Bound By The Billionaire's Vows

An ache spread through him, an ache of misery and disbelief. Of anger and rage. Skye wasn’t capable of that deception, surely?

She couldn’t have known.

‘She hadn’t mentioned it,’ he said with a hint of the ruthless determination that had seen him rebuild a once-great empire from its ashes and ruins. But his mind was reeling. Shock was seeping through him.

Skye was pregnant? And she’d come to him, seeking a divorce? A divorce he’d agreed to because he’d known he owed her that much; because he’d wanted her to be happy. And he’d thought he was done making stupid, emotion-driven decisions!

Would Skye have insisted on a divorce if she’d known about the baby? He couldn’t believe it of his wife. And yet, she was the daughter of that bastard Johnson. Did he really have any idea what she was capable of?

His brow was fevered as he replayed every detail of their meeting, looking for signs that she knew her condition. Had she touched her stomach at all? What else would a pregnant woman do? He had no clue.

Hell.

The idea of a baby had never even really occurred to him; foolish, given how often they’d come together.

‘Perhaps she has not been symptomatic.’ The doctor shrugged, as though it didn’t matter. As though it weren’t the most important news Matteo had received in his life. As though Skye’s knowledge or lack thereof wouldn’t change everything.

How could he forgive her if she’d planned to keep it from him?

His nod was distracted. ‘Is the baby okay?’

‘So far as I can tell.’ The doctor smiled reassuringly.

They’d only ever talked about children briefly. Skye was too young to have been thinking of having babies and Matteo hadn’t entered into the marriage with procreation on his mind. But still! She must have known how much this child would mean to him.

And she’d been intending to take the Vin Santo heir away from him. To raise his child as a Johnson!

Fury whipped at the soles of his feet, spurring him forward. ‘Did my wife’s handbag...?’

‘Yes, I believe it was dropped off separately.’ The doctor nodded curtly. ‘Someone found it on the pavement.’

His expression was grim.

‘I’ll have it brought in.’

‘Thank you.’

He waited impatiently, staring at Skye, trying to make sense of this, trying to hold his temper together. But, the more time that passed, the more he came to suspect the worst.

She’d been so adamant about the divorce—that it had to be right now. She had no time to wait.

And she’d held out the perfect carrot to get him to fit in with her plans! The hotel! The damned hotel. He would have done anything to get it back, even marrying her. And, yes, even divorcing her.

He’d wanted the matter of their marriage and the hotel resolved and she’d given him that on a platter. What a fool he was! He’d almost let go of the most valuable thing in his life.

His child.

How could he have been so stupid? Hadn’t he learned his lesson with the whole Maria debacle? He’d just been a boy then. A young, foolish boy. He’d fallen for her lies hook, line and sinker. He’d fallen in love with her too. And learned how stupid a notion love was. He’d sworn he’d never trust a woman again, and here he’d been about to take Skye’s request at face value. Damn it! She was a Johnson, first and foremost. When had he forgotten that?

A hospital staffer arrived minutes later, handing the handbag to him in a large plastic bag.

He took it without speaking, reaching for her bag and ripping it open. There were the damned divorce documents, alongside his purchase contract on the hotel. He removed both angrily and stuffed them in the still-damp pocket of his suit.

He was about to drop the bag to the floor when something else caught his eye.

Curiously, he reached for it, and his anger only darkened when he saw that the object was her passport with a ticket folded neatly inside. A quick inspection showed that it was to take her to Sydney, Australia, later that night.

The evidence was truly damning. All doubt evaporated and left inside him a seed of anger so powerful that it ripped his soul in half.

She had been going to take this child from him. His flesh and blood.

Nausea rolled through him, rising in his chest. He gripped his hands together, his eyes resting on his wife’s face—so beautiful, even like this.

Had she truly wanted to raise a child away from him? Without him ever even knowing?

The pain at the very idea was sharp.

‘Signor Vin Santo? We have spare clothes if you would like to get changed.’ A nurse was smiling at him kindly.

He didn’t return it. He couldn’t. ‘I’ll stay with my wife, thank you.’ The words rang with derision, yet the nurse didn’t seem to detect the undercurrent of Matteo’s tension.

Fury was at war with disbelief.

A machine was rolled through the door, its wheels making a soft squeaking noise as it was brought to rest beside Skye. The doctor he’d been speaking to earlier bustled in and sent him a look of reassurance.

‘Try not to be so worried,’ she said, pushing Skye’s dress up and arranging the blankets around her hips, exposing only her stomach. It was so flat. Was it possible that the doctor had got it wrong? How could a baby be developing inside her tiny frame?

His eyes devoured her body once more, purposefully looking for changes now. Her neat breasts were still small and round, just enough to fill his palms. But perhaps there was a new roundness to them he hadn’t appreciated before...

He swallowed past the bitterness. He would process her betrayal later. Once he knew his baby was okay.

The doctor lifted a part of the machine and pressed it to Skye’s belly, and Skye made a soft moaning noise.

‘Is it painful?’ Matteo asked instinctively.

‘No, not at all.’ The doctor spun the cart around so that Matteo could see the screen. He lifted his eyes to it and frowned.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘It’s too early to see anything clearly. I would say she is perhaps six weeks.’ The doctor smiled at him kindly. ‘Your baby is around the size of a lentil.’

‘A lentil?’

‘A legume,’ she clarified. ‘But I can see good blood-flow generally. There’s nothing here that worries me.’ She went to lift the wand but Matteo spoke, arresting her movement.

‘What is that?’ He pointed to a line at the bottom of the screen.

‘Ah. That is the heartbeat.’

‘The heartbeat?’ He closed his eyes as the reality began to thunder through him.

Emotions gripped him, so strong, so raw, and suddenly he wasn’t capable of speech. He stepped away from the bed, from his wife, from the doctor, and sucked in a deep breath of air.

‘Why don’t you get changed, Signor Vin Santo? You’ll be no help to her if you’ve come down with a flu.’

He didn’t answer. He was busy analysing the situation, trying to make sense of it.

Skye was pregnant with his child. With the Vin Santo heir. And she’d wanted to keep the information from him.

Unless... He turned slowly, his eyes locked to the doctor’s. Hope briefly flared in his chest. ‘You asked if she knew. Is there any way she wouldn’t have known?’

The doctor’s empathy was palpable. ‘Of course. It is still very early. If she hasn’t mentioned it to you, I think it is highly likely that she didn’t yet realise. It really depends on whether she had any other symptoms, and if she had a reason to do a pregnancy test. Were you trying to conceive?’

‘No.’ Their marriage was about one thing, and one thing only. The hotel. A child would just have complicated matters further.

How the hell had this even happened? She’d been on the pill, hadn’t she?

‘Your wife will be awake soon.’ The doctor leaned over and lifted one of Skye’s eyelids, then nodded confidently. ‘You will be able to ask her.’

It was suddenly imperative for Matteo to know the truth. No, it was imperative for him to know that she hadn’t known. He couldn’t believe that Skye would have planned to keep this information from him. Despite the evidence against her, he still had hope. A part of him believed she would never do something as calculated as taking a baby from its father.

No matter what he’d done, no matter what she believed, this was different. Their baby was not a pawn; it deserved better than to be used by either of them as a bargaining chip.

But worse was the belief she hadn’t intended to use it as a bargaining chip at all. Worse was the realisation that she had simply meant to disappear. To get on a plane and fly out of his life, taking his son or daughter with her.

He ground his teeth together and turned back to the bed.

His heart rolled.

It wasn’t possible.

‘Matteo? Where am I?’

Her thin, raspy voice drew his attention. He stared at her long and hard before speaking. ‘You’re in the hospital. In Venice.’ His expression was guarded, but he felt anger in his every expression, beneath the mask of civility he had donned with effort.

‘Hospital?’ Her eyes swept shut. ‘I fell. No, I fainted. That happens sometimes.’

‘Since when?’ he demanded icily, moving closer.

Her hands dropped to her stomach and he could see that she was in turmoil, that she was agonising over what to say. But apparently a need for reassurance eclipsed all other concerns. ‘Is he okay? Is my baby okay?’

CHAPTER THREE

EVERY SOUND IN the hospital was audible. The beeping of far-away machines monitoring the life signs of patients. The low-key chat of staff. The ringing of a phone. The whir of an overhead fan. Everything was audible in that way when things take on an almost supersonic quality in moments of shock and duress. The sounds had a brightness beyond their due.

Skye waited, her breath held, her worry lurching desperately.

‘Matteo?’ It was a whisper. A strangled, hoarse cry. ‘Please tell me...’

‘Our baby is fine,’ he said with a coldness that perforated her relief and doused it in ice.

Skye’s eyes fell closed. The whole point of coming to Italy and forcing his hand, of giving him the hotel, had been to ensure they were divorced before it was too late. Before her stomach became rounded, before she had given birth to their child, before he had any concept there even was a child. But she wasn’t sure she could summon the energy to care in that moment.

None of that mattered.

She felt only relief.

Tears stung her eyes. ‘Thank God. Oh, Matteo, I’m so relieved.’

‘They’re going to monitor you,’ he said, taking a step back from the bed and crossing his arms. ‘For a few more hours.’

‘I’m fine.’ Skye reached for the IV cable that was attached to her wrist and pulled it out. Matteo winced as the inch-long needle fell from her arm. ‘Fainting is one of the symptoms I’m learning to live with.’

She stood, but was so unsteady that Matteo couldn’t help but reach for her. His touch was clinical, but he didn’t want to see his wife—no, the mother of his child—splayed across the bed, unconscious again.

‘I’m fine,’ she reiterated snappishly, and her teeth were bared, her body language the definition of defensive. But it was the behaviour of a badly wounded lioness defending her cub.

She was terrified.

Of him? Of his anger? Of what she thought he’d do? So she should be! To attempt to conceal the Vin Santo heir from him... Just who did she think he was? ‘So you obviously knew you were pregnant.’ The words held a latent threat.

She winced and pulled back, moving away from him by skirting the bed.

‘When the hell were you planning on telling me?’

‘Would you stop yelling?’ she murmured.

Matteo ran his hand through his hair, pulling at it with barely suppressed frustration. He hadn’t intended to yell; only a rage he hadn’t felt for many years, since the last time he’d come up against a Johnson in a confrontation, had completely usurped all his other impulses. He spoke more softly, but there was an inherent danger to the silky edges of his words. ‘You weren’t going to tell me, were you?’

Skye looked at him for a moment and then turned her attention back to the bed. ‘I didn’t...feel it was any of your business,’ she said, and somehow managed to look confidently defiant even as she extolled the absurd explanation.

‘My baby is none of my business?’ he responded with scathing disbelief. ‘How exactly do you figure?’

‘You don’t want a child. Not with me. I was doing you a favour.’ She shook her head. ‘I was doing us all a favour. I don’t want to raise a baby with you any more than you do with me. And the baby deserves to be born into a world that’s not...full of bitterness and acrimony.’

‘The baby deserves a chance to know both his parents,’ Matteo responded sharply. ‘You were going to deny both it and me that opportunity. Weren’t you?’

She glared at him. ‘You went into this marriage wanting one thing, and one thing only. And now you have it. Children were no part of this.’

‘That is beside the point. You are, in fact, pregnant with my child. This is not in the realms of the hypothetical. I had a right to know.’

Her mouth dropped open and she stared at him, searching for something to say—anything—that might explain her point of view.

The hurt she’d felt at realising that he’d used her. The fact that he’d conned her into falling in love with him, had used her inexperience and desire against her, knowing that he would never be able to give her the only thing she really wanted.

Love.

Matteo wasn’t built to love. She knew that now. The newspapers that declared him heartless and ruthless were right.

What a fool she’d been to believe that their similar upbringings had destined them to be together. As though both having suffered the misfortune of being orphaned meant they would live happily ever after.

How could she explain to him that this option had been the best for everyone?

No words came to mind. Nothing. She had thought about it long and hard, though. She’d agonised over what to do. And this had made complete sense.

It still made sense.

‘I don’t want to raise a child with you,’ she said with a determination that was somewhat belied by her quivering lower lip.

‘That is not your decision.’

Skye pulled a face. ‘We’re divorced, remember? Or as good as.’

Matteo’s mouth formed a grim line. ‘There will be no divorce.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out the papers, tearing them in half with satisfaction, along with the contract for the hotel. The whole deal was off. This baby changed everything.

Skye’s eyes followed the soft ripping of the soggy paper then flew to his face. ‘You will not be flying out of Italy, taking my child with you.’

‘You can’t stop me,’ she snapped, wrapping her arms around her slender body, holding herself tight.

‘Like hell I can’t.’ He spoke coldly. ‘If necessary I will take this matter to the family courts today.’

Skye’s mouth dropped open. ‘You...can’t stop me from leaving. No court would make a mother remain in a country that she’s not even a born citizen of.’

He lifted a hand, silencing her with the simple gesture. ‘Perhaps not. But you had better believe I will have every reporter available covering the story. Our child will know, from as soon as he can read, that I fought like a dog for him. That I wanted him—and you wanted simply to take him from me.’ He leaned closer, his face only inches from Skye’s. ‘I will fight for him with my dying breath. You will long for the days when we were married, rather than being in constant custody disputes in court.’

She shivered, his threat making her stomach roll. ‘You wouldn’t do it. You’re too private.’

‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my child.’

‘Then let-let me raise him,’ Skye stammered. ‘Let me raise our baby, because that’s best for everyone. And you can be...involved,’ she conceded, because she could clearly see she had no other option.

‘How involved?’ Matteo demanded.

‘You can visit. Several times a year. I suppose I can bring him to Italy when he’s older. We’ll work out a schedule.’ She said the word as though it was the miracle cure they desperately needed. ‘Christmas, birthdays, just like every other divorced couple.’

‘Your parents weren’t together,’ Matteo said with cold disbelief. ‘You told me that you hated feeling pulled from one to the other. Yet you’d suggest it for our child?’

Skye froze. He was right, of course. Though Skye hadn’t spoken much about her upbringing, she’d obviously given enough indication for him to glean the truth of her loneliness.

‘We’ll do it better than they did,’ she said softly.

‘We won’t do it that way at all.’

Disbelief scored her heart. ‘You can’t make me stay married to you. That’s insane.’

‘Insane is what you planned to do. Insane is planning to hide your pregnancy and baby from me. Hell, Skye, I cannot believe you thought, for one moment, that I wouldn’t find out.’

‘How would you have?’ she snapped. ‘This was just bad luck. If I hadn’t passed out...’

His eyes glittered with anger. ‘Yes?’

Skye’s cheeks were pale. ‘You would never have known. Ever.’

‘Because you were going to disappear into thin air and hide from me?’ He moved closer, his expression menacing. ‘And what if you met another man? Would you have married him? Raised my child with him? Would you have let my child, the Vin Santo heir, grow up with no idea of who he is? From where he comes?’

Skye was as white as a sheet and, in the part of Matteo’s brain that was working, he recognised that he should ease up. That he should give her a moment to breathe and reach her own conclusions. Only, Matteo had rebuilt the family empire by sheer determination alone and easing up on any of his adversaries was not something he believed in doing.

And Skye was his adversary—his enemy—not just by blood, but now also by deed. How could she not be, given the deception she’d been willing to practice?

‘Answer me, damn it!’ he demanded, and when she didn’t respond he grabbed her around the waist, pulling her body to his. Her lips parted on a wave of shock and he took advantage of the surprise, driven by a soul-deep instinct. He ground his mouth to hers, lashing her with his tongue, stirring her into the kind of frenzy that had typified their short, super-heated marriage.

It wasn’t just about possessing her. He wanted to possess all of her, to mark his claim on her as his wife, and as the mother of his baby. He wanted to claim their child. ‘This is my baby.’

Skye was frozen with shock but it didn’t last long. The second Matteo’s lips touched hers she was flashing back into the past through the days of their marriage, the nights of their passion, the need that had always defined them. She was losing a battle to the only truth she could rely on—sensual need.

‘Would you have raised him with another man?’ He asked the question straight into her mouth so that she heard the words in the depths of her soul and felt his pain as though he’d touched her there. But he didn’t break their kiss, making it difficult for Skye to answer.

‘This is my child.’ The statement was filled with judgement. ‘And you are my wife.’

Skye made another sound, a mix between a groan and a sob, a sound of desperate emotion and pain, of acknowledgement and regret.

‘I won’t let you go. Not now.’

His hands moved inwards, finding her still-flat stomach. He ran his fingers over her and he ended their kiss, moving away, looking at her with eyes that were cold despite the raging intimacy they’d just shared. Despite the heat in Skye’s blood, her cheeks, the awareness that fired in every part of her body.

‘Come home with me.’

It was not a question, yet Skye still wanted to fight. ‘It won’t work.’

Matteo’s eyes glittered. ‘Of course it will.’

‘Because our last attempt at marriage was such a success?’ Skye scoffed, turning away from him so that she could take a moment to get her blood pressure under control, so that he wouldn’t see the way she was trembling.

‘I will not let you take my child from me. I will raise it on my own, or you can choose to be a part of his life.’

‘How c-can you even say that?’ she stammered, spinning around to face him head on. ‘No court would ever award you full custody!’

Matteo’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do you know who I am?’

A shiver ran down her spine; adrenalin pumped in her body.

‘Do you know what I will do to get what I want?’

Skye’s heart stammered in her chest. He’d married her for a stupid piece of real estate—an ancient hotel long since shut down; a building in the middle of Rome in which she had no interest. Matteo’s determination to get what he wanted was indeed a force to be reckoned with.

To underscore his intent, he added, ‘I will not rest until my child is in my home, being raised by me. Here. In Venice, where he belongs. For more than a thousand years, Skye, Vin Santos have lived on this island.’ He pointed downwards, as if to indicate the ancient marshes on which the city was built. ‘We are as much a part of Venice as Venice is of us. The child you carry in your womb is of me, of Venice, and this is where he should be. I will not let you take him.’

Skye shook her head, but fear was filling her all the way to the top of her heart.

Was he right? Could he, in fact, take their baby?

She needed to speak to a lawyer, and fast.

‘If you fight me, I will spare no expense and I will stop at nothing.’ His teeth were bared, his expression vibrating with passionate resolve. ‘I will make your life hell, and you will wish, one day, that you’d never met me. And that you’d never had my child.’

Skye was shaking. She was furious! She closed the distance between them on autopilot, lifting a hand and cracking it across his cheek.

‘How dare you?’ she demanded heatedly, watching as red spread across his cheek from where flesh had connected—hard—with flesh.

‘I told you,’ he said with a look of cold indifference. ‘I will stop at nothing to get what I want.’

‘And you want our child,’ she said, turning her face away, looking towards the door of the hospital.

‘Si.’ Silence cracked between them, angry and vicious. Matteo broke it, forcing himself to be completely honest. To lay out for his wife the truth of their situation. ‘But I also want you.’

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