by Lynne Graham
Amber had certainly not expected such perfect recall of events.
‘Famous last words,’ Rocco conceded in a dark, roughened undertone. ‘Famous stupid last words. Even as I spoke them I was wincing for myself, but I couldn’t resist temptation long enough to do what I should have done. It was always like that with you, bella mia.’
‘I could have said no,’ Amber found herself pointing out in all fairness. ‘But I didn’t. I was irresponsible too.’
‘I was your first lover and I’m seven years older and a lifetime more experienced,’ Rocco countered harshly, swinging back to face her. He had turned a sort of ashen shade beneath his bronzed complexion and his strong facial bones were rigid. ‘But after a few weeks had passed and you showed not the slightest sign of concern, I assumed we’d got away with our recklessness and I didn’t think of the matter again.’
Amber flushed. ‘I thought about the risk even less than you did.’
‘It’s not a risk I’ve ever taken with any other woman,’ Rocco muttered heavily, his lean, strong hands clenching into fists and then slowly unclenching again as if he was willing himself into greater calm. ‘So this is what changed in you, this is why you told me I might regret you coming here...everything is falling into place. Porca miseria...I have been incredibly slow on the uptake. Your bitterness and your anger were there for me to see. But there I was, believing like a plaster saint that only I was entitled to such feelings.’
‘Rocco...’
Rocco lifted his hands and spread them in an almost aggressive silencing motion. ‘I need a drink.’
He had already worked it all out, Amber registered. And although she had not expected him to react as if he had received the good news of a lifetime, she had equally well not been prepared for him to turn pale as death and head for the drinks cabinet.
‘Do you want one?’
‘No...’
‘Neither do I.’ With a hand that was noticeably unsteady, Rocco set the glass he had withdrawn back into the gleaming cabinet and thrust the door shut again as if he was warding off temptation. He settled sombre dark eyes on her. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you—’
‘You’re speaking pretty loudly without saying very much.’ Amber thought that his shock, horror and pallor gave her a fair enough indication of his feelings on finding out that he was a father. Certainly, a woman with a young child was no candidate for a free-wheeling affair and frequent foreign travel. But then she wasn’t about to have an affair with him, she reminded herself urgently.
‘Shock... I think I could have better stood this happening with anyone but you—’
As that statement sank in on Amber, the seemingly ultimate rejection, her tummy gave a sick somersault. ‘How can you openly say that to me? How?’
‘How not? Do you think I can simply shrug off what you’ve told me as if it never happened? Don’t you think that just like you I’m going to be remembering this for the rest of my life?’ Rocco demanded, more emotional than she had ever seen him.
Her brain fogging up in her efforts to understand what he was telling her, Amber gazed blankly back at him.
‘Well, maybe not just like you,’ Rocco adjusted, meeting her questioning eyes with frowning force. ‘But surely taking such a decision was deeply upsetting?’
Amber had had just about enough of trying to follow a bewildering dialogue in which Rocco appeared to have lost his ability to put across clear meaning. ‘Would you please pause for a moment and just tell me in plain English what you’re talking about?’
‘What? I was trying to be tactful. I didn’t want to distress you,’ Rocco ground out between clenched white teeth. ‘But you don’t seem to be that sensitive on the subject, do you? No, scratch that. I didn’t say it...you didn’t hear it. I swear I am not judging you. I wasn’t there to offer support. I know that. I accept that—’
Amber tilted her honey-blonde head to one side and stared at him with very wide but no longer uncomprehending eyes. ‘Tell me, is the word you’re dancing all around but avoiding...abortion?’
Rocco went sort of sickly grey in front of her, a sheen of perspiration on his skin. He nodded jerkily and breathed in very deep.
‘Did I accidentally speak that word without realising it?’ Amber prompted on a rising note of incredulity.
Rocco shook his head in negative.
‘So you just assumed that if I fell pregnant I would naturally rush off for a termination, did you?’
The silence sizzled like a live electric current.
His full attention welded to her, Rocco’s brows pleated. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘Didn’t I?’ Amber sucked in a vast amount of oxygen like a woman ready to enter a pitched battle with extreme aggression. ‘No, I darned well didn’t go off and have an abortion! You have got some nerve just arrogantly assuming that that’s what I chose to do!’
‘Right...right,’ Rocco said again, evidently getting his brain back into gear but not, it had to be said, at supersonic speed. ‘You didn’t have an abortion...you gave birth to our baby?’
He was recovering a more natural colour and straightening his shoulders again, Amber noted. Huge relief was emanating from him in perceptible waves. Amber was utterly transfixed and fascinated. She had never been able to read Rocco as easily as she did that moment.
‘For that, I am very grateful,’ Rocco asserted thickly at nowhere near his usual pace and making a visible effort to shake free of his shock. ‘The other conclusion...it would have haunted my conscience for ever and we might never have come to terms with it. So, obviously, you gave our child up for adoption—’
‘Excuse me?’ Amber’s temper was on a knife edge because she was so wound up.
‘The thought of that breaks my heart too...’ Rocco’s dark, deep drawl shook slightly as he made that emotive admission.
‘Really?’ Amber was back to being fascinated and paralysed to the spot again.
‘But it was very brave of you to go through the pregnancy and face that alone and a situation I will simply have to learn to live with,’ Rocco framed like a guy picking every word while walking on ice likely to crack under him and drown him at any minute. ‘I can...I will, but it is such a terrible loss for both of us, bella mia.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would have been...at least, it would have been for me, certainly,’ Amber heard herself mumbling. ‘And I’m beginning to get the message that it would have been a terrible loss for you too. So—’
Rocco raised and spread fluidly expressive hands in an appeal for a pause in revelation. ‘No more until I have had a drink. I am all shaken up.’
Amber watched him pour a brandy with a great deal less than his usual dexterity. ‘So you like children.’
‘I think so...I haven’t met many,’ Rocco said hoarsely, carefully, and passed her a drink without being asked. ‘But that time I thought I might have got you pregnant, I liked the idea.’
‘Oh...did you?’ Amber studied his clenched profile, recognised that he was still firing on really only one cylinder, and her heart overflowed. ‘That’s good, Rocco. Because, for what it’s worth, your idea of what I would do when I found myself unexpectedly pregnant and without support is very badly off target.’
He focused on her with grave dark eyes, his strain palpable. ‘How...off target?’
‘Well, I didn’t go for abortion and I didn’t go for adoption. Oh, and before you make yet another wild deduction, I did not abandon my baby either or have him placed in foster care,’ Amber informed him gently. ‘In fact, my baby—our baby—is upstairs right now...OK?’
The balloon glass dropped right out of Rocco’s hand and fell soundlessly to the carpet. But it smashed noisily when he stood on it in his sudden surging step forward.
‘If that is a joke, it’s a lousy one,’ he breathed raggedly.
Amber folded her arms. ‘Unlike you, I don’t crack jokes at the most inopportune moments. Freddy’s upstairs sleeping in one of your guest rooms.’
Rocco gazed at her as if she had taken flight without wings before his eyes. He was totally stunned. ‘Say that again...Freddy?’
‘Your son, Freddy...I called him after my grandfather, who was about the only role model I wanted him to follow in my own family,’ she said shakily.
‘Upstairs...here?’ Rocco shot at her incredulously, suddenly recovering his usual energy without warning. ‘In my own home? I don’t believe you!’
‘You want to see him?’
Rocco wasn’t waiting. He was already striding out into the hall. Amber followed his forceful surge up the stairs. ‘Room at the foot of the corridor... Rocco, if you wake him up before midnight, he’ll scream blue murder. After midnight...even around two or three in the morning, he’s bouncing about his cot and positively dying to socialise.’
‘I’m not going to wake him up...OK?’
Amber insinuated herself between him and the door which had been left ajar. She pushed it wider. Light spilled in from the landing and, in concert with the nightlight Amber had brought with her, it shed a fair amount of clarity on the occupant of the cot. There Freddy lay in his all-in-one sleeper which was adorned with little racing car images.
Rocco mumbled something indecipherable in his own language and peered down into the cot, lean hands flexing and then bracing again on the side bars. Freddy shifted in his sleep, looking incredibly angelic with his dark curls and fan-shaped lashes. Rocco’s expression of sheer, unconcealed wonderment filled Amber with enormous pride, but there was no denying that she was in a stupor of shock at the way matters appeared to be panning out.
Like a man in a dream, Rocco was slowly sinking down to crouch by the side of the cot so that he could get an even closer look at his sleeping son. ‘The throwback gene didn’t get him,’ he muttered absently.
‘Sorry?’
‘His hair is dark. He’s not going to get the life teased out of him at school as I did,’ Rocco extended with pronounced satisfaction. ‘He has my nose and your mouth.’
Amber nodded in silence at news that was not news to her, but which she had not expected him to pick up on quite so quickly.
‘Also my brows—’
‘He got your eyes too.’ Amber was in a total daze. Where were the doors slamming in her face, the denials of paternity, the demands for birth certificates, DNA testing and all the other supporting evidence she had somehow expected? Well, maybe not all of that, but at least one or two elements, she conceded dizzily.
‘Where was Freddy when I was stalking you in the woods?’ Rocco murmured.
She explained about her sister’s nanny.
‘Freddy is really something else,’ Rocco declared of his son.
‘He won the beautiful baby competition at the village fête last summer,’ Amber heard herself saying with pride. ‘Opal was furious and couldn’t hide it. She was expecting her daughter...my niece, Chloe, to win.’
Rocco sprang fluidly upright again and cast her a veiled appraisal. ‘We need to talk.’
CHAPTER NINE
ROCCO only walked to the big landing above the stairs and cast open a door there.
‘You’ve accepted Freddy’s yours, haven’t you?’ Amber enquired nervously. ‘He’s a year old next week but he was born prematurely... I had an awful pregnancy.’
‘How awful?’
Scanning the spacious bedroom as he switched on the lights, Amber wondered why they weren’t going downstairs again and asked.
‘I want to hear Freddy if he wakes up.’ Rocco studied her with stunning dark golden eyes. ‘Awful...you were saying?’
‘Well, I wasn’t exactly fighting fit to begin with,’ she pointed out, edgily pacing away from him. ‘I was sick morning, noon and night as well, so I lost more weight. I couldn’t find another job and I couldn’t afford the rent on my flat either, so I had to move into a bedsit. I didn’t have blood running in my veins by that stage, I only had stress.’
She spun back. Rocco was really pale, his bone-structure rigid.
‘Had enough yet?’ Amber prompted.
‘No...’ he framed doggedly.
‘Well, my blood pressure was too high and I ended up in hospital because I was threatening to miscarry. So there I was flat on my back and not allowed to do anything for weeks on end. It was like a living nightmare. No privacy, no visitors, no nothing, just me and my thoughts—’
‘What about your sister?’
‘If you knew Opal like I know Opal, you wouldn’t have been in any desperate hurry to contact her and confront her with your messy mistakes either.’ Amber sighed. ‘But I finally had to call her because I needed my bedsit cleared out and she was really wonderful.’
‘And I was nowhere—’
‘I started hating you in that hospital bed,’ Amber admitted.
‘Am I allowed to ask why you didn’t contact me?’
Amber surveyed him in outrage. ‘After you accused me of stalking you?’
‘Did you know you were pregnant at that stage?’
‘No.’
Rocco just closed his eyes and swung away. ‘I was a bastard. On Saturday, you said I wouldn’t discuss that newspaper story and that that wasn’t fair. You were right, so let’s get it out of the way now and then never talk about it again.’
Unprepared for that subject to be raised, Amber groaned. ‘I went to school with the journalist who wrote that story.’
In astonishment, Rocco froze. ‘You went to school—’
‘With Dinah Fletcher, yes.’ Amber explained how the other woman had contacted her. ‘She said she had only recently moved to London to start a PR job—’
‘A PR job—?’
Amber kept on talking. ‘She was always great fun at school and I was delighted to hear from her. She came over with a bottle of wine. I told her about you but I never gave her a single intimate detail. It was girly gossip, nothing more—’
Rocco sank down heavily on the foot of the bed. ‘She got in touch with you because she already knew that I was seeing you. She set you up,’ he breathed in a raw undertone.
‘Yeah and I fell for it.’ Amber could feel the tears threatening because she still felt sick at the awareness that she had actually enjoyed that evening. She had had no suspicion that Dinah was a junior reporter, ambitious to make her mark, regardless of who got hurt in the process. ‘A couple of days after the story appeared, she phoned and said she hoped that there were no hard feelings and that she was only doing her job. I asked her if it was also her job to tell lies about what I’d said but she just put the phone down on me.’
Rocco viewed her with haunted dark eyes and vented a distinctly hollow laugh. ‘I was planning to tell you tonight that I was now big enough to take a joke—and that at least you hadn’t informed the world that I was lousy in bed and you had to fake it all the time...’ His deep, dark drawl faltered. ‘Now I don’t know what I can say.’
‘Not a lot in your own defence,’ Amber agreed in a flat little tone, but the most appalling desire to surge across the room and put her arms round him was tugging at her. He was badly shaken and suddenly she was no longer feeling vengeful satisfaction. Only as she saw that within herself did she appreciate that she had so badly wanted revenge. The nasty part of her had enjoyed hammering him with all the bad news.
‘I was naive...I was indiscreet and probably I deserved to get dumped because I caused you so much embarrassment,’ Amber conceded in a sudden rush. ‘But it was the way you did it—’
Brilliant dark eyes shimmering, Rocco sprang upright again. ‘I was on the brink of asking you to marry me. Then that sleazy article hit me in the face and I really thought you’d been taking me for a ride!’
Amber’s feet had frozen to the carpet. It was her turn to go into shock.
‘Nothing had ever hurt me so much and I couldn’t face seeing you again. I saw no point,’ Rocco admitted heavily. ‘I could see no circumstances in which that story could’ve been conceived without your willing agreement and participation.’
Amber stared at him with shaken eyes. ‘You were going to ask me to marry you?’
Rocco pushed a not quite steady hand through his bright silvery fair hair and shrugged, but it was a jerky movement that lacked his usual grace. ‘I felt you’d made such a fool of me. There I was ready to ask you to be my wife... I was in the process of buying a house, I even had the engagement ring...and then bang! It all fell apart in my hands.’
‘But couldn’t you have once stopped and thought that I wouldn’t have done such a thing to you?’ Amber pressed helplessly, if anything even more aghast at the discovery that she had lost so much more than she had ever dreamt. Rocco had loved her, planned to marry her. Rocco would have been pleased about Freddy. Rocco would have been there for her every wretched step of the way had not that newspaper story destroyed his faith in her.
‘When I’m hurt I lash out and nothing I can do or say can alter the past. You will say I didn’t love you enough...I would say I loved you so much, I was afraid of being weak and ending up back with you again,’ Rocco bit out in a roughened undertone.
‘Would you?’ A glimmer of silver lining appeared in the grey clouds that had been encircling Amber until he spoke those final words. ‘And all those other women?’ she asked on the strike-while-the-iron’s-hot principle.
‘Anything to take my mind off you and it didn’t work. I didn’t sleep with anyone else for a very long time...and that was lousy too. In fact...’ Rocco hesitated and then forced himself on, dark blood rising to accentuate his carved cheekbones. ‘Everything was lousy until I looked out Harris Winton’s front window and saw you and felt alive again for the first time since I dumped you.’