Convenient Brides

“Don’t you believe in marriage, Paolo?”

“For some people, perhaps.”

His shrug spoke volumes. But she was a devil for punishment, and couldn’t let go gracefully. “But not for you?”

“The world is full of beautiful women, Caroline,” he said cheerfully. “How can I be expected to choose just one?”

“Do you even believe in love?”

“But of course! I love women—all women.” He smiled his charming, devil-may-care smile. “I am Italian. I love love!”

She tried to smile back, and started to cry instead as all her hopes went up in smoke. “I thought I was special, but I’m just the latest in a long line of willing conquests, aren’t I?”

“Don’t do this, cara,” he said, rolling his magnificent brown eyes. “Don’t spoil our glorious time together with tears and recriminations.”

“I suppose I should be flattered you spared me one whole night. Silly me, to have thought it was the beginning of something lasting, something b…beautiful!”

“Ah, Caroline…!” Briefly he touched her face and let his fingers linger almost regretfully at her mouth, before stepping firmly away. “You see your world through rose-colored spectacles, cara mia, whereas I learned long ago that mine is painted in ugly shades of gray.”

If she hadn’t known then that she meant nothing to him, he drove the point home a few days later. On the Thursday before they were to fly back to the U.S., Callie and her mother stayed overnight in Rome, with the Raineros. The next morning, just as they stepped out to the street where a taxi waited to take them to the airport, Paolo drove up in a fire-red Ferrari.

He had a woman with him; a sultry, voluptuous, darkhaired beauty in a skimpy top and a thigh-high skirt, who sat so close beside him that she was practically in his lap. But when he went to kiss her, she laughed, pulled away and rolled her tongue provocatively over her full, red upper lip.

Suddenly Callie saw herself through his eyes—a pathetically naive girl with a bad case of puppy love. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to continue their affair. He liked his women sophisticated, sure of themselves and elusive. The more difficult the chase, the better he liked it.

She was so far out of her league, it was laughable. Rather than being the object of his desire, she’d been an amusing bit player. Someone to laugh about with his male friends. A convenient and willing body to keep him entertained until a better prospect showed up.

If only it could have ended then, with her humiliation complete, her heart in pieces, but her future, at least, intact. But he was not to be so easily dismissed. A month later, she discovered she was pregnant, and all that bright and shining opportunity she’d thought was hers for the taking, lay in shambles.

There would be no Smith College, no graduation summa cum laude. She had let down all the people who believed in her: her mother, who’d been so proud of her scholastic achievements; the board of governors at her private school, who’d awarded her their highest scholarship prize; her headmistress, who’d written such a glowing letter of recommendation to the college on her behalf.

And Vanessa.

“You’re what?” she exclaimed, after Callie confided in her sister. Their mother was away at the time, visiting a cousin in Florida, but Vanessa and Ermanno were in New York on the first leg of their year-long honeymoon-cum-business tour, and drove up to spend the weekend with Callie, who’d stayed home. “Good grief, Callie, I didn’t know you were seeing somebody. Have you told Mom?”

“No. I found out just before she left for Florida. She’d have canceled the trip if she’d known.”

Still reeling, Vanessa said, “I can’t believe it! You always claimed you didn’t have time for a steady boyfriend. When…who?”

It had taken all Callie’s courage to mumble, “Your brother-in-law. The day you got married.”

“Paolo?” Vanessa clapped a hand to her mouth, aghast. “My God, Ermanno will kill him!”

“Ermanno can’t know. Don’t tell him, please!” Callie begged.

But Vanessa stood firm. “I’m not keeping a secret like this from my husband. He has a right to know.”

Outraged when he heard, Ermanno’s first reaction was that he’d see to it Paolo did the honorable thing and married Callie.

She flatly refused to consider the idea. “I’m not compounding one grievous mistake with another. Marriage is out of the question, even if you could drag Paolo to the altar, which I highly doubt.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Ermanno said, after a moment’s reflection. “The last thing you need is a husband incapable of fidelity. We must find another solution, one which will keep this shameful secret from my father. It would destroy him, to learn that his favorite son has disgraced our family in such a way.”

He spoke without rancor, and when Callie remarked on it, shrugged philosophically and said, “I accepted long ago that, in my father’s eyes, Paolo is the golden boy who can do no wrong. I’m not saying my father doesn’t love me, too, but my brother…it’s different with him, and that’s just the way it is.”

“Your father sometimes doesn’t use the sense he was born with,” Vanessa declared, planting a loving kiss on her husband’s cheek. “But I, thank goodness, do!” Then, turning to Callie, she said, “We’ll figure out a way to help you, honey. I take it you’ve seen a doctor?”

“Yes. He pointed out my choices—abortion, adoption or keeping the baby.”

“And?” Vanessa eyed her anxiously.

“I can’t terminate the pregnancy. I couldn’t live with myself, if I did.”

Visibly relieved, her sister asked, “What about adoption?”

“Oh, Vanessa!” Callie’s eyes overflowed again. “I don’t think I could go through with that, either. Giving my baby away to strangers—” She stopped to mop her tears. “I’m so ashamed. How am I ever going to face Mom.”

“Never mind the shame,” Vanessa declared. “The point is, pregnancy isn’t something you can keep secret for very long. Soon, everyone will know, including Mom.”

“No! I could move away. Get a job. Save my money—”

“There is no need to worry about money,” Ermanno said quietly. “That is one thing I can do something about.”

“And you have to tell Mom, Callie. She’ll be shocked, of course, but you know she’ll stand by you. Maybe, with her help, you’ll be able to keep the baby.”

“I don’t think I can stand to see the disappointment in her eyes,” Callie said miserably.

As it turned out, she didn’t have to. Tragically, on the drive home from Florida, their mother was killed in a headon collision in North Carolina. She never knew she was about to become a grandmother.

The hot splash of tears on her face drew Callie back to the present—that, and Paolo’s voice, low and concerned, observing, “What did I say to make you cry, Caroline?”

“You asked me why I didn’t go to Smith,” she said, swiping her fingers over her cheeks. “If you must know, it was because of my mother’s death.”

How plausibly the lie rolled off her tongue! Accepting it without hesitation, he said, “Ah, yes! I remember now that she died not long after Ermanno married Vanessa.”

“That same summer. My father left us when I was six and Vanessa eleven, so for most of my life it had been just my mother, my sister and I. Then, in the space of two months, I was alone.”

Except for your babies, of course!

That had been the next shock to hit her.

“Definitely twins,” the obstetrician to whom her doctor referred her had declared confidently. “Two for the price of one, young lady. You’re going to have to take very good care of yourself for the next five months. We don’t want a premature delivery.”

Oh, the blistering shame, to be the youngest daughter of the late, respected Audrey Leighton, president of the Junior League, pillar of society. To be pregnant and unmarried—with twins. Oh, God! Oh, God!

“You weren’t really alone. You still had your sister, and Ermanno, too.”

Oh, yes. More than you can begin to know! “I seldom saw them. They were traveling all over the world for the better part of a year.”

“So they were—until Vanessa was put on bed rest because of her pregnancy. They stayed in California then, until after the twins were born, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” she said, with guilelessly misleading honesty.

“And you were there for the birth?”

Callie stared fixedly at the moonlit sea, hating that she had to mouth another lie, albeit by omission. “Yes.”

“My mother planned to be there, also, but the babies came almost a month earlier than expected.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Actually only ten days early, thanks to the excellent care Callie had received. But Vanessa and Ermanno had planned their story carefully, to avoid just such a situation as Paolo described.

He shifted in his seat and then, shockingly, stroked the back of his hand down her cheek. “Ah, Caroline,” he said softly. “I see how it hurts you, that you were there to welcome the children into the world, and yet could not be here, to see them grow up.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she cried, scrunching her eyes shut against the painful images forcing their way to the forefront of her mind.

To give birth, to hold her babies close to her heart and smell their sweet, newborn smell—and then, ten days later, to let them go? There were no words to describe the emptiness, the agony.

Even after all this time, the picture remained as painfully sharp as if it had happened just yesterday: Vanessa, wearing a yellow dress and matching jacket, Ermanno in a pale gray suit, and each of them holding a tiny bundle wrapped in a soft white blanket.

You know we couldn’t love them more, if they were our very own, Callie.

Never fear that they will want for anything, Caroline. They will have the best that money can buy.

Before stepping into the waiting limousine, Vanessa turned one last time to Callie. We’ll give them brothers and sisters. They’ll be part of a big, loving family—and so will you, Callie. You’ll be their darling aunt.

But the other children never materialized. Vanessa had been unable to conceive. Oh, Callie! she had wept. If it weren’t for you, I’d never have known the joy of being a mother. Thank you so much, darling, for the gift you gave us.

“Then tell me all of it,” Paolo urged. “Tell me what it is that haunts you with such sorrow.”

“My sister died last week,” she said, choking back a sob. “Isn’t that enough?”

Sliding his arm around her shoulder, he pulled her close and cupped her chin, forcing her to look at him. “There’s more,” he insisted. “I hear it in your voice. I see it in your eyes. What is it you’re holding back? Please, Caroline, let me help you.”

“You?” Her laugh verged on the hysterical. “I hardly think so!”

“Why? Because, the first time I held you in my arms, I was too foolish to realize your true worth?” He expelled a huge sigh of frustration. “That was a long time ago, cara. Trust me when I tell you, I’ve changed for the better since then.”

Temptation nibbled at the edges of her resolve. Quickly, before it gained too powerful a hold, she replied, “Easy for you to say, Paolo, but where’s the proof?”

“Here.” He tapped a fist to his chest. “I admit that when I met you in Paris, I viewed you as a threat to my family, and was prepared to squash you flat at the first hint of sabotage. But I’ve watched you, this last week. I’ve seen your kindness to my mother, the way you sit with her and try to comfort her when your own heart is also breaking. I’ve seen how patient you are with the children, how loving, even though, more often than not, they rebuff your overtures.”

His hand strayed down her throat, stole around her neck. “If it were within your power to do so, I believe you would change places with Vanessa, just to give them back their mother. Yet something more than that is eating you alive. I know it, and it worries me, even as my heart tells me you’re incapable of sinister motives.”

“My heart hears your words and wants to believe them,” she countered tremulously, “but my head tells me actions are what count.”

“Then let your head be the best judge of this,” he said, and before she could guess his intent, let alone utter a protest, his mouth came down on hers and fastened there in a burst of heat that set her blood on fire.

Chapter Five

SHE’D felt faint stirrings of desire with other men since he’d initiated her into the art of love, nine years before. Kinder, less dangerous men. More sympathetic and deserving men. But always, Callie had withheld herself, even if her current love interest hadn’t known it. When it came right down to that moment of ultimate surrender, she hadn’t been able to let go. Not once, since the night she’d conceived Paolo’s children, had she permitted herself the freedom to respond without reservation or inhibition.

But if she’d spent the intervening years suppressing her sexual urges, Paolo had clearly spent the same amount of time fine-tuning his. The once-reckless womanizer had matured into a virtuoso seducer whose finesse laid instant waste to her resistance.

The very second his mouth touched hers, all thought of selfpreservation fled her mind. With just a kiss, he turned her world on its ear, and nothing mattered but to prolong the pleasure of being in his arms again; of awakening after a long and arid sleep, and feeling, with every cell in her body, every beat of her heart, the sweet, sharp trickle of desire permeating her blood. Without a moment’s pause, she was ready to sell her soul all over again, if that’s what it took to satisfy the raging hunger he inspired.

Her lips softened, parted. How else could she drink in the essence of him? When his tongue trespassed beyond the bounds of friendship and entered the forbidden territory of lovers, she held it prisoner, drawing it ever deeper into her mouth.

She cradled his cheek. Let her fingers steal up to knot fiercely in his thick, black hair. She swayed against him, arousing both him and herself by brushing her nipples lightly against his chest.

His hand skated from her throat to her ribs, and settled urgently, possessively, at her hip. For the first time in what seemed like eternity, she again experienced that scalding rush of heat between her legs. Sensed the distant tremors gathering strength within her, forerunners of a starving passion that would be satisfied with nothing less than complete fulfillment.

How disastrously it all might have ended, had he not exercised some restraint, was anybody’s guess. But again, with a discipline his younger self had never shown, he pulled them both back from the brink. “Forgive me, Caroline,” he said hoarsely, shoving her almost roughly into the far corner of the passenger seat. “I should not have done that.”

Dazed, disappointed, she swiped her hand across her mouth and injected a hard-won note of outrage into her reply. “Why did you then?”

“I couldn’t help myself.” He hesitated, and if she hadn’t known him to be the most confident man she’d ever met, she’d have thought him unsure he should utter his next words.

At length, though, he went on, “I find myself drawn to you. You touch me—against my will, I might add—with your selfcontained grief. I see the way you swallow when the pain almost gets the better of you, and I wish I could comfort you. But I forfeited that right a long time ago, and of the many things I regret having done, it’s that I’ve given you no reason to trust me now.”

Another silence, this one full of brooding frustration, before he burst out savagely, “Dio, if it were within my power, I would have us meeting here for the first time, with no painful history to sour your view of me!”

“We were both young and foolish, Paolo,” she said, an unsettling stab of guilt attacking without warning. She was the injured party, the one who’d given up everything—or so she’d told herself these many long years. Yet in line with other recent self-insights, as she watched him, listened to him, she suddenly wasn’t quite so sure.

“But I was the greater transgressor.” Fleetingly his hand ghosted over her hair and down her face. “You were little more than a child, Caroline, and so anxious to please that it disgusts me to remember how I took advantage of you. If I had a daughter, I would kill the man who dared to treat her, as I treated you.”

Tell him! Say the words: You do have a daughter, Paolo, and a son, as well! Then let the chips fall where they may. Dare to believe that the truth can indeed set a person free.

The urge to confess rose, as strong and surprising as her earlier guilt. She had to bite her tongue not to give in to what was surely the ultimate folly. A moment’s lapse in judgment could cost her everything because, no matter what he might say now, his repentance would surely turn to outrage when he learned the secret she’d kept from him all this time.

“You do not answer me,” he said, a world of weary regret in his voice.

“What do you want me to say? That I forgive you?”

“No. That’s asking for far more than I deserve.”

His candor was killing her! Too ashamed of her hypocrisy to look him in the eye, she stared again at the swath of moonlit sea. “No, it’s not. In the last week, we’ve both learned that life’s too short to waste it bearing grudges. So let’s forgive each other, Paolo, for the mistakes we’ve both made.”

“What are yours?” he asked, with just a trace of humor in his tone. “That you were too beautiful for your own good? Too sweetly appealing for mine?”

Humbled yet again by his selfderision, she said, “I chose to be a stranger to my own flesh and blood, just as you accused me of doing. I stayed away from my niece and nephew, when I should have made an effort to grow closer to them.”

“You’re here for them now, cara.”

Yes, but deep in her heart, she was terribly afraid she’d left it too late. Her children didn’t want to know her.

They turned to Lidia to dry their tears and sing them to sleep. They ran to Paolo when it hit them that Ermanno could no longer be there for them. Even Salvatore occupied a special place in their hearts, regardless of Callie’s belief that he was far removed from the typically warm, loving Italian patriarch they deserved. When all was said and done, the Raineros were her children’s true family, and she had only herself to blame for that.

Blinking away the persistent threat of tears, she said, “I mean nothing to them. You said so, yourself.”

“They are afraid to love you.”

Another wave of pain engulfed her. “Afraid? Why?”

“Because they have learned too early what it is to have the very foundation of their lives knocked out from under them. As they see it, their parents have abandoned them, and so might you. You are kind and tender with them, everything a loving aunt should be. But they are not, I fear, willing to risk another loss, so soon after the first.”

“So how do I rectify that?”

“By not turning their world upside-down with impossible demands. Do not ask them to open their hearts to you, just because you happen to be their mother’s sister. Don’t be in too big a hurry to rush back to America. Rather, stay here in Italy long enough to earn their trust. Do that, and their affection will follow.”

“That could take months.”

He shrugged. “So? You already said you’re prepared to take a leave of absence from your work. Have you had second thoughts, and decided Gina and Clemente aren’t worth such a sacrifice?”

“Of course not! But—”

“But you have your own life, one you share perhaps with a lover?”

“No.”

“Then what’s so important about your schedule that everything has to conform to it, regardless of how it might affect other people’s?”

Seeing herself through his eyes, she cried passionately, “You don’t understand!”

“Then make me,” he said. “You say you want what’s best for our niece and nephew—”

“I do! I want to give them the kind of security that comes from knowing that they are deeply and irrevocably loved, even though their parents have died.”

“Which is exactly what I also want for them. So why, if we’re in agreement, are we fighting each other?”

“I don’t know!” she cried, frustration spilling over. He knocked all the starch out of her convictions with his powerful line of reasoning. “I can’t think straight when you badger me like this!”

“Is that what I’m doing, Caroline? Badgering you?”

No, you’re reinforcing a whole host of self-doubts about what I thought were entrenched beliefs in my rights, and I can’t deal with that, especially not with you sitting so close beside me that I forget to be prudent.

“Am I?” he said again, running his knuckles along her jaw in a caress so tender that it undid her.

Her vision blurred. “No,” she said, blinking furiously. “I’m feeling overwhelmed, that’s all.”

“Understandable.” Another pause followed, this one humming with a different kind of energy, before he said thoughtfully, “Given our common goal, can we not find a way to work together, instead of in opposition?”

Tamping down an improbable surge of hope, she said warily, “Exactly what is it you’re proposing, Paolo?”

“That you give me one year. Put your career on hold and take that leave of absence and live here. With me.”

“With you? You mean, in your house?”

“Exactly. At present, I own an apartment, but for the children’s sake, I would buy a villa on the outskirts of Rome. A place with a garden where they could play—one close to where they lived with their parents, so that they could attend the same school, and keep the same friends. In other words, I would make a home for them—and you.”

“You can’t possibly be suggesting that the four of us would all live under the same roof?”

“Why not?”

“Because your father wouldn’t allow it, for a start!”

“My father does not dictate my choices, Caroline. I am my own man.”

She didn’t doubt that for a moment. “Perhaps. But he’d never accept my place at your side.”

“He’d have no choice but to accept you, if you were my wife.”

“You’re suggesting we get married?” This time, there was no controlling her spiking blood pressure.

“Yes,” he said calmly, as if proposing marriage out of the blue was as common an everyday occurrence as brushing his teeth.

“But you don’t love me!”

“Nor do you love me. But we both love the children, do we not?”

“Well…yes.”

“Then is it not worth trying to give back to them a little of what they’ve lost—a home, two people who love them, a semblance of normality?”

To be his wife, to share a home with him and their children…had this not been the stuff her dreams were made of, for longer than she cared to admit? And yet, to grasp them now, on the strength of a whim, an impulse, was surely courting heartbreak all over again.

Quickly, before her foolish heart led her astray a second time where he was concerned, she said, “With a marriage in name only? I don’t think so, Paolo!”

“Nor do I. Such marriages stand no chance of succeeding.”

By then too confused to be delicate, she said bluntly, “Are you suggesting we sleep together?”

With enviable aplomb, he replied, “Why not? I admit, intimacy coupled with love makes for the best bedfellows, but between compatible, consenting adults, intimacy alone can nurture a closeness they might otherwise never know.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“Then they part as friends and go their separate ways, which is why I ask you to give me a year. If, at the end of it, we agree we cannot make the marriage work, we will end it.”

“And exactly how does that help the children?”

“It gives them a breathing space, a time to heal, among people who care about them enough to put their personal ambitions aside. At the same time, it allows them the chance to get to know you, which cannot be a bad thing if, as you say, you want what is best for them—because you surely must agree, no child can have too large a loving family.”