Draco's Marriage Pact (The Dante Inferno: The Dante Dynasty Series Book 7) Read online

  Gently, oh, so gently, he cupped the source of her pleasure. He breached the soft folds and scraped his fingers over and in, offering her teasing forays and tempting swirls and dips. She shuddered in reaction and her breath hitched, then gave. With each new touch the breath sobbed from her lungs and she lifted herself toward him, urging him on.

  It ended all too soon. She stiffened within his hold and cried out as her release tore through her. Draco gathered her close, just holding her. He felt her tears through his dress shirt and murmured ridiculous reassurances in both English and Italian.

  “Shh, now. It’s all going to work out.”

  She opened her eyes, and he could see the dazed satisfaction mingling with her tears. “I didn’t think I wanted you to make love to me. But I did. I do. It’s just been so long since—” She broke off with a shiver of pleasure.

  He couldn’t dispute it. In fact, he could tell her right down to the day and hour just how long it had been. But her concession gave him hope. “You’re right. It has been a long time. I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner, Shayla.”

  She relaxed against him and he watched as exhaustion overcame passion and sleep slipped across her face and into her body. No matter how hard she fought to hold it at bay, it waged a war she couldn’t win. Little by little it stole the tension from her so she melted into his arms as though she belonged. Which, of course, she did, even if she didn’t realize it yet.

  Her eyes fluttered open before falling closed again. “Draco?” she murmured.

  “I’m right here, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “Never. You might disappear if I do and I don’t think I could survive losing you again,” he teased, though he could hear an element of raw honesty underscoring the words.

  “I don’t want to leave you.”

  He closed his eyes and faced facts. “But you’re afraid to stay. Afraid you’ll be trapped in the dragon’s lair and never be free again.”

  She didn’t answer.

  But then, there was no answer, just an undeniable truth that cut him to the very core.

  He never knew what woke him. One minute he was sound asleep and the next, painfully alert. He groped for his wife, aware on some level that it was a futile effort. She wasn’t in the bed.

  He shot upright. “Shayla?” Her name escaped sharp as a report.

  “I’m here.” He vaguely made out her shape somewhere between the bed and the bathroom. He caught the fear in her voice, a fear mingled with some other emotion. Excitement? “Draco, I think my water just broke.”

  He shot out of bed and reached her side in two running strides. “Okay, take it easy.” He gripped her arms, supporting her. “Aren’t we supposed to go to the hospital when that happens?”

  “No.” She broke off with a quick gasp. “Oh. Oh, my.”

  He hung on tight, fighting to gather up every ounce of self-control he possessed in order to keep his voice low and even. “Labor pain?”

  It took her a full half minute to answer. “Yes.”

  He debated the safety of releasing her long enough to flip on the overhead light. Decided to chance it. He made it to the door and back in two seconds flat and wrapped a supportive arm around her. “Do you need help dressing?”

  She blinked at him in bewilderment. “Why should I get dressed? I just need a nightie.”

  Maybe labor affected normal brain processes. “You’re going to wear a nightie to the hospital?” he questioned with impressive restraint.

  She smiled, ridiculously tranquil given the circumstances. “Relax, Draco. It’s not like the baby’s going to pop out onto the bedroom floor.”

  Somehow she’d read his mind, considering he’d been thinking just that. He also wanted to believe her, but . . . “Better safe than sorry. We should go now.”

  “Don’t you remember what Dr. Henderly said? We don’t leave for the hospital until I’m in active labor.” She escaped his grasp and crossed the room. “What I plan to do is go change and then climb back into bed for another hour or two while we time the contractions. Once I’m certain I’m actually in labor, we’ll call the doctor.”

  He vaguely remembered Henderly saying something similar at their appointment—hell, was it only yesterday? He beat back the overwhelming urge to sweep his wife up in his arms and cart her off to the hospital, regardless of protocol. He needed to act, not laze around in bed.

  But over the next two hours, that’s precisely what they did. Just when he was on the brink of insanity, Shayla agreed to call the doctor and alert her to recent events. He could have roared in relief. Then Shayla proceeded to get up and dress as though it were any other day of the week.

  All through the morning he watched his wife like a hawk while going silently mad. Finally, unable to stand it for another second, he slipped out onto the deck—while Shayla mopped a perfectly clean kitchen floor—and called Sev.

  He didn’t bother with a greeting. “She’s in labor and won’t go to the hospital,” he announced.

  “Have you called the doctor?”

  “Of course I’ve called the doctor!” he snapped. “Do you think I’m an imbecile?”

  Dead silence met his question, then Sev chuckled. “A subject in need of long and serious debate. But perhaps we should save that for a more convenient time and stick to the issue at hand. How far apart are her contractions?”

  “Every twenty minutes or so.”

  “She’s in early labor,” Sev explained. Maybe Draco would have taken it better if he hadn’t heard the exact same thing from Shayla at least a dozen times over the course of the last several hours. “You never know how long that’s going to last with a first baby. When she gets to four or five an hour for a couple hours straight, load her into the car whether she’s ready to leave or not.”

  Finally. An action plan. “Okay. Now you’re talking. I can do that.”

  “So, is she vacuuming or dusting?”

  Draco shot a hand through his hair, standing it on end. “She’s mopping the damn floor! I mean, what’s with that?”

  Sev chuckled. “Yeah, I drew the line when Francesca decided to scrub the bathtub.”

  “Got it. No bathtubs,” he muttered. “I’m telling you, Sev, they need manuals for this stuff. And by that I mean detailed damn manuals.”

  “Tell me about it. Francesca was the first to give birth, remember? I didn’t have anyone I could call.” After filling Draco’s head with that horrifying image, Sev added, “Why don’t I alert the troops for you?”

  He hesitated. “Are they likely to come over?”

  “The women will, for sure.”

  Draco shuddered. Not a chance in hell. “Wait until we leave for the hospital. I’ll give you a call on the way and you can send out the alert.”

  “No problem.”

  Disconnecting the call, Draco returned inside. He found his wife bent low over the kitchen counter, her hands fisted on the edge in a white-knuckled grip. He instantly came behind her and rubbed her back, gently talking her through the contraction.

  The instant it eased, he asked, “How many is that in the past hour?”

  She checked the notebook she’d been using to keep track. “Five.”

  Son of a bitch! Five? They were at three just a short time ago. What the hell happened to four? At this rate she really would pop their son out onto the floor. Maybe that explained the mopping.

  “Time to go,” he insisted. “Better to be too early than too late, and with tourists overrunning the city this time of year, traffic is always bad.”

  To his relief, she didn’t argue, though she tested his last shred of sanity by insisting on putting away the various and sundry cleaning products she’d pulled out. The next few hours passed in a haze. He vaguely remembered the drive to the hospital, followed by the check-in procedure. Then a nurse showed up and asked ridiculous questions in order to determine his wife’s status. Couldn’t she just look at Shayla and see she was in labor? Did they really need to sit there and pl
ay twenty thousand questions?

  But that wasn’t the worst part. Oh, hell, no. The worst part was the endless hours of witnessing Shayla’s progression from those early contractions to the ones that had her moaning in agony and clutching his hand in a bone-cracking grip while he watched on, utterly helpless. Of watching the monitors that peaked with each contraction and never came down so that he ended up flat-out lying to her, telling her the contraction had stopped and to rest before the next one hit. By that time, she was so far gone, she couldn’t even tell the difference between pain and the absence of it. All the while, he told her how and when to breathe, mopped her brow with a damp washcloth and practically drove his fist through her spine because she wanted him to massage her lower back longer and harder.

  “Back labor,” the nurse murmured sympathetically. “That’s so not fun.”

  When the doctor finally decided Shayla could start pushing, Draco wanted to fall on his knees and offer hosannas . . . right up until he saw firsthand the struggle it took her to push something the size of a Hummer through an opening no larger than the eye of a needle. Somehow, though, she did it. And it wasn’t a Hummer that slid into the world, but his son who emerged with a squall loud enough to crack plaster.

  “Oh, Draco, he’s beautiful,” Shayla murmured. For some reason, she counted tiny fingers and toes, then counted them again as though she might have gotten the count wrong the first time round. “He’s the most gorgeous baby in the entire world.”

  Gently, the nurse transferred the newborn from mother to father, showing Draco how to support a tiny head covered in a tuft of black hair. He stared at his son and felt his heart swell with a love so overpowering, he didn’t think he could contain it. His gaze met Shayla’s, sharing the moment with her.

  His wife. His son.

  It didn’t matter what it took or what he’d have to do. He’d find a way to keep and protect them, to love and provide for them. He closed his eyes. And, ultimately, he’d set them free.

  Draco joined his relatives in the waiting room, endless Dantes overflowing the area. “It’s a boy,” he announced. “We have a son. Eight pounds, two and a half ounces.”

  “And the lungs of an opera singer. A miniature Lucianone,” Rafe joked, using the affectionate name for Pavarotti. “We heard him all the way out here.”

  Sev approached and slapped Draco on the shoulder. “Congratulations. We’re all thrilled for you. With a mother as beautiful as Shayla, you’ll be beating the girls off with a stick before you know it.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Draco muttered. He snagged his cousin’s shirt and yanked him off to one side where they couldn’t be overheard. “There’s a problem.”

  Sev’s golden gaze flashed in alarm. “Is something wrong with the baby?”

  “I think so.” Draco glanced uneasily in the direction of the delivery area. “I think . . . I think I may have broke him.”

  Sev blinked. “Broke him. Broke the baby?”

  “Keep it down, will you?” Draco swallowed—hard—before continuing in a low rush. “When I first found Shayla in Atlanta, I hugged her really tight and the baby kicked, like I’d squeezed him too hard. Then during delivery, she kept begging me to rub her back, you know, as hard as I could.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, forcing out his confession. “I think I smushed him.”

  “Smushed,” Sev repeated.

  “You heard me,” Draco growled. “Shayla kept talking about how beautiful he is. But I gotta tell you, Sev, that baby is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like someone made this beautiful face out of clay and then smacked a fist into it. And . . . and I think it was my fist.”

  “Smush.”

  Draco stabbed a finger in his cousin’s chest. “Exactly. Smush. I smushed his face either when I hugged her or when I was giving her a back massage. But nobody in the delivery room seemed to notice.”

  Sev burst out laughing, the sound ringing across the room. Then he locked his arm around Draco’s neck and knuckled the top of his head. “Idiot.”

  Draco fought free, offended. “Why am I an idiot?”

  “All babies come out smushed. How great do you think you’d look if you’d just been squeezed out like toothpaste from a tube? Hell, when little Lorenzo was born, he looked like the son of Godzilla. But everything popped back into place after a few weeks. Fortunately for the human race, even when they look like the spawn of Satan, all mothers think their precious newborns are the most beautiful creatures ever born to mankind.”

  Relief threatened to send Draco to his knees. “So, I didn’t . . .”

  “Nope. Now, fair warning, if the kid’s seriously ugly after a couple weeks, then you can blame yourself.”

  Draco felt himself pale.

  “Because then you’ll know the poor kid takes after you.” Sev grinned. “And you have to be the most butt-ugly of all the Dantes.”

  Chapter Eight

  As far as Draco was concerned, the next few weeks would have been absolutely perfect if Leticia Charleston hadn’t blown into town on her broomstick, accompanied by her flying monkeys—aka her lawyers. Ostensibly, she arrived to sign the final documents selling the Charleston diamond mines to the Dantes, an endless, foot-dragging, nine-month process from negotiating the original leasing of the mines to the final sale. At least, that’s what she claimed when she landed on their doorstep.

  “Would you deny me the opportunity to see my only grandchild now that the Charleston mines are about to become the Dantes?” she demanded. She glared when he hesitated. “Well?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Draco?” Shayla’s voice came from behind him. “Is that the door?”

  He swore beneath his breath. “I’ve got it.”

  “Who—” She cradled the baby against her shoulder and peeked around his shoulder. “Grandmother!”

  Shit! With a long-suffering sigh, Draco stepped back and allowed Leticia across the threshold. “Come on in.”

  “Gracious as ever,” she snapped as she sailed into the house. She paused to study the tiny bundle Shayla held. Something moved across her expression, something that replaced the coldness with an almost human warmth and longing. And then the look vanished, which pretty much confirmed he’d imagined it. “I assume from the excess of blue the poor child is wearing that it’s a boy?”

  “Yes. We named him Stefano, after Dad, as well as Draco’s maternal grandfather.”

  Leticia’s spine snapped to attention. “Your father’s name was Stefan, not Stefano.”

  “But he’s named in honor of Dad,” Shayla said gently.

  Leticia relented enough to peer down at the baby. “He looks more like you than Draco. I don’t suppose he could be Derek Algier’s son?”

  Draco saw red. “Son of a—”

  Shayla cut him off with a quick shake of her head. “I insisted on a paternity test right after Stefano was born. Even though Draco knows he’s the father, I heard there were rumors floating around Europe that Derek and I had an affair and I was pregnant with his child. I wanted the facts set straight for everyone’s benefit.”

  Leticia chewed on that for a long minute. Based on her expression it must have tasted bitter. “How altruistic of you.”

  “You never give up, do you?” Draco strove to keep calm.

  She whipped around. “Would I rather the boy be Derek’s? In a heartbeat. You Dantes have stolen everything from me. My business. My son. My granddaughter. Now you’ve even hijacked the Charleston lineage, stomping your muddy Dante genes into our pool.”

  “Grandmother!”

  “Fouling the waters, as it were?” Draco suggested coolly.

  “Yes! That’s exactly right. It wasn’t enough you killed my only child.” It was the most passion he’d ever heard from her, her breath sobbing from her lungs. “Now you’ve robbed me of my granddaughter and my great-grandson.”

  “The Dantes aren’t responsible for your son’s death,” Draco stated. “Shayla’s parents died in a car wreck.”

&n
bsp; “Because they’d just found out we were bankrupt, bankrupt because of the Dantes.”

  “First, the Dantes were only partly responsible for the bankruptcy. Granted, you couldn’t compete against our fire diamonds. Not back then. But it was your mines drying up that ultimately ruined your business.”

  Leticia swept that aside as of no account. “The bottom line is you destroyed my son!”

  He wouldn’t let her get away with it. “No, Shayla’s parents died returning home from a night out celebrating,” he corrected. Reluctant compassion flooded through him. “I looked it up, Leticia. I looked it up after I learned you blamed us for their deaths. I read the newspaper account. It was raining. They’d been drinking and took a cab home because neither were willing to drive.”

  Leticia’s chin quivered. “No. They had nothing to celebrate and every reason to despair.”

  “He wasn’t upset about the bankruptcy. They were celebrating his new job. A job with Dantes’ New York office.”

  Shayla stiffened. “Grandmother, is that true? All this time you told me the Dantes were responsible for my parents’ death. But they weren’t, were they?”

  Her face crumpled. “Yes! It is their fault. Stefan would never have gone over to the enemy.”

  “But he did,” Draco replied. “And that’s what you can’t forgive. His betrayal.”

  Tears rained unchecked down her cheeks. For the first time since he’d known her, she looked her age. “He’d never have accepted a job with you people if Primo hadn’t tempted him.”

  Despite the “you people” dig, empathy underscored Draco’s comments. All things considered, he could afford to be generous. “After your husband died, you hoped Stefan could pick up the reins and run Charlestons. But he wasn’t management material any more than Shayla was. He was a designer. An artist. He didn’t have the necessary skills for business.” He dared to take her hand in his. “But you did. Why didn’t you step in, Leticia? You have everything it takes to go head to head with Dantes. You could have given us a real run for our money.”