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Experiences she would have to miss now.
Compromising the tiny life inside her while the former love of her life looked on...
She let her head sink into her hands.
Clinica Torpisi wasn’t going to be the healing hideaway she’d been hoping for.
More like hell on earth.
CHAPTER TWO (#u62f58ab4-51a4-5917-861e-c8b3310d59b0)
HE SAW HER across the piazza. Jamie wondered now, having adjusted to the platinum blond hair, how he hadn’t noticed her instantly. He certainly had when she’d walked into Northern General. How could he not have when he’d entered the clinica?
Fathomless chocolate-brown eyes straight out of the Italian-nymph guidebook. Slender. The darkest chestnut hair he’d ever seen. Short, but thick enough to lose his hands in when he wanted to put his fingers against the nape of her soft, swan-like neck. Perfect raspberry-red lips. Olive skin. Carrying herself like royalty.
She was royalty.
He shook his head again.
Little wonder he hadn’t recognized her straight off. He hadn’t wanted to.
A bit of shock.
A splash of denial.
Hope, pain, love, despair... All those things and more made up the roiling ball of conflict burning in his heart. Most of all he just wanted to understand why.
He hitched his trousers onto his hips. She wasn’t the only one who’d lost weight in the past couple of years.
Stop apportioning blame.
The closer he got, the more he wondered what the hell he was doing.
No. That wasn’t true. Ripping off the bandage had become his modus operandi since she’d left. He might as well stick true to his course. Life wasn’t sweet. Might as well get used to it.
“Mind if I join you?”
Beatrice started, as if her thoughts had been a thousand miles away. When she’d pulled him into focus he watched as she searched his face for signs of enmity. He couldn’t say he blamed her. After his performance in the supplies room earlier in the day he’d hardly made a good show of the manners his mother had drilled into him.
“Please...” Beatrice pushed aside a small plate of antipasti and indicated the chair beside her. One from which he could enjoy the stunning lakeside view. One that would seat them side by side, where they wouldn’t have to look into the other’s eyes.
He sank into the chair, grateful for this reprieve from animosity. Perhaps a few hours apart had been what they’d each needed. Time to process.
“Is that a spritzer you’re having?” He pointed at the bright orange drink on the table, the glass beaded with condensation as the final rays of sunlight disappeared behind the mountain peaks beyond the lake.
“No.” She shook her head. “I never liked spritzers. Too...” Her nose crinkled as she sought the right word. “Aftertasty,” she said finally, her lips tipping up into the first suggestion of a smile he’d seen. “Orange soda is my new guilty pleasure. I don’t seem to be able to drink enough of it.”
He was about to launch into the lecture he gave all his patients—too many fizzy drinks were bad for the bones, bad for the brain, bad for the body—but just seeing the tension release from the corners of her eyes as she lifted the glass, put her lips around the red and white stripes of the straw and drew in a cool draught made him swallow it.
He hadn’t come here to deliver a lecture. He had questions. Thousands of questions.
A waiter swooped in, as they all did at this time of day, keen to get as many people as possible their drinks before the early-dining Americans began infiltrating the wide square in advance of the Europeans.
He and Beatrice both bit back smiles at the waiter’s terse “Is that all for signor?” after he’d settled on a sparkling water.
“Going back to the clinic?” Beatrice asked.
“That obvious?”
“Mmm, ’fraid so.” Beatrice looked out toward the square as she spoke. “It would be a glass of Gavi di Gavi if you were finished, wouldn’t it? If...” She hesitated. “If memory serves me right.”
He nodded. Surprised she’d remembered such a silly detail. Then again, there wasn’t a single detail he’d forgotten about her. Maybe...
He rammed his knuckles into his thigh.
Maybe was for other people. He was all about sure things. And Beatrice wasn’t one of them.
Jamie scrubbed a hand along his chin, then scraped his chair around on the stone cobbles until he faced her head-on.
“What are you doing here, Beatrice?”
“Well, that’s a nice way to—” She stopped herself and lifted a hand so that he would give her a moment to think. Say what she really meant to.
Despite himself, he smiled. She’d always been that way. A thinker. Just like him. The more they’d learned about each other, the stronger the pull had been. Interns hadn’t been meant to date residents—but try telling that to two people drawn to each other as magnetically as iron and nitrogen. Weighted and weightless. He’d felt both of those things when he’d been with her. Secure in himself as he’d never been before, and so damn happy he would have sworn his feet hadn’t touched the ground after the first time he’d tasted those raspberry-ripe lips of hers.
“You have read the papers lately, haven’t you?” Beatrice asked eventually.
“I have a hunch that world peace is a long way off, so I tend to steer clear of them.” Jamie leant forward in his chair, elbows pressed to his knees. “C’mon, Beatrice. Quit throwing questions back at me. Why are you in Torpisi?”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You are the one person in the world I wish had read the tabloids and you haven’t!” She threw her hands up in the air and gave a small isn’t-the-world-ridiculous? laugh.
When their eyes met again there was kindness in hers. A tenderness reserved just for him that he might have lived on in a different time and place.
“I never got married.”
She took another sip of her soft drink and looked away as casually as if she’d just told him the time. Or perhaps it was guilt that wouldn’t let her meet his eye.
Jamie blinked a few times, his body utterly stationary, doing its best to ingest the news.
Despite his best efforts to remain neutral, something hardened in him. “Is this some sort of joke?”
She shook her head, seemingly confused about the question.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” It was her turn to look bewildered.
“Oh, well...let’s see, here, love. Quite a few things, now that I come to think of it.”
He spread out his fingers and started ticking them off, his tone level, though his message was heated.
“Up and leave me for a man you didn’t love. Ruin the future we’d planned together. All that to never even see it through?”
He pulled his fingers into tight fists and gave his thighs a quick drumming.
“Is this some sort of cruel game you’re playing, Beatrice?”
He pushed back in his chair and rose, no longer sure he could even look her in the eye.
“If you’re here to rub it in and make sure you made your impact, you can count me out.”
* * *
“Jamie! Wait!”
Bea’s voice sounded harsh to her own ears. As quickly as she’d reached out to stop Jamie from leaving she wished she’d rescinded the invitation, tightly wrapping her arms around herself to brace herself against the shards of ice coursing through her veins.
She’d betrayed too much by calling out to him. Jamie would know better than anyone that there had been pain in her voice. The ache of loss. But what was she going to do? Explain what a fool she’d been? That she’d gone and got herself pregnant at an IVF clinic in advance of her wedding so her family, the press and the whole of Italy could coo and smile over the Prince and the Principessa’s “honeymoon baby”?
She was the only one in the world who knew that her fiancé—her ex-fiancé—was infertile, apart from a doctor whose silence had been bought. She was surprised he’d even told her. Perhaps their family get-togethers had begun to rely a bit too heavily on talk of children running around the palazzo, in order to cover up the obvious fact that neither of them were very much in love.
Their one joint decision: an IVF baby. Keeping it as quiet as possible. A private clinic. More paid-off doctors and nurses. An anonymous donor.
The less anyone knew, the easier it had been to go ahead with it.
Her sole investment in a relationship she had known would never claim her heart. A child... A child who had been meant to bring some light into her life.
Now it just filled her with fear. Confirmation that she’d been a fool to agree to the plan. She no longer had the support of her family and, worse, she would be a single mother in a world where it was already tough enough to survive on her own.
It hadn’t felt that way when she’d been with Jamie. With him she’d felt...invincible.
Relief washed through her when Jamie sat down again, pressing his hips deeper into the chair, his back ramrod straight as he drained his water glass in one fluid draught before deigning to look her in the eye.
“I’m in trouble, Jamie.”
As quickly as he’d tried to leave, Jamie pulled his chair up close, knees wide so they flanked hers, fingers spread as he cupped her face in both his broad hands, searching her eyes for information.
“Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”
No, but I hurt you.
He used an index finger to swipe at a couple of errant locks of hair so his access to her eyes was unfettered. Against his better judgment—she could see that in his eyes—he traced his finger along the contour of her jawline, coming to a halt, as he had so many times before, before gently cradling the length of her neck as if he were about to lean in and kiss her.
It was like rediscovering her senses all over again. As if part of her had died the day she’d told him she was returning home to marry another man.
She blinked away the rising swell of tears.
Part of her had died that day. The part that believed in love conquering all. The part that believed in destiny.
“Beatrice,” Jamie pressed. “Did he hurt you?”
I was a fool to have left you.
She shook her head, instantly feeling the loss of his touch when he dropped his hands, sat back in his chair and rammed them into his front pockets, as if trying to hide the fact that his long surgeon’s fingers were balled into tight fists. For the second time in as many minutes. Twice as many times as she’d ever seen him make the gesture before.
He’d aged in the years since she’d seen him last. Nothing severe, as if he’d been sick or a decade had passed, but he had changed. His was a proper grown-up male face now, instead of holding the hints of youth she had sometimes seen at the hospital, when he’d caught her looking at him and smiled.
It felt like a million years ago. Hard to believe it was just two short years since he’d been thirty-three and she twenty-eight.
“Just a young lass, you are,” he would say, and laugh whenever she whined about feeling old after a long shift. “Perfect for me,” he’d say, before dropping a surreptitious kiss on her forehead in one of the busy hospital corridors. They’d been little moments in heaven. Perfect.
She closed her eyes against the memory, gave them a rub, then forced herself to confront the present. It was all of her own making, so she might as well see it for what it was. Payback.
A painful price she knew she had to pay when all she really wanted was for him to love her again as he once had.
Impossible.
Sun-tanned crinkles fanned out from Jamie’s eyes, which she still wasn’t quite brave enough to meet. The straw gold of his hair was interwoven with a few threads of silver. At the temples, mostly. More than she thought a man of thirty-five should have.
But what would she know? When she grew her dyed hair out again it might all be gray after the level of stress she’d endured these past few weeks. It was a wonder she hadn’t lost the baby.
Her hands automatically crept to her stomach, one folding protectively over the other.
“Did he hurt you?” Jamie repeated, the air between them thick with untold truths.
“Only my pride,” she conceded. “He didn’t want me.”
The explanation came out as false, too chirpy. She hadn’t wanted Marco either. What she most likely really owed him was a thank-you letter.
“Can you believe it?” She put on a smile and grinned at the real love of her life, as if having her arranged marriage grind to a halt in front of some of Europe’s most elite families had been the silliest thing to have happened to her in years.
“He should be shot.”
“Jamie...” Bea shook her head. “Don’t be—” She huffed out a lungful of frustration, then unfolded her arms from their tight cinch across her chest, visible proof she was trying her best to be honest with him. Open. Vulnerable. “Mi scusi. I’m sorry. I don’t have any right to tell you what to feel.”
“You’re damn right you don’t,” he shot back, but with less venom than before.
Something in her gave. He deserved to vent whatever amount of spleen he needed to.
“Serves you right” was probably lurking there in his throat. Along with a bit of “now you know how it feels” followed by a splash of “what goes around comes around” as a chaser.
She deserved the venom—and more.
After a moment had passed, with each of them silently collecting their thoughts, Jamie reached across and took one of her hands in his, weaving their fingers together as naturally as if they’d never been apart.
A million tiny sparks lit up inside her. A sensation she’d never once felt with her ex-fiancé.
Obligation didn’t elicit rushes of desire. She’d learned that the hard way.
