.

mother continued to talk, but Valentino did not hear what she said. He had surged to his feet and was trying to rush across the brickwork of the patio. But his movements were uncoordinated and jerky as his mother’s words reverberated inside his head like clanging cymbals in a discordant rhythm.

       Faith was pregnant?

      His Faith? The woman who said she did not want to see him anymore. The one who had ended their relationship, such as it was.

      He shook his head, but the blanket of shock refused to be dislodged.

      He was going to be a father again? Now? When he had thought never to remarry, when he had believed Giosue would be his only child. It was unreal but not. Part of him accepted the news with an atavistic instinct of rightness. He had no doubt the baby was his. Dismiss him though she had tried to do, Faith was his. She had been since the moment they met. Hell, a primal part of him claimed she always had been—even before they knew each other.

      Even the most rational part of his mind accepted that she was his now. She had been with no one else since their first time together, and probably for a long time before that.

      He yanked open the door of his Jaguar and climbed inside, slamming it again as he started the car with a loud roar of the engine, and then tearing out of the drive.

      How was she pregnant?

      They used birth control. Religiously. Rather, he did. Still, there had only been a handful of times that their protection had not been one hundred percent. After each slip, he would be beset by guilt, and work extrahard in future to make sure they were covered.

      With a sense of inevitability, he realized one of those times had not been too long ago.

      He’d taken Faith to dinner at a favorite trattoria. Instead of sitting outside, so they could watch people on the street—as Faith was wont to do—Valentino had asked for some privacy. They had been given a table in the back corner, the restaurant lighting barely reaching into the shadows that surrounded it. The light from the single candle in the center of the table set a romantic mood.

      At least, he’d thought so.

      Faith frowned as he helped her take her seat. “I know our relationship isn’t common knowledge, but do we have to hide in the dark?”

      He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “I thought we could entertain ourselves over dinner, rather than finding our amusement in watching other people.”

      The embarrassing truth was that Faith liked people-watching—sometimes too much. She paid more attention to the ones surrounding them than to him, and he did not like that. Tonight he was determined to have her entire focus. If it took seducing her publicly, so be it.

      And that is exactly what he did, starting with a kiss just below the shell of her ear, using both teeth and tongue as well as his lips.

      She was shivering and had made a small whimpering sound by the time he finished and took his own seat across the small table from her.

      “Considering what you apparently have planned for our entertainment, I now understand why you asked for a table hidden away from curious eyes.” Faith smoothed her top, accentuating the way the silky fabric clung to her breasts and exposing hardened nipples, despite two thin layers of fabric over them.

      “You think you can survive one evening without people-watching?” he asked, his voice husky with the desire sparking his senses.

      “I have a feeling you can make it worth my while.”

      “You must be psychic,” he teased. “For I plan to.”

      “Call it an educated guess. I’ve been at the receiving end of your tender mercies too often to discount their effect.”

      “Good.” He had every intention of lavishing those mercies on her tonight.

      They teased each other over dinner, working their desire to a fever pitch. He was tempted to find an even darker corner and bring them both to completion right then and there. He refrained, determined to make the night a memorable one for his beautiful lover.

      Her peacock-blue eyes were glazed with passion, her lips swollen as if they’d been kissed, and her breathing was shallow and quick. Her nipples were so hard they created shoals in the fabric over them and she’d squirmed in her seat more than once.

      “Having trouble, carina americana mia?” He meant his voice to be joking, but it came out deep and sensual instead.

      A competitive glint shone in her gaze along with the passion. “I think no more than you.”

      She’d definitely done her utmost to turn him inside out, and she had succeeded.

      He reached across the table and brushed her cheek in a rare public display of affection. “I think it is time to make our way to my apartment.”

       “Yes.”

      Back in his apartment, they wasted no time in disposing of their clothing, but once they landed naked on the bed, he forced a slowing of the pace. It wasn’t easy, he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in her wet, silken depths, but there was more to making love than reaching an orgasm.

      There was the element of driving your partner out of her mind.

      Her hands were everywhere in a blatant bid to sidetrack him from his silently stated intention, and he had to gather both her wrists in one hand and hold them above her head.

      She gasped, her body bowing in clear need. “Kinky, Tino.”

      “Necessary, tesoro.”

      “Why?”

      “I want you out of your mind with pleasure.” “I’m already there.”

      “No.” He kissed her, sweeping her mouth with his tongue. He pulled back. “You can still talk.”

      And then he set about taking care of that. He kissed his way down her throat, sucking up a bruise in the dip right below her clavicle bone. His mark.

      She shuddered and cried out, like she always did when his hormones got the best of him and he gave her a hickey like he was still an adolescent learning his way around a woman. Maybe that’s why he regressed so often.

      He moved to her breasts, taking one in his free hand and laving the other with his tongue. Eventually, after a lot of mewling and half-formed words from the dead-to-rights sexy woman below him, he zeroed in on her nipples. He didn’t play. He focused. He plucked. And he pleasured.

      She screamed.

      She arched.

      She came, her body going rigid and then shaking.

      He released her hands and rolled on top of her, using the head of his penis to tease the swollen nub of her clitoris. She cried out incoherently and he kept it up. Her legs locked around his and she pressed upward, forcing him inside. He rocked and kissed her until he was on the verge of climaxing himself.

      It was only then that he remembered the condom he wasn’t wearing.

      With more self-control than he thought he had, he pulled out and reached for the bedside drawer where he kept his supplies before surging back inside her.

      When he came, she was screaming his name and convulsing around him in a second more-intense orgasm.

      Remembering made him harder than a rock and twice as immovable.

      That night had happened somewhere between two and three months ago. If he looked at his PDA, he could get an exact date. It was something he’d kept track of as zealously as he had their birth control itself. Only, the timing had never come to anything before. Maybe that was why he hadn’t been worried along these lines in this instance?

      The possibility that Faith might be carrying his child had not even occurred to him. Why would it? A woman didn’t break up with the man whose child she carried.

      He