by Kate Hewitt
The apartment building where Mia lived was a two-storey stucco house with an apartment on each floor and a pool in the back. Hers was on the second floor, and he mounted the steps with grim determination. Rapped once, short and hard. Waited.
A few seconds later he heard light footsteps, and then the slip of a chain before the door opened. Mia stood there, the questioning smile on her face morphing into an expression of complete and utter shock.
‘Alessandro…’ His name came out in a whisper.
‘You should have told me.’ The words came out before he could stop them.
Her face paled and one hand fluttered to her throat. ‘How did you…?’
‘So it is mine?’ he interjected grimly, and her eyes sparked.
‘It is a she, which you probably already know, considering you’re here.’
‘Yes, I do.’ He’d forgotten her fire, and how it annoyed and impressed him in equal measure. ‘Are you going to let me in?’
Wordlessly she stepped aside, closing the door behind him. Alessandro looked around the room, noting its bland corporate furnishings softened by familial touches—a colourful mat and baby’s activity gym on the floor, a pink bouncy seat in one corner, a wicker basket of bright toys by the coffee table.
He turned to Mia, taking in how she had changed. Her hair was pulled back loosely, golden tendrils framing a rounder, softer face. Her figure was rounder and softer too, more womanly. She was dressed in a tunic top and capris, casual clothes he realised he’d never seen her in. Of course, he’d barely seen her at all. He’d known her for two days. Two short, incredible, life-changing days.
Neither of them spoke; she regarded him nervously, wiping her palms down the sides of her flowing top.
‘Where is she?’ he demanded.
‘Sleeping in her nursery. Alessandro…’
‘You should have told me.’ He couldn’t get past that. ‘No matter what did or didn’t happen between us, you should have told me.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t forgive that, Mia.’
‘You can’t forgive?’ Her nervousness fell away as she stared at him incredulously. ‘You have some cheek, Alessandro Costa.’
Now he was glaring as well, both of them with daggers drawn, only moments into their meeting. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘What makes you think I didn’t try to tell you?’ She planted her hands on her hips, her eyes furious slits of bright, bright blue. ‘Why do you assume?’
He shook his head slowly. He wasn’t buying that. ‘If you’d tried, I would have known.’
‘Oh, really? You, the head of a huge, sprawling multibillion-dollar organisation? You think a message from a nobody PA would have been passed on?’
He frowned. ‘So how did you try to reach me?’
‘The only way I knew how,’ she snapped. ‘Through the switchboard of Costa International.’
His frown deepened, but he still couldn’t concede the point. ‘There must have been a better way…’
‘And what way would that have been?’ Mia challenged. Now she was the one who sounded angry and aggrieved, the one who was in the right, and yet Alessandro felt she couldn’t be. She couldn’t be. ‘You didn’t exactly want to keep in touch, did you? I didn’t have any of your contact details, and I was under the distinct impression you never wanted to lay eyes on me again. Which was fine by me, because I didn’t want to lay eyes on you.’
Which, absurdly, stung, even though he knew it shouldn’t have. It wasn’t as if they’d had a relationship, or even been friends. ‘A baby changes things, obviously,’ he snapped. ‘A baby changes everything.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
MIA STARED AT ALESSANDRO, a feeling of dread surging along with the anger that had been her instinctive response, even though she knew he had a point. For the last year she’d been fighting a sense of guilt over the fact that she hadn’t tried harder to tell him, but she’d always justified it to herself, telling herself at least she had tried to give him a message, and in any case he wouldn’t have cared anyway. Presumptions, she realised now, that were utterly wrong, because Alessandro looked as if he cared very much indeed.
Now he was standing there in front of her, she felt overwhelmed by the sheer presence of him, too dazed to hold on to a single coherent thought. When she’d seen him at her door, she’d felt the blood rush from her head, and she’d had to clutch the doorframe to keep herself upright.
She’d never thought she’d see Alessandro again. She’d convinced herself that he would never find out, that he’d never look for her, that he’d never care. Clearly she’d been wrong.
Several times she’d wondered about making more of an effort to let him know he was going to be a father, but she’d never felt brave enough, and as the months had gone on and on it had felt harder and harder to do.
Once Ella had been born, she’d been too tired and overwhelmed to think about Alessandro at all, much less worry about him.
But now he was here, looking furious and wronged, and she had no idea what to do about it. After everything she’d been through—terrible morning sickness, a difficult labour and delivery, and Ella’s colicky start to life—she didn’t think she could handle Alessandro’s outrage on top of it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she did her best to stand her ground and meet his stony gaze. ‘But I did try to reach you.’
‘So what are you saying?’ Alessandro demanded. ‘You left a message with the switchboard saying you were having my baby?’ He sounded scathing.
‘No, of course not,’ Mia answered with dignity. ‘I would never be so indiscreet, especially concerning a matter so personal to both of us. I simply said it was urgent and very important that you receive my message, and I asked you to return my call. Which you never did.’
‘Because I never got the message!’ Alessandro exploded. ‘As you very well should have been able to guess.’
Mia drew a steadying breath. ‘That is not my fault, Alessandro.’
‘No?’ Alessandro shook his head slowly. ‘Surely there were other ways, Mia. You could have told your boss, Eric Foster. He has my details. You could have got them from him, and contacted me directly.’
Mia looked away, knowing she could have done exactly that. Guilt needled her again, sharp, painful pricks. ‘To be honest, Alessandro, I didn’t think you’d care.’
The silence that met this statement was thunderous. Alessandro stared at her, his mouth open, his eyes flinty, before he folded his arms across his impressive chest and raked her with a single, scathing glare. ‘You didn’t think? Or you didn’t want to know? You hid my own child from me—’
‘Yes, I did,’ Mia cried. ‘I felt I had to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…because I was scared.’ She hated admitting it, but she didn’t know what else to do.
‘What were you scared of?’
‘You. Sweeping into my life, making demands.’
‘Like seeing my own child? Is that such an outrageous demand?’
‘I was afraid you might ask for something else,’ Mia admitted in a low voice. Alessandro’s eyes narrowed to deadly slits.
‘Ask for something else…?’
‘A termination,’ she admitted, unable to look at him as she said it. ‘You didn’t seem thrilled about a potential pregnancy when you mentioned it to me…’ She trailed off, because the absolutely outraged look on Alessandro’s face kept her from any speech or thought. She shrank beneath his anger, hating that she was doing so.
She’d promised herself never to cower or cringe, and yet here she was, doing both.
‘A termination,’ Alessandro said, and then swore. ‘How dare you make such decisions for me?’
It seemed a strange twist of irony that in trying not to be controlled, she had come across as controlling. Mia sank onto the sofa, overwhelmed by Alessandro’s anger, by the way
everything had been turned upside down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I see now that I shouldn’t have. You just seemed so alarmed by the possibility of a pregnancy…’
‘And you assured me you couldn’t be pregnant! You were on the pill.’
‘I was, but I missed two, because of…well, because of everything.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell me that? To alert me to the possibility?’
‘It seemed such a tiny risk…’
‘Obviously not.’ He wheeled away from her, his anger making him need to move. ‘You made decisions you had no right to make.’
‘I thought I was doing what was best. And it isn’t as if you were checking up or even thinking of me all year, were you?’ she flung at him, tired of being on the defensive. ‘I did an internet search on you, you know. And I have to tell you, Alessandro, what I saw made me less inclined to search you out.’
Alessandro turned back to her, his powerful body taut and still. ‘What you saw?’
‘It looked like you were with a different woman every night.’ Mia lifted her chin. ‘Supermodels and socialites, by the look of them. Your bedroom must have a revolving door.’
‘You almost sound jealous,’ Alessandro remarked in a low, dangerous tone.
‘Hardly,’ Mia scoffed. ‘But from what I saw, you didn’t seem like father material.’ As soon as she said the words, she knew she’d gone too far. Something dark and deadly thrummed through Alessandro, tautening his body, flaring in his eyes.
‘You are not in a position to judge my parenting skills,’ he said in a voice that was all the more frightening in its quiet intensity. ‘That was not your right, just as it was not your right to keep this information—and my own child—from me.’ Mia opened her mouth, trying to frame a response that was not quite an apology, but Alessandro cut across her before she’d barely drawn a breath. ‘In any case, whatever you saw online…those were nothing more than social engagements.’
‘Are you saying it never went further?’ she scoffed. ‘I have trouble believing—’
‘I’m not saying one thing or the other,’ Alessandro replied, his voice rising, edged with ire. ‘It has no relevance. We weren’t a couple. I didn’t know.’ He took a step towards her, menacing in his stature, his pure physical presence. Mia held her ground, but only just. ‘No matter what photos you saw of me online, you should have told me I was going to be a father. End of.’
‘Fine.’ Her voice quavered as her hands once more bunched into helpless fists at her sides. ‘Fine, I should have. I admit that. But…can’t you admit your part in this? Getting rid of me the day after…’ Her voice trembled and broke. ‘The very next day, Alessandro. Can’t you realise how that made me feel?’
Colour slashed his cheekbones as he jerked his head in a brief nod. ‘It would have happened eventually, but I admit, our…liaison precipitated it. I thought working together would be a distraction. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so…abrupt.’
‘So that was you making a unilateral decision,’ Mia returned, her voice shaking, ‘while calling me to account for doing the same.’
‘They’re entirely different situations, Mia. A job versus a baby. You cannot compare,’ Alessandro fired back, taking another step towards her so they were nearly standing toe to toe. Mia felt exhausted by his anger; her daughter was three months old, she’d been going it alone the entire time, and she was hormonal and sleep deprived and very near tears. Still, she took a steadying breath and met his furious, narrowed gaze with a challenging one of her own.
‘I’m not comparing, I’m only asking you to understand where I was coming from.’
‘I can’t understand at all where you’re coming from,’ he snapped. ‘What you did was inexcusable—’
‘Did you come here to blame me, Alessandro, for everything? Because I get it. This is all my fault. Message received. Now you can go home.’ Her voice trembled and tears she was desperate for him not to see stung her eyes. She turned away from him, too tired to keep battling.
She flopped onto the sofa, tucking her knees up to her chest. She’d just put Ella down for a nap and she’d been hoping for a little sleep herself. Clearly that was now an impossibility, which alone was enough to make her cry.
‘I’m not going home.’ Alessandro came to sit on the sofa opposite her, his hands resting on his knees. He gave her a level look that Mia could barely summon the energy to return.
‘What do you want, then?’ she asked tiredly, only to realise how open and dangerous that question was.
Now that she could think about it all properly, the shock of seeing him finally starting to fade, she realised he’d flown a long way for nothing more than a confrontation. He couldn’t have come simply for that. He had to want more. A lot more. But what?
‘I want my daughter,’ Alessandro stated simply, the words icing the blood in her veins and freezing her soul. She stared at him, as trapped as an animal in a snare, as his iron-hard gaze slammed into hers. ‘And I’m not leaving without her.’
Alessandro hadn’t meant the words as a threat, but he recognised that they sounded like one. He saw it in the flare of Mia’s eyes, the pulse that beat in her throat, as her hand crept up to press against her chest as if to still her fast-thudding heart. No, it wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.
‘Alessandro, be reasonable…’
‘Reasonable? What is reasonable about having my child hidden from me for three months—?’
‘I didn’t hide.’ Her voice trembled but he still heard a note of quiet dignity in it that struck an emotional chord within him. ‘Please, Alessandro, for…for our daughter’s sake, can we not play the blame game? Surely we can reach some kind of…of arrangement…’
An arrangement?
Was she hoping to fob him off with some half-baked idea of shared custody, parental visitations? ‘The only arrangement I’m interested in,’ Alessandro told her curtly, ‘is to take my daughter back to where she belongs.’
Mia’s eyes looked huge and dark in her face. ‘Which is where?’
‘Home. My villa in Tuscany. It is the perfect place to raise a child.’ As he said the words, he knew how much he meant them. His daughter would not have the kind of chaotic, unstable childhood he’d had, filled with strangers and strange places. She would have every need provided for, emotional and physical. And that required a home, with two parents fully involved in her life. He would not negotiate on any of those points, as a matter of principle and honour.
Mia pressed her lips together; Alessandro saw the sheen of tears in her eyes, giving them a luminous quality. ‘And what are you expecting me to do? Just…just hand her over?’
It took Alessandro a moment to realise what she thought, what she’d assumed—that he would take their daughter, and leave her here. Did she really think him such a monster? Had she thought he’d been threatening that? He felt both hurt and shamed by the idea.
‘No, of course not. I would never ask or expect such a thing. A child belongs with her mother as well as her father, especially one as young as ours.’ Ours. A ripple of shock went through him at the thought; he had a child. They did. He still couldn’t grasp it fully, the implications crashing over him in endless waves.
‘Then…’ Mia’s worried gaze scanned his face. ‘You want me to go with you?’ She sounded as if she could scarcely credit such a possibility.
‘Yes, of course I do.’ It had been obvious to Alessandro from the beginning, considering his own unfortunate background, and one he would never, ever wish on a child of his own. A child belonged with his or her parents. Always.
He could see now from Mia’s stunned expression that she had not considered that. No wonder she’d been so hostile; she thought he’d been going to steal their child, as if he’d ever do such a despicable thing.
Mia shook her head slowly. ‘Go with you…to Tuscany?
’ she clarified, as if she still couldn’t believe it.
‘Yes.’
‘But…’ Mia continued to shake her head, as if she could not imagine such a thing coming to pass.
‘There is surely nothing keeping you here,’ Alessandro observed. ‘You’ve only lived here a year.’
‘As you know so well,’ she returned.
‘So I fail to see any problem.’
‘You just expect me to—to uproot myself yet again…’
‘For our child.’ As if on cue, a faint cry sounded through the flat, making them both still and stare at each other. The moment spun on, both of them frozen, and then she cried again. His daughter. ‘Where…where is she…?’ Alessandro began, barely able to form the words.
Wordlessly Mia rose from the sofa and went down the hallway to the flat’s bedrooms. Alessandro followed, his heart starting to thud. His daughter.
‘Hello, darling.’ Mia’s voice had softened into an unfamiliar coo as she opened the door to a small bedroom decked out in pale grey and mint green. Alessandro stood in the doorway, transfixed, as Mia went to the cot and bent over it, then scooped up the tiny form that had been inside.
She turned to Alessandro, the baby pressed to her shoulder, one hand cradling her head possessively. She was tiny, a mere scrap of humanity, and so very precious, bundled in a white velveteen sleepsuit.
‘This is Ella.’ Mia’s voice trembled. ‘Do you…do you want to hold her?’
Hold her?
Alarm warred with a deep longing. Alessandro stared at her for a moment, speechless and uncertain for what felt like the first time in his life.
Did he want to hold her? Yes.
Was he terrified? Yes.
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, not sure what to do. How did one hold a baby? He had no idea. He had never held one before.