The Surprise Conti Child (13 page)

Among all of Leandro's estates and she had toured a mind-gaping number of them this past week with him and Izzie, she liked Villa de Conti the best.

And not just because of the spectacular view Lake Como offered either. There was a peace, a kind of quiet here in the villa that she didn't see elsewhere. A sense of happiness among the three siblings, of what they had built together after the disastrous, it seemed, almost destructive consequences of their parents' marriage.

Even as Valentina sometimes rebelled at his dictates and Luca, quite recklessly, provoked Leandro, just for the fun of it—the devil—over the past few weeks Alex had realized any happiness they had found, the love they shared was because of Leandro.

In the name of duty he did it, but the fact that he would give anything for their happiness warmed Alex's heart.

Also, Valentina lived here and they had become fast friends again. Even Luca dropped by every few days and somehow Alex felt as if she was as much a part of their family now as Izzie was.

Or perhaps it was the absence of Leandro's grandfather, Antonio.

The old man hadn't said one word to her again, hadn't even approached her. Only looked at her with a cutting hostility but Alex told herself she didn't need his approval.

She knew, however, that Antonio was still a large part of Leandro's life. He seemed to be the closest to a friend and mentor Leandro had. But something about him didn't sit well with Alex.

She hoped it was just her reaction to the old man not liking her and making it very obvious.

Grabbing a robe from the lounger, Alex pulled it on and headed for her bedroom. Izzie was out with Valentina and the afternoon stretched ahead of her.

Alex showered and dressed.

Settling in the shade in the sun-drenched terrace, she dialed her parents' home number, eager to hear how their trip went. When an automated voice told her that the line was disconnected, she called her mom's cell instead.

It took her mom barely five minutes to cut across Alex's questions and blurt out her excitement.

Her parents had sold the store to an interested buyer who had offered them loads of money for the prime location.

Alex made all the necessary comments, faked excitement she didn't feel.

How many times had she tried to get a refinance for their house with the store as a guarantee? And yet someone had spent a bucketload of money on it.

But the weight on her chest refused to melt away as she went through the day. Something about her parents' sudden bout of good fortune made her uneasy.

Or was it just her attachment to the store, she doubted herself again. Was it just that things were changing too rapidly for her peace of mind or was it something else?

Days passed by in a blur as Alex tried to hold on to the wave of change that rocked through her life.

Only nights spent between the sheets with Leandro made her feel together again. Only by laying against his warm chest and hard body could she retain a sense of herself, could hold the reins of her life.

Outside of it, the weight returned to her chest.

Her parents' selling the store.

Valentina not only meeting the enigmatic Kairos Constantinou, but within three weeks of meeting her, Kairos proposing marriage to her.

The rapid-fire argument she had caught between Leandro and Luca over Kairos.

That vague sense of unease returned a hundredfold and Alex struggled with it for days.

It felt like a dark portent, like a choice was rushing at her that she didn't want to make. As if the sense of well-being and wonder she had discovered with Leandro would be ripped away at any moment.

* * *

The sounds of revelry from the gardens that floated up through the windows and the balconies, of snippets of Italian and Greek, of the sultry jazz tune that Kairos and Valentina were dancing to, the intensely lush colors of the summer—jasmine and rose, and the scent of wild orchids that decorated each table...

Everything faded as Leandro straightened from the vanity sink and his gaze fell on the wrapper half peeking out of the wastebasket.

He'd almost missed it and if not for the word flashing at him like a neon sign he would have thought nothing of it.

Half of that phrase winked at him as if playing peekaboo with his already somber mood.

Fingers turning as cold as the gold-tinted marble, he stared at it. It seemed as if he was being petrified from the inside out, such was the stillness inside him.

He didn't know how long he stood like that, looking at it, but unmoving. And then shattering that stillness, laying waste to that stony silence inside him came a howl from his throat that should have quaked the very foundation of the centuries-old villa he stood in.

It propelled him into action, and he bent his knees, and pulled out the wrapper gingerly, as if it was a bomb that could detonate at any moment and decimate his suddenly fragile life.

Breath ballooned up in his chest, crushing his lungs as he read the script on the wrapper.

Someone had taken a pregnancy test.

And since this was Alexis's bedroom, the bedroom in which he had made love to her in the past six weeks, he had little doubt who. He had forgotten to use protection that first night after the party.

And after that, Alexis had told him they would have to use condoms until she went back on the pill.

He had bitten off his retort countless times about how they wouldn't need it if they just got married, like he wanted to.

Her mouth falling open, she had looked at him in disbelief. “Married? You want more kids?” she had said, as if the very prospect was scary.

“
Si.
Where did you think this is leading?” he'd thrown back at her curtly, frustration turning his temper ragged.

“Marriage is a big step,” she'd countered then. “And I can't even think about more kids now.”

He'd barely held back the snarl that rose to his lips. “You would have us continue in this vein, sneaking into bed at night and into closets during the day? For how many days do you think you can fool Isabella?”

For how many more days would she torture him this way?

For days, there had been a compulsion in his blood, a pulsing throb under his skin that he needed to secure their future. That he needed to bind Alexis to him in any way he could.

But she had told him not to rush her, that she was enjoying their learning each other, enjoying the freedom of being his lover without the restrictions and confines of marriage.

Maledizione!
He should have dragged her to the church by the hair after that statement.

But no!

Vulnerable in a way he'd never been before, having no experience of this confusion within, he had let her set the tone for their relationship.

After all, he'd manipulated her thoroughly, hadn't he?

It was the only thing she'd ever asked of him. That they take it slow.

He understood the word
sucker
that Luca used for some of his friends.

He had thought to make her happy, to gain her trust. He'd taken her to the opera and when she had challenged him, he'd watched a marathon of some cult TV show because she'd called him a traditional, stick-up-his-ass, starchy brute.

He made love to her in the night in her room, like some illicit lover, because she insisted on not confusing their daughter before matters were settled between them.

Dio
, she hadn't even come into his room once. Hadn't let him take her in his bed. She didn't let him wake up with her in the morning, shuffling him out of her room at dawn because she thought Izzie would wander in.

And now to find this...

The test, where was the test...he went to his knees. With shaking fingers, he upended the basket.

Maybe it wasn't positive
, the vulnerable, emotionally weak part of him piped up.
Maybe that's why she hadn't even mentioned it. Maybe he was making a big issue out of—

And the plastic, rectangular tube lay faceup on the white marble, the answer winking up at him.

She was pregnant!

Alexis was pregnant. With his child. Again.

And she hadn't told him.

Cold chill infiltrated Leandro's skin, clamped his very bones.

She hadn't said a word all day.

He had seen her at the lavish breakfast he had arranged in Kairos and Valentina's honor just for family. She had sat next to him, a little bit lost, until Luca had prodded her.

He did that always, Leandro had realized irritably. Made Alexis smile and laugh. Looked after her in a way he'd never seen Luca do before with another woman.

After the breakfast, they had both gone their separate ways, a hundred things on his mind about the engagement party tonight.

Until he had come upon her, here in this bedroom and asked her point-blank if something was bothering her. If there was something he could fix for her.

She had fed him a white lie that she was anxious about her dad's health.

Too afraid to examine his own spiraling anxiety about her continued refusal, he had accepted her answer.

Had made love to her in that very bed while the entirety of his family and three hundred members of Italian society had been arriving on his estate. Stroked and tasted and touched every inch of her until his name was a litany on her lips.

Because only there could he strip her defenses, only when she was naked and writhing beneath him, only when he drove away everything else with his hands and mouth and touch, did Alexis belong to him completely, mind, body and soul.

All last week, she had been curt, a little distracted, even with Izzie. Even Valentina, as self-involved as she'd been, had commented on Alex's appetite.

Which meant Alexis had known, or at least guessed, the truth before this morning.

With a growl, he pushed away the basket, threw the test on the floor.

Hurt and pain were like twin spikes in his sides, stealing his very rationality. Shredding that sense of control he had always needed to handle his world.

Why hide the truth from him this time? What did she fear? Or had she decided she didn't want to be with him after all?

I would like to visit New York for a couple of weeks
, she had said just yesterday, throwing him for a loop.

Why? Why go to New York now?

Why was she pulling away from him?

And what could he do to stop her?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
T
WAS
ALMOST
dawn and she still hadn't come to him, still hadn't told him. And for the first time since that night when he had made love to her, Leandro kept himself away from her bedroom.

The party had come to an end hours ago and the dense silence, the pitch-dark of the night, suited his somber mood. Somehow, he'd held on to his control. His jaw should have turned to concrete hours ago for the way he'd gritted his teeth and greeted everyone.

His face should have turned to brittle glass for the happiness and normalcy he'd had to fake.

His blood should have chilled to ice at the sight of Alexis in a navy blue silk dress that hugged her curves so gloriously. She had looked strained though he was the only one who noticed.

Like him, she hadn't wanted to mar the happiness of Valentina's big night.

If he went to her, he would weaken.

If he touched her, if he lost himself in the sensuality of her body, he wouldn't care about why she was avoiding him.

If he took her and moved inside her, the hurt wouldn't lessen when he was done.

Because he would still be outside of the wall she'd erected between them.

It was nothing but a madness and Leandro was through with being this mad, this out of control.

He had to do something to shred this fear. He had to take action.

Only action, only setting things right had always saved him. Had stopped him from crumbling. Had enabled him to take care of Luca and Valentina.

And the right thing was that Alexis belonged with him just as Isabella did.

She was his and he wouldn't let her go.

He reached his study and slammed the door shut behind him.

Countless times, he had come in here, to swallow his tears. To bury his fears. To shore up his courage so that he could act like an adult when he had barely been one.

Here was where he had lost his innocence and discovered that the man who should have protected them all was an animal instead.

Here was where he had threatened Enzo after he had raised his hand at their mother.

Here was where he had hugged Luca when they'd discovered the horrible truth their mother swallowed.

Here was where he had argued with Antonio, for days, about the rightness of bringing Valentina home.

A growl rumbled through him at the thought of losing Alexis, too.

He had just poured a generous measure of whiskey, something else he'd never indulged in as a rule, when the door opened behind him.

Even in that moment, his breath hitched in his throat, hope flared.

Antonio stood at the door and Leandro turned away from his grandfather's shrewd gaze. He didn't want anyone to see him like this.

Not when he didn't understand himself.

“Drinking, Leandro?” Antonio's challenge was instant, dry and carried the weight of a thousand questions. Enzo had not only been an alcoholic but an abusive one.

All of them, even Antonio, had felt the effects of that.

Leandro threw back the whiskey in a reckless gesture. It seemed he was finally coming apart at the seams and he hadn't even realized that he had been holding so tight. That his complacency and his control were this flimsy.

The fiery slide of the whiskey against his throat and chest blunted the edge of his roiling emotions. Just. He faced Antonio and shrugged. “Maybe I have earned the right, Nonno?”

Antonio's cane was a harsh rap against the gleaming marble floor. “Maybe you have become weak.”

Leandro remained silent, hating to agree with Antonio.

“That woman, what has she done now?”

Brittle laughter escaped Leandro's mouth. Apparently, the only absolute in his shifting world was Antonio's black prejudice of Alexis.

“She is pregnant.”

A fierce kind of joy lit up Antonio's old eyes, so raw that Leandro looked away. He thumped Leandro on the shoulder, the force of it no less for his frail body.

“Marry her soon,” he declared as if that hadn't been a foregone conclusion from the moment Leandro had seen that Alexis needed him just as much as Isabella did.

Why couldn't she accept it when Leandro offered her everything?

“The Conti heir cannot be a
bastardo—
”

“You do not know if it is a boy, Nonno, and she has not told me.”

Antonio missed a beat. “You think she will use this to manipulate you?”

“Alexis doesn't have a manipulative bone in her body.”

“Then why does it—” Antonio stared at Leandro, then frowned as if he couldn't fathom the import of this. “This matters to you? That she has not informed you?”

Leandro drove his shaking fingers through his hair. Trust his grandfather to arrive at the crux of it so easily. “
Si
, it does. It means I still do not have her trust. It means she still has not accepted that we must marry.”

It means that he still did not have her heart.
And that clawed through him.

Something dawned in Antonio's gaze. Whatever it was, Leandro didn't like it one bit. “She leads you by your manhood, she refuses to marry you and now...she plays with your emotions. I knew this would happen.”

Running a shaking hand over his nape, Leandro bit back his stinging retort.

The sounds of a file slapping the mahogany desk brought his head up.

A grim sort of triumph danced in Antonio's eyes.

“What is that?” Leandro inquired.

“Read it for yourself.”

A small insignia on the top right corner of the file was Leandro's first clue—a highly expensive Milanese private investigations firm.

A passport-size picture of Alexis, maybe eight or nine years old, that naive but defiant tilt to her chin, his second clue.

Pages and pages of information on Alexis from school grades to jobs, including the time she and her friends had received a mark on their juvenile record for some minor shoplifting. When she had been fired from a job at an accounting firm when she'd been eighteen—the year after her brother's death, he remembered.

Facts even he didn't know about her pregnancy. The loan on her store that had been almost defaulted. And then details about the accident and her recovery.

Nausea barreled up Leandro's chest and filled his throat. “What in hell is this?” The question was rhetorical yet he couldn't wrap his mind around it.

“It's a report that I had that firm put together a week after that woman stormed into our home. That shoplifting record, those bad investments, and this accident recently...it is not a hard story to put together.

“I can find a lawyer in two minutes who will label her an incompetent mother. And your children will be yours.”

“I will not separate my children from their mother. I need her in my life, Antonio.”

Leandro's stark statement echoed around them while Antonio's mouth tightened. But he did not care.
Dio
, he did not care about anything.

For the first time in his life, he wanted,
no, desperately needed
, something to even go on. He wanted Alexis's heart, he wanted to be loved by this strong woman, he wanted to bask in the generosity of her laughter and passion. He wanted to go to bed with her through countless dark nights and wake up with her to a million sunrises. He wanted to help her heal and see her soar...

Yet he did not know how to keep her from slipping away from him.

She was.
Dio, she was.

“I could not hurt her with this, Nonno. I could not forgive myself if I hurt her.”

“Then use it in my name. Use it to scare her, use it to bind her to you.”

Leandro jerked away from the table.

It was so diabolical and yet simple.

Antonio could force her hand with this very file. Even a whisper of a separation from Isabella would send Alexis into his arms. Leandro could reassure her it was not true, but persuade her to the altar with him. And she would be Leandro's forever.

Once Alexis gave her commitment, once she vowed herself to him in marriage, there would be no going back, whatever way she'd arrived there.

She would be that perfect, adoring wife, her loyalty toward him and their family absolute. He knew that as well as he knew his own mind.

A life with Alexis and Isabella and his unborn child, just as it should be, versus this anxiety, this confusion about her feelings, this desperate chasm that he couldn't fill no matter what he did.

If he used it, Alexis would be shattered. It was the worst thing he could aim at her, even in the guise of Antonio, the worst that she believed of herself.

But if he didn't...what if she never agreed to marry him? What if after everything Leandro had done, he wasn't enough?

He could have the only woman he'd ever wanted in his life this badly.

What, per carita, was he waiting for?

* * *

Alex felt every passing second like a net was drawing in closer around her. Soon it would choke her if she didn't tell Leandro about the pregnancy. The terrifying anxiety she had felt at seeing the test positive had calmed now, but not the fear of the oncoming fate.

She hated cheating him of this news every passing second, especially as she knew how elated he would be.

A big, loving family, he wanted it. He wanted everything he and Luca and Valentina hadn't had growing up. He would shower this baby with just as much love as he did Isabella. He had so much love to give, and yet, would he open himself up to feeling anything remotely like that for Alex herself?

Again and again, he talked of duty, of what an exceptional mother she was, of giving Isabella security, of the rightness of all of them together...

And nothing about her and him...

Nothing about why he wanted her with a desperate intensity every night, about the raw fear she saw in his eyes when he didn't think she was looking at him, about the urgency and anger she sensed gathering in him every time she postponed their talk of future...

Would he ever learn that he had to risk his heart to have and hold hers? Would it all be her capitulation but none of his? Would he only manipulate her again and again, like he'd already done with her parents' store?

For one question of Luca and five minutes of his time had told her that some offshore branch of Conti Luxury Goods had acquired a tiny health food store in Brooklyn.

Why, why did he need to buy their store and offer that exaggerated price for it?

Was it just to retain control of this situation between them? To arm himself against her?

So every time she had gathered courage yesterday, every time she had firmly put her reasons for not jumping into marriage, fear eroded her courage.

That she would let him persuade her, that he would forever bind her to him without ever opening his heart to her, that she would forever wonder if it was something to do with her that stopped him from loving her... Alex didn't want to live like that.

She didn't want to spend the rest of her life like she'd done for so long. Craving her parents' approval and attention but never receiving it, calling herself inadequate and not being able to help it, forcing herself at things that she'd never been good at and failing...

On and on, the cycle would go on...

God, it would be a thousand times worse with Leandro, for she wanted more from Leandro than she'd ever wanted from anyone else.

She wanted him to want her because he couldn't live without her. Because he loved her, just as much as she loved him. She wanted him to be desperate for her, just as she was.

Bloodthirsty of her, true, but how could she live with anything else?

When she knew walking away from him would shatter her into a thousand different pieces.

* * *

The morning had started out horrible with nausea churning through Alex's stomach. She had barely slept, waiting and wondering if Leandro would come to her.

When somewhere around dawn, she'd realized he wasn't going to, she had cried herself to sleep. The tears felt both like a burden and a relief for she was no closer to deciding what she wanted to do.

She'd desperately wanted to go find him, to sink into his embrace, to tell him how much she loved him. But what would he say? What if he only took advantage of it?

What if he turned the biggest truth of her life into another weakness?

She emptied her glass of orange juice and decided to take Izzie out for a walk when Luca walked onto the terrace, a grim expression on his face.

Fear was a fist in her throat for Alex knew, instantly, that something was very wrong.

Luca threw a file on the table. “I promised I would help.” There was no warmth or charm in his tone. A nerve flicked violently in his temple while that laughing mouth set into a hard, cruel curve.

It was such a change in his demeanor that it took her a few seconds to focus on the file.

Like a snake uncoiling, ready to strike and sink poison, it stared back at her. “What is it, Luca?”

“A file,
cara
.” His tone tempered and perversely, it made her throat raw. “About you. To prove that you're an incompetent mother.”

Alex jerked so hard that she'd have toppled off the chair if not for Luca's hand behind her. Her heart thumped in her chest, a loud rushing in her ears made her head spin. The nausea she'd felt this morning returned a hundredfold.

She gripped the edge of the breakfast table, looking for an anchor in her drowning world.

Incompetent
...the word was a like a burn mark on her skin, festering and deep and painful. More so than all the pain she'd suffered in the accident.

More so than all the years of tears and deprecation and grief she had suffered at her parents' hands.

With shaking hands, she opened the file. Watched pages and pages of her life distilled into hard little facts. Stripped of her insecurities and fears. Reducing her entire life into one dimension.