by Lynne Graham
Vito tensed. ‘I didn’t say anything about that. No expectations…’ he murmured silkily, lean brown hands sketching an eloquent arc in the air as if to nullify her suspicions.
‘Of course you have expectations…but, in this case, I’m afraid it’s not going to happen. You had your chance and you blew it!’ Holly snapped back, striving to hang on to her temper.
His brows drew together. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Holly rolled her eyes, her lush mouth compressed. ‘A timely little reminder that if you had really wanted to see me again I did leave you my phone number.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Vito insisted.
Holly tensed even more, angry that she had let that reminder fall from her mouth. ‘I left a note thanking you for your hospitality and I printed my phone number at the bottom of it.’
Vito groaned. ‘I didn’t find a note when you left. Where did you leave it?’
‘On the shelf in the fireplace.’ Holly shrugged dismissively, keen to drop the subject.
‘If there was a note, I didn’t see it,’ Vito assured her.
But then he would say that, wouldn’t he? Holly thought, unimpressed. Of course he had found the silly note she had left behind and he had done nothing with it. And in doing nothing he had taught her all she needed to know about how he saw her. She had gone over the events of that morning in her mind many, many times. She was convinced that Vito had gone out for a walk to get a break from her. For him the fun of togetherness had already worn thin. He had ignored her note most probably because he’d been relieved to find her already gone. He had seen that night as a casual one-night stand that he had no desire to repeat.
‘Whatever. It’s pointless to discuss it after the amount of time that has passed. But let me spell out one fact,’ Holly urged thinly. ‘I didn’t come to see you today for anything…er…physical. I came to see you about something much more important.’
At her emphasis, Vito raised a level dark brow in cool query mode, his wide sensual mouth tightening with impatience. And she could feel the whole atmosphere turning steadily colder and less welcoming. Naturally. She had taken sex off the lunch table, as it were, and he was no longer interested in anything she might have to say to him. And why would he be interested? She was poor and he was rich. He was educated and she was more of a self-educated person, which meant that she had alarming gaps in her knowledge. He was hugely successful and a high achiever while she worked in dead-end jobs without a career ladder for advancement. It was incredible, she finally conceded, that they had ever got involved in the first place.
‘More important?’ Vito prompted, his irritation barely hidden.
Defiance and umbrage combined inside Holly. She had held on to her temper but it was a close-run battle. His assumption that she was approaching him for another sexual encounter had shocked her, possibly because she had persuaded herself that they had shared something more than sex. Now she saw her illusions for the pitiful lies that they were, lies she had told herself to bolster her sagging self-esteem while she was waddling round with a massive tummy.
‘Yes, much more important,’ she confirmed, lifting her chin and simply spilling out her announcement. ‘I got pregnant that night we were together.’
Vito froze as if she had threatened to fling a grenade at him. He turned noticeably pale, his strong bone structure suddenly clearly etched below his skin by raw tension. ‘You said you were on the pill—’
Holly wasn’t in the mood to go into the intricacies of missed pills and antibiotic treatment. ‘You must know that every form of contraception has a failure rate and I’m afraid there was a failure. I got pregnant but I had no way of contacting you, particularly not when you had given me a fake name.’
Vito was in shock. Indeed Vito could never recall being plunged into such a state of shock before. Everything he had assumed had been turned upside down and inside out with those simple words… I got pregnant.
‘And do you usually reintroduce yourself with a very evocative Santa hat and a sprig of holly when this happens?’ he heard himself snap without even mentally forming the words. ‘Is this some sort of a scam?’
Holly’s small shoulders pushed up, along with her chin. ‘No, Angelo is not a scam, Vito. He was born eight months after that night.’
‘You come here without a word of warning and throw this announcement at me like a challenge,’ Vito ground out in condemnation, no fan of major surprises in his life, as yet not even capable of thinking of what she was telling him. The prospect of having a child had long struck him as a possibility as remote as the moon. He had known fatherhood was on the cards somewhere down the line if he married Marzia but he had also known that neither of them were in any hurry to start a family.
‘No, I did not. If I challenged you it would be an awful lot tougher!’ Holly shot back at him furiously. ‘Tough was waitressing until I was eight months pregnant and being in labour for two days before I got a C-section. Tough is working as a childminder and a shelf-stacker and never getting enough sleep. You wouldn’t know tough if it leapt on you and bit you…because in your whole blasted spoilt-rotten life you have had everything handed to you on a plate!’
A dark line of colour had delineated Vito’s high cheekbones as he viewed her in growing disbelief. ‘That is enough.’
‘No, it’s not enough, and you do not tell me when enough is enough!’ Holly fired back at him, while pointing at him with an angry finger.
‘Ranting at me is not getting us anywhere.’
‘I’m entitled to rant if I want to rant!’ Holly launched back at him an octave higher, shaking with rage and the distress she was fighting off while wondering if Vito ever lost his temper, because he was still so very controlled. ‘And I don’t want to get anywhere with you. I’m done here. I’ve told you that you’re a father and that’s why I came to see you. I saw your photo in a newspaper, incidentally…a lovely way to identify the father of your child! But if you want to think Angelo’s a scam, you’re welcome.’
‘Holly…’
Holly yanked open the door and marched down the corridor very fast because she could not wait to get out of the building. She could feel the tears building up and she didn’t want them to fall in front of an audience. She ignored Vito’s voice when he repeated her name and stabbed the lift button with frantic force.
‘Holly…come back here!’ Vito shouted without warning.
So taken aback was she by that sudden rise in volume from him that she spun round and looked at him. He was only halfway down the corridor, evidently having expected her to return at his urging, and if looks could kill she would have been lying dead at his feet. He did have a temper, though, she registered belatedly, and it made his dark eyes glitter like gold ingots and gave his lean, darkly beautiful features a hard, forbidding edge.
Horribly aware of the number of people openly staring, Holly turned back to the lift just as the doors opened. She dived in as fast as she could but not fast enough to prevent Vito from joining her.
‘You should’ve come back to my office.’
In silence, Holly contemplated his polished shoes because the tears were even closer now and stinging her eyes like angry wasps.
‘I have to look into this situation. I need your phone number and your address,’ Vito breathed in a raw undertone.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so offensive—funny, how you get the wrong idea about people. I really didn’t want to get pregnant, Vito, but I love my son and he is never ever going to hear me admit that because now that he’s here he’s the best thing that ever happened to me,’ she bit out shakily, hurriedly stepping out of the lift.
‘Phone number. Address,’ Vito said again, closing a hand to a slight shoulder to prevent her from walking away through the crowded concourse.
With a heavy sigh, Holly dug into her bag and produced a notebook. He handed her a gold pen. She squinted down at the pen, dimly wondering if it was real gold, and then scolded herself for that stupid t
hought. She printed out the requested details and ripped out the sheet to hand it back to him. ‘Look,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘There’s no pressure on you here. If I’m honest I don’t really want you in our lives. You’re not the sort of man I want around my son.’
And having deprived Vito of breath and speech with that damning final indictment of his character, Holly disappeared into the crowds.
CHAPTER SIX
WELL, YOU MADE a real screw-up of that, Vito reflected for the first time in his life. But Holly hadn’t given him the smallest preparation for what was to come, so it was scarcely surprising that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. He didn’t react well to surprises and the delivery of the Santa hat and the holly had seemed suggestively sexual. Was it any wonder he had got the wrong idea? His hard mouth compressed while he wondered about that note she had mentioned. Had she left a note? He had looked in all the obvious places. There had been nothing on the table or the door, and what did it matter now anyway?
What really mattered was that without the smallest warning he was apparently a father…
That was a mind-blowing concept but Vito was primarily ruled by his very shrewd brain and his first call was to his lawyer, who within the hour put him into contact with a London-based specialist in family law. Once all his questions had been answered, Vito was frowning at the realisation that he didn’t really have any rights over his own son. Only marriage granted such legal rights. He didn’t consult Apollo because he knew that his friend would start talking about demanding DNA tests but he and Apollo lived very different lives and Vito was confident that if Holly had given birth to a baby eight months after that night, it could only be his baby.
He didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, and after he had organised travel to Holly’s home town for the following day and informed her by text of his planned visit, he phoned his mother to break the news.
Concetta Zaffari’s delight at learning that she was a grandmother tumbled through her every word and then there were questions about Holly that Vito found hard to answer, and some he skipped altogether.
‘Obviously you’ll be getting married,’ Concetta trilled cheerfully, and Vito laughed that his mother should even feel the need to say that. Of course they would be getting married. No Zaffari in history had had an illegitimate child and Vito had every intention of being a better parent than his own father had proved to be, although how to go about achieving that ambition he had no very clear idea.
*
Holly did not respond to Vito’s text because it annoyed her. Why did he assume that she was free to drop everything to make herself and Angelo available at a time that suited him? She was working an early morning shift the next day because it was a Saturday and Pixie was taking care of Angelo for her.
As a result, when Vito arrived in his limousine, having been picked up from the helicopter ride that had brought him from London, he was taken aback to be met by Pixie and informed that his son was having a nap.
‘Where’s Holly?’ he demanded, frowning down at the diminutive blonde, whose facial expression telegraphed her antagonism towards him.
‘At work.’
‘Where?’
‘The supermarket fifty yards down the road,’ Pixie advanced reluctantly. ‘You can wait in your car. Her shift ends in an hour.’
Infuriated that Holly hadn’t thought to warn him so that he could adjust his arrival time accordingly, Vito strode down the road. He was full of righteous indignation until he walked through the busy shop and caught a glimpse of Holly wheeling a trolley bigger than she was through the aisles and pausing to restock shelves. Tough is working as a shelf-stacker and never getting enough sleep. Abruptly, he spun on his heel and strode back out of the busy shop again, shamed by the reality that the mother of his child was being forced to work so hard to survive.
Vito would have argued that he had not been spoilt rotten, but he had been born rich and with a near-genius-level IQ, and phenomenal success in almost every field was a reward he took for granted. He had never had to struggle, never had to make the best of two bad choices, never had to do anything he didn’t want to do and the sheer undeniable luxury of those realities about his life was finally sinking in on him. With uncharacteristic patience he directed his driver to take him away from the street of tiny terraced houses where Holly lived to a hotel, where he had lunch while imagining Holly going without food, which didn’t improve his appetite.
‘Vito came, then?’ Holly exclaimed as she wriggled out of her overall.
Pixie nodded confirmation. ‘Cheese toastie for lunch?’
‘Lovely. I should’ve texted him to say that time didn’t suit me. I don’t know what it is about Vito but he makes me act completely out of character!’ Holly declared guiltily.
‘Take it from me, anything other than awe and flattery is probably good for Vito’s character. At least he’s interested in meeting his son,’ Pixie said cheerfully. ‘That’s good news.’
Holly scoffed down the cheese toastie and touched up her make-up. She couldn’t sit down, and she couldn’t concentrate either. She wanted to stand at the window waiting for Vito like a kid watching out for Santa Claus arriving. Embarrassment gripped her then and she sat down, only to fly up again when Angelo cried as he wakened from his nap. Changing her son, she gave him a hug and he drank down some water to quench his thirst. It was cold in the small sitting room and she lit the fire to warm it up.
‘I’m off out now,’ Pixie told her while Holly was strapping a wriggling Angelo into his infant seat.
‘But—’
‘This is about you and him and Angelo and it’s private. Give me a text when he’s gone,’ Pixie suggested.
Only minutes later the bell went and Holly’s heartbeat leapt into her throat, convulsing it. She raced to the front door and then paused to compose herself for several seconds before opening it.
‘Holly…’ Vito pronounced softly, staring broodingly down at her from his great height. Sheathed in jeans and a sweater teamed with a buttery soft brown leather jacket, he totally took her breath away.
‘Come in…’ Her wary glance was ensnared by black-fringed dark golden eyes that sent her heart racing. ‘Don’t stare,’ she scolded breathlessly.
‘I find you very attractive. Naturally, I’m going to stare, bellezza mia.’
He hadn’t found her attractive enough to use her phone number, Holly reminded herself ruefully. ‘No, don’t say insincere stuff like that. All we really have to do here is be polite to each other,’ Holly told him in the small, confined hall as he came to a halt beside her.
‘I can manage much more than polite,’ Vito declared, his long brown fingers settling down onto her slight shoulders and feeling the rigid tension that now gripped her small frame. She had the most luscious mouth he had ever seen on a woman, pink and soft and succulent. His jeans tightened at his groin, his physical reaction instantaneous.
At his touch, Holly turned rigid with discomfiture. ‘I meant friendly rather than—’
‘Maledizione! You want me to be friendly when I can hardly keep my hands off you?’ Vito shot at her with raw incredulity. ‘I don’t think I can manage that.’
‘But you have to. I wouldn’t be comfortable with anything else,’ Holly told him earnestly, convinced that only disaster would follow if she allowed any further intimacy to complicate an already tense relationship.
‘Have to?’ Vito queried, a flash of glittering challenge entering his searching gaze as he stared down at her. ‘Have you got someone else in your life…another man?’
Holly dealt him a startled glance. ‘No… Why are you asking that?’
Without warning, Vito moved forward, pinning her up against the wall behind her. ‘Because if there was I’d probably want to kill him!’ he muttered in a raw undertone.
In wonderment, Holly looked up into his lean, darkly beautiful face and then her view blurred as he hauled her up to his level and opened her mouth with the crushing dema
nd of his own. He tasted so good, all minty and fresh, and the strength in the arms holding her felt even better. Every hard, angular line of his long, lean physique was pressed against her as he braced her hips against the wall. The passion of that hungry kiss threatened to consume her and the anomaly between the cool face he showed the world and the uncontrolled hotness hidden beneath electrified her. The piercing ache she had almost forgotten tugged cruelly in her pelvis as his tongue tangled with hers. His mouth was sublime, the feel of his unyielding muscles, hard against her softer curves, incredible. Insane chemistry…insane behaviour, she translated, pulling back from him with shell-shocked abruptness because she knew with shamed horror that all she really wanted to do with him at that moment was drag him upstairs to her bed to rediscover the amazing pleasure he could give her.
‘No, this is not what you’re here for…’ she muttered in curt reminder, her spine stiff as she turned her back on him to walk into the small sitting room. ‘You’re here to meet Angelo and that’s all.’
‘You make it sound so simple when it’s anything but simple,’ Vito countered with a roughened edge to his voice because she had pushed him away and he had had to resist a powerful urge to turn caveman and yank her back to him.
‘If we both make the effort, we can keep this simple and polite,’ Holly stated with rigorous resolve.
‘I have something I need to explain to you first…’ But by that point, Vito could see over the top of Holly’s head and his attention zeroed in so quickly on the child in the infant seat that his voice literally trailed away.