LITMIR.BIZ

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of course, she wondered how she could have been so stupid to have not seen it before. It all added up. But her general queasiness and lack of appetite—even the lateness of her period—had been easy to overlook after Renzo had dumped her.

      Of course she’d hoped. Hoped like mad she’d somehow got her dates muddled, but deep down she’d known she hadn’t because the brand-new aching in her breasts had told her so. She’d gone out to buy a pregnancy kit and the result had come as a shock but no great surprise. Heart racing, she’d sat on the floor of her bathroom in Norfolk staring at the blue line, wondering who to tell. But even if she had made some friends in her new home town, she knew there was only one person she could tell. Tears of injustice had stung her eyes. The man who thought she was a thief and a con woman. Who had looked at her with utter contempt in his eyes. But that was irrelevant. Renzo’s opinion of her didn’t really matter—all that mattered was that she let him know he was going to be a father.

      If only it had been that easy. Every call she’d made had gone straight through to voicemail and she’d been reluctant to leave him her news in a message. So she’d telephoned his office and been put through to one of his secretaries for another humiliating experience. She’d felt as if the woman was reading from a script as she’d politely told her that Signor Sabatini was unavailable for the foreseeable future. She remembered the beads of sweat which had broken out on her forehead as she’d asked his secretary to have him ring her back. And her lack of surprise when he hadn’t.

      ‘Why...?’ Her voice faltered as she looked up into the midwife’s lined face. ‘Why do I have to have someone at home with me?’

      ‘Because twenty-eight weeks is a critical time in a woman’s pregnancy and you need to take extra care. Surely there must be someone you could ask. Who’s the baby’s father, Darcy?’

      Briefly, Darcy closed her eyes. So this was it. The point where she really needed to be self-sacrificing and ignore pride and ego and instinct. For the first time in a long time images of Renzo’s darkly rugged face swam into her mind, because she’d been trying her best not to think about him. To forget that chiselled jaw and lean body and the way he used to put on those sexy, dark-rimmed glasses while he was working on plans for one of his buildings. To a large extent she had succeeded in forgetting him, banishing memories of how it used to feel to wake up in his arms, as she concentrated on her new job at the local café.

      But now she must appeal for help from the man who had made her feel so worthless—whose final gesture had taken her back to those days when people used to look down their noses at her and not believe a word she said. She told herself it didn’t matter what Renzo thought when the hospital phoned him. That she didn’t care if he considered her a no-good thief because she knew the truth and that was all that mattered. Her hand reached down to lie protectively over her belly, her fingers curving over its hard swell. She would do anything to protect the life of this unborn child.

      Anything.

      And right at the top of that list was the need to be strong. She’d been strong at the beginning of the affair and it had protected her against pain. She’d done her usual thing of keeping her emotions on ice and had felt good about herself. Even during that weekend when he’d taken her to Tuscany and hinted at his trust issues and the fickleness of women, she had still kept her feelings buried deep. She hadn’t expected anything—which was why it had come as such a surprise to her when they’d got back to England and he’d offered her the key to his apartment.

      Had that been when she’d first let her guard down and her feelings had started to change? Or had she just got carried away with her new position in life? Her plans to move to Norfolk had been quietly shelved because she’d enjoyed being his mistress, hadn’t she? She’d enjoyed going to that fancy ball with him, when—after her initial flurry of nerves—she’d waltzed in that cherry blossom–filled ballroom in his arms. And if things hadn’t gone so badly wrong and Drake hadn’t turned up, it probably wouldn’t have taken long for her to get used to wearing Renzo’s jewels either.

      She’d been a fool and it was time to stop acting like a fool.

      Never again would she be whimpering Darcy Denton, pleading with her cruel Italian lover to believe her. He could think what the hell he liked as long as he helped take care of her baby.

      She opened her eyes and met the questioning look in the midwife’s eyes.

      ‘His name is Renzo Sabatini,’ she said.

      * * *

      Feeling more impotent than he’d felt in years, Renzo paced up and down the sterile hospital corridor, oblivious to the surreptitious looks from the passing nurses. For a man unused to waiting, he couldn’t believe he was being forced to bide his time until the ward’s official visiting hours and he got the distinct impression that any further pleas to be admitted early would by vetoed by the dragon-like midwife he’d spoken to earlier, who had made no secret of her disapproval. With a frown on her face she’d told him that his girlfriend was overworked and underfed and clearly on the breadline. Her gaze had swept over him, taking in his dark suit, silk tie and handmade Italian shoes and he could see from her eyes that she was sizing up his worth. He was being judged, he realised—and he didn’t like to be judged. Nor put in the role of an absentee father-to-be who refused to accept his responsibilities.

      But amid all this confusion was a shimmering of something he couldn’t understand, an emotion which licked like fire over his cold heart and was confusing the life out of him. Furiously, he forced himself to concentrate on facts. To get his head around the reason he was here—why he’d been driven to some remote area of Norfolk on what had felt like the longest journey of his life. And then he needed to decide what he was going to do about it. His head spun as his mind went over and over the unbelievable fact.

      Darcy was going to have a baby.

      His baby.

      His mouth thinned.

      Or so she said.

      Eventually he was shown into the side room of a ward where she lay on a narrow hospital bed—her bright hair the only thing of colour in an all-white environment. Her face was as bleached as the bed sheets and her eyes were both wary and hostile as she looked at him. He remembered the last time he’d seen her. When she’d slid to the floor and he had just let her lie there and now his heart clenched with guilt because she looked so damned fragile lying propped up against that great bank of pillows.

      ‘Darcy,’ he said carefully.

      She looked as if she had been sucking on a lemon as she spoke. ‘You came.’

      ‘I had no choice.’

      ‘Don’t lie,’ she snapped. ‘Of course you did! You could have just ignored the call from the hospital, just like you’ve ignored all my other calls up until now.’

      He wanted to deny it but how could he when it was true? ‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘I could.’

      ‘You let my calls go through to voicemail,’ she accused.

      Letting out a breath, Renzo slowly nodded. At the time it had seemed the only sane solution. He hadn’t wanted to risk speaking to her, because hadn’t he worried he would cave in and take her back, even if it was for only one night? Because after she’d gone he hadn’t been able to forget her as easily as he’d imagined, even though she had betrayed his trust in her. Even when he thought about the missing diamonds and the way she’d allowed that creep to enter his home—that still didn’t erase her from his mind. He’d started to wonder whether he’d made a big mistake and whether he should give her another chance, but pride and a tendency to think the worst about women had stopped him acting on it. He’d known that 50 per cent of relationships didn’t survive—so why go for one which had the odds stacked against it from the start? Yet she’d flitted in and out of his mind in a way which no amount of hard work or travelling had been able to fix.

      ‘Guilty as charged,’ he said evenly.

      ‘And you told your secretary not to put me through to you.’

      ‘She

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