The Marriage He Must Keep (3 page)

And so feminine, still so beautiful and womanly with her hair loose and her face clean of makeup that his libido responded. How? How could he not go five seconds in her presence without experiencing a rush of heat to his groin and a lurch of possessiveness in his gut? It was maddening to have such a primeval reaction and not be able to control it.

For the merest hint of a second, as their gazes locked, he saw a flash of...something. The thing he saw when she woke beside him. The smile that began to glimmer before it reached her lips.

Then it was gone.

She adjusted her hospital gown self-consciously and shifted the baby up to her shoulder, rocking with agitation in the gliding chair, trying anxiously to soothe the baby who sounded positively desolate.

“Alessandro.” She kept her lashes lowered.

Not
caro
. Not even Sandro. He tried to recall the last time she’d greeted him in a way that sounded the least bit welcoming or friendly.

When had she last really looked at him? Met his gaze for longer than a millisecond?

But if he had a moment of regret that leaving her in London had impacted their marriage, his sense of duty smothered it. Every decision he made was for the sake of the Ferrante family. He had shunned marrying for love quite deliberately. His wife was an asset, a strength, not a weakness.

Still, her rebuff grated after his difficult journey to reach her.

The nurse gave him a pleading,
I don’t know what to do
look, putting him further on edge. He loathed emotional chaos and had been drowning in it since Primo’s call. Why the hell wasn’t anyone taking things in hand here?

“Is there a problem?” he asked, taking control himself.

“Your wife wants to use a bottle, but you don’t want to introduce one this early,” the nurse insisted to Octavia. “It causes nipple confusion. He might not take to the breast after.”

“You don’t want to feed him yourself?” Alessandro was genuinely shocked. He and Octavia hadn’t talked about how she would feed the baby and women had a choice about these things, he supposed. He wasn’t sure why he took her decision like a slap, but coming on the heels of her cool greeting, he had never felt so summarily rejected in his life.

“Look at him,” she said with a tremble in her voice, and showed him the baby.

The infant was red-faced and frantic, abrading Alessandro’s nerves with his cries.
Just feed him,
he thought, unable to fathom why she couldn’t see that’s what the baby wanted.

“And look at that one.” She pointed to the incubator on the other side of the room. It was clearly labeled Kelly.

Alessandro looked from the incubator back to his wife. Then to the fussing infant she held. Then to the nurse. Then back to the incubator.

He was not a stupid man, but he didn’t understand. And it made him uneasy that he didn’t understand. It was too foreign an experience.

“The tags are in order, Mr. Ferrante,” Wendy assured him. “We follow very tight protocols. When the head nurse gets back, she’ll explain. This is your baby.” She pointed to the one that Octavia held.

“Look at that one,” Octavia demanded vehemently enough that Alessandro was impelled across to view the other infant inside the dome.

The boy was on his side, naked but for a diaper, limbs moving in slow flails. He looked forsaken, bawling alone in there, catching at Sandro’s heart. He had the urge to pick him up and try to soothe him. This boy was literally crying out for human touch, but that would have to come from parents with the last name of Kelly. Obviously.

Nevertheless, he found himself unable to lift his gaze, locking on to the few wisps of black hair that poked from beneath the baby’s green-and-white-striped cap. Something in the fine silkiness made Sandro think of the delicate strands at Octavia’s temple and the back of her neck, but the tag on this baby’s ankle read Kelly.

Exhaustion was catching up to him if he was having delusions. Octavia had been through a lot, he reminded himself, using mammoth effort to scale himself back to cool reason. He had thought Octavia one of the most rational people in his life, but she was only human and possibly still foggy from whatever drugs they might be feeding her.

He looked back at her and for once he held her complete attention, as if she was sending silent brain waves at him, trying to induce him toward something.

“She won’t give him to me,” Octavia said, husky voice wavering between acute anger and a deep suffering that tugged at a deep place inside him.

“He’s not your baby, Mrs. Ferrante,” the nurse maintained.

“This is not my son,”
Octavia returned, red and frazzled as she tried to calm the baby bellyaching on her shoulder.

Alessandro had to use a long mental reach to find his patience, but he was well practiced at maintaining his composure. Snapping and acting on impulse, no matter how tempting, was not the sort of behavior he exhibited, ever. Italian or not, his mother’s son or not, his displays of passion were confined to the bedroom.

“Bring me a bottle. I’ll feed him,” he ordered the nurse. “My wife is obviously having reservations. It’s her body, so...”

“That is not—I’ll feed
my
baby,” Octavia cried, looking up at him in a way that was halfway between forceful and vanquished. Betrayed and misunderstood.

Disappointed
.

As stung as he was by her rejection of their son, as shocked as he was to see her throw a tantrum, something moved in him. Uncertainty.

But she had to be wrong. Mix-ups didn’t happen. She was holding their baby. Wasn’t she?

Her gradual rejection of him the past months crept over him like a frost. Why didn’t she want him anymore? Why wouldn’t she accept his child?

* * *

Wendy left to prepare a bottle, of course, because when Alessandro spoke, people listened. No one ever jumped like that when Octavia spoke.

And no one had ever managed to look at her quite like that, as if she was something he wanted to scrape off the bottom of his shoe like cold, fetid mud.

Octavia dropped her gaze, unable to meet his eyes. He was far too handsome anyway, shrugging out of his leather aviator jacket so his muscles strained against the clinging knit of the light blue pullover he wore. His stubbled cheeks were the only sign of his long night in the air. The rest of him was crisp gray pants, hair ruffled and starting to curl where it was a little too long on top, and those gray-green eyes that penetrated like a persistent tropical rain.

Everything about him was strength. Level shoulders, steady mouth, composed brow. His face had a perfect bone structure of clean lines, like his maker had used a ruler while drawing his features, leaving sharp angles at his cheekbones and making a straight slope of his nose before finally softening with freehand for his lips.

His sinful lips. She shouldn’t be thinking of all the wonderful things that mouth had done to her. Carnal things.

That mouth was pursed in distaste at her unbelievable claim.

Patting the baby she held, Octavia tried desperately to comfort him while seeking comfort herself. Was she crazy? Primo was always quick to ask her that.
Are you on drugs? Have you lost your mind? Do you think like normal people? How could you imagine such a thing?

Months of those sorts of queries had left her questioning her own sanity. Why was she in London, isolated from all that was familiar, carrying a baby the father seemed to care nothing about? Why wasn’t she fighting for a better situation? At the very least, she should have insisted on some sort of contact or acknowledgement from her husband. Why hadn’t she demanded that he speak to her firsthand, not second?

Being here in London had been like boarding school, something to be endured. She hadn’t been in physical peril, merely unhappy. Her mother had spent her entire life unhappy. Such was the lot of a wife who was a pawn in male ambition. Who would have had any pity for Octavia? Poor little rich girl, whining because she had to live in a mansion with servants and all the shopping she could stand.

Being the tolerant, patient sort, she’d thought her husband would eventually show up and make her feel special again. She had believed in the vision of a warm and loving family, that was the problem, yet here she was being denied even the right to hold her own baby.

Being tolerant and patient and obedient and dutiful were all starting to look like the stupidest things she’d ever done.

Rocking jerkily, she gently bounced the baby she held, mind whirling. That baby over there looked like Alessandro. Couldn’t he see it? She’d argued with the nurse until she couldn’t stay on her feet any longer or risk dropping the baby she’d been given. The woman had refused to let her have him, but it was obvious to anyone with functioning eyes. Why wasn’t her husband backing her up? If he couldn’t see it, perhaps she really was cracked.

But his cry, that baby’s cry, muted as it was by the incubator, was tearing her up. So was this one’s. She felt like the worst person in the world, unable to help him, but she couldn’t feed him from her breast. That boy over there was her son. That was the baby her body yearned to nurture. She
knew
it.

Into the din of crying infants and the staccato glide of her chair, the door gave a click and a woman’s chattering voice entered.

“—expected to deliver naturally, but the cord— Oh, hello. I heard we were competing for the surgeon’s attention last night. I’m Sorcha Kelly.” The blonde in the wheelchair was beautiful. Her hair was pulled into a clip and her oval face was clear and pale. She hadn’t puffed up the way Octavia had. When her curious gaze lifted to Alessandro’s, it made Octavia tense with jealousy.

Bracing herself, Octavia glanced up, certain Alessandro would be noticing and responding to a smile that wasn’t exactly an invitation, but what man could resist such fresh-faced beauty?

He offered a polite nod and a distant introduction. “Alessandro Ferrante. My wife, Octavia, and our son, Lorenzo. That is the name we agreed upon, is it not?” he said to Octavia, willing her to accept that much at least.

All she could manage was a tiny nod and a shrug. Yes, she wanted to call her son Lorenzo, but that name didn’t match this baby.

Alessandro’s dour look stilled the air in her throat, making it impossible for her to say so. Why did he have to look at her with such disdain? She could practically hear him thinking,
Just like Mother
, but she wasn’t making a scene on purpose!

She opened her mouth to plead her case, but Sorcha Kelly was holding out her arms for the baby that her nurse had fetched and loosely wrapped. The nurse asked Alessandro to turn his back and he did with a brisk apology, dragging his gaze off the other infant and giving Sorcha the privacy she needed to settle in the rocker with one breast bared.

A lightning streak of anguish burned through Octavia, singeing her heart into a dark, powdered coal as she watched Sorcha close her arms around the baby.

“I’ve been waiting to meet you, Mr. Kelly.” Sorcha’s expression was filled with anticipation and sweet joy.

Octavia finally found her voice. “That’s—”

“Octavia,” Alessandro said, his tone soft yet deadly.

She took a shaken breath, glanced into eyes that might have been shadowed with something more than disparagement. Offense? Injury? It caused a dip and roll in her chest, but anxiety had her quickly shifting her attention back to Sorcha.

The other woman had cocked her head. Her brows pulled together as she smiled crookedly at the overwrought infant she held. The nurse urged Sorcha to put the baby to her breast.

“I don’t think—” Sorcha’s gaze came up and straight across to the baby Octavia was trying to soothe, rubbing his back and rocking him.

“The bottle, sir,” Wendy said, returning to hand something to Alessandro.

Octavia was aware of them in her periphery, but her entire world fuzzed at the edges as she met Sorcha’s troubled gaze. The only thing that mattered was that baby Sorcha held.
Her
baby.

Sorcha’s gaze clashed with Octavia’s, apprehensive and confused. Gently, Octavia lowered the baby she held so Sorcha could see his face.

They were only a few meters apart. It was very easy to see Sorcha’s eyes widen in shock, to interpret her expression as the kind of terrified alarm that only a mother whose baby was in peril would wear. As if he was falling out a window.

“How did you—” Sorcha began in a tone of accusation, then quickly bared the ankle of the boy she held, hand shaking as she looked at his tag. Her panicked gaze came back to Octavia’s.

“They wouldn’t believe me,” Octavia said, voice so thin she barely heard it herself.

“Believe what?” Sorcha’s nurse asked, while the nurse who’d been torturing Octavia tried to stammer out statements of protocol again.

“My wife is confused,” Alessandro said and bent to reach for the baby Octavia held.

She tightened her arms around him, refusing to give up the infant.

At the same time, Sorcha blurted, “Don’t. Don’t touch him.” She struggled to her feet and hitched her gown over her breast, then came across to Octavia.

“No one would believe me,” Octavia told her again, motherly instincts rising hard as her own baby approached. Her eyes stung and her heart hurt. “I wanted to feed him, but he needs his own mama and they wouldn’t give me mine...”

Her words garbled into a choke of emotion as she and Sorcha clumsily exchanged infants.

“I believe you,” Sorcha said with a wobbling smile, kissing her baby’s cheek as she took him, drawing him close against her chest with tender care. “Of course we know our own babies.”

Octavia nodded in gratitude, thinking she would be Sorcha’s slave forever, she was so thankful.
This
was Lorenzo. He smelled right and fit her arms and his skin was so soft and right against her lips. His little body was startlingly strong despite being racked by crying for a good twenty minutes. Oh, he had his father’s ferociously determined face, looking as though he would get exactly what he wanted no matter what he had to do.

He latched perfectly, quieting in synchronicity with his nursery mate.