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He would panic.
She smiled, but then winced, breathed in sharply and roused him, voice as calm as she could make it, to tell him that the time had come.
Mateo woke with the alacrity of a cat. He’d been waiting for this. He felt as though this was the very moment he had been waiting for his whole life and he flicked on the light switch, turned to her with concern and slid off the bed to get dressed, all without pausing to draw breath.
In his head, he had rehearsed everything a thousand times. He grinned when she said, casually, ‘You’re not going to panic, are you?’
Mateo looked at her, in the process of zipping his trousers, grinning.
‘Do I strike you as the kind of guy who panics?’
‘In a situation like this? Yep.’
At three-thirty in the morning, the roads were bleak and empty. It was a route Mateo knew well. Ever since they had moved to the cottage, he had become accustomed to roads that were largely free of traffic and had become accustomed to the way they spun and twisted round corners, often without warning and with the occasional tractor meandering along, not a care in the world for traffic piling up behind it.
Once upon a time, he had been a workaholic and, while he still worked hard, things had been put into perspective.
Lifehad been put into perspective.
He reached out to briefly hold her hand and felt her hang on tightly to it. He heard her trying to put the breathing method she had been taught into practice. Panic? He was on the verge of it.
He had wanted to go private for the entire pregnancy, but Maude had burst out laughing and told him not to be an idiot.
‘We could have had a top consultant waiting for us right now,’ he ground out, swerving into the hospital car park and helping her out.
‘This is just fine, Mateo. I can’t begin to tell you how many women successfully deliver their babies without a top consultant on speed dial.’
Eight hours later, Violet Felicity Moreno was delivered without fuss.
And there in the hospital, as Mateo sat and gazed in wonder at the tiny seven-pounds-and-eight-ounces scrap of dark-haired baby girl lying next to his wife’s bed, he knew what peace, joy and contentment felt like.
It was something he thought he would never achieve, something he had never even thought about, a concept that had never cropped up on his horizons.
His beloved Maude was smiling at him, her love as unconditional for him as his was for her.
Happiness.
Read on for an extract from WHAT HER SICILIAN HUSBAND DESIRES by Caitlin Crews
Coming next month
WHAT HER SICILIAN HUSBAND DESIRES
Caitlin Crews
“Truly,” he said, in that low voice of his that wound around and around inside her, “you are a thing of beauty, Chloe.”
“So are you, Lao,” she said softly, then found herself smiling when he looked surprised she should compliment him in return.
It made her wonder if he was so overwhelming, so wildly intense, and so astronomically remote in every way that mattered, that no one bothered to offer him compliments. But any such thoughts splintered, because he carried her hand to his lips and pressed a courtly sort of kiss to her knuckles.
It should have felt silly and old-fashioned, but it didn’t. Not in an ancient castle, perched here above an island so steeped in history.
And not when the faint brush of his lips across the back of her hand made everything inside her seem to curl up tight, then begin to boil.
“Welcome, little one,” he murmured, the heat in his gaze making everything inside her take notice, especially the tender flesh between her legs. And that heart of hers that would not stop its wild thundering. “To our wedding night. At last.”
