Heiress's Pregnancy Scandal, page 15
‘And no more did I know it.’
A gasp broke from her. Instant recognition of that deep, gravelled voice, charged with so much.
She slewed around. Felt faint suddenly with shock. With so much more than shock.
It was Nic.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FRAN’S EYES LEAPT WIDE. She got to her feet, impelled upwards. ‘How—?’ The most banal of questions. The most irrelevant.
He walked towards her. Like her, he was enveloped in a ski-jacket, thick boots on his feet, crunching on the stony path.
‘My security team found you,’ he told her. ‘They’re good at their job.’ He took a breath. ‘I was always glad you assumed I was one of them.’
‘You let me think that,’ she countered.
Her mind was reeling, but it was impossible to say anything else. Nic—Nic, here? It made no sense.
‘Just as you let me think things about you.’
She gave a sigh. ‘It was what we both wanted at the time.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Nic. His hands were plunged into the pockets of his jacket. ‘At the time.’ He paused, his eyes resting on her. ‘And now? Now what is it that we want?’
She let her gaze slip away, and there was sadness in her voice. ‘Different things. Impossible to reconcile. You’re forcing yourself to marry me, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to marry a man who hates everything about me. A man I don’t like for that very reason.’
‘Is that so?’ A studied neutrality filled his words. As if he were balanced on the point of a sword so sharp it could slice away his life with the merest slip.
‘Yes!’ There was vehemence in her voice—there had to be. How could she be standing here, thousands of miles from Rome, and Nic be standing here too? Having this conversation. A conversation that was a waste of time, of effort.
A waste of so much.
Emotion burned in her throat. Made her words sound as if they were wrung from her. ‘Oh, Nic, you shouldn’t have come here. It serves no purpose. It changes nothing. You’re still Nicolo Falcone and I’m still Donna Francesca. We’re strangers to each other. Strangers who deplore what the other is—strangers who by mistake have created a child between them, but strangers still.’
He nodded. He was keeping himself under control, because it was essential to do so. Just as it had been on his journey here—on the flight to Salt Lake City, closer to here than San Francisco, gaining him time on her, and then on the pedal-to-the-metal drive south, guided only by what his security team had uncovered.
She’d never flown to LA. She’d flown via San Francisco instead, then taken another flight to Vegas. Picked up a hire car there. Asked the clerk about winter closures, revealing her destination. Giving him the chance to get here in time.
To say what he had to say.
On which so much hung.
More than I ever knew. Could ever know. Until she walked away from me.
‘Yes,’ he said now, his tone still measured, his hands plunged deep into his pockets, where she could not see them clench with the exertion of the emotion that it was so essential to keep from her.
For now—or else for ever.
‘Yes, strangers. The aristocratic Donna Francesca and the nouveau riche Nicolo Falcone.’ He took a breath, felt the cold air rushing into his lungs. ‘But there are two people who aren’t strangers.’
He paused again. He had to get this right. He had only one chance, and on it everything depended. Everything.
‘Two people,’ he went on, his eyes never leaving her, ‘who met as strangers but parted as lovers. Nic Rossi and Doc Fran.’
Doc Fran. The sound of his affectionate name for her rang in her ears, clutched at something inside her. She wanted to cry out, but was silent. Silent as she stood there, unable to move, unable to do anything but hear his words, as still he spoke to her.
His eyes were fixed on hers, willing her to listen. To believe. Believe what he was telling her, what he must tell her. His voice took on an intensity that caught at her, made her take a breath in.
‘Fran, why—why—when we first met, do you think we never told each other who we were? Why did we want to be the person each of us presented ourselves as being? Because,’ he spelt it out now, finally, urgent to make her understand, ‘we didn’t want to be weighed down by the rest of who we are! We wanted to be free of that.’ She must understand him, surely she must—
Her eyes were widening, wondering, taking in his words. Letting them make sense inside her.
Then she heard herself answer him.
‘Here in the USA I’ve never had to be Donna Francesca,’ she said. ‘I could just be...myself.’ She looked at him. ‘The person I would have been but for an accident of birth. With no expectations on me to marry a man like Cesare, to be his Contessa, fulfilling my mother’s dreams instead of my own.’
He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, filling with new self-knowledge. ‘I liked it that you thought me just one of the security team. It meant I didn’t have to be Nicolo Falcone, endlessly proving the world wrong about me. Proving I could outsoar Viscari.’
Her expression changed. She was reminiscing. ‘I remember how you said it was defeatist to accept the universe as it is.’
His blue-eyed gaze drifted across her face. ‘I remember the fire in your eyes as you talked to me about the stars. The passion in your voice.’ His expression changed again—changed to one that started to melt the bones in her body. ‘And not just a passion for the stars.’
She gave a smothered cry, backing away. ‘But that’s gone. You made it clear enough that night I came to your hotel.’
His eyes flashed. ‘I was telling Donna Francesca.’ He took a shuddering breath, making himself say what he knew now was the truth. The truth he had tried to twist into knots inside him. ‘I used it—used your being Donna Francesca—to send you away.’ He shook his head slowly, as if clearing something from it. ‘But that wasn’t the reason. I was lying to myself—to you.’
His mouth set and his gaze turned inward.
‘All my life,’ he said slowly, finding the familiar thoughts that had controlled him all his life hard to put into bare, bald words, ‘I have feared being as my father was—a man who left my mother pregnant with me. It was why I was so insistent that we marry. All my life I have vowed I would not be like him. And the simplest, surest way to not be like that was never to let any woman close to me. So I would always part from women, thankful to do so, thankful they had not come to rely on me, to hope for what I dared not offer them. And that,’ he said, ‘is what I did with you—as I have with all the other women who have passed through my life.’
His face worked.
‘Except you were never like any of those women. Right from the start you were different.’ He paused. ‘Special. Like no other woman I’ve known.’
He took another breath.
‘So when I saw you again, that night in London—saw you again when I had thought never to do so—all I knew was an overwhelming rush of something I had never felt before, never allowed myself to feel. You made every other woman in the world disappear for me. And that showed me...’ His voice changed, dropped. ‘Showed me the danger I was in—’
He broke off.
‘I had to find something—anything—to keep you at bay. So I used the revelation of who you were as a way of doing that.’
Fran’s eyes shadowed. She had her own truth to face. One that she had hidden from herself.
‘I told myself that night when I came to your hotel that I simply wanted to make my peace with you—that I couldn’t bear your cold rejection just because I hadn’t told you the truth about myself, because I’d seemed so friendly with Vito Viscari. But I was lying to myself. I know that now. I came to you for one reason only.’
Her voice changed, became charged with intensity.
‘I came to you because the first emotion that leapt in me when I saw you again was joy, Nic. Overwhelming joy. And I wanted to find you again—the Nic I’d known here, in our time together. That’s why I came to you that night...the true reason that I blinded myself to.’
Emotion filled her, full, and choking, so that she could hardly breathe. Could not look at him.
She walked away from him, moving to the low wall that separated the terrace from the rough ground beyond, where it started its precipitous plunge a mile deep into the earth. She gazed out across the gaping distance to the rim so far away. Where once they had stood together, hand in hand.
But now...?
The question hung in the air—hung in the great gap of space that yawned over the plunging canyon.
Nic spoke behind her quietly, his voice low. ‘We never made it here, to the North Rim, did we?’ he said. He paused, and in the silence stretched all that he had come here for. ‘But we’re here now.’
She did not answer—could not. He came to stand beside her and she felt the powerful sense of his presence at her side.
‘We’re here now,’ he said again.
And still she could not answer.
He spoke again, in that quiet, deep voice.
‘What are names? Nic Rossi or Nicolo Falcone. Doc Fran or Donna Francesca. What are names compared with who we are? And why...?’ He drew a breath. ‘Why should they imprison us? Why should we imprison ourselves? Why should I let my poor mother’s fears be fulfilled in me? Why would I be as faithless as my father, abandon my own child as he did? If I think it’s defeatist to stick with the universe as is, then it’s even more defeatist for me to think I would be like my father.’
He took another breath, drawing cold air into his lungs.
‘Because of that I let you go, telling myself it was the right thing to do. And I did not seek you out again.’
Fran spoke, finding the words to say. ‘I thought to make contact again, but I couldn’t find you—and you had made no contact with me. I had to accept it was over. That I had to move on. I told myself you had been the confirmation of my decision not to marry Cesare. Told myself that because letting go of Cesare had been easy it would be just as easy to let go of you, too—’
She broke off.
‘It wasn’t easy. Isn’t easy.’ She looked at him, her face strained. ‘It wasn’t easy to tell you I wouldn’t marry you.’
She sensed his body, so close to her but not touching, tense.
‘So why not ask yourself why it isn’t easy?’
The question came from him. Not accusing. Only setting it between them. Needing an answer.
She could not give one. For tears were spilling, silently, and she could not stop them, could do nothing but stand there, full of so much she could not speak of.
Silence netted them. Silence and the chill wind blowing down from the north.
Nic spoke. His eyes fixed on the far horizon to the south.
‘Your answer is the same answer I will give,’ Nic said, in that quiet, deep voice. ‘The answer that brought me here to join you, to where you, too, have come. For the same reason I have come here, giving the same answer to the same question. Come here to the destination we never made it to on our road trip together.’
There was a sudden unbearable tightening in his throat, and as if of its own volition, his hand reached for hers, meshing their fingers tightly.
‘The destination we’ve reached now. Here...’ He paused. ‘Together.’
A sob choked from her, impossible to stifle, to deny, as impossible to stop as it was to stop her fingers clutching at his, crushing them with hers, desperate and clinging. Instantly his own grip tightened on her hand and he swept her bodily into him. Folding her to him as she wept against him, sobs racking from her, breaking free at last of all that had held them back, bringing to her a release that flooded through her.
He let her weep, cradling her against him, his strength supporting her in her storm of tears.
His arms tightened about her as words broke from him. ‘Don’t leave me. I can’t bear it if you leave me.’
The cry came from deep inside, from a place he’d never acknowledged could ever exist. But it blazed within him now.
She couldn’t speak—not in words. But her hands clutched at his body, convulsing over the thick material of his jacket.
‘Fran, this is us. This is who we are. We knew that, felt it when we were together, but we did nothing about it. We let life take us in different directions. But we should never have let that happen.’
He was guiding her forward, sitting her down on the bench she’d leapt from at his approach, lowering himself down beside her, his arm still around her shoulder. She buried her face in his chest, tears still streaming uncontrollably.
His mouth smoothed the golden tresses of her hair. ‘Shall I say it first? Say what the truth is between us that we have been too blind to face?’
He lifted her face from his shoulder, let his blue, blue gaze pour into hers.
‘You said we were good when we were together, but we were more than good. We were right for each other. Right as only two people who should spend the rest of their lives together are right for each other. That’s what we had—that’s what we recognised in each other but never said out loud. Well, now I do. I say it out loud—to you, here and now.’
He took a ragged breath, never letting go her gaze as she lifted it to his, yearning for his. He was filled with an emotion so strong it overpowered him, yet through it he spoke again. And each word bound him to her with bonds that would never break, could never break. Not now. Not ever.
‘I know, Fran, with every fibre of my being, that you recognised that too and still do.’ He paused, and she could hear the catch in his voice, felt her heart turn over at it. ‘And you always will. For we have it again, and more, that rightness between us. The rightness of our love.’
He cupped her face with his hands, cradling it between his strong, tender fingers. His eyes pouring into hers.
‘The love of Nic Rossi for Doc Fran—and, yes, the love between the people we also are, if we can accept it in each other. Nicolo Falcone and Donna Francesca. They too can love each other now.’
His voice changed, became edged with the bitterness engendered in him long, long ago.
‘I know I will hardly be welcomed by your family—a self-made, fatherless slum kid—’
Her fingers flew to his mouth to silence him. Emotion was streaming through her as strong as the dazzling radiance of the universe, joy and wonder and a rapture she had never known till now. But she had to speak. To counter what he’d just said. Set it to rest for ever.
‘How can you say that? You’re a billionaire hotelier! You could probably buy and sell my father ten times over.’
Her voice changed, became strained, and her eyes searched his painfully as she lifted his hands away, folding them within her own, impressing upon them the fearful emotion she felt suddenly.
‘I don’t want you despising me for an accident of birth. I can’t help being who I was born, any more than you can.’
‘I know that,’ he acknowledged heavily. His expression became shadowed. ‘But I’ve had to fight for everything I ever had, and I’ve always despised those who have it handed to them on a plate, despised everything they stand for. All that the likes of Vito Viscari stand for. I have done right from the moment he appeared, fresh out of university and wet behind the ears, and his uncle gave him the managerial position I had worked my guts out to deserve in years of hard, unrelenting slog. Right to the moment his wife’s mother gave him back the shares I’d seized from him in my takeover bid.’
She rested her forehead against the strong wall of his chest, his hands still folded within hers, feeling his heart pounding within. Then, abruptly, she lifted her head away.
‘Nic.’ Her voice was urgent. ‘You have to let go of such feelings.’ She guided his right hand, deliberately sliding it beneath the thick quilting of her jacket, across the soft warmth of her body beneath. She felt him start, but ignored it. She pressed her own hand over his, keeping it there.
‘Our baby, Nic,’ she said. ‘Our baby will be born to both our heritages. Its grandfather will be a marchese, its great-grandfather a duke, and it will be heir to your billions. Are you going to despise it for the circumstances of its birth?’
She nodded slowly as she went on, his silence giving her the answer she knew he must give.
‘You see?’ she said softly.
She slid her fingers into his, rounded on her still slender frame within which their baby nestled, safe and protected. Growing to become the child they had created between them.
Our baby is real. Growing and living.
Wonder filled her, and a feeling of thankfulness that was an embrace to the baby deep within her.
A baby...a mother...a father. A family.
Emotion caught at her throat and she leaned into the strong body of the man with whom she had created such a miracle. A sense of peace possessed her now, after the tumult of her tears. A peace so profound and a sense of wonder so radiant in her mind, her heart, that she could scarcely bear it.
She had come here, to the destination they had never reached on that road trip that had ended before it should, to say goodbye to him. But now—ah, now—
Joy flamed in her—the same sudden blaze that had filled her when she’d seen him after all those months in London, but more...oh, so much more!
Could they really, truly be here together? United like this?
His hand was on her belly, and her hand was on his, and beneath them both the baby they had made was growing silently and secretly. For the first time she gave a little gasp of wonder. For the first time it was real to her. And as she cradled the tiny being, and he did too, for the first time she felt the wondrous reality of conception like a flower opening within her.
We’ve made it real. Made it real because now we are real together too! Nic and Fran... Nicolo and Francesca. And we are all the family we shall make together, when our baby is born to us.
