She wanted to strangle Zac and scream at him and it was an effort to smile gratefully at the nannies as she sat down to rock Jack back to sleep in what was undoubtedly the nursery of a little boy’s dreams, with a cot shaped like a race car. By the time she got Jack ensconced in his cot and went into the bedroom next door, Eloise was already sleeping peacefully in a miniature four-poster bed draped in pink. All the luxury surrounding her, all the fancy toys piled up waiting to be played with, felt surreal and foreign and alienating to Freddie, and for a moment she wanted desperately to be back in the safe confines of the tiny bedroom she had shared with her niece and nephew.
Instead she had a housekeeper introducing herself as Mariette in broken English and offering to show her to the master bedroom suite. Once again, Zac was nowhere to be seen and at that moment, feeling totally isolated, Freddie didn’t care. She wanted normal and for her that meant a shower and a bed and the renewed strength that would come from a good night’s sleep. She had barely slept at all the previous night, lying awake dreamily thinking about Zac, her first sexual experience and their future together. Now the chances of them achieving some rosy perfect state of coupledom struck her as both pathetic and unlikely.
Zac walked into the master suite at one in the morning, the need to make amends having finally overcome his fierce pride, but he was too late. Freddie was already dead to the world, curled up in a tight little ball hugging a pillow on the far side of the bed. He studied her, the flush of sleep on her delicate features, the tousled dark blonde hair playing across the pillow, the relaxed line of her lush pink mouth. So lovely and so fragile, he acknowledged reluctantly, and he had hurt her. Getting married was fast proving to be a learning experience and the first lesson was that his behaviour affected her as well. Pretty basic one that, he acknowledged grimly, but then Zac had never had another person’s needs and wishes to consider before.
In the morning, he would make everything right, he assured himself. Quite how to go about achieving that objective escaped him, but he was fairly sure that some serious thought would give him the answer. But why the hell had he brought her to the Villa Antonella, a place haunted by his earliest bad memories? The place where his short-lived but once normal family life had disintegrated into messy broken shards overnight?
He couldn’t answer that question either.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FEELING ALMOST REJUVENATED by a night of unbroken rest, Freddie bounced out of bed and then looked at the time and almost laid an egg. What about the children? She should have been up two hours earlier to look after them! And then she remembered the nannies and the guilt ebbed, but only very slowly because feeding Eloise and Jack still felt like her job.
After another shower, she applied the lightest possible make-up from the new stash that had been part of her makeover and selected a cool cotton sundress from the new wardrobe of summer clothing Zac had ordered on her behalf. Only then did she feel ready to greet the sunshine blazing through the tall windows.
Zac was always giving her stuff. He was very generous, she acknowledged ruefully, but it didn’t cancel out his stubborn go-it-alone attitude. She headed to the children’s bedrooms first but both were empty. Jennifer was coming upstairs as Freddie went down and informed her that Eloise and Jack were with Zac out on the terrace. She was disconcerted by that news, for she had uncharitably assumed that the hiring of two nannies indicated that Zac wanted the kids kept out of his hair as much as possible. Mariette showed her out to the wide stone terrace that ran along the rear of the house to take advantage of the truly spectacular panoramic view across the rural valley behind it.
Freddie came to a sudden halt to appreciate the landscape. Olive trees with silvery foliage crowded terraces ringed by ancient stone walls and lavender fields stretched over the furthest hill, the brilliant purple furrows of blooms seeming to perfume the fresh air. The terrace was shaded by an ornate ironwork pergola lushly wrapped in grape vines and wisteria.
‘Auntie Freddie... Auntie Freddie!’ Eloise came running down the terrace to show her a picture of a dragon, or was it two dragons? ‘See...they getting married.’
‘Very nice,’ Freddie assured her niece, trying not to notice that the larger dragon shape was adorned with what looked very like a tattoo. Eloise was already demonstrating a natural artistic ability that far outstripped her age group.
Tension laced Freddie’s slight frame when she saw Zac rising from the table at the far end while Jack literally tried to run to her.
As she hastily scooped up Jack before he fell, for while he could walk he could not yet run, she noticed that Zac had forsaken his business suits in favour of close-fitting jeans and a white linen shirt against which his skin glowed. He looked, Freddie thought resentfully, like a health advert, not at all like a man who should’ve been nursing a monster hangover. She moved towards him stiffly, face tight, eyes evasive as she set Jack down to play with the toys scattered across the terrace.
‘Mariette is bringing your breakfast,’ Zac murmured casually.
‘I didn’t ask for any.’
‘I ordered for you.’
‘But you don’t know what I wanted,’ Freddie pointed out thinly.
‘I ordered a selection,’ Zac assured her with a steely glint in his brilliant eyes as he surveyed her. ‘You suit blue. You look lovely.’
‘I seriously doubt that,’ Freddie countered with an angry flush, thinking of how her perfectly groomed self the day before had failed to attract such interest.
‘Let’s not argue in front of the kids,’ Zac urged warningly.
Resenting that reproof, Freddie breathed in so deep that she was vaguely surprised she didn’t explode like a bag of hot air, because suddenly she was so angry with him that she could barely breathe and hold the furious words in.
‘These are for you...’ Zac announced, lifting an elaborate and very large bouquet of flowers in a vase up onto the table. ‘And this...’
‘This’ was a jewellery box, and she didn’t want to open it. Flowers, and presumably diamonds. He had utilised a whole host of brain cells to come up with those as an apology, she thought nastily, but neither gift hit the right spot. She glanced at him, reading the wary light in his glorious crystalline eyes, the wariness of a man dealing with an unknown quantity and wondering how she would react.
Mariette arrived with an entire trolley of food and a maid to serve. Freddie felt embarrassed accepting only fruit, a croissant and a cup of tea. But even the melting tenderness of the pastry fought to make it past her tight throat. Did she give Zac the benefit of the doubt and move on past the debacle of their wedding day? Even if she didn’t feel the smallest bit forgiving? As a rule she didn’t sulk or hold spite, but he had to explain himself at the very least, she decided. She lifted the jewellery box so that he couldn’t call her bad mannered and flipped up the lid on a diamond-studded gold watch.
‘Wow...thank you so much,’ she said generously, determined to be gracious, glancing across at him. Momentarily those lean, darkly handsome features surrounded by his blue-black luxuriant hair and accentuated by those bright pale blue eyes literally blew her concentration to smithereens.
‘How can you drink tea instead of coffee in the morning?’ Zac asked inconsequentially, watching her with an intensity that made her skin tighten over her bones and set up a disturbing throb between her thighs.
‘It’s what I’m used to,’ she muttered, recognising that he planned to gloss over the whole wedding day thing without even making an actual apology aside of the flowers and the watch, and recognising too that she could never look herself in the face again if she allowed him to use his electrifying sexuality to derail her.
Jennifer and Isabel arrived to collect the children to take them out into the garden. An unearthly silence fell across the terrace after their departure and Freddie swallowed hard, still picking nervously at shreds of her croissant.
Entranced, Zac watched her pluck another shred of pastry and place it between her moist pink
lips and his jeans tightened. He thought about sex. She clasped the watch round her slender wrist. He thought about more sex. He discounted her tension, reckoning that what they both needed was a good rousing tumble in bed to find each other again.
‘Are you planning to say sorry?’ Freddie asked, shattering both his expectations and his mood. ‘Even thinking about it? Or is it just a case of not being able to get the words out?’
‘You know that I regret my attitude yesterday,’ Zac told her tautly. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’
Freddie nodded. ‘But you can’t expect flowers and a designer watch to do the job for you.’
‘They always have in the past.’
‘Then you’ve been mixing with the wrong kind of woman,’ Freddie responded acidly. ‘And to be frank, sorry wouldn’t even begin to cover it.’
Zac sprang out of his chair, the legs of it scraping harshly across the stone tiles beneath. ‘I got drunk. I didn’t kill anyone!’ he flashed back at her with sudden anger.
‘You pretty much opted out of our entire wedding day,’ Freddie declared, shaken by that anger but persisting. ‘You weren’t there to start the dancing with me. You weren’t there even to cut the cake. It was humiliating and hurtful and, obviously, people noticed your absence. All I need you to do now is explain why...’
‘I’m no good at those kinds of explanations.’
‘But you could, at least, try,’ Freddie said gently.
‘Meu Deus...what do you want from me?’ Zac demanded rawly. ‘An apology? You already have it.’
‘I need to know why—’
Without warning, Zac was being plunged into a much bigger crisis than he had expected and he wished he had lied about feeling trapped and had skipped the very self-indulgent drinking episode that had followed. ‘I don’t want an annulment. I don’t want to lose you or the children,’ he admitted in a driven undertone. ‘I behaved badly. You suffered for it. Now I’m thinking more clearly and there is no one else I want to marry, no one else I want to be married to... I can only face sharing those kinds of ties with you,’ he completed doggedly.
Freddie finally managed to breathe again. She had believed she had to make the offer because she didn’t see how she could keep him if he didn’t want to be with them. That would be a recipe for disaster. Now, fear and insecurity still pulling at her, she stared up at him anxiously. ‘I don’t want to make you unhappy.’
‘Freddie...in my whole life, nobody ever cared whether or not I was happy!’ Zac exclaimed in wonderment. ‘Can we go indoors now? Standing right at this spot brings back unfortunate memories of the accident I had here as a child.’
‘You came here as a child? And got hurt?’
‘Antonella bought this place almost thirty years ago. My mother and stepfather liked to entertain friends here in the summer,’ he told her flatly as they traversed the marble foyer. ‘I was three and very adventurous. I clambered down the slope and fell and cut my leg badly. Luckily...or unluckily as it later proved...there was a doctor among the friends staying and he saved my life because I had lost a lot of blood.’