The Italian's Christmas Child(26)

‘Do you have any photographs of when you were pregnant?’ Vito asked, startling her into turning wide blue eyes onto his lean, dark face.

‘I don’t think so... I wasn’t feeling very photogenic at the time. Why?’

‘I’m sorry I missed all that. Something else I can’t get back,’ Vito conceded gravely. ‘I really would have liked to have seen you when you were carrying our child.’

Regret assailed her, for she would have loved to have had his support during those dark days of worry and exhaustion. She had struggled to stay employed and earning for as long as possible so as not to be a burden on Pixie.

‘As for that challenge you offered me,’ Vito mused, walking back to their bedroom to change. ‘Draw up a list of places you would like to go.’

‘No lists. I’m phobic about lists,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Let’s be relaxed about what we do and where we go. No itineraries laid out in stone. Are you taking time off?’

‘Of course. But I’ll catch up with my email in the evenings,’ he warned her. ‘I can’t completely switch off.’

‘That’s OK,’ she hastened to tell him. ‘But you may be bored.’

‘Not a chance, gioia mia,’ Vito riposted as he cast off his wet shirt. ‘You and Angelo will keep me fully occupied from dawn to dusk and beyond.’

‘And beyond’ was very much in Holly’s mind as she studied his muscular brown torso, a tiny burst of heat pulsing between her thighs. It was the desire she never really lost around Vito. Her colour heightened. She was so pleased, so relieved that he had listened to her, but there was a fear deep down inside her that she would not have enough to offer to satisfy him outside working hours.

* * *

‘When was the last time you saw your mother?’ Vito asked lazily as they lay in bed six weeks later.

Holly stretched somnolent limbs still heavy with pleasure and rolled her head round to face him, bright blue eyes troubled. ‘I was sixteen. It wasn’t the nicest experience.’

‘I can deal with not nice,’ Vito volunteered, closing an arm round her slight shoulders to draw her comfortingly close.

Holly felt gloriously relaxed and shockingly happy. With every day that passed she was increasingly convinced that Vito was the man of her dreams. He was everything she had ever wanted, everything she had ever dreamt of. But even better, he had proved that he was capable of change.

Six weeks ago, she had reminded Vito that he had to learn how to be part of a family instead of an independent operator seeing life only from a work-orientated point of view. He had started out wanting to make up lists and tick off boxes as if that were the only route to success. He had a maddening desire to know in advance exactly what he would be doing every hour of every day and had only slowly learned to take each day as it came.

Holly had spent several days creating a mood board of her ideas on how to redecorate their hideous bedroom. While she was doing that, Vito had learned how to entertain Angelo. Settling on a colour palate of soothing grey enlivened with spicy tangerine accents, Holly had ordered the required products and utilised a local company to do the actual work. Throughout the entire process, Vito had shown depressingly little curiosity, merely agreeing that it was many years since the castello had been decorated and that, as his mother had never had any interest in revitalising the interior, he was sure there was plenty of scope for Holly to express her talents.

Leaving the work team to handle the decorating project, Holly and Vito had taken their son to stay on the shores of Lake Lugano. Vito’s family had bought a Swiss villa because, like Zurich and Geneva, Lugano was a major financial centre. Over the generations the Zaffari bankers had found the shores of the lake a convenient business location to stash the family while they worked.

At the villa they had thrown open the shutters on the magnificent lake views and enjoyed long lazy meals on the sun-dappled loggia. By day they had explored the water in a private boat, stopping off to ramble around the picturesque little villages on the rugged shoreline. Some evenings they had sat on the lake terrace drinking garnet-coloured Brunello di Montalcino wine while they watched the boats sailing by with twinkling lights. Other nights they had strolled round the cobbled lanes in Lugano to pick a quiet restaurant for dinner, but none had yet lived up to the perfection on a plate offered by Vito’s personal chef.

They had visited the Zoo al Maglio, where Angelo had been enchanted by the antics of the monkeys and had struggled fiercely to copy them. They had caught the funicular railway to the top of Monte San Salvatore to enjoy the alpine scenery and on the way back they had stopped off at a chocolate factory, where a peckish Holly had eaten her weight in chocolate and had sworn never to eat it again while Vito teased her about how much he adored her curves.

There had been shopping trips as well, to the designer boutiques on the Via Nassa, where Holly had become bored because her new wardrobe was so expansive she saw no reason to add to it. She had much preferred the bustling liveliness of the farmers’ market in the Piazza Riforma, from which she had returned home carrying armfuls of the flowers she couldn’t resist. Discovering that arranging them was more of an art than a matter of simply stuffing them in a big vase, she had resolved to ask her mother-in-law for some tips.

‘Your mother...’ Vito reminded her. ‘Are you going to sleep?’

‘No. It’s only two o’clock in the afternoon.’ But in truth she was already smothering a yawn because their post-lunch nap had turned into a sex-fest. ‘Mum...’ she reminded herself. ‘It was the last time I ever lived with her. I thought she wanted me back because I was no longer a child who needed looking after twenty-four-seven. I thought she finally wanted to get to know her daughter. But I got it all wrong—’

‘How...?’ Vito asked, long fingers inscribing a soothing pattern on her hip bone.

‘Mum was living with a guy who owned a little supermarket. She asked me to help out in the shop...’ Holly’s voice trailed away ruefully. ‘It was a crucial school year with exams and I didn’t want to miss classes but she insisted she couldn’t cope and I fell for it—’

‘And...?’ Vito prompted when she fell silent again.

‘It turned out that she only wanted me working in the shop to save her having to do it and they weren’t even paying me minimum wage. I was just cheap labour to please her boyfriend and give her a break.’ Holly sighed. ‘I missed so much school that social services took me back into care. Of course I failed half my exams as well. I haven’t seen her since. I realised that she was never going to be the mother I wanted her to be and I had to accept that. She wasn’t the maternal type—’

‘And yet you’re so different with Angelo.’

‘And if you compare your relationship with your father, aren’t you different with Angelo too? We both want to give our son what we didn’t have ourselves,’ Holly murmured, rejoicing in the heat and strength of his long, lean length next to hers. ‘Why didn’t you invite your father to our wedding?’

‘I thought it would be too awkward for my mother and our guests, particularly when Ciccio is fighting for a bigger divorce settlement because he stands to lose a lot of things that he’s always taken for granted.’

‘Concetta seems quite happy...well, for someone going through a divorce, that is,’ Holly qualified ruefully.

‘With my father gone she has a lot less stress in her life and for the first time she has her independence without the restriction of either a father or a husband. She loves her new home and the freedom she has there.’

‘It’s a new life for her,’ Holly mused drowsily, thinking that her own new life was still in the honeymoon period and wouldn’t really officially start until they returned to the castello the following day and embarked on a more normal routine.

‘I didn’t realise that marrying you would be a new beginning for me as well,’ Vito admitted thoughtfully, acknowledging that he had not fully thought through the ramifications of marrying and becoming a parent. He had plunged into matrimony, dimly expecting life to go on as it always had only to learn that change was inevitable.

‘Do you have regrets?’ she whispered fearfully. ‘Do you sometimes wish you were still single and unencumbered? I suppose you must.’

‘I have no regrets when I’m in bed with you...not a single one.’ Vito gazed down at her with dancing dark golden eyes alive with wolfish amusement. ‘Sì, I knew you’d be annoyed by that point but, Dio mio...at least I’m honest!’

And as his eyes laughed down at her, her heart swelled inside her and she knew, just knew in her very soul that she loved Vito. She loved him the way she had tried not to love him. She had tried so hard to protect herself from feeling more for Vito than he felt for her because that was the hard lesson she had learned in loving her unresponsive mother. You couldn’t make a person care for you; you couldn’t force those feelings.

In any case, it had crossed her mind more than once that Vito’s emotions might be quite unavailable in the love category. Holly had met Vito on the rebound, shortly after his fiancée had ditched him. That Christmas theirs had been a classic rebound attraction. Was Vito still in love with Marzia? Had he tried to return to the beautiful blonde during the fourteen months he and Holly had been apart? Had he mourned the loss of Marzia once he’d decided that he had to marry Holly for his son’s sake? And how, when he never ever so much as mentioned the woman, could Holly possibly ask him to tell her honestly how he currently felt about Marzia?