The Italian's Secret Child

by Catherine Spencer

  The face of an angel…the body of a god…a mouth that made sin seem respectable, and modesty a liability! Feeling herself flush, Stephanie looked away again. “I suppose you’re still too young to know what commitment’s all about.”

  “And you’re able to arrive at so damning a conclusion because…?”

  Defensively, she said, “Well, what are you now, Matteo? Thirty-two, thirty-three?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  As if she wasn’t perfectly aware of that! As if his birth date wasn’t etched in her memory as thoroughly as Simon’s, or her own! “And still unattached. I guess you’re just a late bloomer—one of those men who takes longer than most to mature.”

  “Or perhaps I’m one of those men who waits until he knows for sure what he wants, before leaping into marriage. I’m not a great believer in divorce.”

  “You sound just like my father.”

  “I never thought to hear you admit to such a possibility,” he said. “Indeed, I distinctly recall your telling me that, in my raw, untutored state, I had no hope of measuring up to his rarified standards.”

  Her flush deepened, this time from shame. “I was barely nineteen, at the time. A girl still, very much influenced by upbringing and my father’s expectations of me.”

  “You were a woman in all the ways that counted, Stephanie.”

  The way he pronounced her name, accenting the first syllable and drawing out the last, caressed her nerve endings with sensuous pleasure. “No,” she said, flatly refusing to allow such an untoward response and invoking, instead, the utter lack of feeling with which he’d let her know their affair was over. “I was a silly, naive teenager who thought that when a man said I love you, he actually meant it, when in fact what he really wanted was to get her into his bed. You knew how to flatter me, and I didn’t know enough to recognize that’s all you were doing.”

  “All?” His voice dropped to a purr, and she flinched as if he’d touched her. “You did not come to me willingly? I dragged you from your house and brought you to the stable by force?” He shook his head. “That’s not how I remember it, cara. As I recall, you found much pleasure with me.”

  “Did I?” Languidly, she turned her gaze on the blue expanse of sea, feigning utter boredom with the topic. “It’s possible, I suppose, so I won’t argue the point. But if you want the truth, Matteo, I barely remember the details of our association. I’m afraid they were buried long ago under more significant events in my life.”

  “I was your first lover,” he said—as if she needed the reminder! “I might not have been fit to sit at your father’s table, but I taught you about passion, what it could mean, how deeply it could run. I don’t believe a woman ever forgets such an experience, no matter what might come later.”

  “She doesn’t forget being dumped, either! I remember you grew tired of me rather quickly.”

  “But I’ve never forgotten how you felt in my arms—so fragile and unsure. I remember the texture of your skin, your hair…your touch, your scent….”

  Determined to extricate herself from a situation growing more unbearable by the second, she stood up. “And I just remembered the time.”

  Her legs were shaking, but the fear that she’d collapse in a heap at his feet was the least of her worries. Her brain, on the other hand, was a matter for serious concern. It seemed incapable of stemming the rush of words spilling out of her mouth, regardless of how indiscreet they might be. Already, she was lying to him, and the longer she remained there, the greater the chance that she’d lie again—and again.

  She couldn’t live like that anymore. She wouldn’t.

  “It was nice seeing you again, Matteo,” she said firmly, “but I really must be going.”

  She made to push by him but, to her horror, he detained her by wrapping his long fingers around her wrist. “You still haven’t told me who Simon is.”

  Ah! The breath pinched in her lungs at the one question she most dreaded. She glanced down at his hand on her arm. To her, at that moment, it represented dark male strength pitted against feminine weakness. At last, on a tiny squeaking sigh of defeat, she said the only thing she could say. “He’s my son.”

  In all conscience, what other choice had she? Matteo was bound to learn the truth eventually, and even if he weren’t, she wasn’t about to deny her own child.

  “Son?” His eyebrows rose.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” she replied, tweaking the truth just enough to throw him off the scent. “My marriage might not have lasted, but at least something good came out of it.”

  “Not quite good enough to prevent a divorce, it would seem.”

  “It’s not a child’s job to act as the glue holding a couple together.”

  He lifted his shoulders, his shrug saying plainly enough, even before he spoke, what he thought of her line of reasoning. “No. That responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of the parents, and I’d have thought having a child would be reason enough to work at saving a marriage.”

  “It isn’t always possible. Some marriages are too fatally flawed.”

  He shrugged again. “If I had a son—”

  “Well, you don’t!” she snapped, and could have cut out her tongue. She sounded as shrill as a fishwife, and far more jittery than the conversation warranted. “At least,” she went on, moderating her tone, “I assume you don’t?”

  “No.” His eyes, so dark a brown they were almost black, settled reflectively on her face. “But if I had, I would move heaven and earth to keep my marriage intact. I would not allow my child to be torn between his parents, as if he were just another asset to be divided down the middle.”

  Up at the villa, a small figure stepped onto the terrace and scanned the garden. Recognizing Simon, and terribly afraid that he’d come racing down the path to meet her, she said, “In a perfect world, neither would I, but I learned a long time ago that perfection is seldom within reach. And now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Mom?” Simon called out.

  “I’ll be right with you, sweetie.” She smiled and waved at him, then turned back to the man at her side and said grimly, “Take your hand off my arm, Matteo. Now!”

  But he seemed barely aware of her, and was staring instead at Simon. “So that’s your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope I’ll get to meet him soon.”

  Not if she had anything to say about it! “It’s possible.”

  “More than that, it’s highly probable. As next door neighbors, we’ll likely see quite a bit of one another over the next few weeks.” Idly, he pressed his fingers to her inner wrist. “Your pulse is racing, Stephanie. Do I make you nervous?”

  “Not in the slightest. But you are beginning to annoy me!”

  He lowered his lashes, as if to cover up the amused disbelief dancing in his eyes, and raised her hand to his lips. “If you say so,” he murmured. “A presto, cara. See you soon.”

  She fervently hoped not, but knew there was little chance she’d get her wish. The most she could be grateful for was that Simon had blue eyes and was blond like her, even though his hair was a shade or two darker. He bore no resemblance at all to Matteo, and no one looking at them would for a moment suspect the two were father and son.

  The bickering and backbiting of its residents having finally petered out, the villa lay blanketed by the heavy silence of night. In the room adjoining hers, Simon sprawled in his bed, long ago asleep. But Stephanie, too restless to settle, paced the narrow balcony outside her bedroom, and wondered whatever had possessed her to think, for one moment, that her family was capable of spending more than an hour together before the in-fighting began.

  Not that they resorted to raising voices or hurling dishes at one another. Heaven forbid they should so far forget themselves as to behave in a manner unbefitting the descendants of statesmen on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border! Instead, they delighted in sly, hurtful innuendo; in nasty little digs that slipped past a person’s guard as stealthily as a knife
sliding between the ribs.

  Simon had inadvertently started tonight’s incident, midway through dinner. “Who was that man you were talking to this afternoon, Mom?” he’d piped up, between the main course and dessert, and that’s all it had taken for the rest of the meal to go down the tubes in fine style.

  “He lives in the cottage next door,” she’d said. “I ran into him while I was exploring the garden.”

  “Why was he holding your hand?”

  Dismally aware of all eyes swiveling in her direction, Stephanie had touched her napkin to her mouth and done her best to contain the flush threatening to lay waste to her composure. “He wasn’t holding my hand, Simon. He was shaking it. We were just saying hello again because we first met a long time ago.”

  “A somewhat far-fetched coincidence, meeting him again now, wouldn’t you say?” Her father, ever the dignified professor quizzing a delinquent student, ever the disapproving parent saddled with a rebel daughter instead of a third, perfect son, had inspected her suspiciously over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses.

  She’d held his gaze. “But true, nevertheless.”

  Not liking the defiance he heard in her voice, he’d raised his brows in silent reproof. “Indeed? And does this man have a name?”

  “Of course he does, Victor,” her grandfather said. “It’s Matteo De Luca.”

  “And that’s supposed to mean something to me?”

  “It should. He came over from Italy and spent almost six weeks with us, the summer Stephanie graduated high school. He bought that special tool I invented for cutting granite—the one you said no one would ever want because it would never work.”

  “I have no recollection of any such person.”

  “I’m not surprised, Bruce,” her grandmother said tartly. “That was the summer your father had back surgery and could have used some help getting around afterward, but you chose to remain in the city and were too busy jockeying for Head of Department status at the college, to care how we were coping. Thankfully, Matteo wasn’t, and always made time to lend a hand when it was needed. I don’t know how we’d have managed without him.”

  Andrew, spoke up then. “I remember him! Met him when we came out to the lake one long weekend. Nice guy, as I recall. Played a mean game of racquetball and could swim like a fish. Worked like a Trojan, too. Except when he took an hour off once in a while, I don’t think I ever saw him that he wasn’t up to his elbows in oil and grease, trying to get Grandfather’s gadget up and running. He was a real hands-on kind of guy.”

  “Now that you mention it, I remember him, too.” Cast in his father’s image, right down to the aquiline nose and prematurely iron-gray hair, Victor had curled his lip in a sneer. “Given half a chance, he’d have had his hands all over Stephanie as well, and I don’t think she’d have minded one bit.”

  Stephanie had almost choked on her wine. Victor was the most self-absorbed man on the planet, yet if he’d picked up on the attraction between her and Matteo, it was more than likely that others had noticed it, too. “That’s ridiculous!”

  “It had better be,” her father ordained. “You were taught to uphold certain standards of behavior. If I’d had any inkling that you were monkeying around with some transient laborer behind my back—!”

  “Oh, Bruce, we might not have spent much time at the lake that summer, but I’m sure I’d have noticed if Stephanie did any such thing,” her mother cut in with unusual temerity. One did not interrupt the almighty Professor Leyland when he was in full throttle; one hung on his every word and waited for permission to speak.

  Just to impress on his wife how far she’d overstepped the mark, he let a second or two of thundering silence tick by before replying, “I wish I shared your certainty, Vivienne. Instead, I find myself more inclined to understand why, if sinking to the level of the lowest common denominator is what most appealed to our daughter, it’s such small wonder she couldn’t hold on to Charles.”

  Aware that her cheeks were flaming, as much from anger as embarrassment, Stephanie had shoved back her chair and scooped Simon out of his. There was a great deal she’d have liked to say, not the least being that she’d neither submit to being reprimanded as if she were still in her teens, nor tolerate having her imperfect past served up for dessert. The days when her father’s icy contempt could wound her were long gone, but she’d wait for a more propitious time to tell him so. “I think I’ve heard enough, and my son certainly has.”

  “Touched a nerve, have we? I thought as much!”

  Victor’s voice had floated snidely after them as she hustled Simon inside the house, and it had taken every ounce of willpower for her not to race back to the terrace and give him a piece of her mind he wouldn’t soon forget.

  “Stop it this instant!” she’d heard their grandmother snap. “Stephanie’s quite right. That conversation was un-fit for a child’s ears, and nothing short of offensive to mine!”

  So much for burying our differences, Stephanie thought now, breathing deeply of the balmy night air and striving for a serenity that seemed bent on eluding her. Her father was as overbearing as ever, her mother as easily put in her place, and Victor as unpleasantly supercilious. Only Drew showed signs of a little humanity.

  And if all that didn’t present complications enough, Matteo De Luca had come back into her life, to peel away years of forgetting, and lay bare the pain of remembering how much she had loved him—and how easy it would be to fall prey to his charms a second time. Whoever had first coined the expression, the more things change, the more they remain the same, had known what he was talking about.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THOUGH small, Ischia’s main town, Ischia Porto, bustled with activity. Stands of lemon trees and Indian fig separated the stretch of golden sand from expensive boutiques, hotels and beach shops. But after an hour of sight-seeing, Simon rebelled. Even watching the ferries come in to dock had lost whatever appeal it might once have held.

  “I can see ferries any old time at home,” he whined. “Why can’t we go back to the villa and swim in the pool?”

  “You can swim in a pool at home any old time, too,” Stephanie pointed out, striving for patience, “but you can’t explore Italy whenever the mood takes you. Come on, Simon, this is a real adventure. Just think of everything you’ll be able to tell your friends about, when you get home.”

  “Nobody cares about a bunch of shops and old buildings, Mom! They’re boring.” Cheeks flushed from the heat, he trailed disconsolately beside her along the Corso Vittoria Colonna. “Italy’s boring, as well.”

  From his point of view, she supposed it was. To minimize the risk of running into Matteo again, she’d dragged the boy from one village to the next over the last four days, and it was frankly too much for him. He was only just nine—not exactly of an age to appreciate spectacular scenery, or the history of an island which dated back to the eighth century B.C. But she could hardly explain her real reasons for avoiding the villa.

  “Would an ice cream sundae make you feel better?” she coaxed, steering him to a table at a sidewalk café.

  He shrugged and slouched onto the nearest chair. “I guess.”

  She ordered Gelato Cassata for him, the tiramisu flavor for herself, then took a tourist map from her bag and spread the sheet flat on the table. Surely she could find something to appeal to a boy his age! “How about a ride in a horse-drawn carriage this afternoon? That’d be fun, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess.” About as impressed as if she’d suggested they run behind the horse, with a shovel and pail in hand, Simon scowled and began idly kicking his foot against the base of the table. Thud…thud…thud….

  “What about a boat trip, then?”

  “If you want.” Thud…thud…thud….

  The little vase of flowers on the table wobbled precariously. Steadying it, Stephanie said, “Please stop doing that, Simon!”

  He regarded her apathetically. “Doing what?”

  “Kicking the table. It’s irritating, and
you’re going to knock over these flowers. Eat your ice cream, instead.”

  He stared mutinously at the gelato rapidly melting in its glass dish. “I don’t like it. It’s got bits of stuff in it.”

  “They’re just little pieces of candied fruit.”

  He poked his spoon around in the mess, sampled a tiny mouthful, and made a face. A moment later, the rhythmic thud…thud…thud…started again.

  “I told you not to do that!” she said, annoyance lending a sharp edge to her voice.

  He looked up, startled by her tone. “Didn’t mean to, Mom,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”

  She watched him a moment, knowing she was to blame for the misery she saw on his face. She never should have agreed to a holiday which had “disaster” stamped all over it, even before she knew Matteo De Luca was part of the mix.

  “I’m doing my best here, Simon,” she said at last. “Do you think you could help me out by trying to be a bit more enthusiastic?”

  “I guess,” he said for the third time, sounding more morose than ever.

  Burying a frustrated sigh, she studied the map of the island more closely. Left to her own devices, she’d have headed west along the coast as far as the village of Lacco Ameno, and spent the afternoon browsing through its two museums, but she could well imagine Simon’s reaction to such a suggestion. Conversely, he might possibly be interested in the thermal baths also found there, but she wasn’t having her precious child cavorting in waters reputed to be the most radioactive in Italy.

  She wasn’t sure exactly when she became aware that she and Simon were being observed. All she knew was that, out of the blue and despite the cloying heat, a shiver passed over her skin. Slowly, with an almost preternatural sense of inevitability, she lifted her head. Her gaze immediately collided with that of the man standing across the street beside a small Fiat.

  If she’d had her wits about her, she’d have grabbed Simon by the hand and run in the other direction. Instead, she sat frozen in the chair, a classic example of a deer caught in the headlights, and watched helplessly as Matteo De Luca wove a lazy path through the crowd of pedestrians, and came to a stop at her side.