His Child: The Mistress's Child / Nathan's Child / D'Alessandro's Child

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘Carla never knew anything about it.’

‘Are you sure? They say that wives always know—only sometimes they pretend not to.’ She stared at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘How could you do it? How could you do that to her and live with yourself afterwards?’

Her condemnation of him was so strong that he felt he could almost reach out and touch it, but he knew he couldn’t let her stumble along this wrong track any longer, no matter how painful the cost of telling her.

‘She didn’t know,’ he ground out, ‘because she wasn’t aware. Not of me, or you, or what happened. Not aware of anything.’

She blinked at him in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The night I made love to you—my wife hadn’t spoken to me for eighteen months.’

Foolish hope flared in her heart, putting an entirely differentperspective on events. ‘You mean…you mean that you were separated?’

He gave a bitter laugh at the unwitting irony of her words. ‘In a sense, yes—we had been separated for a long time. You see, the car crash happened before I met you, Lisi, not after. It left her in a deep coma from which she never recovered. She didn’t die for several months after…after…’

‘After what?’ she whispered.

His eyes grew even bleaker. ‘After I made love to you. You must have been about six months pregnant when she died.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE sitting-room of her childhood retreated into a hazy blur and then came back into focus again and Lisi stared at Philip, noting the tension which had scored deep lines down the side of his mouth.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Don’t you?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘My wife—’

His wife. His wife. ‘What was her name?’

He hesitated, then frowned. What was it to her? ‘Carla,’ he said, grudgingly.

Carla. A person who was referred to as a ‘wife’ was a nebulous figure of no real substance, but Carla—Carla existed.Philip’s wife. Carla. It hurt more than it had any right to hurt. ‘Tell me,’ she urged softly.

He wasn’t looking for her sympathy, or her understanding—he would give her facts if she wanted to hear them, but he wanted nothing in return.

‘It happened early one autumn morning,’ he began, and a tale he had not had to recount for such a long time became painfully alive in his mind as he relived it. ‘Carla was driving to work. She worked out of London,’ he added, as if that somehow mattered. ‘And visibility was poor. There were all the usual warnings on the radio for people to take it easy, but cars were driving faster than they should have done. A lorry ran into the back of her.’ He paused, swallowing down the residual rage that people were always in a hurry and stupid enough to ignore the kind of conditions which led to accidents.

‘When the paramedics arrived on the scene, they didn’t think she’d make it. She had suffered massive head injuries. They took her to hospital, and for a while it was touch and go.’

Lisi winced. What words could she say that would not sound meaningless and redundant? He must have heard the same faltering platitudes over and over again. She nodded and said nothing.

‘Her body was unscathed,’ he said haltingly. ‘And so was her face—that was the amazing thing.’ But it had been a cruel paradox that while she had lain looking so perfect in the stark hospital bed—the Carla he had known and loved had no longer existed. Smashed away by man’s disregard for safety.

‘I used to visit her every day—twice a day when I wasn’t out of London.’ Sitting there for hours, playing her favourite music, stroking the cold, unmoving hand and praying for some kind of response, some kind of recognition he was never to see again. Other than one slight movement of her fingers which had given everyone false hope. ‘But she was so badly injured. She couldn’t speak or eat, or even breathe for herself.’

‘How terrible,’ breathed Lisi, and in that moment her heart went out to him.

‘The doctors weren’t even sure whether she could hear me, but I talked to her anyway. Just in case.’

He met a bright kind of understanding in her eyes and he hardened his heart against it. ‘I was living in a kind of vacuum,’ he said heavily. ‘And work became my salvation, in a way.’ At work he had been forced to put on hold the human tragedy which had been playing non-stop in his life. He gave her a hard, candid look. ‘Women came onto me all the time, but I was never…’

She sensed what was coming. ‘Never what, Philip?’

‘Never tempted,’ he snarled. ‘Never.’ His mouth hardened. ‘Until you.’

So she was the scapegoat, was she? Was that why he had seemed so angry when he had walked back into her life? ‘You make me sound like some kind of femme fatale,’ she said drily.

He shook his head. That had been his big mistake. A complete misjudgement. Uncharacteristic, but understandable under the circumstances. ‘On the contrary,’ he countered. ‘You seemed the very opposite of a femme fatale. I thought that you were sweet, and safe. Innocent. Uncomplicated.’

Achingly, she noted his use of the past tense.

‘Until that night. When we had that celebratory drink.’ He walked back over to the window and stared out unseeingly. ‘I’d only had one drink myself—so I couldn’t even blame the alcohol.’

Blame. He needed someone to blame—and she guessed that someone was her. ‘So I was responsible for your momentaryweakness, was I, Philip?’

He turned around and his face was a blaze of anger. ‘Do you make a habit of getting half-cut and borrowing men’s hotel rooms to sleep it off?’ he ground out, because this had been on his mind for longer than he cared to remember. ‘Do you often take off all your clothes and lie there, just waiting, like every man’s fantasy about to happen?’

‘Is that what you think?’ she asked quietly, even though her heart was crashing against her ribcage.

‘I’m not going to flatter myself that I was the first,’ he said coldly. ‘Why should I? You didn’t act like it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.’

His words wounded her—but what defence did she have? If she told him that it had felt like that, for her, then she would come over at best naive, and at worst—a complete and utter liar.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ she said, and regretted it immediately. ‘I’m sorry,’ she amended. ‘I shouldn’t be flippant when you’re telling me all this.’

Oddly enough, her glib remark did not offend him. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said heavily. ‘I don’t want to be wrapped up in cotton wool for the rest of my life.’

‘Won’t you tell me the rest?’ she asked slowly, because she recognised that he was not just going to go away. And if he was around in her life—then how could they possibly form any kind of relationship to accommodate their son, unless she knew all the facts? However painful they might be.

He nodded. ‘That night I left you I went straight to the hospital. The day before Carla had moved her fingers slightly and it seemed as if there might be hope.’

She remembered that his mood that day had been almost high. So that had been why. His wife had appeared to be on the road to recovery and he had celebrated life in the oldest way known to man. With her.

‘But Carla lay as still as ever, hooked up to all the hospitalparaphernalia of tubes and drips and monitors,’ he continued.

He had sat beside her and been eaten up with guilt and blame and regret as he’d looked down at her beautiful but waxy lips which had breathed only with the aid of a machine. Carla hadn’t recognised him, or had any idea of what he had done, and yet it had smitten him to the hilt that he had just betrayed his wife in the most fundamental way possible.

His mouth twisted. To love and to cherish. In sickness and in health. Vows he had made and vows he had broken.

He had always considered himself strong, and reasoned and controlled—and the weakness which Lisi had exposed in his character had come as an unwelcome shock to which had made him despise himself.

And a little bit of him had despised her, too.

‘She died a few months later,’ he finished, because what else was there to say? He saw her stricken expression and guessed what had caused it. ‘Oh, it wasn’t as a result of what you and I did, Lisi, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ she admitted slowly. ‘Even though I know it’s irrational.’

Hadn’t he thought the same thing himself? As though Carla could have somehow known what he had done.