by Penny Jordan
The foyer of the five-star hotel was empty of any of its wealthy guests as Annie got down on her hands and knees to remove a piece of trodden-down chewing gum from the marble floor. Her shift was actually over, but the receptionist—who seemed to have taken a dislike to her—had insisted that she pick up the litter dropped, Annie was sure quite deliberately, by the woman who had walked through the lobby a few minutes earlier. Her high heels had clacked on the marble floor, and her look of contempt for Annie had been all too plain as she’d smoothed down the skirt of her no-doubt expensive outfit and then dropped the chewing gum on the floor.
The sun was shining outside, its brilliant rays getting in Annie’s eyes and dazzling her. She blinked, raising her head in an attempt to avoid the too-bright light.
Falcon wasn’t in a very good mood. He had flown into London earlier in the week and had gone straight to a meeting with the head of what was supposed to be the country’s best missing person tracking agency, only to be told that whilst the agency had initially managed to identify Annie Johnson as the mother of Antonio’s child, she had disappeared five months ago, taking her baby with her, and they had not as yet managed to find her.
Falcon had spent a fruitless afternoon with Annie’s stepbrother, to whom he had taken an instant dislike, and now he had received a message from his youngest brother Rocco, telling him that their father’s health had suffered a sudden decline.
‘He’s stable now, and back at the castello.’ Rocco had told him. ‘But the hospital says that he is very frail.’
He needed to be in Sicily, Falcon knew, he had a duty to his family to be there. But he also had a duty to this child conceived so casually by his half-brother, and denied by him as though he was no more than a piece of detritus. Falcon had never liked Antonio. He hadn’t thought it was possible for his contempt for him to increase, but he had been wrong.
As he stepped into the foyer of his hotel, his eyes shielded from the glare of the sun by gold-rimmed discreetly non-logoed Cartier glasses, the first thing he saw was a cleaner, kneeling on the floor beside her bucket of dirty water. She was wearing a body-shrouding, washed-out blue overall and her hair was scraped back from her make-up-free face, but when she lifted her face to avoid the sunlight glaring into her eyes, Falcon’s heart turned over inside his chest and his heart started to race.
It was her. There was no mistake. After all, he’d only just left the office where her photograph had been pinned to the file in front of him. There was no mistaking those intensely blue eyes, nor that elegantly boned and beautifully structured face, with its small straight nose and its softly full mouth—even if right now her skin was drained of life and her expression etched in lines of exhaustion.
The hand she’d reached out to remove the flat grey-white pat of chewing gum that someone had left on the otherwise immaculate floor was red and swollen, her wrist thin and fragile, and her scraped back hair was out of sight beneath some sort of protective cover. But it was her. By some miracle, it was her.
The receptionist was still glowering at her, causing Annie to feel a sudden rush of anger. She had worked over her allotted hours, time for which she would not be paid, and the chewing gum wasn’t her responsibility. She stood up abruptly—and then gasped as her action brought her into immediate physical contact with someone. Not just someone, she recognised as male hands came out to grab her, somehow sliding up under the gaping arms of her overall to fasten round her bare skin. His intention was to fend her off, she imagined, rather than save her from stumbling, since such a man was hardly likely to care about the fate of someone like her. He was wearing an expensive suit, his eyes shielded from her inspection by dark-lensed sunglasses, and his hair were dark and his skin tanned.
He was still holding her—waiting for her to apologise for daring to breathe the same air as him, she thought bitterly. She tugged away from him, only to have his grip on her arms tighten. She looked up at him. A discomforting feeling was running through her body, its source the point of contact between his hands and her skin. Her pulse had started to jump and she was breathing too fast as her heart raced. She felt dizzy, her lungs starved of oxygen as though she had forgotten how to breathe and yet she was breathing—although very unsteadily.
Sensations like the mechanics of a long-unused piece of machinery were coming to painful life inside her. She wanted, she discovered in bemused disbelief, to lean into him, to have his arms come fully around her so that she was held against his maleness. A shudder ripped through her, and her body was hot with guilt and shame.
The most extraordinary feeling had Falcon in its grip. He didn’t know what it was or where it had come from. The only comparison that came readily to his mind was a memory of being young and standing on the edge of one of Sicily’s most dangerous clifftops in the middle of a fierce storm, feeling the wind buffet him, knowing that it could take him and do what it wished with him. He had both wanted to fight its power and give in to it. What he’d felt was a mixture of awe and exhilaration, an awareness of a great power and a desire to test himself against it. It was a sense of being alive, heightened and stretched taut, of being on the edge of something dangerous and compelling.
The receptionist had left her desk and was coming towards them. Somehow Annie managed to wrench herself free and pick up her bucket so that she could make a speedy exit. She could hear the receptionist apologising as she did so.
CHAPTER TWO
SACKED. She had been sacked because a hotel guest had—shock, horror—had to touch her. The hotel receptionist had obviously reported the incident, and a complaint had then been made to the firm that employed her. Her manager had been waiting for her when she had returned with the other workers to the depot, to give her the news. As a part timer she had no comeback. She was now out of a job.
It was supposed to be summer, but the morning’s bright sunshine had now gone and it had started to rain. As she stepped out into the street Annie hunched into her raincoat—a good-quality trenchcoat that belonged to her previous life, a life before the death of her mother and the birth of her son.
She was twenty-four years old, she reminded herself. Far too old to cry because she was alone and vulnerable and desperately worried about how she was going to hold everything together without her cleaning job.
The city streets were busy now, and she didn’t want to be late collecting Ollie from his nursery. There’d been a notice pinned up in the nursery asking for teachers’ assistants at the nearby primary school. Annie would have loved to have applied, but it was too dangerous. They’d check up on her and discover that Antonio’s clever lawyers had threatened to sue her for claiming that he’d raped her, saying that in reality she had consented to having sex with him. Her reputation would be ruined. She had no proof that she had been raped. It had been her word against his and she couldn’t even remember what had happened. She knew beyond any shadow of a doubt, though, that she would not have consented.
Her stepbrother had been furious when he had received that telephone call from Antonio’s solicitors. He had been so sure that Antonio would pay up. She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold, and then pinned a forced smile to her face as she climbed the short flight of stone steps that led to the door of the nursery.
The sunny yellow-painted hall walls were decorated with the children’s brightly coloured artwork, and Mrs Nkobu, one of the more senior staff, greeted her with a warm smile.
‘There’s a man waiting to see you. Mrs Ward wasn’t for letting him—she told him it was against the rules—but it’s plain to see that he’s the kind that doesn’t pay attention to anyone’s rules but his own,’ she told Annie conspiratorially.
Fear iced down Annie’s spine.
Colin had found them.
Strictly speaking the nursery wasn’t supposed to allow anyone not authorised by a parent to have access to any of the children, but Annie knew how persuasive Colin could be. Nausea curdled her stomach. He would try to take over her life again. He would say it was in her b
est interests. He would remind her that their parents had left their assets to him because they trusted him to look after her—even though her mother had told her that the house would come to her, because it had belonged to her father.
She mustn’t think about any of that now, she told herself. She would need all her energy and strength to survive the present; she mustn’t waste it on the past.
‘He’s in the carers’ room,’ Mrs Nkobu informed her, referring to the small fusty room with a glass wall through which parents and guardians could watch the children whilst waiting to collect them.
Annie nodded her head, but instead of going to the carers’ room she went to the nursery, busy with other mothers collecting their children. Ollie was sitting on the floor, playing with some toys, and as always when she saw him Annie’s heart flooded with love. The minute he saw her he held out his arms to her to be picked up. Only once she was cradling him tightly in her arms did she feel brave enough to look through the glass panels into the room beyond them.
There was only one person there. He was standing with his back to the glass and he was not Colin. But any relief she might have felt was obliterated by the shock of recognition that arced through her, sending through her exactly the same tingling sensation of deadened sensory nerve-endings awakened into painful life as she had felt earlier in the hotel lobby, when he had held her.
A long-ago memory of herself as a young teenager came back to her. Inside her head she could see herself, giggling with a schoolfriend over a handsome young teenage pop idol they had both had a crush on. She had felt so alive then—so happy, and so unquestioningly secure in her unfolding sexuality. She held Ollie even tighter, causing him to wriggle in her arms at the same moment as the man from the hotel lobby turned round.
He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses now, and she could see his eyes.
The breath left her lungs with so much force that it might as well have been driven out by a physical blow. She knew who or rather what he was immediately. How could she not when the eyes set in the scimitar-harsh maleness of his face were her son’s eyes? That he and Ollie shared the same blood was undeniable—and yet he looked nothing like Ollie’s father, the man who had raped her. Antonio Leopardi had had a soft, full-fleshed face, and pebble-hard brown eyes set too close together. He had been only of medium height, and thickset. This man was tall with broad shoulders, and his body—as she already knew—was hard with muscles, not soft with over-indulgence. He smelled of clean skin, and some cologne so subtle she couldn’t put a name to it, not of alcohol and heavy aftershave.
He was clean-shaven, his thick dark hair groomed, whereas Antonio had favoured stubble and his hair thickly gelled.
Everything about this man said that he set the highest of standards for himself even more than for others. This man’s word, once given, would be given for all time.
Everything about Antonio had said that he was not to be trusted, but despite their differences this man had to be related to her abuser. Ollie was the proof of that.
She wanted to turn and run, fear tumbling through her as she felt her defences as weak as a house of cards; but her fear was not fear of the man because he was a man, Annie had time to recognize. It was a different fear from the one that lay inside her like a heavy stone. Instinctively she knew that this man was no threat to her, and that she was in no danger from him. His focus wasn’t on her. It was on her son—on Ollie.
Her mouth had gone dry and her heart was pounding recklessly, using up her strength. There was no escape for her. She knew that. Still she tried to delay the inevitable, her hands trembling as she strapped Ollie into his buggy and then reluctantly pushed it to the door.
He was waiting for her in the corridor, one strong, lean brown hand reaching for the buggy, forcing her to move her own hand or risk having him close his hand over her own.
Falcon frowned as he registered her reaction to him. Was her recoil part of the legacy Antonio had left her? He had been struck when he had seen her earlier by her vulnerability, and by his unfamiliar desire to reassure her. Now that feeling had returned.
Falcon wasn’t used to experiencing such strong feelings for anyone outside his immediate family. He had never denied to himself his protective love for his two younger brothers, nor his belief that, as their elder, in the absence of their father’s love and their mother’s presence in their lives, it was his responsibility to protect and nurture them.
He had grown up shouldering that responsibility, but he had never before felt that fierce tug of emotional protectiveness towards anyone else.
It was because of the child, of course. There could be no other reason for his illogical reaction.
It had taken him several hours of impatient telephone calls and pressure to track her down via the agency that had employed her—thanks to that wretched receptionist preventing him from following her at the hotel.
This morning he had felt sorry for her. Now he was motivated solely by his duty to his family name to make amends for what Antonio had done, he assured himself. And of course to ensure that Antonio’s son grew up knowing his Leopardi heritage. It had taken him longer than he had wished and a great deal of money to track him down, but now that he had there could be no doubting that the child was a Leopardi. He had known that the minute he had seen him at the nursery. The boy’s blood was stamped into his features, and Falcon had seen from the woman’s expression when she had looked at him that she knew that too.
They were outside now, with no one to overhear them.
‘Who are you?’ Annie demanded unsteadily. ‘And what do you want?’
‘I am Falcon Leopardi, the eldest of Antonio’s half-brothers from our father’s first marriage.’
Colin had mentioned Antonio’s family to her—or rather he had tried to. But she had refused to listen. Antonio had, after all, refused to acknowledge his son.
‘You are Antonio’s brother?’
The tone of her voice betrayed disbelief, and Falcon detected a deeper core of something that sounded like revulsion. He could hardly blame her for that. In fact, he shared her revulsion.
‘No,’ he corrected her grimly. ‘We were only half-brothers.’
How well she understood that need to differentiate and distance oneself from a supposed sibling. But how ridiculous of her to allow herself to imagine that she and this man could have anything in common, could share that deep-rooted antipathy and guilt that had been so much a part of her growing up.
Even now she could still her mother saying plaintively, almost pleadingly, ‘But, darling, Colin is just trying to be friends with you. Why can’t you be nicer to him?’ She had tried so hard to tell her mother how she had felt, but how could you explain what you did not understand yourself? In the end it had driven a wedge between them—a gulf on one side of which stood Colin, the good stepchild, and on the other side her, the bad daughter.
Where had she gone? Falcon wondered, watching the shadows seeping pain as they darkened her eyes. Wherever it was it was somewhere in her past, he recognized. The quality of her silence held a message of her helpless inability to change anything.
It was the present and the future that he was here for, though.
She must resent Antonio—more than resent him, he would have thought. Although her love for her child was obvious, and backed up by all the information his enquiry agents had been able to gather. She was an exemplary and devotedly loving mother. Apart from the fact that for some reason she had turned down her stepbrother’s offer of a home under his roof. Colin Riley had not been able to furnish him with a logical explanation for that, although he had implied that there had been some kind of quarrel which she, despite all his attempts to repair the damage, had refused to make up.
‘She’s always been inclined to be over-emotional and to overreact,’ he had told Falcon. ‘All I wanted to do—all I’ve ever wanted to do—is help her.’
‘There was no love lost between the three of us and Antonio.’
Falcon’s voice, h
is English perfect and unaccented, brought Annie back out of the past.
‘I will not seek to hide that fact from you—nor the fact that Antonio was our father’s favourite son. I can also assure you that Antonio’s choice of lifestyle was not ours. It could never have been and was never condoned by us.’
Annie looked at him, and then looked away again, her heart jumping as it always did whenever she had to think about Ollie’s conception. Falcon Leopardi was obviously trying to tell her that he and his brothers were not tarred with the same brush as their younger half-brother. His choice of the word ‘assure’ suggested that convincing her that his morals were very different from his half-brother was something he was determined to do. But why?’
‘As to what I want…’
He paused for so long that Annie looked at him again, hard fingers of uncertainty and unease tightening round her heart when she saw that he was looking at Ollie.
‘Before his death,’ Falcon continued, ‘Antonio told our father that there was a child. But he died before he could give more details. Such was the love our father felt for Antonio that he demanded that this child be traced. When no child could be found we assumed that laying claim to its existence had been another example of Antonio’s enjoyment of deceit.’
Falcon paused again. She’d kept her gazed fixed straight ahead of her whilst he was speaking, but he could see from the way her grip had tightened on the buggy how tense she was.
The tale of what had been done to her was one of breathtakingly callous cruelty that would fill any decent person with revulsion. The only merciful aspect of it was that she herself apparently had no recollection of what had occurred. There was no doubt in Falcon’s mind that the rape had been a deliberate act of punishment, intended to humiliate her—not conducted because Antonio had hoped to arouse her to passion and desire for him. That fitted in so well with everything Falcon knew about his half-brother’s warped personality.