by Lynne Graham
‘I suggest you don’t mention that fatal word,’ Cesare drawled.
Roger stared at him, frowned, and drove a hand through his sweat-streaked blonde hair. He looked at Cesare, then back at Mina, and sighed. ‘All of a sudden I see the light. I’m Roger Keating, Mina’s brother-in-law, Mr Falcone.’
‘Don’t you dare be polite to him, Roger!’ Winona snapped, stalking out into the hall. ‘Tell him to get out!’
‘Winona,’ Roger muttered, tight-mouthed with embarrassment. ‘Let’s at least try to be civilised about this——’
‘Civilised? This is the bastard who ruined my sister’s life!’ Winona railed in a shaking voice. ‘He’s caused this family nothing but misery——’
‘Don’t say any more…please,’ Mina broke in tautly.
‘If it weren’t for you, Steve and Mina would be married by now!’ Winona condemned as she glared at Cesare with loathing. ‘Steve was even willing to take on your child but Mina was too bloody proud to let him do it, and now, just when everything is finally beginning to go right for them, you show up again!’
Without looking at anyone, Mina swung round and walked back out of the house, rigid-backed and sick inside. The dreadful silence followed her. And then she heard Cesare rake back with, ‘My child?’ His tone was raw with disbelief.
Winona burst into tears, belatedly realising what she had done.
Mina sank down on the bench on the south wall of the house. The heat of late afternoon did nothing to lift the deep inner chill sinking into her very bones. She folded her hands together tightly. She could have told him herself but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it from her. After what Cesare had put her through four years ago she would have cut out her tongue sooner than let him know that she had given birth to his child nine months later.
That birth had been the last in a long series of humiliations inflicted by him and when she had realised that she did not have the strength to surrender her daughter to adoption and the more secure background that would then have been hers her sole consolation had been the belief that Cesare would never, ever know that Susie existed.
A long dark shadow blocked out the sunlight.
‘Tell me it’s not true,’ Cesare urged her fiercely.
Mina fixed her attention on the gravel, her eyes burning. ‘I told you to stay away from me——’
‘Knowing I would keep on coming! I don’t believe you had my child…’
‘No problem. Get back in your car and drive away,’ Mina advised in a wooden undertone that masked her increasing turmoil. ‘That’s what I wanted right from the first moment I laid eyes on you again.’
‘It’s impossible!’ he asserted roughly.
‘I wish it had been.’ But that wasn’t quite true. She did wish it and she didn’t wish it. She adored Susie and had made considerable sacrifices to keep her but she had also discovered the hard way that single parenting ineluded a lot of guilt and inadequacy. In addition, she had had to rely on her family to enable her to give Susie a decent home and for someone as independent and proud as Mina that had been a constant source of self-reproach.
There were four children,’ Cesare began without any expression at all.
Three blonde, one black-haired…and ‘revolting’. Hysteria clogged up Mina’s throat. She was waiting for the awful truth to dawn on him. In the space of five ghastly minutes, Susie had contrived to expose her every flaw. Her temper, her tenacity, her aggression.
‘The one who bit and swore?’ Cesare prompted not quite levelly.
The silence stretched and smouldered with the strength of his incredulity.
‘Are you telling me that that dirty little creature is my child?’ he suddenly slammed at her with raw ferocity. A hard hand closed over her shoulder without warning and literally hauled her upright. ‘I asked you a question!’ he roared down at her, giving her a little shake that made her hair fly round her distressed face.
‘But you don’t really want the answer, do you?’ she burst out.
Abruptly he thrust her back from him and strode away a couple of paces before restively swinging back to her. He was very pale, his hard bone-structure harshly prominent beneath his dark skin. ‘She didn’t look old enough.’
‘She’ll be four in December. She’s small, that’s all.’
Cesare’s narrowed dark gaze held hers with sudden chilling menace. ‘She looked neglected…’
Mina was violently off-balanced by the charge. ‘N-neglected?’
‘Madre di Dio…if you are telling me the truth and that child is mine…’ Cesare’s expressive mouth compressed into a savage bloodless line ‘…who the hell has been looking after her while you’ve been in London?’
‘My sister——’
‘That shrieking harpy?’ Cesare blistered back at her.
Mina turned white at this unfamiliar description of her sister. ‘Winona loves Susie!’
‘But she hates me!’ Cesare shot at her with black fury. He raised a brown hand and slashed it through the air. ‘If that little girl is mine——’
‘Will you stop saying that?’ Mina interrupted painfully. ‘If she’s yours! Nobody brought you here to pin Susie on you! You brought yourself here and refused to leave. If Winona hadn’t lost her head, you still wouldn’t be any the wiser——’
‘And why is that? Why, if you were pregnant, didn’t you contact me?’ Cesare demanded in a driving undertone. ‘Why do I only find out by accident?’
Mina lifted her chin, fighting to control the wobble in her voice. ‘I should think that’s obvious. I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want your financial help. In fact I didn’t want anything more to do with you. I didn’t ever want to see you again. I owed you nothing after the way you treated me!’
‘But what about what you owed the child?’ Cesare intoned with scorching emphasis. He watched her strained face tighten and uttered a harsh laugh. ‘No, you didn’t think about her. I don’t think you think about her very often——’
‘How dare you say that?’
‘She’s dirty, foul-mouthed, improperly supervised and desperate for attention. That doesn’t say much for you as a mother, does it?’
‘You only saw her for a few minutes. You don’t know her,’ Mina whispered, stricken, appalled by his censure. ‘She’s a tomboy but she has a bath every night. She only says that one bad word…’
‘Forgive me if I’m not too impressed.’ Cesare looked at her with bitter condemnation. ‘So Susie is the trouble I would be digging up which I wouldn’t want to handle? Why did you have her? Was she your insurance policy against prosecution? You were ready to use her to protect yourself, weren’t you? After all, she hasn’t clipped your wings much. You dumped her down here and simply got on with your life!’
White-faced, Mina’s distraught gaze clung to his fiercely clenched features in growing horror. ‘It wasn’t like that. I left her here because I couldn’t afford anywhere decent to live and I knew she was well looked after and safe here with my family——’
‘Where is she?’ Cesare glanced around expressively, an ebony brow rising. ‘You don’t even know, do you? She could be out on that road under a car!’
‘She’s too scared to walk over the cattle grid!’ Mina lifted a trembling hand to her throbbing brow, wondering what she had done to deserve this nightmare. Whatever response she had expected from Cesare it had not been an immediate catalogue of scathing attacks on her parenting skills.
‘She runs wild…my child, my daughter whom you tell me I had no right to know about! Who the hell do you think you are, to make a decision like that?’ Cesare shot at her with unhidden savagery.
Pale as paper and trembling, Mina whispered, ‘You treated me like——’
‘You deserved!’ Cesare cut in before she could complete the sentence. ‘But I did attempt to see you again after that night because I was concerned that my irresponsibility might have had repercussions.’
Shaken by the reminder, Mina looked away from him.
> ‘When I couldn’t find you, I called myself a fool for imagining that you would have taken such a risk. I assumed you had guarded yourself against pregnancy before you got into my bed,’ he revealed, his delivery suddenly icy cold, the anger tamped down and rigorously controlled. ‘It never crossed my mind that you might choose not to inform me of your condition. But then, why should you have done? You didn’t need my money to support her. Your wonderfully understanding family took responsibility and left you free——’
‘That isn’t how it was!’ Mina protested with a sob in her voice.
‘Per amor di Dio…’ he ground out thickly. ‘You have given me such a shock, I feel as if the ground is rocking under my feet!’
Mina was in tears. She felt like a target and he was the one throwing the knives, his aim deadly in its cruel accuracy. Too much had happened in too short a time space; too many agonising emotions had been unleashed and right now she was in the eye of the storm, powerless to control them. But when she looked at him, registered by the lines of savage strain etched into his clenched features that he was suffering an equally powerful emotional conflict, that somehow hurt even more than what she was feeling.
And finally she saw into herself, would have done anything to shield herself from that private viewing but what she saw could not be buried again. An anguished understanding of her own pain had flooded her. She still loved him. That was the only reason why Cesare could still hurt her to this extent. It was the worst time imaginable to make that discovery. The acknowledgement that she still loved him devastated her.
She collapsed down on the bench again, weak as water, and lowered her aching head. He hated her and she wanted to put her arms around him! She wanted to tell him she was sorry even if she didn’t know quite what she should be sorry for as yet. How the heck could she defend herself feeling like that?
‘I need time to think this over,’ Cesare admitted flatly and then he threw her entirely by simply walking away.
She stared after him with despairing eyes and slowly closed them as the throaty purr of the Ferrari faded away into the distance. He was devastated too and she had never seen him in that state before. But then finding out you were a father four years after a one-night stand wasn’t something that was covered by any book on social niceties. Worst of all, it was not a situation which Cesare was able to control, and if there was one field in which Cesare excelled it was controlling everything and everybody within his radius.
He despised Susie’s mother and he hadn’t been much more impressed by his first meeting with his daughter. But Cesare was very family-orientated. He wasn’t the kind of man who was capable of forgetting that he had a child because it didn’t suit him to have that child. He took his responsibilities seriously. Hadn’t she seen him in action with his obnoxious brother, Sandro?
He looked after Sandro, had given him a fancy title in Falcone Industries to keep him happy and stuck him in a very large office where, even with the very limited powers at his disposal, Sandro still managed to get himself into one mess after another…messes which Cesare cleared up and covered up. Why? Sandro was family. Sandro had had endless excuses made for him.
Why was she thinking about Sandro? But she knew why. Her last memory of Cesare’s brother was scorched into her bones. The morning after that night she had spent in Cesare’s arms she had wakened alone and wandered out of the bedroom half dressed, and had discovered to her mortification that the voice she could hear speaking on the phone belonged not to Cesare, but to his brother…
Sandro had asked her out the very first day she started work at Falcone Industries. She had turned him down, had had no plans to date anyone she worked with. In any case, Sandro was creepy and she hadn’t been in her job a week before she’d realised that the majority of the secretarial staff felt the same way as she did about the boss’s kid brother.
In Falcone Industries, Mina had entered an exclusively male executive clique and she had been shaken by their hostility. Even the other PAs would have cut off their hands sooner than help her out when she was trying to find her feet. She had walked into a plum job which some of them had applied for and the word had been that Cesare had employed her simply because she was easy on the eye. The next rumour had been that she was sleeping with the boss.
Cesare had not stepped in to help her. He had sat back and let her get on with it, sink or swim. But he had stopped the filthy jokes and the foul language in the boardroom, probably because she suspected that there had never been such offensive talk until her arrival. They had tried to treat her like an errand girl and for a while she had been foolishly obliging, hoping to make friends and show that she was not too big for her boots.
‘You only make coffee for me,’ Cesare had told her one day. ‘You only run messages for me. Learn to say no to everyone but me.’
How long had it taken for her to fall in love with him? His sophistication and his looks had initially intimidated her and he hadn’t been easy to work for. The first time he had shouted at her she had locked herself in the loo and fought back childish tears. The next time she had shouted back…and after a stunned pause he had stunned her by laughing. He had fascinated her right from the beginning. He was brilliant in business, intensely competitive but not a workaholic. If he worked hard, he also played hard and she had been staggered by the speed with which women came and went in his highly visible social life.
By the end of the first month, Mina had known she had three problems. One was that Sandro Falcone was refusing to take no for an answer and becoming increasingly unpleasant. The second was that she was passionately attracted to Cesare. The third was career-orientated. Cesare flew round Europe on a regular basis but he didn’t once take her with him; he took her subordinate instead, leaving Mina in London.
‘Did I say I would take you abroad with me?’ he had responded when she had finally picked up the courage to query that omission.
‘Well, no, but——’
‘Maybe this job isn’t working out for you?’ He had dismayed her by looking as if that idea appealed to him.
The second month he had become more shorttempered. In fact the more overtime she’d worked, the harsher he’d become. They had been spending a great deal of time alone together. By then, Mina had known that she was head over heels in love. The third month, the evidence of all the other women in his life had vanished. She would look up and find brooding golden eyes fixed on her and the air would hum but she had blamed herself for that awareness and feared that he suspected her feelings for him.
And then, that final night, they had been in the penthouse apartment at the top of the Falcone building. Everyone else had left but she had been finishing off transcribing her notes. He had offered her a glass of champagne and then, quite out of the blue, those golden eyes had suddenly shimmered down at her. ‘I surrender,’ he had muttered rawly, and he had grabbed her and kissed her breathless.
The glass had dropped out of her hand. He had kept on kissing her. She didn’t even remember how they had got to the bedroom. Cesare had given a very good impression of being as out of control as she was yet she did recall that he had taken immense care not to hurt her the first time they made love.
‘I never mix business and pleasure,’ he had said afterwards. ‘But this is different.’
And as far as meaningful conversation had gone that had been that. By the time she had got her mouth open, he had been making love to her again. As for pillow-talk concerning a deal he had recently closed, she had fallen asleep in the middle of it, waking up late into the morning when she should have been at her desk, appalled that Cesare had not roused her before he’d left. She had also been the victim of her own doubts and insecurities, painfully conscious that she could not recall Cesare saying a single word which might have allayed her fears that she had made an ass of herself.
Sandro had spun round and surveyed her with startled disbelief when she’d come running out of the bedroom, not even sure what time it was and hoping to catch Cesare before he
departed for Hong Kong.
‘So Cesare hit paydirt,’ Sandro had finally sneered after a long silence. ‘You’re a joke, Mina. And let me tell you something else: you backed the wrong horse. My brother doesn’t believe in office nooky. He thinks it’s bad for the old team spirit. The day before you started work here everybody was warned off you!’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she had mumbled.
‘And now he has had what nobody else was allowed to have he’ll dump you so fast and hard your head will spin! Cesare always goes by the book.’
Birdsong pierced her concentration. Blinking, in a daze, Mina was dragged back out of the past and she focused on the fading sunlight and the garden but she didn’t see them. She was still reliving the unutterable humiliation of that encounter—Sandro’s smirking face, his suggestive voice pawing over something which had until that moment been precious and oh, so private. He had made her feel grubby but she hadn’t believed that Cesare would behave like that, had initially refused even to entertain the idea that he could have swept her off to bed on nothing more than a lustful impulse.
‘Mummy?’
She glanced up. Susie was sidling along the wall towards her, her small face stiff with uncertainty. Mina’s throat closed over and she opened her arms. Susie flew into them, locking her arms round her mother’s throat in a stranglehold, with all the fierce affection that was the other side of that temper of hers.
‘Sorry,’ she sniffed.
Mina smoothed the dark head buried against her shoulder, wanted to squeeze her to death with the force of her own disturbed emotions.
‘Not be bad any more,’ Susie promised.
‘Darling, you’re only bad sometimes.’
‘I get cross.’
‘I know,’ Mina soothed. ‘But you mustn’t bite people.’
‘When you going on the train?’
Mina swallowed back the thickness in her throat. She had told Susie repeatedly over the past fortnight that she wasn’t going to be leaving on the train again but Susie couldn’t quite accept that yet. She had been accustomed to Mina’s departures for so long. Was Cesare right? Had she done everything wrong with Susie? Should she have buried her wretched pride and asked for his help? But she had envisaged so many even more humiliating scenarios when she had considered telling Cesare that she was pregnant.