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

And then he believed that when that lover had walked out on her, leaving her as she had left him, then and only then had Lucy had the breakdown she had talked about.

‘You think that…’

She had stiffened in his arms, pulling away from the warmth and support of his body. And just the tiny movement seemed to take an inordinate amount of effort, bring with it a wrenching pain that was out of all proportion to the distance she put between the two of them.

‘You really believe that the only reason I could possibly leave Marco was because there was another man!’

Ricardo didn’t need to answer. It was there in his eyes, stamped into the lines of his face. Suddenly, disturbingly, she was seeing her erratic behaviour through his eyes. The excessive spending, the way she had disappeared for most of the day, with no explanation. Had he really thought that she was meeting someone else? That she was having an affair? The thought that she might have put him through that made her shiver inwardly. How could she blame him for thinking so badly of her if that was what he had suspected?

‘I can see now that the way I behaved might have made you think that,’ she admitted shakily. ‘And you don’t know how much I regret it if it did. But you have to believe me—there never was anyone else.’

She saw his frown, the way his dark eyes dropped to lock with her own clouded gaze.

‘Then why…’

‘I wasn’t ill—didn’t break down after I left here.’

Though leaving Marco had been the last straw. The one that had broken this particular camel’s back and driven her in despair and desperation to find a doctor.

‘You’re saying…’

Ricardo’s face changed as realisation dawned. This time his eyes went to the cot where Marco still slept, then came back to her.

‘Are you telling me that it was post-natal depression that caused your breakdown? That was why you left?’

Lucy could only nod, her throat too clogged for speech. It was impossible to read the rush of feelings that flashed in Ricardo’s eyes, but she saw the questions there and straightened her spine, waiting for them to come. And now he was the one to move away, putting more distance between them.

‘That was like no depression I’ve ever seen.’

‘No,’ Lucy admitted.

She couldn’t hold it against him that he hadn’t recognised what even she hadn’t known. She had had the doctor to explain it to her. Ricardo had been looking in from the outside.

When he had been there, which wasn’t often.

‘You were out all the time. Spending money like water.’

‘I know—I was hyper. Manic.’

Post-natal psychosis, the doctor had called it. Not just depression but the more severe form of the illness, which had literally driven her almost out of her mind. So much so that she had been unable to think straight enough to recognise what was happening to her.

It hadn’t helped that her relationship with her own mother had been so difficult. The only time that Janet Mottram had shown any real interest in her daughter had been when she had used the child as a pawn in her personal battle with her exhusband. And, looking back, Lucy knew that what she had feared most was being as distant and unloving a mother to Marco as Janet had been to her.

And, without anyone to confide in, she had been trapped with her own thoughts. Thoughts that had so frightened and appalled her that there was no way she could have admitted them to Ricardo.

So she had put on a front. A cold, distant front that had driven him away from her even more. And she had succeeded so much better than she could have hoped. From the time that Marco had been born, she and Ricardo had barely spoken to each other. It had been what she wanted but at the same time it had added to the aching inside her, creating a spiral of despair from which she had felt that she would never break free.

‘You bought clothes, perfume—clothes you never wore when you were with me.’

And he had thought that she had bought them to make herself look good for someone else.

‘All that spending—it was just an attempt at distraction. I didn’t even want the clothes half the time.’

And the other half she had wanted them to boost her image, to make Ricardo look at her with the desire he had once shown her. But it had seemed that the women she had overheard had been right. She was not the sort of wife who could hold a man like Ricardo. A man who didn’t do commitment. Who was used to having his pick of the most glamorous, most sophisticated women of the world.

If only he would speak—say something. Anything, other than subjecting her to the dark, silent stare that seemed to want to probe right into her eyes, burn its way into her head.

‘Heaven knows what you must have thought of me!’

‘It was only what I expected,’ Ricardo stated flatly. ‘Normal female behaviour. Every woman I’ve known has been out for what I could give her. Why should you be any different?’

How could she fight such cynicism? She hadn’t been able to do so when they had been together, so why should anything be different now? Besides which the thought that she still hadn’t told him absolutely everything, that there were still things she was holding back, things she could hardly bear to think of herself, sat like a leaden weight in her heart, closing off her throat so that there was no way she could make herself speak.

‘And you are well now?’ he asked, an edge to his voice that she couldn’t interpret and she felt too emotionally adrift even to try.

‘The doctors say I am,’ she managed stiffly. ‘They think all should be well and that I’m not likely to relapse. I would never have come back here if I’d thought…’

‘I believe you,’ Ricardo said when her voice broke too much for her to go on. He was still so very distant, his deep-set eyes hooded and hidden, but his tone gave her a little cause for hope.

‘So if you could see your way to letting me spend some time with Marco…’

And, just at that moment, with amazing timing so that it was almost as if he had heard his name spoken, in the other room the baby stirred and started to whimper faintly, still half asleep.

‘Marco…’

Instinct drove Lucy to her feet but she was only halfway there when realisation struck and she froze, grabbing at the settee arm for support as she looked back at Ricardo, meeting the deliberately blanked out expression in his narrowed gaze.

‘I…I’m sorry…’

She regretted that as soon as she’d said it. She wasn’t sorry at all for reacting automatically to the sound of her child’s cry. She might not have been the best mother in the world—she knew she hadn’t—but that didn’t mean that her maternal instincts had died, swamped by the tidal wave of foul stuff that that rushed over her in the depths of those darkest days. After all, she’d only left because of what she was afraid of. Because of the fear that she might do something dreadful to her little boy. That was those mother’s instincts working overtime, not losing their way. And now she was doing exactly the same—responding to the way that her baby most needed her.

The memory of that cry had never left her. In her sleep she would hear it and come jerking awake, sitting up in a rush, eyes wide with horror and fear, needing to find Marco…and knowing he wasn’t there. That had been the worst, the most terrible moment of all. The thought that somewhere her baby was crying and she couldn’t go to him.

Here and now, she could respond to his call. But at the same time she didn’t quite dare to. Not with Ricardo watching and not knowing how he would react if she followed her instincts. He had sworn that she would never take the baby from him, so would he let her comfort the little boy—or would he grab at her arm, to hold her back? Or would he, worst of all, wait until she was at the cot’s side, about to take her son into her arms and then snatch the little boy away from her—so near and yet so desperately far again.

‘I doubt that you’ll understand…but…’ Her voice trailed off as she met the burning darkness of his eyes, felt herself flinch under their scorching force.

From the other room came a second more wakeful cry, louder this time, drawing Lucy’s eyes in a glance of yearning anxiety towards the door.

‘I’ll call the nanny,’ Ricardo said and the words brought back such a rush of memory that it pushed her response from her mouth before she had had a moment to consider if it was wise.

‘No!’ she said sharply. ‘No nanny! Not now.’

‘You were happy enough to leave him in her care before.’

‘Did you give me any choice?’ Lucy flung at him. ‘Did you even discuss it with me? No—you made a unilateral declaration that Marco was going to be looked after by a nanny. It may be the way you were brought up—the norm in your wealth driven world to have your children farmed out to the hired help, but it wasn’t what I wanted.’

‘I had no intention of having him “farmed out”,’ Ricardo snapped coldly. ‘And it certainly wasn’t the way that I was brought up. My mother barely had enough money to feed and clothe me, never mind hire a nanny.’