Dante: Claiming His Secret Love-Child

by Sandra Marton

  Then she’d heard Dante’s voice.

  She could not have kept from going to him any more than the big, beautiful hawk moths could keep from beating themselves to death against the lit windows of the house at night.

  Why had she believed he’d buy the fazenda for her? Worse, why had she let him kiss her? To let that happen…to give in to the kiss, to respond like a wanton to the feel of his arms, the heat of his body, the never-forgotten taste of his mouth and then to have him show how little he thought of her by believing she would have slept with Ferrantes…

  That she would have slept with any man after having been with him and, Deus, she hated him for that, for leaving his mark on her lips, her skin, her stupid heart.

  Gabriella froze.

  Someone was ringing the doorbell. Banging on the door. She could hear it all the way up here, even with the water running. It would wake Daniel, but how could she let Ferrantes in?

  Because, this time it would be him.

  She didn’t take the time to towel off. Instead, she flung on her robe, tied the sash and ran downstairs. Her heart was racing. She needed a weapon. Her father had kept guns but she didn’t know where they’d be. Arturo, who’d despised killing things, had probably disposed of them.

  “Gabriella! Open this door.”

  She blinked. Dante? Why had he returned? It couldn’t be him. But when she turned on the outside lights and peered out the window, it was his rental car she saw parked before the house, not Ferrantes’s obscenely extravagant SUV.

  What did he want now? There was only one way to find out. She took a steadying breath and cracked the door an inch.

  “I don’t know why you came back,” she said, or started to say. But just as he’d done a little while ago, Dante brushed past her as if she were nothing. His easy arrogance was infuriating.

  A good thing, because it swept away the sudden ache in her heart the unexpected sight of him provoked.

  “Excuse me,” she said coldly, “but I did not invite you in. It is very late, and—”

  He swung toward her, eyes bright and hard as diamonds.

  “Yes,” he said coldly, “it is definitely very late.”

  His gaze swept over her, lingering on the rise of her breasts, the length of her thighs. She thought of how the thin cotton robe must be clinging to her damp body and she flushed and folded her arms.

  His smile was thin and dangerous. “Dressed for company?” he said softly.

  She could feel her color deepen. “Dressed for bed,” she said coolly. “My days have an early start.”

  His smile vanished.

  “Taking care of a kid must cut down on your social life.”

  Her chin lifted. “What do you want?”

  “It’s hard to imagine a city girl like you enjoying this kind of life.”

  “That only shows how little you know about me.”

  A muscle jumped in his cheek. What was she talking about? He knew a lot about her. She preferred white wine. She didn’t eat red meat. She wore clothes by big-time designers.

  Those things constituted knowing a woman, didn’t they? Sure they did. It meant he knew what restaurants she preferred, what to choose on a menu, what to tell his PA to buy her whenever he decided it was time to give a woman a gift.

  “Dante. I asked you a question. Why did you come back? We said all we had to say an hour ago.”

  He dragged his thoughts together. She was wrong; they hadn’t said all there was to say an hour ago and he damned well wasn’t leaving this time until they had.

  “That’s just the point,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure we did.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You never answered the one question that matters.”

  She kept her eyes on his, but her face lost a little color. “What question?”

  “Gabriella. No games.” He took a step toward her; his eyes grew suddenly dark. “Is the child his?” He paused. “Or is it mine?”

  His words hit her with an almost physical force. When she’d first realized she was pregnant, she’d imagined this scene endless times.

  It had never ended well.

  That was the reason she hadn’t fallen apart that terrible night Dante had taken her to dinner and told her he didn’t want her anymore, just seconds before she’d been about to tell him she was carrying his child.

  He had not wanted her then. He did not want her now. So, why was he asking the question?

  Better still, how should she answer it?

  He came closer, close enough so she had to tilt her head back to look at him.

  “It’s a simple question, Gabriella. Whose kid is it?”

  Her heart was pounding. His voice was hard. So was his face. Hard and threatening. What did he want? If only she knew.

  His hands closed on her wrists.

  “Answer the question.”

  Why should she tell him now? She’d gone through the worst alone. Pregnant. No longer able to model. Coming home because she had no other choice, coming home to her father’s cold derision, to the illness and death of first him and then her brother.

  Gabriella tossed her head, searched and found the you’re-boring-me look she’d perfected for her stints on the runways of Paris, Milan and New York.

  “Why ask when you already supplied the answer?”

  His hands gripped her harder. She could sense the tightly controlled anger all but pouring off him.

  “Answering a question with a question is a load of bull and you know it,” he said grimly. “One more time. Who does the kid belong to?”

  “The ‘kid,’ as you so charmingly put it, belongs to me. That’s all you need to know. Now, get out!”

  She gasped as he put a little twist on her wrists, lifted her to her toes. “Get out?” he said very softly, and flashed another of those thin, dangerous smiles. “Aren’t you forgetting something, baby? This isn’t your house. It’s mine.”

  Her heart gave a thump so loud she was amazed he didn’t seem to hear it.

  “The advogado—Senhor de Souza said I did not have to vacate for forty-eight hours.”

  “You’ll vacate when I say so.” His mouth twisted. “You want those forty-eight hours? Tell me what I want to know.”

  Gabriella jerked against his grasp; he slid his hands to her shoulders, cupped them hard enough so she could feel the imprint of his fingers.

  “It is none of your business.”

  “How old is the kid?”

  “Four months. You see? I have given you an answer. Now, get—”

  “Four months. And you left me a year ago.”

  “I left you?” She laughed. “You left me, Dante. You…you discarded me like…like a toy you’d tired of.”

  His mouth twisted. “I never thought of you as a toy.”

  “‘It’s been fun, Gabriella,’” she said, in uncanny imitation of his message if not his exact words, “‘but it’s time I moved on. There are so many women out there—’”

  “I never said that,” he shot back, but he could feel the color rising in his face.

  “It was what you meant.”

  She tossed her head; her damp curls flew about her face in wild abandon.

  God, she was so beautiful!

  Her robe was made of cotton. It was not fashionable. It looked old, a little worn, but she made it look regal. The thin fabric clung to her body like silk, outlining her breasts, cupping them as his hands had once had the right to do. Her nipples poked against the cotton. He remembered their shape, their size, their color.

  Their taste.

  Sweet. Incredibly sweet. How he had loved to lick them. Suck them. Bite gently on them while she buried her hands in his hair and sobbed his name. He’d feast on her breasts until she trembled in his arms and then he’d slide his hand down, down, down until he cupped her, felt her heat, felt her body weep with need for his.

  His erection was swift and almost painful. He let go of her, turned his back, strode across the room while he fought
for control, furious with himself for losing it, with her for making him lose it. Seconds passed. At last he swung toward her again.

  “How long do you think it will take me to get answers, Gabriella? An hour? A day? One call to my lawyer and he’ll set the wheels in motion. I’ll know where the kid was born—”

  “Stop talking about him that way! He has a name. Daniel.”

  “And on his birth certificate? What’s his surname?”

  “Reyes,” she said, lying, hating herself for the instant of weak sentimentality that had made her list Dante Orsini as her son’s father.

  “Fine.” Dante took his mobile phone from his pocket and flipped it open.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling my attorney. You want to do this the hard way, we will. But I promise you, you’re only making me even more angry than I already am.” His lips twisted. “And that’s not what you want. I promise you it isn’t.”

  He was right. She knew that. He would be a formidable enemy. Besides, what would it matter if she told him the truth? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing was what she wanted from him. She had reached that decision the night he’d cast her aside.

  Really, what was she protecting but her pride?

  And yet…and yet he was a powerful man. A complex man. That he had returned to ask her about the baby proved it. If she admitted he was Daniel’s father, anything was possible.

  “Gabriella.” His voice was soft but his eyes were ice. “What’s it going to be? Do we do this my way—or the hard way?”

  He watched her face, saw the play of emotions across it. She was shivering, from the cool of the night or from anger. He didn’t give a damn. And if it was all he could do to keep from hauling her into his arms again and kissing her until she sighed his name and trembled not with cold or rage but with need, what did that prove except that she was a woman, an incredibly beautiful woman he’d never stopped wanting and—dammit, what did that have to do with anything?

  “For the last time,” he said sharply. “Is Daniel mine?”

  Perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps it was acceptance of the inevitable. Or perhaps, Gabriella thought, perhaps it was hearing her son’s name on the lips of the man who had planted his seed deep in her womb thirteen long months ago.

  Whatever the reason, she knew it was time to stop fighting.

  “Yes,” she said wearily, “he is. So what?”

  Of all the night’s questions, that was the only one that mattered. And Dante knew, in that instant, his world would never be the same again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GABRIELLA had promised herself she would not tell Dante that her baby was his—but that was when telling him would have meant seeking him out after Daniel’s birth, and what would she have said then?

  “Hello, Dante, how have you been and, by the way, here’s your son?”

  Logic had kept her from something so foolish. Dante didn’t want her; why would he want to know she’d had his child?

  But this—this was different.

  Fate, circumstance, whatever, had brought him back into her life. He had seen her little boy, asked her a direct question. How could she lie to him?

  Now, waiting for him to react, she realized that she should have lied.

  He looked as if he’d been struck dumb.

  If this were an old movie, if she was Meg Ryan and he was Tom Hanks, he’d have gone from shock to joy in a heartbeat. But this wasn’t a movie. More to the point, this was Dante Orsini, the man who lost interest in a woman after a couple of months. She’d known his reputation—and she’d wanted him anyway. The part of her that yearned to be a sophisticate had said she could handle an affair like that.

  Wrong. Agonizingly wrong. She had not been able to handle it, especially when he’d cut her from his life as if she’d never been part of it. How on earth could she have told him she’d had his child after that?

  But she had told him now, only after he’d bullied her into submission.

  No, she thought, watching him, no, this was not a movie. It was real life. And Dante’s face said it all.

  Shock. Disbelief. Horror. His color had drained away until the same pale-blue eyes she saw in her baby’s face glittered like pools of winter ice in his.

  She took a steadying breath. She wasn’t feeling very well. The auction. Ferrantes. Dante turning up and now this. Her head ached. The truth was, everything ached. Maybe she was coming down with something or maybe she was simply reacting to the endless, awful day. Whatever the reason, she wanted Dante out of here. She was not up to trying to explain anything to him or to hearing him deny that Daniel was his.

  But, strange as it might seem, she could understand it.

  She’d been in denial, too. Complete denial. She hadn’t even admitted the possibility she might be pregnant when she had missed her period. Her cycle had never been regular so she hadn’t thought anything about being late. She had no morning queasiness. No tenderness in her breasts. And then one night, alone in her bed because Dante was away on business, it had simply hit her.

  Maybe she was pregnant.

  She’d thrown on some clothes, rushed to the all-night pharmacy on the next block, bought a home pregnancy test kit, took it home, peed on the little stick…

  Two hours and six test kits later, she’d slumped to the cold tile bathroom floor in horror. So, yes, she could see that Dante might react with shock….

  “—be mine, Gabriella?”

  She blinked, looked at him. His color was back. So was his arrogance. It was in his voice, in the way he was looking at her, even in the way he held himself. Aloof, removed, apart. Once, she’d found that lord-of-the-universe attitude sexy. Not anymore. She was no longer the foolish, impressionable woman who’d fallen for the great Dante Orsini.

  “Did you hear me? I said, how could the child be mine?”

  She felt the throbbing in her temples increase in tempo. The cold question hurt. She would not let him know that, of course. He had hurt her enough the night he’d handed her those damnable earrings.

  “The usual way,” she said with deliberate sarcasm. “Or did you not take Sex Ed 101?”

  “This isn’t the least bit amusing,” he said coldly. “I used condoms. Always.”

  Yes, he had. Sometimes, she’d done it for him. They’d both liked that. She could remember, with heart-stopping clarity, the silk-over-steel feel of him against her palms. The feel of his hand in her hair, cupping the back of her head as she bent to him.

  “Gabriella.” His voice was frigid. “Did you hear what I said? You know damned well that I always used protection.”

  This was more than denial. He was accusing her of lying. She wanted to ball up her fist and hit him. What kind of woman did he think she was? Did he think she would make up a story such as this?

  “What I know,” she said, “is that I became pregnant despite your ‘protection.’”

  His mouth thinned. “If a condom had failed, I’d have known it.”

  Oh, how she wanted to slap that superior-to-thou expression off his face!

  “Of course,” she said with a bitter smile. “You are, after all, the man who knows everything.”

  “I know that it would be difficult for anyone to see how I could have impregnated you.”

  He sounded as if he were describing a laboratory experiment instead of the coming together of a man and a woman. Didn’t he remember how sex had been between them? She did. She could remember it all. Dante, between her thighs. His mouth drinking from hers. The feel of him, slowly entering her. The scent of his skin, the essence of their shared passion….

  Deus, what was the matter with her? Why had she told him Daniel was his? This discussion was without purpose. The only interest he would possibly have in her baby was in convincing himself the baby was not his.

  And that was fine, she thought, and moved briskly to the door, wrapped her hand around the knob and yanked it open.

  “We are done here, Dante.”

  “Done?” He
laughed. “We haven’t even started. I want answers.”

  “You have your answer. You asked whose child Daniel was. I told you. You denied it. We have nothing more to say to each other.”

  He reached out his hand, slapped the door closed and stepped closer to her. He could feel his adrenaline pumping. Did she really think she could toss him out? Never mind that he owned this house. How about the bombshell she’d just dropped on him? Telling him the kid upstairs was his….

  You asked, a sly voice inside him whispered.

  Yes. He’d asked. And she’d answered. He had every right to follow up with questions—or did she assume he’d accept her fantastic claim just because she’d made it?

  A man only did something that stupid once in a lifetime. He’d done a lot of growing up since the incident with Teresa D’Angelo.

  “Let’s assume the kid is mine.”

  Bile rose in her throat. “Go away,” she said, her voice shaking. “Forget this conversation ever took place.”

  “Which is it? Are you claiming he’s mine or that he isn’t?”

  It was too late to lie. “He is yours,” she said wearily, “but only by biological accident.”

  “Did you know you were pregnant with the kid the night we broke up?”

  “I told you,” she said, her eyes suspiciously bright, “he has a name. Daniel.”

  “Fine. Great. Did you know you were carrying Daniel when we broke up?”

  “The night you said I’d worn out my welcome, you mean?”

  “Dammit, answer the question. Did you know?”

  “What if I did?”

  “Didn’t it occur to you to tell me?”

  Her eyes brightened with anger. “When? Before the earrings or after?”

  He felt his face heat. She made it sound as if he’d been trying to buy her off, as if this whole damned thing was his fault.

  “I gave you a gift because I…I wanted you to know you’d meant something to me.”