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He rubbed his thumbs over the distended peaks and her breath caught in her throat, making her gasp, and then he lowered his mouth to the achingly sensitive tips and she was lost entirely to the wild surge of desire that ignited the blaze at her melting centre. He found her there, skating across the aroused bud beneath her knickers, making her spine arch and her body jerk as he slid aside the taut strip of fabric between her thighs and found the slick dampness of her arousal.
‘Madre di Dio, I want you,’ Gio growled as he rose over her to remove that last item of clothing.
And then he found the hot, damp, quivering heart of her with his mouth and his fingers and his tongue and she was lost, utterly lost for long moments of blissful sensation that surged through her in gathering waves until she reached a peak that threw her up and into timeless space where she fell apart with sheer pleasure and the lingering deep relief of satisfaction.
Her body still on a high from that overload of delightful feeling, she watched him don protection. She couldn’t credit that she had chosen to be with him again but, in that instant, it didn’t matter that there were differences between them, it only mattered that he was the father of her child and she craved him like an addictive drug.
He drove into her tender sheath with measured strength, stretching her with a slow burn of wildly electrifying sensation. Her excitement soared to an impossible high because she was ultra-sensitive to every lithe twist of his hips. Heart hammering, body clenching in agonising need, Leah hit another climax and it wiped her out for long timeless moments while she slumped limp and Gio struggled to catch his breath again, finally rolling over to release her from his weight and thrusting his tumbled hair off his brow with a sated groan.
‘That was unbelievable,’ he muttered unevenly. ‘Unbelievably good.’
Leah experienced a painful moment of self-discovery. She wanted to turn time back and find herself leaving the building as she should have done. Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve, she mocked herself bitterly. Everybody had a weakness and evidently Gio Zanetti was hers, only, sadly, he was not a weakness she could afford and, just then, she loathed herself for not turning him down, for not pushing him away. Instead, she had surrendered to her own lust for him.
‘You see we have the passion. That’s really all we need,’ Gio intoned.
Both Leah’s hands clenched into tiny fists. He had never come closer to an assault than he was at that moment with her because he was making her taste the consequences of her own poor judgement. He still thought it was acceptable to question her morals and, by succumbing to his appeal, she had betrayed herself, playing into his desired image of her as a woman who treated sex casually. As Gio stalked into the bathroom, Leah was up off that bed within seconds and frantically getting back into her clothes. All that was on her mind was escape at the fastest rate possible. Bare minutes later she was leaving the building, flushed and tousled but too upset to be embarrassed and reminding herself that she could actually afford now to take a taxi.
When he returned to the bedroom, Gio was utterly taken aback to find Leah gone. What was it with her? She had sex and then she ran like a deer being hunted. The first time, well, he had kind of written that up to his having become her first lover. Foolishly he had ignored her insistence then that they could only have one night together. No woman had ever told him that before, so he could forgive his own disbelief. But when it happened a second time and she disappeared, it gave him real pause for thought. What had he done? What had he said? It was hard to escape the idea that in her estimation he did and said everything wrong, and that suspicion hit him like a punch squarely in his pride.
He did not treat women badly. He didn’t lie to them, and he didn’t cheat on them either. Yet Leah behaved as though he were the worst guy alive. He wondered dimly if it could have something to do with pregnancy hormones, but he knew absolutely nothing about pregnancy, only that he had a friend who had confided that his wife had become very highly strung after she conceived. So, he wasn’t about to take offence, he assured himself, immediately ditching his angry annoyance. He would accept her departure like an adult...even ifshewasn’t behaving like an adult? Gio gritted his even white teeth, striving to make allowances when he had never before in his life made allowances for a woman. He liked Leah’s chippy feistiness, he reminded himself, he just didn’t like the fact that he never knew what she would do or say next. To his way of thinking, Leah, in comparison to all the women he had ever known, might as well have been an alien from another planet.
Leah attended her medical appointment alone the following day. Cleo had offered to accompany her, but Leah had politely demurred. She was a single parent-to-be, she reflected ruefully, and she needed to get used to doing stuff alone. She didn’t want Ari and Cleo to start feeling that they were responsible for her in the way that Sally had. She would get through her pregnancy alone fine.
Buoyed up by that belief, Leah was shattered when Gio strolled into the plush waiting room at Mr Grove’s clinic while she was waiting to be called for her ultrasound. She wanted to hiss,What the heck are you doing here?but it was impossible to do so when they were surrounded by people. It made her feel even worse that she was immediately relieved that she had gone shopping for maternity clothing that same morning and was at least respectably dressed.
Unhappily, Gio Zanetti was the ultimate cynosure of attention in the waiting room. He was sheathed in a tailored navy suit that had probably cost a fortune and that accentuated every line of his lean, strong, muscular physique. It shook her to recognise that his lean, dark features left her bereft of breath and that she was not the only woman present who reacted. Every eye turned and lingered on him as he sank fluidly into the empty seat beside her as though he had every right to be there. And it was all her own fault, she acknowledged, because she had told him where the appointment was and he must have phoned to ask for the time...
CHAPTER SIX
‘WHATTHEHECKare you doing here?’ Leah contrived to whisper-hiss at Gio in the corridor after the nurse came to fetch them through to the surgery.
Gio sent her a slanting smile that made her treacherous heart skip a beat. ‘I realised that you were right. I don’t want to miss this opportunity,’ he asserted, grateful that she didn’t know the story of his marriage.
Of course, absolutely no onedidknow that story apart from Gio and his ex-wife and there was a very good reason for that, Gio allowed grimly. Naturally he had no desire to admit what an idiot he had been at the age of twenty-one. He preferred to forget his marriage had ever happened and, since it had been a dire experience, he believed that few would blame him for that attitude. Only since Leah’s arrival in his life and her pregnancy had he begun to appreciate that that disastrous marriage had marked him in ways he had not appreciated.
Leah had already been through a preliminary meeting with the doctor during which various tests had been run and she had been gently admonished for not seeking medical attention sooner. Now, rattled by Gio’s unexpected appearance and wondering whether to be grateful or resentful for his presence, she lay down for the ultrasound, striving not to feel awkward as she tugged up her loose top and pushed down her maternity jeans to enable the technician to work, rubbing on the gel and then wielding the transducer wand. Gio infuriated her to the brink of screaming by getting into a technical chat about the equipment with the medics. Talk about a disinterested bystander!
And then the heartbeat sounded very loudly and Gio fell instantly silent.
‘Is that the...?’ Leah began uncertainly.
‘And there is what Mr Grove suspected.’ The technician pointed at the screen. ‘There are two babies. Would you like to know the gender?’
‘Two?’Leah gasped. ‘Twins? They run in my family.’
‘Twins,’ the obstetrician confirmed cheerfully. ‘Gender reveal or not?’
‘Yes... I would like to know,’ Leah whispered shakily.
‘Fraternal twins. A little girl and a little boy.’
Just like her and her lost twin, Leah reflected painfully. Sadness tugged at her before she pushed it away to concentrate on the joy of the twins she was carrying. Their lives would be far different from the chaotic childhood she and her brother had experienced, she reminded herself more happily.
Gio was transfixed by the extraordinary 3D screen that showed the babies lying side by side, depicting two little faces. He had never seen anything like it before in his life. But then, he reminded himself doggedly, he had never seen an ultrasound screen before. But it had also not occurred to him that babies could look quite that cute. But then, he didn’t think he had looked at many babies before either. Maybe they all looked like that. He blinked while the doctor informed Leah that she would have to take extra precautions as a twin pregnancy would be tougher on her than a singleton one. He experienced an extraordinary urge to scoop Leah up into his arms and take her straight back to his home and it utterly horrified him, putting to immediate flight the temptation to instantly accept that those images werehischildren.Per amor di Dio...what the hell was happening to him?
Still very much spooked by that impulse, Gio left the room with Leah in silence and then turned his head to glance down at her, belatedly registering that she had an expectant look in her big brown caramel eyes. ‘Are you even thinking about getting that test to sort stuff out?’ he enquired quietly, careful not to sound too demanding on that score.
Baulked of her every naïve hope of sharing her pregnancy with Gio, Leah was cut to the quick by that horribly dispassionate question. If that was all he had to say after seeing those wonderful images on screen, there was no hope left for him. She stamped down hard on her disillusionment and told herself that she had got exactly what she deserved for expectingmorefrom Gio Zanetti. What she needed and their children would conceivably need in the future, he apparently didn’t have to give, and that was, at its most basic, anemotionalconnection.
