Chapter Five #2
Then he huffed out a bitter laugh, his eyes roaming the room, before coming back to her, in disbelief.
‘Really? That’s what you’re worried about right now?’ he demanded. Of course she would care more about Gallo Group than, oh, just a little something like telling him he was the father of an unborn child.
‘Well, that’s what brought you here,’ she pressed. ‘You said you needed me to handle the contract renewal.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with it later,’ he dismissed.
‘You can’t. He’s GG’s biggest client. If he goes, then the whole company will fall apart!’ she exclaimed.
And he knew he shouldn’t be surprised. He knew he shouldn’t be angry that at this very moment in time, just when he was struggling with the fact that he was going to be a father, she was worrying about her family’s damn company.
‘This is very true,’ he agreed. ‘It’s also something you didn’t care one single iota about less than twenty minutes ago. And as you so rightly pointed out, Gallo Group is mine and I’ll handle it in the way I see fit.’
She let out a growl of frustration that matched precisely how he felt.
He locked his phone screen, slipping it back into his pocket, and watched as Maria did a very good impression of someone about to throw a tantrum.
He imagined there would be only three seconds before she started tapping her foot on the floor in annoyance.
That she did it in four seconds showed a surprising amount of restraint on her behalf.
She huffed a long wave of thick black curls over her shoulder and his hand fisted from the memory of how it had once felt to hold those in his palm.
How she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen was beyond him.
He had spent years living in Paris, and had counted models as some of his companions.
Was it because now he knew she was pregnant?
Was he imagining the glow about her, or was that simply the heat of her anger? Did it really matter?
Certainly not now that she was carrying his child. Which brought him right back to the matter at hand. He’d checked his diary before messaging his assistant. And even if it hadn’t been clear, he would have made it so.
‘Will this weekend suffice?’ he asked her, knowing that it would throw her. Knowing that it would confuse her. A small, mean part of him relished the fact that she might feel just a little of what he was currently struggling with.
‘For what?’
‘Our wedding.’
‘Wedding? I can’t marry you!’ she cried, throwing her hands up in the air. ‘What on earth would the family think? That I’m so desperate to get my hands on Gallo Group that I’d sell myself by marrying—’
Her words halted dramatically mid-sentence and mid-air, the temperature in the room dropping to freezing from his anger.
‘What were you going to say, cara?’ he demanded. ‘That you were prostituting yourself? To someone like me? The illegitimate bastard son of a whore who inherited everything they’d always wanted?’
‘Micha, I—’
But he didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want her to take back her unthinking words. Because he needed to know, needed to remember what she thought about him. He couldn’t go into this blindly and naively like he had before.
‘I’ve been called worse. I don’t care what they think,’ he dismissed.
‘But I do,’ she said, her eyes bright with indignation.
‘And that’s always been your problem, Maria. One that I’m more than happy to exploit to my advantage.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘All I have to do is wait, Maria. Because it won’t be long until you start to show.
And what do you think will happen when news of an unwed Gallo heir gets out?
No, I know you better than that. So I know you’d rather marry me than drag Gallo Group through the mud by such a scandal.
You might not work there any more, but you’re a Gallo.
You wouldn’t do anything to harm the company. ’
‘You bastard,’ she bit out.
‘Yes. That is quite literally true,’ he admitted. ‘Which is why when I say that we will be marrying this weekend, I mean it. So let me be very clear, bella. There is literally nothing I won’t do in order to ensure that my child grows up legitimate. Nothing.’
She saw it. The absolute, uncompromising truth in his gaze. When he got like this, he was a force to be reckoned with, undeniable and unstoppable. It was both absolutely pig-headed and infuriating, but once it had also been incredible.
He took a step closer to her, enough so that Maria could smell the seductive hints of his aftershave and see the hard gold glittering in his eyes.
‘I would become a hound of hell myself, cara, if it was necessary,’ he vowed, and she believed him.
Tears pressed at the backs of her eyes, but she would not, could not, let them fall. Not in front of him. What she did behind closed doors was her business, but she couldn’t show this man a single hint of her vulnerability.
He was right. She did care what her family thought.
She did care how news of her pregnancy would shake the very foundations of Gallo Group—a company that prided itself on traditional family values.
A family that prided itself on them, even though not a single one of Gio’s children had ever entered into a happy, successful marriage.
But she also cared that at one point in her life he was the only man she thought she might be able to have this future with: a child, a husband.
He had always been the shadowy face in her fantasies.
But the hatred, the anger that she saw in his gaze right now?
Oh god, it was the nightmare that had come from a beautiful daydream.
But she couldn’t dwell on that right now.
‘So other than your ego, is there a single reason that you can provide that would stop us from getting married? Stop me from providing the kind of security that our child would need?’ he asked.
‘I have my own money, Micha,’ she reminded him.
It devastated her, the way he made it sound as if it were nothing but selfishness to refuse his proposal—and what proposal? Demand more like.
But she didn’t want her child to grow up the way that he had, with the scars that he had.
Oh, he might hide them well these days, but once he’d been vulnerable enough for her to catch a glimpse of them.
He’d never once blamed his mother, never once treated her with anything but the respect she deserved.
But Maria knew those scars were there. And she’d do anything to protect her child from those same wounds.
‘This weekend?’ Maria asked, hating the weakness in her voice.
‘What would you gain by waiting?’
She opened her mouth, but he pressed on, regardless.
‘You’ve already had two months. And what has that brought you? Other than a house in the middle of nowhere?’ he remarked, looking around him as if the place that she had hoped would be her salvation, her sanctuary, was lacking in some way.
She wanted to argue. She wanted to rail against him, against his accusations.
She wanted to pound her fists against that powerful, broad chest of his.
And he looked at her as if he knew it. As if he could so easily read her every desire.
Just like he had looked at her the night she’d visited him in Paris.
‘Mmm?’ he prodded, as if he were actually waiting for an answer.
It had brought her nothing but the mirage of time. She’d not gotten anywhere other than where she’d been when she first arrived. She’d barely even been able to unpack. As if she too knew that she wouldn’t be here long.
Because in truth, she’d always known. She’d go back to him.
She’d go back to him because no matter what she felt, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, keep his child from him, nor keep her child from its father.
Because no matter what passed between them, she knew that he would expend his last breath making sure that his child had whatever it needed.
And that was a man she’d marry.
As if sensing her surrender, he pulled his hands out of his pockets and rocked back on his heels.
‘Registry office,’ she bargained.
‘No.’
‘What?’ her head snapped up.
‘No; it’s a one-syllable, very common word,’ he defined unnecessarily.
‘Micha.’
‘If you think that you will start your life as my bride, come into my home as my wife, if you think you’re going to stand by my side at the very least until our child is of legal, adult age, having had some secret, out-of-the-way wedding with no photos or family as if we are ashamed, then you are very wrong. ’
She flinched, seeing it how he’d seen it and regretting her request instantly. ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she whispered.
‘Then what did you mean? Every single Gallo that has married in the last twenty years, with the exception of Antonio, has had the centre spread in Hello Magazine.’
‘Oh, and you think you can organise that in less than four working days, do you?’ she shot back, instead of answering his question.
‘You would do well not to underestimate me, Maria,’ he warned and she heeded.
‘Nor you, me, Micha,’ she said, feeling the hot scouring heat of anger crawling up her spine.
She was tired of his threats, and if she was being honest, was a little bit hurt too.
‘You think you can come in here and make demands that upend my life and that I have no say? What about after the wedding, huh? What about after you’ve put your ring on my finger and claimed me in front of the world?
’ Like some trophy, she mentally added. ‘You’ll go back to work running the company you know should be mine, while I stay at home and play wife and mother? ’
‘Play?’ he asked, an arched eyebrow raised in a challenge.
‘You know what I mean,’ she dismissed.
‘No, I don’t,’ he said, leaning back from the breakfast bar. ‘The Maria I knew would never have kept such a secret to herself.’
‘The Maria you knew grew up after you left,’ she shot back, wishing his gaze wasn’t so unfathomable. ‘She stopped making assumptions long ago, so yes. Before I even consider agreeing to your proposal, I want to know what marriage looks like to you.’
She saw the muscle flex in his jaw, knew that his silence was not mutinous, nor malicious.
He was struggling to formulate his words in that way that he sometimes did when his emotions became too much.
The realisation, a knowing left over from a time when they had been close, when she had thought that perhaps they loved each other, hit her hard and took her own frantic pulse rate down a little.
Because this wasn’t easy for him. And somehow that made it less painful for her.
‘I will not have our child growing up like you—watching your mother stand in silence while her husband flaunts his affairs for all and sundry,’ he announced, the verbal blow striking a bullseye.
It had been that silence, that mute acceptance of the most awful carelessness that had driven Maria almost entirely through her life, determined never to be that person, never to let another person turn her into a statue, with no other purpose than to stand there and look pretty.
‘Nor shall it grow up like me,’ he continued, cutting into her thoughts, and stopping himself before he could describe a childhood that she already knew.
It had never been a secret that his mother had been forced to sell herself on the streets after his father abandoned them the day Micha was born.
Perhaps, she thought for the first time, it should have been.
Perhaps his shame would have been easier to bear—not that she believed for even a second that he should have been ashamed.
How on earth were they—two broken people—supposed to raise something so pure, so innocent and so utterly dependent on them? When they hated each other.
But you don’t. You don’t hate him.
She pushed her inner voice down where she couldn’t hear it any more.
‘What did you mean about my mother?’ she asked, wanting to know, needing him to be clear.
He frowned, the slash of his brow dark over his eyes.
‘Affairs?’ she forced herself to ask.
It was clear that Micha wanted a traditional marriage, but…
‘There will be no affairs, Maria.’
His words reverberated in the room with his vehemence.
‘I—’
‘So that there is no confusion, after our marriage you, and our child, will come to live with me. We will live together until our child is eighteen. We will appear united and very much in love to every single person that knows us. Family, colleagues, the journalists that swarm this family like wasps, even the parents of our child’s friends.
The entire world will envy our marriage, Maria.
So there will be no affairs. And before you can rage in accusation that I would have any different role in this marriage, I will never share my bed with another woman while my ring is on your finger. ’
Maria scoffed.
‘I’m not a savage, Maria. I can control myself.’
‘For eighteen years?’
‘Yes.’
There was no compromise in his response. No room for her to question or doubt. He meant every word he said.
Her phone on the countertop vibrated, causing it to jump a little across the smooth marble.
And yet Micha didn’t take his eyes off her.
The phone continued to ring, completely ignorant of the battle of wills that was happening around it.
This marriage? This kind of marriage? It was everything she’d never wanted for herself. Everything she’d spent her entire life trying to avoid. But for her child? For the security, the legitimacy, the protection, he could offer them? There wasn’t even a single moment’s hesitation.
She nodded in agreement.
‘Okay,’ he said, his gaze flicking across to her phone. He picked it up and swiped the screen to accept the call, as if he had the damn right.
‘Ivy? What are you and your husband doing on Saturday?’ he asked and just like that, Maria’s life changed again.