The Italian’s Bride On Paper by Kim Lawrence

CHAPTER TWO

‘WHEREISSHE?’

The question flustered her and put her on the defensive.

‘She who?’

This drawn-out innocent act tried his temper, but not as much as the unwelcome recognition of his own initial shock reaction to the sight of the woman barring his way. God alone knew how long he had stood there literally in the grip of a hormonal rush worthy of a teenager.

Or a man who had gone too long without?

He found the latter explanation far more palatable and very easily solved. Sex was like any other hunger. It was not at all complicated as long as you didn’t start imagining there was anything other than a mutual attraction there. No matter how strong, no lust had a shelf life beyond a few weeks.

‘I think we should take this inside, don’t you?’

Sam swallowed as an image of her wide dilated eyes and messy hair floated through his head. Just how responsive would she be in bed...? Frowning in response to the sly voice of his libido, he pushed the images away to focus on the reason he was here.

She panicked. ‘No!’

Her response was so unexpected it stopped him and his thought processes dead in their tracks, and it took him a few moments to actually take on board what she was doing.

She stood there stubbornly, a hand braced against either side of the door frame.

‘I don’t think we should take this inside,’ she said firmly.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said, feeling an unexpected stab of admiration as she tightened her grip on the door frame, blocking his way with, what, an entire seven stone nothing?

Stronger than his admiration was the mental image of placing his hands around her ribcage and bodily removing her from his path. His thought lingered on the image long enough to count as self-indulgent and he frowned slightly.

Maya compressed her lips and maintained her defiant stance even though, truthfully, she was starting to feel a little foolish. As gestures went this one was pretty futile, and she was still suffering from the weird feeling of having entered a conversation midway through.

Forget about the why, and the how, just focus on the now, she told herself, and in the now she physically represented no obstacle to him. He could have lifted her out of the way with one hand tied behind his back... It was far more worrying that the idea of him doing that made her breath come a little too fast as, under the protective cover of her lashes, she made a covert scan of his long lean length. It only revealed what she already knew: he had the physique of a Greek god who worked out a lot—or in this case an Italian god.

So nothing has changed in the twenty seconds since you last drooled over him, Maya!

‘Violetta!’ He pitched his deep voice to carry and Maya groaned.

‘All right,’ she sighed out. It was easier to admit the truth, or at least this portion of it, than have him wake Mattio. Dealing with one Agosti male at a time was enough and this one was way too big to rock to sleep. She cleared her throat and pushed away a deeply distracting image of his dark head on her breast. ‘She isn’t here, but—’

‘And Mattio?’

‘Well, you can’t have him...because he’s not here either.’

Sam’s brows lifted at her obviously panicky tack-on. ‘You are a very bad liar,’ he observed, unaccountably disgruntled at the discovery. ‘Look, enough.’ He brought one long-fingered brown hand down in a slashing motion. ‘I really don’t care who you have in there, beyond my nephew, who belongs with me.’

‘I don’t have anyone in there!’ she retorted.

But in his mind’s eye, Samuele was seeing a lover sleeping in her bed. Grimly, he found he had no problem disturbing this exhausted, sleeping boyfriend.

‘You always walk around dressed like that after midday?’

Catching his drift, Maya blushed. ‘My sex life is none of your business,’ she countered, thinking, It’s just as well he doesn’t know I haven’t got one.

Life might be interesting if it were his business.

As he veiled his eyes with his ludicrously long lashes she glimpsed a gleam before he delivered a flat statement that came out sounding a lot like a threat.

‘I can stay here all day.’

‘No, you really can’t.’

‘I—’ He stopped at the unmistakable sound of a baby cry.

‘Oh, my God, look what you’ve done now!’ she exclaimed.

On the receiving end of a ‘rot in hell’ glare, he did not immediately respond to the opening as she stood there, hands pressed together as though she were praying.

A moment later she breathed out. ‘I think he’s gone back to sleep.’

‘I am not going away without Mattio.’

There was no hint of concession in his voice or on his chiselled features. Thinking hard, she considered his beautiful fallen-angel face, her eyes drifting over the angular contours of his lower jaw and hollowed cheeks, which were dusted with dark stubble that emphasised the razor edge of his carved cheekbones and the sensual curve of his upper lip.

‘So, I think this is where you invite me in.’

‘Or what, you’ll barge your way in? I’m warning you, I really will call the police.’

He lifted his eyes from where they had drifted to the gaping neckline of her silky nightshirt, and she couldn’t help the shiver of excitement that sizzled down her spine.

‘Feel free if Violetta actually isn’t here.’ He subjected her face to a speculative laser-like scan. ‘I’m quite sure this situation will be of interest to them.’

It suddenly occurred to her that this might well be the case. She weighed her options and discovered she didn’t have many.

With a tight-lipped sigh she stepped to one side and without another word he shouldered his way past her.

‘Come in, why don’t you?’ she drawled, sarcasm masking her apprehension as she glared at the man who now dominated her small living room.

Samuele scanned the modest space that had probably been dominated by the stacks of books and a dressmaking dummy draped with fabric, only now they took second place to a baby buggy, a stack of disposable nappies and general baby detritus. But the item his eyes zeroed in on was a stuffed rabbit. He felt his throat thicken, remembering when it had been new, his brother’s way of telling him that he was going to be an uncle.

‘Don’t you mean you’re going to be a father?’ Samuele had responded.

‘Maybe.’ His brother had handed him the toy. ‘The cancer’s back, Sam. I start chemo next week. So, you see, this kid is going to need you to be around.’

‘You’ll be around for them! You beat it once, you’ll beat it again.’

‘Sure, I will.’

They had kept up the pretence, dancing around the truth, right up until the last minute. Sometimes he thought that his little brother had been protecting him, rather than the other way around.

Maya watched a muscle jump in his cheek as he bent forward, pausing before he straightened up with a soft toy in his hand. For a split second she saw something in his face that made him seem almost vulnerable. She experienced a troubling moment of what felt scarily like empathy, but then he looked at her, and his eyes were not those of a man who needed her empathy, they were hard and cold and ruthless.

‘So where is Violetta hiding?’

‘She’s not hiding anywhere...’ Unable to sustain eye contact with the darkness in his, she transferred her gaze to the toy trailing from his fingers. ‘She’s...gone out.’

‘Where and when will she be back?’ he asked as he arranged himself in the nearest chair.

Maya struggled to contain her panic as she watched him stretch his long legs out in front of him. ‘I don’t exactly know,’ she said, pretty sure she was sounding as lame as she was feeling.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t know exactly what—where or when?’

‘All of those.’

‘You know very little,’ he observed unpleasantly.

‘I know you are sitting in my chair and I didn’t invite you in... I’m sure that’s against the law.’

He grinned. ‘Only if I’m a vampire.’

Her lips tightened at the flippancy but she couldn’t help thinking that it wouldn’t actually be such a stretch to see him in the role of a sexy vampire!

‘Look, this is ridiculous.’ So was imagining offering him your neck.

Ridiculous would be him allowing himself to be fobbed off. ‘I’ll wait for her.’

‘No!’ She gulped and added, ‘I’m expecting some—’ She broke off as the sound of a low murmur amplified by the baby monitor on the coffee table filled the room. ‘Oh, God, he’s woken up again.’

Her eyes widened as her uninvited visitor vaulted to his feet in one smooth stomach-clenching action. Maya was only a heartbeat away from throwing herself physically in his path as he approached the door leading to Beatrice’s bedroom. It was crazy; she still thought of it that way, even though her sister had only spent a few nights there before her life had taken a very different direction.

What would Bea do?

She wouldn’t have let him in.

Get a grip! Beatrice wasn’t here, she was, and she couldn’t let Beatrice fight her battles any more. Maya was never going to give in to a bully, not ever again.

She got between him and the bedroom door, and she turned to face the advancing figure, who suddenly seemed about ten feet tall, raising her hands as if she could actually physically stop him. She knew she’d have had more chance of stopping a hurricane! It struck her that the analogy was very apt—there was something truly elemental about him.

‘There are rules,’ she said, refusing to give ground. ‘Ground rules.’

He looked astonished. ‘Rules...?’

‘If Mattio has fallen asleep again, don’t wake him up—please.’

She held her breath, once again seeing in her head the image of herself being lifted bodily by two strong hands—which produced another worryingly ambiguous reaction low in her stomach.

She cleared her throat. ‘It took a long time for him to settle.’

Sam looked from the door to her pleading face and after a moment he nodded.

Her relief seemed genuine. ‘So, what is Violetta playing at? What little scheme have you two been hatching?’ he asked.

‘I hate to ruin a conspiracy theory with inconvenient things like facts, but there is no scheme or hatching, there is no us two.’

‘She is your sister, isn’t she?’ The fact that she looked sexily wholesome on the surface made her far more dangerous than her overtly glamorous but entirely toxic sister.

‘Half-sister, actually.’

‘She ran to you, left her baby with you, so you two must be close.’

A little laugh escaped Maya’s parted lips. ‘I hadn’t even met her before last night when she turned up with Mattio.’

Unlikely as it sounded, Samuele found he was inclined to believe the ring of truth in her voice.

‘So she’s using you. Typical.’

‘No, she’s not... Do not twist everything I say.’

‘So when did she leave?’

There seemed very little to gain from not telling him. ‘I’m not sure. I woke up, and there was a note...’ Maya’s hand went to her pocket. ‘She seems really desperate.’

He laughed and said something that sounded pretty rude in Italian before he tacked on a polite translation in English. ‘She is really devious.’

‘She’s probably suffering from postnatal depression—new mothers need support, you know.’ As if he’d know the meaning of the word, she thought, throwing a look of seething contempt at him.

‘She left her baby and you’re still defending her. You really don’t know your sister very well at all, do you?’

‘I know enough, about her and about you too...’

His dark eyes narrowed on her flushed face his expression assessing as his long lashes rested briefly on the cutting angle of his cheekbones. ‘Ah, so my reputation precedes me,’ he drawled with a slow smile that Maya found almost as disturbing as his apparent ability to read her mind. ‘So what has the absent mother been saying? Actually, don’t bother, I can guess most of it, but maybe you should allow for a little bit of artistic licence on her part.’

‘You probably make her feel inadequate!’

‘Projection, much?’

The hot angry colour flew to her cheeks. ‘You don’t make me feel inadequate.’ Her chin lifted to another defiant angle as she claimed boldly, ‘Nobody makes me feel inadequate.’

The overreaction hinted at a vulnerability that was none of his business, he told himself, swiftly closing down that line of speculation.

‘You don’t strike me as an inadequate woman,’ he mused, allowing his eyes to move in a slow sweep up her slim body before settling on her vivid heart-shaped face inside the frame of wild silky waves. The delicate features qualified as high on the catch-your-breath index but there was a determination to the round chin and a fierceness in her direct gaze that he seriously admired.

Taken aback by his response, Maya took an involuntary step away from him.

What do I strike you as, then?She pushed away the question as irrelevant and reclaimed the space she had given up. She tightened the sash on her robe another breath-restricting inch while somewhere in the back of her mind a voice reiterated, It’s past midday and you’re still in your night clothes.

‘I wasn’t talking about me.’ Would he have been saying that if he’d seen the person she had been? Her defensive wall wavered and then held against the wave of self-disgust, and she met his dark stare with a semblance of calm.

He arched a dark brow. ‘No?’ His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug as his gaze moved beyond her to the closed bedroom door. ‘If you say so...’ He sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. ‘I am here to see Mattio. Is he in here?’ He tipped his head towards the right of the two doors they stood outside.

‘That’s my bedroom.’ God, Maya, how old are you? she thought as she felt the heat rise up her neck. Deciding the best way to deal with the juvenile blush was to pretend it wasn’t there, she glared up at him.

‘You’re not here to see him, you’re here to take him away and I won’t let you,’ she asserted, sounding more confident than she felt at her ability to follow through with this claim.

‘I haven’t made any secret of what I’m here to do and if you’re about to threaten me with the law again...’ The prospect didn’t alarm Samuele overly. ‘I’d think that one through if I were you. Bring in the authorities on this one, and, red tape being what it is, I probably won’t walk out of here with Mattio, but he will leave in the arms of some child protection social worker. And then when my court order granting me temporary guardianship comes through—which it will—I’ll be able to take Mattio home.’

‘You have a court order...?’

‘I will have, soon.’ It was not strictly a lie, but it would not have bothered Samuele if it had been.

‘But,’ she quavered out defiantly, ‘Violetta is his mother! Don’t courts always give a child to the mother?’

He gave a hard laugh and slung her a pitying look. ‘That’s often true—but it does kind of depend on the mother, don’t you think?’

‘Violetta’s not here to defend herself,’ Maya argued, knowing that words could be weaponised and a disparaging word here, a scathing comment there, could over time alter people’s perception of someone, as she knew to her cost.

‘Isn’t that the point?’ he suggested drily, looking bored with the discussion. ‘She dumped a baby on a virtual stranger in a foreign country. That might raise a few legal brows.’

‘Foreign...?’

‘Mattio is Italian, he is an Agosti!’

‘So is Violetta.’

‘Not if Charlie has any say in the matter,’ he shot back.

‘Charlie?’

‘Her next meal ticket,’ he outlined with a thin smile.

‘I’m not listening to you,’ she bit back through clenched teeth.

‘Because the truth hurts?’

‘You twist everything I say.’

‘Twist,’ he echoed, raising his hands in a gesture that reinforced the scornful incredulity written on his face.

‘For a woman to leave her baby...’ Shaking her head, she scanned his face for any sign that he was capable of understanding what a massive thing that was. ‘Have you any idea of what a terrible place she must have been in?’

‘You really are determined to see her as some sort of victim, aren’t you? I promise you that is the very last thing Violetta is. Look, Mattio is not your responsibility—’

‘It’s not about responsibility,’ she retorted. ‘It’s about—’ Struggling to put her feelings into words, she clenched her hands and tried to focus.

‘It’s about what?’

‘It’s about...’ She made herself meet his eyes even though she knew the experience would not be comfortable. ‘A child needs to be loved, to be wanted, and you don’t really want him.’

‘Now you’re telling me what I want?’

‘You just want to control everything.’

Samuele sketched a thin-lipped smile that he knew didn’t reach his eyes. At that moment he’d settle for controlling his own baser urges, which at that moment... He shook his head slightly and thought, Better not to go there. The main thing was that he was in control.

‘You really have swallowed Violetta’s fiction hook, line and sinker, haven’t you?’

‘I haven’t swallowed anything!’ she fired back. ‘I’m not some sort of gullible idiot—though I can see that it would suit you if I were!’

He didn’t react immediately to her claim...there seemed little point. As he studied her face it was obvious she believed everything she was saying. His frustration levels threatened to bubble through his enforced calm.

He’d thought that he’d mentally prepared for every scenario he might face to get Mattio back, but in all of those he’d been dealing with Violetta, a known quantity.

This woman was definitely not a known quantity; in fact, she was the biggest unknown quantity that he had encountered—ever. A woman who looked as she did but made no conscious effort to use her allure was a mystery to him. She could bewitch a man with a flutter of her eyelashes if she wanted to, but all she did was try and batter him into submission with her totally flawed logic and stubborn arguments.

If he didn’t have more important things on his mind, he might have been tempted to find out more about her, against his better judgement, though instinct told him that Maya Monk came with serious complications and possibly not the ones that he was armoured against. All the same, she was intriguing and quite incredibly beautiful.

How was it possible to want to taste a woman and at the same time want to...? He shook his head, despairing that anyone could be so wilfully stupid. This would have been a hell of a lot easier if she hadn’t believed everything she was saying, and the fact he had not detected the sort of artifice he always expected from a beautiful woman made him uneasy.

His unease deepened when without warning a Eureka smile spread across her face.

‘What about Violetta’s mother? Could she come and look after Mattio until Violetta gets back?’ Maya knew it was a compromise but maybe one that he might accept. ‘What...why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Your mother too, if I’m understanding your relationship correctly.’

‘We’re not in contact. Olivia has her own family.’ Some of it was in her spare bedroom. ‘And I have mine.’ What would she not have given for her mum or sister to be in the same time zone right now?

If they had been, they would be here in this room offering her back-up and some much-needed baby advice.

‘It’s tough being rejected.’

She flinched, really disliking his ability to wander around inside her head. ‘I’m not a victim. I was adopted as a baby, and, I told you, I have my own family now.’

‘Olivia died six months ago.’