The Moretti Marriage Read online

  “As they should have!” Charlotte said, still the protective parent even at seventy-six. “They might have an illustrious family tree, but you didn’t exactly grow up on the wrong side of the tracks yourself, my love. Tonight’s little get-together was a triumph. You really outdid yourself, and you must be exhausted.”

  “I am a little tired.”

  “Then I’m taking you to the Inn for dinner. It’s been a long time since just the two of us went out.” She paused delicately. “Of course, you’re welcome to join us, Chloe, if you wish….”

  “Oh, absolutely not!” Chloe was quick to answer. “I want nothing more than to kick off my shoes and relax. Go ahead and have a good time. Heaven knows you’re both working hard enough putting this wedding together that you deserve a bit of a break.”

  They didn’t bother to put up an argument. In fact, they seemed almost eager to leave her behind. Not that they said as much, of course. Instead, they agreed that she was quite right to take it easy, then the pair of them hurried out to the car and drove off before she could change her mind.

  By then, it was well after eight but although darkness had fallen, the heat of the day lingered, leaving the air so soft and warm that, instead of taking a long, luxurious bath, she pulled on an old bathing suit and went down to the pool for a swim.

  “Just eight more days to get through, then all this craziness will be over. A week from Sunday, we’ll be on our way to the Bahamas,” Baron had whispered, when he kissed her good-night. “I can hardly wait, Chloe….”

  Slipping into the limpid water, Chloe floated on her back and gazed up at the heavens, willing herself to share his eager anticipation. Next Saturday at this time, they’d have been married nearly five hours. They’d be in the honeymoon suite of the hotel where they planned to spend the night. Chances were, they’d already have made love for the first time.

  Would it be wonderful, the way it had been with—?

  Her mind snapped shut on the thought, as suddenly and mercilessly as a leg-hold trap. She would not allow Nico to creep in; he had no place in her life anymore.

  Just then, a meteor streaked across the velvet sky in a shower of sparks. A lucky sign, according to some. Make a wish, they’d say—and she would, if she didn’t already have everything any woman could wish for.

  Everything, except one thing, that is. And there was no use wishing for that, because it was asking for the impossible. Neither prayers nor superstition could breathe life back into her little son.

  Instead, “I wish I could forget,” she whispered, tears blurring her vision and turning the blanket of stars into a shimmering arc of rainbows. “I wish it really was possible to start afresh and leave the past behind.”

  He picked up his phone on the second ring. “Sì?”

  “The coast’s clear, Nico. Make your move.”

  “Does she suspect?”

  “Not a thing.”

  He smiled, switched off the phone, and headed out the door.

  She hadn’t known he’d been watching her all evening as she moved about the garden with her fiancé and his family, the mother fat as a pigeon, the father tall and thin. She’d had no idea that he’d stood at the dormer window in the gardener’s lodge and seen how his replacement had slung his arm around her shoulder and nuzzled her hair. How he’d kissed her when he thought no one else was looking—full on the mouth, with the sort of hungry need Nico understood only too well.

  Treading stealthily, he followed the brick walk from the lodge to the main house, shrouded in darkness now except for the light shining from her bedroom. Of course, she’d be shocked to see him. Shocked and furious, probably. But his business interests gave him a perfectly valid reason to be in town the same week that she happened to be marrying someone else, and although he could have changed his dates and avoided seeing her again, wild horses hadn’t been able to keep him away—especially not after he’d heard her mother’s reservations.

  “I’m not saying she isn’t fond of Baron,” Jacqueline had told him. “But there’s no real spark there, Nico. She’s going through the motions, that’s all.”

  It had been all the encouragement he’d needed to stick with his original plan. “I’ll be there by Friday.”

  “That’ll leave you only a week to make her reconsider.”

  “Dio, Jacqueline!” he’d said with a laugh. “It didn’t take me more than a day, the first time!”

  “But she’s different now. She’s…wounded.”

  “We all are,” he’d reminded her. “But that’s no reason to use another marriage as a refuge from the pain.”

  “Exactly! Baron’s a good man, Nico. He deserves the best, and much though I love her, I’m not sure he’ll be getting the best if he marries my daughter. I’m not sure she’s able to give him her whole heart.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Even though you might be the one who ends up being hurt? I’m going only on a mother’s instinct here, Nico—a sense that my child is taking the line of least resistance because it’s easier to give in than to fight. But I could be wrong. It could be that Chloe really does want this marriage for all the right reasons.”

  “I’ve never been afraid of taking risks, you know that. And it seems to me, Jacqueline, that the risk to you is even greater. She might never forgive you for interfering like this.”

  “It’s a chance I have to take.”

  “There you have it, then. We do what we have to do, and pay whatever price is asked of us. She is worth it, sì?”

  “Yes.”

  Which brought him to where he was now, making his way through the shadowed garden, with the advantage of surprise on his side. By catching her with her guard down, he hoped to shock her into revealing a glimpse of that part of her she kept so well hidden from everyone else.

  Except that, in the end, he was the one caught off guard, when he stepped out from behind a tall calla lily and activated the motion-detector security lights. Which would have been fine, if she’d been inside the house where he expected her to be. But she wasn’t. She was floating on her back in the pool, instead, and before he could dart back behind the concealing foliage, she’d let out a startled squeak and, raising her head, stared straight at him.

  Her hair hung around her shoulders in a riot of water-soaked waves, and her legs—those long, glorious legs that used to wrap around him as if they never wanted to let him go…oh, they were a beautiful sight, slicing through the water as she struggled to stay afloat!

  There wasn’t much point in trying to hide then. So he did the next best thing. He stood there and unashamedly drank in the sight of her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHLOE’S first response at seeing him was one of such utter shock that she swallowed a mouthful of water which went down the wrong way; her second, that either the mixture of light and shadow was playing tricks on her, or she was seeing a ghost. “Tell me you’re not real!” she choked, floundering to the side of the pool.

  But the figure at the edge of the pool deck looked and sounded frighteningly real. “Ciao, Chloe,” he said, in that velvet-smooth, sexy Italian voice, and moving forward with his easy, long-legged grace, neither of which appeared to have diminished with time. “Did I startle you?”

  “Yes!” she spat, and slapped his hand away when he leaned down and tried to help her out of the water. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

  He broke into his old, devilishly charming grin, and something turned over inside her in a slow-rolling somersault of awareness. She hadn’t felt anything like that in more than four years, and it terrified her. Climbing onto the pool deck, she pushed the wet hair away from her face, flung her towel around her shoulders, and planted her fists on her hips.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, Nico,” she said, with as much controlled dignity as she could manage, given the total upheaval taking place inside her, “but I can assure you, you’re not welcome. So unless you wish to spend the night in jail, I suggest you remove yourself fr
om my mother’s property immediately.”

  “I—” he began.

  “Because,” she continued, riding roughshod over his attempt to get a word in edgewise, “if you don’t, I’ll call the police and have you carted away from here in the paddy wagon.”

  He tried to look wounded, but the laughter in his eyes betrayed him. “You’d do that to me, cara?”

  “In a heartbeat,” she informed him stonily. “And don’t call me cara.”

  “What should I call you, then? Signora Moretti?”

  “I dropped that name, the day we divorced.”

  “You might have dropped the name, but that doesn’t change the fact that we were once husband and wife. But I don’t suppose you want to be reminded of that, with another man waiting to step into my shoes, in little more than a week’s time. What will you call yourself then, my dear?”

  “Mrs. Baron Prescott—not that it’s any of your business.”

  She might as well have saved her breath. Undeterred, he continued his inquisition. “And you love this Baron person?”

  “Why else do you think I’m marrying him?”

  He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and stepped closer. “What I think isn’t the issue here, my lovely Chloe. It’s what you think that matters.”

  Right at that moment, with him standing close enough that she could detect his faint, alluringly familiar scent, she could barely think at all. Picture Baron! she ordered herself. Concentrate on him!

  But Baron had receded to the farthest reaches of her mind, dwarfed by the vastly more compelling flesh-and-blood presence of Nico. Helpless to tear her eyes away, Chloe gazed at him.

  On the surface, he’d changed little since she’d seen him last. He was still outrageously handsome. Still unmistakably European in the way he wore his clothes, with such sinuous grace that even the unremarkable blue jeans and white polo shirt he had on now assumed the elegance of an Armani suit.

  His black hair was as thick as ever, and bore not a trace of gray. His mouth, his teeth, his smile, continued to invite intimacy. As for his darkly beautiful eyes…oh, she couldn’t look into his eyes. They reminded her too much of her son’s.

  “Why do you care what I think or how I feel?” she said bleakly. “I’m not part of your life any longer.”

  “We had a child together. For that reason alone, there’ll always be a connection between us. Nothing and no one will ever break it. You can take a dozen new husbands, cara mia, but they’ll never succeed in wiping out the memory of the life and the love we once shared.”

  She pressed her lips together and looked away, desolation sweeping over her in relentless waves. No, she’d never forget, because to do so would mean wiping out the too brief time Luciano had been part of her life, and that she could never do. Memories of him were all she had left. “Do you still miss him, Nico?”

  “All the time,” he said, knowing without having to ask that she was referring to their baby. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him, and wish things had turned out differently. He would be four, if he’d lived, and you would not now be contemplating marrying another man, because you’d still be married to me.”

  “But he didn’t live!” she cried, all the grief she tried so hard to contain tearing loose inside her like a river bursting its banks. “And it’s your fault that I lost my little boy!”

  He jerked his head aside as if she’d slapped him hard across the face, but not so quickly that she didn’t see the devastation written there. After a second or two, he turned to look at her again, the suspicion of tears gleaming in his eyes. “He was my child, too, Chloe.”

  Mortified, she clapped a hand to her mouth and whispered, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Nico! I shouldn’t have said that. I know it’s not true. But the hurt never really goes away, and seeing you again brings it all back as if it happened just yesterday.” She huddled more closely into the towel, shivering suddenly despite the mild air. “What are you really doing here?”

  “I always stay here when I come to Canada.” He shrugged, as if making himself at home in his ex-mother-in-law’s house was the most natural thing in the world. “You might have divorced me, but Jacqueline never did. She has always made me welcome.”

  “But why now?” she pursued, hiding her dismay at his revelation. “If you knew I was remarrying next week, you must have realized this was not the time for you to show up unannounced.”

  “It could not be avoided. When business calls….” He shrugged and to her shame, she found she couldn’t quite drag her gaze away from the easy shift of his broad shoulders under his shirt. “I must answer, yes? And since I will be here for at least ten days, Jacqueline invited me to attend your wedding. Such a lovely, gracious lady, your mother!”

  With each shocking disclosure, he moved toward her. And every time he did so, Chloe took a step back, desperate to maintain distance from him because she didn’t dare think of what might happen if she let him come too close. Bad enough that her body ached with vague yearning, as if it recognized that there’d been a time when he’d brought it to vibrant, thrilling life. “She did not!”

  “She most certainly did,” he said, lunging forward without warning and grabbing her around the middle.

  His hands almost spanned her waist, his fingers so strong and sure that she hadn’t a hope of escaping him. “One more step and you’d have toppled backward into the pool,” he murmured, drawing her away from one kind of danger and toward another, far more perilous.

  At once panic-stricken and hypnotized, she stammered, “I don’t believe you! Why would she do such a thing?”

  “Because ours was the most civilized divorce in the world, so where is the harm in wishing you and this new man well, and showing him he has nothing to fear from me?”

  “He already knows that.”

  “Then my being here won’t disturb him, will it?”

  “Not a bit!”

  “And what about you, Chloe? Will knowing I’m close by make you less sure of yourself and the plans you’ve made?”

  “Absolutely…not…” The denial emerged on a sigh, defeated almost before it was uttered, because he was stroking his hands up her ribs, over her shoulders, down her arms, and robbing her of every last ounce of strength. Her legs grew weak as water, her vision clouded, and she felt herself swaying toward him.

  He put her from him very firmly. “Then there’s no problem. Consider me nothing more than another guest, here to witness your marriage and toast your future happiness. It’d be a shame for me to have come all this way and miss such a grand event. You know how much we blue-collar Italians love a good party.”

  Throwing cold water in her face would have been less shocking than what he proposed. The strength flowed back into her body, fortified by a dose of righteous indignation. “You are not coming to my wedding, and that’s final! I’ll see you in hell, first!”

  “Darling,” he said lazily, “I’ve already spent enough time there. I doubt anything you can devise to punish me now will ever equal that.”

  How easily he could seduce her with a touch wasn’t the only thing she remembered. He was beyond stubborn, too, once he’d made up his mind about something. “Be reasonable, Nico,” she begged, trying to keep the frantic edge out of her voice. “You’ll feel awkward…a man alone at a wedding is out of place. People will talk and wonder why you’re here. And even if they don’t, I can’t imagine why you’d want to see me marry someone else.”

  “Because your happiness is important to me.”

  “But why do you care? You’re not responsible for me anymore.”

  “I’ll always feel responsible, cara. You suffered more sorrow with me than any woman should have to bear. If I couldn’t be the one to heal you, I want to shake the hand of the man who can.”

  She saw the obstinate set to his jaw, the way he planted his feet apart, as though to say, If you want rid of me, you’re going to have to pick me up and remove me by force.

  Trying to disguise the desperation creepin
g up on her, she said, “I won’t allow this, Nico. You’re not going to bully me into letting you stay. I don’t want you here, it’s as simple as that. Consider yourself uninvited.”

  “Can’t do that, it wouldn’t be polite,” he replied, all sweet reason. “Your mother’s the one who issued the invitation, and this is her house. Until she tells me I’m not welcome, I stay.”

  I will kill her! Chloe vowed furiously. So help me, I will wring my mother’s scheming neck, the very first chance I get!

  “We’ll see about that,” she told him. “Unlike you, my mother can be persuaded to change her mind.”

  “Why does my being here make you so nervous, cara? Are you afraid I’ll embarrass you?” He indicated his snug-fitting jeans, his blindingly white shirt. “Do you think I’ll show up dressed like this on your big day? That I’m still scratching to make ends meet, and can’t afford a decent suit and tie? Because if so, rest easy. I’m respectably rich now.”

  “If how much you’re worth was that important to me, I’d never have married you in the first place,” she said scornfully. “I didn’t fall in love with your money.”

  He laughed. “How could you? I didn’t have any!” Then he sobered, and when he spoke next, his voice had grown gentle with nostalgia. “I remember so well the day we met. Do you?”

  “Not really.”

  He looked up at the stars and smiled, as if he and they shared a secret. “It was a Tuesday.”

  “Thursday,” she corrected.

  “At a jewelry booth.”

  “In an antique shop which happened to sell estate jewelry, which isn’t quite the same thing.”

  “Sì!” He nodded and adopted the smiling pose of a professor faced with an unusually bright student. The only thing missing was a beard—and so help her, if he’d had one, she’d have pulled it out by the roots! “It was just as you say. I had found a cameo brooch which I planned to give to my sister, Abree, for her birthday.”