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‘You’re working a force majeure into a promise?’
Matthieu laughed, sudden and joyful, breaking some of the weight of the moment and bringing a smile to her lips.
‘What does my wife know of contract clauses?’
‘My brother is a leading international business figure. He calls it the Act of God clause, in case unforeseeable events prevent a contract being fulfilled.’
‘Act of God. Okay, I can go with that,’ Matthieu said, firming his grip on her hand.
‘Force majeure aside, I will do everything in my power that you should never feel such a thing again.’
As Matthieu said the words, he felt them slip deep within him and take hold. He looked at the woman sitting across from him, the pain in her eyes almost too much to bear. His family might have been taken from him at a very young age, but he had never doubted their love for him. Not once. Yet here Maria sat, unsure of love from the two people that should have loved her the most. And he hoped upon hope that he had just made a promise that he could fulfil.
He understood her need for independence, that sense of self he’d admired from the first moment he’d met her and, even more so, when she’d brushed aside the accusations she was simply after his money when she had come to tell him about their child. He could see that she hated that she was now reliant on him.
‘Maria, whether it’s clothes, a lifestyle that you think is not yours, but provided for you by me, it’s not. What is mine is yours. I meant that the day I said “I do”. No matter what. That doesn’t take away from you, who you are or what you’ve achieved. I’d like to think that you could see that it is only something that adds.’
She exhaled a long and low breath. One he wasn’t sure how to interpret. Until her eyes narrowed and transformed, an impish light breaking the seriousness of the conversation. ‘And now I’m hungry. And not for food. So, husband, are you going to make good on your promise and allow me my feast?’
He refused to withhold the smile he felt pulling at his lips. Refused to turn away from the warmth blooming within his chest. It was more than carnal desire, it was something like happiness. And if this was what it was like to live with the leash lifted ever so lightly, he wanted more. He wanted to know what life was lived like, not in the shadows of his grief, but in the light of Maria.
CHAPTER NINE
AS MARIA EXITED the car that had picked her and Matthieu up from the private airfield just outside Siena she clung to the words he had given her two nights before. Promises that she was not less than she had been for getting unexpectedly pregnant and marrying him, that he would be there for her. Always. No matter what.
She wasn’t naïve enough to expect that her father might be here today, she wasn’t really sure that he even knew that she was pregnant and married, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to care. She had long ago given up on being concerned about his thoughts and feelings towards her. But Seb? Her brother? He had given her so much...and somehow she wanted to pay that back by being worthy...or by somehow being someone he could be proud of.
She pressed down the soft silks of the beautiful dress Matthieu had surprised her with yesterday as the wind blew about her and soothed both her nerves and her restless child.
‘Are you okay?’ Matthieu asked as he came around the car to stand beside her.
Maria nodded. ‘I think our child is looking forward to meeting their uncle,’ she said with a smile and another sweep of the now very much unavoidable bump she carried before her. ‘Are you okay?’ she said, thinking of the quiet that had almost consumed him throughout their journey.
He looked confused. ‘Why would I not be?’
‘Sebastian can be a little overprotective. He is, after all, my brother.’
He shrugged a shoulder. ‘I have tackled multibillion-dollar deals with the world’s toughest CEOs. Your brother will not be a problem.’
‘If you say so,’ Maria responded, a little sceptical at how dismissive Matthieu was of her concern. Perhaps she had misunderstood the reason for his brooding.
The door swung open and there he stood in the middle of three arched domes in the centre of the estate’s façade. It was Sebastian’s most cherished holding. It had been one of the first purchases he’d made once he had secured all the Rohan de Luens’ finances. It was beautiful, perfectly formed. Not obscene as some of the estates Maria remembered from Spain, but large and nestled amongst a modest ten hectares of land, with some old and mostly untouched vineyards that Theo had always itched to get his hands on.
Seb had refused all of his entreaties, enjoying instead the wildness and untouched way it had sprawled beyond the broken, aged wooden confines and grew rampant and wild. In part, Maria liked to think that he kept it that way because it had inspired one of the first pieces of jewellery she had created.
Unconsciously she sought out Matthieu’s hand and suddenly Maria was struck by how important it was for Seb to like her husband
. Not the dark stranger she had met all those months ago, but the man she had come to know and like, the man that she was beginning to see he could be. Her inner voice scoffed at the soft word used to describe the complex emotion that had begun to form around her feelings for Matthieu.
But before her mind could follow that thought, Matthieu had started to walk forward and they were quickly face to face with Sebastian, whose eyes had rested on her very visible bump and had widened with something like...awe. And even he, though she could tell he was struggling to hold it back, couldn’t prevent the smile from forming at his lips.
Any words in her mind were cut off as he dragged her into an embrace so powerful and consuming she felt a little as if she were coming home.
When he was done, instead of returning her to where she had stood, he placed her beside him, almost putting himself between her and Matthieu.
Her brother looked Matthieu up and down, and Maria was a little surprised that Matthieu let him, given the challenge that was locked into Sebastian’s gaze. After a moment, as if Matthieu had allowed her brother his fill, he thrust out a hand and introduced himself. It was a beat before her brother accepted his hand. She rolled her eyes.
And so it begins.
