Simon, of the blond hair and blue eyes, his son? Matteo had reeled at the idea. “Impossible!” he’d scoffed.
“If DNA proof is what it takes to convince you,” she said, with a curious lack of emotion, “it can be arranged.”
Who did she think she was, that she could play fast and loose like that with other people’s lives?
But that side of his brain remaining detached from the unfolding scene had told him he didn’t need laboratory proof. Stephanie wasn’t lying. A bone-deep instinct that approached paranormal proportions told him she was speaking the truth, perhaps for the first time since he’d known her.
What made it so much worse, though, was that he’d actually wondered, back when she’d first arrived on Ischia and been so skittish every time she saw him, if he could possibly be her son’s father. Something about the boy, the easy way he’d connected with the child, had struck a strangely unnerving chord.
And damn him—damn her!—he’d ignored it. Decided she was too scrupulously honest to pull off such a deception. Decided it was just wishful thinking on his part, and that he’d be better off concentrating his attention on her, the primary object of his affections, and forgetting about Simon until he’d reeled in Stephanie.
What point was there, after all, in disrupting the kid’s life if he, Matteo, was not destined to be a vital part of it? Time enough to cement a bond with the boy when he knew the mother was his for the asking.
“Un brindisi!” From the other end of the table, his slightly inebriated second cousin, Jacomo, struck his wineglass with his fork, bringing all eyes on him. “To Matteo and his lovely Canadesa Stephanie! Welcome to our family, Signora!”
“Grazie,” she murmured, behaving exactly as a well brought-up Leyland should. Masking her misery behind a thin, impenetrable reserve, and responding with the subdued courtesy of the perfect guest not about to take more for granted than was willingly offered.
But Matteo saw how tightly she gripped the stem of her wineglass. Saw how she fought to control the agitated rise and fall of her breasts beneath the filmy dark blue fabric of her dress.
If his mother or grandmother noticed her distraction, they gave no sign. Instead, as Jacomo entertained everyone with snatches of song from The Marriage of Figaro, they showered her with warm, encouraging smiles. Nodded their approval. Did damn near everything but stand up and proclaim her their future daughter-in-law.
“You don’t have to,” she’d admitted in a trembling whisper, when he’d demanded of her how he should break news of his son to his immediate family. “I’ve already told them.”
He’d sworn fluently and thrown a savage punch at the wall. “So I’m the last to know?”
Unable to look him in the eye, she’d cast her glance aside and nodded. “I didn’t mean for it to come out like this, Matteo.”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” he’d replied. “I’m sure, if you had things your way, you’d have gone to your grave without telling a soul.”
She’d swung back to face him at that. “No! I had every intention of confessing to you before this weekend was over. I couldn’t bear the guilt a moment longer.”
“So you chose now to rid yourself of it, with the house full of relatives in a party mood? Why, Stephanie? Did you think their presence would force me to meekly accept this astounding revelation, and spare you the consequences of your actions?”
“Listen to me,” she’d begged, trying to grab hold of his hands, a move he’d avoided with unbridled distaste. He wanted none of her—not the touch of her soft, smooth skin, not her lying mouth, not her piteous, tear-glazed eyes. “I didn’t—”
“Save it!” he spat.
“But I have to explain, Matteo!”
“You most assuredly do, but at a time of my choosing, not yours. At this moment, my mother’s household staff is waiting to serve a celebratory dinner destined to last well into the evening. We have fourteen visiting family members eager to sit down at our table, and unable to do so because etiquette demands they wait until the guest of honor chooses to join them—not, I suppose, that you ever expected any blood relative of mine to recognize the rules of socially acceptable behavior, let alone abide by them.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, she cried, “I can’t face them! Not with this hanging over us.”
“Why ever not, cara Stephanie, la mia bella bugiardo? You’ve managed to conduct yourself with admirable aplomb this far, despite your professed burden of guilt. What’s another hour or two, or ten? What’s another day, or week?”
“Please, Matteo, don’t force me to go through with this. Make my excuses, I’m begging you!”
“Not a chance in hell! You might not care one iota about embarrassing yourself, but I will not permit you to embarrass me or my family. So wipe the falso grief from your deceiving face and replace it with something more suited to the occasion.”
“I won’t!” she said brokenly. “I can’t!”
He did touch her then, clamping his hand around the delicate skin of her upper arm and marching her to the door. “You can, and you will.”
She could, and she had! The animated talk, the level of laughter as his cousins reminisced about childhood exploits and misdemeanors, Jacomo’s irrepressible urge to serenade the party growing stronger with each glass of wine he consumed, told Matteo clearly enough that they all remained unaware of the steely tension stretching between him and her.
The conviviality scraped his nerves raw. He wanted to slam the flat of his hand on the surface of the long polished table, hard enough to rattle the sterling silver and send the heavy crystal skidding. Wanted to bellow his pain and outrage for the whole world to hear.
Cloaking his churning emotions, he leaned back, toyed with his glass, laughed in all the right places, and generally projected the air of a relaxed host enjoying the good company of his nearest and dearest. Everyone was too busy having a good time to notice that he contributed little to the conversation, or that Stephanie’s head drooped like a fading flower on the delicate stem of her neck. None but he saw the lone tear drizzle down her cheek, to be swallowed up by her napkin as she made a pretense of dabbing the corner of her mouth.
That she ate nothing of the food placed before her was something only Emanuel realized. The ultimate inscrutable maggiordomo, he betrayed not a vestige of surprise and merely whisked away her untouched plate, and replaced it with another.
Matteo wished he could take pleasure in what he observed of her misery. He wished knowing that she’d brought it on herself gave him satisfaction. He wished he could hate her.
Instead, her fragile inner core undid him. He had every right to despise her for all she’d denied him and their son. But damn her, he couldn’t ignore the crushed vulnerability in her eyes, the sad and trembling curve of her mouth.
And it infuriated him.
The chance to escape didn’t arise until everyone moved from the dining hall to the evening salon, for espresso and grappa. In the ensuing hullabaloo, Stephanie managed to slip through the door to the east wing without anyone noticing.
The enormous strain of preserving a front before a roomful of well-intentioned strangers had taken a fearsome toll. Physically and emotionally drained, she sagged against the wall and listened as the buzz of voices, bursts of laughter, and occasional snatches of operatic aria faded to a distant murmur.
She envied Matteo his large, close-knit family, so different from her own, but tonight they exhausted her. Nothing they offered in the way of diversion could take her mind off the disastrous events before dinner, and not all their collective warmth was enough to counteract the pervading chill of Matteo’s icy displeasure.
Dejectedly, she leaned against the window and gazed out on a night freckled with stars; a night so beautiful that it hurt to look at it. One so haunted with pain and useless regret that she wished she could wipe the memory of it clean from her mind, and knew she’d never be able to.
At length, she marshaled her flagging energy, and stumbled down the long hall
to her suite of rooms. Of course, he’d be furious that she’d deserted the party. But any more furious than he already was? She doubted that was possible. And regardless, she was at the end of her social rope.
Matteo’s outrage and her own beleaguered attempt not to disgrace herself in front of his family had, of necessity, taken precedence thus far into the evening. But the other half of the equation had lurked in the background long enough and was no longer content to take second billing.
How could she minimize the damage already inflicted on her relationship with Matteo? And more important, how did she permit the truth of Simon’s paternity to emerge without shattering the child’s trust?
“Your dead husband and I aren’t interchangeable parts,” Matteo had raged, when she’d dared suggest he could at long last assume his rightful place in his son’s life.
“But if I explain—”
“What? That you wilfully misled him, and knowingly kept his real father from him all these years? How does your warped little mind justify having done that, Stephanie?”
Plainly put, there was no justification. Nothing excused denying a boy his father, or a father his child. Whatever had made her think differently?
Defeated before she’d even begun to resolve the crisis her life had become, she pushed open the door to her suite. It swung silently inward to reveal the moon shining its light through the tall Palladian windows and turning to dull silver everything it touched.
This, she thought, surveying the scene through a mist of tears, was Simon’s true inheritance. Not the material wealth represented by the elegant antique furnishings, but the legacy of timeless security inherent in the very atmosphere of the place. She had robbed him of that, of the acceptance of this loving family, and subjected him instead to life with a single mother whose need to provide well for him had necessitated placing him in the care of strangers.
How could she expect him to believe she’d thought she was acting in his best interests?
Wretchedly, she stooped to take off her high-heeled satin pumps and made her way barefoot over the smooth marble floor to the bedroom. The domestica had turned back the covers on the four-poster, and left a lamp burning on the mirrored dressing table, and a thermos of ice water on the nightstand.
The plump pillows and cool white sheets offered temporary solace from all that beset her, and Stephanie, so bone weary she could barely stand, didn’t even try to resist the escape they promised. Now was not the time to figure out how she was going to cope with the crucial situation facing her. Not with exhaustion sapping her of the ability to think clearly.
Someone once said that the darkest hour lay just before dawn, and who was she to argue the point? Maybe things wouldn’t look quite so black in the morning. Perhaps in sleep the answers she so desperately sought would come to her.
She stripped off her dress and hung it in the armoire, then removed her jewelry, and took a fresh nightgown from the tall chest of drawers. The sheer ordinariness of such rituals bolstered her spirits a little by reminding her that, no matter how bad things might seem at this very moment, life did go on. This day would pass.
But respite was not to be so easily come by, after all. Fifteen minutes later, when she emerged from the bathroom, she found Matteo waiting. Eyes glittering in the dim light, he advanced toward her, and he didn’t need to put into words the fact that he was livid with rage. It oozed from every pore. Was printed in cold fury on his face, in the lethal clenching and releasing of his fists.
She’d always known him to be a man of great passion but she’d never thought to see it like this, corrupted by anger to an ugliness that left her quaking. She’d never thought she could be so afraid of him. But at that moment, fear rose up her throat and filled her mouth with metallic urgency.
Panic stricken, she darted for the door, frantic to escape. But he moved swiftly to block her exit, and instead of finding freedom, she blundered into the solid wall of his chest.
He held her to him, not with love but with the steely force of prison bars. To pit her strength against his was pointless. He could have lifted her clean off the floor without effort. Could have snapped her neck with one hand.
And at that moment, he looked capable of both.
Uttering a pitiful squeak of protest, she said, “Let me go!”
“Not,” he said grimly, manacling her wrists in his long, strong fingers, “until I’m done with you. And that, my very dear Stephanie, will not be any time soon.”
She tried to pry herself free, a move which achieved precisely nothing but a tightening of his punishing hold. “Do not make me hurt you, Stephanie,” he warned, with soft and deadly menace.
“You already are,” she retorted. “Your mother would be appalled if she knew you were here, terrorizing me like this. Your grandmother would be ashamed. As for what your son would think, if he could see you manhandling me…!”
She’d grabbed the accusations out of thin air, a last-ditch attempt to protect herself that carried with it very little hope of success. Amazingly, though, they stopped him as forcefully as if he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
He released her so suddenly, she almost collapsed at his feet. Turned his head away, as if he couldn’t face her. Inhaled long, unsteady, hissing breaths which left his shirt front trembling. “Is this what I’ve allowed you to reduce me to?” he muttered. “A mindless thug who turns to brute violence to resolve his troubles?”
“I’m very sorry, Matteo,” she whispered. “I know how much I’ve hurt you.”
At that, he turned his gaze on her again, and she flinched at the emptiness she saw in his eyes. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because I’m hurting, too. You can’t begin to know the terrible pain I’ve endured in keeping such a secret from you.”
His lashes swept down in slow disbelief. “You have one hell of a nerve, trying to solicit my sympathy for your pain, when you’ve singlehandedly rendered me incapable of rational thought or judgment.”
She flung out her hands in mute appeal. “If it means anything at all, I’ve wished so many times that I’d done things differently. That I’d had the courage to tell you I was pregnant.”
“Why didn’t you?” he inquired cuttingly. “And don’t bother making excuses about my having left your country. If you’d really wanted to contact me, all you ever had to do was ask your grandparents where I could be reached.”
She met his glance head-on. “If I had done that, would you have believed you were my baby’s father? It’s not as if we hadn’t taken precautions. You were very confident that I was well protected from the risk of pregnancy.”
“As confident as you were that I wasn’t proper father material for a Leyland?”
“That thought never entered my head!”
“Of course it did, Stephanie!” he scoffed. “That’s why you didn’t bother to give me the benefit of the doubt. Instead, you ran off and found yourself a man better suited to the role, and married him so fast that you hardly had time to learn his name before you took it as your own, and passed off my child as his.”
“I had to!” she cried. “But not for the reason you think. If my father had known my baby was illegitimate, he’d never have accepted him. I lied, but never because I was ashamed of you, Matteo. It was only ever to protect Simon.”
“You lied because you’re a coward. Because you wanted an easy way out,” he said flatly. “What a joke, to think I was ever taken in by your wide-eyed innocence, your guileless protestations about the sanctity of family!”
Feeling she had nothing left to lose, she told him the rest. “I am even worse than you think. Although I intended to tell you about Simon before I left Italy, I wouldn’t have done it yet if Corinna hadn’t forced my hand.”
“Corinna knows about this, too?” he flared. “Dio, is there no end to your betrayal, that you could parade such news before everyone but me?”
“She guessed the truth for herself. But it was always my dream that Simon would eventually know
you’re his father, Matteo.”
“Your dream, perhaps. But you did nothing to make it a reality until Corinna left you no choice, and for that I must thank her. It is because of her, not you, that I’m now in a position to exercise my rights as a father.”
The accusation fell from those same lips that had kissed her with love, with tenderness, with passion. But there was nothing of those in his tone, or his look, or his manner now. He was angry and cold; bent on vengeance and punishment. And she was afraid of him.
She sank onto the dressing table bench and twisted her fingers in her lap, beside herself with anguish. “How do I convince you how much I regret the lies I’ve told?”
His laugh scraped over her, harsh and unamused. “Don’t ask me! You’ve lied so often in the last few weeks that I’m not sure you understand the meaning of truth. You can’t open your mouth without perverting the facts.”
“That’s unfair, Matteo! Apart from not telling you about Simon, I’ve never lied to you.”
“Really? Aren’t you the one who told me, just yesterday, that this weekend was to be about just you and me?”
“Yes. And I meant every word!”
“But it’s never been about just you and me, Stephanie. There’s always been a third party known only to you, yet one about whom I had every right to be made aware. You don’t call that wilful misrepresentation?”
How could she deny it? “When you put it that way, yes. But I’m not the only one at fault. You deceived me, too, letting me think you were someone different from what you really are.”
“And you think that equals the score? That it makes what you’ve done less despicable?”
She couldn’t look at him. She knew there was no comparison, that her sin was greater by far. She’d been wrong from the outset not to tell him about Simon. The only right thing she’d ever done where Matteo was concerned, was listen to her heart. It had never once let her down.
“Not by a long shot,” she said. “But one thing I will swear to, on my son’s life, is that I love you. I have always loved you. And nothing is ever going to change that.”
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