A bead of hysteria at the enormity of what she was agreeing to formed in her throat. But then he was handing her another card to write on, and a pen to use. She recognised the make—custom-designed and exorbitantly expensive. Like nothing that Nic Rossi, who worked in security at a hotel in Nevada, could ever have aspired to.
She felt something rip inside her—a memory being torn up, its ragged shreds to be whipped away by the desert wind, lost for ever...
Handing back his pen with the card she’d written her phone number on, and taking his in exchange, she made herself look at him.
He isn’t Nic Rossi. He never was. He’s Nicolo Falcone, a billionaire who’s forcing himself to marry a woman he doesn’t want to marry just because she mistakenly got pregnant by him.
She felt her throat tighten and forced it open. What good was it to think of that? To remember the man she’d thought he was...the man he’d never been?
‘Until tonight, then,’ she said.
Donna Francesca speaking to Nicolo Falcone.
He took a visible breath as he stashed his pen, and the card she’d written on.
‘Until tonight,’ he said.
Then he strode from the room, from the apartment, and was gone.
Leaving behind the woman he was going to marry for the sake of the child she was carrying. For no other reason.
The words seared across his brain, etching their truth into his consciousness.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘THE VISCARI.’ NIC’S instruction as the car pulled away from the kerb outside the Marchese d’Arromento’s Rome apartment was curt.
His driver glanced round at him, as if questioning the instruction.
‘You heard me,’ Nic said, his tone grim.
He hadn’t set foot in the Viscari Roma since walking out all those years ago, refusing to kowtow to the pampered stripling who’d been handed on a gilded plate the managerial post Nic had worked so hard to merit.
Beside him sat the reason he was now going to walk back in.
She’d slid into the back seat, murmuring a stilted, low-voiced greeting, but since then had said nothing. As the car moved into the infamous Rome traffic Nic looked across at her, taking in the chic but understated cocktail frock—a couture number, he saw at a glance—the elegant coil of her chignon at the nape of her neck, a double row of antique pearls looped over her bodice, matching pearl drops at her ears. Every inch La Donna Francesca.
Memory pierced him of how he’d critiqued the dress she’d been wearing that first evening he’d set eyes on her as suitable for an academic dinner, but not doing full justice to her breathtaking beauty.
Well, the dress she wore now certainly did do her justice, but he would have given a fortune to have her back as the woman she’d been then.
But she never was that woman. She was always La Donna Francesca, whatever she told you.
&n
bsp; He cleared his mind. No point thinking about that...no point remembering what had been, or never been. No point doing anything but addressing the situation they both faced now: Nicolo Falcone marrying Donna Francesca di Ristori.
‘Have you thought any more about our wedding?’ he said abruptly.
Fran’s eyes flickered to him. ‘Not really,’ she said.
It had been impossible to think about anything coherently. She’d spent the day in a kind of daze, still trying to come to terms with what she had agreed to do. It still seemed impossible, unreal—as unreal as going to dine at the Viscari with Nicolo Falcone.
She’d texted Carla to tell her that Nic would be with her that evening. She had added nothing more. Presumably Cesare would have informed his wife of his high-handed interference in her life. Now they could cope with the results. Starting with having dinner with both herself and the man she had, so it seemed, agreed to marry.
Her dazed thoughts whirled confusedly in her head. Finding no rest.
‘Obviously you have the pick of any of my hotels,’ Nic was saying now. ‘Unless you want to be married from your home?’