A Scandal, a Secret, a BabyMarriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby!

by Sharon Kendrick

  She had returned home from the hospital to a delivery of the most beautiful flowers. Gardenias and roses and stephanotis and lily of the valley had been massed into a bouquet so enormous that she’d hardly been able to get it through the front door. The fragrance had been intoxicating, and the brief accompanying note of thanks had made her want to cry. But crying was the last thing she could afford to do. The last thing she ever did. Crying made you weak, and never had she needed her strength as much as she needed it right now.

  She remembered turning on Dante as if he’d sent her an explosive device, aware of the sudden tremble of her fingers as they had brushed against the white petals. ‘Why did you send me flowers?’

  ‘Isn’t it normal for the father to send flowers to the new mother?’

  Justina had shaken her head. Of course it was normal. But they weren’t normal, were they? None of this was. A baby had been born to two people who were no longer together. Who didn’t even like each other. And Dante was not a man she could trust. She should remember that above all else. He might be ladling on sweet words and consideration, but he would be doing it for a reason. And it seemed that one of those reasons had now arrived.

  She drew in a deep breath as met his eyes. ‘Your mean your mother wants to come and visit?’

  He shook his head. ‘My mother hates to travel. I was thinking that you and I might take Nico to Tuscany instead. I think it’s time he was introduced to his Italian roots.’

  She wanted to protest that at four weeks old Nico would barely be conscious of which cot he was in, let alone which country. But Justina knew Dante well enough to realise that her words would fall on deaf ears. He had always been passionate about his homeland, and no amount of reason was ever going to alter that. In fact she was surprised that he had waited this long to bring it up. That’s why he has been so unusually reasonable, she told herself. The flowers and the nappy-changing and the insistence that she relax in the bath while he looked after Nico—they had all been velvet-coated weapons in his battle to get what he wanted.

  But despite the sensation of being manipulated Justina had no intention of refusing his request, no matter how difficult she might find it to return to his family home. Because Nico needed family—and her own was never even going to make it past the starting line.

  ‘Do they still hate me?’ she questioned, in a voice which didn’t actually sound like her voice.

  ‘I think that’s an unnecessarily emotive way of putting it, Justina.’

  ‘I thought one of your complaints about me was that I wasn’t emotional enough?’ That was the main accusation he’d used to hurl at her, usually just before one of her tours, so that they’d always seemed to part with some sort of atmosphere simmering between them. ‘I remember you telling me that no woman with a heart could leave her man while she went away on tour.’

  Dante met the amber glitter of her eyes. It was true he’d found it unbelievable that she could bear to be away from him for any length of time. He’d thought that her career would pale in comparison to being with the man she professed to love. But apparently not. She had refused to temper her ambition and he had grown impatient with her frequent absences. In the end those absences had chipped away at their relationship, so that many of their snatched reunions had been spent getting to know one another again. Sometimes it had felt as if they were going backwards instead of forward. When it had finally come, his furious ultimatum had seemed inevitable.

  ‘My family didn’t hate you,’ he said slowly.

  There was a pause. ‘They didn’t make me feel very welcome when I met them.’ She could hear that whisper of insecurity in her voice again.

  ‘I think they tried their best.’ He reached down into the cot and stroked Nico’s head. ‘But my mother is an old-fashioned woman who didn’t approve of your choice of career—or all the things which came with it.’

  ‘Like mother, like son!’ observed Justina wryly, though she recognised that it hadn’t just been his mother who had been opposed to her. Dante’s brother Luigi had also disapproved—and all the male D’Arezzo cousins had clearly felt the same.

  Her mind went back to the welcome party which had been thrown during her first and only visit to the D’Arezzo estate. If only Dante’s sister hadn’t insisted on playing the Lollipops’ latest DVD! Justina remembered the entire family sitting and watching in horror as she’d cavorted across the screen wearing a tiny tutu and a minuscule vest-top. After that they’d treated her as if she was some kind of stripper instead of a legitimate songwriter and performer.

  ‘They didn’t think I was the right person for you,’ she added. ‘I was unsuitable. And of course being English didn’t add to my general allure.’

  ‘All Italian mothers want their sons to marry an Italian girl,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘As opposed to an illegitimate nobody whose mother has a track record for breaking up other people’s marriages?’

  ‘I think she wondered how our relationship was going to work when you were travelling the world.’ There was a pause as his black eyes glittered a question. ‘And you must admit that she had a point.’

  Justina glanced down at where Nico lay sleeping and tried to imagine Dante ever being this tiny or this helpless. Unsurprisingly, she failed. ‘So how did your mother react when you told her who the mother of your baby was?’

  Dante hesitated as he considered how best to convey his mother’s words. He had expected anger. Rage. A tirade against the Englishwoman who had made those brazen promotional films and flaunted her half-naked body to the world at large. He had thought there would be a dramatic outburst about a woman like her returning to the scene and ensnaring her powerful son by becoming pregnant.

  But he hadn’t bargained for the softening effects of age, nor the primitive desire to see their powerful family line continued. His mother had been widowed for a long time and Dante was her eldest son. It was right that his offspring should be the firstborn, she’d said. The thought of a whole new generation of the D’Arezzo family was enough to sweeten the pill of the mother’s identity—and the fact that he wasn’t married to her.

  ‘But you will have to marry her, of course, Dante. If this baby is a D’Arezzo, then he must be legitimised.’

  Dante remembered his mother’s immediate assumption. The way she had smiled the smile of a woman who knew that a hundred candidates would have married her son in an instant. But Dante knew it wasn’t as easy as that. Not with Justina. Most women would fall over backwards to become a D’Arezzo bride—but not this woman who took such pride in her independence. Who would see no point in marrying for the sake of a baby—especially when their relationship had failed last time around. Yet despite all this, one irrefutable fact remained—his own fierce familial pride would not countenance his son being illegitimate.

  ‘Dante?’

  He looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘I asked how your mother reacted when you told her she was going to be a grandparent.’

  ‘In the same way that any grandparent would react, I guess. With joy and with excitement. I expect your mother was exactly the same?’

  Justina twisted the end of her plait with restless fingers. ‘You are joking?’ she said. ‘She thinks she’s way too young for that particular role.’

  ‘That figures,’ he said. But despite her flippant comment, Dante glimpsed the hurt which had briefly clouded Justina’s eyes and felt a surge of anger on her behalf. Couldn’t her mother have behaved normally
for once? Couldn’t she just have cooed a little and been there for her daughter? ‘Did she send anything for Nico?’

  Justina laughed. ‘A silver napkin ring which he’ll probably never use.’

  ‘You know, we’ll need to get him a passport as soon as possible,’ Dante said suddenly. ‘If we’re taking him to Tuscany.’

  Justina realised that they’d slipped seamlessly from talking about a hypothetical trip to Tuscany to acquiring a passport for the journey—and wasn’t that Dante all over? He would always try stealth before he tried coercion but the end result was always the same: he got exactly what he wanted.

  * * *

  Their journey plans were set in motion and Justina went shopping for new clothes, since none of her own seemed right. She wanted to wear something normal and flattering after months of being swaddled in loose clothes, but it was more than that. The last time she’d seen Signora D’Arezzo had been at the height of her fame, when she had very definitely been dressed like a pop star. She’d been into glitter and pizazz and making a statement—but nearly six years down the line her tastes had changed. She still bought trendy, but these days she gravitated towards the less garish.

  She loaded up her shopping basket with silk and cashmere and splashed out on some new underwear, telling herself that she was only buying it because her shape had changed. But she felt a flare of colour in her cheeks as her fingers drifted over a lacy thong and she imagined Dante removing it.

  Loaded down with baby equipment, they travelled to a private airfield north of London, where the D’Arezzo jet was ready and waiting. They left England on a drizzly day and touched down in Tuscany, where only a few faint clouds floated in an azure sky, and Justina tried to remember the last time she’d had anything approaching a holiday.

  At Pisa airport they were whisked straight through the various border controls with the kind of adulation which Justina hadn’t witnessed since she’d been on the road with the Lollipops. But then, Dante was on his own territory here, she reminded herself. People knew him. They revered and respected him. The D’Arezzo family had lived in the region for centuries, and his aristocratic air had never been more evident than when people stopped to compliment him on the baby.

  Yet she felt wistful as she watched him carry Nico through, while officials beamed and touched the baby’s raven curls. And she noticed the sideways looks which greeted her as she followed in his footsteps—the glances at the fingers of her left hand, noticeably bare of a wedding ring or any kind of show of commitment from Dante D’Arezzo.

  Perhaps they think I’m the nanny, thought Justina as they walked out to a waiting car. She touched the heavy silk of the jacket she was wearing over black skinny jeans as if to remind herself of who she really was. This was a jacket she’d paid for herself—not gone crawling to a man for an allowance to finance it. She was self-supporting and she should be proud of that.

  ‘You okay?’ questioned Dante, looking up from where he’d just finished buckling Nico into a baby car-seat.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, trying to ignore the butterfly nerves which were building in her stomach.

  ‘You look amazing,’ he said softly as the car pulled away.

  His statement caught her by surprise and Justina glanced up, slightly appalled to hear herself trotting out that most predictable of responses. ‘Do I?’

  ‘You certainly do. Nobody would ever guess you’d had a baby so recently.’

  ‘Until they see the baby, of course,’ she said pleasantly, trying to ignore the instinctive sizzle of her skin. She told herself that he was good at making a woman feel as if she was the centre of the universe—heaven only knew he’d had enough practice at it. He’s a player, she reminded herself, and all players do that. He went to bed with someone barely a week after your engagement had broken down. That is not the behaviour of a man who professed to love you and only you.

  She thought about all the things which remained unsaid between them. That strange intimacy which they’d shared during the birth, when Dante had been there for her in a way she’d never imagined he could. He’d been strong and protective and gentle, and in those highly emotional moments she’d felt close to him again. She had thought she wouldn’t want him there, but now she didn’t like to imagine what it might have been like if he hadn’t been.

  But there were other things which also remained unsaid—things she wasn’t proud of. Neither of them had mentioned that erotic encounter on the sofa, after which he had just walked out of the door as if nothing very remarkable had happened. And he hadn’t made any move on her since, had he? Even now that her body had pinged back into shape and she’d begun to forge her own routine around Nico, Dante still hadn’t looked at her with anything approaching desire.

  She kept telling herself that having no physical intimacy made sense on every level. It was too easy to build dreams when a man was making love to you... But that didn’t stop her wanting him or being so aware of him. As if her body had been programmed to react with excitement whenever he was close.

  Turning her head, she stared out the window as the car drove past high green mountains and tried to concentrate on the beauty of the Tuscan countryside. All she had to do was be a good mother to her baby—that was the most important thing.

  Before long, the motorway gave way to more rural roads, and although it had been over five years since she’d last been here Justina was surprised by how familiar it all seemed. The D’Arezzo home wasn’t immediately visible from the road—mainly because the gardens and estate had been planted so that it would blend into the land around it. A long drive led up to the house and behind it soared more green hills, studded with ancient olive trees and a variety of fruit orchards, and lower down were the prize-winning D’Arezzo vines themselves.

  The palazzo grew closer, with its dark golden walls and its shuttered windows. Justina stared up at its clock tower and all the different wings which had been added over the years and couldn’t fail to be impressed—just as she’d been the first time she’d set eyes on it. Here lay centuries of stability and continuity and a definite place in the local community. It was something she’d never had herself, and a lump rose in her throat as she realised that this was not just Dante’s heritage but Nico’s, too. That his blood made him part of this place and she had no right to deny him that heritage.

  The big car came to a halt in the courtyard, and she was surprised to see Dante’s mother waiting for them. In the past, the housekeeper had greeted them, and the meeting with Beatrix D’Arezzo had been postponed until the formal pre-dinner drinks.

  Justina watched as Dante carried Nico towards his mother and hung back a little as she saw Beatrix lean eagerly towards the baby. Saw her touch his cheek with wondering fingers before exclaiming, ‘Caspita, e uguale a suo padre!’

  Justina smiled as Beatrix came forward to greet her. Her crash course in Italian years earlier might have only left her with a rudimentary grasp of the language, but she understood the gist of that. Baby Nico was certainly the image of his father!

  ‘Justina!’ said Signora D’Arezzo with a smile. ‘Welcome back. And congratulations on the birth of such a beautiful little boy.’

  The words sounded genuine and Justina nodded, acutely aware that Dante was watching her.

  ‘Mille grazie, Signora D’Arezzo,’ she answered, and then she smiled back. ‘He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?’

  ‘Gorgeous, indeed, and the image of his father at the same age!’ said Beatrix indulgen
tly. ‘But you look tired, Justina. Travelling is always tiring—especially for such a new mother. Would you like to see your rooms, so that you can all settle in?’

  Justina gave a grateful smile. ‘That sounds perfect. Thank you.’

  ‘Dante?’ Signora D’Arezzo turned to her son and said something in Italian before turning back to Justina. ‘We haven’t had a baby here for a long time, but we will do our best to make you feel at home.’

  It was Beatrix’s kindness which was affecting her more than anything, Justina realised as she nodded her thanks. Or maybe it was more complex than that—because Signora D’Arezzo was exhibiting a motherliness towards her which she wasn’t used to. Her mother had never been big on hugging—unless it involved a man with a big wallet. She’d treated her daughter more like an adornment than a real person—and hadn’t that been one of the things which had made Justina determined to be as hands-on as possible with her own son, determined that he should feel her love from the start?

  She followed Dante as he carried the baby through the winding corridors of the ancient villa before stopping before an enormous set of wooden doors. Inside, the main room was tall and arched, lined with ancient books on one wall and with a huge fireplace big enough to roast a hog in. Windows on three sides overlooked the undulating Tuscan landscape, and Justina gave a sigh of pleasure.

  ‘Like it?’ asked Dante.

  ‘Who could fail to like it?’ She looked at the paintings and the dark furniture, the silken rugs on the cool floor. ‘It’s the kind of place people dream of visiting.’