yet another excuse for her to delay telling him about the pregnancy. And anyway it seemed to Lara that he was avoiding her.
Maybe as far as he was concerned the contract between them was already over?
‘Ring me tomorrow when it’s over...?’
It’s already over! ‘Sure,’ she managed dully, suddenly feeling more alone than ever before.
‘Look, you know I’d really like to come, to support you if I could, and so would Mum...’
Lara closed her eyes and fought back tears. ‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not. It’s just that I have a hospital appointment tomorrow and Mum is coming with me.’
Lara’s stomach muscles tightened. ‘You’re ill?’
‘No, the thing is, I’m pregnant.’
‘Pregnant!’
‘Yep, and at the moment I’m as sick as hell.’
Tell me about it!
Lara just stopped herself, biting her tongue hard enough to make her wince. It was so tempting to offload, to share something she had in common with her twin, but she couldn’t tell Lily before she told Raoul. She would tell him...when the right time came.
‘I thought it was supposed to end after three months.’
The implication of the comment hit Lara. ‘Three months...so how far along are you?’
‘Twenty weeks...it’s not just you I haven’t told, Lara. I’ve not told anyone. I think I was pretty much in denial, but now I’ve kind of exploded overnight.’
Lara barely registered the forced humour in her sister’s voice. ‘You’re five months pregnant.’ She pressed a hand over her own still-flat stomach. ‘You were pregnant at the wedding?’ There had never been any psychic connection but shouldn’t she have sensed it? How could she have, when she’d been too busy keeping her own secrets to guess her twin might also have something to hide?
‘It was your day, Lara.’
My day... She stared at her hands, feeling the tears that flowed too easily well hotly beneath her eyelids. She blinked them back and focused on the gold band that encircled her finger, suddenly aware her sister had been talking and she didn’t have a clue what she’d said.
She lifted the gold band to her lips, remembering him sliding it on and how right it had felt. Without warning, the protective shield she had been hiding behind slid away, revealing a truth she could no longer run away from. She was staring at the truth...the glaringly obvious truth.
She’d told herself she was acting, that it wasn’t real, but it was real. She was in love with Raoul—he had warned her not to but she had anyway.
He was everything she’d been determined to avoid in a man and yet he was everything she needed, she craved... She closed her eyes, wishing herself back to a time when she had imagined you could control who you fell in love with, that you could choose safe love, when in reality you had no more control over love than the colour of your eyes.
The level of her blind stupidity seemed incredible. Love had nothing to do with self-control or common sense; she had no choice whether to love Raoul and it didn’t matter if he wanted that love, if he rejected it and her.
She loved him with a soul-deep passion and would carry on loving him even after he broke her heart.
The rest of the phone conversation was stilted and awkward but Lara barely noticed. It wasn’t until she put the phone down with a shaking hand that Lara realised she hadn’t even asked her twin who the father of her baby was!
* * *
The day of the funeral was warm, thunder rumbled in the distance but the rain waited until after Sergio had been laid to rest in the family vault.
The afternoon sun hit the study at the palazzo, and it was still uncomfortably warm as Raoul entered, putting his glass on the desk littered untidily with papers. He pulled open the French doors and stood there, eyes closed, breathing in the cool evening air before taking a seat in the padded leather chair beside the desk.
The mourners who had come back to the house after the service were gone...and so was his grandfather. His eyes went to the open door. Even now, he half expected to see the old man framed in the doorway.
But he wasn’t.
Raoul had stood up and told the mourners that for Sergio Di Vittorio family came first.
He could with equal honesty have added that the old fox had also been a master manipulator who could be utterly ruthless when it came to getting his own way.
He had died thinking he had got his way one final time, Raoul thought as he lifted his glass in a silent salute.
The twisted smile on his face vanished as he put down the glass, his thoughts sliding back to earlier when she had told him that they needed to talk. It was obvious what that would be about.
Her future, the one she would have without him. It would be a good one. She had talent, though he doubted she recognised yet how much. She deserved good things, he told himself, ignoring the sinking feeling inside. If he analysed it he’d have to admit that he wanted her to stay—not for ever, obviously, because there was no for ever, but just for a while, just so that he could carry on enjoying her.
When he’d met Lara his life had been disintegrating around him. He had lost or been losing everyone he’d ever cared for, but she had kept him afloat. Of course, having her around was going to make the next few weeks easier, but after that what...?
After that, nothing, because Raoul knew he had nothing to give. He was disgusted with himself for it, but he knew that what he was good at was taking. He knew it would be easy to persuade Lara to stay longer; he knew he was good at manipulating her feelings. But for once he was not going to put his own selfish needs first.
And then he could get back to life as usual.
I thought you’d fallen off the planet, darling!
At first he hadn’t even recognised the woman who had virtually collided with him in the street. Her name had continued to elude him as she’d pressed a kiss to his mouth. Just in time to save embarrassment it had come to him, along with the location of their fling a year or so ago.
She’d looked at his wedding ring and aimed a speculative look at his face. ‘Married, but how married?’
He’d made an excuse and left without responding to the question or the unspoken invitation in her carefully made-up eyes.
That was his life, the one he had chosen, the one he would go back to, just as soon as he was done with Lara.
Refusing to acknowledge the feeling that gathered strength inside him until it came perilously close to icy panic, he clenched his jaw and slowly rebuilt the barriers he had put up in order to survive his first marriage.
He was better off alone.
Not yet though; for the moment Lara was still here.
