Georgia pulled a chair out and brought it close to him. With the way he was sitting on the table, being seated on the chair brought her close to eye-level with the wound. The bleeding had stymied at last. Gathering all her courage, she closed the wound with the fingers of her left hand. He made the slightest jerk.
“Don’t move,” she warned. God, her voice was all tight. Her heart was pounding and perspiration was breaking out on her forehead, but she needed to keep a clear head. She had to think of Niccolo’s skin as a cushion or set of curtains she was stitching together, not the flesh of the man she’d once loved with all her heart.
Having tied a knot in the base of the string, she inhaled deeply through her nose and threaded the needle through the skin. Other than a throaty grunt, he gave no reaction, not even when she pulled the string through.
The first stitch done and cast off, she dabbed at the blood with one of her antiseptic wipes and drove the needle through the skin a second time with the fleeting wonder of whether either of her parents had been forced into doing this very thing at any point in their careers. She supposed she’d never know. Theirs was not a parent-child relationship where anecdotes we shared.
Her confidence rising, her concentration total, Georgia worked with deft efficiency, calculating as she sewed how far apart each stitch should be so that it could be done as quickly as possible without compromising the effectiveness. Throughoutit all, Niccolo barely moved a muscle. She had a feeling he was barely breathing, but it wasn’t until she’d tied off the last stitch that she realised she’d hardly drawn breath either.
“All done,” she whispered.
There was a long moment of silence, then, “Can I have another vodka now?”
She laughed, more out of relief that it was over than any humour. “Let me clean the rest of you and put a bandage on it, then knock yourself out.”
“I intend to.” Beads of sweat had popped on his forehead, and his face was drained of colour, but he still managed a weak smile before looking down at her handiwork. “That is seriously impressive. Your parents would be proud. It looks professional.”
His mention of her parents made her heart catch, evoking memories of a time they’d stayed awake the whole night making love and talking. It was the night they’d discovered neither of them had had much to do with their parents since they’d each turned eighteen. The difference was Georgia’s parents had chosen to move to France and leave their twin daughters behind, while Niccolo had chosen to cut himself off from his. Sensing from his tone that it wasn’t something he was ready to go into detail about, she hadn’t probed him too much on it, figuring he would tell her when he was ready. Weeks later, they’d been over.
“Well, I am an interior designer…” she said, trying to keep the brief lightness of relief going as she took the bloodied bowl to the sink to empty and refill it, even though her heart still seemed to be caught tight in a vice of its own making.
It was through her job that she’d met Niccolo. He’d held a joint majority interest in London’s newest and swankiest skyscraper, The Diamond. The top five floors were filled with exclusive apartments designed for the uber-rich. Georgia had been part of the team who’d pitched for the contract to design the interiors of the apartment show homes.
Only because she’d been desperate to see the rumoured view from The Diamond had Georgia begged her boss to let her attend the initial pitch. As she’d been the least experienced member of the workforce and her designs were suited for family homes rather than apartments for busy professionals, her boss had laughed. He’d finally agreed when she agreed to sit at the back like a wallflower and keep her mouth shut. There had never been any intention of her joining the actual team or working on any aspect of the project.
The first meeting between the team and Niccolo had ended with Niccolo insisting Georgia be the sole designer to work on the interior of his own apartment at The Diamond. As he’d barely taken his eyes off her throughout the entire meeting – a meeting she shouldn’t even have been at and was supposed to have pretended to be invisible for – this had been highly embarrassing. Everyone knew why she’d been chosen, and it had nothing to do with her interior design skills.
It had also been secretly thrilling. Georgia had always been a dreamer, much preferring the men she found within the pages of her romance books to the men she encountered in the real world, and sitting back down to clean all the dried blood off him, she remembered how he’d dazzled her.
Niccolo Martinelli was like no man she’d met before. Not only was he impossibly tall and lean, but he was impossibly good-looking… gorgeous…andpersonable. He was intelligent and fun and carried such energy, such zest for life, that being in his company had felt like being in a room with a sunbeam. Having that sunbeam directed at her had been like nothing else on this earth.
Struggling to breathe again, Georgia cleaned the smooth skin she’d caressed every millimetre of with her heart now racing in a different way to how it had pounded throughout her attempt at playing doctor. The tightness she’d carried inside herself whilestitching him together had eased, her senses firing back to life. His deep olive skin felt so warm and smooth to the touch that she felt an almost irrepressible urge to press her mouth to it.
Clamping her lips together, she tried her hardest to regain her detachment, but when she wiped the thick dark hair around his navel, all she could think of was what lay below the waistline.
He'd been her first. Niccolo had taken her virginity with such delight in her body that any shyness had been swept away. And then he’d taken her heart. She’d never know when she’d fallen in love with him, had never said the words to him or to herself. Only when he’d smashed her heart to smithereens had she understood the depth of her feelings for him, and now, smelling the familiar musk of his skin and feeling the familiar textures, the old longing that had once controlled her every waking moment pulsed deep inside her.
She’d been besotted. Completely, utterly, irretrievably besotted.
His chest and abdomen cleaned of blood, she carried the bowl back to the sink for more fresh water.
“Thank you for the tip-off about your psycho sister,” he said casually as she turned the tap on.
Georgia’s chest tightened painfully at his flippant insult about her twin. “Don’t call her that.”
“She thought she could stop me marrying Siena by giving intimate photos of you and me to the press,” he reminded her.
She didn’t know what was worse. The reminder of the heady evening they’d taken those photos or the reminder of her lie.
Because of Georgia’s lie, Niccolo thought Callie had travelled to Italy to destroy the wedding out of misplaced vengeance over his treatment of her sister.
The truth was, Callie had thought it unconscionable for him to marry Siena without knowing Georgia was pregnant with hischild. She’d thought it unconscionable for Georgia not to tell him.
Georgia had known Callie was right. Niccolo did deserve to know. But he also deserved to live. Niccolo was impetuous. If he’d learned about the baby before the wedding… The Lord alone knew what he’d have done. Likely abandoned the wedding to come charging over to England, leaving all hell breaking loose behind him and the Espositos swearing vengeance.
The irony that all this had come to pass regardless…
It was an irony nearly as painful as the irony that it had been terror for Niccolo’s physical safety, along with the danger Callie was walking into, that had spurred Georgia into sending that panicked message to him. It didn’t matter how much she hated him or how deep the pain of his marrying someone else ran; the need to protect him had been as strong as the need to protect his baby.
