Her plea smote at his heart, and gently but swiftly he disengaged her fingers and went to the telephone, where he made a rapid call.
She lifted her head painfully. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Phoning the hospital.’
‘I don’t need to go to hospital—’
‘Kate, yes, you do,’ he denounced sternly. ‘And, what is more, you will go!’ He began speaking and gave the address, looking round at her as he did so, wishing that he could obliterate that look of agony etched all over her delicate features. He replaced the receiver. ‘The ambulance is on its way. Do you want me to tell your sister?’
Through the mists of pain she hesitated. Sometimes she and Lucy felt more like twins than sisters. She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And does she know? About the baby?’
‘What baby?’ she cried hysterically. ‘There isn’t going to be a baby, is there? But no, I haven’t told her.’ She hadn’t told anyone, as if by not doing that could make it not seem real.
Lucy arrived at the same time as the paramedics, who were carrying a stretcher. She took one wild look of disbelief at Kate lying huddled miserably on the sofa, with Giovanni stroking a cool cloth at her brow, and her mouth fell open in horror.
‘What’s happened?’ she demanded, her eyes flying accusingly to Giovanni. ‘What have you done to her?’
He flinched, but he stood up to face the venom on her face quite calmly. ‘Your sister is pregnant,’ he said quietly.
‘You bastard,’ hissed Lucy, so that only he could hear.
‘Lucy!’ called Kate weakly, and she looked up into her sister’s face, her green eyes swimming with the unbearable reality of what was happening to her.
She was losing Giovanni’s baby.
‘Oh, Kate, darling! Darling! What is it?’
‘I think I’m having a miscarriage,’ whispered Kate brokenly, and saying the hateful word made the first tears come—they slid freely down her cheeks and she made no move to dry them.
‘We’ll lift you onto the stretcher,’ said the paramedic.
She shook her head. ‘No, I’ll walk.’
‘Kate, either you go on the stretcher or I will carry you out to the ambulance myself,’ said Giovanni grimly. ‘Which is it to be?’
She heard the implacable note in his voice, and allowed herself to be lifted on.
‘And will your partner—’ the paramedic looked at Kate, and then to Giovanni ‘—be coming in the ambulance with you?’
Kate stared up into the blue gleam of his eyes, unable to read any emotion in that shuttered expression. She thought about how babies should be conceived. Planned. With love. And preferably within the confines of a happy marriage. Not as the result of a matter-of-fact affair during a passionate weekend when contraception had somehow failed.
Giovanni did not want to be a father, nor her to be a mother. He certainly did not want her to carry his baby—so why subject him to the indignity of seeing this brief, precious life come to a premature end? Why should he be witness to a heartbreak he would be unable to understand?
‘No,’ she said huskily. ‘I want my sister with me.’
He flinched again at the ultimate rejection. ‘Very well, Kate,’ he said flatly. ‘I will wait here.’
He kept a vigil, only just preventing himself from ignoring her request and tearing down to the hospital to sit there and wait, and to interrogate the doctors and the nurses until he had news that she was safe and out of danger.
But Kate had expressly said that she did not want him to accompany her, and he came from a culture which treated a pregnant woman as a jewel above all others.
Except, as he reminded himself bitterly, that the chances were that she was no longer a pregnant woman.
Resisting the urge to smash something, Giovanni sucked in a hot, dry breath of pain. She was losing his baby, he thought, unprepared for the wave of despair which rocked him.
He kept himself busy by clearing away the remains of their meal. He winced as he imagined her making his country’s most famous dish. Imagined her shopping for all the ingredients, knowing all the while what she had to tell him.