Secret Heirs And A Forever Family

Susie blanched. They would immediately know the identity of the father. Did she want that? Would her parents make it their duty to confront him? They were very traditional.

She felt that she hadn’t thought anything through—but then how could she? She’d barely had time to digest the revelation herself.

‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she told him flatly.

Sergio looked at her through narrowed eyes. ‘Not the response I was expecting…’

‘This isn’t a normal relationship, Sergio. This is…sex—and meeting my family isn’t part of the deal…’ She had to say it because she needed to start distancing herself.

‘But I’m here now…’

‘Not because you wanted to come as my partner.’ She looked up at him steadily. ‘In a normal relationship we would have travelled here together. You would have wanted to meet my parents, wanted to take that next step into the future…a future of getting to know one another’s family and friends…’

‘Where has this come from?’

‘Does it matter? I’m just telling it like it is. You showed up here to do a background check on me… I suppose now that you’re here and my family has passed muster it’s all right for you to meet them?’

‘You’ve managed to blow all this out of proportion and I’m wondering why…’

Dark eyes that saw far too much rested on her flushed face and Susie did her best to get her breathing under control.

‘I’m a little stressed,’ she muttered, looking down. ‘It’s not every day the guy you’re going out with decides to check up on your family to make sure they’re not escaped convicts.’

‘That’s not the only reason I came.’

Sergio was willing to let this go. What they had was good—better than good. He didn’t want her to start getting ideas about his place in her life because she was at her cousin’s wedding. He didn’t need long, intense conversations about normal relationships, where boyfriends couldn’t wait to meet the family and have friends over for Sunday lunch.

‘Isn’t it? What, then?’

‘I missed you.’ He smiled slowly.

‘Why is it all about sex for you?’

She could read that smile as easily as she could read a book, and it still had the power to turn her legs to jelly even though her mind was doing its best to resist.

‘It’s not. Making money ranks highly as well. Ah. I spot curious eyes and a few people descending… Looks like you’re going to have to do a round of introductions whether you like it or not.’

So he’d wanted to show up unannounced…? He couldn’t see what the big deal was. When he had started this fling with her he had not expected it to last longer than a week or two. She didn’t fit his profile, and he was smart enough to work out that if the women who did fit his profile were done and dusted within a month or two then there was no chance that her novelty value would outlast a night in the sack, maybe two.

But she was still around, and he wasn’t sick of her yet… And, that being the case, it had made sense to see her in her own surroundings—the surroundings she had always made sure to keep quiet about. He had wanted to know exactly what he was dealing with instead of taking her at face value. That was just the man he was. Where was the problem?

She was still looking at him with wounded, accusing, angry eyes.

‘You know where I’m coming from,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t need you getting weepy and hysterical. I came here to make sure you weren’t playing some kind of long game. But, like I said, that wasn’t the only reason. And now that I’m here there will be questions asked if you’re sour and defiant about introducing your boyfriend to your family. So relax, Susie.’

She’d forgotten just how inherently suspicious he was, but it had been brought back to her now. She had fallen in love with a man who would only ever let her get so far and no further. There would always be part of him that was locked away. He was a charming, seductive lover, but a proper relationship would always threaten his self-control so he would never allow it. She’d conveniently managed to forget that part of him, and it hurt now to have been reminded of it.

‘I’m relaxed!’

‘You could have fooled me,’ Sergio murmured. ‘I think I know how to relax you, though…’

He kissed her on her mouth, felt a whisper of protest, and then she melted into him until he drew back and looked down at her with a sexy smile.

‘Much better.’

‘Mum! Alex…’

It wasn’t much better. She might have been able to hide away in their private little bubble before, but now she had to stand up and be counted—because there was a third party on the scene: a baby. She couldn’t keep going weak at the knees every time he glanced in her direction, pretending that the future was something that would take care of itself in due course.

‘This is… This is…’

‘I know who you are…’

Alex had moved into charming mode, and Susie sighed as she watched her older sister do what most women did when those deep, dark eyes fastened on them. Her brilliant, sharp, independent and undeniably striking sister blushed.

‘Mother, this is only Sergio Burzi. I might be a neurosurgeon,’ she added coyly, ‘but even I know who you are. How on earth did you meet Suze?’

‘You naughty little thing!’ Louise Sadler was smiling, her beautiful aristocratic face creased with delight as she looked at Susie. ‘You kept this one well hidden under your hat. I expect you were hoping to surprise us…?’

‘Or maybe,’ Alex inserted, ‘you didn’t want to say anything just in case your date didn’t turn up. You must have your diary filled to overflowing, Mr Burzi…’

‘Sergio, please…’

‘You probably don’t remember me at all, but we were at the same art gallery opening a few months ago…’

‘Sergio…’ Louise stepped forward, still thrilled to bits, and took his arm. ‘You must come and meet the rest of the family. Your father is going to be delighted,’ she whispered to Susie, who had reluctantly fallen into step as they moved towards the main party, ‘that you’ve brought along such a gorgeous chap…’

‘Mum…’

Too late. Events had been taken out of her hands. Or rather transferred from her hands into her family’s hands—and now, as the evening progressed, everyone else’s hands.

So many people had heard of him. She hadn’t known him from Adam when she had plonked herself next to him uninvited because she had been on the run from her dinner companion. She hoped to God that he didn’t breathe a word about that.

Having had him all to herself for the past few weeks, she was awestruck at the ease with which he mixed. He knew just what to say to everyone. He charmed. He was witty. He was flatteringly attentive to her. And she couldn’t help but feel a treacherous burst of pride at having his arm slung over her shoulders.

Even Clarissa, who was getting steadily more tipsy as the evening wore on, and who barely had time to talk to anyone because she was so wrapped up with Thomas, dragged her to one side and told her that she wanted to hear everything the very second they were alone together once she’d returned from her honeymoon.

Under any other circumstances, Susie would have been over the moon. Had they been seriously involved, and had their relationship gone beyond sex—had she not now been carrying his baby—she would have been bursting with happiness and daydreaming about being the next one to walk up the aisle.

As things stood…

‘Did Stanley bring you? I guess you’ll be wanting to head off now…’

Most of the guests had left. Only a circle of hard-core friends, all drunk, were swaying inside the marquee with glasses in their hands.

Outside, the temperature had dropped and she hugged her pashmina around her.

Somewhere in the course of the evening Sergio’s bow tie had been discarded, and she wanted to slip possessive fingers under his shirt and feel that hard, roughened chest against her skin. She itched to do it.

‘You’re not drinking?’

‘I…I’ve had a headache all day,’ Susie mumbled.

‘What’s eating you?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were coming?’

‘Not this again. I wanted to introduce the element of surprise—let’s not breathe new life into that particular argument.’

‘You don’t know what you’ve gone and done.’

‘Really? Enlighten me.’

‘Now that my parents have met you…especially in the presence of every single one of my family members on my mother’s side…they’ll all be thinking that what we have is serious—is going somewhere…’

‘I’m not responsible for what other people think.’

The cool detachment in his voice washed over her like freezing sleet, penetrating through every part of her being. ‘I know you’re not.’

‘I’m taking it that you can’t face everyone’s disappointment when this is over and we part company?’ he said, in the same horribly remote voice.

‘My parents have had a very happy marriage. Uncle Richard and Aunt Kate the same. I come from a long line of boring, happily married people…’

‘They surely can’t expect you to marry the first guy you meet?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’

‘It’s not that easy, Sergio. You’ve got the makings of the perfect son-in-law—especially after some of the guys they’ve met in the past. You’ve come here… They’ll be thinking that…’

That we’re in love…because they’ll want someone like you for me…

It occurred to her that she had never told him how she felt about him, never breathed a word, because she had been so sure that she could play by his rules. No wonder he was having a hard time trying to work out why she was so hot and bothered because he had shown up.

‘Stop analysing everything. You’re so keyed up, worrying about what other people might think, that you can’t seem to see that it’s your life at the end of the day. You live it as you see fit. If other people have other plans in mind, then tough.’

‘You’re so black and white.’

‘Like I said, I’ve seen what misplaced emotion can do. I stick to what I know. It makes life a damned sight less complicated.’

‘What…what was that girl like?’

She hadn’t been aware that she was going to ask that question until it left her mouth and Sergio, caught on the back foot, raised his eyebrows in a perplexed, impatient frown.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You once said that you’re the way you are because you had a learning curve… Who was the woman who provided the learning curve?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘None. And if you don’t want to talk about it, then forget I asked.’

She shrugged, started making for the kitchen door of the house, which she knew would lead to the spacious ground floor and eventually the front door and her way out—although how she was getting home she had no idea. Her ride, in the form of her parents and Alex, had gone an hour and a half ago. It would have to be another taxi.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Bed and breakfast. It’s in the village. A bunch of us are booked in there.’

‘And I,’ he said smoothly, ‘am booked into the one and only five-star hotel ten miles away.’

‘I’d rather not come with you…’

‘Sure about that?’

And he swooped to kiss her, his tongue probing into her mouth, enveloping her in a swirl of heated responses that shook her to the core.

He did this every time. She needed to think…not say goodbye to all her thought processes and cling to him like a vine.

Yet of their own volition her arms curled round his neck and she found herself gently but efficiently propelled back until she was pressed against the wall in the deserted hallway.

‘We can’t… Not here…’

‘Then I guess that means you’ll be coming back with me…’

CHAPTER SIX

‘HER NAME WAS Dominique Duval. Still is, for all I know—although who can be sure? She might have moved on to marriage number two…or three…or four by now. It’s been a few years, and no one could ever accuse Dominique of being anything other than a fast worker. I met her in a club.’

‘You know, you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to…’

Was she really ready to hear a story of thwarted passion? Was she ready to learn all about his one and only true love and how she’d let him down? Left him to marry someone else?

‘You asked, and after more time together than I’d anticipated it’s only fair that you understand why me and commitment will never have anything more than a passing acquaintance.’

‘When you fall in love with someone it can be brutal when things go pear-shaped—especially if you’ve pinned your hopes on it working out.’

She heard a certain wistfulness in her voice and pulled herself up sharply, because the last thing she wanted was for him to guess at the depth of her feelings for him. When she told him that she was pregnant she would do so as a calm, collected adult whose only priority was to discuss technicalities and to reassure him that he could take as much or as little interest as he wanted.

‘Or so I would imagine,’ she added.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Sergio informed her. ‘I was never in love with that woman. It’s true she made a pass at me the first time we met, but I was involved with someone else at the time, and having fun with two women at the same time has never been my style.’

‘You were never in love with her? But I thought…’

‘You assumed—from a couple of throwaway remarks.’

‘How can you have a learning curve from someone you met in a club when you never had a relationship with her? Did she try and pickpocket you?’

‘My hotel. We’re here.’

Susie followed the direction of his finger to see a grand country house that was lit from top to bottom. Two uniformed men stood outside, as if guarding the entrance. She knew her aunt and uncle came to this hotel on a regular basis with friends. Apparently it did a very good dinner.

‘And, no…pickpockets don’t engender learning curves. Dominique Duval was a nurse, and she made a pass at me because she knew who I was. I was young at the time—barely out of my teens—and from a wealthy family. My mother had died years before and my father had never remarried. I was in line to inherit his fortune, but I think she knew from the get-go that a fortune in the future was a lot less enticing than a fortune she could lay her hands on immediately. Maybe if I’d been interested she would have climbed into bed with me for the fun of it, but she had set her sights higher.’

Looking back, he had been able to make sense of the interest she had shown in his background, in his widowed father—the caring, attractive ex-nurse, with a heart full of compassion and empathy because, after all, she had seen so many hurt and lonely widowers in her line of work.

‘She was a nurse? I thought that was a caring line of work…’ She was hanging on to his every word, barely noticing the grand surroundings of the hotel, or the way the woman manning the reception desk in the early hours of the morning jumped to attention the second he strode in and then scrambled behind them as they headed straight to the bank of lifts.

‘You’d think…’ Sergio flicked her a wry glance. ‘My first powerful lesson in never judging a book by its cover.’

‘And in always assuming the worst when it comes to other people’s motivations…’

‘Very good.’

‘What happened?’

Sergio’s eyes narrowed and he shrugged. His face was hard and coldly unforgiving, even though he was recalling a past situation and not currently enduring it.

‘She made sure to engineer an introduction to my father and pulled out all the right cards. She was a caring, fun girl, thirty years his junior, who could understand just what he might have been going through. She told him a life alone was no kind of life—not for a sexy silver fox like him. He was flattered. For the first time in years he decided that life was worth living after all. They were married within six months and it didn’t take long before her true colours started appearing. The caring, sharing nurse became the free-spending gold-digger she had been all along—and if that wasn’t enough she contrived to get my father to change his will. When he died suddenly of a heart attack pretty much everything went to her, and within five years she had managed to work her way through most of his fortune. Fortunately, he’d had the sense to leave the majority of his companies to me. She was cash-rich, with a couple of houses to spare, but she was still greedy enough to consult a lawyer, in the hope that she might get her hands on some of the companies. I spent five years batting her off until she finally gave up. Where she is now is anybody’s guess.’

Susie wandered over to the chaise longue by the window and sat down, her own problems temporarily on the back burner as she worked out just how he had ended up where he had.

There was safety in a hard-boiled career woman. She thought of her own sister. Alex would never be interested in anyone’s money, or in furthering herself on the back of someone else. She was fiercely independent and ambitious to get ahead under her own steam. That would be the sort of woman he would be seriously interested in. A woman who had her own life—just as he had his own life.

‘I’ve seen how a person can imagine they’re in love,’ he continued, taking up a position on the chair facing her, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his expression cool and remorseless. ‘They get swept away by emotion, lose all sense of perspective, abandon their self-control. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the sort of thing that never has a good ending.’

Susie thought that he might have been describing her.

‘In due course,’ he drawled, ‘I imagine I will want to settle down, but when that time comes it will be rather more of a business arrangement than a giddy loss of judgement.’

He was uneasily aware of just how fast his self-control disappeared when he was presented with her glorious body, but immediately dismissed that as a cause for concern because there was a clear line of demarcation between the physical and the emotional. On the emotional front he knew exactly where he was going, and on the physical front… Well, a little loss of self-control was perfectly acceptable…it made a great change to his usual predictable diet.

Susie heard the unmistakable clang of his boundary lines being repositioned.

Her breathing quickened and she flushed under the steady gaze of his eyes.

Why had she let herself be talked into coming back here with him? She knew why. Because she was weak and in love. Because one kiss from him could send her common sense flying in all directions. Because she was just the sort of emotional type he had told her he didn’t need as a long-term investment.

‘It’s late.’

‘So it is…’ He slanted her a smile that turned her bones to jelly. ‘Come here.’

‘I’m not in the mood for sex.’

‘No? Do you want to put that to the test?’

‘We need to talk, Sergio. There are things… Well, things I need to say to you…’

Sergio frowned. Women who had a pressing need to talk rarely said anything he wanted to hear. He reminded himself that she wasn’t like the other women he had dated. She talked a lot. She probably wanted to talk about the wedding—her parents, her sister, her huge array of cousins. It made such a change from his non-existent family, as an only child born to only children.

His face cleared and he smiled.

‘Let’s go to bed…’

‘This isn’t pillow talk.’

‘Who said it was? I’m just finding it hard to keep going with the chat when we could be doing other things. Why don’t you give an old man a kick and do a striptease for me…?’

‘You’re only thirty-two!’ Her face warmed and her body was going into its usual meltdown.

Sergio grinned and remained where he was, enjoying the way he had hardened for her, enjoying the thrill of what was going to follow. Sooner or later he would move on because, as she had pointed out, they weren’t suited to one another, but just at the moment familiarity was a long way from breeding contempt.

He tried to swallow down his dislike of her reminding him that he wasn’t her type, but it nagged away like a thorn in his side he couldn’t quite reach.

He stood up, strolled towards the bed, shedding his clothes en route until he was left in only his trousers, which he began to remove while she watched in her usual trance-like state of fascination.

Her body was as it always was. There were no outward signs of her pregnancy. But what would happen, she wondered, when she did begin to show? When her flat stomach began to go round…when her breasts grew even bigger…? What would happen to that overwhelming lust he felt for her, which was the one and only thing that kept him going?

It was just one more thought to pile on all the other thoughts that were buzzing around in her head like a swarm of bees.

For the moment…

What if this was the last time she had him—really had him? Because she would break the news to him in the morning and then leave, giving him time to digest the indigestible.

From that point on what they had would officially be over. Which would make right now her last chance to have him make love to her, to have him touch her and feel her and want her…

If she was a coward to be snatching it with both hands then so be it.

She followed him, kicking off her high shoes, and then stood at the side of the bed, with his deep, dark eyes on her, and performed the striptease he had asked her to do.

Sexy, erotic, sensuous… In the dark so that their bodies were shadows and angles…

She was wet for him by the time she slid under the covers. Their bodies seemed perfectly matched. She had felt comfortable with him even that very first time, and she felt so much more comfortable now.

His hands knew just where to touch, what turned her on. He nuzzled her breasts and took her nipples into his mouth in a way that sent delicious sensations zapping through her. He licked her and played with her and toyed with her…taking her to the edge before bringing her back…until her whole body was on fire.

They moved together as one, in perfect unison. He enjoyed it when she straddled him, so that her breasts hung teasingly by his mouth. When she did that she was bombarded by the dual sensations of having him suckle on her breast while he teased her below with his fingers. When she took him in her mouth she knew just how to angle her body so that he could simultaneously take her in his, suck and lick her until her clitoris could take no more, and only then, when they had enjoyed one another to the max, would he don a condom and complete her fully.

This time she didn’t want their lovemaking to end. She didn’t want to close her eyes and fall asleep, knowing that the morning light would bring all sorts of problems to their horizon.

‘So…’ Sergio nuzzled her ear.

He had long since given up his habit of abandoning the woman in his bed in favour of his computer. And he had broken with tradition by allowing her to sleep over, because his mornings were always so much more satisfying when he could wake up and make love to her.

‘So…?’

‘So you didn’t paint the full, unexpurgated picture of your background because your high-achieving family make you feel insecure…’

‘Where did that come from?’ She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

‘I’m a problem-solver. I like it when things add up.’

‘And I’m something that needs adding up?’

‘Your father told me that they pleaded with you to use their apartment in Kensington but you wouldn’t. Why not?’

‘Because I’m not a kid. I can stand on my own two feet.’