‘What …?’ she breathed shakily, with barely a glance at him as she continued to stare at Marco as if hypnotised.
Cesare shrugged his shoulders as he maintained his hold on the now squirming Marco. ‘They have an unerring instinct to go to people who show a dislike for them!’ he explained sharply, and his young nephew launched himself at Robin in the total belief that she would catch him.
Something she did most reluctantly, holding the baby slightly away from her as Marco made a grab for the long honey-coloured hair that Cesare had so recently released from its confinement.
Cesare’s gaze was deliberately unreadable as he looked down at the two of them.
Carla had been a natural mother, totally at ease with her baby son from the moment he was born. But Robin looked as if she was holding a time bomb in her arms—one that was set to explode at any moment.
Marco knew no such inhibitions, grinning at Robin unconcernedly as he twisted a long length of her hair into his baby fist and talked to her in the gibberish that only he could understand.
Cesare frowned darkly and held himself ready to take his nephew from her if it became necessary. If—as she looked in danger of doing!—Robin collapsed completely.
Unless this was just a ploy on her part to try and shake Cesare’s resolve to marry her in order to settle the blood feud between their two families?
He had made no secret of the deep love he had for Marco, and Robin was intelligent enough to know that he would have no desire to present the baby with a mother who didn’t even want to hold him, let alone laugh and play with him.
Was Robin using his love for Marco against him?
If she was, then she was in for a disappointment!
‘I will take Marco back to bed now,’ Cesare told her coldly.
Robin turned to give him a startled look, having briefly forgotten Cesare was even in the room, all of her attention focused on the baby she held in her arms.
‘He seems quite happy where he is,’ she pointed out ruefully, and Marco turned to grin at his uncle as his fingers tightened in her hair.
‘Nevertheless, it is past his bedtime,’ Cesare informed her reprovingly. He reached out to take the resisting baby from her, Marco’s happy gurgles instantly turning to cries of protest.
Robin reached up to untangle the tiny fingers from her hair. No easy feat when Marco seemed determined not to let go.
‘Perhaps I had better come to the nursery with you …?’ she offered huskily as Marco continued to grip.
‘Perhaps you had,’ Cesare allowed wryly, resisting his nephew’s efforts to return to Robin’s arms as he strode off towards the nursery. Robin had no choice but to hurry after him if she didn’t want her hair pulled out by the roots.
Marco grinned at her over his uncle’s shoulder, still hanging on to her hair, and Robin returned that grin now that she was no longer under Cesare’s close scrutiny.
Because Cesare had been wrong earlier today when he had claimed her marriage to Giles had ended because she’d avoided getting pregnant.
She hadn’t avoided it at all.
She hadn’t been able—wasn’t able—to give Giles the children he wanted to carry on the Bennett name.
Robin hadn’t been too worried when she didn’t conceive during the first year of her marriage—had just assumed that it would happen when it happened. But as the months passed with no sign of a baby, Robin had decided she ought to visit a medical specialist.
The first of many such visits.
There had followed two years of tests. The keeping of charts. Followed by more tests.
But no baby.
The tests had shown that there was nothing wrong with either Robin or Giles’s fertility—that Robin simply hadn’t conceived. Her specialist had advised that perhaps they should think of adoption, that sometimes in cases like theirs, where no reason could be found for the lack of conception, with the pressure taken off the mother became pregnant quite naturally. Giles had refused to even consider adoption, had wanted a child of his own blood or not at all.
That child—a son—had been born to Giles and his second wife only two months ago.
Leaving Robin with the certainty that she had to have been the one at fault.
The end of her marriage meant that she would never have a child now, that she was doomed to a marriageless and a childless future. For how could she marry any man and expect him to accept that she could never give him a baby?
Except that Cesare Gambrelli, although he didn’t know it, was now offering to marry her and give her the child she couldn’t have herself.
A baby she had fallen in love with on sight!
CHAPTER FIVE
‘COULD I pOSSIBLY . . . freshen up before dinner?’
Cesare turned at Robin’s halting request, which intruded on his dark and brooding thoughts as the two of them left Marco’s nursery together a few minutes later.
He had thought he would catch her off guard by presenting Marco in that way, and yet Cesare knew that he was the one who felt unsettled by the encounter.
It really was totally inexplicable to him why Marco had taken such a liking to Robin; she had certainly done nothing to encourage him.
The baby had screamed when Cesare had returned him to his cot, his little arms reaching up imploringly to Robin. But Robin had remained completely detached as Cesare laid the baby down, before tucking him beneath the covers with his favourite teddy bear at his side.
Robin’s aloofness towards Cesare he could understand and excuse, but her coldness towards Marco he could not accept. The baby had already lost his mother—even if he wasn’t really old enough to have realised it—and Cesare had no intention of allowing Robin to maintain that ridiculously cool attitude towards him just because she wasn’t in control here.
Because, no matter how she might wish it otherwise, he still had every intention of making Robin his wife. And sooner rather than later!
‘Use the bathroom there.’ He gestured dismissively and he continued to stride towards the sitting room, definitely feeling in need of more champagne.
‘Thank you,’ Robin accepted quietly, before escaping into the bathroom.
When she looked at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, she could see her eyes were overbright.
She was in love!
Not with Cesare Gambrelli.
Nor with any other man.
But with a six-month-old baby who had captured her heart at first sight!
She sat down weakly on the side of the bath, breathing deeply in an effort to calm her racing pulse.
Marco was adorable—absolutely adorable. And it had felt so good when she’d held him in her arms, so achingly right; he was the baby she had dreamt of having for so long—so much so that she had been reluctant to relinquish him to Cesare when the time had come.
What did she do now …?
Cesare Gambrelli had told her he intended marrying her. That he intended for her to be Marco’s mother.
How she wanted the latter, if not the former.
But the price was being Cesare’s scorned and despised wife—a woman he had only married to settle what he called a blood feud. Did she want that?
Yes!
Cesare didn’t know it, but he was offering her something she had