Pregnant with His Baby!

Straightening up, she walked to the bottom of the bed and washed her hands with the gel provided before she acknowledged the father’s presence.

‘He’s doing—’

‘Let me guess, as well as can be expected. Dio, do you people ever run out of meaningless platitudes?’

‘Your son is young and strong and the surgery went well, Mr Bruni. You really shouldn’t anticipate problems before they happen,’ she counselled calmly.

‘You were talking to him?’

‘Yes, I always explain what I’m doing to patients.’

He angled a dark brow and winced slightly as the movement evidently tugged at the raw open edges of the deep gash on his forehead. ‘It does have a soothing quality.’

She stared at him with a perplexed frown.

‘Your voice.’ Before she could decide how to respond to this comment his attention shifted back to his son. ‘If he had not gone back for that damned computer game … a computer game!’ He closed his eyes and inhaled, rubbing the indentation between his brows as he rose to his feet.

He stood there towering over her, staring down at his son’s bruised face, a nerve clenching in his angular jaw as he sucked in air through flared nostrils before adding in a harsh driven voice, ‘My son might die because I wanted to teach him a lesson about values, that being a rich man’s only child doesn’t mean you don’t have to work. He went back for his game because he knew I wouldn’t replace something lost through his carelessness. That might prove to be an expensive lesson—for Alberto.’

Dervla watched, sympathy lodged like a stone in her chest, as his dark lashes swept downwards.

The Italian swallowed hard, causing a convulsive ripple beneath the brown skin of his throat as he made a visible effort to suck in the emotions that spilled out.

Dervla tensed as his dark eyes lifted.

‘What? No “It’s not your fault, Mr Bruni”?’ he drawled sarcastically.

‘I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that,’ she said quietly.

‘You are clearly not a parent.’

Dervla flinched as if he had inadvertently touched an exposed nerve. ‘No,’ she agreed levelly. ‘I am not a parent.’ And never would be.

‘A game worth a few pounds and I own the company …’ The rest of his raw observations were delivered in a staccato burst of Italian, but the sentiment of self-loathing was pretty much the same in any language.

Dervla looked at his hands, clenched white-knuckled in frustration, and acted without thinking. She reached out and covered his hand with her own. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she told him fiercely. ‘It’s the monsters that planned this atrocity. Nothing,’ she added firmly, ‘will be achieved from beating yourself up about it or imagining a hundred if-only scenarios.’

Gianfranco Bruni froze, his eyes glued to the small hand curled over his.

The irrelevant thought that he had rather lovely hands, shapely and strong with long tapering fingers, flashed through her head as she gave one last squeeze before releasing her grip.

‘You really mustn’t blame yourself,’ she insisted earnestly.

There was a short uncomfortable pause.

‘My son’s welfare is all that need concern you, Nurse. I thought we had established I do not need my hand held or my brow mopped by a ministering angel!’ He gave a sub-zero smile, raised one sable brow and added, ‘Do you understand?’

The colour flew to her cheeks. The man was hurting, sure, but was there any need for him to be quite so unpleasant?

‘I understand,’ she said, keeping her voice level.

‘Good,’ he grunted, dragging the chair closer to the bed and folding his long length into it. ‘I’m sure you graduated top of empathy in your class, but save it for someone who prefers mushy sentiment to proficiency.’

‘I hope one doesn’t preclude the other, Mr Bruni,’ she said quietly.

‘Dervla, is there a problem?’

Dervla, who hadn’t been aware of the charge nurse’s approach, started as he spoke. She took a deep breath and willed her pulse rate to slow. ‘No, no problem.’

John gave a nod, but did not look entirely convinced as his glance slid from Dervla to the tall Italian. ‘Mr Bruni, I’ve arranged for a porter with a wheelchair to take you to Casualty. One of the plastic surgeons is standing by.’

Gianfranco Bruni looked at him blankly.

‘Porter?’

‘With a chair.’

‘You think I am an invalid?’

‘It’s hospital policy, Mr Bruni, and the sooner that head wound is sutured, the better.’

‘My head?’

Dervla was not surprised to see John’s expression sharpen into suspicious concern as he looked at Gianfranco Bruni. The Italian looked so baffled by the reference that she suspected he had forgotten he was injured, or maybe he hadn’t even noticed.

‘You’ve got a deep gash six inches long on your forehead,’ the charge nurse explained. ‘You didn’t lose consciousness at any point, did you?’

Gianfranco Bruni gave a dismissive wave and turned away. ‘It’s a scratch,’ he retorted irritably.

Dervla’s exasperation got the better of her. ‘Your scratch is bleeding all over the floor.’

The Italian’s head slewed back. ‘Who, Nurse, do you think you are talking to?’

‘I think I’m talking to a man who would prefer deference to the truth, an extremely stubborn man who wouldn’t relinquish control if his life depended on it.’

It was hard to tell which of the two men was looking more astonished by her outburst.

‘Dervla,’ John began, ‘it might be better if you—’

‘It’s bleeding.’ They both turned in unison to see Gianfranco Bruni looking at the blood on his fingers, his expression oddly blank.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ she cautioned, regarding him warily. He wasn’t the most obvious candidate, but she had seen big, tough-looking chaps faint away at the sight of blood—especially their own.

His head came up with a snap. ‘I am not alarmed. Just give me some tape—a dressing or something to cover it.’

‘This is not a do-it-yourself hospital, Mr. Bruni,’ John intervened quietly.

‘She can do it,’ the Italian said suddenly, stabbing a finger towards Dervla.

Dervla’s jaw dropped. ‘Me!’ She really hoped he didn’t mean what she thought he did.

‘Nurse Smith is—’

‘Is she not able?’

‘Of course she’s able, but after the plastic surgeon has sewn you up there will hardly be a scar.’

The Italian looked at the other man, his upper lip curling as he snarled contemptuously, ‘You think I give a damn about my face?’

His hand lifted in an angry gesture that invited them to look at the object under discussion. It was an invitation that Dervla found hard to refuse.

He might dismiss his looks, but in her opinion a man who looked like him could be forgiven a little of the vanity he appeared to despise.

‘Surely your surgeons have better things to do today than sew up my scratch? My son is not the only one fighting for his life,’ he bit through clenched teeth as he stared with dark pain-filled eyes at the unconscious figure in the bed. ‘I want her,’ he said without looking at Dervla. ‘Nurse Smith.’

They said it was always good to be wanted—but they were wrong, Dervla decided grimly as her stomach churned with unprofessional trepidation.

John shrugged, shot Dervla a questioning look and to her dismay asked, ‘Are you all right with that, Dervla?’

Dervla, who was about as all right with it as putting her hand in a live electric socket, struggled to conceal her irrational horror.

‘Don’t worry. I am not litigious,’ the Italian remarked as she hesitated.

Her head turned and her eyes brushed the cynical deepset eyes of the injured billionaire. ‘I’m not worried about you suing me.’ And she had no doubt about her ability to perform the relatively minor procedure; she had sutured hundreds of wounds. No, her reluctance had more to do with an irrational and strong disinclination to touch the man.

‘The plastic surgeon would make a much better job. I don’t usually—’

His broad shoulders lifted fractionally in a fluid shrug. ‘So be flexible.’

‘Because you won’t be?’

The suggestion brought his narrowed scrutiny zeroing in on her face. Beside her Dervla was dimly aware of John looking astonished and not very happy.

‘You worked that out faster than most people.’

Was that a compliment? she wondered. The lift of one corner of his wide, sensually sculpted mouth might have been his version of a smile …? But then again, she thought, maybe not.

It was five minutes later when Dervla led the way to the small curtained-off section very conscious of the tall man who followed her. She motioned him to the seat and angled the light on his face before washing her hands and sliding them into sterile gloves.

As she leaned closer to clean the wound her nostrils quivered in response to the male scent of his body. The harsh artificial light, not normally flattering, served to emphasise the hollows and planes of his strong-boned face.

‘I’m sorry.’ Under the accumulated grime and blood there was a grey tinge to his skin that she was guessing was not normal.

‘For what?’

‘Hurting you.’

‘I think it’s hurting you more than me.’ The realisation brought a flicker of amusement to his deepset eyes. ‘Are you sure you have the right temperament to be a nurse?’

‘Not everyone,’ she retorted tartly, ‘thinks empathy is a bad thing.’ She paused, a swab in her hand, and asked hopefully, ‘Are you sure that you wouldn’t prefer one of the doctors to do this? It really is a deep wound.’

‘Just get on with it.’

‘Fine, if that’s what you want. I’ll just put in some local anaesthetic to—’

He shook his dark head irritably. ‘Forget that. Just sew the damned thing up.’

‘You really don’t have to prove how macho you are. There’s nobody here but me.’

He looked at her with a contemptuous smile. ‘I thought you’d enjoy having me at your mercy,’ he taunted.

Like most nurses Dervla had ducked more than one blow from drunks in Casualty, and on one memorable occasion had had her shoulder dislocated by a confused patient who had wanted to jump out a second-floor window, but none had made her feel quite as vulnerable or as angry as this man did.

Dervla, who had always prided herself on her professionalism, was deeply dismayed. In her job you simply couldn’t mix professional with personal—it was a line you simply did not cross.

Of course she was only human and inevitably she felt a personal connection with some patients that she did not with others.

With this man she wouldn’t want a connection of any variety!

‘Fine.’

She worked as swiftly as she could, her tongue caught between her teeth as she concentrated on knitting the torn flesh neatly together. He didn’t flinch, which could mean she was really good at what she was doing, but more likely meant he was too stupidly stubborn to admit it hurt.

‘There,’ she said, taking a step back to view her handiwork. ‘You’re done. Now take things slowly—you might feel …’

Before she had finished speaking he had removed the sterile towel she had placed around his shoulders and was on his feet.

He stood, drew back the curtain and arched an enquiring brow at her.

‘I might feel what, Nurse?’

‘Faint if you get up too quickly.’

For a moment his teeth flashed white, his lean bronzed face making him look momentarily a lot younger, and—had it not been clearly impossible—even more attractive. ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

A wet coat being slung onto the sofa beside her jerked Dervla abruptly back to the present. She blinked from the images on the television screen to the figure who was heading to the kitchen where the sounds proclaimed she was filling a kettle.

Sue returned a moment later. ‘It’s absolutely foul out there,’ she complained, running her hands through her wet dark curls. ‘You’ve been crying!’ she accused, peering at Dervla’s damp face.

‘No …’ Dervla lifted a hand to her face and felt the salty moisture on her skin. ‘I suppose I might have,’ she admitted.

‘This,’ her friend said, kicking off her shoes quite literally—they hit the opposite wall, ‘is driving me crazy. I’ve respected your privacy but I’m only human. I have to know—why did you walk out on the delicious Gianfranco? Who clearly adores the ground you walk on.’ She flopped down on the sofa beside Dervla and pushed her coat on the floor. ‘So spill. Give me all the lurid details.’

‘He doesn’t adore me or the ground I walk on.’ The only thing Gianfranco adored was his son and the memory of his dead wife. Dervla raised her empty mug. ‘To new beginnings!’

‘What?’ Sue said, staring at her friend’s bitter face with concern.

‘That was the toast Carla gave when she took me to lunch that first week. She said it was marvellous that Gianfranco had met me, that he was finally able to move on and have a relationship without feeling he was being unfaithful to Sara’s memory.’

‘Well, I’d prefer the woman if she had the odd skin blemish, but she’s got a point, Dervla—’

‘Only she was wrong,’ Dervla cut in huskily. ‘He hadn’t moved on—he hasn’t, and he doesn’t love me.’

‘Don’t be stupid. Of course—’

‘No.’ Dervla shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘He never pretended to, he still loves her.’ My life isn’t over, she reminded herself. It just feels that way. ‘It’s not a baby he doesn’t want—it’s my baby.’

Sue stared at her with eyes like saucers. ‘Baby! But I thought that you couldn’t have a baby. You thought it would be the deal-breaker when you told him,’ she reminded her friend. ‘You were over the moon when he said it was no problem with him.’

Dervla nodded miserably. ‘He said he already had Alberto and he didn’t want any more children. That we had a ready-made family.’

‘But you want your own, and there’s a chance …?’

Dervla nodded. Sue was one of the few people she had ever told about the tragic long-term consequences of complications after a perforated appendix and the subsequent peritonitis that had put her on the critical list in her teens.

‘I might be able to have a baby, but not,’ she added, the tears beginning to overflow in earnest from her tragic emerald eyes, ‘with Gianfranco. I have to choose a baby or him.’

Sue’s arms went around her as she began to weep loudly.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘WELL, what do you think?’ the man at the head of the table asked, lifting his dark head from the spreadsheet he had been studying.

There was a silence in the room as he allowed his hooded gaze to rest on each face in turn. He could read panic in several faces as the executives frantically tried to decide what he wanted to hear.

Gianfranco felt a flash of irritation—he did not surround himself with yes-men or -women.

‘Does nobody have an opinion?’ Or a backbone?

It seemed that nobody had, or if they did they were unwilling to express it. Gianfranco felt his frustration escalate in the growing silence.

‘Perhaps there is somewhere else you want to be?’ he suggested with silken sarcasm.

The trouble, he mused, with people was they couldn’t separate their personal life from their professional life. It was a fatal mistake and one that he couldn’t understand. He had always compartmentalised his life, it was simply a matter of discipline.

His lashes lowered as his dark glance brushed the metal-banded watch on his wrist. He wondered if his assistant, who seemed less than her usual efficient self today, had remembered to relay the message to everyone concerned that he wanted all personal calls to be immediately diverted in here.

The sound of a phone ringing broke the lengthening silence. Gianfranco began to count, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists as he resisted the urge to immediately pull it from his jacket pocket.

Nobody else reached to check if the call was for them. Gianfranco Bruni’s dislike of such interruptions was well known and nobody would have dreamt of not switching off their mobiles before going into a meeting chaired by him.

It was Gianfranco himself who, after the second ring, pulled a phone from the breast pocket of his jacket and, after glancing at it, rose abruptly, excusing himself.

‘The wife,’ the only woman present at the high-powered meeting predicted, unwittingly echoing Gianfranco’s first thought when he had heard the ring.

No one disagreed.

Before his marriage the previous year Gianfranco would not have disregarded his own rule concerning interruptions. Since the wedding to which no one, least of all media cameras, had been invited there had been some significant changes. It was rumoured that Gianfranco even took a day off occasionally, but that was only a rumour.

‘Well, I hope she says something to put him in a less vile mood.’

‘Yes, our leader is not his usual sunny self this afternoon, is he?’ someone agreed drily.

There was a generous noise of assent around the table.

‘Have you met her? The wife, that is?’ one of the executives asked curiously.

The gentle chatter around the table stopped and a couple of people nodded to confirm they had.

One said, ‘My mother got me to take her to the opening of the new children’s hospice. It turns out to be his wife’s brainchild.’

‘I suppose even a lady who lunches needs something to put on her CV.’

‘That’s what I thought, but it turns out she’s really hands-on. Literally actually,’ he recalled with a reminiscent smile. ‘She was down on her hands and knees rolling around on the grass barefoot with some of the kids.’

‘She doesn’t sound like a Gianfranco Bruni girlfriend.’

‘She’s not—she’s his wife. Maybe that’s the difference. You’re not wrong, though. She really isn’t his usual type.’

‘Presumably not hard on the eye, though?’

‘She’s pretty,’ the speaker agreed. ‘A redhead, green eyes, freckles.’ He gave a reminiscent smile. ‘Really great, sexy laugh.’

‘Sounds like Ricardo was smitten,’ someone said slyly, and there was laughter as the middle-aged man in question flushed but didn’t deny the charge.

‘I’ve never even seen a photo of her.’

Another result of his sudden marriage had been that Gianfranco, who had once supplied the gossip columns with acres of copy, had pretty much slipped off the photo-opportunity map and retreated behind the sort of security that people who were as rich as he was could.

‘Not exactly a party girl, then, the redhead?’

‘She is English, though?’ The person who asked the question glanced at the closed door before he spoke. Being caught gossiping about the boss would do his promotion prospects no good at all.

‘I’m not sure. Her name doesn’t sound English … Der something …?’

‘Dervla.’ It was the sole female who supplied the bride’s name.

‘Wasn’t she a model?’

‘Doubt it. She’s not tall enough,’ one person who had met her said.

‘Well, from what I’ve heard …’

The men leaned forward to catch the woman’s words as her voice dropped to a confidential hiss. ‘I don’t know how true it is, you understand, but my friend’s cousin—he works at the hospital in London where she was apparently working when they met.’

‘She’s a doctor?’

‘No, a nurse … she looked after his son when they were caught up in that terrorist thing.’

There were murmurs as the people present recalled the horrific incident she spoke of.

‘I think it’s so romantic,’ she added dreamily.

One of the men, the youngest there, who had been struggling to defend a business decision earlier to his critical boss, laughed and said scornfully, ‘Gianfranco Bruni doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body. A couple of years’ time and he’ll probably trade her in for a new model.’

When Gianfranco had reached for his phone and not seen Dervla’s name he had needed to dig deep into his seriously depleted reserves of self-control to maintain a semblance of composure.

At least until he was out of the room.

In the corridor he gritted his teeth and ground one clenched fist into the other. It had been forty-eight hours and not a word—not one word!

For all he knew she could be lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Fighting against the swell of crushing anxiety in his chest, he pushed his fingers deep into the ebony hair that sprang from his temples and inhaled deeply, forcing the air into his lungs before expelling it in a gusty sigh.

Get a grip, man, he counselled himself as he smoothed back the tousled hair from his brow and adjusted his tie.

Damn the woman!

‘Gianfranco!’

Gianfranco turned his head at the sound of the familiar voice and forced his lips into a semblance of a smile. Normally he would have been genuinely pleased to see Angelo Martinos, who had been his closest friend since the days when they both shared the distinction of being the only ‘foreigners’ at the English prep school they had been sent to at the ages of nine and ten respectively.

‘Angelo, what brings you here?’ he asked without enthusiasm.

‘Called on the off chance. They told me you were in a meeting.’ He raised an interrogative brow as he scanned his friend’s face. ‘Not a good one, apparently …?’

Now this was one of the reasons why Angelo was the last person to see right now. It wasn’t easy to pull the wool over his eyes, and he thought being his best friend gave him the right to pry.

‘You know how it is,’ he returned, doubting that his happily married friend knew the first thing about being put through an emotional meat-grinder by his wife.

Angelo’s wife apparently thought that his every word was a pearl of wisdom, whereas Gianfranco’s own bride never lost an opportunity to challenge him.

‘Feel like a coffee?’ Angelo wondered, his glance lingering briefly on the razor cut on Gianfranco’s angular jaw. When a moment later he noticed the mismatched socks his eyebrows hit his hairline—impeccable and effortless elegance were descriptions frequently ascribed to his friend.

Gathering his straying attention and wishing his friend would take the hint and go, Gianfranco shook his head and said, ‘Not really,’ in a discouraging way that would have made ninety-nine people out of a hundred back off, but not Angelo.

‘I’m at a loose end. Kate and her mum are baby shopping. I was getting in the way.’

‘Sorry, I’m pretty snowed under today. I just ducked out to take a call from Alberto. I should ring back.’

‘I hardly recognised Alberto when I saw him. Thirteen and he must be nearly six feet. At this rate you’ll be looking up at him before long.’

‘Maybe,’ said Gianfranco, who at six five rarely had to look up at anyone.

‘I don’t envy him puberty. It was hell.’

Gianfranco choked off a bitter laugh. ‘For you? I don’t think so, unless adolescent hell involved every girl you wanted and—’

‘I only got them because you knocked them back, Gianfranco,’ Angelo, ever the pragmatist, cut in. ‘Your problem, my friend, was you put women on a pedestal.’

Gianfranco had been approaching his twentieth birthday when he thought he had found one who belonged on that pedestal. By the time he realised that beyond the perfect face the innocent-eyed woman he had woven his romantic fantasies around—a barmaid who worked in the local hotel—had actually been not so innocent and rather more interested in his sexual stamina than his philosophical reflections and pathetic poetry, it had been too late.

She had been pregnant and to his family’s horror he had married her and become a father at twenty.

‘I was intense.’ Gianfranco cringed now to think of the boy he had been. ‘And an idiot.’

‘You were a romantic,’ Angelo retorted indulgently. ‘And I was shallow, but now we are both older and wiser, not to mention happily married, men. It was a great weekend, which is what brings me here. We’d love to return your hospitality. Kate wants to know if you’re both free on the eighteenth, always supposing nothing has happened on the baby front …?’