The Italian's Baby Bargain: The Italian's Wedding Ultimatum / The Italian's Forced Bride / The Mancini Marriage Bargain

Making contact with the sizzling heat in his sensational eyes, she felt her anger and resistance melting faster than snow in July. Gritting her teeth, she clung to the last shreds of her resentment, reminding herself that this relationship was too one-sided.

‘That’s my bed.’

‘Does it matter whose bed it is?’ Alessandro responded impatiently—because he could think of very little else but her legs wrapped around him as she lay soft and warm beneath him…or maybe on top…?

‘I’ve never been in your bed.’ Sam’s voice went cold as she added bitterly, ‘I’ve never been in your bedroom, or even in your home.’

Alessandro had been scrupulously careful to keep her well away from anyone who knew him. She didn’t even know the location of his London home.

‘Which is fine by me,’ she assured him breezily. ‘I wouldn’t want to meet any of your friends.’ And it was painfully obvious he didn’t want any of them meeting his bit on the side.

Alessandro looked disconcerted by the acrid observation. ‘What are you talking about?’

Meet his friends…? Their casual arrangement, which he was finding increasingly unsatisfactory, meant they spent precious little time together as it was. Having his friends monopolise her time? Sure, he was really going to do that!

‘I’d probably have as little in common with them as I do you.’

The stubborn, tight-lipped contention caused his taut jaw to tighten another notch. ‘You have met Smithie.’

Sam’s expression softened slightly as she thought of Alessandro’s ex-nanny. ‘But she’s not like your other friends.’

He raised an eloquent brow. ‘As you have never met them, how would you know what my friends are like?’

Sam’s eyes narrowed with dislike on his lean face. ‘Not everyone considers me such a social liability.’

‘Social liability…!’ he echoed. ‘Why do you insist on putting words in my mouth?’

‘I don’t!’ she protested mutinously. ‘It’s obviously what you’re thinking.’

A hissing sound of frustration escaped through his clenched teeth. ‘Fine!’ he said, flinging up his hands in a very Latin gesture of irritation. ‘I will arrange a dinner…no, I will arrange a reception, and introduce you to everyone I know. Will you be happy then? Or would you like me to invite a camera crew from one of those magazines that specialise in glossy spreads of such things into my home? We can be pictured lounging beside the pool and gush about how inseparable we are…will that make you happy?’

His biting sarcasm stung. ‘It would make me sick.’

‘Then, you see, we do have something in common after all. I value my privacy, and I thought you felt the same way.’

What he valued was his freedom. ‘Don’t glower at me that way. I’m not Jonny.’

His expression darkened. ‘You know, I am sick of the sound of that name.’ An expression of brooding discontent settled on his lean features as he thought about the younger man. ‘I still don’t understand why, if he needed money, he didn’t come to me?’

‘You are Kat’s brother—the poor, deluded girl thinks you’re perfect…Jonny is afraid he’ll look a wimp by comparison with her marvellous brother.’ Her expression left no doubt that she didn’t share the younger girl’s opinion.

‘Nonsense!’

The way he brushed aside her explanation made Sam’s general crankiness morph into genuine anger. ‘That’s so typical of you. If you don’t want to hear something you just pretend it isn’t so. But ignoring it doesn’t make it any less the truth. The truth is you make Jonny feel incompetent and second best.’

‘He is incompetent, and also boring—I have no wish to talk about him any longer.’ If he didn’t get her into bed some time in the next ten seconds he was going to lose his mind…although it was always possible he had already lost it. A swift mental review of his recent behaviour brought a self-derisive twist to Alessandro’s lips.

Sam flung up her hands. ‘See—you can’t help yourself!’ she exclaimed.

Alessandro remained unmoved by her dramatic hand-waving. ‘I thought you set great store by honesty?’ But then I used to think the same about myself, he thought, considering his recent self-deception.

Damn the man—he always had an answer. ‘So, if he had come to you, what would you have done…?’

‘That depends. But I certainly wouldn’t have thrown good money after bad.’

‘You’d have let him go under?’ she accused, shocked by his unapologetic admission. ‘But that amount of money is absolutely nothing to you!’ she protested, clicking her fingers to underline her point. ‘My God, Alessandro, you’re so callous.’

‘I’d have told him to cut his losses and find something he wants to do. He is clearly doing something he neither enjoys or is suited to. I would have told him to find something he can be passionate about.’

‘You make it sound so easy, but Jonny isn’t like you…’

His jaw clenched. ‘You wish me to emulate your hero…?’

‘There’s no need to be stupid. Jonny is not my hero.’

Something flickered at the back of his dark eyes. There was a short, dense silence before he added huskily, ‘And am I?’

The question threw Sam totally off her stride. ‘Stupid? Or my hero…?’ She angled an uncertain look at his face and discovered nothing from his shuttered expression. Did he want to be her hero? It seemed pretty unlikely.

‘My hero would display a little bit of faith in me—not to mention have some respect for my views,’ she retorted, avoiding a direct answer. ‘But actually I don’t think I need a hero. Actually, I don’t think I need a lover.’

If the moment of shocked silence that followed her announcement had lasted another micro-second longer Sam would have retracted it. Only it didn’t.

‘You wish me to leave?’

Of course it might have been possible to retract her reckless words even then, if he had acted for a moment as if he gave a damn one way or the other. But he just stood there, looking remote in the way only he could, so she dug herself a little deeper and said, ‘Well, there doesn’t seem much point in you staying, does there?’

‘I will not impose on you any longer,’ he said, looking so stiff and starchy she almost expected him to click his heels!

She felt numb with shock and disbelief as he walked out of the door, but still managed to scream a defiant, ‘Good riddance!’ at the top of her lungs, before bursting into noisy, emotional sobs.

She eventually convinced herself that she was better off without him.

It took her twelve hours of intermittent weeping and numerous attempts to trivialise her feelings for Alessandro to arrive at this conclusion, but when she got there she knew it was a plateau—a point from which her life could move on in an infinitely saner and more productive direction. It was, she told herself, good that things had come to a head when they had. It wasn’t as if she had ever thought the relationship had staying power.

After all, she was far too old to believe in fairy tales, and if the last few weeks had taught her anything they had taught her that she didn’t want a life fraught with dramatic ups and downs. It might suit some people, but she liked an ordered, organised existence, and she was looking forward to things getting back to normal.

Of course at that point Sam didn’t realize that normal had vanished for ever. That happened a week later.

Chapter Eleven

DOOR keys held in her teeth, one bag balanced on her hip, a sheaf of property leaflets under her arm and two bags of groceries gradually cutting off the circulation to her fingers, Sam climbed the stairs to her second-floor flat. There were many plus points about living on the second floor of this tasteful Edwardian conversion, including a lovely view of the park, but carrying her weekly groceries upstairs was not one of them.

The impossibility of ferrying groceries, a buggy and a baby was one of the reasons she had done a trawl of the local estate agents after she’d waved goodbye to her mother.

God knew how her mother had guessed, but at least she had been spared finding the right moment to tell her parents. She was pretty sure that, despite her mother’s solemn promise not to tell her father yet, it wouldn’t be long before he also knew.

Her mother always meant it when she said conspiratorially, We won’t tell your father about this, Sam. But it didn’t really matter if this was the price of a new pair of shoes or a dent in the new car, the moment George Maguire walked through the door she blurted out the truth. Not only was she incapable of keeping a secret from her husband, she appeared blind to this defect in her character.

Sam had dropped the bags and retrieved the keys from her mouth before she realised she had a visitor.

‘I have been waiting for an hour.’

The breath left her lungs in one gasp as she spun around. Stunned to silence, she just stared. Alessandro, minus his suit but complete with the restless vitality she would always associate with him, stood there. His long legs sheathed in a pair of faded denims, he slouched elegantly, one ankle crossed over the other and his broad shoulders wedged against the wall of the hallway she shared with the other top floor flat.

As she stared, her emotions a turbulent cocktail of longing and loathing, he levered himself off the wall. The black designer T-shirt he wore was fitted enough to allow her to see the tightening of the muscles in his flat belly…She blinked hard to banish the image and bit down on her lower lip.

It had been three weeks since she had last seen him, and she had counted every second.

‘You…here…’ As if there was any doubt about it! The touch of his dark compelling eyes, the scent of his body…God, who else but Alessandro could reduce her to a mindless bundle of hormonal craving by his mere presence?

What was more to the point was why?

He arched a brow and looked her up and down. ‘You were expecting someone else?’

Failing miserably to adopt the desired attitude of defiance to mask her real feelings, Sam mutely shook her head. Hands clenched into tight balls, she didn’t even notice the pain as her nails dug into the flesh of her palms. This, she decided, was the substance of nightmares. Thinking of nightmares turned her thoughts to the frequent occasions when he had featured in her more torrid nocturnal dreams. A rush of shamed heat slammed through her body.

‘You’re here…’

‘We have covered that,’ he said, making no attempt to conceal his growing impatience.

‘Well, why…?’

‘Yes, I am here…for an hour I have been here.’ His narrow-eyed, disapproving glance roamed hungrily over her slender body. His manner was terse and impatient as he looked down his patrician nose and demanded, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

The flight back from New York had begun productively enough. He had been working his way through the pile of paperwork he had brought with him with his usual methodical speed. Then, somewhere mid-Atlantic, he had allowed the infuriating redhead to creep insidiously into his head. She was on another continent, she was a distraction—yet his body had responded to the imaginary scent of her warm body in his nostrils.

Suddenly not being the one to make the first move had seemed less a matter of principle and more an action of wilful stupidity. What was he trying to prove anyway? It wasn’t as if he had any illusions about the nature of his true feelings. The realisation hadn’t been a bolt from the blue, but gradually it had crept up on him—he didn’t want a casual relationship!

He didn’t want some secret little affair.

He wanted Samantha. And he wanted the world, and especially anyone called Jonny Trelevan, to know that she was his.

Putting aside the papers, he’d pulled out the small box secreted in his inside pocket. His expression distant and unfocused, he’d been staring at the square-cut emerald when a passing flight attendant, who had been about to ask him if he required anything, had released a soft, awed cry.

Alessandro had lifted his head.

The girl had flushed a little and given an apologetic shrug. ‘Sorry—it’s just beautiful. The colour is so intense,’ she’d observed, her envious glance drifting to the ring lying on its ruched bed of velvet. Unable to hide her curiosity, she’d added. ‘She must be someone very special…?’

Alessandro, his eyes trained on the ring, had nodded. ‘She is. But she is also as stubborn as hell. But you know something…? I wouldn’t have her any other way.’

The reflective smile that had curved his sensual lips upwards had dimmed as he became aware of the attendant’s amazed stare. Shoving the box back into his pocket, he’d announced that he did not require anything.

And why wouldn’t she stare…? he’d mused as she left—no doubt to spread the story. A man famed for his ability to cut dead anyone unwise enough to delve into his personal life had gushed on like something straight out of a women’s magazine.

He had played out various versions of this scene, where she’d open the door and find him standing there, during the remainder of the journey—while the paperwork had lain untouched. She would, of course, regret her previous unreasonable behaviour, and he in his turn would magnanimously forgive her before he proposed.

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