LITMIR.BIZ

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slowly—you might feel …’

      Before she had finished speaking he had removed the sterile towel she had placed around his shoulders and was on his feet.

      He stood, drew back the curtain and arched an enquiring brow at her.

      ‘I might feel what, Nurse?’

      ‘Faint if you get up too quickly.’

      For a moment his teeth flashed white, his lean bronzed face making him look momentarily a lot younger, and—had it not been clearly impossible—even more attractive. ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

      A wet coat being slung onto the sofa beside her jerked Dervla abruptly back to the present. She blinked from the images on the television screen to the figure who was heading to the kitchen where the sounds proclaimed she was filling a kettle.

      Sue returned a moment later. ‘It’s absolutely foul out there,’ she complained, running her hands through her wet dark curls. ‘You’ve been crying!’ she accused, peering at Dervla’s damp face.

      ‘No …’ Dervla lifted a hand to her face and felt the salty moisture on her skin. ‘I suppose I might have,’ she admitted.

      ‘This,’ her friend said, kicking off her shoes quite literally—they hit the opposite wall, ‘is driving me crazy. I’ve respected your privacy but I’m only human. I have to know—why did you walk out on the delicious Gianfranco? Who clearly adores the ground you walk on.’ She flopped down on the sofa beside Dervla and pushed her coat on the floor. ‘So spill. Give me all the lurid details.’

      ‘He doesn’t adore me or the ground I walk on.’ The only thing Gianfranco adored was his son and the memory of his dead wife. Dervla raised her empty mug. ‘To new beginnings!’

      ‘What?’ Sue said, staring at her friend’s bitter face with concern.

      ‘That was the toast Carla gave when she took me to lunch that first week. She said it was marvellous that Gianfranco had met me, that he was finally able to move on and have a relationship without feeling he was being unfaithful to Sara’s memory.’

      ‘Well, I’d prefer the woman if she had the odd skin blemish, but she’s got a point, Dervla—’

      ‘Only she was wrong,’ Dervla cut in huskily. ‘He hadn’t moved on—he hasn’t, and he doesn’t love me.’

      ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course—’

      ‘No.’ Dervla shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘He never pretended to, he still loves her.’ My life isn’t over, she reminded herself. It just feels that way. ‘It’s not a baby he doesn’t want—it’s my baby.’

      Sue stared at her with eyes like saucers. ‘Baby! But I thought that you couldn’t have a baby. You thought it would be the deal-breaker when you told him,’ she reminded her friend. ‘You were over the moon when he said it was no problem with him.’

      Dervla nodded miserably. ‘He said he already had Alberto and he didn’t want any more children. That we had a ready-made family.’

      ‘But you want your own, and there’s a chance …?’

      Dervla nodded. Sue was one of the few people she had ever told about the tragic long-term consequences of complications after a perforated appendix and the subsequent peritonitis that had put her on the critical list in her teens.

      ‘I might be able to have a baby, but not,’ she added, the tears beginning to overflow in earnest from her tragic emerald eyes, ‘with Gianfranco. I have to choose a baby or him.’

      Sue’s arms went around her as she began to weep loudly.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      ‘WELL, what do you think?’ the man at the head of the table asked, lifting his dark head from the spreadsheet he had been studying.

      There was a silence in the room as he allowed his hooded gaze to rest on each face in turn. He could read panic in several faces as the executives frantically tried to decide what he wanted to hear.

      Gianfranco felt a flash of irritation—he did not surround himself with yes-men or -women.

      ‘Does nobody have an opinion?’ Or a backbone?

      It seemed that nobody had, or if they did they were unwilling to express it. Gianfranco felt his frustration escalate in the growing silence.

      ‘Perhaps there is somewhere else you want to be?’ he suggested with silken sarcasm.

      The trouble, he mused, with people was they couldn’t separate their personal life from their professional life. It was a fatal mistake and one that he couldn’t understand. He had always compartmentalised his life, it was simply a matter of discipline.

      His lashes lowered as his dark glance brushed the metal-banded watch on his wrist. He wondered if his assistant, who seemed less than her usual efficient self today, had remembered to relay the message to everyone concerned that he wanted all personal calls to be immediately diverted in here.

      The sound of a phone ringing broke the lengthening silence. Gianfranco began to count, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists as he resisted the urge to immediately pull it from his jacket pocket.

      Nobody else reached to check if the call was for them. Gianfranco Bruni’s dislike of such interruptions was well known and nobody would have dreamt of not switching off their mobiles before going into a meeting chaired by him.

      It was Gianfranco himself who, after the second ring, pulled a phone from the breast pocket of his jacket and, after glancing at it, rose abruptly, excusing himself.

      ‘The wife,’ the only woman present at the high-powered meeting predicted, unwittingly echoing Gianfranco’s first thought when he had heard the ring.

      No one disagreed.

      Before his marriage the previous year Gianfranco would not have disregarded his own rule concerning interruptions. Since the wedding to which no one, least of all media cameras, had been invited there had been some significant changes. It was rumoured that Gianfranco even took a day off occasionally, but that was only a rumour.

      ‘Well, I hope she says something to put him in a less vile mood.’

      ‘Yes, our leader is not his usual sunny self this afternoon, is he?’ someone agreed drily.

      There was a generous noise of assent around the table.

      ‘Have you met her? The wife, that is?’ one of the executives asked curiously.

      The gentle chatter around the table stopped and a couple of people nodded to confirm they had.

      One said, ‘My mother got me to take her to the opening of the new children’s hospice. It turns out to be his wife’s brainchild.’

      ‘I suppose even a lady who lunches needs something to put on her CV.’

      ‘That’s what I thought, but it turns out she’s really hands-on. Literally actually,’ he recalled with a reminiscent smile. ‘She was down on her hands and knees rolling around on the grass barefoot with some of the kids.’

      ‘She doesn’t sound like a Gianfranco Bruni girlfriend.’

      ‘She’s not—she’s his wife. Maybe that’s the difference. You’re not wrong, though. She really isn’t his usual type.’

      ‘Presumably not hard on the eye, though?’

      ‘She’s pretty,’ the speaker agreed. ‘A redhead, green eyes, freckles.’ He gave a reminiscent smile. ‘Really great, sexy laugh.’

      ‘Sounds like Ricardo was smitten,’ someone said slyly, and there was laughter as the middle-aged man in question flushed but didn’t deny the charge.

      ‘I’ve never even seen a photo of her.’

      Another

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