‘You see the bright side of everything,’ Raffa commented huskily.
‘Not always,’ she reminded him. ‘I see what there is to be seen. You can see it too. We owe this child of ours to be open and happy, and free from guilt. Let’s not burden the next generation with our regret.’
‘How did I get to be so lucky?’ Raffa growled.
‘You asked the wrong woman to go to bed with you?’ Rose suggested.
‘I asked the right woman,’ he insisted. ‘I just didn’t know it at the time.’
‘I only know that I love you, and I understand you, Raffa, and I’ll spend the rest of my life proving that you’re not to blame for anything, if I have to. When grief and guilt is so deep-seated, it takes time to ease, but we’ll keep chipping away until it gets better. I’ll always be here for you.’
‘Whether I want you or not?’ he said.
‘Quick study,’ Rose approved. ‘Even if you send me packing, I’m on the end of a phone.’
‘I won’t be calling, because you’ll be here at my side. I love you with all my unworthy heart. Maybe I should have started with a marriage proposal at Sofia’s wedding, and saved myself a lot of trouble.’
‘You know I wouldn’t have said yes,’ Rose countered.
Turning her beneath him, Raffa loomed over her. ‘As I’m on one knee at the moment, this seems like the perfect moment for you to answer my question. Will you do me the great honour of becoming my wife?’
‘This is not the perfect moment,’ Rose argued on a laugh. ‘You’ll have me saying yes for another reason altogether.’
‘I’m prepared to risk it—but hurry up, you’re stretching my patience.’
‘That’s not the only thing that’s stretching,’ Rose observed wickedly.
‘Is that a yes?’
‘Yes, I’ll marry you,’ Rose confirmed, feeling as if her entire world had turned in the right direction at last. ‘Of course I will. My answer’s...yes!’
News that Raffa Acosta, the world’s most eligible bachelor, was off the market spread like wildfire. Sofia was the first to congratulate Rose, with Rose’s friend Adena hot on Sofia’s heels. Some of the publicity regarding Raffa’s previous reputation was unkind, but Rose brushed it aside, because she knew the man beneath the hype, the man who was so much more than his press suggested.
Raffa made sure they had plenty of private time to build on the deeper connection that was growing between them every day. They understood each other on so many different levels. When it came to sex, which it so often did, Rose remarked that if she hadn’t been pregnant, she would have been by the time they got married.
Their wedding was to be held at Raffa’s beach house on the beautiful Spanish island of Ibiza, where their guests could bathe in gin-clear water beneath a cloudless sky. Raffa arranged for the Acosta jet to fly everyone over. It would include a mystery guest, he revealed to Rose this morning in bed. ‘I love a good mystery,’ he teased, ‘but I’m not going to discuss it now, when we have so many better things to do—’
‘Like...?’
Rose’s question was lost in a shriek of laughter as Raffa brought her on top of him. ‘I love you,’ she whispered later, when they were both lying contented on the bed.
‘Not as much as I love you and our child,’ Raffa assured her as he moved down the bed to lavish kisses on the gentle curve of her stomach, before moving even further down, to kiss Rose in the way she could never get enough of, no matter how long they spent in bed.
Sofia and Adena were Rose’s attendants at the wedding, with Máire in the role of high-spirited matron of honour. ‘Never has so much chiffon and lace been put to better use,’ Máire declared as she turned this way and that to admire herself in the mirror. ‘You don’t look too bad, either,’ she told Rose, with a cheeky grin.
Rose’s gown was a simple sheath of ivory silk that revealed a hint of the curve of her belly. Rose had no intention of hiding the evidence of her pregnancy, any more than she would try to hide the depth of her feelings for Raffa and her friends on this special day.
Those friends shrieked in unison as Raffa strode unannounced into the room.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Sofia scolded her brother.
‘Rose?’ Switching his demanding gaze to Rose, Raffa only had to raise a brow for Rose’s senses to sharpen.
‘Could you give us a few minutes?’ she tactfully asked her friends.
As soon as they’d gone, she held Raffa to account. ‘Must I stand here all day with only a robe covering the dress you’re not supposed to see?’
‘There’s an easy solution,’ he advised. ‘Take it off.’
