LITMIR.BIZ

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Once even in the garden, where she had been playing with Charlie.

      Saw you out here... Couldn’t resist, cara mia, Dante had groaned hungrily, his hands hard on her hips as he made her rise and fall over him until the world went white and she lost the power of speech.

      Dante was insatiable and, admittedly, she couldn’t resist him either, but she had attempted to give him some space and take a sensible step back from that incessant intimacy. In fact, she had spent a lot of time curled up reading in ‘her’ room but had soon learned that it wasn’t her room at all because Dante was always striding in to demand to know what she was doing, even though it was obvious. He would tell her that she shouldn’t read depressing books, drag her off on a drive or out to lunch in Florence and once even to meet his ‘friend’ Liliana, for coffee. Liliana, who wasn’t a friend at all! Liliana, a gorgeous brunette barrister, had studied Belle with indignant, envious eyes and had barely spoken to her, saving all her attention for Dante, who had not even seemed to notice the tense atmosphere between the two women.

      And then there were the gifts, unsought, unwelcome, even the tiny solid gold replica of Charlie on a chain. There was the cashmere shawl he had purchased one morning when he was convinced she was cold because she had shivered with awareness while he stroked her spine with an abstracted hand and she was too embarrassed to tell him the truth. There was the handbag she had paused to admire in a shop window before she had learned that, with Dante in tow, to look at anything for sale was synonymous with saying, ‘Buy it for me, please.’ He was generous, far too generous, a good trait for a man to have.

      Sadly, however, none of that meant that he was ready to support her in having his child. If she had his child, she and that child would be in his life for years and years and he probably didn’t want that, but if she was to choose a termination, his life would return to normal and she would leave it again. That would be that, she conceded sickly. It would sever their connection for good and wasn’t that what Dante always wanted from a woman?

      The freedom to walk away? Wasn’t that why he had hired her in the first place?

       As a stranger, you’ll walk away afterwards without a problem. You won’t cling or believe that I have any further obligation towards you, nor will you assume that having helped me out makes you special to me in any way.

      A baby was an obligation, a lifelong obligation, one he wouldn’t want, she reasoned unhappily, any more than her father had wanted it when he had been a younger man.

      ‘I’ve got something I have to say to you,’ Belle murmured tightly. ‘I won’t consider a termination.’

      ‘I wasn’t planning to ask you to consider that option,’ Dante retorted in crisp dismissal. ‘That’s not on the table.’

      ‘Oh...’ Drained by the removal of that pressure from her mind, Belle sagged, suddenly tired but able to think about the baby she was carrying without frightened conflicted responses getting in the way.

      Her baby, her little family, she savoured without guilt. It didn’t matter that her child hadn’t been planned, not the way she had always hoped, it only mattered that her child would be healthy and that she would manage to be a more loving, caring mother than her own had been.

      ‘Where are you going?’ Dante enquired as she went upstairs once they had arrived back at the palazzo.

      ‘I feel like a nap,’ she admitted self-consciously. ‘I can’t afford to be falling asleep on your guests this evening.’

      ‘Our guests,’ Dante corrected.

      ‘Yes, I must try to stay in role,’ she conceded ruefully.

      The happy live-in girlfriend, confident in her position in Dante’s life and newly in love, everything Belle wasn’t feeling just at that moment. She wondered how Dante was feeling and then remembered that that wasn’t to be discussed until the weekend was over.

      Dante got stuck into work, refusing to dwell further on what they had learned. It had happened. He would deal with it. That was how Dante dealt with challenges. He didn’t emote, he didn’t rage and he didn’t whinge. He would process the development and decide on the best way forward.

      * * *

      Eddie Shriner was a heavily built man in his forties with brown hair and keen grey eyes. Krystal was a tiny blue-eyed blonde with voluptuous curves shown off by a fitted skirt and a low-necked top. She had the low, husky voice of a seductress. Even Belle had to admit that the blonde was a classic beauty but the knowledge that Dante had bedded the other woman made her uncomfortable.

      Krystal, however, wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable to find herself in the company of her husband and a former lover. Krystal’s calculating blue eyes locked onto Dante like a heat-seeking missile the instant she walked through the door and she virtually blanked Belle when she was introduced to her, choosing not to comment on the fact that both women were English born and bred.

      Dinner was challenging with Krystal’s non-stop attempts to grab Dante’s attention with flirtatious comments, which repeatedly interrupted the men’s conversation. Krystal liked, possibly even expected, to be the centre of male attention, Belle registered, and seemed to have little time for other women. Krystal pretty much ignored Belle’s presence at the table and resisted her efforts to engage her in conversation.

      When a member of staff moved to fill Belle’s wine glass, Belle covered it and asked for water instead.

      Krystal stared and lifted a questioning brow. ‘You don’t drink?’

      ‘No,’ Belle confirmed, because even before she had realised she could be pregnant, she had not been much of a drinker. Alcohol gave her an out-of-control sensation that she didn’t enjoy.

      ‘Ah...a problem drinker,’ Krystal assumed snidely. ‘That must make socialising difficult for you.’

      ‘Actually...’ Belle breathed, bristling with the urge to empty a glass of water over Krystal’s purring head. Krystal was so smug now, convinced she had identified Belle’s fatal flaw and keen to drag it out into the open to humiliate her. A fierce desire to lay an even more basic claim to Dante assailed Belle. ‘I’m not drinking because Dante and I are expecting our first child...’

      At that spontaneous announcement, Dante’s arrogant dark head whipped round in their direction fast, dark golden eyes glittering in the candlelight, his jawline clenching even as Eddie offered them his warmest good wishes. Indeed, Eddie, who was not entirely blind to his wife’s penchant for Dante, beamed at the news and relaxed back into his seat.

      Krystal, on the other hand, went rigid, her blue eyes locking like knives to Belle, her shapely mouth compressing into a tight line. ‘My goodness, that’s quick,’ she commented. ‘From what I understand, you’ve only been together for a few weeks.’

      ‘Sometimes,’ Dante inserted with a glance at Belle’s heightened colour, ‘that’s all it takes.’

      ‘Yes, I knew Krystal was the woman for me the day I met her,’ Eddie chipped in cheerfully.

      * * *

      ‘You should’ve kept the baby a secret,’ Dante censured when Belle emerged from the bathroom later that night.

      Clad in the pyjamas she had stubbornly retained and continued to wear, Belle ignored the sexier garments provided as nightwear with her new wardrobe. Even for Dante, Belle refused to dress up like a mistress or behave like one. To her way of thinking, a mistress strove to attract and retain her lover’s interest in her body and used that same body to cement her hold on him. And she wasn’t prepared to do that.

      ‘You should have told me the baby was a secret,’ Belle replied with spirit, but, in her heart of hearts, she knew she had blurted out their secret because Krystal had made her jealous and she had wanted to strike back.

      ‘I wasn’t expecting you to make an announcement,’ Dante imparted.

      ‘A baby definitely makes us look like

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