Or was it?
She rose to her feet, her long black hair tumbling over the low cowl neck of her gown, which melted like liquid silver against her body. She felt transformed—like a glamorous, mysterious starlet from a black-and-white film. She’d never felt so beautiful, or less like the plain, sensible person she’d always been. She took a deep breath, and looked at Cesare.
“I’m ready,” she said softly.
He stared at her. She saw his hands tighten at his sides as his gaze slowly went down the length of her dress. And when he spoke, was it her imagination or was his voice a little strained?
“You look...fine.” Clearing his throat, he held out his arm. “Ready to meet the firing squad?”
“That’s how you refer to your friends?”
He gave her a wicked grin, quirking his dark eyebrow. “You should hear how they refer to me.”
“I already know.” As she took his arm, Emma’s smile fell. “You’re the playboy who will never be caught by any woman.”
He winked at her, a gesture so silly and unexpected that it caused her heart to twist in her chest. “They’ll understand when they meet you.”
Their eyes locked, and the squeeze on her heart suddenly became unbearable.
I love you. The words pushed through her soul, through her heart. I love you, Cesare.
It was a realization so horrible, Emma sucked in her breath in a gasp so rough and abrupt that it made her double over, coughing.
He rubbed her back, his voice filled with concern. “Are you all right?”
She held up her hand as she regained her breath. Downstairs, she could hear the rising noise of guests arriving at the Kensington mansion for the engagement party. All of his snooty rich friends, and their beautiful girlfriends—half of whom Cesare had probably slept with over the years. Half? Probably more.
“Cara?”
She finally straightened, her eyes watery. “I’m fine,” she said, wiping her eyes. It was a lie.
She loved him.
Almost a year ago, she’d left him in despair, believing they had no chance for a future. But now, after just two weeks of wearing his engagement ring on her hand, an awful, desperate hope had pushed itself into her soul. Against her will.
She was in love with him. The truth was she’d never stopped loving him. She was utterly and completely in love with her former boss, the father of her baby.
A man who was going to marry her out of pure obligation. Who didn’t even want to touch her. Who wanted their marriage to be in name only. For their son’s sake. A shell. A sham...
“Emma?”
She couldn’t let him see her face. Couldn’t let him guess what she felt inside. Pretending not to see his outstretched arm, she walked swiftly ahead.
“Wait,” he said sharply.
Emma stopped. She took a deep breath, and looked back at him in the hallway.
Smiling down at her in a way that caused his eyes to crinkle, he took her arm and wrapped it around his own. “It’s an engagement party. We should enter the ballroom together.”
Together. How she wished they could truly be together.
“Are you cold?” He frowned. “You’re trembling.”
“No... Yes... Um.” She twisted her ankle deliberately. “It’s the shoes.”
He snorted, looking at the four-inch heels. “No wonder.”
As they walked down the stairs, she clutched his arm as if her beautiful shoes were really the problem, trying to convince herself everything would be just fine. All right, so she was in love with Cesare and he’d never love her back. All right, so her whole body yearned for him to touch her, but he insisted on separate bedrooms and was likely planning to hook up with the next gorgeous actress who struck his fancy.
But they had a child together. Their marriage would be like a business partnership. That counted for something, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
Her throat tightened.
As they approached the mansion’s ballroom, she saw his friends—tycoons, actresses, diplomats and royalty. The women were thin and young and beautiful, in chic, tight clothes with no stretch marks from pregnancy. They all turned to look at her speculatively. She could see their sly assumption: that Emma had gotten pregnant on purpose. That was how a gold-digging housekeeper trapped an uncatchable playboy.
Their expressions changed as they looked from her to Cesare. And she realized that being in love with him just made Emma exactly the same as every other woman in the room. They all wanted him. They all broke their hearts over him.
She swallowed, glancing up at him through her lashes, suddenly desperate for reassurance, unable to fight this green demon eating her alive from the inside out.
Cesare abruptly stopped at the bottom of the stairs, in front of the open ballroom doors. “Time to face the music.”
His voice was strangely flat. All the emotion had fled from his expression. Meeting her eyes, he gave her a forced smile, as if he already regretted his unbreakable, binding promise to marry her. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
She suddenly wanted to ask him if those were the words he’d say to himself on their wedding day, too. She looked down at her diamond necklace. At her enormous engagement ring.
I can do this, she told herself. For Sam.
Cesare led her into the ballroom, and as she walked across the same marble floor she’d once scrubbed on her hands and knees, she pasted a bright smile on her face as she was formally introduced to London society: the housekeeper who’d been lucky and conniving enough to trap a billionaire playboy into marriage.
* * *
“So the great Cesare Falconeri is caught at last,” Sheikh Sharif bin Nazih al Aktoum, the emir of Makhtar, said behind him. His voice was amused.
“Caught?” Cesare turned. “I haven’t been caught.”
The sheikh took a sip of champagne and waved his hand airily. “Ah, but it happens to all of us sooner or later.”
Cesare scowled. The two men were not close; he’d invited the sheikh as a courtesy, as his company sought to get permission to build a new resort hotel on one of his Persian Gulf beaches. He’d never thought the man might actually come, but he’d showed up at the Kensington mansion in a black town car with diplomatic flags flying, in full white robes and trailing six bodyguards.
Six. Cesare had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Bringing two bodyguards was sensible, six was just showing off. He bared a smile at his guest. “I’m the luckiest man on earth to be engaged to Emma. It took me a year to convince her to marry me.” Which was true in its way.
The sheikh gave a faint smile. “Some men are just the marrying kind, I suppose.”
Cesare raised his eyebrows. “You think I’m the marrying kind?”
He shrugged. “Clearly. You’ve experienced it once and choose willingly to return to it.” The dark eyes looked at him curiously, as if Cesare were an exhibit in a zoo. “As for myself, I’m in no rush to be trapped with one woman, subject to her whims, forced to listen to her complain day and night—” He cut himself off with a cough, as if he’d just realized that saying such things at an engagement party might be poor form. “Well. Perhaps marriage is different from the cage I picture it to be.”
A cage. Cesare felt the sudden irrational stirrings of buried panic. He could hear the harsh