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She glared at him. “What do you think?”
“I think that if you live here with me, you’ll be able to see them far more frequently than if you return to Australia.”
“With a baby? Come on, Dante. My life is about to become—,” she shook her head and he took advantage of her pause to interrupt.
“Yes, with a baby. You can fly there on my private jet. I can come with you to care for our child while you spend time with your family, or I can stay here with the baby.”
Her eyes flashed to his. He felt her weakening. “I don’t need your help.”
“Really? Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a baby, Georgia? You’ve raised teenagers to adulthood, but a newborn is nothing like that.”
“Oh, says you with all your experience of parenting?” She snapped, jerking to stand now, anger in every line of her body, so he spoke without thinking.
“Yes, actually. You’re not the only one who’s done this before.”
Surprise was evident in the way her lips formed a perfect ‘o’. “Don’t tell me you make a habit of having random one night stands and knocking women up.”
He felt sick at the very suggestion. “Before that night, I hadn’t been with a woman in five years.”
She made a sound, a little ‘oh’.
“I hadn’t been with anyone,” he said, slowly, methodically, when inside it felt as though he was being burned with a blow torch. “Since my wife and daughter died.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE GRABBED A HOLD OF her immediate response, and just sat there, staring at him, trying to make sense of his last few statements. That he hadn’t had sex with anyone in so many years went some of the way to explaining why it had felt so animalistic and wild, why it had seemed as though he needed to bury himself in her and stay there forever. And she was relieved. Because in the back of her mind, she’d started to worry that in some way, Dante Santoro had been the perfect lover, and that she’d never enjoy that kind of passion again, but it wasn’t about him, so much as his life circumstances.
He'd been widowed. He was alone. She closed her eyes on that awful sadness. Not just that his wife had died, but his daughter too. She swallowed past a lump in her throat. “How old was she?”
“Bianca was twenty four. Livvie was four.”
Georgia groaned, so desperately sad for him and what he’d lost. “That’s awful.”
He didn’t respond; he didn’t need to. She could see on his face how much that grief had wrapped around him, changed him, and suddenly, everything made so much more sense. His air of “get the hell off my property”, for example. What had seemed like anger had actually been devastation. Five years after their deaths and he was still mourning them.
She toyed with her fingers, not knowing what to say. Even Georgia, a perennial optimist, couldn’t offer a platitude that would make this seem less awful.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, and she meant it. With all her heart. Having lost her parents, she knew a lot about grief, but she could imagine that the death of a child was something else entirely.
“I cannot lose our son.” His voice had a rough, rawness to it that drilled right into her heart. “I cannot go through it again. I didn’t want this, Georgia. Believe me when I tell you this is the last thing I would ever have wanted, but now that it’s happened and you’re pregnant, I cannot exist in a world where my child is not a part of my life.” His accent was thick. “Mine to care for and to protect.”
She shivered at the emotion in his words, so dark and primal. She hated what he was suggesting. It felt a lot like being trapped in a steel cage to Georgia, but maybe, just maybe, she could make it work. Not for Dante, necessarily, but for their son. Because she could see that he would be a good father. Just looking at how willing he was to fight to be in their child’s life meant something.
Once upon a time, she’d wanted to travel, to see the world.
And she’d wanted to study medicine for as long as she could remember.
When she’d discovered her pregnancy, she’d known she had to kiss that dream goodbye. How could she go to university and do such an intensive course as a single mother?
But with Dante’s involvement, his support, maybe she could do both. Not straight away—she knew it would take time to adapt to motherhood, and besides, she wanted to soak up everything she could about their baby. But she could enroll, perhaps to study a single subject. With help and support, surely it would be possible.
And not only was London beautiful, it was also, as Dante had pointed out, that much closer to the States. She could fly over to see the boys much more frequently, though the thought of using his private jet lodged strangely in her throat. She couldn’t look at this man without remembering the way he’d treated her after they’d slept together, how he’d moved heaven and earth to get her out of his life.
Georgia knew it was vital that she remember that. On that night, he’d revealed to her who he truly was, and she didn’t ever want to forget it.
“Let me show you the house,” he said, grim, as though the idea of that was torture.
Whether it was sympathy for him or something else, she shook her head once. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter what your house is like. It’s not going to influence my decision.”
