A Sicilian Husband - Kate Walker [47]
Come home. The words had such a wonderful sound. They seemed to hold the very essence of her dreams, the core of the unspoken hopes that had shimmered in her mind on the night they had met. They whispered of togetherness and sharing, of the possibility of a future.
He wanted her to go home with him. To meet his child. His family. Her heart clenched on a pleasure that was sharp as a pain. Her mind was just a red-gold haze, blurring under the assault, both physical and mental, on all her senses.
‘So, what do you say, cara?’ Gio whispered, his lips against her hair. ‘What’s your answer? Will you come? Will you—?’
‘Yes!’
She couldn’t wait for him to finish. Didn’t need him to complete the question when already she knew in her heart that she had decided and that there was no going back. The long, lonely hours of the past week, the tears she had shed in the darkness of the night, had taught her one thing.
If there was a chance, even the tiniest hope, that they could start again then she would reach out with both hands and grab it, holding on tight.
‘Yes!’ she said again, even more emphatically than before. ‘Yes, I’ll come with you. I’d love to! I can’t wait! It won’t take me a minute to pack and—’
‘And what about your job?’ Gio inserted the question into the excited flow of her response, the ardent lover suddenly submerged beneath cool practicality.
His abrupt change of mood was rather disconcerting, the sudden stillness of his powerful body, the sharp scrutiny in his eyes bringing a sensation like the slow scraping of sandpaper over uneasily raw nerves.
‘My job? Oh, that doesn’t matter!’
Why did it have to happen now? Gio wondered. Why, when it was the last thing he wanted, did he have to remember moments from that evening they had spent together? Moments that hinted at another side to Terrie, a colder, more grasping side than the warm and willing woman he held in his arms.
‘I can’t expect fairy godfathers to come along every day of the week, can I?’ she had said, and he had wondered whether she had hoped to cast him in the role of that ‘fairy godfather’ long-term.
‘You said you planned on “chucking” it.’
‘If you want the truth then no, I don’t have a job any more. Not that I got a chance to chuck it. My employment at Addisons only lasted long enough for me to be interviewed by the boss on Monday and decide that it would be mutually beneficial if I left at once. In fact, if you’d not turned up here tonight you might not have found me. I was already beginning to wonder how I could afford to keep this place on, and I would probably have rung my parents and asked if I could come home.’
Instead of which, he had turned up just in time.
For a second, Gio was tempted to revoke his invitation. To say that he had made a mistake, changed his mind. He no longer wanted her to come to Sicily with him.
But that would be nothing but a lie. And a total denial of the way he was feeling. The needs he had been fighting against all week, only to know that he could hold out no longer. To admit that he could not just turn his back and walk away as he had once planned. That he had to have her once more or he would go insane with wanting.
He had told her the truth about the hunger, the emptiness he had felt all week. But until he had heard the words come out of his mouth, he had never known that he had even thought of inviting her to come back to Sicily with him. But perhaps now that he had said it, it would be the best way to work things. This way he could both have his cake and eat it, as the English saying went.
And it would serve one other, vitally important function too. It would solve another concern that had been nagging at him since his uncharacteristic loss of any sort of sense—except one—during the night they had spent together.
‘Then you’ll welcome a chance for four weeks in the sun?’
There it was again, that disturbingly