He towered over her, so that she was forced to tilt her head to study his face. Her eyes were drawn to the jagged scar which slashed across his left cheek. She could not deny that it marred his otherwise perfect features, causing his eyelid to droop fractionally and zig-zagging over his smooth olive skin to the corner of his mouth. But the disfigurement did not lessen the impact of his raw sexual magnetism; rather, it gave him the look of a pirate, or a knight from ancient times.
He was nothing like Beth had imagined a banker would be. His hair was jet-black and fell in a tousled mane almost to his shoulders. The dark stubble shading his jaw was dangerously sexy, and his razor-sharp cheekbones and aquiline nose gave him an autocratic appearance. But it was his eyes that trapped her gaze. Slate-grey, and as hard as granite, they regarded her intently from beneath heavy brows and gave Beth the unnerving feeling that he could see into her very soul.
He was waiting for her reply. She sensed that everyone in the room was waiting, and the silence pressed on her eardrums. She licked her suddenly dry lips. ‘I’m sorry for my intrusion, but I need to speak with you, Mr Piras.’ Conscious of the curious stares of the party guests she added, ‘Alone.’
His frown deepened, his expression so forbidding that Beth instinctively tightened her arms around Sophie.
‘How dare you come here uninvited and disturb my privacy?’
He spoke in perfect English but with a strong accent. His voice was deep and husky, and caused tiny pinpricks of sensation to dart across Beth’s skin.
In the lengthening silence Cesario studied the woman. If she had been alone he would have had no compunction in ordering his staff to remove her from the castle. Certainly if Beth Granger was a journalist he had every right to throw her out. But he could not deny he was curious about why she had brought a baby out on such a wet and wild night.
His eyes were drawn to the child in her arms and his gut clenched. Once he had held his son and marvelled at the perfection of his tiny features. Once he had cradled Nicolo against his heart and promised to protect him. His failure to keep his promise would haunt him for the rest of his life.
A discreet cough broke into his thoughts, dragging him back to the present. He glanced around the crowded ballroom. Three hundred of Piras-Cossu’s senior staff had been invited to the party and all of them, it seemed, were riveted by the scene unfolding in front of them.
‘Come with me,’ he ordered the woman abruptly. ‘Teodoro, tell the band to continue playing.’
Beth hurried after Cesario Piras as he strode across the room and disappeared through an arched doorway. She followed him into what seemed to be a small storeroom, where bottles of wine and champagne were stored on shelves that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. The thud of the door closing made her spin round and she eyed him warily, even more conscious of his height and imposing presence in the confined space.
He did not bother to conceal his impatience. ‘State your business, Ms Granger. Why have you come here? I hope for your sake you are not a member of the press,’ he added harshly.
Startled, Beth quickly shook her head. No … I’m not … I …’ Her voice trailed away. She had rehearsed this moment over and over in her mind, but now that it was here for real she was beset with doubts. It did not help that Cesario Piras was so formidable. Maybe she should say nothing and take Sophie back to England, she thought, unconsciously gnawing on her bottom lip as she struggled to make a decision. But she had given her word to Mel.
She lifted her eyes to meet his hard grey gaze and felt her heart slam against her ribcage. A medieval castle suited him perfectly, she thought ruefully. He exuded an air of power and authority, and she sensed that he was as strong and uncompromising as the granite walls of his castle.
Perhaps he was a sorcerer who had trapped her in his spell? She could not look away from him, and in that moment something happened—something unexpected and impossible to explain. She felt a sharp pain beneath her ribs, as if an arrow had pierced her heart. Don’t be ridiculous, she silently berated herself. How could she feel a connection to a complete stranger? Especially a stranger who was staring at her with grim impatience etched onto his scarred face.
She looked down at Sophie and took a deep breath. ‘I have come, because the child I am holding is yours, Mr Piras,’ she said quietly.
CHAPTER TWO
WAS this some kind of obscene joke? Cesario wondered savagely. What did this unknown woman who kept her face hidden beneath the hood of her coat mean?
‘Explain yourself,’ he ordered. ‘I do not have a child.’ The words scraped a raw wound inside him.
‘Sophie is your baby. She was conceived on this night a year ago.’
With an impatient oath Cesario shot out an arm and wrenched Beth Granger’s hood back from her face, sending a button flying in the process.
He did not recognise her.
He had slept with a few women since he had been widowed, but she was not one of them. Anger seared him. He was aware that his wealth meant that he could be targeted by unscrupulous women hoping to make easy money by claiming that he had fathered them a child. But this was ridiculous; he had never laid eyes on Beth Granger before. Perhaps she had hoped to convince the lawyers that it had been an immaculate conception? he thought sardonically.
He subjected her to a slow, deliberate appraisal, taking in her tangled mousy hair and the drab, shapeless coat that looked as though she had borrowed it from a street beggar.
‘I think not, Ms Granger,’ he drawled mockingly. ‘Undoubtedly I would remember if you had ever shared my bed.’
Heat scalded Beth’s cheeks. Cesario Piras’s meaning was humiliatingly clear. She was far too unattractive ever to have caught his eye. No doubt he was only interested in gorgeous women like Mel had been. Blonde, beautiful Mel had had men lusting after her since high school, and it was not surprising that she had attracted the attention of a billionaire banker.
Compared to her best friend, Beth had always felt like an ugly duckling—and never more so than at this moment, when she was bedraggled and exhausted, wearing a coat she had bought from a charity shop which was several sizes too big. Recalling the scornful glances of the party guests when she had walked into the ballroom, she had a sudden flashback to when she was sixteen and had attended the school prom in a dress that the manager of the care home had lent her. Mrs Clarke had said she looked lovely, but of course she hadn’t. She had looked what she was: a girl with no parents and no money, in a dress that didn’t belong to her.
Sophie would never suffer that kind of humiliation, Beth vowed fiercely. Not if she could help it. She loved the baby with all her heart, but she knew from bitter experience the importance of money. She wanted Sophie to have all the things she had never had: nice clothes, a good education, the confidence that came with feeling that you were somebody rather than a nobody.
Carefully cradling the baby in one arm, she delved into the pocket of her coat and withdrew a photograph.
‘Sophie is not my child.’
She lifted her chin to meet Cesario’s hard stare and held out the photo to him. ‘This is her mother—Melanie Stewart. Mel attended a party in London exactly a year ago. It was a big event, to celebrate something to do with Piras-Cossu taking over an English bank. I don’t know the details. But Mel met you at the party and later you invited her up to your hotel room. It was a one-night stand. She never even knew your name. But she fell pregnant that night with your baby.’
‘What utter nonsense,’ Cesario snapped witheringly. ‘I don’t appreciate having my time wasted, Ms Granger.’
Her story was so unbelievable it was almost laughable, but he was not amused. He plucked the photograph from Beth’s fingers and glanced down at the image of a voluptuous blonde. The picture meant nothing to him. He did not remember the woman. But then he did not remember much at all about the party at the exclusive Heskeath Hotel in Mayfair a year ago, his conscience taunted him.
It had been his duty to attend the reception, or
ganised by the managing director of the new UK subsidiary of the Piras-Cossu Bank. But that night, just as tonight, Cesario’s thoughts had been with his son. For a couple of hours he’d forced himself to make polite small-talk, but he’d spent the latter part of the evening at the bar, drowning his emotions in neat bourbon.
There might have been a woman. He frowned as fractured memories forced their way into his mind. He vaguely remembered a blonde at the bar. He recalled buying her a drink, and he had a hazy memory of dancing with her.
Shock ricocheted through him. Could there be any truth in Beth Granger’s story? Could he have slept with this Melanie Stewart and have no memory of it? He’d been so drunk that it would have been a miracle if he had managed to perform, let alone father a child, he thought derisively. A miracle—but he could not discount the possibility.
Conflicting emotions surged through him: disbelief, followed by self-disgust that he might have had sex with the woman in the photograph and yet retain no knowledge of her or what had taken place between them. He could not profess that he lived like a monk. He’d had one-night stands occasionally, but they had been a mutual exchange of sexual pleasure—not a drunken fumble he had no memory of and which, if this woman Beth Granger could be believed, had resulted in a child—his child.
His eyes were drawn to the baby. A girl—named Sophie. Inferno! Was she his daughter? He felt a pain in his gut, an ache of longing for the child he had lost. Beth Granger could be lying, he reminded himself. For a start, he did not understand why she had brought the baby to Sardinia. Where was the child’s mother?
A tiny cry broke from the baby as she began to wake.
‘She’s due a feed,’ Beth explained, looking at him anxiously. ‘I need to make up her formula.’
The sound of the child’s cry pierced Cesario’s soul. He remembered the first cry his son had given as he had entered the world, and he closed his eyes for a few seconds, praying that when he opened them again he would find that he had imagined the woman and the baby.
She was still there, her attention focused on the child that she was now rocking in her arms. The baby could not be his. His mind refused to accept such an astounding idea. But he realised that he could not send Beth Granger away without listening to what she had to say.
Cesario withdrew his phone from his jacket and pressed a number on the keypad. Almost instantly there was a knock on the door and the butler entered the room.
‘Escort Ms Granger to the library and ensure that she has everything she requires,’ he instructed Teodoro. ‘I will join her shortly.’
The butler dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Please follow me, Signorina Granger.’
Feeling horribly self-conscious, Beth walked back through the great hall after the butler and expelled a sigh of relief when he closed the doors behind them and she was no longer the subject of dozens of curious glances. Her legs felt shaky. She gave a rueful grimace as she acknowledged that her encounter with the master of the Castello del Falco had left her feeling as limp as a wrung-out rag.
He was so intimidating. And so ruggedly handsome, a little voice in her head whispered. Even with that shocking scar. She wondered what had happened to him. How had he come by such a terrible injury? But, recalling his steel-hard gaze, she knew she would never have the courage to ask.
The taxi driver had carried Sophie’s pushchair and nappy bag into the castle and left them on the porch, she explained to Teodoro when he ushered her into the library. While he went to fetch them she laid the now wide-awake Sophie on the rug, and was rewarded with a winsome smile that melted her heart.
‘You are too cute,’ she told the baby girl softly. At the sound of her voice Sophie chuckled and kicked her legs. But Beth knew from experience that Sophie’s smiles would quickly turn to a demanding cry if she was not fed soon. Taking responsibility for her best friend’s baby had been a steep learning curve, she acknowledged ruefully. But never once, not even on the nights when Sophie had simply refused to sleep and cried for hours, had she regretted that Mel had appointed her as the baby’s guardian.
Even though Mel’s wishes had been clearly stated in her will, Beth had had to go through several nerve-racking interviews with Social Services before she had been deemed suitable to have Sophie and allowed to take her home from the hospital. But none of that mattered. The important thing was that Sophie would not grow up in a children’s home, as her mother and Beth had both done.
‘Your mummy wanted me to look after you, and be a mum to you in her place,’ she whispered to Sophie. ‘I will always love you, and I’ll never let anyone take you away from me. It’s just you and me, my angel.’
But that wasn’t quite true. The thought struck Beth as she shrugged out of her coat. There was also Sophie’s father to consider. Her stomach muscles tightened involuntarily as she wondered how long it would be before Cesario Piras appeared. She could not forget those moments in the ballroom when he had studied her with unconcealed contempt, as if she was something unpleasant that had crawled out from beneath a stone. She knew perfectly well that she was plain, and usually she did not care overmuch about her lack of looks, but for some reason Cesario’s dismissive expression had made her wish that she was beautiful and glamorous—like so many of his female party guests.
She sighed. There was no point wanting to be something she was never going to be, she told herself firmly. But she could at least make sure that she looked tidy and presentable. A glance in the mirror above the fireplace confirmed that her hair was no longer secured in a neat chignon but was hanging in damp rats’ tails around her face. There was no time to tie it up again when Sophie needed her nappy changed, and so she quickly removed the last of the pins and pulled a comb through her hair before she knelt down on the rug to attend to the baby.
Cesario strode across the entrance hall towards the library, his tension evident in the rigid set of his jaw. He had delegated to his chief executive the task of making a speech to the guests, and now he was intent on getting to the bottom of Beth Granger’s extraordinary story. His initial shock at her startling claim that he was the father of the child she had brought to the castle had been replaced by a healthy dose of common sense. There were numerous flaws in her story and many questions that he wanted answered before he would give her claim any credence.
It was even possible that she was gold-digger who had invented her incredible tale to try and extort money out of him, he thought darkly. He’d had experience of a confidence trickster once before. Some years ago a young man had declared that he was Orsino Piras’s illegitimate son and was entitled to a share of the Piras fortune. DNA evidence had disproved the claim, but Cesario had never believed there was any truth in it. His father had been a cold, remote man, and his only mistress had been the bank which had now been owned by the Piras family for five generations.
He pushed open the library door and hesitated on the threshold of the room, his eyes drawn to the young woman who was sitting on the sofa cradling the baby in her arms. Without her coat Beth Granger was much slimmer than his first impression of her. She was rather too slender for his tastes, he mused, noting her small, high breasts and the fragile line of her collarbone visible where the top couple of buttons of her blouse were undone.
Her grey skirt and navy blouse looked as though they had been bought from a bargain store, and her flat black shoes were scuffed and well-worn. But, although her clothes were unflattering, she possessed a quiet grace that he found unexpectedly appealing. She was not beautiful in a conventional sense, Cesario observed. But her heart-shaped face, slightly upturned nose and full mouth held a certain charm, and now that her hair was loose he saw that it was a pale golden-brown, gleaming like silk in the light from the lamp and falling to halfway down her back.
He was surprised by a compelling desire to touch her hair and feel its softness against his skin. He immediately dismissed the thought and walked into the room, noting the quick, nervous glance she darted at him. For a few seconds his gaze locked wit
h a pair of vivid green eyes fringed by hazel lashes, before she returned her attention to the baby she was feeding from a bottle.
Images from the past flooded his mind. He remembered being in the nursery with Raffaella, watching her feeding Nicolo. Their love for their son had been the one thing they had shared; the only bond between two people whose marriage had in no way been a love-match.
For him, marriage to Raffaella Cossu had ensured the merger of the Piras and Cossu banks and made him one of the most powerful men in Italy. Driven by ambition, he had considered a marriage of convenience a small price to pay—or so he had believed, Cesario thought grimly. He had liked Raffaella well enough, and falling in love had never been on his agenda. Experience had taught him that love was an overrated emotion—one which frequently led to pain and disappointment.
He had loved his mother once—adored her. But when he was seven years old she had left his father for her lover and he had never seen her or spoken to her again.
‘Stop snivelling like a baby,’ his father had told him when he had found him crying in his room. ‘Do not waste your tears on a woman. You will find as you grow older that there are always plenty more, especially for a man who has wealth and power.’
Power was the golden grail, Cesario mused cynically. For the Cossu family their lack of a son to inherit their bank had led them to seek a merger with the Piras bank by marrying off their daughter to Cesario. Raffaella had obeyed her parents’ wishes, or perhaps been coerced—Cesario had never known. And eighteen months after their marriage she had dutifully given him an heir.
All would have been well if she had not fallen in love with another man. Love had blown everything apart. Raffaella’s decision to leave her marriage to be with her lover, and Cesario’s determination to keep his son—whom he had loved more than he had known it was possible to love another human being—had resulted in a bitter confrontation, and ultimately in the accident which had claimed Raffaella and Nicolo’s lives.
Behind the Castello Doors Page 2