Convenient Brides (15 page)

W
E’LL
keep in touch,
Paolo had said, on that last afternoon in Rome, but apart from a brief email to acknowledge hers telling him she’d arrived home safely, she didn’t hear from him again, and eventually stopped waiting for the phone to ring, or another message to arrive. Better to stay busy and pick up the threads of her old life, than yearn for a new one that might never come to pass.

So she flung herself into her work, staying at the office long after everyone else left, and sometimes bringing projects home with her. Then, almost a month after she left Italy, she was called to Minneapolis to supervise a hotel restoration.

She stayed a week, and arrived home too late on the Friday night to do anything but fall into bed, exhausted. The next morning, she awoke just after eight to the kind of warm, sunny early December day that made San Francisco the envy of so many other cities throughout North America. But for her, the sun never really shone anymore.

A day for catching up, she decided morosely, wrapping a towel around her wet hair after she stepped out of the shower, then slapping a mud pack over her face and throat, before wandering to the kitchen to scrounge up something to eat. Not that she was hungry, which was just as well, because nothing too appetizing awaited her. The refrigerator was empty, apart
from half a loaf, the limp remains of a head of lettuce, and a block of cheese suspiciously green around the edges.

First on her to-do list, once she was dressed and fit to be seen in public? A trip to the supermarket, followed by a walk down to Fisherman’s Wharf where one of the restaurants might possibly tempt her to eat lunch. Shopping in Union Square for a shower gift for a colleague’s forthcoming wedding. Picking up a movie to watch that evening, when she curled up by herself on the couch, in front of the fire.

Oh, yes, and checking her mail and messages, just in case he’d been in touch. Any chore, no matter how small, to distract her from the gaping, aching hole in her heart that never seemed able to heal.

She’d plugged in the coffee maker and popped bread in the toaster, while waiting for the mask to work its magic, when the doorbell rang. Peeking from her living-room window, she could see nothing in the street immediately below her front entrance, although a black Lincoln was parked illegally at the curb, a few houses away.

The morning paper must have arrived, she concluded. She stopped delivery during her absence, and asked for it to be resumed today. Tightening the belt holding her terry cloth robe closed, she picked her way past her still-unpacked suitcase and downstairs to the foyer.

She slid back the lock, opened the front door just wide enough to reach out one arm and grab the paper, and almost fainted at the sight awaiting her. Two little faces peered back. Faces she hadn’t thought to see again for a very long time, and even then, not wreathed in shy smiles.

“Gina…Clemente…?” she croaked, afraid she was caught up in a cruel dream.

“Hello, Zia Momma,” they chorused, looking so mightily pleased with themselves that, for all that she was too shocked to think straight, she knew they’d rehearsed the greeting ahead
of time. Then, taking a second look at her, they nudged each other in the ribs and subsided into a fit of giggles.

Fairly sagging against the door frame, she pressed a fist to her racing heart. “What in the world are you doing
here?
”

“Well, you said we could visit you whenever we wanted, so we did,” Gina said, as if only an idiot would fail to see the logic of such a move. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?”

She dragged the door wider and gestured weakly. “Of course. But how—who brought you?”

“I did,” the deep, dark Mediterranean voice that had haunted her night and day for the last month, supplied. “May I come in, too?”

She recoiled in horror.
“Paolo?”

“Well, I didn’t expect you’d roll out the red carpet,” he said, his trademark charming smile not quite as poised as usual, “but I hoped you’d be at least a little pleased to see me.”

“I’m wearing a towel on my head!” she squeaked. “I’ve got a mud pack slathered all over my face! Why would I be pleased to see anyone, let alone
you,
looking the way I do?”

“You’re beautiful in my eyes, Caroline,” he said, following the children into her foyer and closing the door, “although you ought to know your cosmetic clay is cracking badly. Perhaps you shouldn’t be talking until it’s finished cooking, and satisfy yourself with just listening to us, instead.”

“I wasn’t expecting company!”

“You mean, you didn’t get my message, telling you we’d be stopping by?” He shrugged philosophically. “Oh, well, too late now. We’re already here. I’d kiss you hello, but this doesn’t seem the most appropriate moment to do so. Close your mouth, darling. You’re beginning to drool.”

Thoroughly restored to his usual in-charge self again, he pushed her ahead of him up the stairs, and somehow she made it all the way without tripping over her feet, even though her pulse was racing so fast, it left her dizzy.

“Please make yourselves at home and excuse me a moment,” she managed, showing her three guests into the living room, and promptly fled to her en suite bathroom.

Her children were here, and they were smiling at her!

Paolo had called her
“darling!”
He’d never called her
“darling”
before!

And, oh dear heaven, when she most needed to put on her best face, she looked like a reject from a bad Halloween party! Although she had no memory of doing so, she’d started to cry, and her tears had left soggy ravines in her blue mud pack.

Appalled, she splashed cold water over the offending mask, and wiped it away with a facecloth. Whipped off the towel and dragged a comb through her hair. At least it had enough natural bounce not to hang in rats’ tails around her face.

No time for makeup, she decided, afraid if she took too long to get ready, Paolo might grow tired of waiting. A spritz of cologne would have to do. And clothes, of course—underwear, a pair of pale green linen slacks, and a cream cashmere sweater she’d bought at Nordstrom’s and never bothered to wear, because she’d had no one to dress up for.

“I poured us both coffee,” Paolo said, handing her a steaming mug when she returned to find him and the children in her kitchen. “Sit down, darling, before you fall down.”

Darling, again!

“Thank you.” She seized the mug gratefully. She needed fortifying. Badly! “I’m sorry I can’t offer you cookies, or something, but my cupboards are rather bare right now,” she told the children, aware they were watching her as if they thought she might suddenly sprout two heads. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have stocked up—”

“I’ll take us all out for breakfast later,” Paolo said. “But we have business to discuss first. A proposition we’d like to put to you.” He cocked an eyebrow at the twins. “Which one of you would like to begin?”

After a pause, Clemente cleared his throat. “I will.”

“Well, get on with it then,” Gina prompted, when he seemed unable to decide what to say next. “It’s really easy. Just ask her if she’ll come back home with us.”

Callie’s heart quite literally stopped. For the longest second in recorded history, she hung suspended between heaven and earth, unsure where she was going to end up.

“Will you?” her son finally asked, timidly. “We’ve talked about it a lot, and we really wish you’d say yes. We didn’t think we would, but we miss you. And now that we’ve had time to think about it some more, we don’t mind that you’re our mother. It’s really quite all right, in fact.”

“Except you’re only our Other Mother,” Gina put in. “You can’t take our real mommy’s place.”

“No,” Callie whispered, those damnable tears threatening again. “I know I never could, nor would I wish to. No one can ever replace your mommy. She was much too special, to all of us.” She chanced a look at Paolo, who leaned against the kitchen counter, his face impassive. “But as far as my coming to live with you—”

“You might as well,” her pragmatic little daughter piped up. “Zio Poppa says the house is way too big for just the three of us.”

“Poppa?” Surprised, she looked his way again.

He gave another shrug. “They’re coming around, Caroline. They’re ready to deal with the truth.”

“Is that why you brought them to me?”

“Not entirely. I have my own agenda, too.” He drained his mug and set it on the counter. “Is there someplace the kids can entertain themselves with something on television, so that you and I can have a little privacy?”

“There’s a set in the living room, and although I can’t swear to it from personal experience, my married friends tell me their children love Saturday morning cartoons.”

“Good enough.” With a sweeping motion, he herded the childrentothelivingroom,andwasbackwithinminutes.Alone.

“Do you care for more coffee?” she asked, suddenly not sure she was ready to hear what he had to say.

“No,” he said, closing in on her. “I don’t need coffee, but I very much need to do this.”

He kissed her, then. At length. With his whole heart. With tenderness and restrained passion and a promise of better things to come.

“Ah, Caroline,” he murmured, when they both surfaced for air. “I’ve waited much too long to do that. And even longer to beg your forgiveness, and tell you that I cannot live with-out you.”

Afraid to burst the bubble of hope taking shape all around her, she said, “The children are too much of a handful?”

“No,
tesoro.
The children are exactly what they’re supposed to be. Impossible to predict, not always easy to please, and thoroughly adorable. But my being only half the equation they need leaves me too often at a loss.”

Disappointment, cold and damp as a San Francisco fog, clouded the clear surface of that magical bubble. “If you’re here because you can’t manage them on your own, the solu-tion’s pretty straightforward. Hire a nanny.”

“If that’s all it would take to ease the ache in my heart, I would. But my problem runs much deeper. Learning to be a father occupies me well enough during the day, but the long, empty hours of the nights, Caroline, are when a man must look into his heart and accept the truth that’s been lurking there for weeks.”

“You need a woman.”

“I need you.”

“Because my being the children’s birth mother makes me the best candidate for the job? We’ve gone that route once already, Paolo,” she said, the disappointment swirling around
her now so thick and black it almost choked her, “and look how it ended.”

He dragged his fingers through his hair, more beside himself than she’d ever thought to see him. “Caroline,
mio amore,
I’m here to beg your forgiveness.”

He had tears in his eyes, she realized. They sparkled like diamonds, touching her so deeply that her heart turned over.

Shame tinting his words, he went on, “I seduced you and cast you aside without a second thought, even knowing, as I did by then, that you were an innocent, no more able to match a man of my experience than the babies you eventually bore because of me.”

“That doesn’t excuse my keeping the pregnancy from you. I should have told you right away.”

“What woman in her right mind would have risked her children’s future by confiding in such a man as I was then? Yet when we met again, both devastated by grief, you welcomed me into your arms and your bed with the same sweet gen-erosity which, if I’d not been too consumed with selfishness to recognize it, you’d given yourself to me, the first time.”

Overcome, he stopped and turned away from her. “I’m making a fool of myself, and embarrassing both of us,” he choked.

Daring to touch him, she laid a hand against his shoulder. It trembled at the contact. “Not if you’re speaking from your heart, Paolo,” she said softly. “There’s no shame in that.”

He drew in a great, shuddering breath. “I don’t need you because of the children, or because I lie alone in bed every night, aching for you. I need you because I love you, Caroline.”

The sun, shining patiently since dawn to little effect, bathed her in a flood of warm, golden light.
“Love me?”

“Love you,” he reiterated shakily. “More than you can begin to know.”

“Are you sure?”

“You are my heart, my life,” he said, turning back and catching her hands. “God forgive me, I’ve known it for weeks and been too proud to admit it. But saying goodbye to you at the airport, watching you walk away, really brought it home to me. Seeing you leave…it nearly killed me, Caroline.”

“Why didn’t you say something before now, then?” she cried, mourning all the wasted days, the pain-filled hours. “I’d given up hope of ever hearing from you again.”

“There were difficulties to be ironed out, with the children, and I wanted them resolved before I came to you. We’re a package deal, I know,
tesoro,
but you’d been through enough. I couldn’t put you through more.” He dropped to one knee before her, and pressed her hand between both of his. “But the worst is over and I’m here now, doing the right thing for all the right reasons, and begging you to give me another chance.”

She longed to believe him. Wanted to grab the brass ring he was offering, and never let it go. But old heartache made her wary. “Does your father know you’re here, and why?”

“My father is recovering from triple bypass surgery. But yes, he knows, and if it matters any, he’s in much more mellow spirits now that his health is on the mend. He won’t give you any more grief. As for my mother, she waits anxiously to hear that I’m bringing you home again. But after all is said and done,
mio amore,
it’s what
you
want that counts.”

He gazed up at her, his expression sober, his eyes speaking volumes of uncertainty. “You already know I’m far from perfect, and always will be. As you’ve no doubt discovered for yourself, my faults are legion. But I give you my most solemn word that, if you’ll give me another chance, I’ll spend the rest of my life making our marriage something so rare and beautiful that you’ll never regret becoming my wife. One way or another, I will win your love.”

What point in pretending, when her heart was bursting to speak a truth too long held in abeyance? The time was past for playing mind games.