Chapter Four
“YOU CAN CHANGE UPSTAIRS.” Luca waved her to go ahead of him in case she needed catching again. “The doctor is on his way.”
“Why?” she asked over her shoulder.
“You’ve fainted at least twice. I’ll have a second opinion on whether that is normal.”
She sniffed and walked through the open doors into the primary suite. With its attached home office and private parlor, it took up this entire floor. Guest bedrooms were another flight up.
Jade paused at the end of his bed and turned, leaving the skirt of the gown twisted around her legs. “Do you have a housekeeper or someone who can unlace me?”
“She only comes in the morning. I’ll do it.”
Not that he wanted to step into the role of groom. He’d been annoyed at the person on the street presuming Jade was his bride. He was still furious she’d been prepared to marry someone else if she was, indeed, having his baby.
Quit saying “if.” It’s yours.
Twice in his life, his reality had been completely upended. He loathed that it was happening again so he was fighting it, not ready to believe this was his baby until he knew. Then he would decide whether marriage was in his future.
Jade made an alluring bride, though. He remembered exactly how soft and smooth her skin was. How lush her breasts had felt in his hands. How responsive she was to his every touch.
She turned away, gathering her skirt and hair forward so she was an exquisitely feminine ivory silhouette. A silk cord crisscrossed through dozens of loops down her back, forming a shoelace pattern from between her shoulder blades to her tailbone, ending in a bow.
He tugged the tail, but the cord didn’t relax.
“I have to pull it free of all of this?”
“And unzip it, yes.” Her back was stiff and straight.
What man would have the patience for something like this on his wedding night? It was a torture device.
It left far too much room for thought as he began pulling the tails of the cord from their loops, trying not to damage the gown.
Jade stood very still while he worked. The whisper of silk against silk was the only sound.
He found his gaze traveling to her shoulders, studying the patterns in her freckled skin, tempted to set his lips against her nape and drink in the sweet fragrance of nectarine—the scent that had clung to his clothes all the way back to Sicily.
He’d been shocked by how quickly things had flared out of control that night.
Yes, he’d wanted her from the first second he spied her.
He’d taken her request for a lift back to London as reciprocal interest and had anticipated bringing her back to this town house for exactly what they’d done on Yardley’s father’s desk.
Dancing with her had been an impulse. An excuse to touch her while they waited for his car. It had been foreplay. He liked kissing and caressing and making a woman climax with his fingers or his tongue. It thrilled him and made him feel powerful and turned him on.
He never lost his head the way he had that night, though.
He had wondered later if Yardley had somehow drugged him.
What else could explain the urgency that had gripped him?
Desire had consumed him. He had craved her taste and reveled in stoking her to acute tension, then tipping her past it and turning her buttery soft before drawing forth more needy gasps and supple offering and a plunge into heat that had scorched him to his soul.
He’d been drained in the aftermath, muscles shaking, brain empty, shocked to discover where he was. He remembered telling her to meet him outside, wanting fresh air and a moment of distance to reclaim his senses. His autonomy.
The news about his grandmother had crashed him back to reality, but there’d been a hot minute where he had thought he should wait for Jade. Maybe even take her with him?
It had felt like a betrayal to entertain that at all. He wasn’t someone who relied on others and they had nothing in common. She was a superficial partier who’d come here to hook up with strangers on a whim.
He had left without speaking to her to prove he could, uncomfortable with how intensely she’d affected him.
He wasn’t used to his self-discipline unraveling so easily, but as this length of silken cord slithered free of its loops, his lizard brain was conjuring prurient uses for this string. Weighted heat sank into his groin, twitching him toward an erection.
He let the cord drop to the carpet and pinched the edge of her gown between her shoulder blades, releasing the hook and eye at the top of her zipper before sliding it down.
That’s when he noticed the fine trembling that gripped her.
It awakened his most carnal parts because it wasn’t fear.
Not with that flag of pink on her cheek or the unsteady way her breath was moving through her parted lips.
Her arms were folded to keep the gown pinned to her breasts, but the swells were quivering like water holding surface tension at the rim of a glass.
She was responding to his touch and it stirred his inner Neanderthal. He wanted to take a fistful of those fiery curls and draw her head back and slide his other hand from her neck into her loosened gown.
“Thank you,” she said in a strained voice.
He didn’t want to move. He wanted to finish unwrapping her, then press her to his bed and continue what they’d started three months ago.
But he had not earned his first million at twenty-two by failing to assess risks and threats. He had not been appointed to such a high-profile role at a multinational central bank by attending wild parties and impregnating socialites on an eighteenth-century desk.
He was an intelligent, ambitious man who was respected for his financial acumen and his grasp of world politics. He was seen as a careful, trustworthy hand at the wheel of international economics.
He had to be all of those things, not a man who could be affected so deeply, he made stupid choices.
He was not like his father.
“Come downstairs when you’re ready.”
Luca’s voice scraped across her taut nerve endings.
Jade tried to be glad he walked out so summarily. She’d been all too aware of the brush of his fingertips at her back, the imposing presence of him behind her, and the way he had undressed her so dispassionately.
Deep down, however, when the doors closed behind him, she felt rebuffed all over again. He wasn’t nearly as affected by her as she was by him. He sounded as though he was angry with her for everything from getting pregnant to trying to marry Reggie to existing at all.
Which was very much the same-old, same-old so she tried to ignore it.
Since she had her phone now, she quickly looked up Luca Cardillo, but didn’t learn much beyond that he’d been born in Sicily, had spent much of his career climbing the ranks at one of Italy’s top investment banks and had recently been appointed to the executive board of a central bank.
Words like “visionary leadership” and “eligible bachelor” were frequently used to describe him.
None of that made an unplanned pregnancy with a stranger sound like welcome news to a man like him, so why hadn’t he allowed her to deal with it quietly? Was he the vindictive type who liked to retaliate?
Fortunately, she was used to people ruining her best-laid plans.
She always had plans B and C, all the way down to XYZ.
When she had mentioned living hand-to-mouth in a council flat with her mother, she already knew what that would look like.
She didn’t want that to happen, but she wasn’t afraid of it because she knew how she would manage it and already had a plan for how to climb out of that circumstance.
That look-ahead strategy was a defense mechanism from boarding school, when she’d been terrified of the dining hall because she hadn’t known where she would be allowed to sit.
She had learned to decide ahead of time that she would try the table in the far corner near the window.
If it was taken, then the spot near the column.
If she was pushed out of that one, she would sit at the one by the serving counter.
Even today, she had run through contingencies all morning.
She was supposed to be traveling to Leeds by now, where she would have stayed with Reggie’s family at their country estate.
Despite a fixed plan to visit them through the weekend, she had packed her passport and four hundred pounds in cash, and had familiarized herself with train schedules, budget cafés and short-stay rentals that she might need in a pinch.
She also had an emergency fund she never touched.
It was enough to keep her mother stable for a few months if everything went sideways—which it had.
Even as her father had been telling her the Snells had a son willing to marry her, Jade had been composing an ad to sublet her flat, in case Kandili had to be let go and she had to move in with Mum herself.
Jade’s mind continued running through all her fallback positions as she pulled on the black trousers and a pale green top she had planned for the train.
They were smart and good quality, but conservative and boring, exactly like the rest of her wardrobe.
She hated drawing attention and had wanted to reassure Reggie’s mother that her new daughter-in-law would not cause any trouble.
How were these pants too tight?
She winced and struggled to suck in her tummy as she closed them. She had gained exactly two kilos, but everything felt pinched and uncomfortable, from bra to knickers to the ankle socks she put on before sticking her feet into a pair of soft-soled flats.
Dreading whatever censure Luca intended to throw at her, she lingered to remove her makeup and brush out her hair, gathering the mass into a loose ponytail in an attempt to ease the tension in her scalp.
When she’d run out of delay tactics, she made her way downstairs in time for the doctor’s arrival.