought. It brought back too many erotic memories of that forbidden night.
‘I’m not sure. A week or two, I think,’ he said. ‘The painters haven’t quite finished. There was a delay with some of the fabrics for the curtains or some such thing.’
Maya didn’t want to think of how she had chosen the colours and fabrics for all of those rooms in the past. She had done it with such enthusiasm and hope for the future. When she had heard he was renovating the villa, adding rooms and knocking down walls and redeveloping the garden, she had been crushed to think he obviously wanted to rid the place of every trace of her presence. It tore her apart to think of how those rooms might one day be filled with his children by some other woman. She thought of the nursery she had so lovingly decorated the first time she had fallen pregnant. After five years of dashed hopes, in the end she had not been able to even open the door.
‘When do you leave?’ Giorgio asked into the pulsing silence.
With an effort she met his gaze. ‘Next Monday.’
‘This is all rather sudden, is it not?’ he asked, frowning darkly. ‘I thought you had decided long ago you weren’t going to go back to teaching. Or are you trying to imply to outsiders that I’m not paying you enough in our divorce settlement?’
Maya refused to rise to the bait. ‘I don’t care what people think, Giorgio. I want to go back to teaching because I have a brain that longs to be used. I was never cut out for the ladies-who-do-lunch set. I should never have given up my career in the first place. I don’t know what on earth I was thinking.’
He continued to study her with his dark unreadable gaze. ‘You seemed pretty happy with the arrangement to begin with,’ he said. ‘You said your career was not as important as mine. You jumped at the chance to become a full time wife.’
Maya mentally cringed at how romantically deluded she had been back then. Although she hadn’t for a moment thought he was marrying her for love, she had longed for it to happen all the same. His marrying her had more to do with tradition and expectation from his family. He had reached the age of thirty and, in the tradition of the Sabbatini blood line, he’d needed a wife and heir. Giorgio had showered her with diamonds and she had been fooled into believing in the whole fairy tale that one day they would get their happy ever after. How young and naive she had been! Just twenty-two years old, fresh out of university, she had fallen in love on her first trip abroad. It had taken her five heartbreaking years to finally grow up and realise not all fairy tales had a happy ending.
‘I had stars in my eyes,’ she said, knowing it would feed his opinion of her as a gold-digger but doing it anyway. ‘All that money, all that fame, all those luxury hotels and villas and exotic holidays. What girl could possibly resist?’
His brows snapped together and that leaping knot of tension appeared again at the corner of his mouth. ‘If you think for even a moment that you are getting half of all I own, then think again,’ he bit out. ‘I don’t care if it takes my legal team a decade to thrash this out in court, I will not roll over for you.’
Maya raised her chin at him. It was always about money with Giorgio. She had been yet another business transaction and the thing that rankled with him was it had failed. The truth was they had both failed. She hadn’t made him any happier than he had made her. Money had cushioned things for a while but she had come to see the only way to move forward was to part.
‘You will only delay the divorce even further,’ she said. ‘I am not after much, in any case.’
Giorgio gave a snort. ‘Not much? Come on, Maya. You want the villa at Bellagio. That has been in my family for seven generations. It is priceless to my family. I suppose that’s why you want to take it away from us.’
Maya steeled her resolve. ‘The place should have been sold years ago and you know it. We’ve only been there the once and you acted like a caged lion the whole time. Both of your brothers haven’t been there for months and in the whole time we’ve been married your mother has never once gone there. For most of the year it lies empty, apart from the staff. It’s such an obscene waste.’
His eyes moved away from hers, as she knew they would. He absolutely refused to discuss the tragic event that had occurred during his childhood, and every time she had tried to draw him out over his baby sister’s death he put up a wall of resistance that was impenetrable. She hated the way he always locked her out. She hated the way it made her feel as if she was not entitled to know how he felt about even the simplest things. But then all he had wanted from her was a cardboard cut-out wife, a showpiece to hang off his arm and do all the things a corporate wife was supposed to do—all the things except unlock the secret pain of his heart.
He turned his back and paced back and forth, his hands clenching and unclenching by his sides. ‘My mother might one day feel the need to go back to the villa,’ he said. ‘But, until she does, the place is not to be sold.’
Maya shifted her tongue inside her cheek, still intent on needling him. ‘Are you planning to go there any time soon?’ she asked. ‘How long’s it been, Giorgio? Two or three years, or is it four?’
He turned and faced her, his eyes blazing with something hot and hard and dangerous. ‘Don’t push it, Maya,’ he said. ‘You are not getting the villa. Anyway, Luca and Bronte will most probably use it now they are married. It’s a perfect place for Ella to spend her childhood holidays.’
Maya felt her insides clench as she thought of the dark-haired, blue-eyed toddler Luca had introduced to his family a few weeks ago. His new wife, Bronte, a fellow Australian, had met Luca two years ago in London, but Luca had broken off the relationship before he had realised Bronte was carrying his child. Their reunion and marriage had been one of the most romantic and poignant events Maya had ever witnessed.
Being around gorgeous little Ella on the day of the wedding had been a torturous reminder of how Maya had failed to produce an heir. She wondered if that was why she had acted so stupidly and recklessly once the reception had ended. She had been so emotionally overwrought, so desperately lonely and sad at the breakdown of her own marriage that she had weakened when Giorgio had suggested a nightcap.
Going back to his room at the Sabbatini hotel in Milan where the reception was held had been her first mistake. Her second had been to let him kiss her. And her third…well, she was deeply ashamed of falling into his arms like that. She had acted like a slut and he had walked away from her when it was over as if he had paid for her services like a street worker.
‘I want the villa, Giorgio,’ she said, holding his diamond-hard gaze. ‘I surely deserve some compensation. I could ask for a whole lot more and you know it.’
His jaw moved forward in an uncompromising manner, his eyes now darker than ink. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea here, Maya. I want this divorce just as much as you do. But the villa is not negotiable. I am not going to budge on this.’
His intransigence fuelled Maya’s defiance, so too did his all too ready acceptance of the divorce. Surely, if he had ever felt anything for her, wouldn’t he have fought to keep her by his side no matter what? The only reason he was dragging the chain a bit was over the settlement.
Her bitterness was like a hot flood inside her, scorching its way through her veins. ‘You bastard,’ she threw at him. ‘You’re rich beyond belief and you won’t give me the only thing I want.’
‘Why do you want it?’ he asked. ‘You’re moving to London within days. What use would you have for a thirty-room villa?’
‘I want to develop it,’ she said with a combative toss of her head. ‘It would make a fabulous hotel and health spa. It would provide a supplementary income to my teaching. It would be an investment, a great investment in fact.’
His eyes flashed like lightning. ‘Are you deliberately goading me?’ he asked. ‘Dio, Maya, I’ve already warned you not to push me too far.’
‘Why?’ she tossed back at him. ‘Are you worried you might show some human feelings for once? Some anger, some passion, or maybe even some vulnerability for a change?’
The air pulsed with a current of energy that made the skin on the back of Maya’s neck start to tingle. His eyes were so black she could not tell where his pupils ended and his irises began. He had stopped clenching his hands as soon as he saw her eyes flick to them but she could sense the tension in him all the same. His face was carved from stone, his lips flat and tight. She wondered if he was going to close the distance between their bodies and take her in his arms the way he had done the night of his brother’s wedding. They had argued just like this and then suddenly, instead of shouting at each other, they were locked in a passionate embrace. Her body quivered at the memory and when she met Giorgio’s eyes she could almost swear he was recalling exactly the same shamelessly erotic moment when his mouth had crashed down on hers.
‘Is that what you want, Maya?’ he asked in a low and deep and silky tone as his hand snaked out and captured one of hers. ‘You want me to lose control and take you just like the last time?’
Maya’s body flared with heat, her wrist burning like a ring of fire where his fingers curled around it like a handcuff. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she bit out.
He pulled her up against him, his body hot and hard and unmistakably male against her soft femininity. ‘I dared before,’ he reminded her. ‘And you enjoyed every second of it.’
Shame flooded her cheeks but she put up her chin haughtily all the same. ‘I’d had too much champagne to drink.’
His mouth turned up derisively. ‘Is that the only way you can absolve yourself for sleeping with me again?’ he asked. ‘Come on, Maya, you were begging for it even before you had your first sip of champagne. I saw it in your eyes the moment you stepped into the church and looked at me.’
Maya remembered the moment all too well. That first glimpse of him standing there beside his brother after not seeing him for months had knocked her sideways. She had pointedly avoided him as much as possible prior to the wedding. The arrangement over Gonzo being picked up and dropped off by a neutral party had been at her insistence because she didn’t trust herself in his company. Going into the church that day and seeing Giorgio, she had felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. All the bitterness and ill feeling had somehow vaporised, all she could see was a tall, commanding and handsome man with impossibly dark brown eyes which at that moment had been centred right on her. The message in his eyes had been as scorching as his touch was right now. ‘Your imagination is getting as big as your ego,’ she said. ‘You think any woman who looks at you wants you.’
She pulled out of his hold and stepped away from him, tossing over her shoulder, ‘You should probably take Gonzo with you now. His lead is hanging on the hall stand.’
‘I am not going anywhere, Maya,’ Giorgio said through gritted teeth.
Maya turned, trying to ignore the flutter of unease that passed through her belly at the dark glittering heat of his gaze as it meshed with hers. ‘Giorgio…’ She ran her tongue over her lips to moisten their sudden dryness. ‘We’ve said all that needs to be said. The rest is in the hands of our lawyers.’
There was another beat or two of heavily charged silence.
‘I didn’t come here to discuss the divorce,’ Giorgio said.
Maya ran her tongue over her parched lips, her stomach freefalling. ‘You…you didn’t?’
His eyes were unwavering on hers. ‘I came here to issue you an invitation.’
She blinked at him in alarm. ‘An…an invitation? What sort of invitation? I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean because I will not for a moment agree to such an outrageous, insulting and indecent proposal.’
His sensually full lips went into a flat line again. ‘Not that sort of invitation, not that it isn’t a tempting thought, given what happened the last time.’
‘It’s over, Giorgio,’ she said, reminding herself as well as him. ‘We are over.’
He held her look for two beats before he spoke. ‘I know it’s over, Maya. It’s what we both want. It’s what we both need to move on with our lives.’
Maya nodded because she didn’t trust her voice to work right then. Of course it was over. It was what she wanted. She was the one who had done the legwork to get the divorce process going. What sort of hypocrite was she to have second thoughts now? Even though those two blue lines on that dipstick were lying in that drawer upstairs didn’t mean they would appear on a subsequent test. It could all be a mistake. She might have imagined the whole thing. She would need to do another test and another, just to make sure.
Giorgio pushed his hand back through his hair again, taking it off his forehead where it had tipped forward as he moved to the other side of the room. Maya noticed then how tired he looked about the eyes. Too much partying, she supposed. She could just imagine him enjoying the night life after years of being tied down in a going nowhere marriage. He had been like that before they had married and that, no doubt, would be his fallback position.
‘My grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party is next weekend,’ Giorgio said, facing her again. ‘He wants you to be there.’
Maya tightened her mouth. ‘Why then didn’t he call and invite me, instead of sending you? Or why not send an invitation through the post? What’s going on?’
‘You know what he’s like,’ he said. ‘He’s a stubborn old fool who thinks we are throwing away a perfectly good marriage. He wanted me to ask you in person. He apparently thinks I still hold some sort of sway with you.’ He gave her a wry look. ‘I told you he was an old fool.’
Maya spun on her heel to pace the floor. ‘I am not attending any more Sabbatini family functions,’ she stated firmly. ‘No way. Not after the last time.’
Giorgio held up his hands. ‘I promise not to touch, OK?’
She stopped mid-pace to glower at him. ‘I don’t hold much faith in your promises. You were barely in the door a moment ago when you put your hands on me as if you owned me.’
He gave her a crooked half smile that never failed to twist her insides. ‘Put it down to force of habit or muscle memory or whatever.’
She screwed up her face in scorn. ‘Muscle memory? What sort of ridiculous excuse is that? We’re about to be divorced, remember? You have no right to touch me now.’
His fleeting smile disappeared and a frown pulled at his brow. ‘Look, Maya, you will make an old man very happy if you agree to come. Divorce or not, he still considers you a member of the family. He will be devastated if you don’t turn up.’
Maya chewed at her lip, torn between wanting to pay her respects to the only grandfather/father figure she had ever known and her reluctance to spend any further time with the one man she suspected she was not going to be able to resist if she was in too close contact with him. ‘If I go it will be because he asked me, not you,’ she said.
He jangled his keys in his pocket as if impatient to leave. Mission accomplished, Maya thought. He’d got what he wanted and now he was off to enjoy his freedom. She watched as he moved to the front door of her small rented villa, the words to call him back stuck like a handful of thumbtacks in her throat.
It’s over.
It’s what we both want.
It’s over.
The words went over and over in her head like a music system stuck on replay.
‘I’ll pick up Gonzo the day before you leave for London,’ he said as he opened the door.
‘Right. Fine. OK,’ Maya said, cupping her elbows to stop herself from fidgeting.
He gave her one last look, his eyes dark and unfathomable as they ran over her. ‘Champagne or not, it was a great night, cara, wasn’t it? Good note to end our relationship on.’
Maya swiftly turned her back on him, her eyes burning with unshed tears. ‘Please leave…’ she said, surprised her voice had come out at all, much less without cracking.
After what seemed an age, the door finally closed with a click that felt as if it had snapped her heart in two.
Chapter Two
THE party for Salvatore Sabbatini was in full swing when Maya arrived the following Saturday. She had almost changed her mind about coming but knew if she didn’t turn up by a certain time Giorgio would come to her place and collect her.
Right now she wanted as much distance as possible between them. Her secret was still safe and she wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible. She had conducted three more tests and they had all produced the same positive result. It was terrifyingly exciting to think she was carrying a child. Six weeks was too early to be confident it would carry to full term, but every miscarriage she’d had in the past had occurred well before the eight week mark.
‘Signora Sabbatini,’ one of the uniformed waiters greeted her with a tray of drinks balanced on one arm, ‘would you like some champagne?’
Maya offered him a tight smile. ‘Orange juice will be fine, thank you.’
Once she had taken her frosted glass, she moved through to the reception room, where a glamorous array of people were milling about to greet the guest of honour. There were Hollywood stars and high finance people, a couple of members of European royalty as well as family and close friends of Salvatore. Everyone was dressed in designer clothes and several of the women were dripping in priceless jewels.
Maya had dressed carefully for the occasion. She could play the part of haute couture-clad wife and had done so for five years. The dress she had chosen was a fuchsia pink, highlighting the natural blondness of her hair and her sun-kissed colouring from a brief holiday she had taken recently. Her heels were high, but still not high enough to bring her shoulder to shoulder to Giorgio when he appeared out of nowhere and put his hand to the small of her back.
She gave a little start and almost spilt her drink. ‘What do you think you’re doing sneaking up on me like that?’ she said, sending him an irritated look.
‘You look exquisite this evening, Maya,’ he said as if she hadn’t spoken. He leaned in closer and drew in a deep breath close to her neck. ‘Mmm, you’re wearing that new perfume again, are you not? It suits you.’
Maya scowled as she reared away from him. ‘Go and mingle with your friends. Everyone will start talking if we’re seen together. I don’t want another press fest to deal with.’
He smiled a sinful smile, his dark eyes glinting at her. ‘Let them talk. I can spend time with my soon-to-be ex-wife, can’t I? Besides, we have business to discuss.’
Maya pressed her lips together. ‘I haven’t changed my mind about the villa. I sent the papers back to your lawyer. I am not going to let you pay me off with a lump sum. I told you what I want.’
‘I know,’ he said, scooping a glass of champagne off the tray of the passing waiter. He took a generous sip before he added, ‘but here’s the thing: I want it too.’
She looked up at him warily. ‘We can’t both have it, though, can we?’
His eyes locked on hers, hot and hard as steel. ‘I have given it some thought. For the next twelve months I would like the villa to remain a private residence. No developments, no changes.’
She frowned. ‘And after that?’
He took another sip of his champagne, his throat moving up and down slowly as he swallowed it, deliberately delaying his response, making her wait, making her feel unimportant, insignificant. ‘After that, if you still want it you can buy it from my family,’ he said.
Maya rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’
‘What’s the matter, Maya?’ he asked. ‘I’m paying you a fortune in settlement. You’ll have enough cash to buy ten villas.’
She stalked away from him. ‘I don’t want your stupid money.’
In an effort to move away from the interested glances aimed at her, Maya slipped out to a balcony accessed by French windows. She hadn’t expected Giorgio to follow her out there but, before she could shut the doors behind her, he had stepped through them.
‘Why are you being so difficult over this?’ he asked, leaning back against the closed doors.
‘I am being difficult?’ she asked with an incredulous look. ‘You’re the one who keeps sending legal documents the thickness of two phone books to me to sign.’
His forehead creased in a brooding frown. ‘I have shareholders and investors to protect. Don’t take it personally. It’s just business.’
Maya put her glass of juice down on a pot stand before she dropped it. ‘Oh, yes, it’s always business with you. Our marriage was nothing more than a business arrangement. The only trouble was I didn’t deliver the goods as promised.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ His voice was hard and sharp, like a flung dagger.
She dropped her gaze and let out a scratchy sigh. ‘You know what I mean, Giorgio.’
A lengthy silence passed.
‘I wanted it to work, Maya,’ he said quietly. ‘I really did, but we were both making each other miserable in the end.’
She looked up at him with a pained expression. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘What’s to get?’ he asked, his voice rising in frustration. ‘We were married for five years, Maya. I know it wasn’t easy for you. It wasn’t easy for me, watching you…’ He didn’t finish the sentence but, moving away from the doors, lifted his glass and drained the contents.
Maya looked at his stiff spine, feeling the emotional lockout she always felt when they argued. He refused to talk about the losses they had experienced. She’d always had the feeling he had dismissed each miscarriage as nature’s way of saying something was not right. She, on the other hand, had wanted to talk about each of the babies she had named as soon as they were conceived. She had wanted to talk about their stolen futures, the dreams and hopes she had had for each of them. To her, they were not a collection of damaged cells that nature had decided were best sloughed away. They had been her precious babies, each and every one of them.
Giorgio hated failure. He was a ruthlessly committed businessman who refused to tolerate defeat in any shape or form. Success drove him, as it had driven his grandfather and his late father to build the heritage that stood unrivalled in the world of luxury hotels. Giorgio had no time for life’s annoying little hiccups. He wanted results and went about achieving them mercilessly if he had to. That was how Maya had ended up his wife. His father had just been injured in a terrible head-on collision and was lying in a semi-coma in hospital, not expected to live past a few weeks.
Giorgio had decided Maya would be an ideal candidate for a wife: educated, poised, young and healthy and in the prime of her reproductive life. How wrong he had been to choose her of all people, she thought bitterly. He could have done so much better, a fact some members of his family had hinted at over the last year or so. They were subtle about it, of course: an occasional comment over dinner about someone’s newborn child or how one of Giorgio’s school friends was now a father of twins. Each comment had been a stake through Maya’s heart, worsening her sense of failure, shattering her self-confidence, destroying her hope of one day being a mother. She had failed as a Sabbatini wife. She had let the dynasty down and, until she got out of Giorgio’s life, his family would continue to look upon her with pity and disappointment.
Giorgio put his glass down on the wrought iron table before he faced her. ‘My grandfather is dying,’ he said in a low, serious tone. ‘He told me this morning. He has less than a month or two at most to live. No one else in the family knows.’
Maya felt her heart drop like a ship’s anchor inside her chest. ‘Oh, no…’
His throat rose and fell over a tight swallow. ‘That’s why he wanted all the family here tonight. He wanted tonight to be a happy celebration. He didn’t want anyone’s pity. He will make the announcement to family and friends in the next week or two.’
Maya could understand Salvatore’s motivation in keeping tonight focused on his birthday instead of his impending demise. Pride was something she had come to recognise as a particular Sabbatini trait. Giorgio had it in buckets and barrels and spades. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said softly, not quite understanding why he had. Why hadn’t he told Luca and Nic, his two brothers, for instance?
His eyes were still meshed with hers. ‘I want you to think about postponing your trip to London,’ he said. ‘Call the school and tell them you can’t make the interview. Tell them you need to take compassionate leave.’
She stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘I can’t take leave before I’ve even got the job. They will give it to someone else.’
He lifted a shoulder. ‘If they do, then you weren’t meant to have it. If they think you are the best one for the position they will wait until you are available.’
Maya frowned at him furiously. ‘Of course they won’t keep the job open for me. I’m the least experienced of the candidates. I haven’t stood in front of a classroom since I was at university on teaching practice. I won’t stand a chance if I don’t turn up for the interview.’
‘You don’t need the job right at this moment, Maya,’ he said. ‘I have agreed on an incredibly generous allowance. If you want to work, then I am sure other jobs will come along in time.’
Maya threw him a castigating look. ‘Why do you have to be so damned philosophical about everything?’
He returned her frown with a challenging arc of one brow. ‘Why do you have to be so irrational and emotional?’
Maya turned away and looked out over the wintry gardens, her hands gripping the balustrade so tightly her knuckles ached. ‘Is this really about your grandfather’s health or an attempt to make me change my mind about the divorce?’
He didn’t respond for so long she wondered if he had left her there, listening to the soft patter of the February raindrops.
‘You can have your divorce, but not right now,’ he said at last. ‘I want my grandfather to die in peace, believing we have patched things up.’
Maya felt her heart slip like a stiletto on a slate of ice. She spun around and faced him again, her eyes wide with panic. ‘You’re asking me to come back and live with you as your wife?’
He held her look with enviable equanimity. ‘For a month or two, that is all,’ he said. ‘It will make the end a lot easier for my grandfather. Our separation has upset him greatly. I had not realised how much until now.’
Maya resented the implication behind his words. ‘So you’re blaming me for his terminal illness, are you?’
His dark eyes rolled upwards in that arrogant way of his which seemed to say she was being childish and petty while he was mature and sensible. ‘You are putting words into my mouth, Maya,’ he said. ‘My grandfather is ninety years old. It is not unexpected that he would be suffering from some sort of illness at his age. The fact that it is terminal is sad but not entirely unexpected. He has smoked rather heavily during his lifetime. He is lucky he has had as many years as he has. My father was not so blessed.’
She glared at him regardless. ‘No doubt you think I have jinxed things for Salvatore or something. I announce I want a divorce and a few weeks later he is dying. I can see a pattern, even if you can’t.’
A muscle twitched in the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘My father dying just a few days after we married was not your fault. It was no one’s fault. It was just a tragic accident. You know that.’
‘I wasn’t talking about your father’s death.’
His muscle moved again. ‘Miscarriages are another fact of life, just like old age, Maya,’ he said, barely moving his lips to speak. ‘They are far more common than you think.’
Maya felt hot colour crawling beneath her skin and turned away again in case he noticed. ‘If we resume living together it will only complicate and ultimately prolong our divorce,’ she said after a slight pause. ‘Everyone’s hopes will be raised and then dashed again once we…go ahead with it in the end…’
‘I realise that is something we will have to deal with,’ he said. ‘But, for the time being, I believe this is the best course of action.’
Maya faced him again with a lip curl of scorn. ‘Why? Because it’s going to give you more time to work out a way to keep your assets safe?’
He stared her down. ‘You never used to be so cynical.’
She lifted her chin. ‘I grew up, Giorgio. Life’s repeated punches have a habit of doing that.’
He moved away to look out over the immaculate gardens as she had done moments earlier. His hands too, she noticed, were white-knuckled as he gripped not the balustrade as she had done, but the back of the wrought iron chair of the outdoor setting at least a metre away from the edge. Maya knew his fear of heights disgusted him, even though he had suffered from it since childhood. She had only found out about it by accident. He would never have told her, which said rather a lot about their relationship, she thought. He saw his fear as a weakness he had to conquer. Countless times, she had seen him fight with himself to overcome his primal reaction. His doggedness had at times both impressed her and frustrated her in equal measure. She had so often wanted to help him but he would push her away as if she had come too close, as if she would be the one to push him over the edge of the dark abyss he dreaded so much.
‘I want my grandfather to die a peaceful death,’ Giorgio said after a long taut silence. ‘I will do anything to achieve it.’
Maya mentally ticked the box marked ‘ruthless’. Giorgio would think nothing of doing whatever it took to get what he wanted, including resuming a relationship with a wife he had never loved and didn’t really want now she had failed to live up to expectations, to use a particularly relevant word. He would no doubt live the lie, playing pretend while he got on with his affair with his gorgeous lingerie model.
Maya knew from experience that the press got it wrong a lot of times, but not all of the time. That was the thing that had plagued her the most. The ‘no smoke without fire’ thing had niggled at her the whole time they were married. Giorgio had always denied the occasional dalliances the press reported, but her doubts and fears had still risen to the surface like oil on water. She had waded for five years through the cloying stickiness, trying to cling to the hope that the conception and subsequent birth of a child would cement their tenuous union.
It had never happened.
She slid a hand over the flat plane of her belly, her heart giving a tight aching contraction.
It might still not happen…
Giorgio turned from the chair as someone came out onto the balcony. ‘Luca,’ he said with a forced on-off smile. ‘I didn’t see you come in.’
Luca, his younger brother by two years, gave him a ready smile that lit his dark brown eyes from behind. ‘We arrived late,’ he said. ‘Ella was a bit late having her afternoon sleep.’
He turned to Maya and bent to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘It’s so good you came tonight, Maya,’ he said. ‘Bronte will be glad of someone to talk to. She was feeling rather nervous about practising her Italian in front of everyone.’
Maya smiled shakily. ‘She has no need to be,’ she said. ‘Everyone adores her and gorgeous little Ella.’
Luca smiled proudly. ‘We have an announcement to make…’ His expression faltered for a second before he continued, ‘I’m sorry, this might not be the news you two want to hear, but we are expecting another baby.’
A silence thickened the air for a nanosecond.
Maya was the first to respond. ‘Luca, that’s truly wonderful news. I am so happy for you both. When is it due?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Luca said, looking a bit sheepish. ‘We’ve only just done one of those home kit tests. It’s all still a little bit unreal, to be frank.’
Tell me about it, Maya thought wryly.
Giorgio gave his brother a firm handshake, anchoring it with a grasp of Luca’s forearm. ‘I am very pleased for you. It will be delightful to have another niece or nephew to spoil.’
Luca appeared relieved his announcement had gone down so well. ‘So,’ he said, still smiling, his eyes this time full of intrigue. ‘What are you two doing out here all alone?’
Another silence hovered like humidity before a storm.
Giorgio was the first to break it. ‘Maya and I have an announcement of our own to make.’ He put his arm around her waist and drew her into his side. ‘We have decided to reconcile. There will be no divorce.’
Maya’s eyes flew to his, her mouth opening but nothing coming out. The weight of his arm around her waist was like a chain, tying her to him just as effectively as his words.
Luca looked from one to the other with a spreading smile. ‘That’s wonderful news. Have you told Nonno? It will be the best birthday present for him.’
Giorgio smiled smugly. ‘We are just about to do so now, aren’t we, cara?’ he said, looking down at Maya.
Maya wanted to deny it. She wanted to tell Luca his brother was a manipulating, ruthless man who would stop at nothing to keep what he wanted in his possession. But she knew if she did it would quite possibly ruin Salvatore’s party. The old man was dying and Luca was right: the announcement of the reconciliation between his eldest grandson and his estranged wife would make his day.
Instead, she gave Luca a weak smile. ‘It’s all happened so suddenly…’
Luca grinned at his brother. ‘I have to tell Bronte. She’ll be so thrilled. This calls for more champagne.’
He picked up Giorgio’s empty glass and then moved to where Maya had left her half-drunk orange juice. He picked it up and, after a moment, turned and looked at her quizzically. ‘Not currently on the hard stuff, Maya?’
Maya felt the weight of Giorgio’s gaze. ‘I…I guess over the years I’ve got used to not drinking,’ she said.
‘You will have to make up for it tonight,’ Luca said and, with another beaming smile, left through the French windows to find his young wife and child.
‘Luca is right,’ Giorgio said after what seemed an endless pause. ‘This is indeed a night for celebration.’
Maya threw him a barbed glare. ‘How could you lie to your own brother like that? This is a farce and you know it.’
He gave a movement of his mouth that communicated total indifference to her opinion. ‘This is about making my grandfather’s last weeks or months of life as comfortable and happy as possible,’ he said. ‘You said you wanted the villa at Bellagio.’ He gave her an indomitable look and added, ‘Believe me, Maya, this is the only way you are going to get it.’
Chapter Three
MAYA fumed as she left the balcony with Giorgio’s arm planted firmly around her waist. Even more guests had arrived and a couple of camera flashes went off. She wondered if Giorgio had primed the select members of the press present to give her no chance of denying the announcement of their reconciliation. She would look a complete and utter fool if she said anything to the contrary now. After all, she had spent the whole time so far with him out on the balcony. People had already started talking.
‘Stop grinding your teeth, mio piccolo,’ he said in an undertone as they moved through to where Salvatore was seated like a king in the main salone.
Maya kept her lips pressed together, her words coming out like hard pellets. ‘You set this up, didn’t you? You set me up so I couldn’t say no. You knew I would not want to spoil your grandfather’s party and you deliberately played on that.’
His arm tightened like a band of steel around her waist. It was a possessive touch but also a warning. ‘Play along with it, Maya,’ he said. ‘Look at Nonno. He is enjoying himself so much. Our announcement on top of Luca and Bronte’s will be the icing on the cake—literally.’
The announcement hardly needed to be made formally for as soon as they walked into the salone all heads turned. There were whispers and gasps, nudges and did-you-see-that looks. More camera flashes went off and then Salvatore looked directly at Giorgio and Maya and his old weathered face broke into a rapturous smile.
‘Is this what I think it is, Giorgio?’ he asked, tears glistening in his eyes. ‘You and Maya have changed your mind about divorcing?’
Maya felt Giorgio’s hand reach for hers and squeeze it gently. ‘Yes, Nonno,’ he said. ‘We have called it off. We are going to work at our marriage.’
Salvatore grasped Maya’s free hand and almost crushed it between both of his gnarled ones. ‘Maya, you and my grandson have made me such a happy man tonight. I cannot tell you what this means to me. All my family is here around me to share this wonderful news.’
Maya could feel the bars of her gilded cage moving in on her, just as they had done for the last five years. She was trapped in a charade that went against everything she believed in. She felt such a fraud, playing to the crowd and most especially to Salvatore. She wasn’t sure she could get through a night of it, let alone a few weeks. Surely someone would see it for what it was? The press were already eyeing her rather closely, she thought, or maybe that was her imagination. She had always found the intrusion of the press rather difficult to deal with. It was so different from her anonymous upbringing, when even her great-aunt had barely noticed her.
More champagne was called for and more and more cameras documented the celebration. Luca and Bronte announced their delightful news which, in Maya’s mind, deserved far more attention than theirs, but it seemed everyone was intrigued by the news of the acrimonious Sabbatini divorce being called off.
Giorgio’s mother greeted Maya with guarded enthusiasm. Maya understood Giovanna’s caution; she had made things difficult for her son by bickering over every little detail to do with their separation, but Giovanna was gracious enough to welcome her back into the family fold. Besides, her mother-in-law was thrilled to finally be a grandmother. She doted on little Ella and, with the news of Bronte’s new pregnancy, Giovanna was clearly preoccupied with the new branch of the family tree.
Nicolò, or Nic as he was more commonly called, the youngest of the Sabbatini brothers, was less accommodating. He adopted his usual sardonic expression as he approached Maya after Giorgio had gone to fetch another glass of juice for her.
‘So it seems you changed your mind after reacquainting yourself with how the other half lives, eh, Maya?’ he said. ‘Glad you came to your senses. You weren’t going to come out in front, not with Giorgio’s legal team working on it.’
Maya kept her expression coolly contained, even though inside she felt furious at being reminded of how outmatched she had been right from the start. ‘Hello, Nic,’ she said. ‘How are things with you?’
He rocked his almost empty champagne flute back and forth, his hazel eyes penetrating as they held hers. ‘Fine enough,’ he said.
She looked around his broad shoulders for signs of a current date. ‘What? No Hollywood starlet tonight?’ she asked with a mocking lift of her brows.
Nic gave her a crooked wry smile that reminded her of Giorgio in one of his rare playful moods. ‘No, I didn’t think Nonno would approve of my latest lover. He mentioned the “M” word a few moments ago. It was enough to turn me to drink.’
‘You’re only what…thirty-two?’ she asked.
He nodded rather grimly. ‘You know the Sabbatini rule. Once you turn thirty, you are meant to settle down.’
‘Luca has only just done so at thirty-four,’ Maya said. ‘You shouldn’t rush into these things. You could end up making a mistake.’
He rocked his glass again, his eyes still boring into hers. ‘Like you did?’
The words hung in the air like a swinging sword.
‘I don’t consider my marriage to your brother to have ever been a mistake,’ Maya said, wishing she really believed it. ‘We just hit a rough patch, that’s all.’
Giorgio came over at that moment and handed Maya a glass of juice. He must have picked up on the atmosphere, for he narrowed his gaze at his youngest brother. ‘I hope you are keeping your thoughts and opinions on marriage to yourself, Nic,’ he said. ‘I don’t want Maya upset by your teasing.’
Nic’s smile was instantly charming. ‘I was just welcoming her back into the family,’ he said. His expression became a little more serious as he addressed Maya directly. ‘I hope it works out for you. I mean that, Maya.’
Maya wondered if he somehow sensed her insecurity. He was an out-and-out playboy—everyone knew about his wild child antics as a teenager and young adult—but the outcome of that madcap lifestyle had given him an almost intuitive sense at times. He had grown up a lot after the tragic death of his father, but it was common knowledge in the family that his mother and his grandfather in particular wanted him to settle down with a suitable wife, which was something Nic made it clear he was not prepared to do. He was a free spirit and hated being tied down. Even within the family corporation, he was the one who had been given the most flexibility. Nic was the one who travelled the world, hardly settling in one place longer than a week or two as he acquired property and oversaw the redevelopments of their hotel chain.
‘Thank you, Nic,’ she said. ‘I aim to give it my very best shot.’
After a few more desultory exchanges with other guests and family members, Giorgio led her away to a quiet corner. He was aware of how strained she looked. Her face looked pale and he had noticed she had surreptitiously mopped at her brow a couple of times, as if she was finding it too warm. ‘Don’t take any notice of Nic,’ he said, watching as his younger brother started chatting up a stunning redhead near the buffet table.
‘Nic is Nic,’ she said in a downbeat voice.
‘Yes, indeed.’ Giorgio sighed and looked down at Maya. ‘You look tired. It’s been a long night. Do you want me to take you home?’
Her fingers slipped on the glass she was holding and he took it from her before she dropped it. ‘Sorry,’ she said, glancing up at him self-consciously before looking away again, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip.
He studied her for a moment, wondering if he should have given her more warning about his intentions. Dropping it on her like that out on the balcony had obviously shocked her. But he was still reeling himself from his grandfather’s revelation. Salvatore had always seemed so ageless to Giorgio. In spite of his weathered skin and arthritic body, his mind was sharp and he still had an active role in the corporation. Giorgio felt humbled by the trust his grandfather had shown in him by telling him first about his illness. Ever since the death of Giorgio’s father, Giancarlo, Salvatore had entrusted more and more responsibility on Giorgio’s shoulders. It would be very hard to say that final goodbye to the man who was not just his grandfather but his business partner and friend.
Maya too would find it hard. She had developed a special kind of relationship with Salvatore over the five years of their marriage. She had grown up in a single parent household but then tragically, when she was just ten years old, her mother had been killed in an accident. Maya had been brought up by a great-aunt who had never married and had no children of her own. Maya hadn’t spoken much about her childhood. She seemed to find it painful so Giorgio mostly had avoided the topic.
He had been delighted when Maya had expressed her avid desire to have children. It was one of the things that made him so determined she was the one he should marry. When the first couple of pregnancies had ended in a miscarriage he had been upset, but out of concern for Maya he had concealed his feelings. He hadn’t wanted her to think she had let him down. He knew she had blamed herself, wondering if there was something wrong with her for not being able to have a child. It was only after the fourth miscarriage had occurred that he wondered if somehow it was him that was causing the trouble. But subsequent tests had shown that he was fine, although sometimes he still worried.
And then Maya had stopped falling pregnant altogether. They had done everything they were told to do. They kept temperature charts, Maya mapped her ovulation period and they had sex when she was supposedly most fertile, but still she’d failed to conceive.
The progression to IVF was something he had not felt entirely comfortable with. It all seemed so clinical, nothing like the sex they used to have when they’d first met. Nothing like the sex they had the night of Luca and Bronte’s wedding.
His body tightened as he recalled that night. He hadn’t cared about anything other than having her as quickly and as passionately as he could. It had been the best sex of his life and he wanted more. He had realised that the day he had gone to her flat to invite her to the party. He had gone there thinking their one-night stand would have cooled his ardour. He had been confident he could have seen her, talked to her and even touched her without feeling a thing. He had been shocked to find out how wrong he was. Putting his hands on her shoulders had sent zapping wires of electric want through him. He wanted Maya as he wanted no other woman. How could he have forgotten how fantastic it was with her? His body had tingled for hours afterwards. He only had to look at her and his blood raced through his veins and made him rock-hard.
He was feeling it now, standing so close to her, breathing in her sexy new fragrance: flowery but spicy and exotic at the same time. The dress she was wearing brought out the glow of her skin and the platinum blond of her hair. She had left it loose this evening, the way he most liked it. Before he even realised he was doing it, he reached out and threaded his fingers through the silk of it where it lay about her shoulders.
She gave a little shudder of reaction and looked up at him. ‘Do you have to do that?’ she asked in an undertone.
‘We are supposed to be reconciled, cara,’ he said, taking the opportunity to brush his lips against her forehead. ‘People will expect us to touch each other in public. They will imagine we will be doing much more when we are finally at home alone.’
‘Where is home supposed to be now?’ she asked in a soft breathless sort of voice. ‘Your place or mine?’
Giorgio shifted his mouth ruefully as he straightened. ‘My place, or what used to be our place, is not quite ready. I’ve been staying at the hotel most nights. We will have to stay at yours tonight, otherwise the press will not believe we are truly reunited.’
‘You think they will follow to check up on us?’ she asked with a worried frown.
He gave her a wry look. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten what the press is like. Haven’t they been on your tail over the last six months of our separation?’
Maya captured her lip between her teeth, thinking of all the times she’d had to get away from the intrusive eyes of the press. That ridiculous ‘date’ with Howard Herrington was a case in point. They had blown it right out of proportion with a photograph that looked far more intimate than it was. She had been leaning forward, trying to catch something Howard had been saying and a flashbulb had captured the moment, making it appear she was about to press a kiss close to Howard’s mouth. When it appeared in the gossip pages the following day she had taken a devil-may-care approach to the fallout. There had been a photo only a week earlier of Giorgio with his model friend. It seemed fitting that Maya had started to reclaim her life, even if Howard Herrington was the worst date she had ever had.
Maya cast her eyes over the crowd. The party was in full swing now; several couples were dancing as the band played some classic dance hits. She remembered the days when she had danced in Giorgio’s arms; he had swung her around and around and even though her head had been left spinning she had always gone back for more. The early days of their courtship and marriage had been so much fun, so dizzyingly exciting for a girl who had grown up with so little. There had been no parties that she could remember during her childhood, no massive family gatherings, no huge celebrations of her own or anyone else’s milestones or achievements.
As soon as she had met Giorgio she had clung to him and his family, subconsciously looking for the anchor she had lacked for much of her life. She had slotted in like a small sea-tossed craft into a safe and sheltered harbour.
She had never wanted to be cast adrift.
She had done that herself.
But now the rules had been changed. She was back, but only temporarily. Giorgio wanted her to pretend things were back to normal and she could do that for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two. The chances were her pregnancy would disappear down the drain of despair, just like the others had done. All she had to do was keep it a secret until Giorgio’s game of pretend was over. There was no point in getting his hopes up as well as hers, or anyone else’s for that matter.
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MELANIE MILBURNE
Sabbatini men play for keeps – losing is not in their vocabulary… When Maya met Giorgio Sabbatini, he rescued the penniless waif and stray despite her inferior breeding. So her decision to divorce him now is made with a heavy heart. Giorgio belongs to a notorious blue-blooded family, and their duty to maintain its lineage is unquestionable.Unable to give him the heir he craves, Maya knows she has to walk away. But the ink on their divorce papers isn’t given the chance to dry: after one last, reckless night of passion there’s a very shocking announcement…THE SABBATINI BROTHERS Three powerful playboys from the richest dynasty in Europe! Ruthless, irresistible…impossible to tame?
THE SABBATINI BROTHERS
Three powerful playboys from the richest dynasty in Europe! Ruthless, irresistible…impossible to tame?
Luca, Giorgio and Nicoló have Italian fire and passion coursing through their blood. And now they are looking for the one thing that money can’t buy…the love of a good woman!
This month Maya learns you don’t say no to Giorgio Sabbatini!
Hearing her say she didn’t need him any more triggered something deep and primal in his blood. He would not let her leave him without a fight—baby or no baby. ‘You have said this is my child, Maya,’ he said. ‘I am not going to walk away from my own flesh and blood. I have changed my mind—our marriage will continue indefinitely.’
Look out for notorious Nicoló Sabbatini, coming soon in Modern™ Romance
Shock: One-Night Heir
By
Melanie Milburne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
About the Author
MELANIE MILBURNE says: ‘I am married to a surgeon, Steve, and have two gorgeous sons, Paul and Phil. I live in Hobart, Tasmania, where I enjoy an active life as a long-distance runner and a nationally ranked top ten Master’s swimmer. I also have a Master’s Degree in Education, but my children totally turned me off the idea of teaching! When not running or swimming I write, and when I’m not doing all of the above I’m reading. And if someone could invent a way for me to read during a four-kilometre swim I’d be even happier!’
Recent titles by the same author:
SCANDAL: UNCLAIMED LOVE-CHILD
(#litres_trial_promo) THE MÉLENDEZ FORGOTTEN MARRIAGE CASTELLANO’S MISTRESS OF REVENGE BOUND BY THE MARCOLINI DIAMONDS
Did you know that Melanie also writes for Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance?
Chapter One
MAYA looked at the dipstick in shock. Her throat closed over as if a hand had locked around her neck as the two blue lines appeared.
Positive.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub, her legs shaking so much she had to clamp her knees together. Hope flickered brightly and then just as quickly waned.
It couldn’t be true.
She took a deep breath and looked at the stick again. She blinked once, twice, three times but the lines were the same as before.
The doorbell suddenly rang with an incessant peal and she sprang to her feet, her heart knocking against her chest wall like a pendulum pushed by a madman. She quickly stashed the test kit in the nearest drawer beneath the twin basins and took a long slow breath to steady herself.
Gonzo was already at the door, barking joyfully in greeting, but Maya didn’t need the dog’s behaviour to signal to her who was at the door. No one rang the doorbell quite the same way as her soon-to-be ex-husband Giorgio Sabbatini did. He always pressed it too hard and for too long. He was summoning her and he clearly would not be taking no for an answer.
Maya fixed a deliberately cool expression on her face as she opened the door. ‘G…Giorgio,’ she said, hoping the catch in her voice wouldn’t betray her. ‘I thought you were sending one of your staff to pick up Gonzo. Isn’t that the arrangement we agreed on?’
‘I decided to come in person this time.’ He bent down to ruffle the ecstatic dog’s ears before he rose back to his full height, his tall frame towering over her. His dark brown eyes glittered with a sardonic light as they met hers. ‘I am quite surprised to find you at home,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be out with your new Englishman lover. What was his name again? Hugh? Herbert?’
Maya bit the inside of her mouth, wishing, not for the first time, she hadn’t gone on that stupid blind date set up by a friend from her yoga class. ‘Howard,’ she said tightly. ‘And it wasn’t anything like the press reported it.’
One of Giorgio’s brows lifted in a cynical arc. ‘So he didn’t rip your clothes off in the hallway of his apartment and have his wicked way with you?’
Maya threw him a venomous look as she closed the door behind him with a snap. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That is more your style, is it not?’
He gave her an indolent smile which made every hair on the back of her neck lift up in reaction. ‘You were with me all the way, cara,’ he said in a tone that was gravelly and rough and so deep she felt a guilty shiver of remembered pleasure cascade down her spine and bury itself in that hot secret place between her thighs.
Maya turned on her heel rather than face him with her colour so high. She still cringed in shame at how she had behaved the night of his brother’s wedding. She still wasn’t exactly sure what had precipitated it. Had it been the champagne or the pain of finally letting go? Break up sex, that was what it was called. It didn’t mean anything, certainly not to him. He had probably bedded several women since they had separated. According to the latest press report, he was currently seeing a lingerie model based in London. Reading that had been like a dart to Maya’s heart but she would rather die than reveal that to him.
She felt him come up behind her, her skin prickling all over and her nostrils flaring as she breathed in his citrus-based aftershave overlaid with his particular male smell. All her senses—the ones she had sworn would always be switched to neutral when he was around—turned to full throttle. She felt her heart give a stutter when his hands came to rest on the top of her shoulders, her breathing stopping altogether when his tall body brushed against hers from behind.
‘You smell nice,’ he said, bending his head so his mouth almost touched the side of her neck. ‘Is that a new perfume you are wearing?’
Somehow she got her voice to work. ‘Get your hands off me, Giorgio,’ she said. Before I turn around and fall into your arms and make a complete and utter fool of myself all over again.
His hands tightened for a fraction of a second, long enough for her heart rate to go up another notch. ‘Our divorce isn’t final until the last of the paperwork is sorted,’ he said, his breath lifting the hairs that had come loose from her makeshift ponytail. ‘Maybe we can make the most of the time before the ink dries, hmm?’
Maya knew what this was about and it hurt much more than the lingerie model. It wasn’t their broken marriage he was fighting for, it was his fortune. The Sabbatini family was as good as Italian royalty. When she had married Giorgio five years ago there had been no prenuptial agreement prepared. It was an unwritten, unspoken law: their marriage was meant to last, as every other Sabbatini marriage had in the past. But Maya wondered if any other Sabbatini marriage had endured the heartache theirs had and survived.
She very much doubted it.
She turned to face him, her heart tightening all over again as she looked into his inscrutable dark-as-night eyes. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.
His thumbs started to knead her knotted shoulders until she was sure she was going to melt into a pool at his feet. She fought the response, clamping her teeth together as she put her hands against his chest to push him away. ‘Will you stop touching me, for God’s sake?’ she railed at him.
He captured her hands effortlessly, holding them in one of his as if they were a child’s. ‘It was good that night, si?’ he said. ‘I can’t remember a time when it was better, can you?’
Maya swallowed unevenly. She had tried so hard not to think of that night, how wonderful it had been to make love with such abandon. No temperature or ovulation charts, no hormone injections—just good old-fashioned bed-wrecking sex, except they hadn’t quite made it to the bed. But this visit: was it about a rerun of that passionate night or a truce to secure his assets?
‘Giorgio…that night was a crazy, stupid mistake,’ she said, not trusting herself to hold his gaze.
She pulled her hands out of his and moved away, crossing her arms over her middle. It was too soon to tell him, of course it was. It would jinx things just like before. How many times had she held up the dipstick in joy, only to have her hopes and dreams smashed like priceless porcelain on a pavement a week or two later? There were no guarantees this time would be any different. If it wasn’t meant to be, at least Giorgio would be free to move on with someone else who could give him what he wanted most. They would both be free to move on. She had wasted five years of his life, not to mention her own. He was thirty-six years old. Most of his friends and colleagues had two or three children by now.
She had given him none.
Giorgio followed her into the tiny salone. Maya felt his gaze on her, the heat of it, the slow burn of it peeling every layer of her skin until she felt raw and exposed. She had to hold herself together. She couldn’t come unstuck and get all emotional and needy in front of him. She was supposed to be over all of that now. She had worked hard at it, working out new priorities, new directions, none of which included Giorgio. Cool and in control was the only way to go with him. She had to prove to him that he no longer had any emotional or sensual power over her. She was her own person now, determined to move on with her life.
She was stronger now, much stronger.
The six-month separation had done that for her. She no longer lived in the shadow of Giorgio’s money and prestige. She was making a way for herself, providing for her future by restarting her career, which she had naively cast aside in order to fit in with what Giorgio and his family had expected of her. She was quite proud of what she had achieved in the time they had been apart. She had been looking forward to starting afresh until this latest hiccup had thrown her off course. Could he see the secret she was trying to hide from him? Was there some clue on her face or in her body, even at this early stage? He seemed to be looking at her so intently, his dark gaze so piercing she felt exposed and raw, as if he could see into her soul.
‘What is this I hear about you moving to London?’ he asked.
She faced him with a set mouth, her shoulders pulled back in determination. ‘I have an interview for a teaching position at a fee paying school. I am on the shortlist.’
A frown brought his brows together. ‘Are you going to take it if it is offered to you?’
She let her arms drop by her sides in an effort to look composed. ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, sending him a pointed look. ‘I have nothing to keep me in Italy.’
A muscle moved up and down in his jaw, as if he were chewing on something hard and distasteful. ‘What about Gonzo?’ he asked.
Maya felt her heart squeeze at the thought of saying goodbye to the dog she had brought up from puppyhood. But no pets were allowed in her apartment block in London, and she knew the big ragamuffin hound would miss Giorgio too much in any case. As it was, the dog had been like a naughty child ever since she and Giorgio had separated. ‘I have decided he is better off with you,’ she said.
His top lip curled. ‘That’s quite a turnaround. You were arguing the point for weeks over who should have him. I was about to get my lawyer to file a pet custody suit.’
Maya lifted one of her shoulders in a shrug of feigned indifference. ‘I am sure he will forget all about me once he moves into your newly renovated villa,’ she said. ‘When do you move back in, by the way?’
Giorgio raked his hand through his hair in a gesture that tugged on something deep inside Maya’s chest. There were so many of his mannerisms she had found herself thinking about lately: how he rationed his smiles as if he found life not all that amusing, how his brow furrowed when he was deep in concentration, and how his eyes glinted and darkened meaningfully when he was in the mood for sex. She skirted away from that errant thought. It brought back too many erotic memories of that forbidden night.
‘I’m not sure. A week or two, I think,’ he said. ‘The painters haven’t quite finished. There was a delay with some of the fabrics for the curtains or some such thing.’
Maya didn’t want to think of how she had chosen the colours and fabrics for all of those rooms in the past. She had done it with such enthusiasm and hope for the future. When she had heard he was renovating the villa, adding rooms and knocking down walls and redeveloping the garden, she had been crushed to think he obviously wanted to rid the place of every trace of her presence. It tore her apart to think of how those rooms might one day be filled with his children by some other woman. She thought of the nursery she had so lovingly decorated the first time she had fallen pregnant. After five years of dashed hopes, in the end she had not been able to even open the door.
‘When do you leave?’ Giorgio asked into the pulsing silence.
With an effort she met his gaze. ‘Next Monday.’
‘This is all rather sudden, is it not?’ he asked, frowning darkly. ‘I thought you had decided long ago you weren’t going to go back to teaching. Or are you trying to imply to outsiders that I’m not paying you enough in our divorce settlement?’
Maya refused to rise to the bait. ‘I don’t care what people think, Giorgio. I want to go back to teaching because I have a brain that longs to be used. I was never cut out for the ladies-who-do-lunch set. I should never have given up my career in the first place. I don’t know what on earth I was thinking.’
He continued to study her with his dark unreadable gaze. ‘You seemed pretty happy with the arrangement to begin with,’ he said. ‘You said your career was not as important as mine. You jumped at the chance to become a full time wife.’
Maya mentally cringed at how romantically deluded she had been back then. Although she hadn’t for a moment thought he was marrying her for love, she had longed for it to happen all the same. His marrying her had more to do with tradition and expectation from his family. He had reached the age of thirty and, in the tradition of the Sabbatini blood line, he’d needed a wife and heir. Giorgio had showered her with diamonds and she had been fooled into believing in the whole fairy tale that one day they would get their happy ever after. How young and naive she had been! Just twenty-two years old, fresh out of university, she had fallen in love on her first trip abroad. It had taken her five heartbreaking years to finally grow up and realise not all fairy tales had a happy ending.
‘I had stars in my eyes,’ she said, knowing it would feed his opinion of her as a gold-digger but doing it anyway. ‘All that money, all that fame, all those luxury hotels and villas and exotic holidays. What girl could possibly resist?’
His brows snapped together and that leaping knot of tension appeared again at the corner of his mouth. ‘If you think for even a moment that you are getting half of all I own, then think again,’ he bit out. ‘I don’t care if it takes my legal team a decade to thrash this out in court, I will not roll over for you.’
Maya raised her chin at him. It was always about money with Giorgio. She had been yet another business transaction and the thing that rankled with him was it had failed. The truth was they had both failed. She hadn’t made him any happier than he had made her. Money had cushioned things for a while but she had come to see the only way to move forward was to part.
‘You will only delay the divorce even further,’ she said. ‘I am not after much, in any case.’
Giorgio gave a snort. ‘Not much? Come on, Maya. You want the villa at Bellagio. That has been in my family for seven generations. It is priceless to my family. I suppose that’s why you want to take it away from us.’
Maya steeled her resolve. ‘The place should have been sold years ago and you know it. We’ve only been there the once and you acted like a caged lion the whole time. Both of your brothers haven’t been there for months and in the whole time we’ve been married your mother has never once gone there. For most of the year it lies empty, apart from the staff. It’s such an obscene waste.’
His eyes moved away from hers, as she knew they would. He absolutely refused to discuss the tragic event that had occurred during his childhood, and every time she had tried to draw him out over his baby sister’s death he put up a wall of resistance that was impenetrable. She hated the way he always locked her out. She hated the way it made her feel as if she was not entitled to know how he felt about even the simplest things. But then all he had wanted from her was a cardboard cut-out wife, a showpiece to hang off his arm and do all the things a corporate wife was supposed to do—all the things except unlock the secret pain of his heart.
He turned his back and paced back and forth, his hands clenching and unclenching by his sides. ‘My mother might one day feel the need to go back to the villa,’ he said. ‘But, until she does, the place is not to be sold.’
Maya shifted her tongue inside her cheek, still intent on needling him. ‘Are you planning to go there any time soon?’ she asked. ‘How long’s it been, Giorgio? Two or three years, or is it four?’
He turned and faced her, his eyes blazing with something hot and hard and dangerous. ‘Don’t push it, Maya,’ he said. ‘You are not getting the villa. Anyway, Luca and Bronte will most probably use it now they are married. It’s a perfect place for Ella to spend her childhood holidays.’
Maya felt her insides clench as she thought of the dark-haired, blue-eyed toddler Luca had introduced to his family a few weeks ago. His new wife, Bronte, a fellow Australian, had met Luca two years ago in London, but Luca had broken off the relationship before he had realised Bronte was carrying his child. Their reunion and marriage had been one of the most romantic and poignant events Maya had ever witnessed.
Being around gorgeous little Ella on the day of the wedding had been a torturous reminder of how Maya had failed to produce an heir. She wondered if that was why she had acted so stupidly and recklessly once the reception had ended. She had been so emotionally overwrought, so desperately lonely and sad at the breakdown of her own marriage that she had weakened when Giorgio had suggested a nightcap.
Going back to his room at the Sabbatini hotel in Milan where the reception was held had been her first mistake. Her second had been to let him kiss her. And her third…well, she was deeply ashamed of falling into his arms like that. She had acted like a slut and he had walked away from her when it was over as if he had paid for her services like a street worker.
‘I want the villa, Giorgio,’ she said, holding his diamond-hard gaze. ‘I surely deserve some compensation. I could ask for a whole lot more and you know it.’
His jaw moved forward in an uncompromising manner, his eyes now darker than ink. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea here, Maya. I want this divorce just as much as you do. But the villa is not negotiable. I am not going to budge on this.’
His intransigence fuelled Maya’s defiance, so too did his all too ready acceptance of the divorce. Surely, if he had ever felt anything for her, wouldn’t he have fought to keep her by his side no matter what? The only reason he was dragging the chain a bit was over the settlement.
Her bitterness was like a hot flood inside her, scorching its way through her veins. ‘You bastard,’ she threw at him. ‘You’re rich beyond belief and you won’t give me the only thing I want.’
‘Why do you want it?’ he asked. ‘You’re moving to London within days. What use would you have for a thirty-room villa?’
‘I want to develop it,’ she said with a combative toss of her head. ‘It would make a fabulous hotel and health spa. It would provide a supplementary income to my teaching. It would be an investment, a great investment in fact.’
His eyes flashed like lightning. ‘Are you deliberately goading me?’ he asked. ‘Dio, Maya, I’ve already warned you not to push me too far.’
‘Why?’ she tossed back at him. ‘Are you worried you might show some human feelings for once? Some anger, some passion, or maybe even some vulnerability for a change?’
The air pulsed with a current of energy that made the skin on the back of Maya’s neck start to tingle. His eyes were so black she could not tell where his pupils ended and his irises began. He had stopped clenching his hands as soon as he saw her eyes flick to them but she could sense the tension in him all the same. His face was carved from stone, his lips flat and tight. She wondered if he was going to close the distance between their bodies and take her in his arms the way he had done the night of his brother’s wedding. They had argued just like this and then suddenly, instead of shouting at each other, they were locked in a passionate embrace. Her body quivered at the memory and when she met Giorgio’s eyes she could almost swear he was recalling exactly the same shamelessly erotic moment when his mouth had crashed down on hers.
‘Is that what you want, Maya?’ he asked in a low and deep and silky tone as his hand snaked out and captured one of hers. ‘You want me to lose control and take you just like the last time?’
Maya’s body flared with heat, her wrist burning like a ring of fire where his fingers curled around it like a handcuff. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she bit out.
He pulled her up against him, his body hot and hard and unmistakably male against her soft femininity. ‘I dared before,’ he reminded her. ‘And you enjoyed every second of it.’
Shame flooded her cheeks but she put up her chin haughtily all the same. ‘I’d had too much champagne to drink.’
His mouth turned up derisively. ‘Is that the only way you can absolve yourself for sleeping with me again?’ he asked. ‘Come on, Maya, you were begging for it even before you had your first sip of champagne. I saw it in your eyes the moment you stepped into the church and looked at me.’
Maya remembered the moment all too well. That first glimpse of him standing there beside his brother after not seeing him for months had knocked her sideways. She had pointedly avoided him as much as possible prior to the wedding. The arrangement over Gonzo being picked up and dropped off by a neutral party had been at her insistence because she didn’t trust herself in his company. Going into the church that day and seeing Giorgio, she had felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. All the bitterness and ill feeling had somehow vaporised, all she could see was a tall, commanding and handsome man with impossibly dark brown eyes which at that moment had been centred right on her. The message in his eyes had been as scorching as his touch was right now. ‘Your imagination is getting as big as your ego,’ she said. ‘You think any woman who looks at you wants you.’
She pulled out of his hold and stepped away from him, tossing over her shoulder, ‘You should probably take Gonzo with you now. His lead is hanging on the hall stand.’
‘I am not going anywhere, Maya,’ Giorgio said through gritted teeth.
Maya turned, trying to ignore the flutter of unease that passed through her belly at the dark glittering heat of his gaze as it meshed with hers. ‘Giorgio…’ She ran her tongue over her lips to moisten their sudden dryness. ‘We’ve said all that needs to be said. The rest is in the hands of our lawyers.’
There was another beat or two of heavily charged silence.
‘I didn’t come here to discuss the divorce,’ Giorgio said.
Maya ran her tongue over her parched lips, her stomach freefalling. ‘You…you didn’t?’
His eyes were unwavering on hers. ‘I came here to issue you an invitation.’
She blinked at him in alarm. ‘An…an invitation? What sort of invitation? I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean because I will not for a moment agree to such an outrageous, insulting and indecent proposal.’
His sensually full lips went into a flat line again. ‘Not that sort of invitation, not that it isn’t a tempting thought, given what happened the last time.’
‘It’s over, Giorgio,’ she said, reminding herself as well as him. ‘We are over.’
He held her look for two beats before he spoke. ‘I know it’s over, Maya. It’s what we both want. It’s what we both need to move on with our lives.’
Maya nodded because she didn’t trust her voice to work right then. Of course it was over. It was what she wanted. She was the one who had done the legwork to get the divorce process going. What sort of hypocrite was she to have second thoughts now? Even though those two blue lines on that dipstick were lying in that drawer upstairs didn’t mean they would appear on a subsequent test. It could all be a mistake. She might have imagined the whole thing. She would need to do another test and another, just to make sure.
Giorgio pushed his hand back through his hair again, taking it off his forehead where it had tipped forward as he moved to the other side of the room. Maya noticed then how tired he looked about the eyes. Too much partying, she supposed. She could just imagine him enjoying the night life after years of being tied down in a going nowhere marriage. He had been like that before they had married and that, no doubt, would be his fallback position.
‘My grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party is next weekend,’ Giorgio said, facing her again. ‘He wants you to be there.’
Maya tightened her mouth. ‘Why then didn’t he call and invite me, instead of sending you? Or why not send an invitation through the post? What’s going on?’
‘You know what he’s like,’ he said. ‘He’s a stubborn old fool who thinks we are throwing away a perfectly good marriage. He wanted me to ask you in person. He apparently thinks I still hold some sort of sway with you.’ He gave her a wry look. ‘I told you he was an old fool.’
Maya spun on her heel to pace the floor. ‘I am not attending any more Sabbatini family functions,’ she stated firmly. ‘No way. Not after the last time.’
Giorgio held up his hands. ‘I promise not to touch, OK?’
She stopped mid-pace to glower at him. ‘I don’t hold much faith in your promises. You were barely in the door a moment ago when you put your hands on me as if you owned me.’
He gave her a crooked half smile that never failed to twist her insides. ‘Put it down to force of habit or muscle memory or whatever.’
She screwed up her face in scorn. ‘Muscle memory? What sort of ridiculous excuse is that? We’re about to be divorced, remember? You have no right to touch me now.’
His fleeting smile disappeared and a frown pulled at his brow. ‘Look, Maya, you will make an old man very happy if you agree to come. Divorce or not, he still considers you a member of the family. He will be devastated if you don’t turn up.’
Maya chewed at her lip, torn between wanting to pay her respects to the only grandfather/father figure she had ever known and her reluctance to spend any further time with the one man she suspected she was not going to be able to resist if she was in too close contact with him. ‘If I go it will be because he asked me, not you,’ she said.
He jangled his keys in his pocket as if impatient to leave. Mission accomplished, Maya thought. He’d got what he wanted and now he was off to enjoy his freedom. She watched as he moved to the front door of her small rented villa, the words to call him back stuck like a handful of thumbtacks in her throat.
It’s over.
It’s what we both want.
It’s over.
The words went over and over in her head like a music system stuck on replay.
‘I’ll pick up Gonzo the day before you leave for London,’ he said as he opened the door.
‘Right. Fine. OK,’ Maya said, cupping her elbows to stop herself from fidgeting.
He gave her one last look, his eyes dark and unfathomable as they ran over her. ‘Champagne or not, it was a great night, cara, wasn’t it? Good note to end our relationship on.’
Maya swiftly turned her back on him, her eyes burning with unshed tears. ‘Please leave…’ she said, surprised her voice had come out at all, much less without cracking.
After what seemed an age, the door finally closed with a click that felt as if it had snapped her heart in two.
Chapter Two
THE party for Salvatore Sabbatini was in full swing when Maya arrived the following Saturday. She had almost changed her mind about coming but knew if she didn’t turn up by a certain time Giorgio would come to her place and collect her.
Right now she wanted as much distance as possible between them. Her secret was still safe and she wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible. She had conducted three more tests and they had all produced the same positive result. It was terrifyingly exciting to think she was carrying a child. Six weeks was too early to be confident it would carry to full term, but every miscarriage she’d had in the past had occurred well before the eight week mark.
‘Signora Sabbatini,’ one of the uniformed waiters greeted her with a tray of drinks balanced on one arm, ‘would you like some champagne?’
Maya offered him a tight smile. ‘Orange juice will be fine, thank you.’
Once she had taken her frosted glass, she moved through to the reception room, where a glamorous array of people were milling about to greet the guest of honour. There were Hollywood stars and high finance people, a couple of members of European royalty as well as family and close friends of Salvatore. Everyone was dressed in designer clothes and several of the women were dripping in priceless jewels.
Maya had dressed carefully for the occasion. She could play the part of haute couture-clad wife and had done so for five years. The dress she had chosen was a fuchsia pink, highlighting the natural blondness of her hair and her sun-kissed colouring from a brief holiday she had taken recently. Her heels were high, but still not high enough to bring her shoulder to shoulder to Giorgio when he appeared out of nowhere and put his hand to the small of her back.
She gave a little start and almost spilt her drink. ‘What do you think you’re doing sneaking up on me like that?’ she said, sending him an irritated look.
‘You look exquisite this evening, Maya,’ he said as if she hadn’t spoken. He leaned in closer and drew in a deep breath close to her neck. ‘Mmm, you’re wearing that new perfume again, are you not? It suits you.’
Maya scowled as she reared away from him. ‘Go and mingle with your friends. Everyone will start talking if we’re seen together. I don’t want another press fest to deal with.’
He smiled a sinful smile, his dark eyes glinting at her. ‘Let them talk. I can spend time with my soon-to-be ex-wife, can’t I? Besides, we have business to discuss.’
Maya pressed her lips together. ‘I haven’t changed my mind about the villa. I sent the papers back to your lawyer. I am not going to let you pay me off with a lump sum. I told you what I want.’
‘I know,’ he said, scooping a glass of champagne off the tray of the passing waiter. He took a generous sip before he added, ‘but here’s the thing: I want it too.’
She looked up at him warily. ‘We can’t both have it, though, can we?’
His eyes locked on hers, hot and hard as steel. ‘I have given it some thought. For the next twelve months I would like the villa to remain a private residence. No developments, no changes.’
She frowned. ‘And after that?’
He took another sip of his champagne, his throat moving up and down slowly as he swallowed it, deliberately delaying his response, making her wait, making her feel unimportant, insignificant. ‘After that, if you still want it you can buy it from my family,’ he said.
Maya rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’
‘What’s the matter, Maya?’ he asked. ‘I’m paying you a fortune in settlement. You’ll have enough cash to buy ten villas.’
She stalked away from him. ‘I don’t want your stupid money.’
In an effort to move away from the interested glances aimed at her, Maya slipped out to a balcony accessed by French windows. She hadn’t expected Giorgio to follow her out there but, before she could shut the doors behind her, he had stepped through them.
‘Why are you being so difficult over this?’ he asked, leaning back against the closed doors.
‘I am being difficult?’ she asked with an incredulous look. ‘You’re the one who keeps sending legal documents the thickness of two phone books to me to sign.’
His forehead creased in a brooding frown. ‘I have shareholders and investors to protect. Don’t take it personally. It’s just business.’
Maya put her glass of juice down on a pot stand before she dropped it. ‘Oh, yes, it’s always business with you. Our marriage was nothing more than a business arrangement. The only trouble was I didn’t deliver the goods as promised.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ His voice was hard and sharp, like a flung dagger.
She dropped her gaze and let out a scratchy sigh. ‘You know what I mean, Giorgio.’
A lengthy silence passed.
‘I wanted it to work, Maya,’ he said quietly. ‘I really did, but we were both making each other miserable in the end.’
She looked up at him with a pained expression. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘What’s to get?’ he asked, his voice rising in frustration. ‘We were married for five years, Maya. I know it wasn’t easy for you. It wasn’t easy for me, watching you…’ He didn’t finish the sentence but, moving away from the doors, lifted his glass and drained the contents.
Maya looked at his stiff spine, feeling the emotional lockout she always felt when they argued. He refused to talk about the losses they had experienced. She’d always had the feeling he had dismissed each miscarriage as nature’s way of saying something was not right. She, on the other hand, had wanted to talk about each of the babies she had named as soon as they were conceived. She had wanted to talk about their stolen futures, the dreams and hopes she had had for each of them. To her, they were not a collection of damaged cells that nature had decided were best sloughed away. They had been her precious babies, each and every one of them.
Giorgio hated failure. He was a ruthlessly committed businessman who refused to tolerate defeat in any shape or form. Success drove him, as it had driven his grandfather and his late father to build the heritage that stood unrivalled in the world of luxury hotels. Giorgio had no time for life’s annoying little hiccups. He wanted results and went about achieving them mercilessly if he had to. That was how Maya had ended up his wife. His father had just been injured in a terrible head-on collision and was lying in a semi-coma in hospital, not expected to live past a few weeks.
Giorgio had decided Maya would be an ideal candidate for a wife: educated, poised, young and healthy and in the prime of her reproductive life. How wrong he had been to choose her of all people, she thought bitterly. He could have done so much better, a fact some members of his family had hinted at over the last year or so. They were subtle about it, of course: an occasional comment over dinner about someone’s newborn child or how one of Giorgio’s school friends was now a father of twins. Each comment had been a stake through Maya’s heart, worsening her sense of failure, shattering her self-confidence, destroying her hope of one day being a mother. She had failed as a Sabbatini wife. She had let the dynasty down and, until she got out of Giorgio’s life, his family would continue to look upon her with pity and disappointment.
Giorgio put his glass down on the wrought iron table before he faced her. ‘My grandfather is dying,’ he said in a low, serious tone. ‘He told me this morning. He has less than a month or two at most to live. No one else in the family knows.’
Maya felt her heart drop like a ship’s anchor inside her chest. ‘Oh, no…’
His throat rose and fell over a tight swallow. ‘That’s why he wanted all the family here tonight. He wanted tonight to be a happy celebration. He didn’t want anyone’s pity. He will make the announcement to family and friends in the next week or two.’
Maya could understand Salvatore’s motivation in keeping tonight focused on his birthday instead of his impending demise. Pride was something she had come to recognise as a particular Sabbatini trait. Giorgio had it in buckets and barrels and spades. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said softly, not quite understanding why he had. Why hadn’t he told Luca and Nic, his two brothers, for instance?
His eyes were still meshed with hers. ‘I want you to think about postponing your trip to London,’ he said. ‘Call the school and tell them you can’t make the interview. Tell them you need to take compassionate leave.’
She stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘I can’t take leave before I’ve even got the job. They will give it to someone else.’
He lifted a shoulder. ‘If they do, then you weren’t meant to have it. If they think you are the best one for the position they will wait until you are available.’
Maya frowned at him furiously. ‘Of course they won’t keep the job open for me. I’m the least experienced of the candidates. I haven’t stood in front of a classroom since I was at university on teaching practice. I won’t stand a chance if I don’t turn up for the interview.’
‘You don’t need the job right at this moment, Maya,’ he said. ‘I have agreed on an incredibly generous allowance. If you want to work, then I am sure other jobs will come along in time.’
Maya threw him a castigating look. ‘Why do you have to be so damned philosophical about everything?’
He returned her frown with a challenging arc of one brow. ‘Why do you have to be so irrational and emotional?’
Maya turned away and looked out over the wintry gardens, her hands gripping the balustrade so tightly her knuckles ached. ‘Is this really about your grandfather’s health or an attempt to make me change my mind about the divorce?’
He didn’t respond for so long she wondered if he had left her there, listening to the soft patter of the February raindrops.
‘You can have your divorce, but not right now,’ he said at last. ‘I want my grandfather to die in peace, believing we have patched things up.’
Maya felt her heart slip like a stiletto on a slate of ice. She spun around and faced him again, her eyes wide with panic. ‘You’re asking me to come back and live with you as your wife?’
He held her look with enviable equanimity. ‘For a month or two, that is all,’ he said. ‘It will make the end a lot easier for my grandfather. Our separation has upset him greatly. I had not realised how much until now.’
Maya resented the implication behind his words. ‘So you’re blaming me for his terminal illness, are you?’
His dark eyes rolled upwards in that arrogant way of his which seemed to say she was being childish and petty while he was mature and sensible. ‘You are putting words into my mouth, Maya,’ he said. ‘My grandfather is ninety years old. It is not unexpected that he would be suffering from some sort of illness at his age. The fact that it is terminal is sad but not entirely unexpected. He has smoked rather heavily during his lifetime. He is lucky he has had as many years as he has. My father was not so blessed.’
She glared at him regardless. ‘No doubt you think I have jinxed things for Salvatore or something. I announce I want a divorce and a few weeks later he is dying. I can see a pattern, even if you can’t.’
A muscle twitched in the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘My father dying just a few days after we married was not your fault. It was no one’s fault. It was just a tragic accident. You know that.’
‘I wasn’t talking about your father’s death.’
His muscle moved again. ‘Miscarriages are another fact of life, just like old age, Maya,’ he said, barely moving his lips to speak. ‘They are far more common than you think.’
Maya felt hot colour crawling beneath her skin and turned away again in case he noticed. ‘If we resume living together it will only complicate and ultimately prolong our divorce,’ she said after a slight pause. ‘Everyone’s hopes will be raised and then dashed again once we…go ahead with it in the end…’
‘I realise that is something we will have to deal with,’ he said. ‘But, for the time being, I believe this is the best course of action.’
Maya faced him again with a lip curl of scorn. ‘Why? Because it’s going to give you more time to work out a way to keep your assets safe?’
He stared her down. ‘You never used to be so cynical.’
She lifted her chin. ‘I grew up, Giorgio. Life’s repeated punches have a habit of doing that.’
He moved away to look out over the immaculate gardens as she had done moments earlier. His hands too, she noticed, were white-knuckled as he gripped not the balustrade as she had done, but the back of the wrought iron chair of the outdoor setting at least a metre away from the edge. Maya knew his fear of heights disgusted him, even though he had suffered from it since childhood. She had only found out about it by accident. He would never have told her, which said rather a lot about their relationship, she thought. He saw his fear as a weakness he had to conquer. Countless times, she had seen him fight with himself to overcome his primal reaction. His doggedness had at times both impressed her and frustrated her in equal measure. She had so often wanted to help him but he would push her away as if she had come too close, as if she would be the one to push him over the edge of the dark abyss he dreaded so much.
‘I want my grandfather to die a peaceful death,’ Giorgio said after a long taut silence. ‘I will do anything to achieve it.’
Maya mentally ticked the box marked ‘ruthless’. Giorgio would think nothing of doing whatever it took to get what he wanted, including resuming a relationship with a wife he had never loved and didn’t really want now she had failed to live up to expectations, to use a particularly relevant word. He would no doubt live the lie, playing pretend while he got on with his affair with his gorgeous lingerie model.
Maya knew from experience that the press got it wrong a lot of times, but not all of the time. That was the thing that had plagued her the most. The ‘no smoke without fire’ thing had niggled at her the whole time they were married. Giorgio had always denied the occasional dalliances the press reported, but her doubts and fears had still risen to the surface like oil on water. She had waded for five years through the cloying stickiness, trying to cling to the hope that the conception and subsequent birth of a child would cement their tenuous union.
It had never happened.
She slid a hand over the flat plane of her belly, her heart giving a tight aching contraction.
It might still not happen…
Giorgio turned from the chair as someone came out onto the balcony. ‘Luca,’ he said with a forced on-off smile. ‘I didn’t see you come in.’
Luca, his younger brother by two years, gave him a ready smile that lit his dark brown eyes from behind. ‘We arrived late,’ he said. ‘Ella was a bit late having her afternoon sleep.’
He turned to Maya and bent to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘It’s so good you came tonight, Maya,’ he said. ‘Bronte will be glad of someone to talk to. She was feeling rather nervous about practising her Italian in front of everyone.’
Maya smiled shakily. ‘She has no need to be,’ she said. ‘Everyone adores her and gorgeous little Ella.’
Luca smiled proudly. ‘We have an announcement to make…’ His expression faltered for a second before he continued, ‘I’m sorry, this might not be the news you two want to hear, but we are expecting another baby.’
A silence thickened the air for a nanosecond.
Maya was the first to respond. ‘Luca, that’s truly wonderful news. I am so happy for you both. When is it due?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Luca said, looking a bit sheepish. ‘We’ve only just done one of those home kit tests. It’s all still a little bit unreal, to be frank.’
Tell me about it, Maya thought wryly.
Giorgio gave his brother a firm handshake, anchoring it with a grasp of Luca’s forearm. ‘I am very pleased for you. It will be delightful to have another niece or nephew to spoil.’
Luca appeared relieved his announcement had gone down so well. ‘So,’ he said, still smiling, his eyes this time full of intrigue. ‘What are you two doing out here all alone?’
Another silence hovered like humidity before a storm.
Giorgio was the first to break it. ‘Maya and I have an announcement of our own to make.’ He put his arm around her waist and drew her into his side. ‘We have decided to reconcile. There will be no divorce.’
Maya’s eyes flew to his, her mouth opening but nothing coming out. The weight of his arm around her waist was like a chain, tying her to him just as effectively as his words.
Luca looked from one to the other with a spreading smile. ‘That’s wonderful news. Have you told Nonno? It will be the best birthday present for him.’
Giorgio smiled smugly. ‘We are just about to do so now, aren’t we, cara?’ he said, looking down at Maya.
Maya wanted to deny it. She wanted to tell Luca his brother was a manipulating, ruthless man who would stop at nothing to keep what he wanted in his possession. But she knew if she did it would quite possibly ruin Salvatore’s party. The old man was dying and Luca was right: the announcement of the reconciliation between his eldest grandson and his estranged wife would make his day.
Instead, she gave Luca a weak smile. ‘It’s all happened so suddenly…’
Luca grinned at his brother. ‘I have to tell Bronte. She’ll be so thrilled. This calls for more champagne.’
He picked up Giorgio’s empty glass and then moved to where Maya had left her half-drunk orange juice. He picked it up and, after a moment, turned and looked at her quizzically. ‘Not currently on the hard stuff, Maya?’
Maya felt the weight of Giorgio’s gaze. ‘I…I guess over the years I’ve got used to not drinking,’ she said.
‘You will have to make up for it tonight,’ Luca said and, with another beaming smile, left through the French windows to find his young wife and child.
‘Luca is right,’ Giorgio said after what seemed an endless pause. ‘This is indeed a night for celebration.’
Maya threw him a barbed glare. ‘How could you lie to your own brother like that? This is a farce and you know it.’
He gave a movement of his mouth that communicated total indifference to her opinion. ‘This is about making my grandfather’s last weeks or months of life as comfortable and happy as possible,’ he said. ‘You said you wanted the villa at Bellagio.’ He gave her an indomitable look and added, ‘Believe me, Maya, this is the only way you are going to get it.’
Chapter Three
MAYA fumed as she left the balcony with Giorgio’s arm planted firmly around her waist. Even more guests had arrived and a couple of camera flashes went off. She wondered if Giorgio had primed the select members of the press present to give her no chance of denying the announcement of their reconciliation. She would look a complete and utter fool if she said anything to the contrary now. After all, she had spent the whole time so far with him out on the balcony. People had already started talking.
‘Stop grinding your teeth, mio piccolo,’ he said in an undertone as they moved through to where Salvatore was seated like a king in the main salone.
Maya kept her lips pressed together, her words coming out like hard pellets. ‘You set this up, didn’t you? You set me up so I couldn’t say no. You knew I would not want to spoil your grandfather’s party and you deliberately played on that.’
His arm tightened like a band of steel around her waist. It was a possessive touch but also a warning. ‘Play along with it, Maya,’ he said. ‘Look at Nonno. He is enjoying himself so much. Our announcement on top of Luca and Bronte’s will be the icing on the cake—literally.’
The announcement hardly needed to be made formally for as soon as they walked into the salone all heads turned. There were whispers and gasps, nudges and did-you-see-that looks. More camera flashes went off and then Salvatore looked directly at Giorgio and Maya and his old weathered face broke into a rapturous smile.
‘Is this what I think it is, Giorgio?’ he asked, tears glistening in his eyes. ‘You and Maya have changed your mind about divorcing?’
Maya felt Giorgio’s hand reach for hers and squeeze it gently. ‘Yes, Nonno,’ he said. ‘We have called it off. We are going to work at our marriage.’
Salvatore grasped Maya’s free hand and almost crushed it between both of his gnarled ones. ‘Maya, you and my grandson have made me such a happy man tonight. I cannot tell you what this means to me. All my family is here around me to share this wonderful news.’
Maya could feel the bars of her gilded cage moving in on her, just as they had done for the last five years. She was trapped in a charade that went against everything she believed in. She felt such a fraud, playing to the crowd and most especially to Salvatore. She wasn’t sure she could get through a night of it, let alone a few weeks. Surely someone would see it for what it was? The press were already eyeing her rather closely, she thought, or maybe that was her imagination. She had always found the intrusion of the press rather difficult to deal with. It was so different from her anonymous upbringing, when even her great-aunt had barely noticed her.
More champagne was called for and more and more cameras documented the celebration. Luca and Bronte announced their delightful news which, in Maya’s mind, deserved far more attention than theirs, but it seemed everyone was intrigued by the news of the acrimonious Sabbatini divorce being called off.
Giorgio’s mother greeted Maya with guarded enthusiasm. Maya understood Giovanna’s caution; she had made things difficult for her son by bickering over every little detail to do with their separation, but Giovanna was gracious enough to welcome her back into the family fold. Besides, her mother-in-law was thrilled to finally be a grandmother. She doted on little Ella and, with the news of Bronte’s new pregnancy, Giovanna was clearly preoccupied with the new branch of the family tree.
Nicolò, or Nic as he was more commonly called, the youngest of the Sabbatini brothers, was less accommodating. He adopted his usual sardonic expression as he approached Maya after Giorgio had gone to fetch another glass of juice for her.
‘So it seems you changed your mind after reacquainting yourself with how the other half lives, eh, Maya?’ he said. ‘Glad you came to your senses. You weren’t going to come out in front, not with Giorgio’s legal team working on it.’
Maya kept her expression coolly contained, even though inside she felt furious at being reminded of how outmatched she had been right from the start. ‘Hello, Nic,’ she said. ‘How are things with you?’
He rocked his almost empty champagne flute back and forth, his hazel eyes penetrating as they held hers. ‘Fine enough,’ he said.
She looked around his broad shoulders for signs of a current date. ‘What? No Hollywood starlet tonight?’ she asked with a mocking lift of her brows.
Nic gave her a crooked wry smile that reminded her of Giorgio in one of his rare playful moods. ‘No, I didn’t think Nonno would approve of my latest lover. He mentioned the “M” word a few moments ago. It was enough to turn me to drink.’
‘You’re only what…thirty-two?’ she asked.
He nodded rather grimly. ‘You know the Sabbatini rule. Once you turn thirty, you are meant to settle down.’
‘Luca has only just done so at thirty-four,’ Maya said. ‘You shouldn’t rush into these things. You could end up making a mistake.’
He rocked his glass again, his eyes still boring into hers. ‘Like you did?’
The words hung in the air like a swinging sword.
‘I don’t consider my marriage to your brother to have ever been a mistake,’ Maya said, wishing she really believed it. ‘We just hit a rough patch, that’s all.’
Giorgio came over at that moment and handed Maya a glass of juice. He must have picked up on the atmosphere, for he narrowed his gaze at his youngest brother. ‘I hope you are keeping your thoughts and opinions on marriage to yourself, Nic,’ he said. ‘I don’t want Maya upset by your teasing.’
Nic’s smile was instantly charming. ‘I was just welcoming her back into the family,’ he said. His expression became a little more serious as he addressed Maya directly. ‘I hope it works out for you. I mean that, Maya.’
Maya wondered if he somehow sensed her insecurity. He was an out-and-out playboy—everyone knew about his wild child antics as a teenager and young adult—but the outcome of that madcap lifestyle had given him an almost intuitive sense at times. He had grown up a lot after the tragic death of his father, but it was common knowledge in the family that his mother and his grandfather in particular wanted him to settle down with a suitable wife, which was something Nic made it clear he was not prepared to do. He was a free spirit and hated being tied down. Even within the family corporation, he was the one who had been given the most flexibility. Nic was the one who travelled the world, hardly settling in one place longer than a week or two as he acquired property and oversaw the redevelopments of their hotel chain.
‘Thank you, Nic,’ she said. ‘I aim to give it my very best shot.’
After a few more desultory exchanges with other guests and family members, Giorgio led her away to a quiet corner. He was aware of how strained she looked. Her face looked pale and he had noticed she had surreptitiously mopped at her brow a couple of times, as if she was finding it too warm. ‘Don’t take any notice of Nic,’ he said, watching as his younger brother started chatting up a stunning redhead near the buffet table.
‘Nic is Nic,’ she said in a downbeat voice.
‘Yes, indeed.’ Giorgio sighed and looked down at Maya. ‘You look tired. It’s been a long night. Do you want me to take you home?’
Her fingers slipped on the glass she was holding and he took it from her before she dropped it. ‘Sorry,’ she said, glancing up at him self-consciously before looking away again, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip.
He studied her for a moment, wondering if he should have given her more warning about his intentions. Dropping it on her like that out on the balcony had obviously shocked her. But he was still reeling himself from his grandfather’s revelation. Salvatore had always seemed so ageless to Giorgio. In spite of his weathered skin and arthritic body, his mind was sharp and he still had an active role in the corporation. Giorgio felt humbled by the trust his grandfather had shown in him by telling him first about his illness. Ever since the death of Giorgio’s father, Giancarlo, Salvatore had entrusted more and more responsibility on Giorgio’s shoulders. It would be very hard to say that final goodbye to the man who was not just his grandfather but his business partner and friend.
Maya too would find it hard. She had developed a special kind of relationship with Salvatore over the five years of their marriage. She had grown up in a single parent household but then tragically, when she was just ten years old, her mother had been killed in an accident. Maya had been brought up by a great-aunt who had never married and had no children of her own. Maya hadn’t spoken much about her childhood. She seemed to find it painful so Giorgio mostly had avoided the topic.
He had been delighted when Maya had expressed her avid desire to have children. It was one of the things that made him so determined she was the one he should marry. When the first couple of pregnancies had ended in a miscarriage he had been upset, but out of concern for Maya he had concealed his feelings. He hadn’t wanted her to think she had let him down. He knew she had blamed herself, wondering if there was something wrong with her for not being able to have a child. It was only after the fourth miscarriage had occurred that he wondered if somehow it was him that was causing the trouble. But subsequent tests had shown that he was fine, although sometimes he still worried.
And then Maya had stopped falling pregnant altogether. They had done everything they were told to do. They kept temperature charts, Maya mapped her ovulation period and they had sex when she was supposedly most fertile, but still she’d failed to conceive.
The progression to IVF was something he had not felt entirely comfortable with. It all seemed so clinical, nothing like the sex they used to have when they’d first met. Nothing like the sex they had the night of Luca and Bronte’s wedding.
His body tightened as he recalled that night. He hadn’t cared about anything other than having her as quickly and as passionately as he could. It had been the best sex of his life and he wanted more. He had realised that the day he had gone to her flat to invite her to the party. He had gone there thinking their one-night stand would have cooled his ardour. He had been confident he could have seen her, talked to her and even touched her without feeling a thing. He had been shocked to find out how wrong he was. Putting his hands on her shoulders had sent zapping wires of electric want through him. He wanted Maya as he wanted no other woman. How could he have forgotten how fantastic it was with her? His body had tingled for hours afterwards. He only had to look at her and his blood raced through his veins and made him rock-hard.
He was feeling it now, standing so close to her, breathing in her sexy new fragrance: flowery but spicy and exotic at the same time. The dress she was wearing brought out the glow of her skin and the platinum blond of her hair. She had left it loose this evening, the way he most liked it. Before he even realised he was doing it, he reached out and threaded his fingers through the silk of it where it lay about her shoulders.
She gave a little shudder of reaction and looked up at him. ‘Do you have to do that?’ she asked in an undertone.
‘We are supposed to be reconciled, cara,’ he said, taking the opportunity to brush his lips against her forehead. ‘People will expect us to touch each other in public. They will imagine we will be doing much more when we are finally at home alone.’
‘Where is home supposed to be now?’ she asked in a soft breathless sort of voice. ‘Your place or mine?’
Giorgio shifted his mouth ruefully as he straightened. ‘My place, or what used to be our place, is not quite ready. I’ve been staying at the hotel most nights. We will have to stay at yours tonight, otherwise the press will not believe we are truly reunited.’
‘You think they will follow to check up on us?’ she asked with a worried frown.
He gave her a wry look. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten what the press is like. Haven’t they been on your tail over the last six months of our separation?’
Maya captured her lip between her teeth, thinking of all the times she’d had to get away from the intrusive eyes of the press. That ridiculous ‘date’ with Howard Herrington was a case in point. They had blown it right out of proportion with a photograph that looked far more intimate than it was. She had been leaning forward, trying to catch something Howard had been saying and a flashbulb had captured the moment, making it appear she was about to press a kiss close to Howard’s mouth. When it appeared in the gossip pages the following day she had taken a devil-may-care approach to the fallout. There had been a photo only a week earlier of Giorgio with his model friend. It seemed fitting that Maya had started to reclaim her life, even if Howard Herrington was the worst date she had ever had.
Maya cast her eyes over the crowd. The party was in full swing now; several couples were dancing as the band played some classic dance hits. She remembered the days when she had danced in Giorgio’s arms; he had swung her around and around and even though her head had been left spinning she had always gone back for more. The early days of their courtship and marriage had been so much fun, so dizzyingly exciting for a girl who had grown up with so little. There had been no parties that she could remember during her childhood, no massive family gatherings, no huge celebrations of her own or anyone else’s milestones or achievements.
As soon as she had met Giorgio she had clung to him and his family, subconsciously looking for the anchor she had lacked for much of her life. She had slotted in like a small sea-tossed craft into a safe and sheltered harbour.
She had never wanted to be cast adrift.
She had done that herself.
But now the rules had been changed. She was back, but only temporarily. Giorgio wanted her to pretend things were back to normal and she could do that for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two. The chances were her pregnancy would disappear down the drain of despair, just like the others had done. All she had to do was keep it a secret until Giorgio’s game of pretend was over. There was no point in getting his hopes up as well as hers, or anyone else’s for that matter.
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