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Enrico’s place was huge, with the formal drawing-room she’d already seen, a dining-room and a very impressive book-lined study, plus a much less ostentatious but still glaringly elegant family-room and kitchen, all on the ground floor. Upstairs, the luxury didn’t falter, she discovered. The master bedroom with its en suite bathroom was a work of art. Freya wanted to leave instantly—it was obvious that this was Enrico’s room by the possessions she could see scattered around it, and she had no wish to linger there longer than she absolutely had to.
There were four further en suite bedrooms, one of which was already fitted out to accommodate a small child. When Freya quizzed Sonny about it, he reckoned that Enrico probably didn’t know there was a child’s room. In fact, Sonny was very forthcoming about how Enrico had bought the house—which apparently had a matching apartment on the two floors above them—unseen and fully furnished. He had moved in a week after he’d finished his relationship with Freya, and had spent only the odd night here since.
She chose the room next to Nicky’s—it was the furthest away from the master suite. Sonny had her boxes moved upstairs and Freya unpacked them with a deep-boned reluctance that showed in her taut expression and kept Sonny’s tongue silent.
Nicky arrived two hours later, carried in Fredo’s big arms. By the dark look on the bodyguard’s face, he’d had more than enough of playing the nanny to an energetic small boy.
The moment Nicky saw Freya standing there in the hallway, he reached out to her with his arms and whimpered, ‘Mummy!’
‘Here, take him,’ Fredo muttered. ‘He’s…tired.’
Tired didn’t really cover it, Freya observed as she took hold of Nicky and let him curl up in her arms. He was dirty, a little smelly and definitely bad-tempered by the frown on his face.
‘Had a good time, brown-eyes?’ she asked him lightly.
‘Fed the monkeys,’ he mumbled. ‘Daddy liked the tigers best.’
Daddy…? Freya lifted questioning eyes to Fredo, who responded with one of his shrugs.
‘He came to find us after getting a child seat fitted in the car,’ he told her. ‘Then he dropped us off here before shooting back to Hannard’s to put in a couple of hours’ work.’
None of which explained how her son happened to be calling Enrico Daddy.
‘You expected Nicky to call him Enrico?’ Fredo challenged, reading her expression.
Freya honestly didn’t know. The whole thing was moving so fast now she could no longer keep up. The tension headache was still thumping away at the backs of her eyes, and the Daddy seemed to make it all so frighteningly official.
‘Want to go home now…’ Nicky muttered.
And that, she thought heavily, started the next battle she had to wage before she could finally give in to misery and throw herself onto her chosen bed to indulge in a proper weep.
Did Enrico really think that he could just uproot them and plonk them down here and everything would carry on as normal? Did he think that turning up at the zoo and getting Nicky to call him Daddy automatically made him into a father?
‘Let me show you what I’ve found upstairs first,’ she suggested to Nicky with yet more lightness she just did not feel. ‘Daddy has this huge house, with the biggest bath you’ve ever seen in your life!’
The little boy’s curly dark head lifted off her shoulder. ‘I want my bath,’ he demanded sullenly.
‘But you can swim in this one if you want to,’ Freya said, winging a bright I’m-a-happy-mummy smile at her scowling son. ‘And it makes frothy bubbles…’
Nicky didn’t like his new bedroom. He didn’t like the big bath. By the time—a couple of very long hours later—she had finally bathed, fed and lulled the over-tired, confused and fractious toddler into sleep in his new bed, it was all she could do to walk straight to her bedroom, strip off her clothes, take a quick shower then fall into her own bed.
Enrico stood leaning against the door-jamb, looking across at the flood of Freya’s hair that streamed out across her pillows. She’d got into bed with wet hair, he saw, following the long trailing sections that looked heavy and darkened and damp. He could even smell the clean-scented shampoo from here.
He lifted a hand to rake his fingers through his own recently showered and shampooed hair.
He was tired and fed-up. Sonny wasn’t talking to him: his housekeeper had taken exception to being left to deal with the new arrivals without much notice. Not his job, he’d said, to mop up after Enrico’s women. It wasn’t his job either to watch the mini-monster run rings around her while she was too tired and depressed to cope.
But now the mini-monster was sleeping the sleep of dark angels in a next-door bedroom.
His son. Enrico had gone to meet Fredo and Nicolo at the zoo this afternoon, and had spent time with the small boy, reaffirming that he was his father. When he was with Nicolo he knew it—knew it with every fibre of his being. It was only when the boy was not in his sights that the doubts crept back in.
Then he’d spent more time standing at his son’s bedroom doorway, reassuring himself of it yet again as he watched Nicolo sleep.
Now here he was, standing here watching Freya and doing the same thing. A soft table lamp glowed beside her bed. A similar light was left on in the child’s bedroom next door; the interconnecting door had been left ajar—presumably so Freya could hear if Nicolo awoke in a strange place and needed her.
He was on one hell of a steep learning curve here. The latest part of his ascent had been to learn that small children needed twenty-four-hour attention—to the extent that you tuned in even while you slept.
Which meant he could not close this door. A sigh eased from him. He made a mental note to employ a nanny as soon as possible, then stepped further into the room. Time to get tough again. Time to keep the pressure on, despite the exhausted sleep Freya had clearly sunk into.
