Sicilian Nights Omnibus (33 page)

His bed, his body, his life, his heart and his love—everything he had to give, all of it. But of course, he couldn’t tell her that. It would only add another burden to those she already had to carry.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

W
HY
WAS
BEING
in Falcon’s bed tonight so very different from last night? Annie wondered miserably, as she lay alone. It was over an hour since Falcon had suggested that she must be tired—only to tell her that he had some work to finish the minute she had agreed that she was, but that she should go ahead and go to bed. In that time she had showered and dried herself and curled up in the large bed, her heart pounding with excitement and love, her body on fire with intoxicated longing and desire, but Falcon had not come to join her.

Now he was in the bathroom, where he had been for what seemed like for ever, and the unwelcome and unwanted thought was creeping over her that Falcon might be delaying coming to bed because he was hoping that she would be asleep when he joined her. After all, she was the one who had asked to sleep with him, not the other way round.

But the last time he had been in bed with her he had wanted her.

Had he? Or had he simply been doing what he had promised and showing her what it was like to be wanted?

He was going to marry her.

To protect her and Ollie and because he thought it was his duty. Not for any other reason.

The joyful anticipation that had filled her began to drain away. Annie turned on her side, to face away from the middle of the bed. If Falcon didn’t want her then she wasn’t going to embarrass them both by making it look as though she wanted
him
.

Falcon pushed his hand through his damp hair, having wrapped a towel around his hips. He had just spent an hour desperately trying to pretend that he was working when the only place his thoughts were was in his bedroom and in his bed—with Annie. Now he had been forced to endure the supposedly arousal-dousing ritual of a cold shower to ensure that when he got into bed with her he would have no reason to be tempted into waking her up to take her in his arms.

His body was quite obviously not aware of the purpose of a cold shower, since it was showing every evidence of its physical desire for Annie not having abated one iota. As for his emotional desire for her—his love for her seemed to be increasing with every second he spent with her.

Falcon had believed that he had put in place within himself emotional and mental back-up systems for dealing with every situation that life could throw at him. But he had neglected to prepare for anything like this. Love was something that wasn’t going to happen for him, he had decided. It was something he could not allow to happen.

Everyone assumed that in due course he would marry and produce an heir, as countless eldest Leopardi sons had done before him. Deep down inside himself, though, Falcon had questioned the whole concept that being the eldest son meant he must marry and provide an heir. He had two brothers, after all. Then there had been the conflicting natures of the kind of traditional marriage entered into by his parents and a modern twenty-first-century marriage. One thing they shared, though, was that neither of them guaranteed a mutual commitment to a shared lifetime of marital happiness.

He had grown to manhood loathing the thought of making a woman as unhappy as his father had made his mother—the result of their traditional dynastic marriage—but neither had he felt able to trust the longevity of a modern marriage. Especially one that would have to endure the pressures that came with his position as head of the Leopardi family, custodian of its present and future good name, as well as the history of its past. Falcon took those responsibilities very seriously.

Without a really strong, enduring love he doubted that it would be possible to give any children of his marriage the inner emotional security and strength his own eldest son would ultimately need if he was not to feel burdened, as Falcon had from a very young age, with the knowledge of what lay ahead of him. It was, he had decided, better—and easier—to stay single.

When his brothers had married for love their happiness had reinforced his private decision. But that had been before Annie had come into his life and he had fallen in love with her.

Even if they had met ‘normally’, and fallen mutually in love, he would not have wanted to burden her with the life that must be his. Hand in hand with Falcon’s strong sense of duty went an equally strong awareness that his life involved making sacrifices. There was no way that he would have wanted the woman he loved to share those sacrifices.

He believed passionately in Annie’s right to her personal freedom of choice—in her right to define her own boundaries and live her own life. The actions of those who had deprived her of those rights filled him with contempt, and an almost missionary zeal to counter them.

And yet now
he
was the one who would be taking them from her by marrying her.

What choice did he have? Without his protection she would be at risk from her stepbrother for as long as Colin lived. The only way Falcon could give her his protection was by marrying her.

Marrying her, taking her to his bed as his love, impregnating her with his child, even loving her—surely these were all forms of imprisonment every bit as bad in their way as the behaviour he had so criticised and condemned in her stepbrother, who also claimed to love her? Love could be a terrible prison when it wasn’t reciprocated—for both parties, but especially for the one who hadn’t asked for it and didn’t want it.

So what was he to do? Not marry her and leave Annie and Oliver vulnerable to the machinations of a man who had already made it very clear that, whilst he would go to any lengths to keep Annie in his life, he would equally go to any lengths to remove her child from her life?

Marry her but ensure that the marriage was in name only, so that he was only violating his promise to preserve her right to freedom on one issue?

In his arms she had wanted him; she had responded to him with passion and pleasure.

Because she had never known anyone else. Because he had sprung for her the trap which had been set over her. The sensuality of her response to him was merely the beginning of her journey into her own womanhood, not the end.

She would continue that journey in his arms.

But because their marriage forced her to do so. Not because she wanted to.

* * *

Annie felt the bed depress beneath Falcon’s weight, and then the cool rush of air as he disturbed the bedclothes. She waited, desperately hoping beyond hope that he would reach for her, or even say something to her—some words of comfort and tenderness that would offer her the solace of knowing that it wasn’t
her
he was rejecting but simply their current situation. But instead all she had was the cold pain of an empty silence.

How could she marry him knowing that he was only marrying her out of some misplaced sense of duty and honour? Where was her pride? Her self-respect?

The same moonlight that had silvered Falcon’s body so erotically only a few nights ago was streaming in through the windows tonight, but now it was reinforcing her pain in lying here alone and longing for him.

She forced herself to close her eyes, in the hope that she would be able to escape into sleep, but before she could do so Ollie started crying.

He had been grizzly earlier in the day, his right cheek flushed and slightly swollen, indicating that he was cutting a new tooth. Poor baby—no wonder he was crying in pain, Annie thought sympathetically as she slid carefully out of the bed, praying that the sound of Ollie’s distress wouldn’t wake Falcon.

She hurried into Falcon’s dressing room without stopping to pull on her robe. She was wearing one of the nightdresses that had been included with her new clothes, full-length, in fine pleated sheer soft peach-coloured silk, with darker ribbons that cupped her breasts and then tied at the front. The side seams were split almost to her hipbone, and tied with more ribbons at the top of her thigh. Not exactly practical for night-time nursery visits—but then, she admitted ruefully, she hadn’t been thinking of its suitability for that purpose when she had put it on so much as of the speed with which Falcon could divest her of it when he pulled at the ribbons.

As the dressing room did not possess a window, a small nightlight had been left glowing, to give some light without disturbing Ollie, and now, as he saw Annie, he stopped crying. His poor little cheek looked very red and sore, and Annie winced as she lifted him out of the travel cot and then sat down in the chair that had been put next to it, with him on her knee.

A quick inspection of his mouth confirmed he was indeed cutting a new tooth. The moment he felt her touch on his raw flesh he clamped his gums together, in an attempt to relieve the pain, the edges of the new tooth sharp on Annie’s finger.

‘Poor little boy,’ she comforted him. She had got some soothing gel and some medicine in his baby bag, but she’d have to put him back in his cot so that she could get them out, and she knew from past experience that the minute she did that he would start roaring in protest. The last thing she wanted was for him to wake Falcon, so she pushed the door closed with her elbow and then put Ollie into the cot, gently shushing him whilst she searched frantically in his bag for the teething gel and the baby pain relief.

Five minutes later she was congratulating herself on having both soothed Ollie and not woken Falcon—and then, as she straightened up from kissing the baby’s sleeping face, she caught the side of the slightly unstable butler’s tray she’d been using as a worktop, sending an empty glass crashing to the marble floor, where it immediately smashed into zillions of pieces.

By some miracle Ollie didn’t wake up, but the combination of her shock and her desire to steady herself had her stepping backwards, in her bare feet, straight onto a piece of broken glass.

She had barely begun to cry out in automatic reaction when the dressing room door was flung open, and the room itself illuminated by the light from the bedroom. Falcon stood in the doorway, instantly taking in what had happened. Unlike her, he was wearing soft leather slip-on footwear, along with a thick bathrobe.

‘Don’t move,’ he told Annie, stepping into the dressing room and then lifting her bodily into his arms to carry her through the bedroom and into the bathroom, ignoring her protests about the damage that would be done to the bedroom carpet by the blood dripping from her cut foot as he did so.

Once they were in the marble bathroom he placed her on the top step of the short flight of limestone stairs that led down to the large shower area, warning her, ‘Keep your foot off the floor, in case there’s still glass in it.’

‘It’s nothing—just a small cut,’ Annie protested. She felt so guilty about waking him up and causing all this trouble, but Falcon wasn’t listening to her. Instead he was crouching on the hard limestone floor with her cut foot resting on his knee whilst he studied it carefully in the bright light.

‘I can’t see any glass there,’ he told her.

‘I’m sure there won’t be.’ Annie tried to remove her foot, but his left hand was cupping her heel, spreading an unwanted and very dangerous heat through her body.

‘Maybe not, but I’m not prepared to take any chances that there is.’ Very gently Falcon worked his way round the cut and into its centre with his fingertips.

When he had stopped, and Annie had eased out a long, fractured pent-up breath, Falcon mistook the cause of her relief, looked up at her and said, ‘Yes, it does seem to be free of glass.’

Thank goodness Falcon didn’t realise that it hadn’t been the cut on her foot that had caused her anxiety, but her fear of betraying to him just what his touch was doing to her.

‘Stay like that and don’t put your foot down on the floor. I’m going to get a bowl from the kitchen, so that you can bathe the cut in antiseptic, and then I’ll go and clear up the broken glass.’

He was only gone a matter of seconds, returning with a large plastic bowl which he half filled under the basin tap before adding to it some antiseptic liquid from the bathroom cabinet.

‘It will sting,’ he warned as he placed the bowl on the floor next to her foot. ‘But keep it in the bowl until I come back.’

He was right. It did sting, Annie acknowledged, after he had left her to go and clean up the broken glass. But the pain was nothing compared with the pain of loving him.

The stinging sensation had worn off by the time he came back. He checked her foot after she had obediently lifted it from the bowl, and then frowningly pronounced that the cut was glass-free and clean.

‘I can do that,’ Annie objected, when he removed the bowl and placed a towel on the floor for her to put her foot on.

‘You could, but it will be easier if I do it.’

Easier? To have him gently but firmly drying her foot? One hand cupping her heel as he had done before, the sensation of his touch arousing a wild frenzy of inappropriate images and longings? No way. Sitting there, her hands gripping the edge of the step for fear that she might reach out towards him, was one of the hardest things she had ever had to do.

She had to say something. She couldn’t bear the thick, tense silence between them any longer.

‘I’m sorry I disturbed you.’

Falcon looked up at her. There was an expression in his eyes she couldn’t define—a darkness edged with something fierce and proud.

‘So am I,’ he agreed flatly.

His response to her apology made her recoil. What had she been hoping for? A gallant remark to the effect that he didn’t mind?

He was still holding her foot. Apparently a final inspection had to be made of the cut, a dressing applied to it, followed by a plaster. And then, just when she had thought her ordeal was finally over, and had stood up, ready to make the excuse of wanting to check on Ollie—anything other than get into that bed again—Falcon told her
brusquely, ‘It might be a good idea not to walk on it yet.’

He was going to
carry
her back to bed. Annie didn’t think she could endure intimate physical contact with him that was no intimacy at all—or at least not the kind she so desperately wanted. Her heart was thudding as though she’d been running. Her senses were filled with their awareness of him, their longing for him. She’d managed to hang on to her self control this long—surely she could hang on to it for a few more seconds? Held in his arms? Close to his body? Not a chance.