She pulled the edges of the threadbare cardigan together defensively as his perusal, hungry and invasive, continued.
Without a word, he entered the flat and closed the door with an arrogant kick of his handmade Italian shoe. Wandered soundlessly through the small flat.
Every inch of her stilled in panic as he picked up the cardboard box she had discarded carelessly on one of the sofas.
Anger flashed in his green gaze and then cycled to fury and then to utter powerlessness. He turned the box around and around with those long fingers.
Her breath quivered in her throat noisily as she stared at the expression she thought she never would see. The box was crushed in his hand, his knuckles showing white.
“When did you take the test?” he finally said, something so desperately painful in his tone that she just stared at him.
“Clio?”
Recovering, she fought the urge to go to him. “Yesterday morning.”
Another silence ensued, stretching her nerves so tight that a breath of wind could tear them apart.
“Yesterday morning…”
A quiet sound fell from his lips, shock marring his features. “And?”
The tiny room reverberated with the sound of his question, all the more unnerving for the whispered entreaty that it was.
Clio swallowed and instinctively wrapped her arms around her still-flat tummy. She had expected him to give her a display of that fierce Sicilian temper. This silently obvious conflict rattled her on so many levels. “It was positive. I made an appointment to see a doctor in two days to have it confirmed, but I…I’m pregnant.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?” came the instant retort. He pushed his fingers through his hair, paced the small room. Let out a string of angry curses. Came to a standstill within touching distance, his features wreathed in torturous agony. “Dio, Clio… Would you have hid this from me if I hadn’t come today? Would you have…”
Hands tucked in the pockets of his trousers, he turned away from her abruptly. As if he couldn’t bear the sight of her. The tension in his vibrating frame sent her into a panic.
She knew that final thread of his control had unraveled, the last piece of his armor was broken. Knew that he was hurting and that he would attack at any moment. Knew what families and children and the bonds of kin would mean to his Sicilian blood.
Knew that his vulnerability, beneath the hard shell he had acquired all these years, lay in the depth and intensity with which he had once wanted love and family and laughter in his life.
Knew that he was made for it, that he would make a fantastic father. Knew that she was weakening already after facing the truth about the pregnancy, and seeing him so close by, remembering how good it had felt to give herself over to him…
He was the man she adored with every breath in her. He was the man who showed her to be strong, who showed her what she was made of.
He would fight for custody, she knew. He would do what he deemed to be right by their child. He would tie her up in clauses and contracts, he would use the fact that she hadn’t instantly told him to tie her to him.
To achieve what he had wanted two months ago.
Even as every inch of her thrummed with pain, even as every inch of her recoiled at subjecting her coming child to separate parents living across the globe, Clio made her decision as the woman he had helped her become.
It was better her child had two parents who loved him, rather than a mother who would forever be in agony, living with the man who would never love her back, a mother who would so easily become a shadow of herself.
She straightened her spine and faced him. Waited for the hardest battle of her life to commence. “No. I wouldn’t have hid it from you. But I…” she swallowed the tears in her throat, “I would have given myself a few weeks to prepare first.”
* * *
“Prepare for what?” Stefan threw back at Clio, finding it unbearable to meet her eyes. How deep and sharp her words cut, how easily she had turned him into this mass of ache and love…
Her denial didn’t bring him even infinitesimal relief. His gut still ached, his breath rushed out of him unevenly.
She would have taken a few weeks to prepare herself…that he had driven her to this, it traveled through him like a missile launched specifically to torture him.
He turned, not sure what he would say, and stilled.
With her palm splayed against her stomach, her green eyes shining with tenderness and determination, she faced him. The wide curve of her mouth trembled. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen and it only brought home again how much he loved this woman. How fortunate that she would mother his child…
“Please answer me, Clio. Preparing for what?” he asked again, fisting his hands at his sides, stifling the urge to take her in his arms.
She shrugged, but the casualness she was going for didn’t come through. There was a wariness in her eyes that he decided he would never be the cause of again.
“I knew that if I had told you immediately, you would come armed to the teeth with clauses and contracts. That you would want this child and me and the whole family thing. That you would seduce your way into my life and convince me this was for the best. As sad as it sounds, I need to shore up my defenses against you.”
“You think I will bind you to me in the name of our child? You think me that heartless, Clio?”
Tears ran over her cheeks and she swayed. Cursing himself over and over, Stefan caught her.
“What am I supposed to think, Stefan? Two months have gone by and you didn’t call me once. Two months in which I wondered if I would ever see you again. Two months in which every minute felt like an eternity. Two months in which I battled the urge to come to you, to beg you to take me back any way you wanted.”
He grabbed her hands, willing her to understand him. “I hurt you so much that day. I couldn’t face myself in the mirror thinking of what I had ruined. The minute you had walked out, I realized what I had done, how wrong I was.
“I have been cursing myself, wondering if I could ever take back what I had done. I was terrified that I would hurt you even more after everything you have been through, Clio. I’m terrified that I might never be worthy of you, bella.”
He knelt in front of her, wrapped his arms around her. Bent his head, burrowed into her warmth, the love he felt for her unmanning him.
And even as he trembled at the thought that he might have lost her, he could feel the rightness of this, feel everything in him slide into place. Striving for control that was out of his reach, he pulled her fingers in his hand and kissed her.