by Lynne Graham
‘Let’s get him home,’ Lucca advised with decisive cool.
Inside the limo, Marco was buckled into a car seat. Still on the breathless edge of a threatening sob, he reached out and closed a small hand tightly into the fabric of Lucca’s jacket sleeve. Although it was obvious that their son was fighting sleep, he would not let his eyes close and kept on glancing anxiously at each of his parents in turn as though to reassure himself of their continuing presence.
‘He’s had a frightening experience. It’ll take time for him to recover from his ordeal,’ Lucca opined, his tone light for his son’s benefit but his brilliant eyes hard as polished steel, for the little boy’s normal buoyant, trusting confidence was now strikingly absent.
Weighed down with guilt, Vivien evaded his accusing scrutiny. It was her fault that at the tender age of eighteen months Marco had learnt that his safe little world could turn scary and threatening and that his mother was not always there when he needed her.
Lucca was not impressed by his first glimpse of Vivien’s minute rose-covered cottage. He banged his head on a low-slung beam just inside the door and was in the act of suppressing a succinct swear word when a tiny set of needle-sharp teeth nipped into his trouser leg. Assaulted by a small, wildly barking mop of wiry black hair, he stepped back out of reach.
The dog lurched, fell over and played dead.
‘Oh, my goodness, you shouldn’t have moved so quickly!’ Vivien gasped in dismay. ‘Jock was depending on you for support.’
‘Jock…my Jock…’ Marco demonstrated his first sign of returning independence and animation by scrambling out of his mother’s arms to pet the dog.
His incredulity growing, Lucca watched while Vivien and his son fussed over an animal that, in his opinion, was staging an award-winning performance.
‘He bit me,’ Lucca breathed drily.
‘Oh, my goodness, I can’t believe that he would do anything like that. But if he did, you must’ve given him an awful fright!’ Vivien lamented, engaged in searching the still mop of black hair for vital signs of life. ‘Jock’s very sensitive.’
Jock twitched, snuffled and opened bright, beady eyes.
‘Dio mio…is that a fact?’ Lucca breathed, reluctantly enthralled by the graceful dramatic touches at which the little animal excelled.
‘He had such a traumatic time of it before he came to us,’ Vivien told him earnestly while she carefully raised the little terrier upright again on his three sturdy legs. ‘Someone abandoned him out on the road. While he was chasing cars trying to find his owner again he got hurt. He’s a little suspicious of men but he’s a wonderful watchdog and quite devoted to Marco.’
Jock contrived to look simultaneously tragic and a master of one-upmanship. Having walked the first round in the popularity contest, he trotted past Lucca with his tail held high. Vivien carried Marco upstairs and Lucca followed. He was seriously underwhelmed by his surroundings. It was a shabby, chic dwelling designed for very small people who did not suffer from claustrophobia. To watch Marco being tucked into the cot beside Vivien’s bed, Lucca had to stand out on the landing. His extravagantly handsome face was by then clenched in tough, uncompromising lines. He was sincerely angry that Marco was being denied the space, luxury and toys that he considered to be his son’s most basic right and due.
Vivien watched Marco tense and raise his curly head in dismay when his father shifted position beyond the doorway. ‘He’s scared you’re going to leave. I think he feels safer with both of us here.’
‘I’ll stay until he’s asleep,’ Lucca declared.
The toddler focused huge, sleepy eyes on his father. Vivien averted her attention again. It felt so strange to see father and son interact. For the first time she was seeing the extra dimension to Marco’s world, the dimension where only Lucca held sway. Her son was intensely attached to Lucca, much more attached than she had ever dreamt he could be. Why had she naively assumed that as Marco’s mother she would automatically command the lion’s share of her son’s affection? Even as she watched Marco stretched out a small, hopeful hand through the bars of the cot and Lucca finally strode into the room with a rueful laugh of acceptance.
Sinking down on the edge of her bed, Lucca leant forward and clasped his son’s seeking fingers. Marco smiled happily and finally closed his eyes. Vivien could quite easily have burst into tears at that point. She was seeing stuff she had never thought she would see: Lucca being tender and protective, Marco revealing his total trust and sense of security in his father’s presence. The minutes passed in silence. The lamplight gleamed over Lucca’s luxuriant cropped black hair, picking up on the dense length of long spiky lashes as dark as charcoal. At length, he settled Marco’s relaxed hand down on the mattress with infinite gentleness. Watching them together, her throat tightened.
‘Let’s go downstairs,’ Lucca murmured quietly. ‘It’s late but I have a couple of things I want to say.’
In the sitting room, Vivien closed her hands together in a nervous gesture and then hurriedly folded her arms. ‘I know you’re blaming me for everything and you’re right. What took place tonight was entirely my fault.’
‘I appreciate the way you so frequently save me from the necessity of criticising you,’ Lucca drawled. ‘You rush with suicidal eagerness to put your head in the noose.’
A flush of discomfiture washed her delicate face but her chin tilted. ‘I believe in taking responsibility for my mistakes.’
Brilliant dark golden eyes met hers with level cool and command. ‘That’s commendable and very apt for the occasion because what I’m about to say is likely to prove challenging for you.’
He looked utterly unapproachable. Yet it was only a few hours since he had been in bed with her. The ill-timed intimacy of that recollection made her fair skin burn and sparked enough mental turmoil to make her strained gaze duck away from his. If the detachment he exuded had been measurable in terms of actual distance he would have been a thousand miles away.
‘I want you to move back to London.’
Vivien froze. The tense silence seemed to surge like a rushing wave breaking with almost deafening force against her eardrums.
‘I want the chance to be a real father to my son,’ Lucca imparted with a measured clarity of tone that telegraphed his desire to make every word hit the right target. ‘But I can’t achieve that with an extensive geographical divide between us. I’d like to see Marco whenever I choose and a lot more often. My time with him shouldn’t always feel like a special occasion. I need the option of sharing the ordinary days too. I’d prefer to leave the lawyers out of it as well. I think that you and I will deal better on a more informal and friendly basis.’
Taken aback, Vivien strained to comprehend his exact meaning. Was he asking her to move back in with him? No, no, don’t go there, her brain urged her in disgust at the weakness betrayed by her own eager wish for such an approach from him. No, of course Lucca wasn’t suggesting reconciliation. He was talking solely about Marco and his desire to normalise his relationship with his child. But when he talked of leaving his lawyers out of the equation and mentioned aspiring to a more informal and friendly arrangement with her, sheer surprise at that unexpected development threw her into a loop.
‘Yes…er…but moving to London,’ she mumbled uncertainly, playing for time while she endeavoured to work out what exactly he meant by that invitation. Friendship? Platonic friendship? What else?
‘I’m quite sure some other academic institution would kill to have you or you could concentrate on research for a while. I would take care of everything,’ Lucca told her softly as she turned vague troubled eyes of clear trusting green on him. ‘I know how much you hate upheaval. Obviously you can retain this house and rent it out. All such matters would be dealt with on your behalf and according to your wishes. Naturally I will also cover all your expenses in London—’
‘No, that wouldn’t be necessary—’
‘But I would insist. I’m not in a position to relocate. Y
ou should not suffer in any way from a move that will benefit me. In any case…’ keen dark eyes rested on her perturbed expression ‘…now that we understand each other better, I’m sure I can speak with less fear of injuring my access to my son.’
Vivien lost colour at that veiled gibe. ‘You can say anything you like,’ she hastened to assure him while wondering dimly where he got the idea that she understood him better when she had never understood him in the slightest.
‘I consider this house or even its London equivalent to be an unacceptable home for my son.’
Her bemused gaze widened. ‘But what’s wrong with this house?’
‘I object to Marco being raised in a hovel.’
She flushed. ‘For goodness’ sake, this is hardly a hovel!’
‘It is on my terms. To bring Marco up in such a home is to cruelly deny everything that he is. He is a Saracino,’ Lucca asserted with cool pride. ‘He has a proud family name and lineage and even at this age he should be able to enjoy all the benefits of Saracino achievements.’
A hovel? Vivien swallowed hard. She had almost snapped back a defiant answer but she was badly hampered by the kind of mind that always examined both sides of an equation. It was true that Marco was the son of a very rich man and that measured against Lucca’s vast wealth her home could only seem poor. Was that fair to Marco? she was being forced to ask herself for the first time. Should she have allowed her personal preference for independence to rule the lifestyle choices she had made? Had she been horribly selfish when she’d denied her son the trappings of luxury? Whatever, she was learning that Lucca had very much resented her decision to raise his only child outside the privileged world that was his own.
‘You’re certainly giving me a lot to think about,’ she muttered heavily.
‘I hope so. My estrangement from my son has been a cause of great bitterness to me,’ Lucca admitted without hesitation. ‘I have been excluded from his life on almost all fronts and now I want all that to change. Are you willing to rise to that challenge?’
Her head was buzzing with the bewildering surge of semi-formed thoughts produced by stress and exhaustion. She drew in a shaky breath. ‘I need to think about this.’
‘Unfortunately, I’m not in the mood to be patient. You dislike being hurried into decisions but I feel I have the right to be selfish and put Marco’s needs first.’
‘Putting Marco’s needs first could never be judged selfish,’ Vivien hurried to assure him.
‘If you truly believe what you are saying, then you give Marco the chance to enjoy the comfort of easy access to both his parents,’ Lucca countered levelly.
Vivien was very tense, for the discussion was moving far too fast for her liking and she felt cornered. ‘If only it were that simple…’
‘But it is. Sit back, smell the roses. Let other people deal with the hassle on your behalf, cara.’
His incredibly sexy drawl vibrated through her tense frame and she struggled not to respond to it. When Lucca spoke in that darkly sensual, soothing tone, she felt dizzy and the very personification of weak womanhood. Only the powerful pain of the recent past held her back from the brink of a foolish decision. She loved him but he did not love her. Furthermore it was very possible that he had had sex with her purely as a means of expressing his contempt. So dark, so dreadful was that suspicion that she immediately shied away from it and felt quite ill. But her awareness that Lucca could be frighteningly hard, cruel and unforgiving lingered like a steadying influence on her softer nature.
She had ended their marriage. She was responsible for the damaging limitations that had restricted Lucca’s ability to build up a relationship with his son. But in an effort to redress that wrong was she prepared to give up everything that she had worked so hard to build up over the past two years? She worked in a specialist field of botany and options for career moves were few and far between. It could well be a long time before she found an equally suitable position. On the other hand the opportunity and excuse to spend more time with Marco before he outgrew his baby years would be very welcome to her.
‘There has to be an alternative,’ Vivien mused unevenly, telling herself that it would be most unwise for her to aspire to any friendlier or less formal relationship with Lucca. Unhappily a certain amount of distance was going to be the only way she could handle any further exposure to Lucca. Anything else would break her heart all over again. And her heart was already cracked right down the middle.
What else could it be? Sudden seething emotional pain gripped her. I only wanted sex, he had told her bluntly. Yet sex, and surely far more exciting sex than she could supply, was easily available to him. How far could contempt drive a guy like Lucca? There he was, megawatt handsome and confident, and he had the most beautiful woman in the world in his life. But in spite of those exciting realities, Lucca had chosen instead to bed his wife again. What did that tell her? And what had Lucca himself said? He had asked her the cruellest question, she recalled, sinking deeper into the hold of her despairing thoughts. Do you love me this much? Or this much?
‘There is no alternative,’ Lucca delivered grimly, studying the purity of her pensive profile with bleak condemnation. Anger lay like a cold weight of ice inside him. Her physical delicacy and her aura of vulnerability seemed the very essence of sweet old-fashioned femininity. But she had been cold as charity when she’d walked out on him. In addition, he was not going to beg for time with the son she had virtually stolen from him. Either she gave ground, and a lot of it, or he would fight and he would fight dirty without a shred of conscience.
Vivien wasn’t listening. At that instant, she was acknowledging with great sadness and shame that, whether she liked it or not, Lucca had had good reason to scorn her renewed declaration of love and question the level of her commitment to any such promise. Two years ago, she had, after all, let him down very badly on that score. Her once fervent avowals of love must have seemed like lies to him after she had left him, deaf to his plea of innocence and convinced of his infidelity. She, who prided herself on her loyalty and dependability, had displayed feet of solid clay.
‘If you choose not to facilitate my need to get to know my son better, I will take this to court.’
The cold, precise edge to his accented drawl cut through her abstraction like a scythe. Her head spun round, jewelled green eyes full of dismay. ‘Court? Are you serious?’
Lucca gazed steadily back at her, the uncompromising force of his dark, intense eyes making her tummy take a nervous flip. ‘Where Marco is concerned, I’ve been out in the cold long enough. You seem to take for granted the belief that Marco should live with you rather than with me.’
‘I don’t…I really don’t!’ Vivien had turned very pale because she was shaken by his perceptiveness. It was true that she had never even considered the idea that the child she adored might reside with anyone other than her.
Lucca recognised her denial as a lie and her complacency outraged his sense of justice. ‘I no longer have Jasmine Bailey’s sordid allegations hanging over my head. Why do you find it so difficult to think of me as a parent with a potential right to custody of my own child? How do you think I felt tonight when I heard Marco had been out on the street on his own? Lost and hurt and scared? Dependent on the compassion of a stranger?’
‘I imagine you felt as absolutely dreadful about it as I did,’ Vivien breathed unsteadily, folding her arms as if to ward off that attack.
‘You’re wrong. I was furious with you. You entrusted the most precious being in my life to Bernice the party girl!’ Scorching golden eyes assailed her in angry judgement of that mistake. ‘Marco could have died and I am quite prepared to take tonight’s events into a court room and let a judge decide who most deserves care and control of a vulnerable child!’
White as milk, Vivien clasped her trembling hands tight in on themselves. Her green eyes were dark with stress and fear. ‘There’s no need to threaten me with that course—’
‘Dannazione! There is
every need. My son was born eighteen months ago and right from the start it was clear that I was to be granted only the most minor role in his life,’ Lucca bit out harshly. ‘My child was two days old before I even knew he had been born! Have you any idea how that made me feel? Time and time again my perfectly reasonable requests to see my child were rescheduled and often for the meanest of excuses! One tiny sniffle and you wouldn’t let him out of your sight!’
His accusations, she registered in a sudden awful moment of insight into her own behaviour, had a horrible edge of truth. She had always loathed the Saturdays when she had had to hand her baby over to the nanny, who, acting as go-between, took him off to spend a few hours with Lucca. Initially Marco had cried pitifully at being divided from his mother and, although that had passed, Vivien had still hated the pain of having to part with him in the first place. She had felt as though Marco were being cruelly snatched from her and had worried herself sick while he’d been away from her for she had had the greatest difficulty in picturing Lucca the womaniser as a caring father.
In point of fact, she had resented the legal requirement to share her son with the same male who she believed had betrayed her by taking another woman into his bed. She was shocked by that belated realisation that, without ever appreciating what she was doing, she had been trying to punish Lucca by restricting access to Marco. Steeped in genuine regret, Vivien stared back at Lucca with hollowed miserable eyes. ‘I’m so sorry…’
His stunning dark golden gaze challenged hers. ‘Then don’t waste my time now and don’t force me to take you to court to fight for Marco.’
That blunt warning shook Vivien. He was serious. He was willing to fight for custody of Marco and possibly even eager for the excuse to do so. Furthermore, she only had herself to blame for the depth of his sense of injustice for she had not been generous with the amount of time she had allowed him to spend with his son.