An Enticing Proposal. Meredith Webber

while you talk to him, but I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.’ She watched Lucia stand and saw her slender frame silhouetted against the light from the window, a neat bulge showing the eighteenth week of her pregnancy but still far too thin to be healthy, and another idea occurred to her.

      ‘If he does want to take you home and you decide you’d prefer to stay, we can use your health as an excuse. In my opinion, you’re not yet stable enough, even on the insulin, to be undertaking an arduous flight and I’m sure your obstetrician would agree with me.’

      From the new expressions on Lucia’s face, this suggestion was receiving a mixed reception. Paige came closer and put her arms around the woman’s narrow shoulders.

      ‘You’re not happy here,’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off at home? Perhaps not with your husband, but with family or friends? People you know and love? People who would care for you?’

      Lucia shrugged away from her.

      ‘My family would say my place is with my husband,’ she said bitterly. ‘I can hear them now. My mother especially—and my sisters. It was their idea I marry, their fault, all of this.’

      Paige hesitated. Lucia was emotional, but the words had more petulance than fear and, thinking of the handsome man with the dark blue eyes—remembering his genuine pain when he’d talked of Lucia’s flight—she pressed a little further.

      ‘Didn’t you want the marriage? Did you love someone else?’

      Lucia shook her head and began to cry, silent tears sliding down her cheeks.

      ‘Love someone else?’ She sobbed out the words. ‘How could I when he was all I knew, the man I was destined to marry? I loved him, and only him—but he…He had different ideas about love—ideas Italian men of position held many centuries ago, not now, although I know many men cheat on their wives. When I told him I would not allow it, he laughed and said he would take a mistress if he wished for who was I to stop him?’ She sniffed, then finished with a tilt of her head, ‘So I ran away!’

      Paige stared at her, unable to believe what she was hearing. Well, she could believe the arrogant man she’d met downstairs might have such antediluvian views, but that a vague and possibly teasing threat about some future indiscretion had made Lucia flee? She’d imagined assault—either physical or emotional—shuddered over her mental images of what the gentle, trusting soul might have endured. But to run away because he’d said he might take a mistress one day?

      ‘Go take a shower and get dressed,’ she said abruptly. ‘And while you’re in there make up your mind whether you want to see him or not. I’ll have lunch ready when you come out, then you’ll have time to see him before we do the next blood glucose test.’

      Lucia grimaced but she left the sunny sitting room where she spent most of each day—lying on the couch watching soaps on TV—and turned towards the bathroom. Paige watched her go and wondered, not for the first time, what on earth had prompted her to take the girl-woman in.

      Instinct.

      Ironic that the same inbuilt warning system had sent up flares when she’d first seen Lucia’s husband! Only then they’d signalled ‘danger’ instead of ‘help’.

      ‘I will see him,’ Lucia announced when she returned, dressed in loose-fitting tan trousers and a golden yellow mohair sweater—looking stunning for all her poor health. ‘I will see him here and tell him I cannot go home.’

      Paige sighed but didn’t argue, going downstairs to the kitchen and fixing a sandwich for the two of them, counting off the calories in Lucia’s meal and writing them down so she knew how many her patient-guest had eaten. In the beginning she’d tried to persuade Lucia to undertake this task for herself, but had finally given up, deciding it was more important to teach her to do her own injections and blood glucose tests.

      Huh!

      ‘OK, your turn to do the injection.’ She said this every time and every time Lucia came up with some excuse for not taking the responsibility. Paige fitted a needle to the syringe, lifted the insulin out of the refrigerator and set it on the table. ‘Just try filling the syringe, Lucia. Pull down to the mark, stick the needle through the rubber top on the bottle and press the plunger in to release the air.’

      ‘I cannot touch that needle, I might injure myself!’

      It was the usual argument—one they had four times a day—so both knew their part in it.

      ‘You can’t injure yourself if you hold it properly. Do you want to be dependent on someone else all through your pregnancy?’ Paige grinned to herself as she realised why this argument had had little effect on Lucia in the past. Given the princely husband, the younger woman had probably had swarms of servants catering to her every whim—being dependent on someone was a habit rather than a concern.

      ‘You do it, Paige, just today?’

      The voice cajoled and the brown eyes begged.

      Paige grumbled about her weakness in always giving in, and filled the syringe with the fast-acting insulin Lucia would need for her body to handle the meal she was about to eat.

      ‘But I’m not staying with you while you talk to him,’ Paige warned, determined to win one argument today. ‘You’ve got to see him on your own.’

      Lucia didn’t argue. In fact, she smiled and looked excited, flushed with a soft and youthful radiance which made Paige feel older than her twenty-five years and unaccountably depressed as she tackled her own lunch with far less gusto than her guest.

      And the depression wasn’t lifted by the stern expression on her next visitor’s face. She had sent Lucia upstairs to the sitting room and was waiting outside the house when the long black car with the consular plates drew up. Although the autumn sun was warm, she found herself shivering as he alighted. A fact that didn’t escape him.

      ‘You should be wearing a jacket,’ he chided, and moved towards her as if to wrap his arm around her shoulders. The cold was replaced by warmth and she dodged ahead, leading him towards the side door which led directly into her flat.

      ‘No wonder she ran away,’ she muttered, more to herself than him. ‘If you tell a stranger what to wear…’

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘It was nothing.’ She reached the door and paused, then turned to face him, looking into his eyes—hoping to read his reaction to what she had to say. ‘Lucia has agreed to see you, but I’d like to say…’ The words petered out under the intensity of that blue gaze. Pull yourself together! Think of Lucia, not eyes that seem to drill into your soul. ‘She’s in a very fragile state, easily upset, both physically and emotionally. Will you remember that? Treat her gently?’

      Or eyes that darken dangerously!

      ‘And what do you imagine I intend to do to her? Throw her over my shoulder and force her to return with me? Is that how an Australian man would behave, Miss Morgan? How you would like a man to act with you?’

      Damn him—and her give-away cheeks! The image had made her go hot all over. Battling to regain control, she tried an imperious look of her own.

      ‘Australia has as many gentlemen as any other country, though they may not carry fancy titles, and, no, I wouldn’t expect any man to ride roughshod over a woman, but men can exert more than physical power.’

      ‘And women can’t?’ he countered, fixing her with a look so quizzical she wondered how she’d come to be arguing with him.

      ‘Just treat her gently,’ Paige said, turning abruptly away before her face betrayed even more of her inner chaos. She’d never felt such a physical reaction to another human being. For the first time in her life, she was beginning to understand what people meant when they talked about instant attraction. And sex appeal! Not only could she now accept its existence, but she had to acknowledge that this man had it by the bucket-load.

      Yet his wife had