‘Marry me.’

‘Look, I don’t know if you’re actually serious—’

‘It is not a subject I am likely to joke about.’

Despite the outraged note of offence in Cesare’s interjection, Samantha was not so sure. This man’s personality and the motives that drove him were still pretty much an enigma to her—ironic, considering that he knew her more intimately than any man. At her side her fists clenched as she struggled not to think about how intimately.

‘But don’t you think this is a slight overreaction?’ He couldn’t see her, so he wouldn’t know how badly she failed in her attempt at a smile—but that was cold comfort when she was shaking hard from the inside out. As if things weren’t already complicated enough, he had to throw a crazy idea like this into the mix…and make her think about how different it would be if what they had shared had not been empty, shallow sex.

‘To a situation as trivial as you having my child, you mean?’

Kim Lawrence lives on a farm in rural Anglesey. She runs two miles daily, and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons, and the various stray animals which have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!

Recent titles by the same author:

DESERT PRINCE, DEFIANT VIRGIN

SECRET BABY, CONVENIENT WIFE

The Brunelli
Baby Bargain

By

Kim Lawrence

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

SAM took a deep sustaining breath and muttered, ‘Don’t bottle it now,’ to herself as she approached the young woman who sat behind a large glass desk. With her blonde hair and hourglass figure the woman had the kind of beauty that always attracted men’s attention.

Diminutive redheads with freckles, on the other hand, were not so universally lusted after, at least in Sam’s experience, although it had seemed for a while that Will had thought differently—until the day she had walked in and found her erstwhile fiancé in bed with a beautiful blonde.

Normally when Sam’s thoughts touched on this memorable occasion she experienced a wave of nausea that turned her sensitive stomach inside out, but not this time. This time her stomach was already paralysed with sheer terror.

Her eyelashes brushed her cheeks as she squeezed her eyes closed and took a second breath, willing her frantically racing heart, which felt as though it were imminently about to break through her ribcage, to slow. She forced a smile; if a person acted as though they expected to be shown the door, they probably would be.

She had taken several hours to achieve the appearance of someone who might consider strolling into the headquarters of a multinational empire and demanding to see the man who was top of the food chain as something she did every day of the week, but, catching sight of her reflection in a mirrored panel on the opposite wall, she knew her efforts had been wasted.

This was not going to work.

Ignoring the voice of pessimism, or rather reality, in her head, Sam pinned the smile back on and cleared her throat. The sound attracted the attention of the receptionist, but only briefly because at that exact moment the glass lift doors to Sam’s left silently opened to reveal another blonde, a tall voluptuous one wearing a very small red dress.

The girl behind the desk stared and so did Sam; so also did the men with cameras who had appeared from nowhere as if by magic.

The ravishing blonde seemed totally unfazed by the flash photography and the volley of questions the paparazzi flung in her direction. She simply bared her perfect teeth in a brilliant smile and proved that, even though she had made the transition from modelling to Hollywood, she still knew how to strut her stuff. Flanked by two large muscular bodyguards, she glided through the foyer pausing once or twice to give the hungry press a pose while responding with an enigmatic smile and a coy, ‘No comment,’ to their demands to know if she and Cesare were back together.

As the door closed leaving only the heavy scent of the actress’s exotic perfume in the air Sam was wondering much the same thing—talk about bad timing! The last thing any man wanted to hear was the news she had come to deliver, but she imagined that this was doubly true of a man who had just been reconciled with the love of his life.

Sam sighed and tried to push the image of the actress from her head; she wasn’t here to compete for the Italian’s attention or his affections. She wasn’t even slightly interested in Cesare Brunelli’s love life and she had no wish to be part of it, something she would make quite clear.

Her only reason for being here was simple: tell him and leave. The ball would then be in his court and if he decided not to pick it up then that would make life a lot simpler.

All she had to do was tell him.

It was now or never!

At the moment never was looking pretty damn good!

She winced as her designer shoes pinched. They had been a bargain, but were also a painful half a size too small, though the confidence boost they gave her far outweighed any discomfort.

‘I’m…’ She stopped as she tried to introduce herself to the woman behind the desk, her mouth open, her confident manner wobbling into pessimistic anxiety.

What was she meant to say?

I’m Sam, but that won’t mean anything—your boss doesn’t know my name, he doesn’t even know the colour of my eyes, he’s oblivious to the fact I have freckles, and my hair is ginger. But I thought that given the circumstances it was only polite to let him know my news face to face as opposed to some more impersonal method—I’m having his baby.

As she stood in the reception of Cesare’s offices, Sam thought of the differences between an Italian billionaire and a girl who juggled her finances each month. She had probably earned less during her entire working life than Cesare did in a minute! Still, things were improving professionally—she’d put in four years of unglamorous work on the local newspaper in the Scottish market town where she had been born, making tea before rising to cover the weddings and church fêtes. Now, finally, her hard work had paid dividends and she had landed a job, although a very junior one, admittedly, at a national daily here in London.

‘Yeah, things are better than they were in my day,’ the established older female journalist who had taken her under her wing had told her. ‘You have talent, Sam,’ she conceded, making Sam glow with pride.

‘But,’ she warned, ‘you need to give one hundred per cent if you want people to think you are serious and, while scruples aren’t a bad thing exactly, you need to be a bit more…flexible. Oh, and it goes without saying that the last thing you want at this point in your career is a high-maintenance relationship.’ At this point she had laughed and Sam had joined in. ‘Or a family…professional suicide!’

Baby!

Sam wasn’t laughing now as she considered this new and frankly scary detour in her hitherto predictable life. She had been scared—she still was—but there had never been any tortured soul-searching; it had simply never occurred to her not to have this baby.

Underneath the scariness and the panic there was a deep-seated and totally inexplicable feeling of rightness… This was not a feeling she anticipated the father of her accidental baby would share. But just because he wouldn’t want anything to do with the baby didn’t mean he didn’t have the right to know.

Sam had steeled herself for his inevitable anger and suspicion that she had told herself would be normal for any man in such circumstances. What was less normal was the strange sense of inner serenity she had tapped into—a serenity she hadn’t known she possessed, although she also wondered whether it might just be a symptom of delayed shock.

A shaky sigh left her lungs as Sam shook her head. She had only had a fortnight to get used to the idea and it still hadn’t fully sunk in yet—in fact the whole situation had a surreal quality.

Her hand went to her belly, still flat under her jacket and her lips curved into a wry smile. No doubt the idea would start to feel more real when her waistline began to expand.

She addressed the girl behind the desk once more. ‘I’m…Samantha Muir and…’

The girl looking slightly bored now the actress and her noisy entourage had left, lifted the phone she was speaking into away from her ear and, without making eye contact with Sam, said, ‘First left.’

Sam blinked. This was not the way any of her mental versions of this scene had played.

The shoes must really have worked!

The shoes in question were at that moment nailed to the floor. She couldn’t move, she was so shocked at not even having her identity queried or the reason for her visit questioned.

‘First left?’ she echoed, inwardly wondering why she was still standing there. The woman wanted her to go through that door, she wasn’t to know Sam didn’t have an appointment so she shouldn’t under any circumstances volunteer the information.

What was holding her back? Those inconvenient scruples, that awful compulsion to tell the truth in moments when a white lie or silence worked much better, or simply gutless fear?

With a hint of impatience the receptionist nodded and waved long red-painted nails in the direction of the door before turning her attention back to the phone.

This is too easy, persisted the voice of suspicion in Sam’s head.

‘Easy is good,’ Sam retorted under her breath. If this was a case of crossed wires it was working to her advantage so she’d be a dope not to go with the flow. She lifted her chin and once again fixed a confident smile on her pale face—she was tapping into previously unexpected acting talents—and walked through the door without knocking.

It was a bit of an anticlimax, as the room she found herself in was not large. The only furniture was a small desk in one corner and some easy chairs set along one wall. A door beside the desk opened and a slim thirty-something man with thinning sandy hair and a harassed manner walked in, then dropped the file of papers he was holding when he saw her.

‘You’re a woman.’

Under normal circumstances Sam would have responded to this accusation, because it was definitely an accusation, with ironic humour. But humour and irony were both beyond her at the moment.

Instead she nodded cautiously and said, ‘Hello, I’m Sam Muir and I’d like—’

‘Sam!’ He slapped a hand to his forehead and groaned. ‘That explains it, of course. And just when I thought that this day couldn’t get any worse.’

Sam, feeling increasingly bewildered, gave another vague nod. ‘I’m here to see Mr Brunelli…?’

As she spoke her mental barrier slipped and a dark image flickered across her retina. The blurry lines solidified into features until she could see each strongly sculpted line and individual angle of Cesare Brunelli’s face.

It seemed amazing now that she had had no precognition of danger the first time she had looked into the face of the tall man who had towered over her.

The impact of his beauty had been like a physical blow drawing the breath from her burning lungs like the heat from a furnace being drawn into a vacuum.

She had been dimly conscious of emotions deep inside her stirring, breaking free of self-imposed restraints, but had felt strangely disconnected from what had been happening to her. Her innate ability to distance herself emotionally and analyse what she was doing and why had deserted her totally. Of course she hadn’t recognised this until it had been too late—the damage had been done!

When she had been with him she hadn’t been able to control her pounding heartbeat, the weakness in her shaking limbs or the burning heat that had washed over her skin.

It wasn’t just the stern symmetry and powerful planes of his bronzed patrician features, or the curve of his mouth, it was no individual feature but the combination that made him so beautiful.

Even now, twelve weeks later, the memory of his face made Sam’s throat ache, but now she could think about her reaction and what had happened later more objectively.

She could not deny he was a good-looking man who possessed an arrogant sexuality she was not totally immune to, but what had happened had been the result of a freak set of circumstances rather than anything more momentous.

He would probably turn out to be quite ordinary, she thought. She’d probably just built him up in her mind into something extraordinary to defend her own behaviour because nothing short of a rampant, irresistible sex god could be responsible for her fall from grace. She was looking for excuses.

Whereas the plain truth was there were no excuses; she’d been reckless and stupid. She’d had a moment of weakness—actually an entire night of weakness, but this was something she chose not to dwell on—and now she had to live with it.

She would probably see him and discover he bore no resemblance to her romanticised image of a brooding, damaged hero in need of comfort that only she could give.

Quickly she shied away from the subject of giving and turned her thoughts instead to the present. Dragging her attention back to the sandy-haired young man, she noticed he was rifling through some papers he now had in his hand.

‘This might be a problem… It looks like your CV has gone walkabout too, my God!’ he exclaimed in disgust. ‘That woman really was a total liability!’ He put aside the papers and glanced up at Sam, adding as an apologetic afterthought, ‘Sorry, it’s not your fault.’

Actually it was.

A fresh wave of disgust and shame washed over Sam.

Who else was there to blame? She’d kissed Cesare first, kissed a total stranger.

The memory of him was indelibly stamped into her consciousness—the way his face had been illuminated by the sudden flash of white lightning outside the window, and the way things had twisted painfully in her chest when she had seen the terrible bleakness that had shone deep in his incredible eyes and the utter frustration stamped on his dark features.

Unable to voice the words of comfort, unable to force any sound besides a choking sigh past the emotional congestion in her throat, she had instead reached out and taken his face between her hands.

The actions had been spontaneous, and, she had realised almost immediately, a mistake. He had stiffened at the touch of her mouth, his own lips remaining unresponsive under the pressure of hers.

Kissing a gorgeous man who didn’t want to be kissed might be something that any number of women her age could laugh off with a shrug, but Sam did not possess that skill.

She hadn’t wanted to laugh; she’d wanted to die from sheer mortification. She had started to lift her head, started to mutter a mortified apology, and would have removed her hands had his own fingers not come up to cover hers and hold them against his face.

Sam’s heart thudded again as she remembered his fingers tangling in hers, the fine muscles along his jaw tensing, his nostrils flaring as he slurred something thick in his own language.

She had felt rather than heard the groan that had seemed to be dragged from deep inside him before being lost in her mouth.

She had started it!

It was absolutely no excuse that he had looked as if he needed kissing.

Of course, if he hadn’t kissed her back and the storm hadn’t knocked out the electricity…there would have been no problem. No problem, no scalding shame and no baby!

She bit down hard on her lip and subdued the images that rose shameful and graphic in her head… It had happened and it was pretty pointless given the consequences in pretending it hadn’t, but nothing could be achieved by endless post-mortems.

Tension drawing the soft lines of her pale face taut, her hand went unconsciously to her stomach. He would not want to know, which suited her fine. She could walk out of the door knowing that she had done the right thing.

‘Is Mr Brunelli actually here?’ she asked. Half of her wanted the answer to be negative.

The man sighed, his glance swivelling significantly towards the door behind him before he nodded and belatedly introduced himself. ‘I’m Tim Andrews. Call me Tim,’ he added with an easy-going smile.

After a hesitation Sam took the hand he extended, her gaze sliding to the door. If she moved quickly she could be through it before this nice man could stop her.

‘You’re shaking,’ the man said suddenly, concern replacing the harassed expression on his face as Sam pulled her hand away.

She thrust her hands in the pockets of her jacket and told herself to relax. What was the worst they could do? To be forcibly ejected by Security would be a new experience. Although her last new experience had not turned out so well, however blissfully perfect it had been at the time.

‘I’ve come a long way to see Mr Brunelli.’ It had actually just been a couple of Tube rides, but she saw no harm in exaggeration given the circumstances. ‘And I’m not leaving until I do. I mean it.’ Sam wished she felt half as resolved as she sounded.

There was a startled pause before Tim said, ‘I believe you.’

I wish I did, she thought.

‘I’ll do what I can but…’ He gave a shrug that told her to be prepared to be disappointed. ‘Would you like to take a seat?’

Sam, who would have quite liked to be somewhere else—anywhere else—walked to one of the chairs set against the wall and sat down.

After a tap on the dividing door Tim Andrews walked through.

From where she was sitting Sam could hear the sound of raised voices, or at least one anyway, and that was the only one she was hearing. It brought it all back with a rush, or would have if she had not sternly pushed it away, which wasn’t easy when the owner of the deep, gravelly, accented tone was standing on the other side of that wall.

Perhaps she’d been wrong to opt for the personal touch—a letter or an email, in fact anything that did not bring her into physical contact with this man, might have been better.

It wasn’t as if she had anything to prove to anyone else or herself.

Sam wasn’t conscious of getting to her feet or crossing the room, but she must have because the next thing she knew she was standing in the open doorway.

The room beyond was vast, but Sam was oblivious to the oak panelling and wall of glass that framed a view of the river. Her glance only skimmed the eclectic mix of modern designer and antique furniture before going straight to the tall, lean, broad-shouldered figure standing with his back to her.

He turned his head slightly, revealing the high, intelligent forehead, strong line of an aquiline nose and the slightly squared angle of a firm shaven jaw.

The man she had spent the night with had worn his hair collar-length and his jaw had been covered in stubble. He had been raw and earthy, as elemental as the storm that had raged outside as they had made love.

This man had a smooth jaw line and his hair was cut close to his head. Casual and crumpled jeans had been replaced by a beautifully tailored grey suit that shrieked designer. He looked the epitome of masculine elegance and sophistication.

Suddenly this didn’t feel like a polite formality—it felt like a major mistake. Sam was gripped by an urgent and primitive compulsion to turn and run, and she would have obeyed this instinct if her legs or for that matter any other parts of her body, had shown any inclination to follow instructions.

‘Shall I shut the door? She’s out there and—’

‘No, leave it open. Candice does not understand the concept of less is more when it comes to perfume.’

As Sam saw Cesare’s aristocratic nose wrinkle in distaste she wondered if this display was less to do with genuine repugnance to the exotic scent and more to do with the person it reminded him of.

Did it just bring memories of his time with Candice flooding back or fill him with helpless longing?

Neither possibility made Sam feel particularly cheerful. Ever since she’d read a newspaper article on Cesare’s relationship with Candice, Sam had been wondering if it had been the beautiful actress’s face he had been seeing in his head when he had made love to her. For all Sam knew those liquid Italian endearments that had melted her might have been intended for someone quite different, someone who really was his bella mia, his beautiful blonde ex-fiancée—except—now the ex part was in question.

‘Look, I’m sorry about Candice but she—’

‘There is no need to explain Candice to me, Tim—she is sensationally single minded when she decides on something. I take it the news of her presence here was leaked?’

The slighter man responded to this dry enquiry with a rueful grimace. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘She was never one to waste a good photo opportunity.’

‘About this girl, Cesare, she’s travelled to get here—couldn’t you just see her? You don’t have to actually give her the job.’

As Sam listened she finally understood the reason for the open doors that she had so far encountered—they thought she was an applicant for a job!

This realisation might have made her laugh if it had not been for the fact that the only thing Sam was really conscious of at that moment was the man who responded to this coaxing comment from Tim with a contemptuous snort.

Just her luck it turned out Cesare actually was a rampant sex god!

‘I was quite specific I do not want a female PA.’

‘Well, the agency couldn’t say that, could they? Not without being accused of sexual discrimination.’

‘So this is why a woman was included in the shortlist? To pay lip service to equality?’

She watched as Cesare Brunelli walked around the desk, his face set in lines of irritation, then without taking his eyes from the other man he picked up a smooth green rock shot through with iridescent streaks of gold and began to rub it between his palms.

Sam, her eyes glued to his long brown fingers, ran a tongue over her dry lips as her stomach filled with a flock of butterflies at the thought of those fingers on her skin, the skilful touch leaving trails of fire.

‘Is that the same stone you brought back from the peak when we did that Himalaya trek?’

‘Yes.’ As he let the stone settle in the palm of one hand Cesare’s expression was unreadable.

It was no struggle for Sam to see him clinging to some sheer cliff face. He looked like a man who liked to push the boundaries and himself.

‘That was some experience, wasn’t it?’ Tim enthused, a grin spreading across his face. ‘Even if I didn’t make it to the top,’ he added ruefully. ‘But next time I’m not going to chicken out. I’m going to keep up with the big boys. Then I’ll see the view for myself.’

The sound of the stone being set back down on the desk brought the sandy-haired Englishman’s eyes to the tall Italian’s face.

‘But I will not.’

The moment the words were out of his mouth Cesare regretted them. He disliked self-pity in others and even more so in himself.

Colour flooded Tim’s face. ‘I’m really sorry. I can’t seem to open my mouth without—’

‘Saying something to remind me that I’m blind? The fact you forget it is why I keep you around. That and the fact your schoolboyish looks lull the opposition into a false sense of security. You’re about the only person who doesn’t walk on eggshells around me.’

There had been one other.

Cesare closed his eyes, but it did not stop him hearing her voice in his head. Sometimes he thought she had been an erotic figment of his imagination, but his imagination would not have been capable of conjuring such vivid memories. He heard her voice saying things that nobody else had dared, but every word and every accusation had been true.

‘Gutless wonder’ had perhaps been a little harsh, but a flicker of a smile crossed his face at the recollection—his response at the time of her comments had not been such a tolerant or objective one.

She had become the innocent—though provocative—focus of all the inner rage and impotent fury that consumed him.

His nerve endings had been exposed and stripped bare—perhaps just by her voice. The husky quality certainly had the ability to dig its way under a man’s skin.

She had said things that nobody else would, things that had needed saying. She had ripped away his defences with a few observations and made him feel what he had been trying not to—pain!

She had tapped into the protective hollowness that he had been carrying around.

The sex had been something else—a mistake, but the sort that he would like to make again, he mused, a reflective smile playing around the corners of his lips.

‘People always walk on eggshells around you,’ Tim retorted, snapping Cesare out of his reverie, ‘because you intimidate the hell out of them.’ That much at least had not changed since the accident.

‘You’re suggesting I’m not a fair man? That I’m a bully?’ Cesare asked, sounding interested rather than offended by the possibility.

‘I’m suggesting you’re a man who sets himself high standards and expects others to live up to them, but not everyone has your—focus.’

It had taken more than mere focus for Cesare to overcome the personal demons that had arisen after he’d suffered losing his sight.

It had taken a will of steel.

‘About this girl…?’

Cesare’s fingers drilled an impatient tattoo on the desk. ‘You know my opinion of this sort of pointless political correctness, so why waste this woman’s time and mine?’

‘She was included by mistake, her name is Sam…’ Tim’s explanation trailed away as he added coaxingly, ‘Couldn’t you just see her?’ The moment the words left his lips a flush mounted his fair, freckled face and he broke off before saying awkwardly, ‘I mean…’

Cesare lifted a sardonic brow. ‘I know what you mean, Timothy,’ he said, amusement in his voice. ‘And I do wish you would stop trying so hard to spare my feelings. But, no, I will not…see her. I can hardly be accused of sexual discrimination towards women in the workplace. Is it not a fact that we employ more women in senior management positions than any other comparable company?’

‘Yes…’

‘I have no problem with women in the workplace—it is just a woman in my office I do not want.’ He found the idea of having unseen eyes filled with pity following him around the office intolerable.

‘This one might be different.’

‘You mean she might not be caring and compassionate and she might not be unable to perform incidental tasks like sorting my diary because she is so busy oozing empathy and protecting me. It didn’t matter how rude I was—’

‘And you were.’

‘It didn’t matter.’

‘She still fell in love with you! I should have your problem,’ Tim muttered.

A spasm of distaste contorted Cesare’s dark lean features as he snorted. ‘Please do not confuse that sort of soppy sentimentality with love.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘I WON’T fall in love with you.’ Sam felt pretty safe in making this statement, though obviously she wouldn’t have felt as comfortable if she had been discussing falling in lust.

She had fallen deep and desperately in lust with this man about ten seconds after she’d set eyes on him. Lust had made her principles and self-respect vanish in a hot flash of indiscriminating hormones…

But love was a very different kind of beast; love bore no resemblance to a bolt of lightning that robbed you of your ability to think; love wasn’t about chemicals; it happened gradually, it grew in strength and it endured.

Lust, on the other hand, was made of much more flimsy material. It had no staying power…which was why Sam could look at Cesare now and feel nothing but…oh, God, looking at him was not a good idea!

The sound of her voice made both men turn their heads in her direction and Sam was forced to rapidly re-evaluate the staying power of her lust.

The hormones were still there and active!

She knew Cesare couldn’t see her but it felt as though he were staring right at her.

Sam’s heart was pumping so fast she could hardly drag air into her lungs.

Cesare looked so different. Would he shrug off the veneer of cultured sophistication as easily as he might shrug that impeccably tailored jacket over his broad shoulders…?

Well, she wasn’t going to hang around to find out, Sam reminded herself as the image of Cesare in her head began to shed more than his jacket!

‘I’m not here about the job, Mr Brunelli.’ And she wasn’t here to lust after his body. Lusting was what had got her in this mess to begin with!

His incredible eyes, sloe-dark and framed by preposterously long, curling ebony lashes, were trained directly on her face. Sam felt as if that piercing stare were seeing, not just her face, but the thoughts in her head, and as these thoughts involved him wearing very little it was a deeply disturbing feeling.

Cesare stilled, his hands clenching into fists at his sides as the deep little voice with the unique husky resonance hit him like a slap in the face.

He’d searched for her and been unable to find her, the woman who had appeared in his life then quietly vanished leaving only the scent of her body on his bed sheets to show she had not been a dream.

She was here. She had found him. A slow smile curved his lips as anticipation uncurled in his belly. After the accident his sexual appetite had gone into hibernation, but had been re-awoken with a vengeance by the owner of this voice. When she had vanished so, inexplicably, had his desire.

It was back!

Cesare’s deep voice cut through the stretching silence. ‘Leave us, Tim.’

Tim, who was walking across the room to Sam, stopped in his tracks at the curt request. Cesare could feel the other man’s astonished stare, but ignored it.

‘Leave you?’ Tim echoed as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. His glance slid to Sam. ‘With her?’

‘Yes.’ One corner of Cesare’s mouth lifted and he sketched a sardonic smile.

Sam’s sense of insecurity deepened. She had mentally prepared herself to expect one thing, but this wasn’t it! Not only had Cesare’s appearance undergone a transformation, so had his manner.

The Cesare Brunelli in Scotland had been struggling with demons of self-doubt as he came to terms with what had happened to him. He had been angry and frustrated, his manner abrasive and belligerent.

This man, with his air of unstudied authority, looked as if he’d never experienced a moment of self-doubt in his life!

‘I’ll call if I feel in danger, Tim.’

And what will I do if I feel in danger? Sam thought as she drew a deep breath. She already felt in danger—of losing her mind if nothing else.

This is what I wanted, she reminded herself. But suddenly being alone with Cesare Brunelli no longer seemed so desirable.

‘Hold on, Tim,’ Cesare ordered, and Tim paused. ‘What does she look like?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Is she a blue-eyed blonde, a brown-eyed brunette…?’

Cesare already knew that her face was level with his heart, he knew that her figure was correspondingly petite and the skin that covered those delicious slight curves was smooth and silky. It was a shock for him to recognise how often during the intervening weeks he had thought of the face he had traced with his fingers, the face with the small, determined chin, tip-tilted nose and wide, lush mouth. His musing had been frustrated by the inability to put a colour to her eyes or to know the shade of the long silky tresses he had speared his fingers into and smoothed from her brow.

‘She has deep blue eyes—very blue—and auburn hair,’ Tim said, without looking to check the details. He then looked embarrassed and threw Sam a self-conscious and apologetic look. ‘Sorry.’

Sam shook her head. ‘It isn’t you who has no manners.’ Neither did he have an aura of raw sexuality that made it impossible for a person to relax in his company.

The pointed comment drew a hastily cut-off chuckle from Tim, who then quickly vanished.

The door closed with a click and she took a deep breath. ‘I’m…’

Cesare tilted his head to one side. Red hair explained the temper and meshed perfectly with his mental image. ‘I know who you are, cara. You seem to have made quite an impression on Timothy,’ he stated, not looking entirely pleased by this observation. ‘So a blue-eyed redhead…?’

‘I hardly think the colour of my eyes is relevant.’

‘Possibly, but as we are on such intimate terms… Now, I don’t think we were ever formally introduced…Sam…?’

To his mind a boy’s name was entirely inappropriate for the most feminine woman he had ever encountered.

‘How did you know that it was me?’ She shook her head and directed her wary gaze at his face. ‘You couldn’t, you can’t…’ Unless…?

She took a stumbling step backwards as he began to cross the room towards her, moving with confidence as he negotiated his route past several obstacles including a chair that stood in his way.

If she hadn’t known already it would never have crossed her mind that he was blind.

Maybe he wasn’t any longer?

His next mocking words revealed he had read her thoughts.

‘I may be blind, cara, but I’m not stupid.’

But I am, she thought as she stared at his mouth and thought about it on her skin… She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself protectively. She was glad that he could not see the giveaway action.

‘Then how?’

‘Your voice is very distinctive.’ Low and smoky with a sexy little rasp. The muscles along his taut jaw tightened as his resentment stirred. Like an annoying tune, he hadn’t been able to get that husky sound out of his head.

Or her.

Sam’s fingers clenched and she said quickly, ‘A lot of people have a Scottish accent.’

But only one had that voice.

Cesare had not doubted for one second that this was the woman who had spent that night in Scotland with him. ‘And your perfume…’

He swallowed hard, causing a visible wave of contraction beneath the brown skin of his throat. His nostrils flared as his body responded to the warm floral female scent in his nostrils.

‘I don’t use perfume,’ she protested hoarsely.

He had stopped close enough so that all she had to do was reach out and she could touch him, and she felt an almost overwhelming compulsion to do just that.

This was crazy! She hadn’t come here to revisit this insanity, Sam thought as she gulped and tried to tear her eyes from his beautiful face. She failed—the man was totally compelling.

‘And now the mystery woman has a name…’ The indentation between his eyebrows deepened. ‘Sam…?’

The way he wrapped his tongue around her name sent an illicit shiver down her spine.

‘Samantha, but everyone calls me Sam.’

‘I prefer Samantha.’

Sam was wondering how to respond to that when without warning he stretched out his hand. She closed her eyes and swayed as the sensitive tips of his long brown fingers trailed slowly down the curve of her cheek.

‘So you are real. I was beginning to wonder, but for the scratches on my back I might have decided you were a figment of my imagination.’

The hot, mortified colour flew to Sam’s cheeks as she lowered her gaze, unable to maintain eye contact even though he couldn’t see her.

‘Look, I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.’ She’d started to wonder much the same thing herself… This was something that could have been done at a distance—clinically.

But then you wouldn’t have seen him, pointed out the sly voice in her head, and isn’t that what you really wanted…?

Cesare shook his head. ‘No, I assume you want something. I’d like to flatter myself and think it is my body, but…’

A choking sound escaped Sam’s throat. ‘You’re really not that fantastic,’ she told him as the erotic images playing in her head stood witness to her whopper of a lie.

‘That’s not what you said at the time… “Perfect, utterly perfect” were words mentioned several times, I think, and you also appeared to have a very high opinion of my abilities in bed.’

‘If you were any sort of a gentleman you wouldn’t have brought that up.’

‘I’m not.’

She shook her head. ‘Not what?’

Her stomach muscles clenched as the corners of his lips lifted in a slow predatory smile. ‘A gentleman, cara, not in any sense of the word, but then it wasn’t my beautiful manners that made you jump into bed with me, was it?’

‘I can’t believe I ever felt sorry for you!’ she gasped, glaring at him.

His head went back as though she had struck him. With nostrils flared and a thin white line etched around the sculpted outline of his lips, he retorted in a voice edged with ice, ‘So you slept with me because you felt sorry for me?’

Sam’s brow puckered into a frown as she returned to a mystery she had still not fully resolved to her own satisfaction. ‘I really don’t know why I did it—I’m always so sensible.’ She gave a perplexed shake of her head and sighed. ‘I knew what I was doing, I knew it was crazy, but it was as if…’

As he listened to her faltering response the hostility drained from Cesare’s expression. ‘You just had to in the same way you had to take your next breath.’

Sam looked up, amazed to hear her own feelings so simply but accurately expressed. ‘Exactly like that!’ Then, realising what she had just admitted and to whom she had admitted it, she blushed to the roots of her hair and added defensively, ‘I don’t feel sorry for you any more.’

The wolflike smile that revealed his even white teeth made Sam wonder if she had been too subtle in her effort to make the point that the madness had passed and she no longer felt unable to control herself.

‘But we are forgetting the formalities, Samantha.’ He said her name as though testing the taste of it on his tongue before inclining his dark head and announcing formally, ‘I am Cesare. But of course you already know this…you are here. The only question remaining is still why?’

The why was something she was still working her way around to. ‘I didn’t know your name when I…when we…’

‘Went to bed because you were consumed by pity—I must say you hid it well.’

The sardonic insertion brought a flush to her cheeks. ‘Oh, I didn’t feel it then, not until I saw your picture in an article.’ She had not believed for a moment that the man described as the financial genius of his generation was the same man she had spent the night with. Then she had read the brief paragraph that mentioned an accident that had robbed him of his sight and the subsequent calling-off of his marriage to a well-known actress.

‘And now you have discovered a new depth of feeling for me?’

Sam, baffled by the ironic suggestion, shook her head. ‘I…’

‘Now you deeply regret, in hindsight, leaving while I was sleeping?’

The guilty colour climbed to Sam’s cheeks. ‘That was… I…’ How could she explain the fact that she had been too embarrassed to hang around, that she’d never woken up beside a man before and she had panicked?

‘No need for explanations—I understand this change of heart totally.’

‘I doubt that,’ she muttered drily.

‘Oh, yes, I know from experience how people’s attitudes change when they discover how much money I have.’

It took the space of several seconds for Sam’s brain to translate the sarcasm. Teeth clenched, she levelled an angry, glittering violet-blue-eyed glare at his lean, sardonic face.

A man who had such a jaundiced view of human nature was not likely to greet the news he had fathered a child with an open mind.

‘For the record, I don’t care about your money.’

Cesare was conscious of a feeling of irrational disappointment as he dragged a hand through his dark hair—she was the same as everyone else after all.

What was her angle?

Cesare had never been a man who indulged in one-night stands and he considered men who slipped away like thieves in the night were displaying at the very least bad manners. He saw no reason not to apply the same rules to women.

And while her walking out on him had initially made him as mad as hell, once the anger had worn off he had realised she had just given and not asked for anything in return, which in his world made her pretty unique. Alas it now seemed that she was not so special.

‘Of course you don’t.’

His cynical drawl made her want to hit him. ‘And if I was as cynical as you…’ She drew a deep breath and bit back the retort, forcing herself to continue with more moderation as she added honestly, ‘I really had no idea who you were when I…we…at the time, and quite honestly I wish I still didn’t. But I was researching for an article and your photo…’

‘Researching…?’

Sam misread the edge in his voice as skepticism and she raised her chin in defence.

‘Actually, I work for the Chronicle,’ she said, trying to sound casual and failing—she still got a buzz from people looking impressed when she told them her job.

Cesare did not look impressed. In fact he couldn’t have looked less impressed. ‘You’re a journalist?’

‘Yes…’ Hearing the defensive note in her voice, she bit her lip and added, ‘I happen to be very good at what I do.’

‘I do not doubt it.’

His sneer left her in no doubt that this comment was not intended as a compliment.

‘I take it you have a problem with journalists.’

Cesare bared his teeth in a snarling smile, giving himself a moment to contain the fury he could feel hammering inside his skull before he responded in a voice that was wiped clean of all emotion save contempt.

‘I suppose it is a job that would suit someone with no moral scruples.’ The person who had interviewed the family of the child he had pulled from the burning car had certainly had nothing that approached a moral. They had added to the anguish by asking the parents while their child lay critically ill if they felt responsible for Cesare’s own loss of sight.

The careless observation drew a gasp of startled anger from Sam’s lips.

‘I try not to generalise and I admit that most journalists I know would stop short of lying their way into someone’s bed to get a juicy story,’ Cesare said, shaking his head. ‘I should have, but you know I didn’t see this one coming… I should have known there is no such thing as a free lunch.’

An open-handed slap landed with a resounding crack on the side of his face, the force of the blow sending his head sideways.

Shame and shock rolled over Sam as she pressed both hands to her heaving chest. She had just seen red when he made that snide remark. It might not have been deep and meaningful to him, but he didn’t have to trivialise and make the night sound so cheap and nasty.

She was shaking. She had never struck anyone in anger in her life…it wasn’t in her nature.

Just as it wasn’t in her nature to have a one-night stand.

It was this man! Tears of frustration swam in her eyes as he added insult to injury by laughing.

‘You think this is funny?’

One hand laid against the red mark on his lean cheek, he lifted his broad shoulders in an expressive shrug. ‘At last,’ he drawled, ‘I’ve found a woman who doesn’t make any concessions to my disability. If only you weren’t also a callous, manipulative little bitch you might well be the perfect PA…or even,’ he added, his voice dropping an octave to become so sexy and suggestive that a flash of heat was sent across the surface of Sam’s skin, ‘the perfect mistress.’

‘If that’s the post you’re interviewing for I can see why you’re struggling to fill it!’ she snarled, thinking how a job like that would have them queuing around the block! ‘No wonder your fiancée left you!’

She watched as he tilted his head slowly to one side. There was no suggestion in his expression that the jibe had hurt him, but she felt a surge of guilt anyway.

‘It was in the article I read,’ she admitted gruffly. And she, like, she suspected, most of the people reading it, had not for one second believed that the separation between the glamorous couple had preceded the accident that had left the billionaire blind.

‘And I was downstairs when Candice…so are things all right between you now?’

Her fishing trip went unrewarded. ‘Is this professional interest?’

There was that sardonic inflection in his voice again. ‘Your love life doesn’t interest me professionally or otherwise.’ Though she seemed to be doing a pretty good impression of someone who did care. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added, feeling the focus of her anger shifting to the woman who had left the man she loved when he needed her.

What kind of woman did that?

A beautiful one, she thought as an image of the blonde actress in the sexy red dress formed in her head. Sam had put the immediate strong wave of antipathy she had felt towards the article’s photo of the actress smiling up at Cesare down to the strong resemblance the woman had to the one Will had dumped her for. Now Sam had seen Candice in the flesh she knew that she had been doing the actress an injustice. She was far more beautiful in reality, oddly enough, also more real was the antipathy that Sam felt towards her.

The pity in Sam’s apology caused Cesare’s brows to twitch into a straight line.

‘You are sorry for what?’ he enquired warily.

‘Well, that she left you, of course!’ Sam retorted, her voice cracking with dislike and aggravation as she immediately contradicted herself by adding, ‘Though I don’t blame her, because you may be blind but you’re still a total bastard. You know, I really wish that I had slept with you for a story…because if I had I would be feeling a lot less stupid now!’ she declared shrilly.

‘Then if not for a story, why did you sleep with me?’

Sam ignored the question. She’d had practice—she’d been doing just that to the ones in her own mind for the last twelve weeks. ‘You think I’d write about what happened? You think I want to advertise the fact I slept with you! You think I want my family and friends to know?’ She shook her head and told him grimly, ‘Nothing could be farther from the truth. I’m ashamed of what I did!’

Having listened to her emotional diatribe with an expression approaching boredom, he leapt on her last comment.

‘You think sex is something to be ashamed of?’

The suggestion brought an angry flush to her cheeks.

‘Only sex with you! I’ve had relationships—I was engaged.’ He really does not need to know this, she told herself.

‘Engaged?’ For some unfathomable reason Cesare experienced a flash of searing anger at the image that went with this statement.

‘Yes, engaged! For your information I have a perfectly healthy attitude to sex! I’m not some sort of repressed…’ She stopped, just managing to cut her retort short of total suicidal disclosure—it turned out she needn’t have bothered.

CHAPTER THREE

‘VIRGIN?’ As Cesare spoke the memory of Sam’s hoarse cry of wonder echoed in his head, but as the memory dredged up feelings he did not want to examine he pushed it away.

Now, the suggestion drew a strangled cry of dismay from her throat.

He arched a dark brow. ‘You thought I wouldn’t notice?’

‘Hoped.’ Sam bit her lip as the admission escaped uncensored.

‘So you could pretend it didn’t happen? Do you intend to be a professional virgin?’ he goaded. ‘The next time you decide to offer me psychological advice, remember that you are the well-balanced woman who preferred anonymous sex with a stranger than to sleep with her fiancé.’

‘I don’t prefer anonymous sex!’ She was outraged at the suggestion.

‘Then you did know who I was.’

A hissing sound of exasperation escaped her clamped lips. ‘I keep telling you I had no idea who you were.’

‘The dictionary definition of anonymous sex is carnal relations with someone you don’t know.’

‘You don’t read the same dictionaries I do. Look, I really don’t know why you’re making such a big thing of this… Honestly, to hear you talk anyone would think I drugged you into submission. It just happened, and I’m not going to beat myself up over it.’ That sounded really grown up—in a perfect world she really would be this well balanced and pragmatic. ‘And for the record I’d have been quite happy to have sex, it was Will who…’ She stopped, an expression of mortified horror spreading across her face as she realised what she had said.

‘Your fiancé wouldn’t sleep with you?’ Cesare thought of her soft body beneath him, of her pulling him down towards her.

There was no question in his mind that any man who could have had that and rejected it was a fool—a certifiable loser.

‘He fell in love with someone else and my personal life is none of your business,’ she hissed, wishing she had realised this before she had blabbed all the embarrassing details.

‘Tell me what else am I to think? You turned up out of nowhere, pretending to be a cleaner… You tried to get inside my head…’

‘Believe me, your head is the very last place I’d want to be.’

‘You say you didn’t want to be in my bed but that’s where you ended up. Where you planned to end up?’

The totally unjustified suggestion drew a cry of protest from Sam. ‘I did no such thing! I didn’t plan anything, it…it was an accident. It was sympathy sex,’ she was driven to claim.

The words were barely out of her mouth when she was racked by shame and guilt. It had been a mean and petty thing to say, not to mention a lie, but there were times, she told herself, when only a lie worked, and she felt desperate.

Frustratingly her pitiless assertion did not even dent his self-assurance, let alone do irreparable damage to his self-esteem, which looked to be fully intact. He even laughed before he drawled, ‘Sure it was, cara.’

She watched his expressive mouth curl upwards, then swallowed as she closed her eyes and remembered feeling the hot, carnal caresses of his mouth on her. A shiver passed through her body and she thought how it was better by far not to go there.

‘A second ago I was capable of sleeping with you for a story, but suddenly I slept with you because you’re utterly irresistible. Maybe I was just curious?’ He greeted the suggestion with an arched brow. ‘I’d never slept with a blind man before.’

‘You’d never slept with any man before.’

‘Then I hope it makes you feel special!’ she yelled. ‘You know, I don’t know why you’re so mad with me. Unless it’s because you resent that I saw through the macho tough-guy façade. Don’t worry, I know what happened wasn’t personal.’

‘Not personal?’

‘You needed someone and I was there.’

Cesare frowned and pushed away the intrusive memory of the feelings that had twisted in his chest when he’d held her in his arms in the breathless aftermath of their lovemaking. The knowledge that he had been her first lover had shocked him, but it had also deeply aroused him, more than he had imagined possible.

‘It is true there have always been some things, cara, that I prefer not to do alone—’

The deliberate crudity made her blush.

‘It’s a foible of mine and if we’re talking needs I’d say that you needed me at least as much as I needed you. Will you put that in your story? Is this is a courtesy visit to inform me of the imminent article? I’m interested—what tack did you take…?’

‘Go to hell!’ she choked.

‘Which is where I was when you dragged me back from the edge by sharing your delicious little body with me. An interesting angle for you—how I saved the billionaire on the brink by generously sharing my luscious little body. But I have to tell you it was only sex—you were not my salvation.’ It was something he had told himself on more than one occasion.

‘Believe me, I wouldn’t want to be!’ she was able to rebut with total sincerity.

‘What are you, then?’

The words slipped out before she could stop them. ‘Pregnant. I’m twelve weeks pregnant.’

In the act of straightening his already perfectly symmetrical silk tie, Cesare froze. For several seconds he did nothing at all including, or so it seemed to Sam, breathe.

‘Pregnant?’

‘It was quite a shock.’

Cesare’s heartbeat and the world around seemed to have slowed. ‘You’re sure?’

The question sent a surge of anger through her. ‘You think this is something I would say if I wasn’t absolutely sure? You think I just came here on the off chance?’ She stopped and blinked back the sudden rush of tears that filled her eyes. ‘Of course I’m sure!’ she added thickly.

‘You’re crying!’ Cesare accused.

‘No, I’m not,’ she denied, shaking her head as she scrubbed a hand across her pink nose. Through her damp lashes she watched as he speared his fingers into his hair and rested the heels of his hands against his closed eyes.

‘I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any need for a post-mortem over why and how and—’

His head lifted. ‘I think we both know how.’

His wry interruption brought a dull flush to Sam’s pale cheeks. She bit her lip, lifted her chin and continued doggedly as though he had not spoken.

‘The why still remains something of a mystery to me, but,’ she added adopting a bright tone, ‘these things happen…’ She stopped and bit her lip again. Couldn’t she say anything that wasn’t a cliché or a platitude?

A muscle clenched in his lean cheek. ‘Not to me.’

‘Well, me neither, as it happens.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ He hadn’t just impregnated a woman, he had impregnated a virgin! In some societies that could be a capital offence.

‘Look, don’t worry, I’m not expecting anything from you. I just thought you might like to know…so now you do I’ll be off…’ She shrugged the strap of her bag firmer onto her shoulder and turned.

‘You’ll be off…?’ he choked.

‘Yes.’

His shook his head. ‘This is surreal…’

Sam knew what he was talking about. ‘Hard to take on board all at once, I know, but I’ll just leave you my number in case you want to contact me.’ He would probably throw it in the waste-paper bin when she left, but she had done the right thing in telling him.

‘Who are you?’

‘You know who I am, I’m Sam Muir.’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘I mean who…why were you cleaning at that place that night? A cold, drafty castle in the middle of nowhere.’ Cesare had only noticed the cold after she had gone. ‘The woman I spoke to the next day…’

‘Clare—my sister-in-law. I asked her not to—’ She could hear the strident ring of a phone somewhere in the distance and it seemed strange to Sam that normal things were happening in other parts of the building while she was experiencing the most abnormal moment of her life. She would never complain about mundane or routine again.

‘Be cooperative about your whereabouts?’ Cesare finished for her suggestively.

‘Even if I hadn’t asked her to be discreet, she wouldn’t pass on the details of any employee to a stranger.’

‘Discreet? The woman invented some crazy story about epidemics.’

‘That’s not a lie, it’s the truth. Look, if you must know, I don’t make a habit of having one-night stands with total strangers and I left because I was…embarrassed.’ Sam recalled the burning shame she had felt when she had awoken with a man’s face cushioned on her breasts.

Her heavy eyelids closed and her eyelashes fluttered against her flushed cheeks as things low and deep inside tightened and quivered. She was able to recollect in exact detail how the heat of his breath on her skin had felt and the sensual, abrasive roughness of his jaw against the ultra-sensitive flesh.

Even filled with total horror and self-loathing at the situation she had been unable to resist the temptation to sink her fingers into the lush thickness of his hair and smooth the strands back from his brow before she had carefully extricated herself.

‘So you’re related to the people who run the Armuirn Estate?’ Cesare asked.

Sam nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. ‘Yes, by marriage. Clare and my brother run the estate. He was ill that night with the flu. So there was a flu epidemic. I stepped in as a cleaner to help them out.’

‘The man you spoke of when we were together that evening…Ian, is it? He is your brother?’ Cesare could remember feeling an irrational spurt of hostility to the man she had casually referred to.

Sam, who couldn’t recall having mentioned Ian at all, said, ‘Yes. He and Clare can’t afford to live in the castle. They have twin boys, but you really don’t want to know any of this, do you?’

If the man didn’t want to know about his own child he was hardly going to be much interested in the offspring of total strangers.

His voice, deep and impatient, cut across her. ‘Look, maybe you should sit back down?’

‘I’m fine as I am.’

‘Maybe I’ll sit down, then.’

She watched as he folded his long, lean length into a chair and sat there with his chin rested on steepled fingers.

The silence stretched.

Finally he broke it. ‘This isn’t a joke—you’re actually pregnant?’

Sam caught herself in the act of nodding again and bit her lip. ‘Yes.’

She waited tensely.

He looked pale, but, considering the bombshell she had just dropped, he appeared to be taking it pretty well, if you discounted that muscle in his lean cheek that was spasmodically throbbing.

‘Did you plan this?’

Sam stiffened. ‘I beg your pardon?’

The ice crystals in her normally expressive voice gave him a pretty clear idea of what she was feeling. The frustration of not being able to see her face was like a dull ache in his chest. There had been many bitter moments since he’d become blind when he had grieved for the loss of his sight, but never had he felt it as acutely as he did at this moment.

‘You think I planned this?’

‘It is a possibility.’ Even as he spoke he recognised his own lack of conviction.

‘Only if you have a warped mind, but don’t worry, I don’t want anything from you. It just seemed…polite to let you know.’

‘Polite?’

‘If I’d known you were some sort of weird conspiracy-theorist nut I wouldn’t have bothered. You obviously think that all women are out to get impregnated by you… Well, let me tell you, from where I’m standing you don’t look like such a bargain,’ she snorted contemptuously. ‘Unless you like cynical, mean-minded and plain nasty. For the record, if I could have chosen a father for my baby it really wouldn’t be you! You wouldn’t even make the shortlist. So go ahead, think this was all part of some cunning plan, and feel happy because if it was it definitely backfired!’

He heard the lock on the door click and realised she was walking out on him again. Rage rose up in him, closely followed by something he refused to recognise as panic.

‘Marry me.’

The flat statement—it could hardly be called a request—delivered in that terse, peremptory tone effectively ruined her sweeping exit and almost made Sam fall off her high heels.

She slowly turned her head. ‘You’ll laugh, but—’ He didn’t laugh, though, or even smile as she stared, unable to tear her eyes from his dark features. Not a muscle in his face moved and his beautiful eyes somehow remained focused on her own face.

Sam turned her head and told herself the feeling of something hard and heavy lodged behind her breastbone was pity. The sort she would feel for anyone who had suffered such a tragedy.

‘For a moment there I thought you said…’

‘Do not play games. You heard me, Samantha.’

Her headmistress had been the only other person to call her Samantha, but it had not made her nerve endings prickle or even lightly tingle.

She swallowed, her voice rising to an incredulous squeak as she asked on a note of hysterical query, ‘You’re proposing we get married?’

‘Is that not what you wanted me to say?’ Cesare, who had been almost as surprised as she appeared to be to hear himself make the proposal, could now see that it was the obvious solution—the only solution. ‘Is that not why you came here?’

Sam’s eyes went saucer-wide—he sounded so incredibly matter of fact about the subject.

‘I never in a million years expected you to suggest this…or wanted you to,’ she added, thinking of and instantly dismissing those few silly fantasies she had been guilty of weaving in the middle of the previous interminably long sleepless night. Fantasies were harmless—things only got dangerous when you started trying to act them out.

‘Look, I don’t know if you’re actually serious—’

‘It is not a subject I am likely to joke about.’

Despite the outraged note of offence in his interjection, Sam was not so sure. This man’s personality and the motives that drove him were still pretty much an enigma to her—ironic considering that he knew her more intimately than any man. At her side her fists clenched as she struggled not to think about how intimately.

‘But don’t you think this is a slight overreaction?’ He couldn’t see her so he wouldn’t know how badly she failed in her attempt at a smile—it was cold comfort when she was shaking hard from the inside out. As if things weren’t already complicated enough, he had to throw a crazy idea like this into the mix…and make her think about how different this would be if what they had shared had not been just sex.

‘To a situation as trivial as having my child, you mean?’

‘Our child.’ His sudden possessive attitude was something that made Sam uneasy and something she definitely didn’t want to encourage.

He dismissed the correction with a fluid shrug. ‘I have some old-fashioned idea about family life.’

‘I’m sure your girlfriend might have some too. Look, I’m not treating this trivially, I’m just trying to make life easier on you. I’m not making any unreasonable demands.’

‘You should be,’ he said. Sam was still struggling to make sense of his condemnation when his distinctive dark brows drew together in an irritated frown of incomprehension. ‘Girlfriend…?’

Will he dismiss me from his thoughts as simply when I walk from the room? Sam wondered bleakly.

‘Candice was leaving as I arrived.’

‘Candice need not concern you.’

‘She might have something to say about you marrying someone else.’ Probably very loudly, too. To people like the actress, publicity was a way of life. To Sam the idea of her personal life becoming the currency of gossip columns filled her with utter horror.

An expression of baffled irritation settled on Cesare’s features. He moved his right hand in a dismissive arc. ‘What has it to do with her?’

‘Or me, I suppose?’ she suggested, utterly appalled by his display of callous unconcern for his ex-lover…maybe not even ex…? The man was clearly as ruthless in his personal life as he was reputed to be in business.

‘Do not be ridiculous!’

The suggestion drew a laugh of sheer incredulity from her throat. ‘Me ridiculous?’ she echoed, laying her palm flat against her heaving chest. ‘I’m not the one saying we should get married. For God’s sake, you didn’t know my name until a few minutes ago!’ She lifted a hand to her brow and shook her head. This entire situation was beyond surreal and the scary thing was that for a split second she had almost started to consider it.

‘But I knew a lot of other things about you, Samantha.’

The sexual inference in his deep drawl sent a flash of heat over her skin. ‘You don’t know me at all,’ she snapped back, her anger divided between him and herself. Why did she let him do this to her?

He ignored her statement and asked, ‘Are you worried a blind man would not make a good father?’

The frustrating thought of the many things he would never be able to do with his child rose in Cesare’s head to torment him. He realised he would never see his child’s face and the acknowledgement was like a knife thrust to his heart.

‘You being blind has got nothing to do with it,’ Sam said. ‘They say that women are instinctively drawn to alpha males to father their children.’ Up until now Sam had been able to say she was the exception to the rule. ‘And as you’re about the most alpha male on the planet…’

‘A man who requires guidance to cross the road cannot protect his child from danger.’ It was a father’s role to guard his offspring from the perils in the world, and the thought of this role reversal filled Cesare with a furious impotence.

Sam studied his self-critical expression and felt her tender heart twist as she recognised the fear and doubts that lay under the confident front he presented to the world.

‘Being blind does not make you a bad father or role model.’ Unlike, to her way of thinking, sleeping with blonde actresses with long legs. ‘It has nothing to do with this situation at all, except,’ she admitted, adhering reluctantly to honesty, ‘that if you had been able to see none of this would have happened.’

‘You mean I would not have been in Scotland that night.’

‘I mean you would have been able to see me,’ she blurted. Irritated by his blank frown, she spelt it out. ‘I’m not your type.’

She saw the flicker at the back of his eyes and wished she had let him continue to carry the clearly unrealistic image he had of her, but as tempting as it was, she couldn’t.

‘I think you should let me be the judge of that. I have seen your face with my fingers.’ Eyes half closed, his fingers inscribed a series of soft motions in the air.

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