The Mills & Boon Christmas Wishes Collection. Maisey Yates

      And had Holly been Marzia it would have been sufficient. Marzia had wanted that ring and his lifestyle. She would have thrown a party to show off the castello and she would have invited all the most important socially connected people to act as her admiring audience. She would have spent half the day at a beauty salon and the other half shopping for couture garments designed to impress. Vito had lost count of the number of times he had returned to the town house he had once shared with Marzia only to discover that they were hosting a dinner when he was longing for a quiet evening. Marzia had been easily bored and had needed others to keep her entertained. Holly, in comparison, asked for and expected very little. In fact she was asking for something she shouldn’t have had to ask for, he acknowledged with a grim look in his dark, unusually thoughtful gaze.

      Family came first...always. Even his workaholic grandfather had never put the bank before his family. What had he been thinking of when he’d left Holly and Angelo to amuse themselves? They needed him and he hadn’t spared them a thought.

      ‘And tonight?’ Vito prompted.

      ‘It was bearable. I heard Celia and Jenna bitching about me but I stood up for myself and I couldn’t care less about their opinions. But I would’ve been more equipped to enjoy myself and relax if I’d had more time to prepare.’

      ‘I screwed up,’ Vito acknowledged broodingly.

      ‘Yes,’ Holly agreed, sliding into bed while he still hovered. ‘And sometimes I’ll screw up. That’s life.’

      ‘I’m not used to screwing up,’ Vito told her.

      ‘Then you’ll try harder not to make the same mistakes again,’ Holly riposted sleepily.

      * * *

      Holly slept in the following morning. She woke with a start, showered and pulled on jeans to pelt upstairs and spend some time with Angelo. In surprise she stilled in the doorway of the nursery bathroom when she saw Vito kneeling down by the side of the bath and engaged in dive-bombing plastic boats for Angelo’s amusement. She had simply assumed that Vito had gone into the bank as usual but it was clear that at some stage, even though he had dressed for work, he had changed his mind. His jacket and tie were hooked on the radiator, his shirtsleeves rolled up.

      ‘Vito...’

      Raking damp, tousled black hair off his brow, Vito turned his head and flashed her a heart-stopping grin. ‘Angelo emptied his cereal bowl over his head at breakfast and I decided I should stay home.’

      Holly moved forward. ‘I can see that...’

      ‘I’m very set in my ways but I believe I can adapt,’ he told her, laughing as Angelo smacked the water with a tiny fist and splashed both of them.

      ‘He’ll grow up so fast your head will spin. You won’t ever get this time back with him.’ She sighed. ‘I didn’t want you to miss out and then live to regret it.’

      ‘You spoke up and that was the right thing to do. I respect your honesty. Parenting is a whole new ball game and I still have to get my head around it,’ Vito confided, snatching down a towel and spreading it on the floor before lifting Angelo’s squirming little body out of the bath and laying him down.

      ‘How to get yourself soaked!’ Holly groaned.

      ‘I’m already drenched to the skin,’ Vito riposted with quiet pride. ‘Angelo and I have had a lot of fun.’

      The nursery was empty and Holly rustled around gathering the necessities. ‘What have you done with the nanny posse?’ she asked curiously.

      ‘I told them to take a few hours off. Being so new to this I didn’t want an audience.’

      Holly dried Angelo and deftly dressed him. Vito unbuttoned his wet shirt, the parted edges revealing a bronzed sliver of muscular torso. Together they walked downstairs.

      ‘Do you have any photographs of when you were pregnant?’ Vito asked, startling her into turning wide blue eyes onto his lean, dark face.

      ‘I don’t think so... I wasn’t feeling very photogenic at the time. Why?’

      ‘I’m sorry I missed all that. Something else I can’t get back,’ Vito conceded gravely. ‘I really would have liked to have seen you when you were carrying our child.’

      Regret assailed her, for she would have loved to have had his support during those dark days of worry and exhaustion. She had struggled to stay employed and earning for as long as possible so as not to be a burden on Pixie.

      ‘As for that challenge you offered me,’ Vito mused, walking back to their bedroom to change. ‘Draw up a list of places you would like to go.’

      ‘No lists. I’m phobic about lists,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Let’s be relaxed about what we do and where we go. No itineraries laid out in stone. Are you taking time off?’

      ‘Of course. But I’ll catch up with my email in the evenings,’ he warned her. ‘I can’t completely switch off.’

      ‘That’s OK,’ she hastened to tell him. ‘But you may be bored.’

      ‘Not a chance, gioia mia,’ Vito riposted as he cast off his wet shirt. ‘You and Angelo will keep me fully occupied from dawn to dusk and beyond.’

      ‘And beyond’ was very much in Holly’s mind as she studied his muscular brown torso, a tiny burst of heat pulsing between her thighs. It was the desire she never really lost around Vito. Her colour heightened. She was so pleased, so relieved that he had listened to her, but there was a fear deep down inside her that she would not have enough to offer to satisfy him outside working hours.

      * * *

      ‘When was the last time you saw your mother?’ Vito asked lazily as they lay in bed six weeks later.

      Holly stretched somnolent limbs still heavy with pleasure and rolled her head round to face him, bright blue eyes troubled. ‘I was sixteen. It wasn’t the nicest experience.’

      ‘I can deal with not nice,’ Vito volunteered, closing an arm round her slight shoulders to draw her comfortingly close.

      Holly felt gloriously relaxed and shockingly happy. With every day that passed she was increasingly convinced that Vito was the man of her dreams. He was everything she had ever wanted, everything she had ever dreamt of. But even better, he had proved that he was capable of change.

      Six weeks ago, she had reminded Vito that he had to learn how to be part of a family instead of an independent operator seeing life only from a work-orientated point of view. He had started out wanting to make up lists and tick off boxes as if that were the only route to success. He had a maddening desire to know in advance exactly what he would be doing every hour of every day and had only slowly learned to take each day as it came.

      Holly had spent several days creating a mood board of her ideas on how to redecorate their hideous bedroom. While she was doing that, Vito had learned how to entertain Angelo. Settling on a colour palate of soothing grey enlivened with spicy tangerine accents, Holly had ordered the required products and utilised a local company to do the actual work. Throughout the entire process, Vito had shown depressingly little curiosity, merely agreeing that it was many years since the castello had been decorated and that, as his mother had never had any interest in revitalising the interior, he was sure there was plenty of scope for Holly to express her talents.

      Leaving the work team to handle the decorating project, Holly and Vito had taken their son to stay on the shores of Lake Lugano. Vito’s family had bought a Swiss villa because, like Zurich and Geneva, Lugano was a major financial centre. Over the generations the Zaffari bankers had found the shores of the lake a convenient business location to stash the family while they worked.

      At the villa they had thrown open the shutters on the magnificent lake views and enjoyed long lazy meals on the sun-dappled loggia. By day they had explored the water in a private boat, stopping off to ramble around the picturesque little villages on the rugged shoreline. Some evenings they