Secret Love-Child (Mills & Boon By Request): Kept for Her Baby / The Costanzo Baby Secret / Her Secret, His Love-Child

by Kate Walker

  “I think you’re a magnet for disaster, which follows you wherever you go. The pity of it is, it touches the people around you, as my son has discovered to his cost.”

  Chagrined, Maeve said, “Have I never managed to do anything right in your eyes?”

  “You used to dress well enough at least to look the part of a Costanzo wife.” Celeste’s gaze skimmed over her, coldly, pitilessly. “Now you can’t even do that.”

  Although Maeve stood at least three inches taller than her mother-in-law, at that moment she felt herself shrink into an old, all too familiar insignificance. “I have tried to fit in,” she said.

  Celeste let out a snort of contempt. “You will never fit in. You’re a nobody.”

  “You’re quite right,” Maeve said, stung into retaliating. “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I come from very humble origins. But my parents had their priorities straight. They understood what common decency was all about, and instilled in me a sense of humanity you completely lack. What kind of woman rejects another for something beyond her control? More to the point, what kind of mother are you, that you refuse to accept your son’s wife?”

  Celeste turned white around the mouth. “You have the effrontery to lecture me about how a mother should behave? You, who has turned over responsibility for her—”

  “That’s enough, Madre!” Suddenly Giuliana was there, inserting herself between them. “Not another word, do you hear? Maeve, mia sorella la più cara, Dario sent me to find you. Come with me now.”

  “No,” Maeve said, standing her ground. “Not until she finishes what she started to say.”

  “It is not my mother’s place to say anything,” Giuliana insisted, grasping her by the elbow and marching her to the door. “This is between you and Dario. Let him be the one to answer your questions.”

  Shaking from the aftermath of her confrontation with Celeste, Maeve whispered, “How can I face him? This evening is such an important occasion for your family, and I spoiled it.”

  “You did no such thing.” Opening the door, Giuliana almost shoved her out to where Dario waited. “Get her away from here,” she told him urgently. “In fact, get her out of town quickly, before our mother finds a way to finish what she just started. Enough damage has been done for one night.”

  He nodded, wrapped Maeve’s velvet evening cape around her shoulders and ushered her from the hotel to his chauffeured car parked in the forecourt. Bundling her into the backseat, he climbed in after her, slammed closed the door and told his driver, “A Linate.”

  Linate was the airport where the corporate jet had landed on its arrival from Pantelleria, her island prison. “Are we going back to the villa?” she asked in numb resignation.

  “No,” he said. “We’re going back to Portofino, where we began.”

  “Why bother? It won’t change who I am.”

  “You’re my wife.”

  “Take a good look at me, Dario,” she said, throwing open her cape, while the tears she’d so far managed to suppress flooded her eyes. The city streetlights flashed intermittently over her ruined evening gown, turning the stain dark as blood. “I’m a pathetic misfit.”

  He folded her hands between his and chafed them. “It’s only a dress, Maeve,” he said gently. “Not worth getting upset about.”

  “Oh, it’s about so much more than that, and we both know it. It’s my life, disguised under a veneer of highsociety money and sophistication to hide who I really am underneath. Your mother’s right. I don’t belong with a man like you. You should let me go and find someone from your own strata of society to be your wife.”

  “It’s much too late for that.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated, and she realized how often he’d done that in response to her questions over the last weeks, as though he had to launder his answer before daring to utter it.

  Beside herself, she struck out at his arm with her fist. “Tell me!” she cried. “If it concerns me, I have the right to know.”

  “Okay!” He threw up his hands in surrender. “But not until we get to Portofino. You’ve waited this long to hear the whole story. Another hour or two isn’t going to make any difference to the outcome.”

  He’d called ahead for a helicopter to transport them to Rappallo, and for one of his sailing crew to open up the yacht and have a car waiting to drive them the short distance from the heliport to Portofino.

  Maeve was shivering by the time they’d taken the dinghy out to the big boat and climbed aboard, though whether from the cool night air or sheer misery was hard to determine. Not that it made any difference to Dario. He’d held out long enough and it was time to come clean. Peruzzi could say what he liked about waiting for nature to take its course, but Peruzzi wasn’t the one watching Maeve come unraveled.

  Taking her to the aft salon on the promenade deck, he filled two mugs with the hot chocolate he’d ordered prepared, then carried them to where she huddled on the couch and sat down next to her. “Here,” he said. “This will warm you up.”

  She brought her hands out from under her cape and wrapped them around the mug. “Thanks,” she said dully. It was the first word she’d uttered since her impassioned plea for the truth, during the drive to Linate.

  Her gaze flickered around the salon, and after a while she spoke again. “Is this room where we began?”

  “Not quite. We spent that night on deck.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  So he did, leaving out nothing. No point trying to whitewash the facts at this stage. He’d behaved badly and she might as well know that from the start.

  She sipped her hot chocolate and listened without interrupting until he finished, then said, “So we had sex the first night we met?”

  “I prefer to say we made love.”

  Her face registered her disbelief. “How could I have done that? I’d never been with a man before.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Being saddled with a novice couldn’t have been much fun for you.”

  “Fun isn’t the word that comes to mind, Maeve.” Taking her mug, he set it with his on the low table in front of them and clasped her hands. “Even in your innocence, you were passionate and generous, and I couldn’t resist you. But I admit I was taken aback when I realized I was your first lover. You were twenty-eight at the time and beautiful. How is it you were still a virgin?”

  “I didn’t have much time for romance. I was too busy building a career.” She looked at him almost shyly. “I’m glad there’s only ever been you.”

  Had there? Or would she remember another lover, before the night ended?

  “So what happened next?” she went on. “Did we know right from the start that we were meant to be together?”

  Hearing the sudden lilt in her voice, he averted his gaze. “It didn’t happen quite like that. You left for home a few days later and I didn’t expect to see you again. But I found you weren’t easy to forget.”

  “Forgetting’s always easy. It’s the remembering that’s hard.”

  Thinking back to the day he’d proposed, he had to admit that in a way she was right. He’d give his right arm not to remember what happened next….

  Late on a stinking hot afternoon at the end of August, he stopped in Vancouver on his way from Seattle to Whistler. Tracking her down was simple enough. There was only one Maeve Montgomery, Personal Shopper, listed in the Vancouver business pages.

  She lived in the city’s west end, on the sixth floor of a west-facing apartment building in English Bay. The beach was littered with sunbathers soaking up the rays when he arrived. Mothers unpacked picnic hampers and spread towels over huge logs washed up by winter tides. Children held their fathers’ hands and splashed in the shallow waves rolling ashore, their shrieks of glee occasionally rising above the muted roar of commuter traffic headed for the suburbs.

  A pleasant enough spectacle of domesticity, but not something that held much appeal for him, he decided, searching for Maeve’s name in
the list of residents posted next to the intercom outside her front door. There were too many beautiful women in the world for him to tie himself down to just one; women who understood how the game of love was played.

  Is that why you’re here, because Maeve Montgomery’s one of those women? The question came at him out of nowhere just as he was about to buzz her number.

  He stopped with his finger poised. What the devil was he thinking? They had nothing in common, beyond a night they both wanted to forget. Why would she want to see him again? More to the point, why did he want to see her? For a romp between the sheets, when he knew that’s all it would ever amount to for him? To boost his ego at the expense of hers, again?

  Disgusted with himself, he turned away. At the bottom of the steps, a leggy blond in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt had stopped to balance a brown paper sack of groceries on one hip while she fumbled in a leather bag hanging from her other shoulder. The setting sun silhouetted the elegant jut of her hip, the curve of her bosom, the rounded swell of her belly.

  Preoccupied with finding whatever she was looking for in the purse, she didn’t notice him. But he had ample time to study her and what he saw filled him with black despair. The woman was Maeve, and she was unmistakably pregnant. About four and a half months along, he reckoned, recalling how his sister had looked at that stage when she was expecting Cristina. And the last time he’d seen Maeve had been in April….

  He’d reached a critical point in his revelations. Either he plunged ahead with a truth that the experts had warned could crush her, or he stopped now and continued to pray for a miracle that he knew in his heart was not going to happen. Neither the island, Milan nor seeing his family again had triggered her memory. Portofino had been his last hope that he’d be spared having to tell her bluntly how they’d come to be husband and wife. And it, too, had drawn a blank.

  Cool night air notwithstanding, he was sweating. Ripping off his bow tie, he undid the top two buttons of his shirt, strode out to the promenade deck and leaned on the rail, his chest heaving. The moon slid out from the shadow of the castello atop the steep hillside rising behind the town, and shed a pearly glow over the bell tower of the Church of San Giorgio. Closer at hand the sea lapped gently against the yacht’s hull. But overriding them all was the scene unfolding in his memory….

  Unaware that she was being watched, Maeve had hitched her purse strap more securely over her shoulder, shifted the sack of groceries to the crook of her arm and climbed the steps, a set of keys dangling from her free hand.

  He waited until she reached the top before blocking her passage and, removing his sunglasses, said, “Ciao, Maeve.”

  She stopped dead, shock leaching the color from her face. Her mouth fell open, but no sound came forth. Her eyes grew huge and wary. At last, making a visible effort to collect herself, she asked faintly, “Why are you here?”

  “I’d have thought that was self-evident. I’ve come to see you.”

  As if “come to see you” conveyed a message vastly different from the usual, she tried unsuccessfully to hide her thickened waist behind the sack of groceries. “I’m afraid this isn’t a good time. I have other plans for tonight.”

  “Cancel them,” he said flatly. “We obviously have matters to discuss.”

  “I thought I made it clear the last time we were together that I have nothing to say to you, Dario.”

  “That was nearly five months ago. Much has changed since then. For a start, you’re pregnant.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Plenty, if, as I have reason to suspect, it’s my baby you’re carrying.”

  She tilted her chin proudly. “Just because you happened to be the first man I slept with doesn’t mean you were the last.”

  “Quite possibly not,” he agreed, “but nor does it address the question of the child’s paternity.”

  A crimson flush chased away her pallor. “Are you suggesting I’m the kind of woman who doesn’t know who her baby’s father is?”

  “No,” he said pleasantly. “You came up with that improbable scenario all by yourself. And we both know you’re lying because that same kind of woman doesn’t wait until she’s twenty-eight to part with her virginity.”

  “I’m twenty-nine now. Old enough to live my life without your help, so please go back to wherever you came from.”

  “I don’t care if you’re a hundred,” he snarled, infuriated by her attitude. “I’m going nowhere until we’ve established if I’m the one who got you pregnant, so hand over your groceries, lead the way to your apartment, and let’s continue this conversation someplace a little less public.”

  “Don’t order me around. I’m not your servant.”

  “No,” he said wearily. “But we both know you’re the mother of my child, and whether or not you like it, that gives me the right to a lot more than you appear willing to recognize, so quit stalling and open the damned door.”

  She complied with a singular lack of grace and rode the elevator to the sixth floor in mutinous silence. Once in her apartment, she flung open the doors to the balcony to let in what little breeze came off the water, then spun around to face him. “All right, now what?”

  “Now we talk like reasonable adults, beginning with your admitting the baby’s mine.”

  “I was under the impression you’d already made up your mind you knew the answer to that.”

  “Nevertheless, I want to hear you acknowledge it.”

  “Fine.” She slumped wearily onto a padded ottoman and eased off her sandals. “Congratulations. You’re about to become a daddy, though quite how you managed it is something I’m still trying to figure out.”

  “The same way most men do,” he said, her sulky indignation all at once leaving him hard-pressed not to smile. Which would have been inappropriate in more ways than one. She was in no mood to be teased, and there was nothing remotely amusing about the predicament they were facing.

  “I didn’t think a woman was likely to get pregnant her first time. In any case, you used a condom.”

  “Not quite soon enough, I’m afraid, and for that I have only myself to blame. I knew better than to run such a risk. My only excuse, and a poor one at that, is that I found you irresistible.”

  “Oh, please! Once it was over, you couldn’t wait to be rid of me. The fact that you didn’t once bother to contact me afterward is proof enough of that. Which brings me back to my original question. Why are you here?”

  “You weren’t as forgettable as you seem to assume. I was passing through the city and decided to look you up. Now that I am here, however, the question uppermost in my mind is, when were you planning to tell me about the pregnancy?”

  “I wasn’t. All you were interested in was a one-night stand, not a lifetime of responsibility.”

  “I might be every kind of cad you care to name, Maeve, but I’m not completely without conscience. You could have contacted me at any time through the Milan office, and I would have come to you.”

  “What makes you think I wanted you? I already have everything necessary to give my baby a nice, normal life.”

  “Not quite,” he said. “You don’t have a husband.”

  “I won’t be the first single mother in town. Thousands of women take on the job every day and do it very well.”

  “Some mothers have no other choice, but you can’t seriously believe a child isn’t better off with two parents to love and care for him.”

  “No,” she admitted, after a moment’s deliberation. “If you want to be part of this baby’s life, I won’t try to stop you.”

  “How very generous of you,” he said drily. “But explain to me if you will how that’s going to work, with your living here and my being in Italy? A child is not a parcel to be shipped back and forth between us.”

  “You have a better solution?”

  “Of course. We form a merger.”

  “Merger? As in, another company to add to your corporate assets?”

  “Ma
rry, then, if you prefer.”

  “What I’d prefer,” she said tightly, bright spots of color dotting her cheeks, “is for you to take your merger and leave—preferably by way of a flying leap off the balcony!”

  “I’m making you an honorable offer, Maeve.”

  “And I’m declining. I’m no more interested in acquiring a reluctant husband than I’m quite sure you are in being saddled with a wife.”

  He looked at her. At her long, elegant legs, her shining blond hair, the fine texture of her skin and the brilliant blue of her eyes. She was beautiful, desirable, but so were any number of other women, none of whom had spurred him to relinquish his bachelor state in favor of married life. What made her forever different was the bulge beneath her T-shirt for which he was responsible. And in his book, that left him with only one choice.

  “It’s no longer just about us and what we want,” he said. “Like it or not, we are to be a family, and to us Italians, family is everything.”

  “Well, I’m not Italian. I’m a liberated North American woman who well understands that even under ideal circumstances, marriage is hard work. And you can hardly expect me to believe you think these are ideal circumstances.”

  “They are unexpected,” he conceded, “but not impossible.”

  And so it had gone back and forth between them for the next hour or more until, eventually, he had worn her down and she had accepted his proposal.

  He took her out for dinner to celebrate. She hadn’t eaten much because a late meal gave her heartburn. He hadn’t eaten much because the enormity of what he now faced sat in his stomach like a lead weight….

  The rustle of her gown and faint drift of her perfume brought him back to the present. “Dario?” she said, coming to where he stood at the rail and placing her hand on his arm. “What’s wrong?”

  He blew out a tormented breath. How did he begin to tell her?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HE DIDN’T answer, but stood as if carved from stone and refused to look at her. Already at the end of her rope, Maeve shook his arm in a burst of near-uncontrollable fury. “Don’t ignore me!” she raged. “I asked you a straightforward question. What’s wrong?”