‘I don’t understand...’ Because missing from all of that were the three words she wanted to hear.
‘I’m not the sort of guy you ever saw as a long-term proposition...but Susie, I could be. I mean, think about it—have we had one argument since I moved in? A single argument? No. Not one. Have I been...well...useful? Yes. Those are two things you should take into account when you decide that I’m not the one for you. You might fantasise about someone who wears an earring, has a ponytail and knows how to cook quiche, but would he really be the man for you?’
‘He might be if he loved me...’
‘No one could love you as much as I do. No one.’
‘You love me? No, you don’t. You don’t believe in love.’
Unable to tell her what he was being driven to tell her without touching her, Sergio took immediate advantage of her open-mouthed confusion to join her on the sofa. If he had to overwhelm her with his physical proximity, then so be it. He wasn’t above low tricks.
‘I never thought I did,’ he murmured, ‘but no one’s right all of the time. Even me.’
‘Now I really am shocked.’ Susie’s heart was swooping and diving so fast that she could scarcely breathe. ‘I thought you were the guy who never got it wrong?’
‘You’re going to marry me,’ he ordered shakily. ‘Aren’t you?’
Susie pulled him towards her and kissed him with all the passion she had been storing up for the past weeks and months—the passion that had lain slumbering under the surface, ever ready to leap out and take charge.
‘You love me! Of course I’m going to marry you. I’ve loved you for so long... I just never thought that you could ever love me back—and I’ve been so scared of getting used to you being around me. You never thought that you could love, and I always knew that I could...except I never expected it to be someone like you...’
‘I’m reading all sorts of terrific compliments into that,’ Sergio said huskily.
He slipped his hand under the jumper and gently, tenderly caressed her, stroked her swollen nipples, but he didn’t go further. They had a lifetime to explore one another. He could take his time. But he just had to feel her, and her body was wonderfully familiar. Everything about her filled him with a sense of completion, as though this was the woman he had been waiting to find.
He shuddered when he thought that he might not have met her at all—that she might have joined that mustard-clothed clown on her blind date and left his restaurant without throwing herself into his company.
‘You should,’ Susie whispered. ‘And you should know something else...’
‘What’s that?’
‘I feel a twinge—and this time it’s the real thing...’
* * *
Georgina Louise Francesca Burzi was born with very little fuss, after a complication-free delivery. Pink-cheeked, with a mop of dark curls, dark eyes and the same long dark killer eyelashes of her father, she was declared by every single person who came to visit the most beautiful baby on the planet.
Louise Sadler, chuffed to bits with the impending wedding—which, she declared, she had always known would happen, because what mother didn’t know when her daughter was in love—made time to gloat quietly over the fact that she had hit the grandmother post first.
‘And leave the wedding to me,’ she added sotto voce, keeping a sharp eye on her husband, who was holding the baby and attempting to look comfortable. ‘I’m suggesting small, intimate and exquisite—emphasis on the exquisite. Too big can sometimes be just a little too tacky...’
Susie was more than happy to oblige, and she realised, somewhere deep inside her, how far she had come. She was no longer trying to prove anything to any of her family. They loved her as she was...
And so did Sergio—who never tired of telling her.
Now, with their visitors all gone and back in the comfort of their house, Susie reached out and linked her fingers through his, settling with a sigh into the gentle kiss he placed on her neck. In a Moses basket next to the sofa, where they were sitting quietly relaxing, baby Georgie was sleeping, her tiny, soft snores punctuating the comfortable silence.