grunt and settled back in her seat.
‘But the strain of not mentioning the elephant in the room was beginning to tell.’
‘Lily hasn’t told anyone.’ Not even me. ‘Raoul...? It’s been nearly a year now, and I haven’t changed my mind.’
Though she had been angry at the time, she was grateful now that he had insisted on the wait. For the last few months her emotions had been all over the place.
She knew she hadn’t been easy to live with but Raoul had been incredibly patient, when she got angry with him, herself or life in general. And then there had been the sad times when all she could do was cry.
‘Today—’
‘Today was hard,’ she admitted. ‘Inside,’ she said, pressing a hand to her chest, ‘I feel like a mother but no one can see that. One day I hurt, the next I feel as if it had happened to someone else. I know I’ve been hell to live with and that was never part of the contract.’
‘I broke the contract when I got you pregnant.’
‘So your guilt is keeping us together.’ She turned to stare at the clouds.
He wished he could have said yes, that would have made things simpler to sort in his own mind, but though guilt played a part there was a lot more keeping him with Lara, more than he wanted to think about.
‘A little while back I thought you’d changed your mind... Was I wrong?’
She turned her head and looked at him in astonishment. ‘For a while,’ she admitted, ‘I did feel as though having another baby would be betraying the one I lost... I suppose that sounds mad to you.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
Her eyes slid from his and she looked out of the window. ‘It might never happen for us.’
He responded with an emotion-dampening positivity. ‘Of course it will, and if it doesn’t it won’t be for lack of trying.’
‘So you haven’t changed your mind?’
His libido gave a lazy kick as she relaxed and laughed again; the sound made him realise how rare these moments were now.
‘I want...’ He wanted to see her happy, he wanted to repair the damage he had wrought after watching what she had been through during the last year. He would have done anything to make her laugh like that again. ‘No,’ he said softly.
‘How about it, then...?’ Holding his interested gaze, she slipped off her spiky heels and, tongue caught between her teeth in sexy concentration, her green eyes wide and mockingly innocent, she stretched out her bare foot and moved it slowly up his leg.
‘You think...?’
He felt the heat rising up his neck, then the heat coalesced a little lower as her foot came to rest between his thighs. ‘In a helicopter, really...?’
Eyes dancing, she gave a wicked chuckle and withdrew her foot. ‘Well, maybe it can wait until the plane... I mean, what’s the use of having a private jet if you can’t make use of the privacy?’
‘I like the way your mind works,’ he said, thinking now this was the way babies should be made!
Eight months later
IT HAD BEEN Lara’s idea to revive the masked ball that had last been held at the palazzo twenty years before. If anyone had asked him his opinion, and they hadn’t, Raoul would have pointed to the high wall that surrounded the property and said it had been built for a reason—to keep people out.
But she was so fired up about it that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw a damper on her enthusiasm. His agreement to the scheme had been taken as read, though there had been several times since when he’d wished he had objected, not least when an army of caterers, musicians and assorted staff who were required for the smooth running of such a social event invaded his home.
Still, it looked as if the hard work had paid off. The night seemed to be a roaring success.
Raoul could hear his wife’s throaty laugh from across the room. Her head was thrown back to reveal the lovely line of her swan-like throat, and the emeralds that had been dug out of the vault for the occasion lay glinting against the pearlescent skin of her breasts. That had been their first row tonight—the dress too revealing, too everything.
His thoughts slid back to when she had walked through from her dressing room carrying his mask in one hand, hers in the other.
The cut of the black dress had drawn a spontaneous low, feral groan from his throat; once he had started breathing again all he could think about was peeling it off.
‘You can’t wear that!’
In retrospect Raoul could see that he could have dealt with the situation better, but then hindsight was a marvellous thing.
The smile left her lovely face and her chin went up as she tossed his mask across. He lifted a hand automatically to catch it.
‘You want to dictate what I wear?’
Hell, there was the quiet voice, the one that generally preceded a redheaded meltdown. He felt an answering flare of temper aggravated by extreme sexual frustration.
‘Do you always have to get your own way?’ he countered, thinking of all the times he had let her have it. You’re in danger of turning into a lapdog, Raoul.
‘Have you ever heard of compromise? Or patience?’
‘I beg your pardon! And if I am a male, controlling jerk for wanting my wife not to wear something that could get her arrested—’
Her magnificent eyes flashed green fire up at him and her even more magnificent bosom swelled with wrath. ‘You think I look like a hooker?’
‘Do not put words in my mouth.’
‘It’s not my fault if some men have one-track minds!’
Raoul hooked a hand around her back and felt a deep responsive quiver run through her body as she dropped the hand-painted antique mask. ‘I’m not some men, I am your husband.’ The argument, the real cause, the hundreds of guests about to arrive burned away in seconds as the heat of primitive need consumed him.
‘Shall I help you out of it...?’
He took her throaty little whimper as a yes and started to slide the zipper of the scandalous dress down. The image in his head of it falling in a silken puddle at her feet vanished as she suddenly stiffened and pulled away and, with hands raised above her head, began to struggle frantically to pull the zipper back up.
‘You think all you have to do is get me in bed and I’ll agree to anything!’ she charged furiously.
Nerve-shredding frustration gnawed at him as he walked towards her. His control was perilously close to snapping. It must have been
