Page 4 of Back to Claim His Italian Heir
‘I can,’ he informed her in a voice of silky, suppressed rage, ‘blame you for marrying the next man who offered. I assume he was the next man?’ He jerked his head towards the door to the sanctuary, which he sincerely hoped was now empty of guests—and groom. ‘Not a very impressive specimen, all told. Really, you could have done better.’
‘Don’t insult Will,’ she replied with quiet, dignified resignation. ‘Or blame him. He’s done nothing to you.’
True, but Nico felt a scorching flash of fury all the same. ‘No,’ he agreed when he trusted his tone to be pleasant. ‘I don’t blame him. Quite the contrary, my dear.’ He bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile as he took a step closer to her, watched her shrink against the cushions of faded velvet. Was she pretending to be afraid of him, to add to the drama, appeal to some sort of sympathy? Damsel in distress was a role she knew how to play to the hilt, but it wouldn’t work this time. Far from it. ‘I don’t blame your groom,’ he told her with succinct, acid sweetness. ‘I blame you.’
CHAPTER TWO
EMMAGAZEDATthe fury simmering in her husband’s eyes and felt everything in her shrink. She supposed she should expect him to be angry, but that sneering derision twisting his lips made her want to curl up in a ball, close her eyes again, and pretend he wasn’t here. This was such amess.
Their marriage had been a mistake. She was pretty sure Nico had already been coming to that conclusion, even if he liked to bask in his self-righteous rage now. Yes, shehadbeen about to marry another man, mere months after she’d married him. And yes, he had been declared dead, but such a trifling consideration wouldn’t bother Nico. He’d always seemed to her a man who understood right and wrong, saw it in stark, certain terms—unlike her, who’d had to bend the truth more than once just to survive. Who had learned not to trust in happily-ever-afters, even if she’d dared, ever so briefly, to wonder if she could have one with Nico.
Now Emma knew that their marriage never would have lasted past the honeymoon stage, and, with another person to consider, she wasn’t about to jump into that shark tank again. Looking at Nico’s furious expression, she doubted he wanted her to, either. So why was he here?
‘Emma?’ he prompted silkily. ‘Care to make any explanation as to why you wanted to enter into matrimony with another man so soon after you had done so with me?’
‘Because I needed to,’ Emma replied bluntly. ‘Something you could never understand.’ She folded her arms and looked away, telling herself she could deal with his anger, because the truth was she preferred it. If he stayed angry, she wouldn’t remember how kind he’d once been. How considerate and tender, in a way that had just begun to chip away at the carefully constructed walls she’d built around her heart, brick by necessary brick.
Don’t trust anyone. Don’t let people in. Definitely don’t start to care, because then you’ll get hurt. You’ll be rejected by the people you’d come to trust, which hurts so much more.
Well, fortunately she hadn’t started to care. Much. He’d died—or she’d thought he had—before her defences had been truly breached, and in the three and a half months since then she’d had plenty of time—and reason—to build them up again. He was angry? Well, so was she. His family had treated her abominably, and she’d had no reason to think Nico wouldn’t have gone along with it, had he been alive. She had decided a long time ago that she would never stay somewhere she wasn’t wanted, and Nico certainly didn’t look as though he wanted her now.
But he doesn’t know about the baby.
And how on earth was she supposed to tell him, when he was already so furious with her? The last thing she wanted was for Nico Santini to order her life around, all while in a self-righteous rage. She didn’t deserve that, and her baby didn’t, either.
‘You needed to,’ Nico repeated, his voice positively dripping with sarcasm. ‘Really.’ He towered above her, arms folded, biceps rippling, a vengeful god in a three-piece suit. Three months in a coma or hospital or wherever had not diminished his hotness one bit, Emma acknowledged sourly. It would have helped if it had. Why couldn’t he look a little...anaemic? Injured, at least? The only sign that he’d been in a crash at all was a scar by his eyebrow, and in fact that livid little line just added to his sexiness, drat the man. The close-cropped ink-dark hair and vivid green eyes didn’t help, either, along with the body that, despite being in a hospital bed for several months, looked every bit as powerfully muscular as it ever had. Everything about Nico Santini was potently virile, intoxicatingly male. And right now she really wished it weren’t.
‘Yes, really,’ she replied with a shrug, as if it were a matter of indifference, as if her heart wasn’t threatening to jackhammer through her chest. Nico would never understand what it was like to need something—security, safety, a roof over your head. He would never believe that she’d had a genuine friendship with Will, that she hadn’t been taking him for a ride. She certainly wasn’t about to explain any of it to him, only to be scoffed at. ‘You were dead, Nico, or so I thought. I don’t have to offer excuses, and you have no right to be angry.’
‘No right!’ He looked outraged, and a sudden laugh rose in her throat like a bubble. Thankfully she swallowed it down. She did not want to incite his rage any more than she already had.
‘No right,’ she repeated. ‘We’d only been married a week. We barely knew each other. How long did you expect me to play the grieving widow?’
‘Longer than you did, clearly,’ he bit out, the skin around his mouth turning white before he swung away from her.
Emma was under no illusions that he was hurt by what she’d done. He hadn’t loved her, after all. She’d always known that, deep down. Nico might have played the attentive lover for a while, but it had never been real. Their relationship had never been tested, had never had a chance to see if it would endure. And when he’d died—or at least she’d thought he had—his true colours had been revealed by his family.
No, he was angry because of his pride, she supposed. He’d always made it clear he would be the one who decided when their relationship ended. Well, she had been the one to end it, but then he’d beendead.
‘So you have no excuses,’ Nico stated flatly as he turned around, his expression now forbidding. ‘Nothing to exonerate yourself.’
‘I don’t need to exonerate myself, and I really don’t know what you expect me to say.’ Emma glared up at him as she folded her arms, mainly to hide her very small bump, because she was pretty sure he didn’t realise she was pregnant—with his child. And when he realised that...well, she had no idea what he might do. She doubted he wanted to continue their marriage, all things considered, but she would die before she let him take her child away from her, the only family she’d ever had. She had no intention of revealing anything more than she had to, not until she knew what Nico wanted. Not until she could trust him with the truth.
Yet looking at those glinting green eyes narrowed in anger, she still remembered—painfully, shamefully—how soft and mossy they’d seemed after she’d first met him, how he’d looked at her with something almost like love. Of course, it hadn’t really been love, not even close. She knew that, of course she did, but still, it had felt...well, as close to love as she’d ever known, maybe, which was pretty pathetic, she acknowledged now, especially since Nico had made it clear at the start that he didn’t love her.
She’d been fine with that, had accepted it, as she’d accepted it for her whole life. Something about her, she suspected, had always been fundamentally unlovable, if the foster families she’d cycled through were anything to go by. Whether it was indifference, weary kindness, or outright cruelty, they’d all abandoned her in the end. But now...now she had to think differently, because now she had to watch out for someone else, as well. Someone infinitely important. Someone whose well-being mattered far, far more than her own.
She’d been a waitress at a small Italian bistro in New York when she’d met Nico just five months ago, the kind of hole-in-the-wall place that billionaires weren’t supposed to frequent, and yet Nico had. He had a table in the window, his paperwork spread out while he sipped a glass of Chianti, and Emma walked by him, transfixed by the blade-like precision of his cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the breadth of his shoulders, the expensive fabric of his shirt stretching tautly across them as he studied the papers before him with a remarkable and focussed intensity.
He was utterly unaware of her, of course—that was, until she breathed in the spicy scent of his cologne and, stupidly overwhelmed by its heady fragrance assaulting her senses, she tripped over her own feet and managed to dump an entire plate of spaghetti and meatballs right into his lap.
He jumped up, appalled and furious, accidentally knocking his glass of wine over his papers in the process. He snatched the glass to turn it upright, but of course it was too late. He was covered in sauce and his papers were covered in wine. Total disaster.
And Emma, because it was all so awful, and she was pretty sure she was going to get fired for causing it, laughed. It was her default, her defence mechanism, a way to not let herself be hurt by the casual cruelty, or, sometimes even worse, pitying kindness she’d encountered throughout her life. And, face it, a gorgeous man with a crotch full of spaghettiwasfunny. Sort of.
A horrified giggle escaped her in a bubble of sound, and he swung his infuriated and incredulous gaze towards her before she clapped her hand over her mouth. Now was not the time to laugh, she told herself severely, not when this incredibly handsome and obviously powerful man had just had his dinner, his paperwork and his suit all ruined—by her. And she knew how powerful people liked to blame their underlings for just about everything. Not that she’d met anyone remotely as powerful and magnetic as the man in front of her, spaghetti and all.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, trying for a deeply contrite tone, even as another giggle escaped through her fingers.