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Worse, he’d probably decide she was trying to deceive him again, and then her chances of earning any money to take care of her baby would be nullified before she ever stepped in front of a camera. He’d throw her and Nicky to the wolves without a second thought, and then he’d step into his fancy limo and be ferried away to the next amazingly expensive location on his To See list.
No, she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t take the chance when there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel.
The car pulled to a stop in front of her shabby apartment building. Drago looked out the window—at the yellow lights staining everything in a sickly glow, the fresh graffiti sprayed across the wall of a building opposite, the overflowing garbage bins waiting for tomorrow’s pickup, the skinny dog pulling trash from one of them—and stiffened.
“You cannot stay here,” he said, his voice low and filled with horror.
Holly sucked in a humiliated breath. It looked bad, yes, but the residents here were good, honest people. There were drugs in the neighborhood, but not in this building. Mr. Boudreaux ran it with an iron fist. It was the safest thing she could afford. Shame crawled down her spine at the look on Drago’s face.
“I am staying here,” she said quietly. “And I thank you for the ride home.”
His gaze swung toward her. “It’s not safe here, bella mia.”
Holly gritted her teeth. “I’ve been living here for the past seven months,” she said. “It’s where I live. It’s what I can afford. And you have no idea about safe. You’re only assuming it’s not because it’s not a fancy New York neighborhood like you’re used to.”
He studied her for a long moment. And then he pressed an intercom button and spoke to the driver in Italian. After that, he swung the door open and stepped out.
“Come then. I will walk you to your apartment.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she protested, joining him on the pavement with her duffel in tow. “The door is right here.”
The building was two stories tall, with three entrances along its front. Each stairwell had two apartments on each floor. Hers was on the second floor, center stairwell. And the driver had parked the limo right in front of it. A dog barked—not the one in the garbage, but a different one—and a curtain slid back. She could see Mrs. Landry’s face peering outside. When her gaze landed on the limousine, the light switched out and Holly knew the old woman had turned it off so she could see better.
She was a nosy lady, but a sweet one.
“I insist,” Drago said, and Holly’s heart skipped a beat. She had to take her things to her apartment, and then she had to go to Mrs. Turner’s across the hall and get Nicky.
“Fine,” she said, realizing he wasn’t going away otherwise. If she let him walk her to the door, he’d be satisfied, even if he walked her up the steps to her apartment. And it wasn’t as if her baby was home.
She turned and led the way to the door. She reached to yank it open, but he was there first, pulling it wide and motioning for her to go inside.
“Better be careful you don’t get your fancy suit dirty coming inside here,” she said.
“I know a good cleaner,” he replied, and she started up the stairs—quietly, so as not to alert Mrs. Turner, who might just come to the door with her baby if she heard Holly arrive.
He followed her in silence until she reached the landing and turned around to face him. He was two steps behind her, and it put him on eye level with her. The light from the stairwell was sickly, but she didn’t think there was a light on this earth that wouldn’t love Drago di Navarra. It caressed his cheekbones, the aristocratic blade of his nose, shone off the dark curls of his hair. His mouth was flat and sensual, his lips full, and she remembered with a jolt what it had felt like to press her lips to his.
Dammit.
“This is it,” she whispered. “You can go now.”
He didn’t move. “Open the door, Holly. I want to make certain you get inside.”
He didn’t whisper, and she shot a worried glance at Mrs. Turner’s door. She could hear the television, and she knew her neighbor was awake.
“Shh,” she told him. “People are sleeping. These walls are thin, which I am sure you aren’t accustomed to, but—”
He moved then, startling her into silence as he came up to the landing and took her key from her limp hand. “You’d be surprised what I have been accustomed to, cara,” he said shortly. “Now, tell me which door before I choose one.”
Her skin burned. She pointed to her door and stood silently by while he unlocked it and stepped inside. Humiliation was a sharp dagger in her gut then. A year ago, he’d dressed her in beautiful clothes, made her the center of attention, taken her to a restaurant she could never in a million years afford and then taken her back to his amazing Park Avenue apartment with the expansive view of Central Park. None of those things was even remotely like what he would see inside her apartment and she burned with mortification at what he must be thinking.
He turned back to her, his silvery eyes giving nothing away. “It appears to be safe,” he told her, standing back so she could enter her own home. A home that, she knew, would have fit into the foyer of his New York apartment.
She slid the door quietly closed behind her, not because she wanted to shut him in, but because she wanted to keep her presence from Mrs. Turner until he was gone.
Fury slid into her bones, permeating her, making her shake with its force. She spun on him and jerked her keys from his hand. “How dare you?” she sputtered. “How dare you assume that because I live in a place that doesn’t meet with your approval, you have a right to think I need your help to enter my own home?”
“Just because you’ve entered without incident in the past doesn’t mean there won’t come a night when someone has broken in to wait for you,” he grated. “You’re on the second floor, cara. You’re a beautiful woman, living alone, and—” here he pointed “—these windows aren’t precisely security windows, are they? So forgive me if I wanted to make sure you were safe. I could no more allow you to come in here alone than I could jump out that window and fly. It’s not what a man does.”
“First of all, I don’t see why you care. And second, I don’t live alone,” she grated in return, her heart thrumming at everything he’d just said.
He blinked. “You have a boyfriend?”
“A best friend, if you must know. And she’s at work right now.”
He glanced around the room again. Gabi had left a lamp burning, as she always did, but it was a dim one in order to save electricity. Drago flicked a switch on the wall, and the overhead light popped on, revealing the apartment in all its shabby glory.
It was clean, but worn. And there was no way to hide that. His gaze slid over the room—and landed squarely on the package of diapers and jars of baby food sitting on the dinette. Holly closed her eyes and cursed herself for not putting everything away this afternoon. She’d been too caught up with her fragrances in the little free time she’d had after returning from the store.
Drago’s brows drew down as he turned his head toward her. “You have a baby in this apartment?”
Before she could answer him, tell him she was collecting for charity or something, there was a knock on the door.
“Holly?” Mrs. Turner called. “Are you home, sweetie?”
CHAPTER FOUR (#u7a4c4a26-b33e-537e-bdd9-bc5118cd1434)
DRAGO WATCHED AS the color drained from Holly Craig’s face. She pushed her hair behind her ear and turned away from him, toward the door.
“Coming, Mrs. Turner,” she said sweetly, and he felt a flicker of annoyance. She’d been nothing but cross with him since the moment he’d first spoken to her in the casino. He understood why she would be angry with him, since he’d ruined her plans last year, but she should be perfectly amenable now that he was offering her the job of modeling for Sky. If she was ambitious, and she must be to undergo the deception she had, why wasn’t she softening toward him?
His gaze landed on a table tucked into one corner of the room. It was lined with testers and other paraphernalia she must use to make her fragrance. Clearly, she was serious about it. And her grandmother was from Grasse, the perfume capital of the world. That didn’t mean the woman had had any talent, or that she’d been a nez. Those were highly prized. If she’d been a nose, she would have gone to work in the industry, husband or no.
But Holly was certainly convinced she had what it took to succeed in his business. He glanced at the shabby furnishings and wasn’t persuaded. If she had talent, why was she here? Why hadn’t she kept trying even after he’d turned her down? There were other companies, other opportunities. They weren’t the best, but they were a leg up.
Which she desperately seemed to need, he admitted. He refused to feel any remorse for that. She might have spent all her money coming to New York, but he was not responsible for her choices.
And yet, this place depressed him. Made him feel jumpy and angry and insignificant in ways he’d thought he’d forgotten long ago. He hadn’t always lived the way he did now—with everything money could buy at his fingertips—and this dingy apartment was far too familiar. He thought of his mother and her insane quest for something he’d never understood—something she’d never understood, either, he’d finally come to realize years after the fact.
Donatella Benedetti had been looking for enlightenment, the best he could figure. And she’d been willing to drag her only son from foreign location to foreign location, some of them without electricity or running water or any means of communicating with the world at large. He’d held a hat while she’d busked on the streets, playing a violin with adequate-enough skill to gain a few coins for a meal. He’d curled up in a canoe while they’d floated down an Asian river, moving toward a village of mud huts and deprivation. He’d learned to beg for money by looking pitiful and small and hungry. He’d known how to count coins before he’d ever learned to read.
Holly took a deep breath and opened the door to greet an older woman standing on the other side. The woman held a baby carrier, presumably containing a baby, if the way Holly bent down and looked at it was any indication.
The beginnings of a headache started to throb in Drago’s temple. Babies were definitely not his thing. They were tiny and mysterious and needy, and he hadn’t a clue what to do with them.
“I thought I heard you come up,” the woman was saying. “He was a good baby tonight. Such a sweetie.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Turner. I really appreciate you helping out like this.”
The other woman waved a hand. “Pish. You know I’m a night owl. It’s no problem to keep him while you work.” She looked up then, her gaze landing on him. Drago inclined his head while her eyes drifted over him. “Oh, my, I didn’t know you had company,” she said.
Holly turned briefly and then waved a hand as if to dismiss him. “Just an old acquaintance I ran into tonight. He’s leaving now.”
He was not leaving, but he didn’t bother to tell her that. Or, he was leaving, but not just yet. Not until he figured out what was happening here.
There was a baby, in a carrier, and Holly was taking it from the woman. Was it her baby? Or her roommate’s? And did it matter? So long as she modeled for Sky, did he care?
“Go ahead and take care of the baby,” he said evenly. “I can go in a moment, once everything is settled.”
The woman she’d called Mrs. Turner nodded approvingly. “Excellent idea. Get the little pumpkin settled first.”
Mrs. Turner handed over a diaper bag, as well as the carrier, and Drago stepped forward to take the bag from Holly. She didn’t protest, but she didn’t look at him, either. A few more seconds passed as Holly and Mrs. Turner said their goodbyes, and then the door closed and they were alone.
Or, strike that, there were three of them where there’d been four. Drago gazed at the baby carrier as the child inside cooed and stretched.
“He’s hungry,” Holly said. “I have to feed him.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
She gazed at him with barely disguised hatred. “I’d prefer you go,” she said tightly. “It’s late, and we need to get to bed.”
“Whose baby is this?” he asked curiously. He thought of her in New York, sweet and innocent and so responsive to his caresses, and hated the idea she could have been with another man. He’d been her first. Yet another thing about her that had fooled him into thinking she hadn’t had ulterior motives.
Drago tried very hard not to remember her expression of wonder when he’d entered her fully for the first time. She’d clung to him so sweetly, her body opening to him like a flower, and he’d felt an overwhelming sense of honor and protectiveness toward her. Something she’d been counting on, no doubt.
Dio, she had fooled him but good. She’d gotten past all his defenses and made him care, however briefly. Anger spun up inside him. But there were other feelings, too, desire being chief among them. It rather surprised him how sharp that feeling was, as if he’d not had sex in months rather than hours. Quite simply, he wanted to spear his hands into her hair and tilt her mouth up for his pleasure.
And then he wanted to strip her naked and explore every inch of her skin the way he once had, and let the consequences be damned.
Her expression was hard as she looked at him, and he wondered if she knew what he was thinking. Then she walked over to the couch—a distance of about four steps—and set the baby carrier on the floor. She grabbed the diaper bag from him and began to rummage in it. Soon, she had a bottle in her hands and she took the baby out of the carrier and began to feed it.
Drago watched the entire episode, a skein of discomfort uncoiling inside him as she deliberately did not answer his question.
It wasn’t a hard question, but she looked down at the baby and made faces, talking in a high voice and ignoring him completely. Her long reddish-blond hair draped over one shoulder, but she didn’t push it back. He let his gaze wander her features, so pretty in a simple way, and yet earthy somehow, too.
She had not been earthy before. Now she bent over the child, holding the bottle, her full breasts threatening to burst from the white shirt, her legs long and lean beneath the tight skirt of the casino uniform. The only incongruous items of clothing were the tennis shoes she’d changed into.
Drago suddenly felt out of his element. Holly Craig nursed a child and turned every bit of love and affection she had on it, when all she could spare for him was contempt. Watching her with the baby, he had a visceral reaction that left a hole in the center of his chest. Had his mother ever focused every ounce of attention she had on him? Had she ever looked at him with such love? Or had she only ever looked at him as a burden and a means to an end?
“Holly,” he said, his voice tight, and she looked up at him, her gaze defiant and hard. If he’d been a lesser man, he would have stumbled backward under that knife-edged gaze of hers. He was not a lesser man. “Whose child is that?”
He asked the question, but he was pretty certain he knew the answer by now.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” she told him airily, “but Nicky is mine. If this changes your plan to have me model for Sky, then I’d appreciate it if you’d get out and leave us alone.”
* * *
Holly’s heart hammered double-time in her chest. She hadn’t wanted him to know about Nicky at all, not yet, not until the contract he’d agreed to provide was signed and she knew she’d get her money for doing the Sky campaign at the very least.
But of course her luck had run out months ago. First, she’d gone to New York, spent every dime she had and come home empty-handed. Then she’d lost the house and property—and found out she was pregnant. God, she could still remember her utter shock when her period hadn’t started and she’d finally worked up the courage to buy a pregnancy test.
And she’d driven two towns over to do so, not wanting anyone in New Hope to wonder why she needed a pregnancy test.
She looked down at the sweet, soft baby in her arms now and knew for a fact he was not a mistake. But he’d definitely been a shock on top of everything else she’d had to deal with just then.
And now, of course, when all she wanted was the absolute best for him, when she needed to protect him and provide for him and keep him secret until she had this job sewn up, Mrs. Turner had heard her come home and brought him to her. What if Drago figured it out? What would happen then? She’d lose the opportunity to provide a better life for her baby.
Drago was looking at her with a mixture of disdain and what she thought might be utter horror. Resignation settled over her. She’d already lost the opportunity then.
But you can still tell him the truth.
Would he ignore his child’s needs if he knew? Could she take that chance?
“How old is the child?” he asked, brows drawn low, and her heart did that funny squeeze thing it did when she was scared.
“A couple of months,” she said vaguely, ignoring the voice. She couldn’t tell him. How could she take the chance after everything that had happened? Not only that, but why did he deserve to know when he’d thrown her out and left her to fend for herself?
Guilt and fear swirled into a hot mess inside her belly. She’d always done the right thing. But what was the right thing now?
“You wasted no time, I see,” he said coolly.
“I’m sorry?”
He looked hard and cool, remote. “Finding another lover,” he spat at her.
A hard knot of something tightened right beneath her breastbone. Of course he thought she’d gone home and gotten pregnant by someone else. Of course he did. Holly closed her eyes and willed herself to be calm.
It didn’t work.
My God, the man was arrogant beyond belief! Resentment flared to life in her gut, a hot bright fire that seared into her. “Why should I have waited? Thanks for showing me what I’d been missing, by the way. It was ever so easy to go home and climb back on the horse.”
She gazed down at Nicky, who was sucking the bottle for all he was worth, and willed the irrational tears gathering behind her eyelids to melt away. Drago di Navarra not only thought she’d intended to use her body to get what she wanted out of him, but he also thought she’d been so promiscuous as to run straight home and get pregnant by another man. As if she could have borne another man’s touch after she’d had his.
“Perhaps you should have been more careful,” he said, and a fresh wave of hatred pounded into her. Her head snapped up. She didn’t care what he saw in her gaze now.
“How dare you?” she said, her voice low and tight. “You know nothing about me. Nothing!” She sucked in a shaky breath. “Nicky is a gift, however he got here. I wouldn’t trade him for a million Sky contracts, so you can take your disdain and your contempt and get the hell out of my home.”
She was shaking, she realized, and Nicky felt it. He started to kick his little arms and legs, and his face scrunched up. The bottle popped out of his mouth, but before she could get it back in, he turned his head and started to wail.
“Shush, sweetie, Mommy’s here,” she crooned, her eyes stinging with tears and gritty from lack of sleep. She just wanted to put her head down and not get up again for a good long time.
But that wasn’t possible. It wasn’t ever possible these days.
“Forgive me. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Holly cuddled Nicky, rocking him softly, and looked up at Drago. Shock coursed through her system at those quiet words, uttered with sincerity. It was a glimpse of the man she’d found so compelling last year, the one who’d made her feel safe and who’d made her laugh and sigh and then shatter in his arms.
She’d liked that man, right up until the moment he’d proven he didn’t really have a heart after all. And while she told herself not to be fooled now, she was moved by the apology. Or maybe she was just too exhausted to keep up the anger.
