The last supper, she thought, with a sudden shiver of apprehension. ‘Sit down, Giovanni,’ she said huskily as she hovered in the kitchen doorway.
Almost imperceptively he raised his brows. Was she deliberately staying far away from him physically, he wondered, or was he simply imagining it? ‘Shall I open some wine?’
Not for me, she was about to say, until something made her bite the words back. ‘That would be lovely,’ she said weakly. ‘And after that you could unpack, couldn’t you—while I throw it all together?’
‘Sure,’ he said impassively, with an almost imperceptible elevation of his dark brows as he put the opened bottle of Sicilian red on the table to let it breathe.
He hung his clothes up, and placed a package for her on the bed and when he returned she was dishing the meal out. He sat down at the table and poured them both a glass of wine.
Kate sat down opposite him, glad for the relief thrown on their faces by the flickering candlelight. At least he wouldn’t be able to read her expression.
He raised his glass to hers. ‘Saluti!’ he said softly.
But she merely brushed her lips against the crimson liquid, she did not drink. Even the smell of it was making her stomach clench once more.
Giovanni ate his food, noticing that she did little but move hers around on the plate, arranging it in little piles, in order, he guessed, to appear as if she had actually eaten some of it.
He wondered whether she now saw the role of mistress as too submissive. His independent Kate. Had she decided that this kind of relationship was not for her? And how would he respond if she did? Would it be easy just to let her go?
He sighed and put his fork down, his news forgotten. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ he questioned.
She stared at him. ‘Tell you about what?’ she whispered hoarsely.
He noted her surprise, and its implication irritated him. ‘You think I don’t know you well enough to know when something is wrong, Kate?’ he demanded. ‘You think that all I notice is the way you are when I make love to you? That I am completely obtuse as a man?’
She shook her head. ‘Giovanni…’ She couldn’t say it; she couldn’t.
‘Matri di Diu!’ he swore as he saw the increased whitening of her face. ‘What is it, Kate? Tell me!’
There were only words now. Bald, bare words—because nothing could disguise or cushion the unpalatable fact she was about to tell him.
‘I’m preg
nant,’ she said flatly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FOR a moment, Giovanni’s world imploded. He thought he heard the loud beating of a clock, but there was no clock in Kate’s dining room, so it must have been the thundering of his heart.
He stared across the table at her. ‘What did you just say?’ he asked in a voice which was dangerously calm.
She had thought that she had seen his face in almost every guise. She had thought that she had seen his anger before, but the anger which darkened and hardened his features now was truly monumental. She tried to tell herself that he was shocked. Naturally, he was shocked.
She tried again. ‘I’m pregnant.’
There was a loud crash and at first Kate thought that it was the sound of his chair being scraped back, and of Giovanni rising menacingly to his feet. But the crash had been the glass of wine he had knocked over. The glass had not broken, but the wine had spilt out and seeped all over the white damask table-cloth like a puddle of blood, and neither of them made a move to stop it.
His heart was pounding in his ears. ‘It cannot be my baby,’ he told her with cold emphasis. ‘Can it?’
The indignity and the implication made her cheeks sting. ‘Of course it’s your baby!’ she declared, and she trembled her way to her feet, facing him, her breath ragged, as if they were two combatants in a boxing ring. ‘Whose could it be if not yours?’
‘I have always made absolutely sure that you could not become pregnant,’ he said, still in that cold, deadly voice. ‘You know that!’ He approached her round the table with all the dangerous stealth of a jungle cat, while a hot rage burned inside him. ‘Has there been someone else, Kate? Some man who wasn’t quite so careful while I was away? You are a highly sexed and very responsive woman, we both know that. Tell me the truth, Kate, and I promise not to judge you.’
Judge her? He might as well have torn her heart from her chest. There was a ringing smack as the flat of her hand connected with his cheek, but he did not flinch, merely raised his own hand in lightning-fast reaction to imprison her wrist and to haul her close to him. So close that she could feel his warm, angry breath—see the furious black glitter of his eyes.
‘Whose is it?’ he demanded.
‘Yours! Yours! Yours! Yours!’