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Before she could react, he cupped the side of her face and leaned in. His mouth covered hers in a brief, damp openmouthed kiss that shot a jolt of excitement through her, stopping her breath and curling her toes in her slippers. It was over before she could respond, but his mouth had been hot enough to brand, turning her inside out.
He straightened and his gaze delved into hers before she could hide the yearning he had provoked. With a final caress of his thumb against her cheek, he left.
His absence always left her bereft, no matter how much she hated herself for being dependent on him, but there was more. She felt as though he’d just promised to fight for her, which was deeply heartening after she’d pretty much given up on his wanting anything to do with her.
Maybe that was wishful thinking, though.
“He reminds me of Enrique’s father,” Sorcha murmured after Alessandro was gone. She rocked gently. They’d both been given slings so the babies were tucked securely against them in case they nodded off in their comfortable gliding rockers.
“How so?” Octavia asked, curious how any man could be anything like Alessandro. In every way, he was a step above anyone she had ever met.
“His way of taking control. So confident and determined. You’re lucky to have him here. I guess we both are,” she said wryly.
“Your husband isn’t here?” Octavia probed gently, wanting to know more about her new friend. Well, she hoped they were becoming friends. She had lost touch with the few women she’d known in Naples. They’d never been true friends anyway, just young women she’d gone to school with, most of them single and keen to party, hunting in packs for Mr. Right. After she married and became pregnant and moved to London, Octavia had had nothing in common with them. They’d moved on without her.
“He’s in Spain,” Sorcha answered, voice growing strained. “There was an accident.” She lifted a quick hand from the back of her baby’s head, staying Octavia’s quick gasp. “He’s fine. Recovered. Mostly. But no, he isn’t here.”
“Because you delivered early? Is he on his way?” Octavia asked, instinctively trying to comfort.
Sorcha’s mouth pulled down at the corners and her gaze skimmed the nursery. Only one nurse remained and she was on the telephone.
“We’re not married. Not together,” Sorcha admitted, offering a brave, but flat smile. It fell away very quickly, as though she was having second thoughts about confessing that she was single. As though it was a crime to be ashamed of.
“I’m sorry,” Octavia said thinly, worried she’d overstepped. “But you won’t leave here without my phone number,” she added on impulse. “You and I are in this together.”
“Seems so, doesn’t it?” Sorcha said with a flash of her pretty smile. “Mum always tells me there’s a silver lining to any of life’s setbacks. I’ll be going home to stay with her in Ireland until I’m ready to go back to work, though. I won’t be here to have coffee in person. We’ll have to do it over the tablet.”
“Oh,” Octavia said, crestfallen. As much as she’d been yearning to go back to Naples all these months, now that she’d seen Alessandro again, she wasn’t sure. He might be taking her side right now, but where had he been all these months?
Funny how she’d thought marriage would offer her a chance at a real family, but she felt more alone than ever, despite having a child with him.
“A friend over the tablet would be better than none at all,” Octavia assured her.
* * *
Alessandro was used to results. If they weren’t provided promptly, he got them himself, which was what he was doing right now.
He stationed one of his bodyguards at the nursery door and the other accompanied him and the administrator through the green corridors to meet the hospital’s head of security, Gareth Underwood. Underwood was burly with a fringe of closely cropped hair that left the top of his head bald. He wore wire-rim glasses and a shirt in the particular shade of beige that marked a man as uniformly practical. An access card was clipped to his chest pocket and a radio hung off his hip.
He cocked his head as he shook Alessandro’s hand. “Mrs. Ferrante’s husband,” he repeated. “You’re aware that your cousin identified himself as her husband last night?”
That news was not as surprising as it should be and more than a little irritating. After several escapades in their teens, including one that had even left him making explanations to the law, Alessandro had given Primo strict instructions never to take his identity for any reason. Today, however, he wound up making excuses.
“An effort to ensure her safety, I’m sure. Without going into detail, we’ve had some security concerns at home in Italy.” The possibility had been dancing in Alessandro’s subconscious that this baby switch could be an open attack from the faceless threat he’d been trying to identify for months. He refused to man panic stations until he had all the facts, though. For now, “Octavia was supposed to deliver at a private clinic where her security was already arranged. Primo was only looking out for her, I’m sure.”
“And she didn’t go to the private clinic because...?” Gareth prompted.
“The ambulance failed to arrive and her labor progressed very quickly.” That still infuriated him, but he kept a firm cap on himself. “They had to bring her here.”
“I looked into that.” The administrator held up his cell phone. “Dispatch confirms no other ambulance was called to that address, just the one that brought her here. She made that call herself.”
“Obviously dispatch didn’t log Primo’s request,” Alessandro stated tightly, deeply disturbed that his wife had suffered needlessly. “I’ll follow up with them. None of us would be here if the ambulance had come when ordered and taken her to the correct hospital.”
“Sir?” A wiry technician invited them into a control room. It was small and hot, as these types of stations usually were, and a tight fit for all of them. They were quickly shown an image of Primo trying to accompany Octavia’s stretcher into a locked-down area. The nurse shook her head, pointed at her cap and scrubs, then indicated something down the hall.
“She’s telling him to wait in the lounge,” the administrator provided.
Seconds later, the staff was clearly under pressure, moving quickly as the emergency deliveries were stacked up. People came and went through electronically controlled doors, leaving the doors hovering open again and again. Primo took advantage and stepped into the restricted area directly outside the theaters.
Everyone looked to Alessandro.
He shrugged jerkily, wanting to explain his cousin’s trespass as concern for Octavia, but finding himself holding his tongue and watching, waiting to see what Primo did next.
The technician flicked screens and a moment later they could see the interior of the restricted area. An administration desk was set up with a computer and printer. The surgeon walked out of one theater, peeling scrubs as she went. She threw them into a bin and quickly began to wash her hands. There was no sound, but the way she pointed toward the door with her elbow suggested she was ordering Primo to leave, but she was being urged into the other theater and hurried to put on fresh scrubs and comply.
When a nurse came bustling from the first theater, she halted with surprise, but Primo pointed to the room labeled Theater Two. Whatever he said seemed to alleviate the nurse’s concern. She was in a hurry. She grabbed a tiny striped cap from a cupboard, then quickly began preparing two trays with papers and pens and...
“Name tags?” Alessandro guessed as he saw a printed strip go onto each tray.
“With the mother’s name and the bar code that matches her file,” the administrator clarified. “They print them ahead when they can and add the time of birth in the theater.”
Another nurse came out of Theater Two. She examined both trays, drew one closer to herself, then was pulled into a hunt for something with the other nurse.
That was when Primo glanced at the closed-circuit camera eye, shifted his back to block the line of sight to the trays and made a furtive movement.
“Stop it right there,” Underwood ordered.
Alessandro was aware that they were all looking at him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the frozen image. He shook his head, unwilling to believe what they were suspecting. What he suspected.
“He wouldn’t,” he told them, but doubt had arrived as irrevocably as the stork.
Knowledge, really. Cold recognition that all the small steps he’d taken to keep the Ferrante family cohesive and successful had snapped at its weakest link: his determination to believe in his cousin’s unwavering loyalty.
The tape was restarted and each nurse briskly took her tray into the separate theaters.
“You said it was procedure to check them against the mother’s in the delivery room,” Alessandro recalled, trying to remain rational while adrenaline ballooned in his system, pressing him to go on the attack.
The hospital administrator flattened his lips into a grim line. “Normally, I’d guarantee it would be read aloud and checked by two nurses, but there was a lot of pressure on the staff last night. Those are the sorts of conditions when corners are cut and oversights happen.”
“He couldn’t have known they’d both be boys, though,” Underwood said. “If one had been born a girl...”
“He knew Octavia was having a boy,” Alessandro said tightly. Deep in his subconscious, Primo’s assurance that he would look after Octavia while she was in London took on a malevolent undertone. Alessandro had spent a lifetime trying to be understanding, elevating Primo to the highest position beneath him as recompense for not holding this one, but Primo’s consistent acts of competition now rose with snaking heads of acrimony and envy and treachery.
“The Kelly baby was already born. The first nurse took out a cap for him,” he heard the administrator say through the pounding in his ears.
The truth was pummeling like stones against Alessandro’s chest and shoulders and between his eyes. Primo had betrayed him.
While deep down, a part of him wondered if Primo’s treachery was justified. The guilt of causing his own father’s death had never left Alessandro. He’d always taken Primo’s challenges as his due. His punishment. He believed he should be constantly tested to prove his worth.
He had tried to make up for the terrible actions that had cost his father’s life, though. The patriarch would still have been running things if not for Sandro’s burst of temper. As reparation, he always set the family’s needs above his own. He would lay down his life for the Ferrantes.
To be attacked so gravely from within, through his wife and child, was a greater penalty than he was willing to pay, however.
“I’d like to talk to your cousin,” Underwood said.
In a deadly tone, Alessandro said, “So would I.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ALESSANDRO CAME BACK wearing a look she’d never seen, as if he was a warrior cast in bronze. On the surface he seemed remote, but he radiated such danger Octavia closed her arms protectively around their baby.
“Did you learn anything?” she asked, already overwrought, but needing to know. The sense of threat he projected tightened her throat, as if her body knew on a visceral level that he was in a lethal mood and she should be very still and quiet and not risk drawing his notice.
But he knew exactly where she was. His gaze caught at hers and drilled. The banked ember of fury in his eyes pushed her back in her chair.
It’s not my fault, she wanted to cry.
“They’re still questioning everyone.” His voice was both devoid of inflection, yet terrifyingly harsh. “I’ll be leaving with the administrator to see Primo.”
Good luck, Octavia almost said, but she always kept her opinions about Primo to herself. Even if he’d seen something, he would only speak up if he saw a benefit to his own situation. More likely he’d somehow turn this into her causing trouble for nothing. Fear of what he might say layered atop her exhaustion and despair, crinkling her brow and making her bite her lips.
“What are you thinking?” Alessandro demanded.
She started at the caustic edge on his tone. Since when did he notice she had any thoughts at all?
“Nothing.” She had to work to meet his eyes, disturbed to see he was watching her so closely. She didn’t want him seeing her animosity toward his cousin, though. She knew how close he and Primo were and didn’t want to create even more of an obstacle in their marriage.
Not that she lived with Alessandro. She lived with his mother and, quite ironically, thought Ysabelle was rather nice, despite all her gushing displays and disregard of propriety. Octavia wished the woman spent more time at her home in London, rather than hunting husbands on the Côte d’Azur.
So much left unspoken. It was disheartening if she thought about it, and made the future seem very bleak.
“Try to relax,” Alessandro said gruffly. “You’re safe here.” His hard voice and flat mouth belied what he was saying. “The hospital is bringing in extra security for the entire floor. So am I. Each baby will have a guard of his own until this is sorted out and so will you and Sorcha.”
Sorcha looked up at her name and Octavia wondered whether Enrique’s father was capable of this kind of dispassionate lockdown of lives. Did he also bury frightening news in the guise of comfort? Octavia was introspective, not stupid.
“You think this was deliberate.” Her limbs drained of feeling and her heart slowed to clumsy, disjointed bumps. “Who—?”
She looked to Sorcha, thoughts flying to who could possibly want to attack such a nice woman in such a subversive, evil way?
But the grim way Alessandro kept his gaze on her and Lorenzo told Octavia that Sorcha wasn’t the target. She was. They were.
All the air in her lungs dried up, leaving her sipping for oxygen.
“We have your blood types,” the administrator said, glancing up from a clipboard as he addressed both mothers. “I’d like to give you the results, even though they’re not conclusive.”
Not conclusive? Octavia instinctively cradled Lorenzo closer. The babies now wore additional tags reading Baby One and Baby Two, but this was her son.
“Ironically,” the administrator said, “we should have labeled the boys A and B, since that is the blood type they’ve come back with.” He smiled faintly.
“I’m a B. That was confirmed, si?” Alessandro said swiftly. His hawk-like gaze swooped onto Lorenzo with an avid light, making Octavia wonder if he’d been holding back attaching to his child until he knew irrefutably that this boy was his.
An electric jolt went through her as she sensed him reaching out in a preternatural claim in that moment. Recognizing. Accepting. It was bittersweet because it came on the heels of something dark and nefarious that he wasn’t sharing with her. If only she knew him well enough to see beneath that granite-like mask he wore.
“You are a B, Mr. Ferrante. And your wife is an A,” the administrator said, gaze on the form. “Ms. Kelly is an O and the baby she holds is A. At the moment, none of you can be ruled out as a parent for either of these infants. If Mr. Montero comes up as an A, however, we can rule out his fathering this baby.” He nodded at Lorenzo.
“Did you call him?” Octavia swung her attention to Sorcha, even though she hadn’t seen her new friend use a phone. But she was ready to beg. In some ways it didn’t matter to Octavia who had caused this misery or why, they both just needed their beliefs confirmed so they could move on with mothering in peace.
“We’ve been in touch with Mr. Montero,” the administrator said smoothly. “He was heading straight to the clinic and his results should be with us shortly.”
“Wait. What? You called Cesar?” Sorcha screeched.
* * *
The results came from Spain while Alessandro was still out. What the mothers had known instinctively, science had proven. The babies would be kept in the hospital until the DNA tests confirmed it, but everyone accepted that Lorenzo was hers and Enrique belonged to Sorcha.
Both she and Sorcha slumped in relief and Octavia finally returned to her room—where a bouquet the size of Sicily had been delivered with a card that read, “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, A.”
And yet he was still with Primo.
That bitter reality kept her awake despite her exhaustion. We have a baby, she mentally shouted. Don’t you care? She had texted the blood test results, had seen the notification that her message had been read, but all she heard back was radio silence.
She might as well be Sorcha, raising her baby alone.
The thought sliced a kind of agony through her, but she couldn’t keep doing this, either: waiting for Prince Sandro to arrive on his steed to make her feel worthy.
What she needed was to work on her self-esteem. It had never been particularly strong. Her childhood had been one of strict rules and sighs of tested tolerance, impelling her to press herself hard into the mold her parents wanted just to earn a shred of approval.
She might have kicked up at boarding school, but that had been as much about trying to fit in as proving to her parents she wasn’t under their thumb. By nature she was the bookish sort, so hanging with the party crowd, pretending she was into boys and fashion and drinking hadn’t felt right in the first place, but she’d loved the sense of freedom and independence in making risky decisions: sneaking out of her room at night, voicing strong opinions without caring what anyone thought of them.
Then someone had slipped her something and she would have been one more assault statistic, no doubt, if the party she was at hadn’t been discovered by the faculty as she was passing out. Having her stomach pumped and being suspended for a few weeks had almost been a relief at that point, becoming an excuse to eschew the rowdy crowd and their superficial pursuits if she wanted to return to school.
She had toed the line after that, scared of that spark of insurgence inside her, learning to get by with her own company and buckling to her father’s dictates because it felt safer than trusting her wild side. Eventually she’d attached loosely to a group of girls from Naples because they had geography in common, but she didn’t have a history of fancy vacations or brushes with celebrity to turn into engaging stories. She definitely didn’t have shocking sexual exploits to share.
The identity of her husband had been the first thing to cause ripples of reaction—mostly admiration—among her shallow social pool. To this day, Octavia didn’t understand why Alessandro had chosen her. She was supposed to have married Primo.
She thought back to that gala when she’d met the two men, searching for clues to what he’d seen in her when she’d been such a generic example of an heiress.
“That’s the man your father invited,” her mother had said, pointing out Primo. “The one he thinks might accept you. He would love a connection like the Ferrante family.”
“The one on the right?” Octavia had asked, intimidated and alarmed as she glanced toward the two men, both thirtyish. Primo’s boyish good looks hadn’t even registered beside the compelling Alessandro’s carved features and arrogant sweep of his stern gaze around the room.
“The left,” her mother had said. “The taller one is his cousin, the head of the family. He controls Ferrante Imprese Internazionali. He doesn’t look very approving, does he? I wonder if that’s why he’s here, to decide if we measure up.”
He didn’t look approving at all, Octavia had silently agreed, intimidated by his air of censure. She told herself she was relieved her father wasn’t aiming so high as to think Alessandro Ferrante would be interested. The second-in-command, Primo, would be enough of a coup. He looked arrogant in a different way. Smug almost.
“Make a good impression,” her mother had ordered.
Blowing out a surreptitious breath, Octavia had tried to imagine how one made a positive impression on a potential husband. It was the first time she was being forced to try, but she’d said she would marry the man they chose, so try she would.
Her father had introduced her to the men a few minutes later. Primo had looked her up and down like a buyer at an auction considering a broodmare. Alessandro waited for her gaze to come up to his and locked the contact into something unbreakable.
His air of dissatisfaction was stronger up close. The way he dourly took in every detail from her upswept hair, to the shade of her lipstick, to the scoop of her neckline across her breasts, suggested he was searching for flaws.
Her insides quivered under his inspection while she found herself holding her breath, waiting for his verdict.
“We should dance,” Primo had said in a hard voice, his words coming from off to the right. His hand had come out in her periphery, but she’d been unable to drag her gaze from the frosted moss of Alessandro’s irises.
Something flashed in Alessandro’s eyes as she turned her body to follow Primo without turning her head, only releasing her from her enthrallment when he broke their stare to ask her father something.
She had no recollection of what she and Primo had talked about while they danced, but she could remember every word and intonation of her conversation with Alessandro a little later, when he’d found her on the terrace off the hotel ballroom.
She’d excused herself to the powder room then slipped out there to escape disturbing thoughts of maybe not going through with an arranged marriage. It was cold feet, she told herself. The reality of what she had agreed to was hitting her with the meeting of a potential husband, but that didn’t mean all the reasons she’d accepted as good ones suddenly became bad, she tried telling herself.
She shivered. It was cool. No one else was out here, but it was pretty. The boat lights were streaked like finger paint on the rippling water of the Golfo di Napoli and she was always most comfortable with her own company.
Yet oddly not annoyed when Alessandro intruded.
He brought her champagne, asking, “How long have you known Primo?”
She shivered again, this time less from the chilly air, and more from a preternatural wariness of such a dynamic man. They touched glass rims and murmured, “Salud.”
“I just met him tonight,” she replied.
He paused on the way to taking his first sip, gaze still locked to hers. “Talking to your father, it sounds like they’ve had several meetings already.” Grimness edged his tone.
She choked a little as the bubbles went the wrong way and burned her throat. It wasn’t that she was surprised. Not really. Her father had made it clear all her life that he expected her to marry the man he chose for her, but she would have thought she would be consulted earlier in the process.
“You didn’t know that,” he guessed.
“No,” she murmured. But since one of her father’s other expectations was that she not question his decisions, she kept her reaction to that one disturbed response.
She had felt Alessandro’s gaze on her profile and her heart had pounded as though she’d run up a thousand flights of stairs. This was just a test, she’d told herself. He was a rich and powerful man heading a very rich and powerful family. He wanted to know if she—if her family—was worthy of joining his. She needed to be her most pleasant and conciliatory, reassure him that she’d make a fine wife for his cousin, but her throat could barely work to swallow, let alone make conversation.
“You’re willing to go through with an arranged marriage?” he asked. “You wouldn’t prefer a love match?”
Did he think she was gold digging?
“An arranged marriage makes sense to me,” she said, reminding herself as she spoke, even though her voice wasn’t quite steady. Until tonight, she hadn’t met a man who attracted her enough to consider the alternative.
Not that she would really consider a love match. She didn’t think of herself as the sort men fell for. She’d also been raised under the attitude that her uterus was the center of her worth, and only then if it delivered a healthy heir who could grow up to take possession of her father’s fortune. She didn’t believe that, but given her mother’s struggle to produce her, Octavia couldn’t help feel a duty to make her sacrifice worthwhile. She had agreed to follow through with her parents’ plans and hopefully, finally, earn their appreciation.