Secret Love-Child: Kept for Her Baby / The Costanzo Baby Secret / Her Secret, His Love-Child

Lifting the glass to her mouth, she took a swift, deep gulp of the cooling water as she tried to collect her thoughts. She wished that Ricardo would move somewhere else or that he would come and sit down. Standing there, so tall and lean and dark, he seemed to tower over her oppressively, dominating the room and tightening every one of her muscles just to look at him.

‘Why…’ Her throat clenched and she had to take another gulp of water. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

The look he gave her said that that was a question that didn’t need answering but all the same he drew in a long, deep breath and then looked her straight in the eyes.

‘I wanted to see you with Marco—how you would react. How you would be when you met him for real.’

So she had been right. He had been testing her. The atmosphere she had sensed in the room earlier had been real and not the product of her overheated imagination.

‘And what did you find out?’

‘That you lied.’

It was the last thing she had expected but as she opened her mouth to refute the accusation he ignored her attempt at protest.

‘You lied in that note you left when you said you wanted your freedom—at least when you said you wanted your freedom from Marco. So something else took you away. You said you were sick—what was wrong?’

‘I wasn’t exactly sick…’ Lucy hedged. ‘It was more like a…a breakdown.’

She had his attention now. Those dark eyes couldn’t have burned any stronger, or been more fixed on her face.

‘A mental breakdown?’

If there had been any hint of shock or horror in his voice then she might not have been able to answer him but the truth was that his tone was completely controlled, totally matter-of-fact. So much so that it was only just a reaction.

‘Yes…’

She nodded, keeping her eyes locked with his. That steady black gaze never wavered, never moved. Instead, it stayed fixed on her, probing deeper and further with every breath that she took.

‘You were depressed.’

‘You could say that.’ Lucy’s voice was shaky, her weak attempt at laughter even more so. She knew from his quick frown that her laughter seemed out of place but she just couldn’t hold it back. Depressed seemed such an inadequate word for what she had been through. She had barely known who she was or what she was doing. And the world had seemed like a dark, empty cavern, one that she couldn’t find her way out of, no matter how she’d tried. ‘Though depressed sounds like the way you’d describe it if you lost a job or your dog died.’

‘Not true depression. And if you had a breakdown, then that’s what you must have suffered.’

Looking up into Ricardo’s face, Lucy blinked hard at the unexpected note in his voice. She hadn’t anticipated such sympathy. Was it possible that he might understand after all?

‘It was horrible.’ She shivered at the memory. ‘The whole world seemed black and I didn’t know how to make myself get out of bed every day.’

And knowing what she had done to Marco, that by running away she had probably lost him, and the man she’d loved, for ever, had made things so, so much worse. The future had stretched ahead of her, bleak and cold and empty, and she hadn’t known how she was going to cope. If it hadn’t been for the care of a kind and understanding doctor, the support of therapists, she didn’t know how she would have survived.

‘There didn’t seem to be any point in going on. Any reason to—’

She broke off sharply, startled into awareness of the way that Ricardo had suddenly abandoned his position against the wall and had come close, his fingertips resting lightly on her arm.

‘Don’t…’ he said quietly, pulling her out of the dark fog of her memories.

‘Ricardo…’ Her voice was all over the place, shaking and quavering in a way that she just couldn’t control. And she felt so cold…so horribly cold. She was shivering as if she were in the grip of some horrible fever.

‘Give that to me.’

It was only when Ricardo’s hand came out and eased the glass from her clenched fingers that she realised how tightly she had been gripping it. She had been holding it so firmly that when her hand had started to shake the water inside the glass had swirled around, slopping over the side and splashing onto the pink linen of her skirt, marring the fine material with ugly dark patches.

She remembered buying this skirt—at least, she thought she did. It had been one of the things she had found on one of the first trips she had made away from the villa a couple of weeks after Marco had been born. She had left him with his nanny and had called Enzo, who took care of and piloted the motorboat, to take her across the lake to the shore. And there she had taken the car into Verona, where she had shopped, hunting for something—anything—that would make her feel more human. Something that would make her feel more alive, more in control of herself and her life.

And something that would make Ricardo look at her like a woman he desired once again.

Without the glass to hold, her hands were shaking even more and when she clasped both of them together on her lap they still kept shaking, shuddering where they lay on the pink skirt. With a terrible effort she twisted them together even more tightly, whimpering faintly when it had no effect.

‘Lucia…’

Ricardo’s hand, cool from the cold glass, came over both of hers, holding them, stilling them. But he still couldn’t calm the waves of despair that were taking her body by storm, making it tremble and shake convulsively.

‘Lucia, no,’ Ricardo said quietly, calmly. So calm in contrast to the way she was feeling that it stopped her heart for a moment as she tried to take it in. ‘There is no need for this.’

‘You don’t understand…’

Somehow she managed to get the words out, though her voice was as jerky and uneven as her heart.

It was his closeness that was doing that to her. He had slid down now from where he had been sitting on the arm of the settee and onto the cushions beside her. She could feel the warmth of his body, of the long, strong thigh that was pressed close up against hers. And she drew in the scent of his skin with each uneven, ragged breath. The width of his chest in the deep red shirt, the buttons opened at the throat, was level with her eyes, just a hint of dark curling hair revealed in the open neck, and she longed to be able to rest her head against his strength, draw new courage from him. But the distance between them, the yawning emotional chasm that separated her, would always hold her back.

‘Oh, but I do.’

To her consternation, she found that Ricardo had somehow seemed to read her mind, to know just exactly what she needed. His strong arms folded round her, drawing her close. At first she tensed, trying to resist. But then the sense of loneliness overwhelmed her and she yielded, soft and yearning, against him.

Her head rested on the hard wall of his ribcage, the steady, thudding beat of his heart pounding under her cheek. She could feel his chest rise and fall with every breath he took and she felt, dangerously, as if she had come home.

Ricardo smoothed one hand over the length of her hair, sliding down her back, raising every tiny nerve in response. The warmth of his palm against the skin of her neck made her heart jolt at the feel of it and a moment when those caressing fingers slid briefly in at the scooped neck of her shirt had her breath catching sharply in her throat. The hard strength of his body was against one breast and as the stroking arm brushed against the other with every slow, gentle movement her nipples tightened in stinging response to the sudden waking need low down between her legs.

‘I understand so much better than you could ever believe,’ Ricardo murmured, the deep rumble of his voice drowning out the involuntary sigh of longing she had been unable to hold back. ‘There’s just one thing I want to know.’

Lucy froze against Ricardo’s chest. An edge to his voice made her tense in sudden apprehension. The growing sense of warmth and comfort that had been seeping through her body, driving away the chill that had invaded her blood, suddenly seemed to stop and then, shockingly, started to fade again, allowing the shivering cold to start to creep back again.

‘I want to know his name.’

She hadn’t been wrong about the alteration in his tone, the difference in his mood. It was there too in the sudden change in his position and the way he held her. She was still in his arms, still held close, but it no longer felt like home.

Hard fingers suddenly clamped around her arms, moving her away from him, away from the secure warmth of his lean, hard frame. He held her so that he could look down into her eyes, his dark burning gaze searing her clouded blue one.

‘Who the hell is he, Lucia? What’s the name of the man who did this to you? The man who drove you to a breakdown when he left you.’

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_d57e17e2-4f52-54af-bde0-78ad51c991c3)

WHO the hell is he, Lucia?…The man who drove you to a breakdown when he left you.

For the first few spinning seconds she hadn’t been able to understand what had happened. Ricardo’s sharply snapped questions made no sense. She couldn’t understand where they came from or why he was even asking them. But then, slowly, reluctantly, she looked back over the conversation and realised the train of thought that Ricardo had been following, the conclusions he had jumped to.

He thought that she had had the breakdown after she had left the villa. He really believed—the only way he could possibly see it happening—was that she had run off with another man, leaving him and Marco behind in her determination to start a new life with her lover—his rival.