Back to Claim His Italian Heir
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Kate Hewitt
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HarlequinCHAPTER ONE
‘I DO.’
The words ringing out through the church were not the ones Emma Dunnett expected. They weren’t the ones anyone expected, because this was the part of the wedding ceremony where everybody was meant to stay deliberately, determinedly silent, without so much as a sneeze or a sigh. Someone, it seemed, hadn’t got the memo.
Emma stared at her husband-to-be in alarmed confusion as an electric, expectant silence tautened the near-empty sanctuary and people in the congregation started turning their heads, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the mystery speaker. Her groom was looking just as surprised as she was, his forehead crinkled as his uncertain gaze swept the church for the unknown speaker, lost in the shadows in the back.
‘You...do?’ This from the priest who was marrying them, who also looked confused—there was way too much confusion going on, clearly—peering through the shadowy sanctuary at whoever had spoken with such ringing certainty.
I do was not the answer anyone wanted to the question that had just been given: ‘Does anyone have any objections to this marriage? Speak now or for ever hold your peace.’
No, no one ever wanted to hear someone so much as clear their throat when it came to that particular question. Nobody was supposed to actually answer that, Emma thought with a blaze of panic, her mind a blur as she searched the darkened church for the speaker of those damning words. Asking the question was just a matter of form, a relic from a bygone age, even. A second’s silence, a silent sigh of relief, a shaky smile, and then they moved on. They said their vows, they left the church, they were married, and everything could go on happily.
‘Yes,’ the voice from the back of the church called, his tone strident and certain, faintly tinged with an indefinable accent, tickling Emma’s consciousness, making her stomach dip.
That voice...
‘I most definitely do have objections. One in particular, as it happens.’
The priest was still peering among the pews, where only a handful of guests had gathered—mainly Will’s family and a few friends, all of whom had been rather bemused—to put it mildly—at his willingness to marry a woman he’d met only a little over a month ago. They were all looking much more than bemused now, Emma realised as she caught sight of their faces—Will’s mother was doing her best impression of a gorgon, stony-faced and sour. She’d never wanted her only son to marry someone she considered a shameless gold-digger, having said so to Emma’s face, more than once. Well, so what? There were worse things to be called. Worse things to be.
Not that that was what she was. At least, not exactly. She was marrying Will for security, it was true, but he knew that and they’d become friends. It would be, she hoped, a good basis for marriage. For a family.
She glanced again at Will’s mother and saw her lips twitch in something like satisfaction. Had she arranged this, a way to extricate her son from the so-called siren’s seductive claws? Considering Emma had never even kissed Will, who wasn’t interested in her that way anyway, being cast in the role of scheming seductress was a little ridiculous. Not that his mother would believe just how chaste their relationship was, especially considering Emma was fourteen weeks pregnant...with another man’s child.
A sudden bubble of laughter rose in her throat, and she managed to swallow it down. Bursting into giggles at a moment such as this was definitely not something she wanted to do; the situation was clearly dire enough. She didn’t want to make it worse, even if laughing had always been her deliberate, defiant default, her own brand of courage throughout a tumultuous childhood. Laugh instead of cry, show your sense of humour along with your spirit. It had served her well enough in the past, but now...when her life looked about to be derailed, again?
‘Who are you?’ Will called out, uncertain ire flashing in his pale blue eyes. Emma tried to give him an encouraging smile, although the truth was nothing about this situation felt remotely encouraging. Already she could feel her safe and certain future slipping from her fingertips, as it always seemed to.
Just when she’d settled into the latest foster home, got a decent job, managed to save a little bit...every time, something seemed to go wrong. And for someone who had always had to rely on her own wits and not much else, something going wrong could be disastrous. Hopefully that wasn’t the case this time, because now she had someone else to consider. Someone tiny and precious and very, very vulnerable.
She straightened, one hand resting on her slight bump as she heard footsteps down the nave of the church, swift and solid.
‘Sir?’ the priest called, squinting as he tried to catch sight of the figure striding down the nave, each footfall more purposeful than the last, thuds that reverberated through Emma, echoed in her heart. ‘What objections can you possibly have to this marriage?’
‘What objections?’ A shudder ran through her, like an icy finger down her spine, straight through her soul. She knew that voice. It was the voice that had haunted her dreams, when she’d woken up in tangled sheets, gasping with a potent mix of desire, hope and grief—a roughened thrum, shot through with a velvety softness, a hint of laughter lurking somewhere deep within the assured rumble, a voice that conjured so many memories, and too many regrets. A voice that had made her smile, even when she hadn’t wanted it to.
Hold onto your senses, Emma. Head over heels is definitely not for you, even if you want it to be.
It was a voice she’d never, ever expected to hear again, because its owner was dead.
‘My objection,’ the owner of that silky, powerful voice continued, coming to the front of the church, a shaft of sunlight from the stained glass above gilding his dark hair in gold, ‘is that the bride is already married. To me.’
Nico Santini turned blazing green eyes towards Emma, who felt as if she’d turned to stone. Or maybe ice, because, looking at the freezing fury in her husband’s eyes, she suddenly felt very, very cold. Another shiver went through her, and she dropped her bouquet, white rose petals scattering across the stone floor of the church, releasing their heavy scent, making nausea rise up in her in a tidal wave of realisation as her head swam and her body continued to tremble.
‘Nico...’ His name came out in a croak. ‘How...?’ She found her mouth was too dry, her heart pounding too hard, for her to finish that improbable question. How could he be here? He was dead. Dead! He’d died nearly four months ago, just one week after they’d had a whirlwind romance and wedding, all within the space of a single month. And here she was about to have another one, and... No. He couldn’t be here. He couldn’t be alive. She’d seen the death certificate. They’d had a funeral. Or at least a memorial service, as his body had never been found. And then she’d been basically bundled out of the door and onto a plane before she’d barely got out of her mourning dress, as per, apparently, Nico’s wishes.
So why was he here, in Los Angeles, looking so thunderous? She’d last seen him in Rome, about to travel to the Maldives, where she’d been so sure he’d been killed in a terrible accident, the engine failing on the small plane he’d hired to take him to one of Santini’s world-famous luxury resorts.
A shudder went through her. She couldn’t cope with the mix of emotions she felt: surprise, a wary, absurd joy, but most of all a creeping sense of dread. She’d never known this man, she understood that now, never mind that she’d married him in a haze of hope and happiness. She didn’t want him here, back from the dead, looking absolutely furious, and understandably so, considering the nature of the situation.
Emma was suddenly, painfully conscious of her pale yellow wedding dress, the bouquet she’d just dropped on the ground, the short veil hiding her hair, and, most of all, the groom next to her, the man she’d been about to marry until her husband had walked through the door. Beyond all that, though, she was tinglingly aware of Nico’s thunderous expression as he willed her to look at him, which she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not yet, anyway. What on earth was she meant to do?
‘Sir?’ the minister demanded, his tone turning slightly querulous.
She had no idea how to handle this situation besides running away, not that she’d get very far in this dress and heels. Nico, here. Nico, her husband. Except they’d barely known each other and, despite the blaze of happiness she’d felt when he’d taken her in his arms, she’d started to fear he’d been tiring of her anyway, the way everyone else had in her life. Every foster family, every friend, every person who took a kindly interest and then walked away. Her own mother, even. Why should Nico have been any different? His family had certainly seemed to think he hadn’t been.
‘Emma?’ Will’s voice was soft, hurt, and she turned to him, saw the wounded look on his face. What could she possibly say to him?
‘Will... I... I’m so sorry... I can explain...’ Except Emma knew she couldn’t, not really. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his mother swell up like a bullfrog, full of vindication as she turned to the woman on her left, some aunt or other. And then there was Nico...standing there like a dark angel, a determined warrior, fierce and furious and absolutely certain.
Her husband...back from the dead.
‘Emma, what’s going on?’ Will asked, his voice rising a little. ‘Who is this guy? Are you actually married to him?’
‘I told you about Nico...’ Emma began, in a whisper.
Will’s face flashed with confusion. ‘But he died—’
‘Of course, she knows me,’ Nico cut him off, his voice vibrating with icy contempt. ‘And yes, she is married to me. I am her husband.’ His gaze swung from Will back to Emma, pinning her in place. Eyes as green as moss, and she’d seen them soft with desire, smiling down at her before he’d lowered his lips towards hers for a long and lingering kiss. Now those eyes looked like chips of emerald, glinting hard and cold. Well, there was no love lost on her side, either, all things considered. There had been no love at all, because she hadn’t known him. He hadn’t known her. No matter what she’d tried to let herself believe.
‘Emma?’ Will said again. The priest cleared his throat. Nico stared at her, his cold gaze not wavering. This was hideous. Hideous and unimaginable and really rather terrifying, because Nico wasn’t playing the besotted lover now. He looked as if he hated her, and maybe he did. Maybe he had before he left for the Maldives, or almost.
‘Nico was already tiring of you, Emma. He said as much to me. The sooner you leave, the better.’
After a lifetime of being passed like a parcel, she knew when it was time to get out. When she wasn’t wanted. She’d learned to read the signs—the flash of impatience in the eyes, the tightening of the lips, the weighted pauses and significant looks. And of course sometimes she didn’t need to read them; they were spelled out in blazing big lights.
‘Adopt Emma? Absolutely not.’
Her foster mother’s voice, laced with incredulity, echoed painfully through her all these years later. Yes, Emma knew what rejection looked like, felt like, and so she hadn’t waited around to face it again.
Now she opened her mouth. Closed it. Will let out a soft sound of distress, and the look of scorn on her husband’s face was mixed with an arrogant, blazing satisfaction. He was clearly in control here, calling the shots just as he always had before. As happy as she’d let herself be, Emma had been under no illusions about who had had the control in their short-lived relationship—Nico. Always Nico.
He was the one who had set the parameters of their affair. ‘A few weeks in New York, yes, I’ll fly you to Rome, it will end when I say it does.’
And then, to her shock, he’d asked her to marry him, and even though she should have known better, she’d agreed. She’d wanted the fairy tale, no matter how brief it turned out to be. It was no surprise at all that Nico had come to regret his uncharacteristically impulsive decision.
‘I...’ she began, and then found she couldn’t go on. In addition to already feeling icy, incredulous and yes, terrified, she was also starting to feel dizzy. Very dizzy, because even as she stared at Nico standing there like an avenging angel her vision was starting to tunnel and she had a strange metallic taste in her mouth.
‘Yes, Emma?’ Nico drawled coldly.
‘I...’ She couldn’t see to get past that one word. A whisper ran through the congregation like a lit fuse. The world was blacking at its edges, as if she were looking through a telescope, and Will was still gazing at her with a puppyish mixture of hurt and concern. She wasn’t brave enough to look at Nico again.
Once more Emma tried to speak. No words came out. There were spots dancing in front of her eyes, and the sight of Nico was becoming smaller and smaller, like a pinpoint at the centre of her eye, shrinking into the distance. If only he would go away completely...
‘Emma—’ Will said, stepping towards her, but it was too late.
The last thing she saw before she crumpled to the floor was Nico’s incredulous fury emblazoned on every taut line of his beautiful face.
Well, that certainly was one way for his errant wife to weasel out of a situation. Nico tamped down on his fury as he stepped forward to Emma’s crumpled form. Her erstwhile groom was looking at her in dismay, fluttering his hands uselessly. What a waste of space, stuffed in a suit. He needed to be got rid of immediately, along with all these rubbernecking guests.
‘Clear the way,’ Nico commanded as he bent to pick up his wife. She smelled of the roses from her fallen bouquet along with the scent that was uniquely her, a scent he remembered, that he’d breathed in deeply. He’d once asked her what perfume it was, and she’d laughed, a gurgle of pure enjoyment.
‘Just soap,’ she’d told him, her golden eyes dancing, sparkling like bits of amber. ‘Eau de Dollar Store.’
He’d laughed back and snatched her up in his arms, breathed in the sweet, soapy scent of her hair, revelling in her, in them. What a fool he’d been. What a naïve, deluded fool.
‘Sir—’ the groom began, and Nico silenced him with a single look, swift and blazing.
‘Your part in this farce is over,’ he told the man flatly. ‘Emma Dunnett—Emma Santini—is my wife. I’ll take over from here. You can see yourself out, along with all your guests. As quickly as possible, if you please.’
He drew Emma, lolling lifelessly in his arms, against his chest. She was light, her body lithe and slender, maybe even more than he remembered. Her golden-brown hair was wreathed in roses with a short veil, and she wore a simple ankle-length shift dress of pale yellow. At least she hadn’t worn wedding white, he thought sardonically.
How could she have betrayed him like this?
And yet, why should he be surprised? He’d had betrayal in his life before, a string of deceptions that were still painful to acknowledge. His mother’s affair, his father’s remoteness, all based on the lie of who he was—and who he wasn’t. If the people he’d loved most in the world had deceived him so utterly, another treacherous act should hardly shock him...and yet from her.
From her.
The priest, having sprung into motion, gestured for Nico to head to a small room off the sanctuary of the church. Nico deposited Emma on a small, worn sofa and stepped back.
‘Sir,’ the priest stammered, ‘this is highly irregular...’
‘We’ll be out of your way in a few minutes,’ Nico assured him, ‘after my wife has regained her senses. Could you please leave Emma’s things outside the door for my driver to retrieve?’
He had a car waiting outside, and no interest or intention in staying here for a single second longer than necessary.
‘Please, if you could leave us alone,’ he commanded, and with an unhappy look the priest scurried away. Nico heard the murmur of voices and click of heels before the door closed, and he knew the guests were leaving. Good.
As he gazed down at the supine form of his wife, he hoped, belatedly, that she hadn’t injured herself, but then acknowledged that, despite her fall, Emma was clearly someone who always landed on her feet. She’d demonstrated that admirably today.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she caught sight of him—a gleam of awareness brightening her golden irises before her lids drifted shut again.
Lord help him, but she was beautiful. More beautiful than he’d even remembered. And he’d spent months remembering—months in a hospital bed, trying to remember his own name, her face feeling like the only thing his mind hadn’t let him forget.
And that face was before him right now—heart-shaped and pale, her faintly snub nose scattered with golden freckles, her pink lips slightly parted. Her chest rose and fell in pants that were too agitated to be the deep and even breathing of someone rendered unconscious.
‘Open your eyes, Emma,’ Nico commanded flatly. ‘I know you’re awake.’
If anything her lids scrunched even more tightly shut. Nico let out a huff that would have been laughter if he’d been remotely amused. He wasn’t, because he was too angry for that. And he was angry because that felt so much better than being hurt.
Just a little over three months he’d been gone. Three months.
‘Emma.’
A breath shuddered out of her as she kept her eyes resolutely closed. ‘I don’t feel like opening them,’ she confessed in a croaky whisper.
‘Because you want me to just go away,’ Nico surmised in a hard voice. ‘I’m not surprised.’
Finally Emma cracked open a single eye, to gaze at him uncertainly. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘No, why should I be, considering how quickly you were able to forget me?’ he replied coolly. ‘Two weddings in the space of three months has to be a record for just about anyone.’
‘Three and a half months,’ she corrected weakly, and this time Nico did let out a huff of laughter—hard, humourless laughter, because she was certainly showing her true colours now. How could he have ever been so deceived? Because he’d let himself, he knew. Because, after the revelation of his own birth, he’d wanted to belong to someone. Well, lesson learned. Abundantly. Don’t go looking for love. Don’t even believe it exists, because he had yet to see it in his own life, from his own father.
‘I stand corrected,’ he told her. ‘Three and a half months from one wedding to the next...those two weeks make all the difference, clearly.’
She opened both eyes this time as she regarded him with a weary sort of apprehension. ‘How is it that you are alive?’
‘You sound so pleased that I am.’ She didn’t reply and he forced himself to continue, not to dwell on the truth that was staring him so bleakly in the face. She’d never cared about him at all. He’d just been a meal ticket, as his cousin Antonio had told him, right from the beginning, incredulous that he’d been so foolhardy as to marry a woman after an acquaintance of a mere three weeks. Nico had scoffed at his cousin, determined to believe that he was acting only out of spite and jealousy; their relationship had become increasingly strained since his father’s revelations, with Antonio embittered at not being handed the reins of Santini Enterprises.
And yet he, usually so pragmatic and resolute, had let himself, in a rare moment of weakness, be deluded by the most absurd fantasy. Well, no longer. Not for one second more. ‘I’m alive,’ he told her, ‘because I survived the plane crash. Obviously.’
She shook her head slowly, eyes wide as she stared at him in dismay. Clearly she didn’t relish the idea of living together as husband and wife again. Well, it wasn’t all appealing to him either, but he’d be damned if he’d let her commit bigamy by marrying another man.
‘But where have you been for the last three months?’ she asked, her voice sounding thin and papery. She was lying on the sofa like some sort of Snow White, her hair spread about the cushion, the circlet of roses having been knocked askew. Her figure was elegant and lithe, reminding Nico of how he’d explored every inch of that body, every intriguing dip and lush curve, how he’d made them his own.
He clenched his hands into fists to keep from reaching for her, even now. ‘Three and a half months, you mean,’ he reminded her in a voice like a blade, cutting and quick. ‘After the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean, I was rescued by a fishing boat, and then I was in a cottage hospital on a nearby island. After that I was transferred to a rehabilitation centre in Jakarta, before I returned to Rome last week. Any other questions?’
‘Why didn’t you let me know you were alive?’ This came out more stridently, a golden blaze in her eyes that reminded him of why he’d fallen in love with her, or at least thought he had. That spirit, that humour, the sparkle in her eye, the quirk of her lip. It had lightened something inside him, something that had desperately needed lightening, but of course it had all been false, a tissue of carefully constructed lies, because he’d never known her at all, not truly. That reality was staring him smack in the face right now.
‘Because first I was in a coma,’ he explained flatly, ‘and then I couldn’t remember my own name. I had no identification, no way of anyone knowing who I was. That had been destroyed in the crash.’ His voice pulsed with a pain that he did his best to hide. Those months had been torturous in their own way, and yet in the midst of all the pain and uncertainty, he’d remembered her. He almost wished now that he hadn’t.
Emma’s golden eyes widened as she scooted up on the sofa. ‘You were in a coma?’
‘It’s a little late to sound concerned.’
Her mouth dropped open, eyes flashing. ‘Nico, you can’t blame me for not knowing—’
‘I can,’ he informed her in a voice of silky, suppressed rage, ‘blame you for marrying the next man who offered. I assume he was the next man?’ He jerked his head towards the door to the sanctuary, which he sincerely hoped was now empty of guests—and groom. ‘Not a very impressive specimen, all told. Really, you could have done better.’
‘Don’t insult Will,’ she replied with quiet, dignified resignation. ‘Or blame him. He’s done nothing to you.’
True, but Nico felt a scorching flash of fury all the same. ‘No,’ he agreed when he trusted his tone to be pleasant. ‘I don’t blame him. Quite the contrary, my dear.’ He bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile as he took a step closer to her, watched her shrink against the cushions of faded velvet. Was she pretending to be afraid of him, to add to the drama, appeal to some sort of sympathy? Damsel in distress was a role she knew how to play to the hilt, but it wouldn’t work this time. Far from it. ‘I don’t blame your groom,’ he told her with succinct, acid sweetness. ‘I blame you.’
