Page 18 of Back to Claim His Italian Heir

‘I can’t even imagine,’ Emma exclaimed softly. ‘How long was that for? When did your memories come back?’

He shrugged, again feeling that flash of vulnerability at admitting his ignorance. ‘It’s all a blur, frankly, and it didn’t happen all at once. Bits and pieces...like pieces of a puzzle, except I didn’t know how they fitted together, or what the whole picture was. For a month I was in a coma, and then another month of not knowing who I was, although I had random memories come and go, like flashes of lightning.’ He remembered searching his empty mind, the vacuum of his memory, for much-needed clues, snatching at fragments of memory that drifted through his mind like ghosts, hazy and ephemeral.

‘Then I started to remember more things—events, people, and as I got stronger I remembered more and more. Eventually I knew enough to contact my cousin, Antonio.’ Who had hardly been overjoyed to hear from him, Nico recalled wryly. Had his cousin been hoping to step into his shoes as CEO of Santini Enterprises? Undoubtedly. Nico’s return from the dead must have been a disappointment, although Antonio had at least pretended to be pleased.

‘Antonio,’ Emma repeated. ‘You remembered him first, then?’

No, he’d remembered Emma first. Emma, lying in his bed, smiling up at him, her hair in a curly golden halo about her flushed face. Emma, tilting her chin as she gave him that impish smile, making his heart sing.Emma.‘Yes, and my father,’ he repeated, and now his tone was just as neutral as hers. He’d remembered his father eventually—and the last conversation they’d had, when the man who had raised him had stared at him stonily before turning away in complete and utter dismissal. He would acknowledge Nico in public, but not in private, not as his son. He would never regard him with anything close to affection, and lying in a hospital bed, as the memories had filtered through him like shards of glass, lacerating his shredded conscience and drawing blood, he’d remembered the reason he’d walked away from his family—and into Emma’s arms.

‘And me?’ she asked softly, glancing down. ‘You...you must have remembered me?’

Nico looked away, his jaw bunching. He’d meant to deal simply in facts, but the emotions came chasing behind, galloping up on him, taking him by surprise. ‘Yes,’ he managed tautly. ‘I remembered you.’

The silence that poured over them felt like honey, a golden web of memory weaving them together.

Yes, Nico could not keep from thinking, every thought like an ache deep inside him,I remembered you. I remembered the exact shade of your eyes, how they glint when you laugh. I remembered precisely how you felt in my arms, how your breasts filled my hands. I remembered the squeal of your laughter as I kissed my way down your body, as the laughter became sighs and then gasps... I remembered it all.

He swallowed hard. Shifted in his seat, and forced his mind onwards, out of the honeyed trap of the past. ‘Anyway,’ he said, apropos of nothing.

‘Have you remembered everything now?’ Emma asked, and now she sounded cautious, wary rather than sympathetic. ‘Besides being on the plane, I mean? There aren’t any more...gaps?’

‘No, at least, I don’t think there are. I suppose it’s hard to know what you can’t remember, if you don’t remember it.’ Sometimes he felt a nagging sensation that he’d forgotten something important, some conversation or piece of information, like a tickle at the back of his brain, but the doctors had assured him that was normal with amnesiac patients. He’d learned, for the most part, to ignore it. To focus on what he did remember...like Emma, until he’d learned she’d been the one to forget him. Maybe he would have been better forgetting, too, except not if there was a baby involved. His baby.

‘That all must have been incredibly difficult,’ Emma said quietly.

‘It was.’ He turned to face her again. Her hair was drying in curls, her face still flushed from the bath, and her dressing gown had slipped off one smooth, golden shoulder. She was utterly delectable, and he could not deny how much he wanted her. Still. Now. His heated blood was racing through his veins, his hands itching to touch her. To draw her to him, onto his lap, his lips on hers, his hands...and they could both forget everything that had happened since then; to catapult back to when it had been easy, the two of them in bed, making each other’s bodies sing.

He took a steadying breath. ‘Tell me your side of the story, Emma. What happened after you learned I had died? What did you do?’

The soft look of compassion on her face fell away in an instant, replaced by something far more guarded. ‘I went to LA,’ she said after a moment. ‘As you know.’

‘Yes, but why?’ He leaned forward, wondering if this, perhaps, was the nub of it, the thing he didn’t understand, or maybe he just didn’t want to understand. Didn’t want to accept she was exactly what Antonio had said she was from the beginning—only in it for the money. ‘My family would have provided for you, you know, as my wife. I know we hadn’t been married long, but—’

‘No, they wouldn’t have.’ She cut across him, the words quiet and so very sure. ‘As it happened, they didn’t. They refused, not that I even asked, because it was obvious enough already.’

Nico frowned. ‘Antonio said he offered you ten thousand dollars—’

‘Yes, that’s true, as a gesture of his goodwill.’ Her mouth twisted as she made air quotes with her hands. ‘Which I took, because I didn’t have so much as a penny to my name, and I was desperate. I’m not ashamed to admit that.’ Up went her chin, along with the golden flash of her eyes. ‘But there was no suggestion of me staying with your family, Nico.’ She paused, as if she were going to say something more, and then decided not to. ‘I can’t really begrudge your cousin or father that, though, considering the circumstances. You’d only known me a month. Antonio didn’t know me at all. And I did take the money he offered, so I suppose he thought that proved whatever it was he thought about me.’

Nico stared at her in dismayed surprise, because this was definitely not how his cousin had framed the events. Antonio had insisted Emma had wanted to leave, had demanded the money he’d reluctantly given, and then gone on her merry way, shaking the dust from her shoes. Who was he to believe?

Looking at the lines of bitter hurt etched into Emma’s face, he felt compelled to believe her version, even as he resisted such a notion, because what did it say about his cousin? His family? And yet should he really be surprised, considering how hard-nosed his father had been? How cynical his cousin? ‘Antonio said you couldn’t wait to leave,’ he said slowly.

‘That much is true,’ she admitted. She glanced away, as if to hide her expression. ‘I knew I wasn’t wanted, so I chose to leave.’

He sat back, his mind whirling, his stomach tightening. This was definitely not the story he’d been sold, although he realised he wasn’t really surprised. Why would his father be interested in his wife, when he hadn’t been interested inhim? And Antonio had always been pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness. Nico could still recall the way Antonio had grimaced when he’d told him he was marrying her.

‘Keep her as your mistress, for heaven’s sake, Nico, but don’t actually marry the girl!’

And Nico, in a fit of pique, and a deeper hurt at the widening fissure between him and his cousin, had ignored that advice. Maybe he shouldn’t have, he acknowledged grimly, but it was too late now. But why had he let himself believe Antonio’s version of events upon his return? Was it because he’d been so wounded by Emma’s apparent betrayal, by marrying again? Anger always felt like the stronger option.

‘Do you believe me?’ Emma asked, a vulnerable note creeping into her voice, making him ache.

‘Yes,’ he admitted, shaken by the truth of his words—and hers. ‘I do.’

Suddenly the last three months—three and a half—took on a whole new, uncomfortable complexion. If Emma had left his family, knowing she wasn’t welcomed...if she’d discovered she was pregnant with so very few resources...and if Will had offered to marry and provide for her...why wouldn’t she say yes? For the sake of her—their—child?

Was it really fair to judge her for any of that? To be angry about it?