handsome husband, strode out of the house. He bounced a new football across the terrace to Rio, who gave a whoop of pleasure and grabbed both ball and father in his enthusiasm, chattering in ninety-mile-an-hour Italian about the window he had broken.
‘Daddy didn’t play music in the car like I wanted,’ confided Graziella crossly. ‘We had football.’
From beneath the vine-covered loggia, Jess surveyed the man she loved with amused eyes. He made a special effort to take time off and spend it with his family during the long summers they usually spent at Collina Verde. Although she rarely thought back now to the period when she had feared she would lose Cesario, because she felt it was good to move on mentally, she valued the happiness she had found with him and her children all the more from the knowledge that she could so easily have lost him.
Having changed his mind and finally agreed to accept treatment, Cesario had benefited from the latest neurosurgical techniques. Stereotactic surgery, in which CT images were used to pinpoint the location of the tumour and target it with carefully controlled doses of gamma radiation, had been utilised and this noninvasive method had protected all healthy tissue from damage. He had spent only three days in hospital and, after a successful procedure, had experienced neither complications nor subsequent problems. The tumour was gone and follow-up scans remained reassuringly clear.
‘Do you think we’re spoiling Graziella?’ Cesario remarked as their nanny, Izzy, put in an appearance to take the children indoors for lunch. ‘She’s a real little bossy-boots.’
‘I wonder who she gets that from,’ Jess commented tongue in cheek, since she had noticed that her elder daughter could twist her father round her little finger with just the suggestion of tears or disappointment. ‘Or do you think it could be that maybe she just doesn’t like football radio commentaries?’
A wickedly appreciative grin slashed Cesario’s wide sensual mouth. ‘She takes after her mamma then, her very beautiful, very much loved—’
‘And very pregnant mamma,’ Jess completed, hopelessly conscious of the size of her pregnant body on such a warm day. She was within weeks of her delivery date for their fourth child. She already knew that she was carrying a second boy, who would very probably be christened Roberto after his doting grandfather. Their children had given them both so much joy that they weren’t quite sure when they would consider their family complete.
Cesario splayed a protective hand across the proud swell of her belly. ‘Very beautiful, very pregnant mamma,’ he traded huskily as he pulled her back against him, ‘whom I was extremely lucky to find and marry in my hour of greatest need.’
Jess leant back against the support of his big powerful body and sighed in blissful relaxation, enjoying a moment of perfect peace without the children providing a distraction. ‘We found each other and once I had had a taste of you and Italy I knew you were the man for me. I love you so much.’
Cesario turned her slowly round in the circle of his arms and looked down into the silvery grey eyes he still found so enthralling. ‘The love of my life,’ he breathed and kissed her with tender loving care…
Lynne Graham
MIKHAIL KUSNIROVICH, RUSSIAN oil oligarch and much feared business magnate, relaxed his big body back into his leather office chair and surveyed his best friend, Luka Volkov, with astonishment. ‘Hiking … seriously? That’s truly how you want to spend your stag weekend away?’
‘Well, we’ve already had the party and that was a little high octane for me,’ Luka confided, his good-natured face tightening with distaste at the memory. Of medium height and stocky build, he was a university lecturer and the much admired author of a recent book on quantum physics.
‘You can blame your future brother-in-law for that,’ Mikhail reminded him drily, thinking of the lap and pole dancers hired by Peter Gregory for the occasion, women so far removed from his shy academic friend’s experience that the arrival of a group of terrorists at the festivities would have been more welcome.
‘Peter meant it for the best,’ Luka proclaimed, instantly springing to the defence of his bride’s obnoxious banker brother.
Mikhail’s brow raised, his lean, darkly handsome face grim. ‘Even though I warned him that you wouldn’t like it?’
Luka reddened. ‘He does try; he just doesn’t always get it right.’
Mikhail said nothing because he was thinking with regret of how much Luka had changed since he had got engaged to Suzie Gregory. Although the two men had little in common except their Russian heritage, they had been friends since they met at Cambridge University. In those days, Luka would have had no problem declaring that a man as crude, boring and boastful as Peter Gregory was a waste of space. But now Luka could no longer call a spade a spade and always paid subservient regard to his fiancée’s feelings. An alpha male to the core, Mikhail gritted his even white teeth in disgust. He would never marry. He was never going to change who and what he was to please some woman. The very idea was a challenge for a male raised by a man whose favourite saying had been, ‘a chicken is not a bird and a woman is not a person’. The late Leonid Kusnirovich had been fond of reeling that off to inflame the sensibilities of the refined English nanny he had hired to take care of his only son. Sexist, brutal and always insensitive, Leonid had been outraged by the nanny’s gentle approach to child rearing and had been afraid that she might turn his son into a wimp. But at the age of thirty there was nothing remotely wimpy about Mikhail’s six-foot-five-inch powerfully built frame, his ruthless drive to succeed or his famous appetite for a large and varied diet of women.
‘You’d like the Lake District … it’s beautiful,’ Luka declared.
Mikhail made a massive effort not to look as pained as he felt. ‘You want to go hiking in the Lake District? I assumed you were thinking of Siberia—’
‘I can’t get enough time off work and I’m not sure I’d be up to the challenge of the elements there,’ Luka admitted, patting his slight paunch in apology. ‘I’m not half as fit as you are. England in the spring and a gentle workout is more my style. But could you get by without your limo, luxury lifestyle and your fleet of minders for a couple of days?’
Mikhail went nowhere without a team of security guards. He frowned, not at the prospect of existing without the luxuries, but at having to convince his protection team that he didn’t need them for forty eight hours. Stas, his highly protective head of security, had been taking care of Mikhail since he was a little boy. ‘Of course, I can do it,’ he responded with innate assurance. ‘And a little deprivation will do me good.’
‘You’ll have to leave your collection of cell phones behind as well,’ Luka dared.
Mikhail stiffened in dismay. ‘But why?’
‘You won’t stop cutting deals if you still have the phones in tow,’ Luka pointed out, well aware of his friend’s workaholic ways. ‘I don’t fancy standing on top of a mountain somewhere shivering while you consider share prices. I know what you’re like.’
‘If that’s really what you want, I’ll consider it,’ Mikhail conceded grudgingly, knowing he would sooner cut off his right arm than remove himself, even temporarily,
