without really registering. He was staring down into an abyss and for the first time in his life was paralysed with inaction. How was it that he hadn’t spotted the ground opening up beneath his feet? He had never in his entire life taken his eye off the ball, but he had done it with her.
‘And then you can get back to your busy life. I don’t know… Would you want me to sign anything?’
‘My busy life…?’
‘Earning money, running an empire, being a mover and a shaker in the big, bad world…’
Over time she had come to grasp not just the extent of his wealth but the extent of his power and influence. Neither impressed her, because if he’d been poorer and less influential, then maybe he would have wanted what she wanted: just a normal relationship. Maybe he would have loved her the way she loved him. She didn’t enjoy thinking like that, but she couldn’t help it.
‘I seem to have taken quite a bit of time out of my “busy life” over the past few weeks, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘But I didn’t force you to—’
‘Did I say that you did?’
‘No, but—’
‘Did it ever occur to you that I may have wanted to?’
‘For the baby,’ Susie inserted hastily, before her heart had time to pick up speed and before her head could start building castles in the sky.
‘Love… It comes with a lot of high hopes and bitter disappointments…’
‘I know that’s how you feel.’
‘Or so I thought.’ He ran his fingers through his hair—a gesture that was part frustration, part weird nerves. ‘My father had a long and successful marriage with my mother and it was a marriage that was arranged. When he flung himself headlong into love it crashed and burned.’
‘His marriage might have been arranged, but has it ever occurred to you that he fell in love with your mother? That what he felt for his second wife wasn’t love at all? Maybe just a reaction to loneliness? He was weak and he fell for a pretty woman who flattered him. It happens. But it isn’t love.’
‘I have been doing some thinking, and for the first time…’
For the first time he had thought of his parents, remembered the way they had been with one another, and had realised, slowly but surely, that what had begun as an arrangement had ended as true love. The story hadn’t been as black and white as he had imagined. He had always equated marriage as an arrangement as successful and marriage as a whirlwind of emotion and so-called love as a nightmare. It had subtly altered his approach to relationships.
‘For the first time…?’
‘This situation between us isn’t going to work, Susie,’ he said roughly.
It felt as though he was on the edge of a cliff, a yawning drop at his feet, but the thing was that he was going to step off the side—whatever the outcome.
‘You don’t want to be married to me—you see that as some sort of unacceptable sacrifice, where the only inevitable outcome would be both of us being miserable and resentful…’
‘You would miss your freedom.’ She stared down at her fingers while her mind darted like quicksilver in a thousand different directions.
‘I would miss you more.’ Their eyes met and he found that he was holding his breath. ‘We work. I challenge you to deny that. We can live together and it’s good between us. And that’s without sex.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I don’t want you on a part-time basis when the baby’s born. Just think about it. Think about what we have. This isn’t a relationship that’s destined to fail just because it’s been generated by the fact that you became pregnant. Maybe that was Fate. I’ve never been much of a believer in that old chestnut, but lately I’ve had a turnaround. Fate brought us together and it conspired to keep us together—and that’s what I want. To be with you. With you both. You and our baby.’
‘I don’t understand…’ Because missing from all of that were the three words she wanted to hear.
‘I’m not the sort of guy you ever saw as a long-term proposition…but Susie, I could be. I mean, think about it—have we had one argument since I moved in? A single argument? No. Not one. Have I been…well…useful? Yes. Those are two things you should take into account when you decide that I’m not the one for you. You might fantasise about someone who wears an earring, has a ponytail and knows how to cook quiche, but would he really be the man for you?’
‘He might be if he loved me…’
‘No one could love you as much as I do. No one.’
‘You love me? No, you don’t. You don’t believe in love.’
Unable to tell her what he was being driven to tell her without touching her, Sergio took immediate advantage of her open-mouthed confusion to join her on the sofa. If he had to overwhelm her with his physical proximity, then so be it. He wasn’t above low tricks.
‘I never thought I did,’ he murmured, ‘but no one’s right all of the time. Even me.’
‘Now I really am shocked.’ Susie’s heart was swooping and diving so fast that she could scarcely breathe. ‘I thought you were the guy who never got it wrong?’
‘You’re going to marry me,’ he ordered shakily. ‘Aren’t you?’
Susie pulled him towards her and kissed him with all the passion she had been storing up for the past weeks and months—the passion that had lain slumbering under the surface, ever ready to leap out and take charge.
‘You love me! Of course I’m going to marry you. I’ve loved you for so long… I just never thought that you could ever love me back—and I’ve been so scared of getting used to you being around me. You never thought that you could love, and I always knew that I could…except I never expected it to be someone like you…’
‘I’m reading all sorts of terrific compliments into that,’ Sergio said huskily.
He slipped his hand under the jumper and gently, tenderly caressed her, stroked her swollen nipples, but he didn’t go further. They had a lifetime to explore one another. He could take his time. But he just had to feel her, and her body was wonderfully familiar. Everything about her filled him with a sense of completion, as though this was the woman he had been waiting to find.
He shuddered when he thought that he might not have met her at all—that she might have joined that mustard-clothed clown on her blind date and left his restaurant without throwing herself into his company.
‘You should,’ Susie whispered. ‘And you should know something else…’
‘What’s that?’
‘I feel a twinge—and this time it’s the real thing…’
Georgina Louise Francesca Burzi was born with very little fuss, after a complication-free delivery. Pink-cheeked, with a mop of dark curls, dark eyes and the same long dark killer eyelashes of her father, she was declared by every single person who came to visit the most beautiful baby on the planet.
Louise Sadler, chuffed to bits with the impending wedding—which, she declared, she had always known would happen, because what mother didn’t know when her daughter was in love—made time to gloat quietly over the fact that she had hit the grandmother post first.
‘And leave the wedding to me,’ she added sotto voce, keeping a sharp eye on her husband, who was holding the baby and attempting to look comfortable. ‘I’m suggesting small, intimate and exquisite—emphasis