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‘I’ll make you breakfast—’
‘I don’t want any—’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said grimly, ‘you do. Or rather your body does. You will grow no paler than you already are, Kate, and you will eat it if I have to mash it with a fork and feed you like a baby. Is that understood?’
And, whilst the normal Kate might have rebelled against such high-handedness, this frightened and hurting Kate was glad to have him there, making her decisions and helping make her well again.
She ate breakfast, then soaked in the bath that he had run for her, and forced herself to dress—or, rather, she compromised at dressing. A long, silky caftan which Lucy had bought her for her twenty-first birthday, and the familiar light, loose garment was a little like wrapping herself in a security blanket.
When she walked into the sitting room Giovanni was sitting there and he stood up.
‘Come and sit down. What can I get you?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. You don’t have to keep fussing over me, Giovanni.’
‘I want to.’
She remembered his words to Lucy. He would stay until she recovered—so presumably he wanted her recovered in the shortest time possible.
He noted her silence, her normally mobile face grown inert, as if the life had been sucked out of it. And it had, he thought with a sudden fierce pain. It had. ‘I want to take you back to Sicily with me,’ he said suddenly.
How she had once longed to hear him say that! In her wildest fantasies she had imagined her clinging onto his arm, Giovanni’s girl, the woman he had finally professed love to. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said tiredly.
‘Why not? You need to rest. You need the sun to warm your skin.’
She stared at him as though he was crazy. ‘What about your family?’
‘What about them?’
‘What will they think of you bringing an English girl to their home—?’
‘I have my own villa,’ he interrupted gently, and, when he saw the expression on her face, added, ‘with my own live-in housekeeper, so your reputation will not be tarnished.’
‘Do they know about the baby?’
He shook his head. ‘How can they, when I only found out myself the day before yesterday?’
‘And what about Anna? Won’t she want to come and find me and tell me exactly what she thinks of me?’
His shoulders tensed, the news which had seemed so important now totally insignificant in the light of what had happened. ‘Anna is still in Roma.’
But would his family hate her? See her as the reason why his relationship with Anna had come to an end?
‘Kate,’ he said, in the gentlest voice she had ever heard him use, ‘my family do not interfere. They know that I am a man, and expect me to make my own judgements about my life. They will respect you as my guest.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly.
‘Well, I do. I am taking you to Sicily. I will look after you.’
Until she recovered. And then?
But she had no energy left to fight him. Nor any inclination, if the truth was known—and in a way it was rather a relief to let him take over everything. She did not see herself as passive, merely weary—and he seemed to have strength enough for the two of them.
And Kate knew that her willingness to go with him was about more than Giovanni’s tenacity. She needed someone to look after her—but Lucy’s partner was back—and as he was so often away, how could she ask Lucy?
She certainly couldn’t go to her parents without explaining the circumstances, and she wasn’t prepared to put them through that kind of hurt and disappointment. And, although the doctors had said she could start working as soon as she felt like it, the fact was that she felt completely empty inside. As though she had been blasted clean of all feelings bar one—that, no matter how useless she knew it to be, her feelings for Giovanni still burned as strong as ever.
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