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

by Kate Walker

  A shudder ran through him. He inhaled sharply, opened his mouth to answer, then snapped it closed again.

  Never in her life had she physically assaulted anyone. The very idea sickened her. But at that moment Maeve’s frustration was such that it was all she could do not to kick and bite and scratch and do whatever else it took to jolt him into responding. But no, she thought, her anger subsiding into despair. Not just responding. Telling the whole truth for a change.

  “Listen to me,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. “This has to stop now. The searching gazes, the pregnant pauses…I’m tired of them all.”

  To her astonishment, he let out a bark of ironic laughter.

  “You think this is funny?” she gasped.

  “No,” he said, sobering. “Just an unfortunate choice of words on your part, that’s all.”

  “How so?”

  Pushing himself away from the rail, he squared his shoulders and faced her with the dull resignation of a man confronting a firing squad. “Wait here. I’ll be right back with the answer.”

  She watched him go, her insides churning. She wanted to know everything. Wanted it so passionately that it was eating her alive. Yet at the same time, she was afraid, as if, in the deepest recesses of her mind and heart, she knew she wouldn’t be able to live with what she learned.

  He was back within minutes. Beckoning her into the salon, he switched on a table lamp and gave her a rather large white envelope. “Here,” he said. “If it’s true that a picture’s worth a thousand words, this should tell you plenty.”

  Inside was a photograph, the second she’d come across in the last week, this latest of her and Dario on their wedding day. It was almost as he’d described it. Almost. She recognized the Vancouver courthouse in the background, her blue dress, the little posy of white lilies and roses. But he’d neglected to mention one not-so-tiny detail that leaped out at her and left her light-headed with shock.

  Surely, she thought, groping blindly for the couch, it was a mistake? A trick of light, an optical illusion?

  She blinked to clear her vision, and looked again. The picture trembled in her hand like a storm-tossed leaf, but the incriminating evidence remained intact. “Dario,” she whimpered in a voice she barely recognized, “are my eyes deceiving me, or was I pregnant?”

  “They’re not deceiving you,” he said.

  Then that had to mean…

  Her entire body froze, trapped in the path of a conclusion so gravely dark and terrible that to acknowledge it would crush the life out of her. So she attempted to deflect it by seeking escape in the trivial. No wonder she’d sported such an impressive cleavage in the photograph taken last December. No wonder some of the clothes she’d found in her dressing room at the penthouse appeared so roomy. No wonder…no wonder…

  “And that’s why you married me?” she continued, desperate to avoid uttering the word screaming to be heard. “Because you felt you had to?”

  “Yes.”

  For weeks she’d begged him to answer her questions directly, and for weeks he’d edited the facts to spare her feelings. But now that she needed him to cushion the blow, he blasted her with a truth so painful that she cringed.

  Scrutinizing the photo again, she said, “I guess that explains why you look so stony-faced.”

  “You weren’t exactly radiant yourself. We had not planned to have a baby.”

  Baby, baby, baby…

  There it was, out in the open, the word she’d so strenuously tried to ignore. And once spoken, it hovered in the atmosphere, a devastating, debilitating accusation that shot her from limbo straight into hell.

  “What happened to it?” she whispered, caught in a web of indescribable horror. “Is that why I feel so empty inside—because I miscarried?”

  “You didn’t miscarry.”

  This time his stark reply pierced the heavy bank of fog that had been her constant companion for so long and shredded it to ribbons. They began to shift and part, letting in terrifying fragments of memory.

  The salon grew dark and fearful, inhabited by ghosts that threatened to devour her. Moaning, she threaded her fingers through her hair and dug them into her scalp. Touched the scar now so well concealed. But the images and sounds leaked through its healed incision.

  She relived the sudden jarring impact of a car leaving the road and careening out of control toward the edge of a cliff. Heard again the hideous shriek of tearing metal, the splintering of glass.

  She saw the man beside her slumped over the wheel, and herself scrabbling wildly to release her seat belt so that she could climb into the back of the car, because her baby was there, imprisoned in his infant safety seat. Except it wasn’t safe at all because the car was rocking and spinning, and she had to free him, had to get him out of there and save him, because he was her darling, her precious son, and she would give her life for him.

  She saw the thin line of blood oozing down his pale, still face. Felt herself drowning in his terrifying, soulscreaming silence. And then the world was turning upside down, and the sea was rushing up to meet her, and there was nothing but darkness.

  Until now, when the light of her failure shone too brightly before her and so many fragmented pieces came together to make a horrifying whole.

  The locked room on the island had been his nursery, filled with magical things to entertain him and keep him safe. Mobiles and music boxes; soft blankets and tiny sleeper sets. A quilt she’d made before he was born. Lullabies she’d sung. Books she’d read to him, even though he was too young to understand the meaning: Counting Kisses and Goodnight Moon.

  Oh, sweet heaven! Oh, dear God, please, please…!

  The floor came up to meet her as she crumpled over, hugging herself to keep the pain from splitting her in half.

  “Maeve?”

  She was dimly aware of Dario sinking down beside her, his arms trying to draw her upright on the sofa, his voice layered with concern. In a fit of unprecedented agony, she sagged against him. “How can you bear to be near me?” she sobbed. “How can you bear to touch me? Because of me, our beautiful little boy is dead.”

  “Not so,” he crooned, stroking her hair.

  “He is,” she wept, driven to near madness by her grief. “I remember it all.” Her breath caught at the endless horror movie rolling through her mind. “Dario, I saw him.”

  Grasping her by the shoulders, he shook her gently but firmly. “Whatever you think you saw, Sebastiano is not dead, amore mio. Do you hear me? He is not dead.”

  “You’re lying,” she cried, flailing wildly to break free from his hold. “You’ve been lying to me all along.”

  “Yes, I have lied,” he admitted. “By omission. To protect you until you were ready to face the truth. But I would never lie about this. I give you my word that our son is alive and well.”

  Her adorable baby, with his gummy smiles and big blue eyes, whose skin was softer and sweeter smelling than a rose petal, was not alive. He couldn’t be.

  “His car seat saved him, Maeve.”

  “No,” she said brokenly. “I saw the blood. I saw it, Dario.”

  “It was nothing. A minor cut caused by something flying loose in the car from the impact.”

  His certainty, the ring of truth in his words, let a crack of light into the darkness inhabiting her soul. “A minor cut? That was all?”

  “Not quite. He suffered a bruised spleen, as well, and was hospitalized for a few days, but he’s fine now. More than fine. He’s thriving.”

  “Then, where is he?” she cried, her arms aching to hold him. “Why haven’t I seen him since I left the hospital?”

  “I sent him to live with my family until you were better.”

  “Your family?” She recoiled as if he’d slapped her. “If he’s with your mother—”

  “He’s not with my mother. Giuliana has been looking after him on Pantelleria. He’s there now, with her daughter and their nanny.”

  She hadn’t thought Dario could shock
her more than he already had, but the sheer audacity of his last disclosure took her breath away. “All this time he was practically living next door and you didn’t tell me?” And to think she’d felt guilty about sneaking around behind his back! “How dare you!”

  “Maeve…” He went to pull her into his arms.

  She shook him off. “You kept him from me.”

  “From me, too, and if you think it was easy, you’re wrong.” He threw up his hands in surrender. “Stop looking so wounded. I did what I thought was best.”

  “Best for whom?”

  “For you, Maeve. I thought—”

  “I don’t care what you thought. I want my son.” The wretched tears started again, weakening her when she most needed all her strength. “Damn you, I want my baby!”

  “Tomorrow,” he promised. “We’ll go back to the island first thing tomorrow.”

  “No. I want to go to him now.”

  “Be reasonable, Maeve. It’s after midnight. There’s no way we can get there tonight.”

  “Sure there is. You’re Dario Almighty Costanzo. You can charter a jet as easily as other men hail taxis. You can make a child disappear so that no trace of him remains to remind his mother he ever existed. How do I know you haven’t sent him away where I’ll never find him?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Dario said sharply. “I’ve done nothing of the sort. On the recommendation of your doctors, I hid all reminders of him until such time as you, of your own accord, were well enough to cope with the events that brought about the accident.”

  “You had no right. You’re not God.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m merely your husband, as subject to making mistakes as any other mortal. In hindsight, perhaps I did the wrong thing, but at the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, at the time, I thought I was acting in your best interests.”

  “When is keeping a mother from her child ever in anyone’s best interests, Dario?” she asked bitterly.

  “When the mother has been traumatized to the point that she has no recollection of giving birth,” he suggested, then, regarding her steadily, went on, “Or perhaps if there is reason to believe that said mother intends to desert her husband and abscond with their child.”

  She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Abscond?”

  “Run away,” he amended helpfully.

  “I understand what the word means,” she snapped. “What I don’t understand and certainly don’t like is that you’d think me capable of such a thing.”

  “I don’t like it, either, but the facts appeared to speak for themselves.”

  “What facts?” she said scornfully.

  He subjected her to another steely gaze. “You had most of Sebastiano’s things with you in that car, Maeve—his clothes, his favorite toys, even his baby swing—as well as a suitcase of your own stuff. You were with Yves Gauthier, a man who’d shown up out of nowhere in June and who’d insinuated himself into your life so thoroughly that everyone on the island was buzzing about it.”

  “We were fellow ex-pats. It was natural we should become friends.”

  “Was it natural for him to lease a villa for three months, then suddenly be headed for the airport within a few weeks, with a return ticket to Canada, via Rome, tucked inside his passport?”

  “Did I have a ticket to Rome tucked in my passport? Come to that, did I even have my or Sebastiano’s passport with me?”

  “No. But in view of the fact that, the day before, you and I had had a flaming row at the end of which you told me in no uncertain terms to leave you the hell alone, you can scarcely blame me for entertaining doubts about what you had in mind.”

  “I remember our arguing,” she said, the sequence of events falling into place with disturbing accuracy. “We fought because you wanted me to come back to Milan with you, and I said I wouldn’t because that meant putting up with your mother forever interfering and trying to take over with Sebastiano. You said you hadn’t given up your bachelorhood to live like a monk, and if that’s what I thought marriage was all about, I was mistaken. You told me to grow up and learn to stand on my own two feet. And then you left—went stamping off without so much as a goodbye.”

  “That’s more or less it, yes.”

  “I walked the floor all night after you’d gone, knowing you were right. If your mother bullied me, it was my fault for letting her get away with it, and up to me to put an end to it. But by running away from you?” She shook her head incredulously. “I was running to you. To you, Dario Costanzo, because I decided to be the wife you deserved, instead of sniveling in the corner like a whipped puppy.”

  “Then where did Gauthier fit into the picture?”

  “He didn’t. His only sin was coming by the next day to tell me he had to return home for health reasons. He had a heart condition that flared up again unexpectedly. I recall thinking he didn’t look well and that it was a good thing he was going back to get treatment, but that’s about the extent of it because my concern was mainly with you and our marriage. He had to drop off his rental car at the airport, and offered to give me a lift. He might have been en route to Canada via Rome, but I was headed straight to you in Milan.”

  “And that’s all there was to it?”

  “In a nutshell. But since you seem to have so little trust in me or my judgment, why don’t you ask Yves yourself?”

  “I can’t. He died in the accident. In fact,” Dario said bluntly, “he caused it, though not through any fault of his own. Apparently, he had a heart attack while he was at the wheel.”

  She pressed her fingers to her mouth, assailed by one shock too many. “Oh, no! I’m sorry to hear that. I had no idea he was so seriously ill. He was such a gentle person, so kind, and much too young to die.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of more bad news. And I’m sorry that I doubted your loyalty. I’m your husband. I should have trusted you.”

  “But you didn’t, and maybe the reason is that you were looking for an excuse to be rid of me.”

  “What the devil are you talking about? I married you, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, the memory of their early days together rising sharp and clear in her mind. “You put on a very good front, were every bit the dutiful husband, both in public and in the privacy of our bedroom, but a front is all it ever was. You proposed only because, when you found out I was expecting your baby, you felt you had no other choice.”

  “There’s a strong element of truth in that, I admit.”

  She winced, and wondered why this admission, coming as it had on top of others much worse, should leave her feeling so miserably hollow inside. Hadn’t she told herself, their last morning in Tunis, that he was a man of honor who would never shirk his responsibilities? Well, that she could still call herself his wife was living proof she’d been right.

  “But let me point out that I didn’t know you were pregnant when I went to the trouble of looking you up in Vancouver,” he continued. “That I did because I cared about you.”

  She nodded sadly. “‘Cared about’ is certainly a nice, inoffensive way of putting it.”

  “What else do you want me to say?”

  “That you were at least a little bit in love with me when you married me, as I was with you.”

  “I can’t,” he said, the candor she’d once found so disarming striking a fatal blow. “Love came later.”

  “Did it? You never once told me so. How do you think it made me feel that all the time I was falling more deeply in love with you, you never once said, ‘I love you, Maeve’?”

  “I’d have thought it was self-evident. If you remember as much as you say you do, you can’t have forgotten the nights we spent making love.”

  “Sex was never a problem for us, Dario. The last few weeks are proof enough of that.”

  “It was more than sex.”

  “Not the night I conceived, it wasn’t. You made that abundantly clear the next day.”

  “I know. And nothing I say now can excuse my actions
then. The best I can do is tell you I will regret them for the rest of my life. I treated you appallingly for something that was entirely my fault.”

  “By seducing me, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked so haunted, so miserable, that she felt constrained to say, “In all fairness, you didn’t exactly drag me off kicking and screaming.”

  “That doesn’t absolve me of what followed. All the signs of your innocence were there, if only I hadn’t been too self-absorbed to recognize them. Your timidity, your almost catatonic submission…only much later, after we were married, did I realize that you always react that way when you feel under fire or inadequate.”

  “Was I very inadequate, that first night?”

  “No,” he said, his gaze soft and warm. “Your honesty and generosity were beautiful. They were what made you so hard to forget. You were like no other woman I’d ever known. I might not have planned to marry you, amore mio, but I can tell you in all truth, that I now consider it to be the best decision I’ve ever made.”

  “I want to believe you, Dario, I really do,” she sighed. “But I keep coming back to the fact that you couldn’t be honest with me. You let me think we were on a second honeymoon, when all the time you harbored suspicions that I was going to leave you and take Sebastiano with me. Although,” she added, conscience again prodding her to acknowledge that she’d brought some of that on herself, “I suppose I did give you reason to doubt me.”

  “Does any of it really matter now?” he said, catching her hand and drawing her to him. “This is no longer about what happened in the past, Maeve. It’s about you and me, and where we go from here. Mistakes have been made on both sides. Can we not learn from them, forgive ourselves and each other and start over?”

  She felt torn clean down the middle, half of her wanting to hate him for deceiving her so well. And half of her simply wanting him. “I’d like to think so, but the way you cut me out of Sebastiano’s life, and hid all evidence that he’d ever been born, and kept everyone else away from me…you treated me as if I’d died!”