Modern Romance April 2019 Books 1-4. Heidi Rice

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СКАЧАТЬ to work between us,’ Vivi assured him.

      Shimmering dark golden eyes held her evasive gaze fast. ‘But you could at least give us a chance...it’s not going to cost you anything to try.’

      Vivi lost colour and closed her eyes tight against the intrusion of his. He made trying sound so reasonable, was making her feel bad for refusing. But then he didn’t know, couldn’t possibly understand that she was trying to protect herself from getting hurt. Just suppose it worked for her but not for him? Where would that leave her? Just suppose Raffaele was being a manipulative nasty guy? This was, after all, a man who had been willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths purely to marry her and make a profit even though he already appeared to be wealthy beyond avarice. Wasn’t it entirely possible that Raffaele felt that if he had to be stuck with a wife for the next six months and more, it might as well be a wife who also shared his bed? Wasn’t it possible that he was only trying to use her?

      Or was that her paranoia talking? Raffaele had to have many more sophisticated options than her available if all he wanted was sex, she reasoned more calmly. Even though he was now ostensibly married, there would still be willing women on offer because he was rich and young and very, very good-looking. Also, incredible in bed, she added and felt her face burn. So why would he want to simply use her for that physical outlet? No, she finally decided, the odds were that Raffaele was serious when he suggested giving their marriage of convenience the chance to become something more real. And if Raffaele was making a genuine offer, cowardice—the fear of being hurt—wasn’t a good enough excuse for her to employ as a defence.

      Vivi breathed in deep and opened her eyes, colliding with his intent dark golden stare. ‘Everything in this household is way over the top—too fancy for me,’ she admitted uncomfortably.

      ‘You can make changes,’ Raffaele said easily, startling her with that immediate response. ‘The palazzo hasn’t had a proper mistress since my mother died over twenty years ago and it’s running on the same lines now as it ran under my grandmother. Nothing has been altered.’

      ‘Arianna’s mother didn’t change anything?’ she asked in surprise.

      ‘She was always too busy chasing her next high or she was in rehab or she was shopping,’ Raffaele said drily.

      ‘You really didn’t like your stepmother.’

      ‘There was nothing to like. She had no interest in the man she married, his son or even her own daughter. She wanted the money, the lifestyle, nothing else. I remember her screaming at my father that Arianna was a dreadful accident.’

      Vivi grimaced and said nothing, registering, however, that Raffaele’s rich, privileged childhood had not been as idyllic as she had naively assumed. If he had made false assumptions about her, she acknowledged ruefully, she had been equally guilty of making similar assumptions about him based on superficialities like wealth and background.

      ‘Why didn’t he divorce her if she was so awful?’

      ‘He believed marriage was for ever, but I also suspect that he couldn’t bring himself to face the fact that he’d made a hideous mistake remarrying so quickly after my mother’s death. He was lonely, still grieving, not in the right state of mind to make such a major decision. I don’t think he even appreciated that women as corrupt as Arianna’s mother existed in the world. He’d married young, he couldn’t have been very experienced with women.’

      ‘So, I could make changes here if I wanted to?’ Vivi recapped.

      ‘Of course, it’s your new home. If you’re going to raise our family here, it has to be comfortable for you.’

      ‘Don’t put the cart in front of the horse,’ Vivi urged stiffly. ‘Sometimes, you are so pushy, Raffaele.’

      ‘And sometimes, you like that about me,’ Raffaele fielded, bending down to claim her parted lips with his, sending a dizzy spurt of pleasure travelling through her slender length.

      Vivi rolled out of reach, not trusting him that close, not trusting herself either. ‘We may not work. We don’t have much in common.’

      ‘Incredible chemistry and a baby are a healthy start,’ Raffaele informed her with a sizzling smile.

      ‘All right, I’ll give it a go,’ Vivi told him grudgingly, sliding off the side of the bed at speed when he tried to reach for her again. ‘I’m going for a shower and then I want to eat. I’m ravenous.’

      * * *

      ‘My foster mum was a darling but her husband was a drunk,’ Vivi volunteered ruefully. ‘And there were horrible violent scenes when he came home at night and he would beat her up. I’d be at the top of the stairs listening to him shout, praying he wouldn’t hurt her too much. And then one night he came into my room and sat down on my bed and told me I was a big girl...’

      ‘What age were you?’ Raffaele cut in rawly, incensed by what she had experienced while she was still a child.

      ‘Thirteen, not very developed either,’ she muttered with a shudder. ‘He tried to touch me and I screamed and his wife came in and, well, that was the end of that placement.’

      ‘I hope the next placement was happier for you,’ Raffaele breathed through gritted teeth, shocked against his will by what he was learning about the care system for orphaned kids.

      He had also learned that the stepmother whom he had loathed had not been quite the nightmare he had believed her to be, certainly not when compared to some of the parenting figures Vivi had endured. His stepmother’s essential lack of interest in him and his father’s care had protected him from the worst of the older woman’s drug excesses. Separated from her sisters, however, because it was hard to find a single home willing to take all three girls, Vivi had been deprived of the family support she had relied on as a child.

      ‘That was the worst that ever happened to me and, to be honest, it wasn’t so bad. Zoe had it roughest of all of us. That’s why she is the way she is,’ Vivi told him ruefully, suddenly feeling uncomfortable because as a rule she was very private when it came to her childhood experiences. ‘How on earth did we get talking about this stuff?’

      Raffaele hid a smile because he had learned how to draw Vivi out of her shell and he wasn’t about to share his secrets. Ironically it was new to him to wonder what made another human being tick. Beyond the business world where sizing up opponents was the norm, Raffaele never got close enough to people to care why they did what they did or why they thought a certain way. To date, Arianna was the sole exception to that rule and now Vivi was the second, and both of them were family, which put them in a different category, he reasoned. If only it were as easy to get Vivi to take his advice, actually listen to him, he conceded with considerably less assurance, because Vivi was as stubborn as a rock planted in concrete.

      Over the past seven weeks, his bride had begun to look more noticeably pregnant, something which she complained about because apparently her sister had not shown the same signs at such an early stage. In addition, Vivi was as sick as a dog several times a day, something which she simply took in her stride and brushed off as an unalterable fact of pregnancy. She had yet to go near a doctor, had an innately practical attitude to her condition and saw no need for medical intervention. Raffaele had learned to hide his concern because she did, literally, consider her pregnancy to be none of his male business, but he had contrived one small achievement by persuading her to go for a scan that afternoon with a top-flight obstetrician in Florence. Luckily for him, Vivi wanted to see their baby СКАЧАТЬ