by Lynne Graham
The shame and embarrassment she had fought off at dawn began to creep up again through the cracks in her composure. She had broken all her rules and for what? A one-night stand with a male she would probably never hear from or see again? How could she be proud of that? But would it have been any better to lose her virginity with a sleazy, cheating liar like Ritchie, who had pretended that she meant much more to him than she did?
She thought not. Anyway, it was too late for regrets, she reminded herself unhappily. What was done was done and it made more sense to move on from that point than to torture herself over what could not be changed. How much, though, had all the wine she had imbibed contributed to her recklessness? Her loss of inhibition? Stop it, stop it, she urged herself fiercely, stop dwelling on it.
Vito came down the stairs when she was setting the table. ‘You should have wakened me.’
‘You were up much earlier than I was,’ she pointed out as she retrieved the starters from the kitchen. ‘Hungry?’
Vito reached for her instead of a chair. ‘Only for you.’
Her bright blue eyes danced with merriment. ‘Now, where did you get that old chestnut from?’
In answer Vito bent his tousled dark head and kissed her and it was like an arrow of fire shooting through her body to the heart of her. She quivered, taken aback all over again by the explosive effect he had on her. His sensual mouth played with hers and tiny ripples of arousal coursed through her. Her breasts swelled, their buds tightening while heat and dampness gathered between her legs. It took enormous willpower but she made herself step back from him, almost careening into the table in her haste to break their connection. Suddenly feeling out of control with him seemed dangerous and it was dangerous, she told herself, if it made her act out of character. And whether she liked it or not, everything she had done with Vito was out of character for her.
‘We should eat before the food gets cold,’ she said prosaically.
‘I’ll open a bottle of wine.’
‘This is an incredibly well-equipped house,’ Holly remarked as he poured the wine he had fetched from the temperature-controlled cabinet in the kitchen.
‘The owner enjoys his comforts.’
‘And he’s your friend?’
‘We went to school together.’ A breathtaking smile of amused recollection curled Vito’s mouth. ‘He was a rebel and although he often got me into trouble he also taught me how to enjoy myself.’
‘Pixie’s like that. We’re very close.’ Holly lifted the plates and set out the main course.
‘You’re a good cook,’ Vito commented.
‘My foster mother, Sylvia, was a great teacher. Cooking relaxes me.’
‘I eat out a lot. It saves time.’
‘There’s more to life than saving time. Life is there to be savoured,’ Holly told him.
‘I savour it at high speed.’
The meal was finished and Holly was clearing up when Vito stood up. ‘I feel like some fresh air,’ he told her. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’
From the window, Holly watched him trudge down the lane in the snow. There was an odd tightness in her chest and a lump in her constricted throat. Vito had just rebelled against their enforced togetherness to embrace his own company. He hadn’t invited her to join him on his walk, but why should he have? Out of politeness? They weren’t a couple in the traditional sense and he didn’t have to include her in everything. They were two people who had shared a bed for the night, two very different people. Maybe she talked too much, maybe he was tired of her company and looking forward to the prospect of some silence. It was not a confidence-boosting train of thought.
Vito ploughed up the steep gradient, his breath steaming on the icy air. He had needed a break, had been relieved when Holly hadn’t asked if she could accompany him. A loner long accustomed to his own company, he had felt the walls closing in while he’d sat surrounded by all that cosy Christmas spirit.
And that really wasn’t Holly’s fault, Vito conceded wryly. Even her cheerful optimism could not combat the many years of bad Christmas memories that Vito harboured. Sadly the stresses and strains of the festive season were more likely to expose the cracks in an unhappy marriage. His mother’s resolute enthusiasm had never contrived to melt his father’s boredom and animosity at being forced into spending time with his family.
They had never been a family, Vito acknowledged heavily, not in the truest sense of the word. His father had never loved him, had never taken the smallest interest in him. In fact, if he was honest with himself, his father sincerely disliked him. From an early age Vito had been treated like the enemy, twinned in his father’s mind with the autocratic father-in-law he fiercely resented.
‘He’s like a bloody calculator!’ Ciccio had condemned with distaste when his five-year-old son’s brilliance at maths was remarked on. ‘He’ll be as efficient as a cash machine—just like his grandfather.’
Only days earlier, Vito’s relationship with his father had sunk to an all-time low when Ciccio had questioned his son’s visit to the hospital where he was recovering from his heart attack. ‘Are you here to crow over my downfall?’ his father had asked nastily while his mother had tried to intervene. ‘My sins have deservedly caught up with me? Is that what you think?’
And Vito had finally recognised that there was no relationship left to rescue with his father. Ciccio bitterly resented his son’s freedom from all financial constraints yet the older man’s wild extravagance and greed had forced Vito’s grandfather to keep his son-in-law on a tight leash. There was nothing Vito could do to change those hard facts. Even worse, after his grandfather had died it had become Vito’s duty to protect his mother’s fortune from Ciccio’s demands, scarcely a reality likely to improve a father and son relationship.
For the first time Vito wondered what sort of relationship he would have with his son if he ever had one. Momentarily he was chilled by the prospect because his family history offered no encouragement.
Holly had just finished clearing up the dishes when the knocker on the front door sounded loudly. She was stunned when she opened the door and found Bill, who ran the breakdown service, standing smiling on the doorstep.
‘I need the keys for Clementine to get her loaded up.’
‘But it’s Christmas Day… I mean, I wasn’t expecting—’
‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes last night but I knew I’d be coming up this way some time this afternoon. My uncle joins us for lunch and he owns a smallholding a few fields away. He has to get back to feed his stock, so I brought the truck when I left him at home.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Holly breathed, fighting her consternation with all her might while turning away to reach into the pocket of her coat where she had left the car keys. She passed the older man the keys. ‘Do you need any help?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll come back up for you when I’m done.’
‘I’ll get my stuff together.’ With a weak smile and with every sensitive nerve twanging, Holly shut the door again and sped straight upstairs to gather her belongings. She dug her feet into her cowboy boots and thrust her toiletries and make-up bag back into her rucksack.
And throughout that exercise she wouldn’t let herself even think that she could be foolish enough to be disappointed at being picked up and taken home. Clearly, it was time to leave. She had assumed that she would have one more night with Vito but fate had decreed otherwise. Possibly a quick, unexpected exit was the best way to part after such a night, she thought unhappily. There would be neither the time nor the opportunity for awkward exchanges. She closed her rucksack and checked the room one last time. Reminding herself that she still had to pack the Christmas tree, she went back down wondering anxiously if Vito would make it back before she had to leave.
She flipped open her cardboard box and stripped the tree of ornaments and lights, deftly packing it all away while refusing to think beyond the practical. She raced into the kitchen to dump the foil containers she had used to tr
ansport the meal, pausing only to lift a china jug and quickly wash it before placing it in the box. That was that then, all the evidence of her brief stopover removed, she conceded numbly.
She didn’t want to go home, she didn’t want to leave Vito, and the awareness of that stupid, hopeless sense of attachment to him crushed and panicked her. He would probably be relieved to find her gone and he would have cringed if he saw tears in her eyes. Men didn’t like messy and there could be nothing more messy or embarrassing than a woman who got too involved and tried to cling after one night. This one-night-and-walk-away stuff is what you signed up for, Holly scolded herself angrily. There had been no promises and no mention of a future of any kind. She would leave with her head held high and no backward glances.
All the same, she thought hesitantly, if Vito wasn’t coming back in time to see her leave, shouldn’t she leave a note? She dug into her rucksack and tore a piece of paper out of a notebook and leant on the table. She thanked him for his hospitality and then hit a brick wall in the creative department. What else was there to say? What else could she reasonably say?
After much reflection she printed her mobile-phone number at the foot of the note. Why not? It wasn’t as if she was asking him to phone her. She was simply giving him the opportunity to phone if he wanted to. Nothing wrong with that, was there? She left the note propped against the clock on the shelf inside the inglenook.
Holly wore a determined smile when Bill’s truck backed into the drive. She had her box and her rucksack on the step beside her in a clear face-saving statement that she was eager to get going but there was still no sign of Vito. She climbed into the truck with a sense of regret but gradually reached the conclusion that possibly it was preferable to have parted from Vito without any awkward or embarrassing final conversation. This way, nobody had to pretend or say anything they didn’t mean.
*
Vito strode into the cottage and grimaced at the silence. He strode up the stairs, calling Holly’s name while wondering if she had gone for a bath. He studied the empty bathroom with a frown, noting that she had removed her possessions. Only when he went downstairs again did he notice that the Christmas decorations had disappeared along with her. The table was clear, the kitchen immaculate.
Vito was incredulous. Holly had done a runner and he had no idea how. He walked out onto the doorstep and belatedly registered that the old car no longer lay at the foot of the lane in the ditch. So much for his observation powers! He had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed that the car had gone. Holly had walked out on him. Well, that hadn’t happened to him before, he acknowledged grimly, his ego stung by her sudden departure. All his life women had chased after Vito, attaching strings at the smallest excuse.
But would he have wanted her to cling? Vito winced, driven to reluctantly admit that perhaps in the circumstances her unannounced disappearance was for the best. After all, what would he have said to her in parting? Holly had distracted him from more important issues and disrupted his self-control. Now he had his own space back and the chance to get his head clear. And that was exactly what he should want…
*
‘When you’re finished throwing up you can do the test,’ Pixie said drily from the bathroom doorway.
‘I’m not doing the test,’ Holly argued. ‘I’m on the pill. I can’t be pregnant—’
‘You missed a couple of pills and you had a course of antibiotics when you had tonsillitis,’ her friend and flatmate reminded her. ‘You know that antibiotics can interfere with contraception—’
‘Well, actually I didn’t know.’ Holly groaned as she freshened up at the sink, frowning at her pale face and dark-circled eyes. She looked absolutely awful and she felt awful both inside and out.
‘Even the pill has a failure rating. I don’t know… I leave you alone for a few weeks and you go completely off the rails,’ the tiny blonde lamented, studying Holly with deeply concerned eyes.
‘I can’t be pregnant,’ Holly said again as she lifted the pregnancy testing kit and extracted the instructions.
‘Well, you’ve missed two periods, you’re throwing up like there’s no tomorrow and you have sore boobs,’ Pixie recounted ruefully. ‘Maybe it’s chickenpox or something.’
‘All right, I’ll do it!’ Holly exclaimed in frustration. ‘But there is no way, just no way on earth that I could be pregnant!’
Some minutes later she slumped down on the side of the bath. Pixie was right and she was wrong. The test showed a positive. The door opened slowly and she looked wordlessly up at her friend and burst into floods of tears.
‘Remember how we used to say that the babies we had would be precious gifts?’ Pixie breathed as she hugged her sobbing friend. ‘Well, this baby is a gift and we will manage. We don’t need a man to survive.’
‘I can’t even knit!’ Holly wailed, unable to concentrate, unable to think beyond the sheer immensity of the challenges she was about to face.
‘That’s OK. You won’t have time to knit,’ her friend told her, deadpan.
Holly was remembering when she and Pixie had talked innocently about their ideal of motherhood. Both of them had been born unwanted and had suffered at the hands of neglectful mothers. They had sworn that they would love and protect their own babies no matter what.
And the vague circumstances suggested by ‘no matter what’ had actually happened now, Holly reflected heavily, her sense of regret at that truth all-encompassing. Her baby would not be entering the perfect world as she had dreamt. Her baby was unplanned, however, but not unwanted. She would love her child, fight to keep him or her safe and if she had to do it alone, and it looked as though she would, she would manage.
‘If only Vito had phoned…’ The lament escaped Holly’s lips before she could bite it back and she flushed in embarrassment.
‘He’s long gone. In fact, the more I think about him,’ Pixie mused tight-mouthed, ‘the more suspicious I get about the father of your child. For all you know he could be a married man.’
‘No!’ Holly broke in, aghast at that suggestion.
‘Well, what was Vito doing spending Christmas alone out in the middle of nowhere?’ Pixie demanded. ‘Maybe the wife or girlfriend threw him out and he had nowhere better to go?’
‘Don’t make me feel worse than I already do,’ Holly pleaded. ‘You’re such a pessimist, Pixie. Just because he didn’t want to see me again doesn’t make him a bad person.’
‘He got you drunk and somehow persuaded you into bed. Don’t expect me to think nice things about him. He was a user.’
‘I wasn’t drunk.’
‘Let’s not rehash it again.’ Her flatmate sighed, her piquant face thoughtful. ‘Let’s see if we can trace him online.’
And while Pixie did internet searches on several potential spellings of Vito’s surname and came up with precisely nothing, Holly sat on the sofa hugging her still-flat stomach and fretting about the future. She had already secretly carried out all those searches weeks earlier on Vito and was too proud to admit to the fact, even to her friend.
‘I can’t find even a trace of a man in the right age group. The name could be a fake,’ her friend opined.
‘Why would he give me a fake name? That doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to be identified. I don’t know…you tell me,’ Pixie said very drily. ‘Do you think that’s a possibility?’
Holly reddened. Of course it was a possibility that Vito had not wanted to be identified. As to why, how could she know? The only thing she knew with certainty was that Vito had decided he didn’t want to see her again. Had he felt otherwise, he would have used the phone number she had left him and called her. In the weeks of silence that had followed her departure from the cottage, she had often felt low. But that was foolish, wasn’t it? Vito had clearly made the decision that he had no desire to see her again.
And why should she feel hurt by that? Yes, he had said that night with her was amazing but wasn’t
that par for the course? The sort of thing a man thought a woman expected him to say after sex? How could she have been naive enough to actually believe that Vito had truly believed they were something special together? And now that little bit of excitement was over. What was done was done and what was gone, like her innocence, was gone. Much as her tidy, organised life had gone along with it, she conceded unhappily, because, although she would embrace motherhood wholeheartedly, she knew it would be incredibly tough to raise a baby alone without falling into the poverty trap.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fourteen months later
HOLLY SUPPRESSED A groan as she straightened her aching back. She hated parcelling up the unsold newspapers at the end of her evening shift in the local supermarket but it also meant she would be going home soon and seeing Angelo snugly asleep in his cot.
Picturing her son’s little smiling face made her heart swell inside her. There was nothing Holly wouldn’t do for her baby. The minute she had laid eyes on Angelo after his premature birth she had adored him with a fierce, deep love that had shaken her to the roots.
Without Pixie’s help she would have struggled to survive, but, fortunately for Holly, her friend had supported her from the start. When waitressing had become impossible, Holly had taken a course to become a registered childminder and now by day she looked after her baby and two other children at home. She also worked in the shop on a casual basis. If evening or weekend work came up and Pixie was free to babysit, Holly did a shift to earn some extra cash.
And it was right then when she was thinking about how much she was looking forward to supper and her bed that it happened: she looked down at the bundle of newspapers she was tying up and saw a photograph on the front page of a man who reminded her of Vito. She stopped dead and yanked out the paper to shake it open. It was a financial broadsheet that she would never normally have even glanced at and the picture showed a man standing behind a lectern, a man who bore a remarkable resemblance to the father of her son.