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‘Aurora, he brought out the Grappa he had been saving for this moment.’
‘You told him you were marrying me?’
‘No,’ Nico said. ‘I told him that I wanted, more than anything, to marry his daughter. And then I told him we had stuff to sort out first.’
‘Nico, don’t make a mistake,’ Aurora said. ‘I am strong.’
‘I know you are.’
‘And if you marry me then you will get the full force of my love.’
‘Aurora,’ he said, very definitely, ‘you will get the full force of mine.’
‘All I want, Nico, is the full force of your love.’
It was all she had ever wanted, and she felt as if it had been fully received—but those worms of doubt had started wriggling, and then, from the other side of this vast house, she heard a tiny wail.
Was it Gabe he was here for?
‘I have to go to him,’ Aurora said.
‘I know,’ Nico agreed.
Even though there was the nanny he had had checked and re-checked a hundred times over. She was the very best nanny, and she would love both mother and infant, but she did not do housework.
In any way shape or form.
‘Gabe…’ Aurora walked into the comfy lounge, where her son was being winded midway through his bottle. ‘I’ll give him the second half,’ she said. ‘And then put him down again.’
He seemed to have grown in the time he’d been here, Aurora thought as she fed him, and she looked into eyes that could not be called navy any more.
They were black.
‘Your father,’ Aurora said, ‘is the most complicated man I know.’
She looked at her son for a very long time.
At the long fingers that clutched hers as she fed him.
At his lashes, which she had already counted.
Then at the perfect dent in his jaw.
‘I love him and I believe he loves me…’ she whispered, and her breath hitched. ‘Not a hundred percent as yet, and not as fiercely as I love him, but, my dear son, I do believe he is trying to love our little family.’
She knew eight years of rejection could not be eradicated in one night.
Aurora padded back to the bedroom and Nico could see that she had cried. It twisted him up inside that his cold, unwilling heart had hurt her.
‘We’ll build a house in Silibri,’ Nico said as she climbed back into bed.
‘And you will fly back to Rome…’
‘No,’ Nico said, ‘wewill fly back to Rome. We will be based in Silibri, though.’
‘No.’
Her emphaticnosurprised them both. It was immediate, even though she had never dared to give a future with Nico true thought.
