by Lynne Graham
‘You’ll need the address.’
In the shattering, pulsing silence which followed, Daisy, employing his gold pen, scrawled her address on the back of the business card he presented to her.
Alessio stood up. ‘If it is the last thing I do in this lifetime, I will punish you for this,’ he swore half under his breath.
Daisy was left alone with an uncorked bottle of vintage wine and two untouched glasses. Her knees were knocking together under the table. For a weak moment, she was seriously tempted to try drowning her sorrows. Guilt and bewilderment were tearing her apart. Alessio was outraged and appalled by what she had done. And Daisy was in shock. Alessio, who had once blithely leapt in where angels feared to tread, was backing off for two days to take stock of the situation. Why did that frighten her even more?
CHAPTER FOUR
THE doorbell went in two short, impatient bursts. It was only twenty past nine.
‘Do you think it’s him?’ Tara shrieked in panic from her bedroom. ‘My hair’s still wet!’
Daisy skimmed damp palms down her slender thighs, breathed in deep and opened the door. It was Alessio, strikingly elegant in a pearl-grey suit, pale blue silk shirt and tie.
‘I thought you’d be at work.’
‘I took the morning off,’ Daisy told his tie.
‘Does that mean you’re planning to accompany us?’ The ice in that rich dark drawl let her know how unwelcome an idea that was.
‘No…but Tara’s not ready yet. Would you like to come in?’ Daisy enquired, her fingernails scoring purple crescents into her palms. His cold hostility bit deep.
‘I’ll wait in the car.’
Her tremulous mouth tautened. ‘Alessio…please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is.’
There was a sharp little silence.
He released his breath in a hiss and thrust the door shut. The fierce tension in Daisy’s slight shoulders gave a little. She walked into the lounge. ‘Would you like some coffee?’
He uttered a cool negative.
‘She’ll be a while. She’s not even dressed yet. She was earlier, though. She got up at seven and trailed out her whole wardrobe. Then she decided she needed to wash her hair…’ Conscious that she was babbling, Daisy compressed her lips and jerkily folded her arms. She no longer bad any excuse to avoid looking at him.
Alessio’s vibrantly handsome features were ferociously tense, his strong jawline harshly set. A frown drew his ebony brows together. He looked back at her with glittering golden eyes that chilled her to the marrow. ‘What did I do that was so bad that you had to steal my child from me?’
Daisy’s strained eyes burned and she spun away, not trusting herself to speak. An intimidating amount of bitter incomprehension had splintered through that demand.
‘With that poor a start to our marriage, we were bound to have some problems,’ Alessio continued harshly. ‘But we had no arguments.’
Daisy almost smiled. To argue with someone you had to speak to them, didn’t you? And doormats did not start arguments. Alessio had been able to stride about being mean, moody and silently macho without the smallest challenge from her corner. Indeed, Daisy had grown steadily more afraid of what she might hear if he did break that silence.
‘I was never deliberately unkind to you,’ Alessio asserted.
Daisy resisted an urge to mention his reconciliation with his former girlfriend, Sophia. Why dig up something so long buried? It would be demeaning and petty to confront him about that now. Teenage boys were not programmed for fidelity. And she didn’t even know if he had been sleeping with the other girl or merely seeking out more entertaining company. She wanted to be fair. Their marriage had been over by then anyway.
Their relationship had really died the night when Alessio had turned away from her in bed. Thinking back to that devastating rejection, Daisy relived the anguish of a very insecure teenage girl who had been prepared to settle for sex if that was all she could have from the boy she loved. When Alessio had decided he didn’t want or need the sex either, she felt utterly devalued and useless, instead of feeling relieved that so degrading a practice had ended. A couple of weeks after Alessio had moved out of their bedroom, Bianca had dropped the news about Sophia. Alessio’s sister had enjoyed telling Daisy that her brother was seeing the other girl again.
‘And, even though I then believed that you had chosen to become pregnant, I never once confronted you with that belief.’ Alessio, Daisy registered, sounded very much as though he expected a burst of applause for such saintlike restraint.
‘Why not?’ she couldn’t help asking.
‘I assumed that you had done it so that you would not have to leave me at the end of the summer.’
Daisy reddened to the roots of her hair. She did it because she loved me…she just couldn’t help herself. Trust Alessio to come up with an excuse for her that flattered him! But no wonder he had felt trapped; no wonder he had been so furiously angry with her throughout their short-lived marriage!
‘And what would have been the point? Would it have changed anything? After all, I had already screwed up both our lives with spectacular efficiency,’ Alessio derided, his wide, sensual mouth narrowing. ‘I had failed my own expectations, bitterly disappointed and distressed my parents and got a very young girl pregnant. That was quite enough to be going on with, do you not think?’
Daisy cloaked her pained gaze. His every word tore at her and increased her confusion. It seemed inconceivable to her now, but back then she had never thought in any depth about the effect of their marriage on Alessio’s relationship with his parents. Her adolescent outlook had been narrow and exclusive, centred solely on her own feelings and what was happening in their relationship. She had taken no account of all the other pressures on Alessio. Her belated acknowledgement of her own essential teenage selfishness dismayed her.
‘And now I come here to meet a daughter who is a stranger,’ Alessio breathed grimly. ‘Have you any idea how that feels? A daughter whom I would have loved and cared for and protected has been living all this time within miles of the Leopardi bank in the City…and here she is in a grubby little flat you couldn’t swing a cat in!’
Suddenly, Daisy wanted to cover her ears. ‘I didn’t think you would want her—’
‘Is that what you have told her? Have you poisoned her mind against me as well?’ Alessio dealt her a fierce look of condemnation. ‘And still you do not tell me what I did to deserve such a punishment. So I wasn’t man enough to make it to the hospital… but that was the one and only time I ever let you down!’
Daisy’s knees wouldn’t hold her up any more. She dropped down on the edge of an armchair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled thickly.
Alessio had stridden over to the window. He swung back to study her with bleak, darkened eyes, all emotion firmly back under lock and key. ‘I can do without the tears. If my daughter sees them, no doubt I’ll get the blame for that too, and I have no desire to make a first impression as some sort of big, nasty bully who makes her mother cry!’
Daisy gulped and scrabbled hurriedly for a tissue.
‘As of now we can only look to the future and hope to do better this time around,’ Alessio completed with hard, lingering emphasis, his screened eyes, with a sudden stormy flare of glinting gold, resting on her downbent silver head. ‘Our daughter’s needs must come first. We both owe her that consideration. I hope you appreciate that fact.’
Daisy was too choked up to speak. She was thinking about the pathetic little exercise book that Tara had produced from its hiding place on the top of her wardrobe. Some pictures of Alessio, carefully cut out of newspapers, had been glued into it. In her frantic excitement last night, Tara had bared her soul, hadn’t been able to hold anything back. And Daisy had tossed and turned in her bed until dawn, coming to shamefaced terms with the fact that she had never offered her daughter a photograph of her father. Yet she had a thirteen-year-old photograph of Alessio still lurking in her own purse. For the first
time, it struck her that that was just a tad peculiar and rather hard to explain rationally.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, and made a dive for the door.
When she had managed to compose herself again, she popped her head round Tara’s bedroom door. ‘Are you ready yet?’
Tara was sitting on the edge of the bed, unusually still. Glossy streamers of black hair rippled as she turned her head, her anxious eyes so painfully like her father’s that Daisy’s heart skipped a startled beat. ‘I’m terrified,’ she whispered jerkily. ‘I’ve thought about this for so long, but now it’s really happening, now he’s actually here… suppose he doesn’t like me?’
Daisy recalled Alessio’s restive, simmering tension. ‘He’s just as scared you won’t like him.’
‘Is he?’ Tara scrambled up, bolstered by the assurance. ‘Did he say so?’
‘No, but it’s written all over him,’ Daisy managed with a wobbly smile.
‘I guess this is hard for him too. Maybe he thinks I’m expecting Superdad or something.’ Tara’s eyes softened, her tender heart instantly touched. ‘I mean, he won’t know what to do or say either. I suppose it’s easier for me really… I’ve always known about him.’
‘Yes.’ Daisy watched the carpet begin to blur under her aching gaze.
‘And he must be dead keen, to arrive this early,’ Tara decided.
‘Yes—’
‘I’m being really cruel staying in here and keeping him waiting,’ Tara concluded with a sudden frown of discomfiture.
Having reached the conclusion that her father was more to be pitied than she was, Tara straightened her slim shoulders and stepped round her mother. ‘It’s OK…you don’t need to come. I think I’d prefer to see him on my own first.’
Daisy flattened herself up against the wall and wrapped her arms round herself. Alessio wouldn’t want an audience either. So why should she feel excluded? Her daughter was no longer a baby who needed her every step of the way and Tara had always had a strong streak of independence.
In the lounge they both spoke at the same time.
‘You look like my sister…’ she heard Alessio breathe raggedly.
‘Do you still have your motorbike?’ Tara asked in a rather squeaky rush.
Daisy pressed her fingers against her wobbly mouth, yanked herself off the wall which had been supporting her and fled into the kitchen. Where was all this truly slaughtering guilt coming from? she asked herself wretchedly. Did she have to accept that she’d been completely in the wrong to keep father and daughter apart?
But how easy it was for Alessio to heap all the blame on her! Thirteen years ago, he had not made a single attempt to share his real feelings with her. So, naturally, Daisy had made assumptions. His behaviour had led her to believe that she was making the right decision, but why had it not occurred to her that she might only be storing up trouble for the future? Yes, it was very easy for Alessio to condemn her now. Hindsight made everyone wise. He could say now that he would have loved and cared for his daughter, and how could she challenge him when he had never been put to the test?
And what was going to happen to her relationship with her daughter if Tara started thinking the same way? Did she deserve to be treated like some sort of unfeeling monster? But how much had she been protecting herself from further pain and humiliation when she’d chosen not to tell Alessio about Tara? Daisy dashed a hand over her streaming eyes. And what if Alessio proved to be a terrific father? Just to spite her, just to prove her wrong and himself right, Alessio would very probably break his neck to be Superdad and, the next thing she knew, Tara would bitterly resent having been denied her father all these years.
‘Mum…we’re away!’ Tara called from the hall.
Before Daisy could respond, the front door slammed. From the lounge window she watched Tara walking admiringly all the way round the gleaming black Maserati that Alessio had evidently arrived in. She was chattering and laughing non-stop. She looked as if someone had lit a torch inside her. Alessio was visibly entranced by that glowing volubility. His absorption in his excited daughter was total.
And why not? Daisy thought painfully. In looks and personality, Tara was very much a Leopardi. Strong-willed, stubborn, outspoken and passionate, she was Alessio without the ice and self-control, Bianca without the spite and spoilt-rich-girl arrogance. Daisy would have had to be blind not to recognise that. And how much easier it must be for Alessio to relate to that laughing, talkative girl who bore so little resemblance to her mother. A cold, hard knot of fear clenched in Daisy’s stomach as she gazed down at them. Breathing in deeply, she moved away from the window.
* * *
When she got back from work, Tara still wasn’t home. It was after ten that evening when the bell went. Daisy went to the door, expecting it to be Tara but wondering why she hadn’t used her key. Thirty seconds later, she knew why. Her daughter came through the door, smothering a yawn, with Alessio a mere step behind her. Caught unprepared, Daisy was appalled. She stood there barefoot, clad in a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt that had shrunk in the wash, while Alessio looked as infuriatingly immaculate and sleekly beautiful as he had done twelve hours earlier.
‘I’ve had a fantastic day,’ Tara confided, engulfing her small, stiff mother in a brief hug without even noticing her tension. ‘But I’m really tired. ’Night, Dad.’
Dad? She said it so naturally, so easily that Daisy was shaken. As Tara vanished into her bedroom, she met Alessio’s shrewd gaze and hurriedly cloaked her own.
‘I’ll take that cup of coffee now,’ he drawled smoothly.
Daisy’s cheeks coloured. For an instant, she had a dismaying image of herself hovering like a little girl obediently awaiting her instructions and Alessio taking control of the situation in his own good time. ‘Coffee,’ she said tightly, and marched into the kitchen, leaving him to find his own way into the lounge.
So Tara and her father had got on like a house on fire. She was pleased for them both—she was! A good relationship with Alessio could only benefit her daughter. Now that Tara had met him, the ice was broken and they could all settle down into the kind of detached sharing practised by thousands of divorced parents. Alessio and Tara would form a relationship in which Daisy would play little part.
Maybe she was a bit jealous of that, a bit scared… well, possibly very scared… that Tara might start preferring Alessio to her. But that was childish, wasn’t it? Love stretched. Tara was perfectly capable of loving them both. And thirteen years had to count for something, hadn’t they? Having rammed down her own insecurities, Daisy entered the lounge, determined to be mature and reasonable regardless of how Alessio chose to behave.
She was taken aback to find Tara down on her knees in front of the bookcase, extracting the last of a pile of photo albums, most of which were already stacked suggestively at Alessio’s feet. She gave her mother an anxious look. ‘You don’t mind if Dad borrows these for a while, do you? I said he could.’
Thirteen years of Daisy’s life were documented in those albums. Daisy felt that her privacy was being cruelly invaded and had to bite back words of dismayed refusal. Those were Tara’s records too. What could be more natural than that her daughter should want to share that pictorial account of her childhood with her father?
‘I’ll look after them.’ Alessio’s faint smile was sardonic and Daisy registered the fact that he knew exactly how she felt.
Flushed and uncomfortable, she set a cup of coffee in front of him.
‘We can go over them together after I come back from my school trip,’ Tara told Alessio earnestly as she scrambled up again. ‘’Night, Mum…Dad.’ She stopped in the doorway, grinned widely at both her parents and slowly shook her head in bemusement. ‘It sounds so weird to say that, to have you both here…like a real family.’
Daisy shrank deeper into her armchair as the door closed. Why did Tara have to go out of her way to sound like a deprived child within Alessio’s hearing? she thought in distress. A real family!
Daisy thought of the family who had made her feel like a tarty little adventuress at her own wedding. Everyone had known she was pregnant. Bianca had made sure of that. And Alessio’s mother had cried so much that people could have been forgiven for believing that she was attending her son’s funeral. Taking the hint, the guests had stopped mouthing good wishes and had offered sympathy instead.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she countered.
‘You know as well as I do that there would never have been a divorce if my father had known that you were still expecting a child. The subject would not even have been broached.’
Daisy thrust up her chin. ‘Do we have to keep harping back to the past?’
Brilliant golden eyes rested on her. ‘That past formed the present and will undoubtedly alter the future. Did you really think that I could meet my daughter and then walk away from her again? She’s tremendous!’ Alessio acknowledged, with a sudden surge of appreciative warmth that sharply disconcerted Daisy. ‘Half-child, half-woman, and she slides from one to the other between one sentence and the next.’
Her tense mouth softened. ‘Yes,’ she conceded.
‘She’s funny and bright and very open… but do you know what I found hardest to take?’ Alessio sprang upright and moved restlessly across the room before swinging fluidly back to her, his strong dark face taut. ‘At first, it was like she was getting this one big chance to impress me and she was terrified that she might not make the grade. That’s why she’s exhausted. She’s been living on her nerves all day.’
A lump ballooned in Daisy’s throat. She focused studiously on her bare feet.
‘I believe that I have set her fears at rest. I told her that I would have been there for her from the very beginning of her life had I been offered that opportunity.’