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Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked up at him. I love you, she thought. Is there any chance that one day you could love me, too? ‘What?’ she mumbled drowsily.
‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’
The wind made music out of the chimes which hung in the trees, and the world seemed suspended as it waited for her answer.
Jennifer closed her eyes and touched her lips to his neck. It was not what she had wanted to hear, but it would do. ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘Yes, you can.’
* * *
The days drifted into one another, like a river running into the sea, and Jennifer grew brown and slow and contented. She slept and ate good food and swam like a fish—sometimes in the pool and sometimes Matteo took her out in his boat to splash in the clear waters—and her hair grew pale and he told her she looked like a mermaid.
And every night he slept with her, and made love to her in a hundred different ways, both in and out of bed.
In fact, it was almost like a second honeymoon—except that honeymoons were held together with the glue of shared love, not the unreliable adhesive of an unplanned pregnancy.
‘What is it?’ he questioned softly one afternoon, when they had gone upstairs to lie beneath the cool, curved dome of the bedroom ceiling for their customary siesta.
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘You didn’t have to. You were frowning.’ His fingers traced an imaginary line just above her nose.
Jennifer closed her eyes, because the subject playing on her mind was one that she would rather keep hidden away. It was so like paradise here that she didn’t want to introduce the serpent of reality.
And yet hadn’t their inability to communicate been one of the primary causes of their break-up? Geographical distance had been the reason for that—but you didn’t need to be thousands of miles apart from someone to fail to interact with them on an adult level. And they couldn’t keep pretending that there weren’t a million unresolved issues simmering beneath the surface of this extended holiday.
‘Well, we haven’t discussed how long we’re staying here, or what we’re going to do when we get back—in fact, we haven’t made any real plans at all. We’ve been burying our heads in the sand, and—whilst it has been lovely—I feel a bit as if I’m in limbo. As if the real world were a million miles away.’
‘Well, that was the intention in coming here.’
‘But it can’t continue indefinitely,’ observed Jennifer, smoothing her hand over her belly and watching as his black eyes followed the movement with fascination.
She remembered the very first time she had slept with him. In the morning she had woken first and lain there feeling slightly dazed, thinking, I’m in bed with Matteo d’Arezzo! ‘Can it?’
‘No.’ The rumpled sheet lay tangled around his naked thighs as he moved over her, the powerful shafts straddling her, and for a moment Jennifer thought that he was going to drive his erection into her aching body. But his face was dark and full of tension. ‘Tell me what it is you want, Jenny.’
She shook her head. ‘That isn’t fair. Are you too frightened to say what it is that you want?’
And at that moment he did know fear—he who had been fearless for most of his life. But it was time to take a gamble. To lay down the guidelines for the only situation he could see working for the two of them. He just hoped that he had softened his prickly ex-wife enough for her to be agreeable.
‘I’m Italian—’ he began.
‘You were brought up in America,’ she pointed out. ‘And what’s that got to do with it?’
‘I believe in marriage,’ he breathed. ‘But especially a marriage which involves a family. I want us to try again, Jenny’ he said, and Jennifer heard the unmistakable ring of determination in his voice. ‘To be man and wife. To bring our baby up within a secure family unit. Don’t you want that, too?’
She nodded, too choked for a moment to speak. Had she thought that he might threaten her with a legal battle if she did not accede to his will? Possibly. The very last thing she had expected was that heartfelt appeal, and it affected her more than was probably necessary. Or wise.
‘Of course I do,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s what every mother wants for her baby.’
Not for herself, Matteo noted coldly, but he nodded and kept his face impassive.
She wanted to say, And if there were no baby, would you still want me, even then? But she wasn’t strong enough for that. Because she might still be in love with Matteo but not so much that she would let it blind her. Because if there was no baby, then there wouldn’t be a relationship.
‘We need to do it properly this time around.’ He tilted her chin up and his black eyes were hard and glittering. ‘We will not lead separate lives again, cara. I don’t know how we’ll work it out, but we will.’
‘And I won’t listen to rumours…won’t allow jealousy to flourish.’
‘I won’t give you cause to feel jealous ever again,’ he grated.
