D'Alessandro's Child

by Catherine Spencer

  Tentatively Camille touched his arm. “Michael? Is something wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited for him to elaborate, and when it became obvious he wasn’t going to, said, “Can you tell me about it?”

  When at last he turned to her, his eyes were so empty she might have been looking at a dead man. She had no idea whether he was angry, or ill, or just very tired.

  “No. You’re the last person I can talk to,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He inhaled deeply. “I have no business being here with you tonight—no right at all cultivating an acquaintance with you.”

  “Because we come from different worlds?”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “More than you can begin to imagine.”

  CATHERINE SPENCER, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about romance. Within two months she changed careers and sold her first book to Harlequin Presents® in 1985. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus two dogs and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.

  Books by Catherine Spencer

  HARLEQUIN PRESENTS®

  2143—ZACHARY’S VIRGIN

  2101—THE UNEXPECTED WEDDING GIFT

  2172—PASSION’S BABY

  2197—MISTRESS ON HIS TERMS

  2220—THE MILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE

  Catherine Spencer

  D’ALESSANDRO’S CHILD

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  INITIALLY, all Mike planned to do was observe the child. From a distance. To establish, as well as he could, that all was well in the boy’s life. That done, he would pay a last visit to his dying ex-wife, ease her tortured mind and heart, then take the first flight out of San Francisco and head back to Vancouver without disclosing to another living soul that, more than four years earlier, she’d conceived a child. Mike would even try to forget it.

  It seemed the most decent thing to do; the most humane. Because enough damage had already occurred, and what right had he to plow into matters at this late stage and make them worse?

  But that was before. Before he could put a face to the child. Before he heard the infectious belly laugh of delight, or saw the dark hair so much like his own, or watched the sturdy, sun-kissed legs pumping across the grassy slope to the carousel at the other side of the park.

  After that, observing from a distance just wasn’t enough. He wanted to touch. To speak, to listen. To learn everything about the three and a half years since this child, this son he hadn’t known he’d sired, had come into the world—little things like what foods he preferred, what his favorite toy was, if he liked music, or model trains; whether or not he could kick a ball, skate, swim.

  A few yards from where he watched, the woman—the “mother”—waved to the boy as he swirled past on a painted pony. “Hold on tight, sweetheart,” she called out, her voice as musical as a genteel bell.

  Hold on tight! The words held a bitter irony for Mike. Perhaps if he and Kay had held on tight to their marriage, he wouldn’t be here now, trying to devise a way to strike up a conversation without raising suspicion.

  Already he felt people were watching him, wondering about the stranger in their midst. In a town as small and seriously upscale as this, a guy in blue jeans stood out from the crowd as plainly as his midsize rental car looked out of place snugged up between the Mercedes and BMWs in the tree-shaded parking area.

  The merry-go-round wound to a stop with the boy on the side farthest away from his mother. Standing on tiptoe, the skirt of her pretty mauve dress billowing slightly in the breeze, she waved to catch his attention. “Over here, Jeremy!”

  Jeremy? He’d come across worse names, Mike supposed, but this one was a bit on the arty side for his taste. A boy needed a name that would sit easily on him when he grew to be a man. Something strong and indisputedly masculine. Like Michael. And a last name that reflected his heritage. Like D’Alessandro.

  Slithering off his pony, the boy raced around the carousel and in his eagerness to get back to his mother, tripped and went sprawling practically at Mike’s feet. Without stopping to consider the wisdom of such a move, Mike stooped to haul the little guy upright again.

  There were grass stains on his knees. And the faint remains of baby dimples. The little body was sweetly solid, the eyes staring into his the same dark, fathomless brown as Kay’s.

  The feelings…sheesh, how to describe them! It was as if a hollow suddenly opened up inside Mike; a sense of loss so acute that he caught his breath at the pain of it. The child fearfully shying away from him was his own flesh and blood!

  He ached to reassure him. To cup the smooth round cheek in his callused hand, to hug the innocent little body close and just once whisper, You don’t have to be afraid of me, son. I’m your daddy.

  Instead, he mumbled, “Hey, sport,” then dribbled into awkward silence because, while he never had to think twice about what to say to his four-year-old twin nephews, with this child he had to watch his words.

  A shadow slid across the grass, just wide enough to block out the sun. “Come here, Jeremy.”

  Even lightly coated with alarm, her voice remained musical and lovely. The hand which reached down to pluck her child out of a stranger’s grasp was narrow and elegant, with long slender fingers and delicate oval nails painted pink.

  Glancing up, Mike found himself pinned in a wary silver-blue gaze rimmed with feathery lashes. Straightening, he took a step backward and said casually, “He took quite a nosedive, but I don’t think he’s hurt.”

  She was too well-bred to tell him she no more gave a flying fig what he thought than she appreciated his touching her child, but the message came across clearly enough in her cool reply. “I’m sure he isn’t, but thank you for being concerned. Jeremy, say thank you to the gentleman for being kind enough to help you.”

  “Thank you,” Jeremy parroted, inspecting him with the uninhibited curiosity of any normal three-year-old now that he had the safety of his mother’s leg to cling to.

  Mike wished he dared ruffle that thick mop of black hair—just once experience the pleasure of its texture slipping through his fingers. But it was out of the question. She was watching him too intently, her protective instincts on full alert. So hooking his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans and hoping his grin didn’t look too manufactured, he settled for, “Any time, kiddo.”

  “Well….” The mother folded the boy’s hand protectively in her own and turned away. “We must be going. Thank you again.”

  “Sure thing.”

  He watched them leave, her with the erect carriage of a duchess, and his boy with the agile enthusiasm that only the very young and innocent could know. You’ve accomplished what you came to do, Mike’s rational mind informed him. The child’s well-dressed, well-fed, and well-mannered, and even a fool can see the mother dotes on him. Convey the news to Kay, then stick to your original idea and forget this afternoon ever happened.

  “Fat chance,” he murmured, his gaze trained on the pair as they joined the lineup at the buffet tables set out under striped, open-sided tents.

  The scene, perfect down to the last detail, might have been lifted from a painting. Too bad it couldn’t erase the picture indelibly imprinted on his mind of the room in St. Mary
’s Hospital in San Francisco, and Kay’s face, already pared by illness to skeletal proportions, rendered even more pitiful by her mental anguish.

  “I gave him away,” she’d whispered, her sunken eyes filling with tears and her fingers, so bony they resembled claws, worrying the hospital sheet stretched across her painfully thin body. “Finding I was pregnant, just when I was starting out afresh…with such ambitions. I was so close to achieving my dream…I could smell the success. I couldn’t handle a baby, Mike. Not then.”

  But I could have, he thought bitterly. The brief taste he’d just enjoyed told him that, and he was ravenous suddenly, not for the food people were heaping on their plates, but for closer acquaintance with a child who should have belonged to him.

  He could no more walk away and forget the boy existed than a starving man could refuse nourishment.

  “Who’s your secret admirer, Camille?”

  Though lightly phrased and threaded with amusement, the question brought a flush to Camille’s cheeks which completely undercut her offhand, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.”

  “Oh, come off it! This is me you’re talking to!”

  She should have known better than to try fooling the woman who’d been her best friend since kindergarten. Frances Knowlton hadn’t shared her secret passion for Mortimer Griffin at nine, helped her dye her naturally blond hair a horrific ruby red at fifteen, supported her at twenty through a wedding involving four hundred guests, and kept her together when her marriage fell apart the year she turned twenty-eight, without learning a thing or two along the way.

  “If you’re referring to the man at the table over there,” she said, refusing to glance his way even though her eyes would have been happy to feast on him indefinitely if she’d allowed it, “we met very casually over by the carousel. He was kind to Jeremy.”

  “Which no doubt explains why you’re practically drooling at the mere mention of him now. Not that I blame you.” Fran, never one to care too much about social protocol, lowered her sunglasses and subjected the stranger to a frank inspection before fondling her husband’s knee under the table. “If I weren’t already happily married to the sexiest man on earth, I’d be sticking a Sold sign on Mr. Blue Eyes’ forehead before anyone else, including you, Camille, beat me to it.”

  He did have the most gorgeous eyes, Camille was forced to admit. Not the pale blue-gray she’d been cursed with, but a deep, tropical indigo that blazed with an almost electric energy from his tanned face. And he did keep switching that gaze to her. She could feel it pulsing across the distance between them, a magnet persistently drawing her attention away from Jeremy who was up to his elbows in crabmeat salad.

  “Isn’t it a shame that, like you, he’s here alone?” Fran observed, flinging down her paper napkin and swinging her long legs over the picnic bench. “In the spirit of small town hospitality, I think I should do something about that.”

  Heat rushed into Camille’s face again. “Please don’t, Fran! For a start, I’m not alone, I’m with Jeremy, and….”

  But she might as well have saved her breath. Fran had already descended with single-minded determination on the man seated two tables away. He was acknowledging whatever she said to him, his initial look of inquiry giving way to a dazzling smile.

  A moment later, he’d scooped up his plate and was loping behind her as she wove her way back to where Camille sat stony-faced with embarrassment.

  “If I were you, I’d try to keep my wife under better control,” she informed Adam Knowlton.

  Adam grinned. “Short of keeping her on a very short leash and muzzling her, there’s not much I can do. She’s her own woman, always has been, and I wouldn’t have her any other way.” Then, as Fran made a beeline for a seat next to her husband, thereby leaving the stranger with no choice but to sit beside Camille, Adam leaned forward and muttered, “Better take the scowl off your face and smile, sweet thing. You’re about to be introduced.”

  His name was Michael D’Alessandro. He was, he said, on a working vacation. He lived north of the border, in Vancouver, and owned a construction company and was chiefly interested in building town houses. Back home, the Californian style of architecture was very popular, and he’d come south in part to solicit bids for designs on a gated community he hoped to develop on a tract of land he’d recently acquired.

  He said a lot of other things, too: that he couldn’t believe his luck in running into Adam who was an architect specializing in earthquake-proof residential construction; that he’d discovered Calder by chance and found it very picturesque.

  He answered Fran’s not-so-subtle questions with forthright charm. Married? Not anymore. Traveling alone? Yes. Just passing through or planning to stay in town awhile? No fixed time frame; he was his own boss and could pretty much do as he pleased.

  He even found time to pay attention to Jeremy, drawing him out with the ease of someone used to being around small children. Jeremy responded like a starving plant to water, bursting into infectious giggles and showing off with three-year-old pride. “I can swim,” he announced. “And I’ve got a football and I got my hair cut,” all of which information Michael D’Alessandro received with absorbed attention.

  But the only thing that really registered with Camille was the instinctive feeling that everything about the man spelled trouble, from his mesmerizing, take-no-prisoners eyes, to his stunning smile and his sexy, come-hither voice.

  Sexy? She almost fell off the bench in astonishment. How had sexy managed to sneak into her thoughts? She must have a touch of sunstroke! “Sexy” was no more a part of her vocabulary these days than “romance.” She’d renounced both and concentrated all her love and passion on Jeremy ever since the day her marriage fell apart and Todd walked out not just on her, but on their child as well.

  “So what’s this public picnic all about, or do people in Calder always get together for a crabfest on summer weekends?”

  Fran kicked her under the table, alerting Camille to the fact that the sexy voice had finally got around to addressing a direct question at her. Flustered, she avoided meeting his gaze and stared instead at his hands.

  He had a working man’s hands, big and tanned and capable. Like his arms and, no doubt, all the rest of him so snugly encased in white T-shirt and blue jeans softened to doeskin by numerous washings. Nothing like Todd, who turned a fiery red if he stayed out in the sun very long, and who thought muscle sat best on those who didn’t have much in the brain department.

  “Tell Michael about the women’s shelter, Camille,” Fran prompted, in much the same tone of voice one might use with a social incompetent suddenly turned loose in public.

  “Women’s shelter?” As he shifted to look at her more fully, Michael D’Alessandro’s arm brushed against Camille’s. If finding herself the focus of those arresting blue eyes wasn’t disturbing enough, the shock of his actually touching her ran clean past her shoulder and settled somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, temporarily impairing her vocal cords—not to mention her mental faculties.

  “I….” she croaked, shredding a corner of her paper napkin. “We—a group of us, that is…it’s a project we thought was…um, worthwhile.”

  “As usual, she’s being too modest,” Fran chimed in, rolling her eyes in exasperation when Camille stumbled into silence. “She’s chair of the fund-raising committee—is the one who started the ball rolling in the first place, come to that, and it’s mostly thanks to her efforts that it’s been so successful.”

  Camille swallowed, and vowed she’d throttle Fran the very first chance she got.

  “Is that so?” Laugh lines creased the corners of his eyes as he let loose with a smile that could have melted the polar ice cap. “I wouldn’t have expected there’d be a need for such a place in a town like this.”

  “There isn’t. It’s in San Francisco,” she said baldly.

  “I see.” A shadow of sadness seemed to cross his face and he lowered his eyes briefly. He had ridiculously long lashes
. And sleek level brows as black as his hair which needed a trim. An inch longer and the ends would touch the crew neck of his T-shirt.

  Aware she was staring, Camille turned her attention to Jeremy on her other side, glad that the conversation seemed to have petered out.

  Fran, though, wasn’t about to let that happen. “If you’re interested in supporting the cause, you’re welcome to buy a ticket to our annual gala next Saturday,” she informed the man breezily. “You’ll get a fabulous evening’s entertainment in return—gourmet catering, live dance music, fabulous door prizes—and the really good part is, it’s all tax deductible.”

  “Not for Mr. D’Alessandro,” Camille put in quickly. “He’s not a U.S. resident. In any case, I doubt he’d be interested in attending a function where he doesn’t know anyone.”

  “I know you,” Michael D’Alessandro said, bathing her in another sultry smile. “Not well, perhaps, but enough that I’d like to know you better.”

  Fran jumped on that faster than a flea on a well-fed dog. “Well, isn’t it amazing how things work out sometimes! Would you believe that, less than an hour ago, Camille told me she hasn’t yet lined herself up with an escort? You’d be doing her a double favor if you bought a ticket and offered your services.”

  “Fran, honestly!” Truly annoyed, Camille turned a scathing glare on her friend. “I don’t need you to set me up with a man, and I’m quite sure Mr. D’Alessandro doesn’t appreciate being pressured like this. Drop the subject, please.”

  “I don’t feel pressured,” he said mildly. “Surprised, perhaps. I’d have thought your husband would be your date.”

  “I don’t have a husband. My marriage broke up two years ago.”

  For some reason, the news rendered him temporarily speechless. She couldn’t imagine why. People got divorced all the time, as he should know. She was hardly unique.