The Brunelli Baby Bargain

‘Yes.’

His shook his head. ‘This is surreal…’

Sam knew what he was talking about. ‘Hard to take on board all at once, I know, but I’ll just leave you my number in case you want to contact me.’ He would probably throw it in the waste-paper bin when she left, but she had done the right thing in telling him.

‘Who are you?’

‘You know who I am, I’m Sam Muir.’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘I mean who…why were you cleaning at that place that night? A cold, drafty castle in the middle of nowhere.’ Cesare had only noticed the cold after she had gone. ‘The woman I spoke to the next day…’

‘Clare—my sister-in-law. I asked her not to—’ She could hear the strident ring of a phone somewhere in the distance and it seemed strange to Sam that normal things were happening in other parts of the building while she was experiencing the most abnormal moment of her life. She would never complain about mundane or routine again.

‘Be cooperative about your whereabouts?’ Cesare finished for her suggestively.

‘Even if I hadn’t asked her to be discreet, she wouldn’t pass on the details of any employee to a stranger.’

‘Discreet? The woman invented some crazy story about epidemics.’

‘That’s not a lie, it’s the truth. Look, if you must know, I don’t make a habit of having one-night stands with total strangers and I left because I was…embarrassed.’ Sam recalled the burning shame she had felt when she had awoken with a man’s face cushioned on her breasts.

Her heavy eyelids closed and her eyelashes fluttered against her flushed cheeks as things low and deep inside tightened and quivered. She was able to recollect in exact detail how the heat of his breath on her skin had felt and the sensual, abrasive roughness of his jaw against the ultra-sensitive flesh.

Even filled with total horror and self-loathing at the situation she had been unable to resist the temptation to sink her fingers into the lush thickness of his hair and smooth the strands back from his brow before she had carefully extricated herself.

‘So you’re related to the people who run the Armuirn Estate?’ Cesare asked.

Sam nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. ‘Yes, by marriage. Clare and my brother run the estate. He was ill that night with the flu. So there was a flu epidemic. I stepped in as a cleaner to help them out.’

‘The man you spoke of when we were together that evening…Ian, is it? He is your brother?’ Cesare could remember feeling an irrational spurt of hostility to the man she had casually referred to.

Sam, who couldn’t recall having mentioned Ian at all, said, ‘Yes. He and Clare can’t afford to live in the castle. They have twin boys, but you really don’t want to know any of this, do you?’

If the man didn’t want to know about his own child he was hardly going to be much interested in the offspring of total strangers.

His voice, deep and impatient, cut across her. ‘Look, maybe you should sit back down?’

‘I’m fine as I am.’

‘Maybe I’ll sit down, then.’

She watched as he folded his long, lean length into a chair and sat there with his chin rested on steepled fingers.

The silence stretched.

Finally he broke it. ‘This isn’t a joke—you’re actually pregnant?’

Sam caught herself in the act of nodding again and bit her lip. ‘Yes.’

She waited tensely.

He looked pale, but, considering the bombshell she had just dropped, he appeared to be taking it pretty well, if you discounted that muscle in his lean cheek that was spasmodically throbbing.

‘Did you plan this?’

Sam stiffened. ‘I beg your pardon?’

The ice crystals in her normally expressive voice gave him a pretty clear idea of what she was feeling. The frustration of not being able to see her face was like a dull ache in his chest. There had been many bitter moments since he’d become blind when he had grieved for the loss of his sight, but never had he felt it as acutely as he did at this moment.

‘You think I planned this?’

‘It is a possibility.’ Even as he spoke he recognised his own lack of conviction.

‘Only if you have a warped mind, but don’t worry, I don’t want anything from you. It just seemed…polite to let you know.’

‘Polite?’

‘If I’d known you were some sort of weird conspiracy-theorist nut I wouldn’t have bothered. You obviously think that all women are out to get impregnated by you… Well, let me tell you, from where I’m standing you don’t look like such a bargain,’ she snorted contemptuously. ‘Unless you like cynical, mean-minded and plain nasty. For the record, if I could have chosen a father for my baby it really wouldn’t be you! You wouldn’t even make the shortlist. So go ahead, think this was all part of some cunning plan, and feel happy because if it was it definitely backfired!’

He heard the lock on the door click and realised she was walking out on him again. Rage rose up in him, closely followed by something he refused to recognise as panic.

‘Marry me.’

The flat statement—it could hardly be called a request—delivered in that terse, peremptory tone effectively ruined her sweeping exit and almost made Sam fall off her high heels.

She slowly turned her head. ‘You’ll laugh, but—’ He didn’t laugh, though, or even smile as she stared, unable to tear her eyes from his dark features. Not a muscle in his face moved and his beautiful eyes somehow remained focused on her own face.

Sam turned her head and told herself the feeling of something hard and heavy lodged behind her breastbone was pity. The sort she would feel for anyone who had suffered such a tragedy.

‘For a moment there I thought you said…’

‘Do not play games. You heard me, Samantha.’

Her headmistress had been the only other person to call her Samantha, but it had not made her nerve endings prickle or even lightly tingle.

She swallowed, her voice rising to an incredulous squeak as she asked on a note of hysterical query, ‘You’re proposing we get married?’

‘Is that not what you wanted me to say?’ Cesare, who had been almost as surprised as she appeared to be to hear himself make the proposal, could now see that it was the obvious solution—the only solution. ‘Is that not why you came here?’

Sam’s eyes went saucer-wide—he sounded so incredibly matter of fact about the subject.

‘I never in a million years expected you to suggest this…or wanted you to,’ she added, thinking of and instantly dismissing those few silly fantasies she had been guilty of weaving in the middle of the previous interminably long sleepless night. Fantasies were harmless—things only got dangerous when you started trying to act them out.

‘Look, I don’t know if you’re actually serious—’

‘It is not a subject I am likely to joke about.’

Despite the outraged note of offence in his interjection, Sam was not so sure. This man’s personality and the motives that drove him were still pretty much an enigma to her—ironic considering that he knew her more intimately than any man. At her side her fists clenched as she struggled not to think about how intimately.