at all. The private midwife who lived locally and could be called upon at any time had been her only concession to being married to a billionaire.
But she wanted to keep it real, because reality was her only anchor. Despite Renzo’s enormous power and wealth, she wanted theirs to be as normal a family as it was possible to be. And despite what she’d said when he’d railroaded her into the marriage, she badly wanted it to work. Not just because of their baby or because of their unhappy childhoods. She looked out the window, where her silk shirt was blowing wildly in the breeze. She wanted it to work because she had realised she loved him.
She swallowed.
She loved him.
It had dawned on her one morning when she’d woken to find him still sleeping beside her. In sleep he looked far less forbidding but no less beautiful. His shadowed features were softened; the sensual lips relaxed. Two dark arcs of eyelashes feathered onto his olive skin and his hair was ruffled from where she’d run her hungry fingers through it sometime during the night. She remembered the powerful feeling which had welled up inside her as the full force of her feelings had hit her and she wondered how she could have failed to recognise it before.
Of course she loved him. She’d been swept away by him from the moment she’d looked across a crowded nightclub and seen a man who had only had eyes for her. A once-in-a-lifetime man who’d made her feel a once-in-a-lifetime passion, despite the fact that he could be arrogant, tricky and, at times, downright difficult. And if fate—or rather pregnancy—had given her the opportunity to capitalise on those feelings and for passion to evolve into love, then she had to make the most of it. He might not feel the same way about her but she told herself that didn’t matter because she had more than enough love to go round. She planned to make herself indispensable—not just as the mother of his child, but as his partner. To concentrate on friendship, respect and passion and reassure herself that maybe it could be enough. And if sometimes she found herself yearning for something more—well, maybe she needed to learn to appreciate what she had and stop chasing fantasy.
She spent the next hour crushing basil leaves and mashing garlic, trying to perfect a pesto sauce as good as the one they’d eaten in Rome on the last evening of their honeymoon. Then she picked a handful of daffodils and put them in a vase and had just sat down with a cup of tea to admire their yellow frilliness, when she heard the front door slam.
‘I’m in here!’ she called. She looked up to see Renzo framed in the doorway, her smile and words of welcome dying on her lips when she saw the darkness on his face. She put the cup down with a suddenly shaking hand. ‘Is something wrong?’
He didn’t answer and that only increased her fear. His hands were white-knuckled and a pulse was beating fast at his temple, just below a wayward strand of jet-black hair. She could sense an almost palpable tension about him—as if he was only just clinging on to his temper by a shred.
‘Renzo! What’s wrong?’
He fixed her with a gaze which was cold and hard. ‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘Renzo, you’re scaring me now. What is it? I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I.’ He gave a harsh and bitter laugh. ‘But suddenly I do.’
From his pocket he took out an envelope and slapped it onto the table. It was creased—as if somebody had crushed it in the palm of their hand and then changed their mind and flattened it out again. On the cheap paper Renzo’s name had been printed—and whoever had written it had spelt his surname wrong, she noted automatically.
His lip curved. ‘It’s a letter from your friend.’
‘Which friend?’
‘Shouldn’t take you long to work that one out, Darcy. I mean, it isn’t like you have a lot of friends, is it?’ His mouth twisted. ‘I never really understood why before. But suddenly I do.’
She knew then. She’d seen the look often enough in the past not to be able to recognise it. She could feel the stab of pain to her heart and the sickening certainty that her flirtation with a normal life was over.
‘What does it say?’
‘What do you think it says?’
‘I’d like to hear it.’ Was she hoping for some sort of reprieve? For someone to be writing to tell him that she’d once told a policewoman a lie—or that she’d missed school for a whole three months while her mother kept her at home? She licked her lips and looked at him. ‘Please.’
With another contemptuous twist of his lips he pulled out the lined paper and began to read from it, though something told her he already knew the words by heart.
‘“Did you know that Pammie Denton was a whore? Biggest hooker in all of Manchester. Ask your wife about her mam.”’
He put the note down. ‘It’s pointless asking if you recognise the writing, since it’s printed in crude capitals, but I imagine Drake Bradley must be the perpetrator and that this is the beginning of some clumsy attempt at blackmail. Don’t you agree?’ he added coolly.
Her normal reaction would have been to shut right down and say she didn’t want to talk about it because that had been the only way she’d been able to cope with the shame in the past, but this was different. Renzo was her husband. He was the father of her unborn baby. She couldn’t just brush all the dirty facts under the carpet and hope they would go away.
And maybe it was time to stop running from the truth. To have the courage to be the person she was today, rather than the person forged from the sins of yesterday. Her heart pounded and her mouth grew suddenly dry. To have the courage to tell him what maybe she should have told him a long time ago.
‘I’d like to explain,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath.
He gave her another unfathomable look as he opened up the refrigerator and took out a beer and Darcy blinked at him in consternation because cool and controlled Renzo Sabatini never drank during the day.
‘Feel free,’ he said, flipping the lid and pouring it into a glass. But he left the drink untouched, putting it down on the table and leaning against the window sill as he fixed her with that same cold and flinty stare. ‘Explain away.’
In a way it would have been easier if he’d been angry. If he’d been hurling accusations at her she could have met those accusations head-on. She could have countered his rage with, not exactly reason—but surely some kind of heartfelt appeal, asking him to put himself in her situation. But this wasn’t easy. Not when he was looking at her like that. It was like trying to hold a conversation with a piece of stone.
‘My mother was a prostitute.’
‘I think we’ve already established that fact and I think I know how prostitution works,’ he said. ‘So what exactly was it you wanted to explain, Darcy?’
It was worse than she’d thought because there was anger, only it was quiet and it was brooding and it was somehow terrifying. Because this was a man she scarcely recognised. It was as if his body had become encased in a thick layer of frost. As if liquid ice were running through his veins instead of blood.
She looked at him, wanting to convey a sense of what it had been like, trying to cling on to the certainty that there was something between her and Renzo—something which was worth fighting for. There had to be. He might take his parental
