An Enticing Proposal

She tried for innocence in her expression—in her voice.

‘Lucia?’ she repeated in dulcet tones.

Wrong move! His body language told her she’d unwittingly lit the fuse to set him off. He stepped closer, spoke more softly, but there was no escaping the rage emanating from his body and trembling in his words.

‘Yes, Lucia, Miss Morgan. And don’t act the innocent with me. You phoned my private work number, a new number only a handful of people know, you asked for Marco—a name only Lucia and my family use to address me. You left a message—said you wanted to speak to me. I haven’t come halfway around the world to play games with you, so speak to me, Miss Morgan. Or tell me where she is and let her explain her behaviour.’

Paige shivered under the onslaught of his words—and the emotion accompanying them. No way could she inflict him on her ill and unhappy house guest. But how to tell an enraged husband—however handsome and sexy he might be—you won’t let him see his wife, without risking bodily harm to yourself? She gulped in some replenishing air, waited for the oxygen to fire into her blood, then squared up to him.

‘I will speak to her, ask her if she wishes to see you.’

‘You will…’

Well, at least she’d rendered him speechless!

She raised her hands as if to show helplessness. ‘I can’t do any more than that.’

He glared at her, his eyes sparkling with the fierceness of his anger.

‘Then why did you contact me? To tease me? Torture me even more? Was it her idea? Did she say, “Let’s upset Marco in this new way”?’

The agony in his voice pierced through to her heart and she found herself wanting to put her arms around him, comfort him—for all her doubts about his behaviour towards his wife.

‘She doesn’t know I contacted you,’ she said softly—feeling the guilt again. Wondering how to explain.

He was waiting, the fire dying from his eyes, the grey colour taking over again.

‘Please, sit down. Do you want a drink—something hot—tea, coffee?’

No reply, but he did slump into the chair. He ran the fingers of his right hand through his dark hair, then stared at her. Still waiting.

‘She came to me—off a backpackers’ coach. Do you know about backpackers?’

He shrugged and managed to look both disbelieving and affronted at the same time. ‘Young tourists travelling on the cheap. But a coach? Lucia? Backpacking? And why would she come here?’

Well, the last question was easy. If you took it literally.

‘The bus company has a number of coaches which follow the same route through the country towns of New South Wales. People buy a six-month ticket and can get on and off wherever they like—staying a few days in some places, longer in others. This is a very popular stopping-off place and the company recommends the health service as a number of the professionals here speak more than one language.’

‘Parla italiano?’

The words sounded soft and mellifluous in Paige’s ears and again she felt a pang of sorrow—a sense of loss for something she’d never had.

‘If you’re asking if I speak Italian, the answer’s no. I used a phrase book to leave a message on your answer-phone. I studied Japanese and Indonesian and can get by in German. Many of the European tourists also speak or understand it, so I can communicate to a certain extent.’

‘Which is a credit to you but isn’t diverting me from the subject of Lucia, Miss Morgan.’

Mellifluous? Steely, more like!

‘Or your phone call,’ he added, in a no-less-determined voice.

‘She wasn’t well, and I sensed…’

How to explain her conviction that Lucia was in trouble—ill, lost and vulnerable—so alone that to take her in and care for her had been automatic.

She looked at the man from whom the young woman had fled and wondered how to tell him why she’d been compelled to phone him.

‘She wasn’t like the usual backpackers I see. Mostly they’re competent young people, clued up, able to take care of themselves, if you know what I mean. Lucia struck me as someone so far out of her depth she was in danger of drowning.’ She met his eyes now, challenging him yet willing him to understand. ‘But I also felt she’d been very much loved and cherished all her life,’ she admitted, ‘and from the little she told me, I guessed someone, somewhere, would be frantically worried about her whereabouts.’

He said nothing, simply stared at her as if weighing her words, wondering whether to believe them.

‘She doesn’t know I made that call,’ Paige admitted, feeling heat flood her cheeks again. ‘I looked through her passport one day and found the number pencilled in the back of it. I felt you—her family—someone somewhere—might need to know she was alive.’

He bowed his head, letting his chin rest against his chest, and she saw his chest rise and fall as be breathed deeply.

‘Yes,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘I—we all—did need to know she was alive.’

She studied him. Saw tiredness in the way his body was slumped in the chair. But when he raised his head and looked into her eyes there was no sign of fatigue—and the anger which she’d seen earlier still lit his from within.

‘Did she tell you why she ran away?’ he demanded.

Paige shrugged.

‘She told me very little,’ she said bluntly. ‘All I’ve done is guess.’

‘Abominable girl!’ the man declared, straightening in his chair and flinging his arms into the air in a gesture of frustration. ‘She’s been spoiled all her life, that’s her trouble. Cherished is right! Of course she was cherished. And how does she repay that love and affection? How does she treat those who love her? By taking off! Running away! Leaving without a word to anyone, a note from Rome to her mother, saying she will be all right! Then nothing for months. We all assume she’s dead! Dio Madonna!’

Perhaps it was as well she didn’t speak Italian. The intonation of the words told her it was a phrase unlikely to be repeatable in polite company. Not that the man didn’t look magnificent in his rage, on his feet now and prowling the room like a sleek black animal, still muttering foreign imprecations under his breath and moving his hands as if to conduct his voice. But watching him perform, that wasn’t getting them anywhere, and no matter how magnificent and full of sex appeal he was, he’d be out of her life by tomorrow so the sooner she got rid of him now, the sooner she could tackle Lucia.

And the thought of her reaction to this latest development wasn’t all that appealing! Paige stood, drew herself up to her full height and assumed her most businesslike expression. The one she used when asking for government funding from petty officials put on earth to frustrate her plans for the community centre.

‘If you rant and rave at her like that, I can understand why she ran off,’ she said crisply. ‘Now, if you tell me where you’re staying, I’ll have a talk to her and get back to you.’

‘Staying?’ He sounded as shocked as if she’d suggested he strip naked in the main street. ‘I am not staying! I have work to do. I must get back to Italy. I am—in fact, we, Lucia and I, are booked on a flight out of Sydney tomorrow morning.’

Paige stared at him in astonishment.

‘You flew out from Italy to Australia for a day? You thought you could arrive here, drive up, wrest Lucia forcibly into the car, then career back down the highway and be out of the country within twenty-four hours?’

Maybe her amazement caught his attention for he stopped his pacing and faced her.

‘I did not know where this town was—how far away from the capital,’ he said stiffly. ‘I gave the telephone number to a person at the embassy. He found the address—this address—and arranged to bring me here. It was not until I was in the car I learned she was at a far-off place—a regional centre I think Benelli called it.’ He paused, then added, ‘He said it was still possible to be back in Sydney late this evening and make the flight tomorrow.’

As that pause was the first hint of weakness she’d seen in the man—apart from the fatigue—she took it as an opening and pounced.

‘Well, I suggest you see Mr Benelli again and ask him to arrange accommodation for you, and rearrange your flight home. Apart from anything else, I doubt Lucia is well enough to travel.’

She watched the colour drain from his face.

‘What is wrong with her?’ he demanded, and a hoarseness in his voice told her of his love for Lucia.

CHAPTER TWO

HOW to answer? Tell a man his wife had gestational diabetes mellitus when he didn’t know she was pregnant? And Marco wouldn’t know because Lucia hadn’t known herself—hadn’t even guessed what might be wrong with her. The diabetes was an added complication, one not usually occurring until late into the second trimester of pregnancy when the foetus was extracting more nutrients from the maternal source, but the trauma of leaving home could have triggered a possible predisposition to it, bringing it on earlier than usual.

The thoughts rushed through Paige’s head and she studied him as she decided what to say. He didn’t look like a man who’d give in easily and telling him Lucia was carrying his child, that would hand him an added incentive to force her to return to him. It would also betray Lucia’s trust. Again!

Hide behind professional discretion?

She didn’t think this man would take too kindly to this ethical solution to her dilemma but what the hell.

‘I need to speak to her before I can give you any information about her health or where she’s staying,’ Paige replied, already feeling the waves of his anger as it built again. ‘Give me an hour—or maybe two—and I’ll contact you, or, better still, you could phone me here.’

She opened a desk drawer to get a card for him then realised it would show this building as her home address as well as that of the health service. Bring him closer than she wanted at the moment. Pulling out a scrap of paper instead, she jotted down her number and pushed it across the desk.

He was standing opposite her, staring at her with an unnerving intensity.

‘I already have your phone number, Miss Morgan,’ he said softly. ‘What I don’t know is Lucia’s whereabouts. Now, are you going to tell me where she is or do I call in your police force?’

She did her straightening-up thing again, hoping to look more in control.

‘Lucia is an adult—able to make her own decisions. No police force in the world can compel a woman to return to a situation from which she’s fled.’

She wasn’t absolutely certain about the truth of this statement but he wasn’t to know that. Not that he seemed to be taking much notice. In fact he was laughing at her.

Derisively!

‘Fled, Miss Morgan? Aren’t you overdramatising the situation?’

Damn her cheeks—just when she wanted to appear super-cool they were heating up again.

‘You said yourself she ran away,’ she countered hotly. ‘And now you’ve arrived, like some vengeful gaoler, to take her back—threatening me with the police force! No, I think if anyone’s overdramatising, it’s you, Prince Highfaluting-whatever. Sweeping in here, making demands. I’m the one who’s being reasonable about this!’

OK, so she didn’t sound very reasonable right now, but he’d made her mad. And that superior expression on his carved-rock face made her even madder.

He ignored her rudeness, nodded once, stepped back a pace from his position near the desk and said, ‘I will give you an hour, Miss Morgan, but that is all. For some reason you are under the impression Lucia will not wish to see me. You are wrong. She will be glad and grateful that I have arrived to take care of her.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Paige muttered with as much cynicism as she could muster, though why his sudden switch to politeness was aggravating her more than his anger had she didn’t know. ‘Well, we’ll let her be the judge of that. Will you phone?’

His eyes scanned her face, as if he wanted to imprint it on his mind, and when he finally replied—saying, ‘No, I will return to this house,’—Paige felt a tremor of apprehension flutter down her spine.

And dealing with Lucia wasn’t any easier. When Paige confessed she’d found the number in the passport and had phoned it, her guest had pouted and turned her face to the wall, prepared to sulk.

‘I had to let someone know you were alive,’ Paige said desperately. ‘It wasn’t fair that all your friends and family should have been worrying themselves to death—imagining the worst of fates for you. I just didn’t expect him to come.’

The slim figure shot upright, delight and apprehension illuminating her usually pale face, giving her a radiant beauty.

‘He’s here? Marco’s here? Oh, why did you not tell me straight away? Where is he? Bring him to me! Now, Paige, now!’

One of the few things she had told Paige was that she’d only been married two months before she’d left. It hadn’t taken her long to learn imperious ways!

‘Are you sure you want to see him?’ Paige asked, mistrusting this swift change of mood. ‘He’s here to take you home.’

The beauty faded, leaving her visitor pale again.

‘Of course! He would have come for that reason. Trust him to do such a thing, thinking he would persuade me.’ She pouted again, then tossed the cloud of soft dark hair and added defiantly, ‘Well, I won’t go!’

There was another pause, and Paige could almost read the expressions that washed across Lucia’s face—hope, longing, doubt and confusion.

‘But I’d like to see Marco,’ Lucia continued tremulously. ‘Will you stay with me while he visits? Not let him bully me or talk me into going home?’

Paige sighed. The very last thing she wanted to do was play gooseberry between a man and his wife—particularly, for some reason, between the man in question and this young woman she’d come to like.

‘I think you should talk to him on your own,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you owe him that?’

Huge brown eyes gazed piteously into hers.

‘But he’ll talk me into going back,’ Lucia wailed. ‘Into doing whatever he wants. Marco always gets his way.’

I can believe that, Paige thought, picturing the man who’d invaded her office, but the idea of acting as a chaperone at this forthcoming meeting was making her feel quite ill. She patted Lucia’s arm and suggested she get up and have a shower before her visitor arrived.

‘I don’t know about staying with you while you talk to him, but I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.’ She watched Lucia stand and saw her slender frame silhouetted against the light from the window, a neat bulge showing the eighteenth week of her pregnancy but still far too thin to be healthy, and another idea occurred to her.

‘If he does want to take you home and you decide you’d prefer to stay, we can use your health as an excuse. In my opinion, you’re not yet stable enough, even on the insulin, to be undertaking an arduous flight and I’m sure your obstetrician would agree with me.’

From the new expressions on Lucia’s face, this suggestion was receiving a mixed reception. Paige came closer and put her arms around the woman’s narrow shoulders.

‘You’re not happy here,’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off at home? Perhaps not with your husband, but with family or friends? People you know and love? People who would care for you?’

Lucia shrugged away from her.

‘My family would say my place is with my husband,’ she said bitterly. ‘I can hear them now. My mother especially—and my sisters. It was their idea I marry, their fault, all of this.’

Paige hesitated. Lucia was emotional, but the words had more petulance than fear and, thinking of the handsome man with the dark blue eyes—remembering his genuine pain when he’d talked of Lucia’s flight—she pressed a little further.

‘Didn’t you want the marriage? Did you love someone else?’

Lucia shook her head and began to cry, silent tears sliding down her cheeks.

‘Love someone else?’ She sobbed out the words. ‘How could I when he was all I knew, the man I was destined to marry? I loved him, and only him—but he…He had different ideas about love—ideas Italian men of position held many centuries ago, not now, although I know many men cheat on their wives. When I told him I would not allow it, he laughed and said he would take a mistress if he wished for who was I to stop him?’ She sniffed, then finished with a tilt of her head, ‘So I ran away!’

Paige stared at her, unable to believe what she was hearing. Well, she could believe the arrogant man she’d met downstairs might have such antediluvian views, but that a vague and possibly teasing threat about some future indiscretion had made Lucia flee? She’d imagined assault—either physical or emotional—shuddered over her mental images of what the gentle, trusting soul might have endured. But to run away because he’d said he might take a mistress one day?

‘Go take a shower and get dressed,’ she said abruptly. ‘And while you’re in there make up your mind whether you want to see him or not. I’ll have lunch ready when you come out, then you’ll have time to see him before we do the next blood glucose test.’

Lucia grimaced but she left the sunny sitting room where she spent most of each day—lying on the couch watching soaps on TV—and turned towards the bathroom. Paige watched her go and wondered, not for the first time, what on earth had prompted her to take the girl-woman in.

Instinct.

Ironic that the same inbuilt warning system had sent up flares when she’d first seen Lucia’s husband! Only then they’d signalled ‘danger’ instead of ‘help’.

‘I will see him,’ Lucia announced when she returned, dressed in loose-fitting tan trousers and a golden yellow mohair sweater—looking stunning for all her poor health. ‘I will see him here and tell him I cannot go home.’

Paige sighed but didn’t argue, going downstairs to the kitchen and fixing a sandwich for the two of them, counting off the calories in Lucia’s meal and writing them down so she knew how many her patient-guest had eaten. In the beginning she’d tried to persuade Lucia to undertake this task for herself, but had finally given up, deciding it was more important to teach her to do her own injections and blood glucose tests.

Huh!

‘OK, your turn to do the injection.’ She said this every time and every time Lucia came up with some excuse for not taking the responsibility. Paige fitted a needle to the syringe, lifted the insulin out of the refrigerator and set it on the table. ‘Just try filling the syringe, Lucia. Pull down to the mark, stick the needle through the rubber top on the bottle and press the plunger in to release the air.’

‘I cannot touch that needle, I might injure myself!’

It was the usual argument—one they had four times a day—so both knew their part in it.

‘You can’t injure yourself if you hold it properly. Do you want to be dependent on someone else all through your pregnancy?’ Paige grinned to herself as she realised why this argument had had little effect on Lucia in the past. Given the princely husband, the younger woman had probably had swarms of servants catering to her every whim—being dependent on someone was a habit rather than a concern.

‘You do it, Paige, just today?’

The voice cajoled and the brown eyes begged.

Paige grumbled about her weakness in always giving in, and filled the syringe with the fast-acting insulin Lucia would need for her body to handle the meal she was about to eat.

‘But I’m not staying with you while you talk to him,’ Paige warned, determined to win one argument today. ‘You’ve got to see him on your own.’

Lucia didn’t argue. In fact, she smiled and looked excited, flushed with a soft and youthful radiance which made Paige feel older than her twenty-five years and unaccountably depressed as she tackled her own lunch with far less gusto than her guest.

And the depression wasn’t lifted by the stern expression on her next visitor’s face. She had sent Lucia upstairs to the sitting room and was waiting outside the house when the long black car with the consular plates drew up. Although the autumn sun was warm, she found herself shivering as he alighted. A fact that didn’t escape him.

‘You should be wearing a jacket,’ he chided, and moved towards her as if to wrap his arm around her shoulders. The cold was replaced by warmth and she dodged ahead, leading him towards the side door which led directly into her flat.

‘No wonder she ran away,’ she muttered, more to herself than him. ‘If you tell a stranger what to wear…’

‘Pardon?’

‘It was nothing.’ She reached the door and paused, then turned to face him, looking into his eyes—hoping to read his reaction to what she had to say. ‘Lucia has agreed to see you, but I’d like to say…’ The words petered out under the intensity of that blue gaze. Pull yourself together! Think of Lucia, not eyes that seem to drill into your soul. ‘She’s in a very fragile state, easily upset, both physically and emotionally. Will you remember that? Treat her gently?’

Or eyes that darken dangerously!

‘And what do you imagine I intend to do to her? Throw her over my shoulder and force her to return with me? Is that how an Australian man would behave, Miss Morgan? How you would like a man to act with you?’

Damn him—and her give-away cheeks! The image had made her go hot all over. Battling to regain control, she tried an imperious look of her own.

‘Australia has as many gentlemen as any other country, though they may not carry fancy titles, and, no, I wouldn’t expect any man to ride roughshod over a woman, but men can exert more than physical power.’

‘And women can’t?’ he countered, fixing her with a look so quizzical she wondered how she’d come to be arguing with him.

‘Just treat her gently,’ Paige said, turning abruptly away before her face betrayed even more of her inner chaos. She’d never felt such a physical reaction to another human being. For the first time in her life, she was beginning to understand what people meant when they talked about instant attraction. And sex appeal! Not only could she now accept its existence, but she had to acknowledge that this man had it by the bucket-load.

Yet his wife had run away from him.

The thought occurred to her as she walked up the stairs ahead of him, hearing his firm tread behind her, feeling his presence in the nerves down her spine, aware even of a faint whiff of some sophisticated cologne or aftershave—not a pungent or overpowering odour, but more a tantalising hint of something smooth and sleek but very masculine.

Help! Now it seemed her thoughts were doing the running away—straight into a fantasy land.

‘Lucia is inside.’

She knocked and was about to grasp the doorknob when the door flew open and a vision of loveliness in a bright mohair sweater flung herself into the waiting arms of the prince.

Which is how all good fairytales should end, Paige reminded herself as she returned to the kitchen to play Cinderella-before-the-ball, washing the lunch dishes, working out a dinner menu, wondering what she could do about arranging nutritious meals for Lucia to take on the plane if her prince insisted she return home immediately.

By the time footsteps sounded on the stairs, she’d not only organised what they’d have for dinner but had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly, written out a shopping list, contemplated polishing the silver and settled for washing the floor instead—anything to keep her mind off what might be happening upstairs.

And, no, she wouldn’t take that thought any further either!

She straightened up as the heavy footfall hesitated only fractionally at the bottom of the steps then turned unerringly towards the kitchen. One glance at the dark scowl on Marco’s face told her the reunion hadn’t gone quite the way he’d planned.

‘Lucia tells me you will explain her medical condition. She pleaded tiredness, a need to rest and, in fact, she does not look well. Is this a new game of hers or is she indeed ill?’

Paige felt the words jar against her brain.

‘She didn’t tell you?’