The Billion-Dollar Bride Hunt by Melanie Milburne

CHAPTER TWELVE

MATTEOLOOKEDATher blankly for a long moment, his thoughts twisting and twirling into a tangled knot, strangling his hopes, choking his plans, blocking the pathway he wanted to be on.

He wanted to marry Emmie.

He needed an heir.

Emmie was unable to have children.

He needed an heir.

He cared for Emmie. They were good together. A great team.

He needed an heir.

Emmie was infertile.

He needed an heir.

The whirling of his brain matched the churning in his gut. A strangely painful, burning churning unlike anything he had ever felt before. He wanted Emmie so badly, not just physically, but because the connection he felt with her made him feel whole for the first time in his life.

But he couldn’t be with Emmie and keep his family’s estate.

He had never felt more blindsided than by her revelation. How could he not have guessed before now? She had told him about her cancer but she had said she was cured. Cured but at a price—the price of her fertility. A huge price for a young woman to have to pay and one he could only imagine caused Emmie great sadness. Was that why she said she never wanted to marry? Was that why she concentrated on finding her clients their happy-ever-after but insisted she wasn’t interested in finding her own perfect match?

But there were ways around infertility, many options available that hadn’t been there before for couples in their situation. And he wanted them to be a couple, damn it. They already felt like a couple. The camaraderie, the closeness, the connection was not just in his imagination.

He felt it.

‘But we can have IVF treatments.’ Matteo finally found his voice. ‘There are so many options these days.’

‘But it won’t be my child,’ Emmie said, pressing the heel of her hand against her heart. ‘It would have to be someone else’s egg. I will never look at a child and see something of myself in its features. None of my DNA will be passed on to him or her.’

‘I understand that would be difficult for you but—’

‘How can you possibly understand?’ Her voice rose in despair—a despair that was almost palpable. ‘You can father as many children as you like. You haven’t had cancer and had all your dreams and hopes taken away. You haven’t walked past a pregnant woman or a woman pushing a pram and felt your heart was going to shatter into a million pieces. You haven’t held a friend’s baby and ached with every fibre of your being because you know you can never hold your own baby in your arms.’

‘I might not understand totally but I have lost a child,’ Matteo said in a weighted tone. ‘And I have grieved every day since for him and for his mother.’

Emmie’s arms were wrapped around her body as if she was trying to contain her emotional pain. A pain he recognised because he could feel it grabbing at his guts every time he thought of his late wife and child. His two closest companions were grief and guilt. They followed him wherever he went.

‘I know and I’m sad for you. It was a terrible tragedy and one you have to live with for the rest of your life. But, if I married you, I would only add to your pain. You’re under enough time pressure as it is. You have to be married and have an heir within a year. Even if I agreed to IVF, it would take far longer than that to become pregnant, let alone deliver a child, and there’s no guarantee that will ever happen for me. I don’t even know if my body could cope with a pregnancy after all it’s been through.’

Emmie’s shoulders slumped and she added, ‘Even the most in-love couples struggle when going through fertility issues. We don’t have the magic ingredient to start with—love. We just have lust, and that is not enough.’

The magic ingredient. Matteo had never been a fan of ‘the magic ingredient’ of love after the damage he’d seen it do to his father. The magic ingredient caused pain and heartache and vulnerability and he wanted no part of it. But that didn’t mean he didn’t care about Emmie. He did and he had hoped she would be the solution to his problem. He had started to see her as the only solution. But her bombshell revelation gave him pause. He needed an heir. There was no escaping that fact. He had to marry and produce an heir otherwise his family’s estate would be lost for ever. It was an impossible situation to be in, a torturous choice—happiness with Emmie and losing his heritage, or keeping his family’s estate and losing Emmie.

Matteo picked up the shirt Emmie had discarded and shrugged himself back into it. He needed time to think. He needed a workable solution, one where he didn’t have to choose between the two things he wanted so desperately. But how could he think when his emotions were in a state of chaos? His brain was flooded with unfamiliar emotions, ambushed by feelings he didn’t know how to handle, let alone identify. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your infertility before now?’

Emmie gave him a chilly stare. ‘I don’t usually discuss my health records with my clients and, at the end of the day, that is what you are—a client.’

Her words were like a cold, hard slap in the face. But any offence taken on his part was hardly justified. She had always been clear about the boundaries. They had drifted into a fling and foolishly, misguidedly, he’d thought it could become something more.

It couldn’t.

Matteo searched her features but her expression was stony. The irony was he had used the very same expression many times in the past when a casual lover had asked for more than he was prepared to give. The drawbridge up, the shutters closed, the fortress secure.

‘So, it looks like this is the end for us.’ He delivered the statement in an impersonal tone. The same impersonal tone he had used many times before when ending a fling. But this wasn’t the same as ending any other casual fling. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. It wasn’t supposed to claw at his chest and shred his guts and make him ache to hold her in his arms and beg her to rethink her answer.

Emmie gave a stiff nod. ‘I’ll be in touch with a list of potential dates for you.’ Her tone was as impersonal as his. ‘Thank you for dinner and...everything else.’

Matteo only just managed not to curl his lip. ‘Everything else’ meaning the best sex he’d ever had. The most intimate lovemaking. Now it was over. Finished. He turned to pick up his car keys and wallet, determined not to show the turmoil of emotion he was going through. A turmoil that made it impossible for him to think of a future with anyone else. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘Please don’t bother. I can call a cab.’

‘It’s no bother,’ Matteo said, holding the bedroom door open for her.

She moved past him without another word and every muscle in his body wrestled with the temptation to touch her. To hold her. To never let her go.

But he wasn’t the sort of man to hold on, to never let go, to beg and plead and fall apart because someone didn’t want to be with him.

He was the man who didn’t do emotion. He didn’t feel romantic love.

And he wasn’t going to start now.

Emmie sat silently beside Matteo in the car on the way back to her house. What else was there to say that hadn’t already been said? His proposal had come out of necessity, not heartfelt love, and it had been promptly withdrawn as a result of her informing him about her fertility issues. She derided herself for having been tempted into a fling with him. It had only made things a squillion times worse. A fling with a client. How could she have been so stupid? So reckless and foolish to think there wouldn’t be a price to pay?

There was always a price to pay.

Emmie had taught herself not to want the things most other people wanted and she had been successful in suppressing those desires until she’d met Matteo Vitale. He had upended her life, tempted her into thinking she could have more.

But she couldn’t.

That option had been taken from her as a teenager and there was no way of getting it back.

But if he had loved her...

The thought drifted into her mind but she slammed the door on it. There was no way she could marry him knowing she would be stopping him from having what he most wanted. No amount of love could ever change that. In fact, it could even drive a wedge between them in the end. They might have formed a connection, grown closer than she had expected and had amazing sex, but the bottom line was he needed a wife and heir in a hurry and, while she could be that wife, she couldn’t provide the heir.

And the biggest heartbreak of all was that Emmie wished with all her heart she could.

Over the next month, Matteo ignored the list of potential partners Emmie sent him via email. He wasn’t in the mood for dating. He began to mentally prepare himself for the loss of his family’s estate, knowing it would be impossible to find someone who would suit him more than Emmie. Even if she had said yes to his proposal, he couldn’t have Emmie and have the estate too. He loved the estate in Umbria—it was his birthright, the sacred place where his wife and child were buried—but, unless he could fulfil the terms of his father’s will, it would be lost. He needed an heir to secure the estate.

But he wanted Emmie.

He could not imagine a time when he wouldn’t want her. It was as if his body had decided she was the missing link to his. He couldn’t imagine feeling the same intense level of attraction to anyone else.

Matteo threw himself into work but it failed to enthral him the way it usually did. He was in danger of letting down his clients if he didn’t pull himself together. He prided himself on his meticulous attention to detail, to finding out the truth behind every account he cast his gaze across. But all he could think about was Emmie’s situation, how sad it was for her not to be able to have a child. How cruel life was that so many children were born to inadequate parents and ended up in foster care, while other people like Emmie could not have what they most wanted—their own child. He had seen his own flesh and blood on an ultrasound image, and then only a few months later he had held that tiny, lifeless body in the mortuary. There was no grief like that of losing a child, but close by was surely the grief of not being able to have a child in the first place, especially if it was what you most wanted.

And Emmie did want a child—she wanted one desperately.

Matteo pushed back his office chair, went over to the window of his London office and stared at the crowds of people walking in the streets below. Businessmen and women, people of all shapes and sizes, couples, families—all going about their daily lives while he was up here brooding in a new type of grief state.

Loss and sadness were not unfamiliar feelings...but there was something else that was lurking in the shadowy corners of his mind. From the moment he’d met her, Emmie had encouraged him to talk about his feelings. But talking about them was not the same as actually feeling them. He could talk about anger without feeling angry. He could talk about happiness without feeling happy.

But now, he couldn’t talk about love without feeling something...something that flickered with a faint pulse in his chest every time he thought of Emmie. As though his frozen heart was slowly thawing, the layers of ice melting away to reveal a confronting truth about himself.

He was not incapable of feeling love.

He had deluded himself into believing he wasn’t cut out for commitment. He had fooled himself into thinking he was only interested in casual encounters. He had convinced himself he was more profligate playboy than permanent partner.

But it was all lies.

Self-protecting lies that had shielded him from facing the love for Emmie that had silently, steadily, stealthily grown in his heart. He loved her. Truly loved her. It wasn’t just a concept but an actual feeling. A state of being. It spread through his chest like something that had finally been set free after a long imprisonment. Free of its restraints, it had planted a seed of hope in the soil of his soul. All he needed now was the sunlight of Emmie. For wasn’t she the light in his darkness? Without her, he would wither and fail to thrive. Sure, he could still have an all right life, but it wouldn’t be the blossoming, blooming, blissful life he wanted unless she shared it with him.

He could deal with the loss of his family’s estate. Lots of people lost their beloved homes, Emmie included. She’d spoken of her childhood home in Devon with great fondness, sold in order for her parents to move the family closer to London. He would learn to speak of his family’s estate in the same way and put his regrets to one side. A property was not as important as a person and the only person important to him was Emmie.

But then a doubt raised its head in his brain... Emmie hadn’t expressed her feelings for him. She hadn’t confessed to loving him. Would he be showing more vulnerability than he had ever shown before by repeating his proposal, by telling her how much he loved her?

But vulnerability was a strength, not a weakness—or so Emmie said. It was a feeling like any other feeling. He could talk about it but it was important for him to feel it. To embrace it with courage.

Emmie had a long session with a new client who had a particular request for finding a partner. Harriet McIntosh was a young woman of twenty-nine who had been adopted at the age of two months old. ‘I’d really like to meet a man who is also an adoptee,’ she said. ‘It would be great to have that in common.’

‘So...your adoption worked out well?’ Emmie asked.

Harriet beamed. ‘Brilliantly. I got lucky in the adoption family lottery. My parents couldn’t love me more than if they had physically given birth to me.’

‘Have you met your biological parents?’

‘Only my mother,’ Harriet said. ‘She was a homeless girl of fifteen when she had me. She left me on a community health centre doorstep with a note attached to my blanket, but the authorities were able to find her through DNA matching later on. She wanted the best for me but knew she couldn’t provide it herself. It was a huge sacrifice on her part. I am forever grateful that she loved me enough to do that.’

Emmie had spoken to a few adopted people, some of whom still carried deep sadness about being relinquished, but it was so refreshing...so positive and uplifting...to hear of someone like Harriet who couldn’t be happier about being adopted. It made Emmie start to wonder if she was too adamantly opposed to adoption as an option. But what if she adopted a child and then got sick again? She would be setting up innocent children for hurt and sadness they didn’t deserve.

But you might not get cancer again. Many people go on to live full and healthy lives after cancer.

It was as if two sides of her brain were in deep debate. Could she be the sort of adoptive mother Harriet had been blessed with? Could she embrace the role of parenting without sharing DNA? She loved children. It was hard not to love a child and didn’t every child deserve a loving home? The doubts inside her head were less strident, the positives more insistent.

You can be a loving adoptive mother, like Harriet’s mother—the sort of mother who cherishes the children in her care. Who loves them as her own, protecting them, shielding them, treasuring them.

Emmie could do that with Matteo...except he didn’t love her. And surely the happiest environment for a child would be one in which both parents loved each other? Families came in all shapes and sizes these days. She had made the mistake of thinking there was only one way to be a mother and, because it had been taken away from her, she had ruled out ever doing it any other way.

But there was another way, a wonderful way, to be a mother. Harriet was living proof of it, speaking so lovingly of her adoptive parents.

‘I’m so glad you had such a wonderful experience,’ Emmie said. ‘I think I have someone on my books who is perhaps a little less happy about his adopted family, but maybe meeting you will help him reframe how he sees them.’

‘Oh, great. I can’t wait to meet him.’ Harriet waited a beat before adding, ‘Do you believe in love at first sight? I mean, my parents fell in love with me from the moment they met me. Do you think it’s possible in a romantic context too?’

Emmie smiled. ‘Yes, I really do.’

After all, she had lived experience of it.