AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She swallowed, pressing her hands to his chest so she could feel his heat and his strength. ‘Isn’t it lucky then that you won’t have to?’
His smile deepened. ‘Does this mean you’re going to marry me after all?’
Winifred’s heart just about burst for joy. ‘Perhaps I could be persuaded.’
She didn’t need persuading, but Augustine took it for a challenge, and set about doing so anyway.
Turned out he was very good at it.
Augustine Solari was very good at a lot of things, a king, a lover, a father.
But he was best of all at being her husband.
EPILOGUE
‘HE’SBEAUTIFUL,’GALENSAID, after inspecting the small bundle Augustine had held out to him. ‘He definitely takes after Freddie.’
‘He does,’ Khalil agreed. ‘A perfect little boy.’
Augustine had left his sleeping wife for a moment in order to show off his new son to his friends, and was already glowing with pride and a fierce, protective love so strong he could hardly bear it.
Khalil and Galen had arrived not long after Freddie had gone into labour, there to offer their support at the birth of Augustine’s first child. They’d brought Solace and Sidonie respectively, along with Leo, Solace and Galen’s toddler son, and Khalil and Sidonie’s baby girl, Zahra.
Augustine hadn’t known how much it meant to him to have his friends here until now. He was also pleased that Freddie’s sisters were coming, because she needed her family here too. Both girls had fallen in love with Isavere when they’d been bridesmaids for his and Freddie’s wedding, and they were desperate to see their new nephew.
He chatted with his friends for a couple of moments, before retreating back into the bedroom, to find Freddie awake and sitting up in bed. She held her hands out for their son and he came over, tucking the small bundle back into her arms. Then he sat on the bed beside her, his arm around her shoulders so he was holding them both.
‘Khal and Galen think he looks like you,’ Augustine said.
Freddie leaned against him, tired but radiant with joy. ‘He has your eyes, I think.’ She kissed their son’s forehead, then glanced at him. ‘You still want to call him Piero?’
He knew what she was asking. Did he want to name their son after his father? Before the birth, he’d been uncertain, a part of him still unsure. But now he knew something he hadn’t known before his son’s birth. A truth that had settled deep inside him, easing a wound that had been with him a long time.
‘You know you told me that my parents would be proud of the man I am now?’ he said. ‘I didn’t believe you.’
She settled against him. ‘I know you didn’t.’
‘I do now, though.’
Her head shifted on his shoulder and she looked up. ‘Because you’re a father?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, because I’m a father.’ Gently, he reached out to stroke his new son’s downy forehead. ‘And I know there’s nothing that this little boy can do to make me love him any less. Nothing to make him any less worthy in my eyes than he already is.’
Freddie smiled back and he could feel the warmth of that smile in his soul. ‘Piero definitely takes after you.’
Augustine didn’t think it was possible for his life to become any richer, any more full of joy, any more full of love than it already was.
He was wrong.
His Jet-Set Nights with the Innocent
Pippa Roscoe
Evie’s heart was thrumming with excitement, trepidation and a little of something else. That something else—incredulity at her own behavior.
She felt as if she were part of some old film, dashing off around the world, traveling on an overnight sleeper train to Hong Kong from Shanghai, where she would take a boat out to Indonesia, following coordinates to who-knew-where.
The coordinates could be anything. They could be nothing. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she would find answers there. Answers to questions the professor had spent his life searching for. Answers to questions that had ruined her reputation? She didn’t care too much for that. She had learned long ago that people would think what they thought about her and nothing she did would change that. Even tonight, with Mateo. He had decided that she was too fragile for him, tooinnocent.
