Chapter Four
‘HOW DO I LOOK?’ Alessia asked as she checked her reflection one last time.
She’d selected a pair of deep blue fitted trousers, a simple short-sleeved, high-necked silk top a shade lighter, and a thick satin band separating the two items around her waist. After much deliberation, she’d left her hair loose.
She’d originally tied it into a severe bun but Clara had said it made it look like she was trying too hard.
According to Clara, the bun sent the message of ‘this is me proving that seeing you again doesn’t affect me in the slightest,’ instead of the ‘seeing you doesn’t affect me in the slightest’ look Alessia was aiming for.
Clara looked her up and down and nodded approvingly. ‘Perfect.’
Alessia swallowed. Her world had been thrown into chaos but she could always rely on her sister-in-law’s honesty.
Clara’s ‘perfect’ answer meant Alessia had achieved what she set out to.
To get through the meeting that would bring her face to face with the man who’d slipped out of her life without a goodbye and which would determine the rest of her life, she needed to look as perfect on the outside as she could. God knew she was a shambles inside.
It was Clara’s comment that she could believe Alessia to be pregnant that had started it all.
Alessia must have had her head in the sand because until that point, she hadn’t put together the dots of a late period, tender breasts and nausea.
Until that point, she hadn’t registered that she had no memory of Gabriel using contraception.
What fateful naivety. What brainless stupidity.
She still had no idea how she’d got through Amadeo’s party.
If Clara hadn’t stayed so close throughout the evening, she probably wouldn’t have.
Clara had come to the rescue when it came to the pregnancy test too.
Knowing how difficult it would be for Alessia to buy one without detection, she’d popped to a pharmacist the next morning with her security detail.
Let them think the test was for her! she’d said.
She’d then sneaked it over to Alessia and sat holding her hand while they waited for the result to show, and hugged her and stroked her hair for an hour while Alessia sobbed over the positive result.
Unfortunately, Clara was incapable of telling a lie, and when she’d returned to her quarters and Marcelo asked what she and Alessia had been doing, she’d felt compelled to tell him the truth.
Even more unfortunately, their father happened to be there too.
There had been no time at all for Alessia to come to terms with her situation before her whole family and the majority of the palace staff knew about the pregnancy.
Within two hours of the positive result an emergency family meeting was convened.
For the second time in less than a month, Alessia was the subject behind said meeting.
Barely a day had passed since that positive result and she still hadn’t fully come to terms with it, not on an emotional level. Her family had gone straight to damage limitation mode and she’d been carried by the panicking swell with them.
If she’d thought her mother’s disappointment at her unguarded comment about Dominic had hurt, it had nothing on the cold anger she’d been hit with over the pregnancy, wounding far more deeply than Amadeo’s furious diatribe.
She checked her eyes one last time to ensure the drops she’d put in them that magically disappeared redness from all the crying she’d done were still working, then slipped her feet into a pair of silver heels, dabbed some perfume to her neck and wrists and left her quarters.
If not for a lifetime of poise, just one of the many things drilled into her from the moment she could walk, her first glimpse of Gabriel in the meeting room of her mother’s private offices would have knocked her off her feet.
Her heart thumped so hard she couldn’t breathe but she kept her back straight and her head high and strolled with all the nonchalance in the world to the empty chair.
Whatever happened in this meeting, her eyes would stay dry. She was a princess and she would remember her breeding and remain regal if it killed her.
Above all else, she would not let Gabriel know that seeing him again made her feel more violently sick than any pregnancy sickness.
She’d been nothing but a night of fun for him, quickly discarded and even more quickly forgotten.
It would be too humiliating if he guessed how deeply their night together had affected her. She could still feel the whisper of his touch on her skin. Still caught phantom whiffs of his cologne. Still felt her insides clench to remember how wonderful his lovemaking had been.
A member of staff held the chair out for her and she sat with a nod of thanks and cast her gaze around every person sat at the large oval table.
Her family—her parents and two brothers, who Alessia was sandwiched between—and the family lawyer, sat at one end.
At the other end sat Gabriel and a woman she assumed was his lawyer.
The only person her eyes skimmed over rather than meeting their stare head-on was Gabriel.
She’d intended to but at the very last second been unable to go through with it.
She didn’t think she could bear to see the expression in his eyes.
Skimming her eyes didn’t stop the blood pumping through her body as she still somehow managed to soak in every last detail about him, from the impossibly uncreased white shirt he wore to the perfectly positioned quiff of the black hair she’d thrilled to run her fingers through.
Jutting her chin, she rested her hands flat on the table, praying no one could see the tremor in them, and purposefully faced Amadeo.
Channelling their long-dead grandmother, who’d taken regal haughtiness to heights that deserved to be acknowledged as an art, she said, ‘Has he agreed to accept his responsibility?’
Gabriel had watched Alessia make her grand entrance with his heart in his mouth.
Feelings he couldn’t begin to describe had clawed and fisted his guts and heart since Amadeo’s bombshell.
When he’d driven through the castle gates, the usual photographers on duty hoping to get a shot of a Berruti family member or newsworthy associate bound for disappointment by his blacked-out windows, the clawing and fisting had reached a pinnacle.
Damn it, unless he treaded very carefully, this would be his life again.
The woman he’d never wanted to see again was pregnant with his child, and it enraged him that the blame for it was going to be laid on his shoulders by Alessia as well as her family. He’d thought better of her.
He’d thought better of himself too. But they’d both been there.
They’d both got carried away and failed to use protection.
After their first failure there had been little point in bothering with it, and truth was, the first time had been so damn glorious that he’d wanted to experience every single aspect of it again.
Maybe that’s why it had felt so good, he thought darkly.
That was the first time he’d made love without a barrier.
He was clean. He’d assumed the princess was too, something else that weighed on his mind—since when did he give the benefit of the doubt to anyone about anything, especially with regards to his sexual health?
Keeping himself safe, aka Contraception, was his responsibility.
This had the added benefit of him never having to worry that there might be miniature Gabriel Serres roaming the earth, and, as all these thoughts flashed through his mind, he found himself wondering if this had been her plan all along, to seduce him and get impregnated by him.
Because she sure as hell hadn’t mentioned that she wasn’t on the pill.
He could forgive the first time they’d made love—the madness had trapped them both—but allowing him to make love to her a second time knowing there was nothing to stop an accidental conception?
Not taking action to stop any conception when there was still time? Unforgiveable.
Intentional or accidental, he was there, about to negotiate for his life and the life of his unborn child.
He could play hardball and insist they wait until the birth for a DNA test but knew it would do nothing but delay the inevitable.
He knew in his heart the child was his, but if Alessia wanted him to go along with her family’s demands then she’d damned well better start showing him some respect or he would walk out of there and make the whole damn family wait until the birth for fresh negotiations.
He exhaled the anger that had spiked through him at Alessia’s contemptuous tone as well as her unjustified blame. He would not allow any emotion to show. He needed to treat this like every negotiation he’d taken control of since he was a teenage boy negotiating his warring parents’ divorce.
‘I am more than willing to accept responsibility,’ he informed the side of her head icily, before her brother could speak. ‘The extent of that responsibility is still to be decided, but whatever the outcome of these negotiations, I will support my child and be a father to it.’
‘What is there to negotiate?’ Marcelo asked, his eyes blazing. ‘You’ve got my sister pregnant. You have to marry her.’
Gabriel folded his arms across his chest. ‘Actually, I don’t.’
‘You took advantage of her,’ Amadeo spat.
‘I took advantage of a twenty-three-year-old woman?’ he drawled with a hint of disdain.
Angry colour stained the heir’s cheeks. He would have said something else had Queen Isabella not placed her hand lightly on his. ‘You have to see things from our position,’ she said.