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Yet even if she’d told him nothing about having a baby, his father would have guessed, if she’d had a C-section or stretch marks. If not, he might still be in the dark. Her terrible secret might explain why she’d always seemed so remote and elusive to Leon.
Before they reached the house he phoned Simona. After learning Concetta was back to normal and playing with her new buckets in the kitchen, he told his housekeeper to prepare lunch for him and a guest. They’d be arriving shortly and could eat out on the patio.
Engrossed in her own thoughts, the woman seated next to him hadn’t said a word during the drive. Once upon a time she’d been a baby, separated at birth from her mother by an ocean. When Leon thought about his little daughter and how precious she was to him, he couldn’t fathom Belle’s or Luciana’s history. Leon had so many questions he didn’t know which one to ask first.
When the white, two-story villa built along neoclassic lines came into view, he pressed the remote to open the gates and drove around to the back. When she saw the flower garden there, Belle gave a gasp of admiration.
Leon helped her from the car and led her up the steps into the rear foyer that opened into the dayroom. “At the end of the hallway is a guest bedroom with bath, where you can freshen up. When you’re ready, come and find me in here, and we’ll eat lunch on the patio, where we won’t be disturbed.”
“Thank you.”
The second she disappeared, he hurried through the main floor to the kitchen, where he found Concetta in her playpen with some toys. She made delighted sounds when she saw him, and lifted her arms. He gathered her up and kissed her half a dozen times against her neck, causing her to laugh. Again he was reminded that his lunch guest had never known her mother’s kiss. Obviously not her father’s, either.
Talia smiled. “She’s had her lunch and is ready for her nap.”
“I brought company, so I can’t give her all my attention, but I will when she wakes up.” He kissed her once more and handed her back to Talia. His daughter didn’t like being separated from him, and shed a few tears going down the hall to the staircase.
Much as he wanted to put her to bed himself, he was aware someone else was waiting for him, someone who’d been waiting years for any word about her parentage.
Simona looked over her shoulder. “Do you want lunch served now?”
“Please.”
He retraced his steps to the dayroom and found Belle holding a five-by-seven framed photo she’d picked up from a grouping on one of the credenzas. Her back was turned to him, but even from this distance, he could see her shoulders shaking.
“I won’t pretend to say I understand what you’re feeling. I can only imagine what it must be like to see yourself in Luciana’s image. Though you’re not identical, anyone who knows you well would notice certain similarities.”
Belle put the picture back and whirled around, her lovely face dripping with tears. She used both hands to wipe them off her chin. “My mother is a princess? Your stepmother? I—I can’t take it in,” she stammered. “In the orphanage I used to dream about what she would be like. I had to believe she gave me up because of a life-and-death reason. But my dreams never reached heights like that.”
Leon put his hands on his hips. “I’m still in shock from the knowledge that she had a baby, yet there’s never been a whisper of you.”
He heard his guest groan. “When Cliff told me my mother was from Italy, I wanted it to be the truth. But I never thought I’d really find her. Why did you bother to come to the pension?” The throb in her voice hung in the air.
It was the question Leon had been asking himself over and over. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t honestly tell you the reason. It was a feeling that nagged at me to the point I had to investigate.”
She clasped her hands together. “If you hadn’t come, I would know nothing, and I would be flying back to New York without ever getting an answer. Thank heaven for you!” she cried. “I’ll never be able to repay you.”
A strange shiver chased through his body at the realization he might not have heeded the prompting. He’d tried to ignore it, until he’d been swimming in the pool. Then it wouldn’t leave him alone.
Belle’s gorgeous eyes searched his. “But now that I see her picture, I think I’m frightened. It’s like that old expression about being careful what you wish for, because you might get it.”
She wasn’t the only one alarmed. Already she was important to him in ways he couldn’t begin to explain.
“Is it because you’ve discovered you’re the stepsister through marriage of the infamous Malatesta family?”
He’d thrown the question at her in a silky voice to combat her pull on him. His attraction to her was sucking him in deeper and deeper. He didn’t want this kind of complication in his life, not after having lost Benedetta. Too many losses convinced him it was better not to get involved. Leon had his daughter. She was all he needed.
His guest stared at him through haunted eyes. “What are you talking about? When the couple who adopted me brought me to their house, they broke their birth son’s heart. He hated me from the first day. If anything, I’m afraid of being the orphaned offspring of the woman your father brought into your home, thereby breaking your heart.”
Her words touched on Leon’s deep-seated guilt, and confounded him. She really was frightened. He could feel it. “You’re pale and need to eat. Come out to the patio with me.”
Leon showed her though the tall French doors on the far side of the dayroom. Simona had set the round, wrought-iron table with a cloth and fresh flowers from the garden. She’d prepared bruschetta and her bocconcini salad of mozzarella balls and cubetti di pancetta ham he particularly enjoyed.
He helped Belle to a seat where she could look out at the Adriatic. With the hot, fair weather, he spotted half a dozen sailboats and a few yachts out on the water. It was a sight he never tired of, especially now with the view of her alluring profile filling his vision.
Once he’d poured her some iced tea he said, “If you’d prefer coffee or juice, I’ll ask Simona to bring it.”
But Belle had already taken a long swallow. “This tastes delicious and is exactly what I needed. Thank you.”
After drinking half a glass himself, he picked up his fork and they started to eat. “I’m assuming Cliff is the son you referred to.”
She nodded. “The Petersons adopted me when I was ten. Mr. Peterson never wanted me, but Nadine had always hoped for a daughter and finally prevailed on him to adopt me. They already had a sixteen-year-old son, who had no desire for a girl from an orphanage to move in on what he considered his territory.”
Leon’s stomach muscles clenched in reaction. He could relate to Cliff’s hatred at that age. Leon had been eleven when his father had installed the twenty-year-old Luciana in the palazzo, a world that had belonged to him and his brother, Dante. No one else.
Now that the years had passed, and Leon had his own home and was a father, he understood better his parent’s need for companionship. At eleven he’d been too selfish to see anything beyond his own wants.
From the beginning he’d rebuffed any overtures from Luciana, but he had to admit she’d never been unkind to him or Dante. Anything but. As the years went by, he’d learned to be more civil to her. Maturity helped him to see that her cool aloofness at times masked some kind of strange sadness, no doubt because she’d lost both her parents under tragic circumstances.
To think she’d had a baby she’d been forced to give up! The knowledge tore him apart inside. He could never give up Concetta for any reason.
“How did it happen that Cliff told you about your mother?”
After putting her fork down, Belle told him what had transpired at the attorney’s office. Leon was astounded by what he heard. For her adoptive brother to take the money before telling her what she’d been desperate to know all her life sickened Leon. What made Cliff more despicable to him was to learn he hadn’t let her keep the money that was legally hers.
“Tell me about your life with the Petersons. I’d like to hear.”
She looked at him for a minute as if testing his sincerity. Then she began in a halting voice. “The day I was taken to their house, Cliff followed me into the small room that would be my bedroom. He grabbed me by the shoulders and told me his dad hadn’t wanted a screaming baby around the house. That’s why they’d picked me. But I’d better be good and stay out of his dad’s way or I’d be sorry, Cliff said. And in fact his father was so intimidating, I tried hard to be obedient and not cause trouble.”
Leon grimaced. “They should never have been allowed to adopt you.”
“Laws weren’t so strict then. The orphanage was overcrowded. You know how it is.”
As far as Leon was concerned, it was criminal.
“Ben was a car salesman who loved old cars and had restored several, but it took all their money. He lost his job several times because of layoffs, and had to find employment at other car dealerships. The money he poured into his hobby ate up any extra funds they had. He was an angry man who never had a kind word. The more I tried to gain his favor, the more he dismissed me.”
And destroyed her confidence, Leon bet.
“Nadine held a job at a dry cleaners and was a hard worker who tried to make a good home for us. She took me to church. It was one of the few places where I found comfort. But she was a quiet woman unable to show affection. It was clear she was afraid of her own son and stayed out of her husband’s way as much as possible. I never bonded with any of them.”
“How could you have under those circumstances?” Leon was troubled by her story.
“One good thing happened to me. As soon as I was old enough, I did babysitting for people in the neighborhood to earn money. I’d helped out with the younger children in the orphanage and knew how to play with them and care for babies. I love them.” Her voice trembled.
There was a sweetness in Belle that got under his skin.
“To tell you the truth, I liked going to other people’s houses to get away from Cliff and his father, who were so mean-spirited. He constantly asked me for money, telling me he’d pay me back, but he never did. I didn’t tell on him for fear Ben would take out his anger on me.”
With each revelation Leon’s hands curled into tighter fists.
“Finally Cliff got a job in a garage after school, and in time bought himself a motorcycle. That kept him away from me, but from then on it seemed he was always in trouble with traffic tickets and accidents.
“He was often at odds with both his parents because of the hours he kept with girls they didn’t know. Sometimes he barged into my room, to take out his frustration on me by bullying me. He never lost an opportunity to let me know I’d ruined his life,” she whispered.
“I can’t begin to imagine how you made it through those hellish years, Belle.”
“When I look back on it neither can I. The day I turned eighteen, I got a job in a cell phone store and moved in with three others girls, sharing an apartment. It saved my life to get away from my nightmarish situation.”
“Did Cliff follow you?”
“No. I left while he was gone. He had no idea where I went, and could no longer come after me for money and badger me. The few times I went to see Nadine, I went by her work at the dry cleaners so Cliff never saw me. She knew things were out of control with him and never pushed for me to come home again, because I was over the legal age.”
Certain things Belle had just said brought home to Leon how mean-spirited he’d been to Luciana when she’d first come to live at the palazzo. He’d been an adolescent and had ignored any overtures on her part. Dante had done the same thing to her, following in his big brother’s footsteps.
“I only ever saw him at the church funeral and the attorney’s office after that,” Belle explained. “When he told me my last name, I didn’t know if it was the truth. But I wanted it to be true, so badly that I flew to Rimini on a prayer, knowing I’d seen the last of him, and was thankful.”
Shaken by her revelations, Leon wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “You didn’t learn anything about your birth father through Cliff?”
She drank the last of her tea. “No. I decided he must have disappeared before my mother took me to the orphanage. What other explanation could there be...unless something horrendous had happened and she’d been raped? I shudder to think that might have been the case, and would rather not talk about it.”
“Then we won’t.” If Luciana had been raped, and Leon’s father knew about it, how would he feel about Belle, the innocent second victim? The more Leon thought about it, the more it was like a bomb exploding, the resulting shock waves wreaking devastation. “What’s the name of the orphanage?”
“The Newburgh Church Orphanage. Why do you ask?”
He put down his fork. “Despite the public’s opinion of the Malatesta family, we give to a number of charities. Your story has decided me to send an anonymous donation to the orphanage where you were raised. That’s something I intend to take care of right away.”
A gift no matter how large wouldn’t take away his guilt over his treatment of Luciana, but he realized the only reason Belle was still alive was due to the generosity of others who gave to charity.
“If you did that, the sisters would consider it heaven sent, but you don’t need to do it.”
“I want to. They gave you a spiritual and physical start in life. No payment would be enough.”
“You’re right,” she said in a quiet voice. “One of the sisters in charge reminded us that we were lucky to be there where we could get the help we needed, so we shouldn’t complain. The priest at the church where Nadine took me told me I was blessed to have a birth mother who loved me enough to put me in God’s keeping.”
Hard words for a child to accept, but Leon could only agree. Whatever Luciana’s circumstances at the time, she’d at least had the courage to make certain her baby would be looked after. His admiration for her choice when she could have done something else changed his perception of her. But why had she given up her baby?
Had Luciana loved that baby with all her heart, the way he’d loved Concetta from the moment he’d learned they were expecting? He knew enough about Luciana’s strict upbringing to realize she would have been afraid of letting anyone find out about her baby, causing a scandal that would tarnish the Donatello family name.
Unbelievable that her offspring had grown up into a beautiful, intelligent woman eating lunch with him, no less! You’re enjoying it far too much, Malatesta.
Luciana had lived through a nightmare, and had gone on to make a home for his father and the boys despite Leon’s antipathy. An unfamiliar sense of shame for his behavior over those early years crept into his psyche. He was now paying the price.
“Their goodness to you needs to be rewarded,” he murmured, still trying to digest everything.
“Sometimes I felt guilty for wanting to know about my parents when the sisters tried so hard to keep our spirits up. When Cliff asked me why I wanted to find someone who didn’t want me, I told him it wasn’t important if they didn’t want me. I just needed to know who I am and where I came from. But I’m not your responsibility, and I’ve taken up too much of your time as it is.”
She pushed herself away from the table and stood up. “Now that I have answers to those questions, I can go back to New York. Needless to say, I’ll be indebted to you for the rest of my life. Thank you for bringing me to your villa, and please thank the cook for the wonderful food. If you’ll drive me back to the library, I’d be very grateful.”
Leon got to his feet. “We haven’t even scratched the surface yet.”
“Yes, we have. You and I both know there are reasons why she gave me up. I would never want to cause her pain by showing up uninvited and unwanted.”
“You could never be unwanted!” he declared. He refused to believe it, but that was the father in him speaking, the father who idolized his little girl. Ever since Belle was born, she’d never known the love of her own parents. He couldn’t fathom it.
CHAPTER THREE
“YOU SAY THAT with such fervency, Leon, but we know the facts, don’t we. My mother came back to Italy and married your father. Unless you’re aware of other information, I’m sure she has never tried to find me.”
“I have no idea and neither do you. Nevertheless—”
“Nevertheless, she and your father have made a life for themselves,” Belle interrupted. “Last year I went to the orphanage for a final time to beg them to tell me something about my roots. I had a talk with the sister in charge.” The tremor in Belle’s voice penetrated to Leon’s insides.
“What did she say to you?”
“She told me she wasn’t at liberty to tell me anything, because my adoption was a closed case. Then she handed me a pamphlet to read. It was called ‘A Practical Guide for the Adopted Child.’ The material was based on research gathered by the psychiatric community. She said we’d discuss it after I’d finished it.”
“And did you?”
“Yes!” she cried. “The whole brochure described me so perfectly, I went into shock.”
“Explain what you mean.”
She moistened her lips nervously. “I’ve always had issues of self-esteem. Not to know who you are because you were given up for adoption means you don’t have an identity. All my life I’ve wanted to know if I looked like my birth parents, or acted like them.
“What if I had sisters and brothers I knew nothing about? What if I came from a large family with half siblings or extended family I would never meet or get to know? It used to drive me crazy, wondering.”
“Belle...at least now you know you have a mother and a stepfamily who are very much alive.”
“Yes,” she whispered, staring blindly out to sea. “If I do meet her I’ll be able to learn about my birth father. I longed for a father, too, and spent many hours daydreaming about him. But I’m terrified, Leon, because I was abandoned. Being abandonable meant I wasn’t good enough to be kept and loved. That’s a very hard thing to accept.”
What she was telling Leon made him sick inside. “Since you don’t know the circumstances of being left at the orphanage, don’t you realize your adoptive father and brother have contributed to a lot of those negative feelings?”
“Of course.” She took a shaky breath. “But to meet my own birth mother after all this time and find out from her own lips I hadn’t been loved or wanted would shatter me. I don’t know if I could handle it. The risk is too great.”
Leon shook his head. “That’s not going to happen to you. If you could see the loving way Luciana treats people...” Luciana was very loving to his daughter when he took Concetta over for visits. “You would see that your mother has an innate tenderness that goes soul deep.” Leon had seen and felt it, but in the beginning he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.
“Even so, I know I’m setting myself up to learn that everything I’ve ever thought or dreamed of about her and my father won’t be as I assumed. You’ve told me she hasn’t had other children, but she’s a princess who has lived a life completely different from mine in every way, shape and form. The chances of her even wanting to meet the daughter she gave up are astronomical.”
“That’s not true. You don’t know her as I do.”
“I know you want to believe she’ll be happy to see me, but you can’t know what’s deep in her heart. And there’s your father to consider. The more I know about her and their life, the more I fear a permanent reunion could never be realized.”
“It’s true I don’t know her inner thoughts.” Leon’s mind reeled when he compared the two women’s worlds. And he had no idea how his father would react upon hearing the news that Luciana’s daughter was in Rimini.
“Even if she’s willing to meet me, how will she handle it? She thought she gave me up and would never see me again. Even if meeting me could satisfy the question of what happened to me, it wouldn’t solve the issues she had for giving me up in the first place.
“What if seeing me exacerbates problems that bring new heartache?” Belle sounded frantic. “This meeting might result in trouble between her and your father, and they’ll wish this had never happened...”
She wheeled around, her face white as parchment. Tears glistened like diamonds on those pale cheeks. “What if I brought on a crisis like that?”
Tortured by the fear and pain in her voice, Leon reached for her and rocked her in his arms like he would Concetta when she was upset and frightened. “Shhh. That’s not going to happen, Belle. I swear it.” He kissed her hair and forehead without thinking.
“I—I don’t want it to happen, but you can’t guarantee anything.”
Much as Leon hated to admit it, everything she’d revealed from her heart and soul made a hell of a lot of sense. But suddenly he had other things on his mind. When he’d pulled her to him, his only thought had been to comfort her. Yet the feel of her curves against his body invaded his senses, sending a quickening through him, one so powerful he needed to put her away from him. As gently as he could, he let go of her.
Belle took a step back before looking up at him through red-rimmed eyes. “The sister warned me my time would be better served by getting on with my own life rather than wasting it trying to find my birth mother, who obviously didn’t want to be found.
“I left the orphanage with the renewed resolve to get on with my career and put my dreams away. Then came the moment in the attorney’s office when Cliff made that slip about my birth mother being Italian.”
“A providential slip, in my opinion,” Leon muttered. He was beginning to believe some unseen power had been at work on both sides of the Atlantic. Otherwise how could he account for going to her pension to talk to her, when normally he would have left it alone?
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