LITMIR.BIZ

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her son good morning, then placed him on his feet on the floor.

      Kelly smiled; whatever Judy’s faults, she did love her son.

      ‘It’s no good hanging around with a silly smile on your face, Kelly,’ said Judy, totally misinterpreting the reason for the smile. ‘Take my advice and drop the local boy. You are a good-looking woman—you should set your sights a whole lot higher. Go after someone like Count Maldini, a real catch. Last night I could see he was interested—yours was the only hand he kissed,’ Judy opined with a sigh. ‘But then, even if you got him, keeping him would be the problem.’ Picking up a cup, she filled it with coffee from the pot and walked out with the comment, ‘For Carlo, poor dear; he is feeling very sorry for himself this morning.’

      Judy’s comment gave Kelly pause for thought. She was intelligent, educated and considered herself as good as any other person on the planet. Gianfranco was a count. So what? Perhaps she had overreacted. He had called this morning, as promised. He did still want to see her and explain—well, according to him anyway. Surely he deserved a hearing, or was she the inverted snob he had intimated?

      By the next morning Kelly had reached a decision: she would meet Gianfranco on Friday and hear what he had to say…

      On Thursday afternoon Kelly was sitting on a plane winging its way back to England, glad to be going home and back to reality. On Tuesday Carlo Bertoni had declared there was no point staying in Italy any longer, since, as he could not compete in the yacht race, he might as well get back to work in London. Generously he had suggested Kelly stay on, on holiday, until the end of her contract in ten days’ time. Marta was staying that long anyway, and Kelly had immediately accepted his offer.

      But on Wednesday morning she had been leafing through the pages of the national newspaper and seen a picture of Count Maldini taken at a reception in New York on the Monday evening, with a stunning-looking redhead on his arm. Kelly had been able to fool herself no more; the affair, fling, was over, and there was no point in deluding herself otherwise. It was time she cut loose any connection whatsoever with Count Maldini.

      On Thursday evening she said goodbye to the Bertoni family at Heathrow Airport. They were heading for their London townhouse and Kelly was heading for her family home: a small three-bedroom house in a quiet area of Bournemouth.

      ‘Pregnant,’ the doctor declared, and Kelly groaned. Her periods had always been irregular, and she had not been sick or dizzy, or had any of the complaints usually connected with pregnancy. She had felt lousy in general, but she had put that down to crying herself to sleep most nights over Gianfranco. It had only been a month ago, when she’d realised she could not fasten her jeans, that she’d been brave enough to check dates. It was only what she had feared for the last four weeks, but to hear Dr Jones confirm it was still a shock.

      ‘You really should have seen me a lot sooner, Kelly. Still, no harm done, you’re remarkably fit. I gather there is no father on the horizon?’ he prompted gently. He had known the young girl before him all her life, he watched her mother die in childbirth, and her father die of cancer, and now this. ‘By the date you gave me, you are thirteen weeks pregnant.’

      ‘Yes, that would be right. Thank you, Dr Jones.’ Kelly exited the surgery, clasping a card in her hand for her first ante-natal appointment.

      Sitting in the coffee shop of the largest department store in Bournemouth, gazing dazedly at the Christmas decorations, Kelly was sure things could not get worse. But they did.

      Judy Bertoni appeared out of nowhere. Apparently she was visiting her parents for the day. Kelly cursed the fact she had taken off her coat and hung it on the stand provided, and spent the next half-hour wondering how she could leave without revealing when she stood up that she had filled out somewhat. The jersey wool tube skirt and matching sweater did nothing to disguise it. Eventually she had no option but to get up, as one of the side-effects of her pregnancy was a constant desire to visit the bathroom.

      Eagle-eyed, figure-conscious Judy noticed immediately, and Kelly was subjected to a long speech on the inadvisability of dating a local Italian boy, and ‘I told you so’.

      Kelly was sorely tempted to blurt out who the father was, but managed to restrain herself. Judy, in her Mother Teresa act, promised she would keep in touch and send her Andrea’s cast-offs. Kelly should have been grateful, but she wasn’t; she felt sick and fat and fed-up.

      She was even fatter and more fed-up when she returned from work at six on a cold Friday night in January. After a refreshing shower, and a meal of chicken and chips, she finally settled down on the sofa, prepared to spend the evening relaxing. With a Mozart tape in her Walkman, she held the earplugs to her stomach. She had read somewhere that music was good for the unborn baby and she hoped it was true.

      The doorbell rang.

      ‘Sugar!’ she exclaimed, and, hauling herself up off the sofa, moved slowly to the door. It was probably Margaret. Since the house next door had been sold while Kelly had been in Italy, her new neighbour—a middle-aged spinster with an elderly mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s and a bachelor brother, Jim, to look after—had taken to calling on Kelly. She hadn’t the heart to turn the woman away.

      ‘Just coming,’ Kelly called as the doorbell rang again, longer and louder. ‘Where’s the fire?’ she muttered under her breath, and opened the front door.

      ‘Do you usually open the door without first enquiring who it is?’ Gianfranco queried with a frown of grim disapproval creasing his broad brow.

      In the first second of recognition her blue eyes widened, her heart leaping with joy, but instantly reality intruded. She’d tried to tell herself she was over him, had put him out of her mind and her heart. But seeing him before her, looking as rakishly handsome as ever, with a camel cashmere overcoat worn over a perfectly tailored dark business suit, his black hair rumpled by the winter wind, she knew she was not.

      ‘What’s it to you?’ she snapped, angry at her own weakness where this man was concerned. At the same time she wished she were wearing something more glamorous.

      Gianfranco’s dark eyes swept over her face, taking in the tumbled mass of fine blonde hair, the slight blue shadows beneath her magnificent sapphire eyes, the beauty of her face not withstanding her belligerent expression. She did not look delighted to see him, and, lowering his gaze to where her breasts pressed firm against the soft blue wool of her sweater, and lower still to where the garment stretched over the soft mound of her stomach, he knew why. So it was true… He took a deep steadying breath.

      ‘Your protection is everything to me—you are the mother of my baby,’ Gianfranco declared firmly as he stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.

      What little colour she had drained from Kelly’s face, and her blue eyes widened to their fullest extent as she gazed up in pure shock at the man towering over her. Gianfranco here, in her home, and he knew she was having his baby… ‘But…how…?’ She swayed, suddenly feeling faint, and could not get the sentence out, a host of different emotions tangling her tongue.

      ‘Come, let’s sit down.’ Gianfranco grabbed her arm. ‘It can’t be good for you standing in a cold hall in your condition.’ He unerringly led her into the sitting room of her own home.

      ‘Now wait a minute,’ she finally managed, shakily finding her voice.

      ‘I think we have waited rather too many minutes—months, in fact,’ he teased, his dark eyes roaming pointedly down to her stomach and back to her face as he led her to the sofa and eased her down into it, lowering his long length beside her and taking her hand in one of his.

      The closeness of his large male body, the familiar male scent that was uniquely Gianfranco, all conspired to make her heart race. A dull red flush suffused her cheeks. It wasn’t fair; he only had to touch her and, even fat and pregnant, she still felt the same instant sensual response, every hair on her body standing on end.

      ‘How did you find me—and how did you know I was pregnant?’ Kelly asked the question she should have asked the minute he walked in the door, looking

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