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‘But you will have to marry her, of course, Dante. If this baby is a D’Arezzo, then he must be legitimised.’
Dante remembered his mother’s immediate assumption. The way she had smiled the smile of a woman who knew that a hundred candidates would have married her son in an instant. But Dante knew it wasn’t as easy as that. Not with Justina. Most women would fall over backwards to become a D’Arezzo bride—but not this woman who took such pride in her independence. Who would see no point in marrying for the sake of a baby—especially when their relationship had failed last time around. Yet despite all this, one irrefutable fact remained—his own fierce familial pride would not countenance his son being illegitimate.
‘Dante?’
He looked up. ‘What?’
‘I asked how your mother reacted when you told her she was going to be a grandparent.’
‘In the same way that any grandparent would react, I guess. With joy and with excitement. I expect your mother was exactly the same?’
Justina twisted the end of her plait with restless fingers. ‘You are joking?’ she said. ‘She thinks she’s way too young for that particular role.’
‘That figures,’ he said. But despite her flippant comment, Dante glimpsed the hurt which had briefly clouded Justina’s eyes and felt a surge of anger on her behalf. Couldn’t her mother have behaved normally
for once? Couldn’t she just have cooed a little and been there for her daughter? ‘Did she send anything for Nico?’
Justina laughed. ‘A silver napkin ring which he’ll probably never use.’
‘You know, we’ll need to get him a passport as soon as possible,’ Dante said suddenly. ‘If we’re taking him to Tuscany.’
Justina realised that they’d slipped seamlessly from talking about a hypothetical trip to Tuscany to acquiring a passport for the journey—and wasn’t that Dante all over? He would always try stealth before he tried coercion but the end result was always the same: he got exactly what he wanted.
* * *
Their journey plans were set in motion and Justina went shopping for new clothes, since none of her own seemed right. She wanted to wear something normal and flattering after months of being swaddled in loose clothes, but it was more than that. The last time she’d seen Signora D’Arezzo had been at the height of her fame, when she had very definitely been dressed like a pop star. She’d been into glitter and pizazz and making a statement—but nearly six years down the line her tastes had changed. She still bought trendy, but these days she gravitated towards the less garish.
She loaded up her shopping basket with silk and cashmere and splashed out on some new underwear, telling herself that she was only buying it because her shape had changed. But she felt a flare of colour in her cheeks as her fingers drifted over a lacy thong and she imagined Dante removing it.
Loaded down with baby equipment, they travelled to a private airfield north of London, where the D’Arezzo jet was ready and waiting. They left England on a drizzly day and touched down in Tuscany, where only a few faint clouds floated in an azure sky, and Justina tried to remember the last time she’d had anything approaching a holiday.
At Pisa airport they were whisked straight through the various border controls with the kind of adulation which Justina hadn’t witnessed since she’d been on the road with the Lollipops. But then, Dante was on his own territory here, she reminded herself. People knew him. They revered and respected him. The D’Arezzo family had lived in the region for centuries, and his aristocratic air had never been more evident than when people stopped to compliment him on the baby.
Yet she felt wistful as she watched him carry Nico through, while officials beamed and touched the baby’s raven curls. And she noticed the sideways looks which greeted her as she followed in his footsteps—the glances at the fingers of her left hand, noticeably bare of a wedding ring or any kind of show of commitment from Dante D’Arezzo.
Perhaps they think I’m the nanny, thought Justina as they walked out to a waiting car. She touched the heavy silk of the jacket she was wearing over black skinny jeans as if to remind herself of who she really was. This was a jacket she’d paid for herself—not gone crawling to a man for an allowance to finance it. She was self-supporting and she should be proud of that.
‘You okay?’ questioned Dante, looking up from where he’d just finished buckling Nico into a baby car-seat.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, trying to ignore the butterfly nerves which were building in her stomach.
‘You look amazing,’ he said softly as the car pulled away.
His statement caught her by surprise and Justina glanced up, slightly appalled to hear herself trotting out that most predictable of responses. ‘Do I?’
‘You certainly do. Nobody would ever guess you’d had a baby so recently.’
‘Until they see the baby, of course,’ she said pleasantly, trying to ignore the instinctive sizzle of her skin. She told herself that he was good at making a woman feel as if she was the centre of the universe—heaven only knew he’d had enough practice at it. He’s a player, she reminded herself, and all players do that. He went to bed with someone barely a week after your engagement had broken down. That is not the behaviour of a man who professed to love you and only you.
She thought about all the things which remained unsaid between them. That strange intimacy which they’d shared during the birth, when Dante had been there for her in a way she’d never imagined he could. He’d been strong and protective and gentle, and in those highly emotional moments she’d felt close to him again. She had thought she wouldn’t want him there, but now she didn’t like to imagine what it might have been like if he hadn’t been.
But there were other things which also remained unsaid—things she wasn’t proud of. Neither of them had mentioned that erotic encounter on the sofa, after which he had just walked out of the door as if nothing very remarkable had happened. And he hadn’t made any move on her since, had he? Even now that her body had pinged back into shape and she’d begun to forge her own routine around Nico, Dante still hadn’t looked at her with anything approaching desire.
She kept telling herself that having no physical intimacy made sense on every level. It was too easy to build dreams when a man was making love to you... But that didn’t stop her wanting him or being so aware of him. As if her body had been programmed to react with excitement whenever he was close.
Turning her head, she stared out the window as the car drove past high green mountains and tried to concentrate on the beauty of the Tuscan countryside. All she had to do was be a good mother to her baby—that was the most important thing.
Before long, the motorway gave way to more rural roads, and although it had been over five years since she’d last been here Justina was surprised by how familiar it all seemed. The D’Arezzo home wasn’t immediately visible from the road—mainly because the gardens and estate had been planted so that it would blend into the land around it. A long drive led up to the house and behind it soared more green hills, studded with ancient olive trees and a variety of fruit orchards, and lower down were the prize-winning D’Arezzo vines themselves.
