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

Dio santo, but he had had to fight with himself not to react on the most basic instinctive level. Every male impulse had urged him to reach out for her and pull her to him. To kiss away the imprint of her teeth in her flesh and soothe it with his tongue. He wanted to taste her again, know the soft sweetness of her mouth, explore the moist interior and kiss them both to the verge of oblivion.

He wanted to tangle his hands in the golden fall of her hair and hold her just so—exactly where he could kiss her hardest, strongest, with the deepest passion.

But there was something else he wanted too. Something that combined with the sensual hunger, taking it and twisting it brutally inside him until, looking across at her, he had to push his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans against the temptation to use them in another, very different way.

She was looking down at Marco, laughing softly as the little boy squished his banana in his hand, obviously revelling in the mess he was making and the feel of it between his fingers. And Marco was watching her, his wide smile a beam of delight as he held up the sticky mess for her to see.

A child and his mother. That was what a stranger looking in through the wide open French windows would see in the scene before them. A child and his mother enjoying the moment, sharing the experience of food and fun, while the father, the husband, looked on and laughed with them.

A family.

That was how it should be. It was why he had married her, after all. Because his child, unlike Ricardo himself, his mother before that, should have two caring parents. And, having seen Lucy with Marco, having heard her story, how could he refuse her—and Marco—that in the future? He had to let her back into their son’s life.

And back into his?

The cold stab of anger at the thought was like a blade of ice between his ribs, making him clench his teeth tight against it.

He couldn’t blame her for the way she had run out on her marriage if she had been as ill as she had described. The evidence of her feelings for Marco were there before him in a natural warmth that no one could mistake. But where did that leave their marriage?

Was Marco truly all she had come back for or was there more to it than that? She needed money, obviously, because she had admitted that she had none now. So was she back, looking for the means of support that he as her wealthy husband was obliged to provide? Did she really just want to be with her son or was the fact that she was Marco’s mother still her key to the luxurious lifestyle for which she had married him?

‘Oh, Marco! What a mess!’

Lucy’s voice, soft and warm with amusement, broke into his thoughts, shattering them and sending them spinning off onto another tangent entirely. As she bent her head, leaning down towards the little boy, laughing again as he reached up and smeared the fall of her hair with banana, he found that he was once more seeing the scene as someone else might see it.

That person would see a happy family. Not knowing the events that had torn the little group apart, they would assume it was still the perfect setting in which to bring up the little boy.

Which it was. Or once had been.

He had wanted a family for his child. Still wanted it more than he could say. And if he played his cards right then there was a way that he could still make it come true for the future. For Marco.

And if there were other reasons—private reasons—for him wanting to keep things the way they had been, could he admit them, even to himself? He had no wish to let anyone know the way that, after just twenty-four hours, he was once more fighting the irresistible, burningly sensual passion that Lucy’s slender beauty had always been able to arouse in him. And certainly he was damned if he was ever going to let Lucy begin to suspect that those feelings were there. Sex and money had been the reasons why they had gone into this marriage that was not a marriage in the first place. And sex and money had been the things that had torn it apart too. Those two dangerous elements had ruined his past. He was not going to let them ruin his future too.

She seemed to have been honest with him. And she truly seemed to want to be back with Marco, for the baby’s sake, not for anything she could get out of this, but her concern could easily be faked. Could he really trust her with his beloved son’s future? Why should she be so very different from the other women in his past?

The only way to be sure was to test her sincerity one more time. To make absolutely sure that her reasons for being here were as she claimed. He would offer her the sort of deal that, if she was lying, would surely tempt her into showing her true colours. And the way she responded would tell him all he needed to know.

But if he could get what he wanted out of this situation—if he could keep her here, for Marco’s sake, on the terms that suited him—then he would do just that.

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_b5a40025-2047-5e98-931a-b0cd9ea4c4ce)

‘I THINK he’s had enough…’

Lucy bent down to pick up yet another piece of bread that Marco had flung onto the floor, narrowly dodging the plastic mug of milk that landed right beside her as he discarded that too.

‘Shall I clean up here and then…’

‘Marissa will do that.’

He saw the look she gave him and acknowledged it with a faint inclination of his head.

‘She’ll take him for a walk too, to get some air. It’s better to stick to his routine.’

Ricardo pressed the bell to summon Marco’s nanny before wiping the little boy’s face and hands with a clean cloth and hoisting him out of the high chair and hitching him on to one hip.

‘And we have things we need to discuss.’

‘We do?’

But, as she expected, there was no way that Ricardo was going to answer that as he shook his head and concentrated on wiping a stubborn piece of dried banana out of his son’s eyebrow, managing Marco’s wriggles of protest with an easy skill that wrenched at Lucy’s heart.

‘Not here.’

Not here. Not now. Not in front of Marco. Lucy added the words he didn’t use, acknowledging the cold creeping sense of fear that welled up inside her as she did so.

So was this it? Was this the moment when Ricardo sent her packing? When her all too brief idyll with her little son came to an end and her husband made sure that she left the island?

And if she did, then would she ever see her baby again?

‘No…’

Her hands went out to the child in his father’s arms, but at that moment the door opened and the nanny she had seen before stepped into the room. After a brief conversation in Italian, too rapid for her to catch, Ricardo passed the little boy to Marissa and turned to Lucy. Something about the look on her face must have hit home to him because, as he took her elbow to turn her away towards the door, he bent his head and spoke swiftly, close to her ear.

‘I promised,’ he said roughly and just for a moment she stared at him, not quite understanding.

But then her memory cleared and she had a sudden rush of recollection. Ricardo saying, ‘You will see him again,’ and the conviction in his words that had had her believing him on that when she couldn’t trust him on anything else.

And so she didn’t fight but let herself be led from the room, with a long lingering glance back at the little boy who had taken over her heart without a chance of ever letting go.

He had always had her love, of course. It was just that her illness had blurred that love and preyed on her fears of not being a good enough mother. The thoughts she had experienced had been the depression, not the reality. She could see that now. But, at the time, lost and lonely, even if never alone, she had not been able to cope.

Now she knew the depth of her love, the way it had always been there underneath all the horror and the misery. So how would she cope if Ricardo was once more going to deny her access to her child? Could he do that? And, if he did, then how would she ever be able to afford to fight him in the courts if she had to?

‘Where are we going?’

‘Just here…’

Ricardo pushed open a door to his left, in a position that Lucy recognised. Her heart sank as she walked into the room he had opened, the setting making it plain that her husband had nothing kind or considerate on his mind. His island home’s office, with its dark wood furniture, the big L-shaped desk, the array of computer equipment, was a place for business deals, for cold-blooded decisions with nothing of the heart about them.

‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down?’ Ricardo waved a hand in the direction of a chair, one of three gathered around a small coffee table set in the window overlooking the bay.

‘Will I need to?’

His beautiful mouth twisted at the sharpness of her response and he met her attacking tone with a half shrug of one of his broad shoulders.

‘It depends on how you’re going to react to getting everything you wanted.’

‘What?’