The Italian's One-Night Love-Child

‘Fortunately, I am prepared to do the decent thing.’

Bethany swung round to look at him in surprise. ‘Do the decent thing? What are you talking about?’

‘You are pregnant with my baby and I am a man of honour—a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. Naturally I have no other option but to marry you.’

‘Marry me? Have you completely lost your mind?’ Bethany gave a snort of laughter. Did he really expect her to leap at his generous offer because he was a man of honour, who took his responsibilities seriously and would therefore rise to the occasion by putting a ring on her finger because there was no option?

‘What are you saying?’ With one hand, Cristiano reached to the side of the bed and flipped on the light. Immediately the tiny area around them was thrown into relief. He hoisted himself up on one elbow and looked down at her with a cold frown of incomprehension.

‘I’m saying that I’m not going to marry you!’

Cathy Williams is originally from Trinidad, but has lived in England for a number of years. She currently has a house in Warwickshire, which she shares with her husband, Richard, her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, and their pet cat, Salem. She adores writing romantic fiction, and would love one of her girls to become a writer—although at the moment she is happy enough if they do their homework and agree not to bicker with one another!

COCOONED in the pleasantly cold confines of his black Mercedes, Cristiano De Angelis surveyed the hustle and bustle of the scorchingly hot streets around him from behind a pair of dark designer sunglasses. This part of Rome was as familiar to him as his own penthouse apartment in London where he lived for most of the year, occasionally taking time out to visit his family in Italy. He had grown up here, had gone to school here, had enjoyed the gilded life of a member of the Italian elite, only spreading his wings when he had flown off to go to university in England. It was both comforting and a little claustrophobic to be back, even for a week, and it would be something of a relief to return to the relative anonymity granted him in the streets of London.

He frowned, thinking back to the conversation he had just had with his mother and his grandfather, who had conspired to remind him, over a sumptuous lunch served with unnecessary formality in the opulent dining room of his grandfather’s house, of the passage of time, in so far as it affected him and the pitter patter of small De Angelis feet which they were both, it seemed, desperate to hear.

It had been a dual assault of military precision with his mother on the one side, virtually wringing her hands as she elaborated on her maternal desire that he settle down, be happy, stop playing the field, while his grandfather chipped in with guilt-inducing asides about his declining health and old age, as though he was a decrepit centenarian and not the sprightly seventy-eight-year-old man who could still command attention without uttering a word.

‘There’s a very nice girl…’ his mother had begun, assessing whether that casual piece of information might have landed on fertile ground, but Cristiano had not been having it. While he acknowledged that he would, indeed, one day get married to someone suitable, that time had not quite arrived. He had been firm on the point and, of course, it had been regrettable that he had been forced to witness their crestfallen faces, but the pair of them, given half a chance, would have proved more unstoppable than a freight train at full speed. Any hint of softening on his part and they would have been lining up prospective candidates within minutes.

A reluctant smile of wry amusement curved his mouth and he removed his shades, dangling them from one finger as he looked at the hordes of shoppers who swarmed the elegant designer shop-lined streets, for all the world as though the words credit crunch were not part of their vocabulary.