Chapter 8
EVEN NOW, IN EARLY SPRING, it was delightfully warm and sunny in Italy, so the feeling of water lapping around her body as she entered had been beyond perfect.
Less perfect was the way Raf had magicked up a pale yellow bikini for her, still with the tags attached.
As though he’d furnished this house with the natural expectation that a woman would be with him. He probably did this here all the time.
And so what? She challenged inwardly. What did that matter? They weren’t a couple. They’d spent one night together, and then stupidly made out earlier today, but that didn’t mean he was in any way hers. And it didn’t mean she wanted him to be!
Still, the evidence of his lifestyle, the ease with which he did this sort of thing, was a jarring reminder of what a hill they had to climb.
They were so different, she mused, as she took the final step into the water, glad that she’d beaten him to the pool, because her body was completely submerged by the time he appeared, carrying a glass bottle of mineral water and two glasses.
He placed them near the blue and white striped sunbeds, but she barely noticed.
How could she, when he’d stripped down to a pair of navy trunks and nothing else? His body was exquisite.
Exquisite in a way she’d presumably noticed on the night they’d slept together.
But that had been at close range and this—seeing him from a distance—was like being slammed right between her eyes with his beauty.
His toned, tanned, fabulous wall of abdominals, his leanly muscled legs, everything about him was sheer masculinity and perfection.
Her mouth went dry, and her heart began to race.
With her last ounce of strength, she spun away from him, focusing instead on the picture-perfect view that spread out beneath her.
It was a patchwork of green grass and cypress trees against a deep azure sky.
She paddled to the edge of the pool and braced her palms on the warm coping, forcing herself to take in every detail, to distract herself from the fact she could hear him entering the water, then swimming towards her.
Knowing he was coming did nothing really to prepare her though. A moment later he was at her side, his elbows braced against the tiles, his body tantalizingly close.
“It’s a beautiful view,” she said, voice trembling a little with nervousness.
Yes, the man she’d conceived a baby with made her nervous. Except, it wasn’t really Raf, so much as her body’s response to him, and how hard she had to fight to ignore it.
“I’ve always thought so.”
“How long have you owned this place?”
She steeled herself to look at him, then wished she hadn’t when she found his eyes resting on her face in a way that made his own temptation blatantly obvious. Heat flooded her entire body, and the pool’s water was no match for it.
“It’s been in the family a long time. My grandparents used to spend summers here, so we would visit, as children. At some point, we started going to my aunt and uncle’s instead.”
“Do they live in Italy?”
His lips flickered with something like amusement, and it made her stomach loop and twist as though he’d kissed her.
“What?” she asked a little huskily. “Is that funny?”
“I like that you don’t know anything about my family. About me.”
“Should I?”
He shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
“I mean, I’ve heard of your family, obviously. But I don’t really follow gossip, or whatever.”
“That’s what I mean. I like that.”
Just having him say that, his statement, unleashed a hundred butterflies in her blood. She glanced back to the view jerkily, finding it hard to draw breath.
“Does that mean you don’t want me to know?”
The prolonged silence had her glancing back towards him.
“No,” he said, finally.
Her heart stammered.
“It’s refreshing to get a chance to explain it, that’s all.”
She propped an elbow onto the coping so she could rest her head in her palm. “Do the women you usually…see,” she said, opting for a softer euphemism than ‘sleep with’, “know all about you?”
“Most know who I am,” he said.
There it was again. The same spark of jealousy she’d felt when he’d showed her the wardrobe half-full of women’s clothes with the tags still attached. It took being a good host to the next level.
“That makes me feel kind of stupid.”
“On the contrary, why would you have known me? Our lives are very different.”
She smiled at that. “You mean, you have a private jet and I don’t even own a car?”
Something like pity shifted on his features and it sparked a deep rage response in Elodie. She’d had more than enough pity from more than enough people. In a way, she’d inured herself to it. But with Raf, it hit hard. It hurt.
“What happened with your ex?” he prompted, with quiet concentration.
Pain spread through her as she thought of Aaron, and all the dreams he’d turned to dust. “We were talking about you,” she side-stepped. “And your aunt and uncle.”
His lips tightened and for a moment she thought he might argue, but to her relief, he nodded once.
“My mother died, a long time ago. When I was just a boy. Afterwards, my father struggled. He had loved her a great deal and found life without her almost unbearable. He couldn’t function as a person, far less a parent. ”
Sympathy shifted through her.
“My aunt and uncle—Gianni and Maria—stepped into the breach. They took us in every school holiday, whenever they could. Their home became the epicentre of our lives—it still is, in many ways.”
“That’s who you were talking to, earlier?
” she prompted, surprised to reflect on the conversation she’d overheard, and all the emotions she’d experienced since then.
The hurt and anger, the feeling of betrayal that had morphed into a white-hot rush of need, and then, something like nervous excitement, at his suggestion they just focus on getting to know each other for a while.
“My brothers and cousins,” he said, gaze raking her face and then dropping for a moment too long on her lips, staying there until her bloodstream felt as though it were boiling.
“I was supposed to have dinner with them, last night. The woman who was leaving my house when you arrived is Willow, my sister-in-law. She’d come to make sure I remembered the dinner, and then, evidently, I forgot. ”
Relief—foolish and misplaced—surged through Elodie, to realise that she hadn’t caught him saying goodbye to a lover. How foolish. It didn’t matter if she’d ‘caught’ him or not. That he’d been with women since her was undeniable.
“You had a pretty good excuse,” Elodie pointed out.
“Something I’m sure they agree with, now they know.”
“They sounded concerned.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not a teenager. Why would this worry them so much?”
His eyes lifted to hers, bore into them for a long beat. “You are not the only one with a messy past relationship,” he said. “After my divorce, I swore I’d never have kids. Never settle down. This is quite clearly the opposite of that.”
Surprise lashed through her. “You were married?”
He turned away. His expression, even in profile, taut. “Yes.”
“Wow.”
He angled his face to her, as if reading her like a book. “Wow?”
“You just really don’t seem like the marrying kind.”
His lips compressed into a grim half-smile. “I’m not.”
“But you were?”
The air between them was charged with something she hadn’t experienced before. A tension hummed and zipped between them, but it was emanating purely from Raf. This conversation was almost impossible for him; she could tell, yet she didn’t offer him an easy way out.
They were going to have a baby together. Whether or not they were capable of compromising and co-parenting would be determined by how well they got to know one another. She couldn’t let him off the hook, in the same way she knew she had to be more honest with him about her own past.
“I’ll go first, if you’d like,” she said, reaching out and putting a hand on his forearm, then wishing she hadn’t, when a surge of desire lashed her whole body.
Inwardly, she trembled from head to toe.
Working out how to conquer that reaction was going to be one of the most important things she could do to make this situation work.
He dipped his head once, his features so taut she thought that they could snap apart.
“I was with Aaron for a long time. Almost ten years,” she admitted.
“He was my high school sweetheart, my first crush, first kiss, first everything.” She turned her attention back to the view, because it was easier to speak when she wasn’t looking at Raf.
“I know now that it was a far from perfect relationship, but at the time, I thought we were happy enough. I thought we made sense. We’d always talked about getting married ‘one day’, having kids.
I just didn’t realise that for him, it was more out of obligation than anything else. ”
She didn’t see the way Raf’s brows furrowed together, nor hear the curse he smothered behind his lips.
“We got engaged forever ago. Honestly, I guess he felt sort of pressured into it. That wasn’t my intention, I just thought we were on the same page, working towards the same goals.”
“And you weren’t?”
She shook her head.
“Even when we were engaged, it took a long time to set the date. Again, I think I probably steamrollered him into that, by finding the venue I loved and locking in their availability. In hindsight, I guess he saw it as an ultimatum.”
“On the contrary, it sounds to me that you were acting on the assumption that he’d proposed because he wanted to marry you.”
“I thought the hold up was to do with money,” she agreed, nodding quickly.
“His work was unreliable at best, so we were living off my income alone, and splashing out on a wedding was going to put a huge dent in our savings.” She bit into her lower lip, as she remembered how many conversations they’d had around budget and the expense of hosting even their closest family and friends for an evening.