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He hadn’t thought of Amelia. Not when he’d given the interview.
He hadn’t known her then. He hadn’t known that she’d wish to keep this marriage secret, to give herself time to adjust to it. He hadn’t known that she would turn out to be every bit as sweet as she’d seemed that night, long ago, in Bumblebee Cottage. He hadn’t known that he would come to depend on her, that she could answer every single one of his needs.
His eyes dived to the next page, where there was a photo with him and one of his ex-lovers. A woman whose name he struggled to remember in that moment. Billionaire Bachelor! ran the second headline, and there was a list of his famous past lovers.
His chest felt as though it were being split in two.
‘Answer your phone,’ he snapped, then hung up and dialled her number again.
It rung out, but he kept trying, all the while reading the article.
Every paragraph showed it to be so much worse.
Hell, he’d forgotten about this interview, because it hadn’t mattered to him at the time. He’d given no thought to Amelia, and how she might feel. She’d agreed to marry him, she’d agreed to give him Prim’Aqua once their child was born, and that had been the end of it.
But now?
Dios, please let her not have seen it.
With another oath, he grabbed his suit jacket and swung his arms into it as he walked, stalking towards the door of his office and slamming it in his wake.
‘Sir? You have an appointment in ten...’
‘Cancel my afternoon,’ he bit out, jabbing a finger against the door of the lift. ‘Cancel it all.’
He barely recognised himself in the shimmery reflection of the lift. His face was white beneath his tan. So this, then, was what true fear felt like.
* * *
Amelia stirred her tea, a gentle smile on her face. She daydreamed a lot lately. And she smiled a lot too.
Her hand curved over her rounded tummy—now so big she couldn’t sit in properly against a table. She could use it as a table, she thought with a grin, as she balanced a book on it just for fun.
She stifled a yawn, then looked towards the clock. It was still the early afternoon. She’d taken to napping, to catch up on sleep, because her nights were hardly as restful as they could be. Warmth suffused her body as she remembered the way Antonio had kissed her all over the night before, his mouth finding her most intimate core and his tongue driving her beyond wild, until her nails had almost torn shreds in the silk sheets of his bed and heat had threatened to burn her from the inside out.
He knew exactly how to touch her, to kiss her, to hold her, to give her more pleasure than she could put into words.
She stood slowly, stretching her arms above her head before reaching for her tea and carrying it with her towards her bedroom.
Her phone screen was glowing when she stepped inside and she moved towards it on autopilot, scooping it up to see a screen covered in alerts.
Missed calls—lots of them. From Antonio’s office phone and Carlo’s mobile.
Her heart began to trip faster and faster. She hadn’t spoken to Carlo in months, except via text. It had been too hard to talk to him, knowing that she was lying to him, and she still hadn’t been ready to face the reality of her brother and father’s outrage. And they would be outraged when they discovered she’d married Antonio—that she was pregnant with his baby.
She needed time—and wanted to protect the marriage that they were building. A marriage that, in her heart, she suspected couldn’t have been more perfect if their meeting had been a true love match. Because she loved him with all her heart and every inch of her soul, and she suspected he felt the same.
He had to.
Love didn’t exist in a vacuum. One person couldn’t have enough love to create this abundance of feeling.
She skipped into the voicemail section of her phone. None from Antonio, several from Carlo. Concern for her father came to the forefront of her mind—it would make sense that both men would try to contact her if something had happened to Giacomo.
She lifted the phone to her ear, bracing herself for whatever was to come. But she couldn’t have imagined it would be anything like this.
‘Amelia? What the hell is going on?’
Several curse words in Italian.
