Convenient Brides by Lindsay Armstrong, Catherine Spencer, Melanie Milburne

silence. Weak as a newborn lamb, she sagged against him.
    His shirt was soaked, but he didn’t seem to mind. Beneath the soggy fabric, his heartbeat, tireless and invincible, marked the passing seconds, its driving energy hers to use for howeverlong she might need it. In a world gone increasingly crazy, he alone offered the haven she craved.
    Eventually he said, “Feeling better, Caroline?”
    Sounding like a woman with a serious adenoidal condition, she sniffled, “I suppose. It’s just so hard to accept that Gina wouldn’t turn to me for comfort. I understand it, up here.” She rapped her knuckles against her aching head. “I’m practically a stranger to her, after all. But my heart can’t seem to get the message.”
    He stroked her hair; long, sweeping caresses of the kind a man might employ to soothe a frightened mare. “You do know you overreacted to her just now, don’t you? That this is about more than just the children?”
    “Yes,” she admitted, perilously close to being swept under by another tidal wave of self-pity. “Every time I think I’ve accepted Vanessa’s death, it jumps up and bites me in the face all over again, and the least little thing sets me off. I’m an emotional wreck.”
    “You’re allowed to be. We all are. Just because we’ve paid our last respects to those we love, doesn’t mean we’re over losing them.”
    “But it’s not good for the children to see adults unable to cope. It frightens them.”
    “Exactly. They need a return to stability.” His hand stilled briefly, and when he spoke again, his voice was laden with a huskiness she couldn’t quite decipher. “They need us in harmony, cara mia. ”
    She was beginning to think she needed him, far more than she’d ever have guessed. For reasons that defied logic, the man who’d once torn her life to pieces seemed to be the only one who could make her feel whole again. “Do you really believe we can make a go of marriage, Paolo?”
    “Yes,” he answered, without a second’s hesitation. “I absolutely do.”
    Trying to maintain a thread of common sense, she argued, “But apart from our both being committed to the children, what else do we have in common?”
    He drew his hand down her face and cupped her cheek in his long, elegant fingers. “How about the fact that I find myself wanting more and more to stand between you and anyone who tries to hurt you, my lovely lady? That when I see you cry, I want to take your sadness and turn it to laugher? And if those are not reasons enough to convince you, then what if I tell you that, despite everything that has gone before, I trust you and want very much for you to know that you can trust me.”
    “Trust takes times, Paolo,” she countered. “Like respect, it’s something that has to be earned.” And as long as I keep the secret of the twins’ paternity from you, I deserve neither your trust nor your respect…
    “Some things a man has to take on faith, Caroline,” he said, his dark, beautiful eyes scouring her face.
    Her heart pinched in guilty pain. “And you believe it’s worth it, to give up your single life for a woman you barely know?” she asked, struggling to turn a deaf ear on her conscience. She had to be sure, before she told him, she reasoned. Spilling out the truth prematurely could hurt their chances of making the marriage work for reasons other than convenience.
    He’d suggested a trial period of one year, but she was still looking for a happy ending to last a lifetime. Crazy though she might be, she’d fallen in love with him nine years ago, and realized she loved him still. All that foolish business to do with her legal rights to the children—what had that been about, really, but a desperate attempt to defend herself against his hurting her again?
    She had come prepared for a battle that had never taken place, she realized, and that she’d entertained, even for aminute, the idea of using the children as a weapon, left her sick with