Catherine Spencer - Convenient Brides

Wrapping her legs around his waist, she imprisoned him and, for the first time since she’d conceived his children, she felt complete. Free to give, free to take, free to love with her whole heart and soul and body.

“Slowly, tesoro, ” he whispered harshly, with a futile attempt to delay the inevitable.

But even if she’d been able to obey the plea, he could not. Driven by a hunger too long delayed, his own flesh betrayed him. He rocked against her, fiercely, urgently. Hypnotized by the consuming rhythm, she responded involuntarily and the storm prowling impatiently at the outer limits of her consciousness, let fly with the first distant roll of thunder.

A spasm clutched at her. Released her and retreated, to gather strength for its next onslaught. Clutched again, more tightly…and then again, this time so powerfully that she thought she might die.

Paolo stilled, tense as an overwound spring about to fly apart. “Ah, Caroline, mia bella…mio amore! ” he muttered, dragging the words from the very depths of his being, then drove into her one last time, a deep, hard, hungry, merciless thrust.

It spelled the end, of order, of coherence, of life as she knew it. She dissolved, became nothing—a moonbeam caught in a spinning web of sensation. Sound filled her, rushing like the wind, lifting her. She heard a voice that once was hers crying out as sensation rippled over her, carried her forward implacably, and hurled her past the point of no return.

She toppled, would have fallen off the edge of the earth, spun off into eternity, had Paolo not held her fast. His body shuddered, groaned; a mighty ship fighting an impossible sea. He was drowning, and so was she. And it didn’t matter, because they were together, welded limb to limb, body to body, heart to heart.

She surfaced a long time later, a new woman with a new life, in a new world, one composed of serene moonlight slanting through the windows to splash the dark purple shadows of her room with pale blue stripes. Paolo sprawled on top of her, spent and breathless. And she loved it. Loved the damp warmth of his breath against her neck, the exhausted weight of him.

Again, the words fought to escape. I love you…I’ve loved you forever…

He stirred, lifted his head and regarded her from passionsated eyes. “I suppose I should go so that you can sleep in peace.”

“No,” she said, stroking his beautiful face. “You should stay. I want you to stay, Paolo. Don’t ever leave me again.”

“I hoped you’d say that,” he said, a sleepy smile curving his mouth, and still buried inside her, he rolled to his side and drew her close again.

When she next became conscious of time, the moon had slipped beyond the house and left her room in total darkness. But she didn’t need light to know that, in sleep, she and Paolo had lost their intimate connection. Now he lay with his leg flung over her, and the way his palm closed possessively over her breast told her he, too, was awake, and hungry for her all over again.

The sweet, lazy pace of their second loving stole her breath away. This, she thought, sinking her teeth into her lower lip as the pleasure built to a slow crescendo, is how it will be between us from now on. Sometimes fast and furious, and sometimes so unbearably tender that it will make me cry.

It won’t matter if he can’t say the words, because I’ll feel his love, just as I do now. Then I’ll be brave enough to tell him things I might not dare to say in the bright light of morning. Share secrets that won’t seem so frightening under cover of night. Tell him the truth about the babies. And he’ll forgive me, because he’ll see that I did what It hought was best at the time.

The past won’t matter anymore, because we’ll have the future, and we’ll have our children. We’ll make up for lost time, and accept the way fate has brought us together again. Vanessa and Ermanno’s deaths won’t seem such a terrible waste, but, rather, part of God’s greater, grander plan.

“Caroline,” he whispered urgently, straining against her.

Inflamed by the passion in his voice, she replied, “I’m here,” and contracted around him with a soft cry as his seed ran free.

HAD it not been for the perpetual shadow of Vanessa’s and Ermanno’s deaths, the next two weeks would have numbered among the happiest of Callie’s life. In line with Paolo’s wishes, everyone stayed the extra two weeks on the island, although she’d have preferred it to be just he, she, and the children, seeing it as the ideal chance to meld them into a foursome without any outside interference.

But, mindful of too many changes at once, Paolo asked his parents to stay behind, too. “Maintaining a sense of continuity with the familiar,” he reasoned, “will help the twins accept their new living arrangements more readily.”

His insight and obvious deep concern for them warmed Callie’s heart. How could she help but adore him, when he gave so much of himself to children he didn’t even know were really his? Coupled with her own love for them, it could only strengthen the odds in favor of the marriage.

She also suspected Paolo had spoken with his father; perhaps gone so far as to warn him to curb his hostility, because Salvatore grew, if not all warm and fuzzy toward her, at least not as openly antagonistic.

“It is good to see you getting along better with our grandchildren,” he decreed at breakfast, a few days after she’d accepted Paolo’s proposal. “I believe they begin to feel some affection for you.”

Oh, she hoped so—she thought so! Certainly, they’d shown themselves more willing to include her in their activities. “Will you come, too, Zia Caroline?” Clemente wanted to know, the afternoon Paolo suggested a sunset cruise in thet hirty-nine-foot luxury cruiser moored in the protected marina below the villa.

“Of course,” she told him, and had to blink back a rush of tears at the smile that lit up his face.

Her baby boy…her son! Strong and handsome as his father, but with a gentleness that reminded Callie of Lidia, and of her own mother. How proud Audrey Leighton would have been, of both her grandchildren.

Another day, Gina decided the time was ripe for a game of hide-and-seek. “Zia Caroline and I will play against you and Clemente,” she ordered her uncle, shepherding everyone outside to an iron gate overlooking a formal garden in the grand Italian style, “and you will not cheat.”

“If you say so,” Paolo replied meekly, which made Callie smile.

Gina was definitely her father’s child, strong-willed, forthright, and independent. She made up her own mind about things, regardless of outside influence. “I didn’t much like you at first, even though Nonna said I must,” she’d announced bluntly the previous evening, while she allowed Callie to braid her hair,“but you’re actually quite nice now that I’ve got to know you better. I wouldn’t mind if you stayed with us forever. It’s not as good as when Mommy was here, of course, but it’s nice to have someone who knows how to do my hair. Nonna isn’t very good at it, and when Zio Paolo once tried, he made a terrible mess of it.”

“We’ll hide first,” she decided now, directing her brother and Paolo to cover their eyes and count to a hundred. Then taking Callie’s hand, she ran with her along a crushed gravel path lined with marble statuary. “Follow me, Zia,” she said. “I know exactly the place to hide.”

Skirting a pond filled with lily pads floating around an elaborate stone fountain, she ducked between two stone benches and through an opening carved in a hedge. “Behind this,” she whispered, pulling aside a trailing vine to reveal a natural grotto filled with ferns. “They’ll never find us here. This is my secret place. I’ve never shown it to Clemente. Only Mommy knows about it…” Her voice wavered briefly. “And now you.”