The Italian's Baby of Passion

CHAPTER EIGHT

COMPREHENSION struck Roman with the force of a tidal wave. Of the scenarios he had imagined—and he had imagined plenty—this one had never occurred to him.

The people he employed on those occasions when he required a background check were both efficient and discreet. He could have had the information she had just provided in literally a matter of hours, maybe less. Instead he had taken a far more tortuous route, and had his DNA compared with the hair sample he had taken from the child.

At the time he had told himself that the fewer people who knew what he was doing, the less chance there was of the story leaking out. He’d wanted to know for certain he didn’t have a son without having to involve a whole string of people. Now he was forced to consider the possibility that the truth had only been part of what he had wanted—he had wanted someone to blame.

Not just someone.

The stranger who was bringing up his child without his knowledge had to be guilty of something—! He had wanted to confront Scarlet, to make this personal—it was personal!

His stillness was scary, she thought. It was actually a relief when his shoulders lifted and a soundless sigh shuddered through his powerful frame.

‘Was…?’

Scarlet looked away and with a gesture that was intensely weary rubbed the bridge of her nose; the glasses were gone but the habit remained. She blinked hard to clear her blurry vision as tears filled her eyes.

Damn—! She really didn’t want to cry in front of him.

It wasn’t as if she couldn’t talk about Abby without getting upset; she made a point of talking about her with Sam, who had a photo of his mother in his room.

‘Here, have this,’ he said brusquely.

She released a wry laugh as she automatically took the glass he handed her. ‘I was wondering if you ever say please?’ she explained in reply to his questioning look.

A puzzled frown developed on her smooth brow as their glances meshed. ‘Why are you here, Roman?’

‘Your sister is dead?’

Scarlet nodded, and took a swallow of the wine.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no need to be; you didn’t know her.’

She caught a flicker of something in his expression that she couldn’t put a name to, but it wasn’t there when he walked back from the Welsh dresser with a clean mug in his hand. He proceeded to slosh some wine into it.

‘It’s cheap supermarket plonk.’

He looked at her, his piercing regard intense. He drew a deep breath and his hands coiled at his sides. ‘You’d better sit down,’ he said abruptly.

‘People say that when they’re about to tell you something you won’t like hearing.’

He didn’t deny it.

Scarlet moved a cushion and sat down on the sofa. Her stomach was churning with apprehension.

‘You’d better sit down yourself,’ she said with an irritable frown. ‘You look terrible,’ she added, observing the grey tinge to his olive-toned skin and the definite tautness in the lines around his mouth and eyes.

Her frown deepened.

He still looked pretty damned marvellous.

She watched as he did what she suggested, folding his long, lean frame into a bucket chair beside the TV. It was laughably inadequate for his length and he ought to have looked silly but he performed the action with his usual inimitable grace. Scarlet loved to watch him move; clearly she was losing her mind.

‘It upsets you to talk about your sister?’

Scarlet didn’t hear him at first, because she was covetously watching him, imagining the shift of tight, hard muscles in his shoulders as he moved. He had unzipped his jacket and underneath he wore a simple white designer tee shirt. It was fitted enough to suggest the strongly defined musculature of his upper body, a strong body.

Her eyes were drawn to the faint shadow of body hair visible through the fine fabric and she had absolutely no control over the flutter low in her belly. An image of dark, smooth skin came into her head and she swallowed convulsively. It was like walking into a solid wall; the wave of paralysing longing that hit her made her head spin.

The situation called for her to face some facts she’d been ignoring. Since their first meeting she hadn’t been able to get Roman out of her thoughts. At first she had tried to resist, but then she had told herself that indulging in the fantasies could do no harm. That had been a mistake, one which she was suffering for now.

She was obsessed!

Given full rein her fantasies had multiplied and got out of control. Now she couldn’t look at him without her mind being filled by all kinds of erotic images her feverish imagination had conjured.

Well, it was about time she got her subconscious under control. She took a deep breath. They were talking about Abby, which made her preoccupation with sex all the more shameful.

‘Upset? Not really, it just hits you sometimes…I miss her,’ she admitted simply. Abby wouldn’t have thought her sexual fantasies shameful. If her sister had been here she would no doubt have advised her to go for it, she thought with a smile.

‘Was there an illness…or an accident—?’ There was nothing in his tone or attitude that she could put her finger on, but the question did not come over as a casual enquiry. ‘You don’t want to talk about it?’ he asked.

‘Not especially, but it would seem you do.’ She picked up the cushion and hugged it tightly to her body, rocking a little as she pulled her knees up to her chest. ‘Why is that? Did you know Abby?’ Her eyes widened as she shot him a questioning look.

‘I can’t recall meeting an Abby Smith.’

‘Oh, but Abby didn’t use Smith. She said I looked like a Smith but she didn’t—she was right,’ she reflected, running a hand over the brown hair that Abby had always advised her to bleach. Blondes darling, definitely have more fun!

‘She was an actress?’

Scarlet shook her head. ‘She intended to be one day, but she was a model—Abby Deverell. She was quite successful. Well, actually, she was very successful.’

‘Your sister was Abby Deverell?’

Scarlet could see him trying to find some similarity in her own features. It would be a fruitless search; Abby had been beautiful.

‘People always do that, but we’re not alike.’

God, the woman had had his child and he couldn’t even recall her face clearly. What sort of man did that make him?

‘So you did meet her?’ Scarlet wondered why she hadn’t considered the possibility earlier. It would certainly explain his brooding expression, she thought, slanting a surreptitious glance at his strong profile.

‘Yes, I did meet her,’ he returned abruptly.

Now he had a name and face…or he should have a face. The woman had fronted a very high-profile publicity campaign just a few years ago. You hadn’t been able to walk down the street, open a magazine or switch on a television without seeing her face.

So why, when he tried now to visualise those photogenic features, was he only able to see the face of her younger sister?

Scarlet didn’t register the abruptness of his reply. ‘She was very lovely, wasn’t she?’

He responded to her wistful appeal with an affirmative nod, not because he remembered, to his shame he didn’t, but because it was obviously what she wanted to hear. ‘Yes, she was.’

He had spent one night at her flat. He knew the date; it should have been his first wedding anniversary. He had woken up fully dressed on her sofa with a raging headache; she had said she had let him sleep it off.

‘Did you know her well?’

His silence lasted a long time—a noticeably long time.

Scarlet drew a sharp breath as she suddenly went icy cold all over, convinced that he was about to admit they had been lovers.

‘No, I didn’t know her well.’

The sigh of relief that whistled through her clenched teeth was silent. If he had been Abby’s lover, why would it have made a difference…? What was there for it to make a difference to? It wasn’t as if there was, or ever would be, anything between her and Roman.

‘So Sam knows you’re not his real mother?’

‘Of course. You shouldn’t lie to children.’

‘A very sound principle,’ he approved smoothly. ‘And when Sam’s older and he asks about his parents you’ll be able to tell him…?’

Unwittingly, she thought, he had touched upon a subject that had concerned her for some time. Sam would ask about his father, it was inevitable, but what was she supposed to tell him? The truth? Or was she to invent a hero that a boy could be proud of? It was a minefield.

‘Sam’s very young to understand yet.’

‘It’s surprising how much children understand.’

‘I’ll be able to tell him that his mummy loved him very much.’

‘Has she been gone long?’

‘Abby learnt she had leukaemia when she was first pregnant with Sam,’ Scarlet recalled quietly. ‘The doctors wanted her to have a termination and start treatment straight away. They warned her that not to do so would seriously reduce her chances of survival.’

Their eyes locked. The shock in his was visible, as was the compassion; the latter made her throat ache, and she swallowed.

‘And they were right?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted softly.

‘She ignored them?’ he probed gently.

Scarlet nodded.

He released his breath in a long fractured hiss. ‘What a decision to be forced to make.’ And make alone.

‘I don’t think it actually was that hard for Abby. I don’t think a termination was ever an option for her.’

‘How long after?’

‘Sam was three months old when she died; most of that three months she spent in hospital,’ she imparted quietly.

Roman caught his breath. ‘My God.’ His brow furrowed. ‘She knew that having her baby would kill her?’

Anger flared in Scarlet’s dark-fringed hazel eyes. ‘No, leukaemia killed her.’

She was painfully aware that it was possible for a careless word to plant an idea in a child’s head, and she determined that Sam wouldn’t grow up burdened with the guilt of his mother’s death.

‘And I’d be grateful if you didn’t say that again—ever.’

He inclined his head towards her. ‘Of course, I’m sorry.’

Rather taken aback by his apparent sincerity, she accepted it with a grudging but wary nod.

‘And you have brought her baby up?’ She gave a tiny nod of assent, and his hand came up to his mouth before moving roughly along the angle of his hard, angular jaw.

The bare facts were he had got a woman pregnant and for whatever reason she had not felt able to tell him. That woman had died and if her premature death could not be directly attributed to the birth of his son it had definitely been a contributing factor.

It didn’t matter what sort of spin you put on those facts, he did not emerge from the telling of this story looking good. If there was any victim here he wasn’t it…not that there was any shortage of victims in this story.

‘That must have been hard.’ He winced inwardly at the triteness of his words.

‘I was terrified of the responsibility at first,’ Scarlet admitted. She gave a small laugh. ‘I still am sometimes…’ Her eyes lifted. ‘Does that sound terrible to you?’

As soon as she’d asked the question Scarlet hated the fact she sounded as though she was asking for his approval.

He didn’t reply, just continued to look at her with an odd intensity.

‘It doesn’t sound terrible at all,’ he said finally. ‘So don’t beat yourself up.’

She blinked to clear her blurry vision. It was perverse that after surviving his insults she should be brought to the brink of emotional tears by his kindness.

‘Wasn’t there someone else you could have shared the responsibility with?’

Scarlet sniffed and dabbed her finger to a spot of moisture in the corner of her eye. ‘There was just Abby and me, and our gran who died last year. She was pretty frail.’

He searched her open features, and realised that not only was she not canvassing the sympathy vote, she didn’t have the faintest idea how poignant her statement sounded.

Dealing with people who normally had an agenda—people who wanted something from him—Roman found himself uniquely ill equipped when it came to a dialogue with someone who said what they meant. Someone who furthermore would have thrown anything he offered back in his face.

‘There were no other relatives who could help?’

‘No. My uncle and aunty are not really children people.’

‘But surely they were better situated than you to bring up a baby?’

‘Financially maybe, but it’s not about money, is it?’ she said, taking his agreement on something so fundamental as granted. ‘They didn’t have a family of their own out of choice,’ she went on to explain.

‘And I can’t imagine them welcoming anything which stopped them jumping in the car and driving down to the South of France when they felt like it.’ Her nose wrinkled as she looked reflectively at him and her head tilted a little to one side. ‘They’re a bit like you, really. They do whatever they like without having to consider anyone else…though you’re younger, obviously.’

‘But equally selfish,’ he suggested drily.

‘They love one another, so you can’t call them totally self-obsessed and narcissistic,’ she pointed out tolerantly.

‘Unlike me.’

Scarlet flushed under his ironic gaze. ‘I didn’t say that,’ she protested.

‘You didn’t need to. You can’t imagine me with children?’

Scarlet frowned at the inflection in his voice. ‘You’re Italian Irish, aren’t you?’ She gave an offhand shrug. ‘With that background I expect you’ll have a big family one day, when you’re ready.’

In her head she could see children with Roman’s dark eyes and warm colouring running around…children just like Sam.

‘Or when I’ve grown up?’

‘I wasn’t going to say that. I’m a realist.’

Roman grinned. ‘You have a smart mouth.’ Lush, lovely and incredibly kissable—!

The fact his dark, devastatingly gorgeous eyes were glued to her lips, and that he was no longer grinning, made Scarlet very nervous.

‘I wouldn’t worry—a lot of men never grow up. You’re obviously enjoying playing the field.’ And, my, did he show dedication. She tried to make up for her lack of judgement in speaking her mind with a brittle, blindingly insincere smile.

‘But I expect one day you’ll get bored with it, and when you meet someone…’ Someone beautiful and talented to give him those golden babies.

‘You don’t sound very convinced.’

‘You’re right, I’ve always had my doubts about reformed rakes,’ she confided. Her glance skimmed the strong, arrogant lines in his hard-boned features. And if anyone could accurately be described as a rake, it was him.

‘Rakes?’

Scarlet, who was warming to one of her favourite themes, nodded, barely registering the stunned expression on his handsome face.

‘I know a lot of women think that with the love of a good woman, the good woman being them,’ she qualified drily, ‘even the most committed playboy will metamorphose overnight into a faithful husband.’ She shook her head and gave an incredulous laugh at the ability of her own sex to fool themselves.

‘But you don’t share this view?’

‘Look at me! Do I look like a hopeless romantic?’ she demanded.

He took her reckless offer and there was an extremely uncomfortable interval while he considered the question and her face. The defiant angle of Scarlet’s chin increased in direct proportion to the rapid thud of her racing heart.

Finally he delivered his judgement.

‘I don’t have one hell of a lot of hands-on experience with hopeless romantics but, yes, I’d say you do.’

His dry comment drew Scarlet’s eyes involuntarily to the hands he referred to. His long, tapering fingers curled lightly over the arms of the chair; they were square-tipped, suggesting sensitivity and strength. Something low in her belly tightened as she looked at them and imagined them moving over softer, paler flesh.

Colour significantly heightened, she dragged her eyes clear. ‘Well, I’m not, and,’ she informed him with feeling, ‘I’m glad. I don’t see how falling in love can fundamentally change a person’s character. Call me a cynic, but, the way I see it, once a faithless love rat always a—’ She broke off, her eyes widening. ‘Not that I’m calling you a faithless…’

His eyebrows lifted. ‘No? If you say so.’ His mobile lips formed a cynical smile as he shrugged.

It was pretty damned hard to refute her observations when you had fathered a child on a one-night stand and didn’t discover it until almost four years later.

In most people’s book that qualified as love-rattish behaviour. The fact it had been an accident did not make him any the less an irresponsible bastard.

‘Marriage means different things to different people. Some people are more…flexible…’ she finished awkwardly.

‘I take it “flexible” is a euphemism for sleeping around.’

Scarlet gave an uncomfortable shrug and wondered how on earth she had got onto this subject. ‘I guess so.’

His nostrils flared as he looked at her. The expression of chilling hauteur on his dark patrician features sent a ripple down her spine.

‘I don’t think I’d be at all flexible at the idea of my wife sleeping with anyone else. I happen to consider fidelity an essential component of marriage.’

‘Well, it just goes to show you never can judge by appearances,’ she responded cheerily. ‘Look at me—’ she suggested.

When he did her lashes swept down in a protective gesture. ‘I used to be the most important thing in my life. I had it all, the job, the flat, the car—’

‘And you don’t regret giving it up?’

‘Not for one second. I earn peanuts by comparison now,’ she admitted. ‘Not that I ever earned the serious money Abby did, but on the plus side nobody treats me like I’m a piece of meat, and I don’t have to live on lettuce leaves and cigarettes to stay stick-thin! Mostly people appreciate what I’m doing.’ Present company excluded.

‘So your sister left you well provided for?’ At least she hadn’t spent the last four years leading a hand-to-mouth existence in order to give his son a decent life.

His relief turned out to be premature.

‘Abby earned, but she liked to spend too. But, yes, she had put some money aside for Sam. It will pay for his education and there’ll be a little bit left over for a nest egg for him.’

‘So you have lived off what?’

‘I live within my means, and I don’t worry if I’m not wearing this year’s designs. I mean, money isn’t everything, is it?’ A sudden bubble of laughter sprang to her lips. ‘Actually, I suppose it is to you.’

‘Sure, I sold my soul for a good return on my investments years ago,’ he drawled.

‘I wasn’t being offensive…well, not intentionally, anyhow,’ she added with a crooked smile. His rigid expression didn’t thaw. ‘It was a joke.’

His dark eyes swept across her face. ‘Was it?’

‘Yes!’ she responded, exasperated that he seemed intent on over-dramatising a simple comment. ‘You’re rich, I’m not, so what I’ve never had I’m not going to miss, am I?’ she pointed out simply.

‘Do you plan to go back to your old job?’

‘Who knows what the future holds? But it would be good in the immediate future if you revealed a reason for you being here.’

‘I’m getting there.’

The ironic twist of his lips troubled her. If she was going to be honest, Roman worried her full stop.

‘Where does Sam’s father come into all this?’ he said casually.

‘There isn’t one.’

He raised an ironic brow.

‘Well, there is, but he isn’t in the picture. And not just that one,’ she added as he picked up a framed photograph taken of Sam on his first birthday.

This was the point when people who possessed the basics of social skills dropped the subject.

‘Have you ever tried to contact him?’