The Italian's Baby

‘Are you telling me to go away?’ she demanded, hurt.

‘It might be better if you did.’

‘You sound as if you don’t care one way or the other.’

‘My back is broad, but yours isn’t. I don’t want you hurt.’

‘In other words you’re giving me the brush-off.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he growled. ‘Of course I don’t want you to go.’

She ran into his arms, kissing him again and again.

‘I’m not going, my darling. I’m not going to leave you.’

He kissed her long and deeply, and she responded with fierce, young passion. It was he who pulled away first, trembling with the effort it took to rein his desire back, but determined to do so.

‘I would die rather than harm you,’ he said in a shaking voice.

‘But, darling, you’re not harming me. Dad told me to come and see you.’

He looked at her wryly. ‘And why would he do that?’

She chuckled. ‘Can’t you guess? He wants me to soften you up for his next offer.’

He grinned. ‘And are you going to?’

‘Of course not. But he’s told me to keep on your right side, and while he thinks that’s what I’m doing he won’t make a fuss about me coming here. Aren’t I clever?’

‘You’re a cunning little witch.’

‘I’m only putting Dad’s own theory into practice. He says when you think someone’s acting for you they’re always pursuing their own agenda. Well, you’re my agenda, so come here and let me get on your right side.’

She took his hand and he went with her, unresisting, because neither then nor later could he deny her anything. It was to be the ruin of both of them.

‘Damn you, Luca! You duped me.’

Luca Montese’s face showed no relenting. ‘Nonsense! You sleepwalked into this without checking.’

‘I thought I could trust you.’

‘More fool you. I warned you not to trust me, and goodness knows how many of my enemies warned you.’

The man glaring across the desk was in a fury at the thought of the money he’d coveted and lost. His name was—well, no matter. He was the latest in a long line of men who had thought they could put one over on Luca Montese, and found that they were wrong.

‘We were supposed to be in this together,’ he snapped.

‘No. You thought you’d use me as a tool. I was to get the information, then you planned to make a deal behind my back. You should have been more suspicious. When you think a man’s acting for you he’s always pursuing his own agenda.’

Then a strange thing happened.

As Luca said the words a feeling of malaise came over him, so strong that he had to take a deep breath. It was as though the world had changed in a moment from a place where he was in control to a place where everything was strange and threatening.

‘Get out!’ he said curtly. ‘I’ll send you a cheque to cover your expenses.’

The man left fast, relieved simply to recover his expenses, which was more than anyone had got out of Luca for years. He wondered if the monster was losing his touch.

Left alone, Luca held himself still for a long time. The walls seemed to converge on him and suddenly he couldn’t breathe.

When you think a man’s acting for you he’s always pursuing his own agenda.

The words had come so naturally that he’d never doubted they were his own. Yet they had carried a sweetness so unbearable that it had almost destroyed him.

He was choking. He got up and opened the window, but the terrifying memory wouldn’t go away.

She had said it, and then she had pulled him down on the bed and loved him until his head was spinning. And he had loved her in return, making her a gift of everything that was in him, heart, body and soul, everything he was or hoped to be.

And that had been his mistake.

It was a mistake he’d never made again in the fifteen years since, when he had piled up money and power. He’d commanded his heart to harden until he could feel nothing, and he had been a success in that, as in everything else.

Now something frightening was happening. More and more the past was calling, tempting him back to a time when he was alive to feeling. But if he worked hard he reckoned he could kill it.

Only one person did not tread carefully when Luca was around, and that was Sonia, his personal assistant. Middle-aged, cool and efficient, she viewed her employer with eyes that were half motherly, half cynical. She was the only person he totally trusted, and with whom he could discuss his personal life.

‘Don’t waste time brooding,’ she advised him over a drink that evening. ‘You always said it was a weakness. You’ve got your divorce, so forget it, and marry again.’

‘Never!’ he snapped. ‘Another barren marriage for people to snicker at? No, thank you.’

‘Who says it’ll be barren? Just because you didn’t have a child by Drusilla doesn’t mean a thing. Some couples are like that. They can’t have a baby together, but each of them can have a baby by somebody else. Nobody knows why it happens, but it does.

‘This hairdresser is her “somebody else”. Now you have to find yours. It shouldn’t be hard. You’re an attractive man.’

He grinned. ‘Not like you to pay me compliments. Normally, according to you, I’m an impossible so-and-so with an ego the size of St Peter’s dome and—I forget the others but I’m sure you remember them.’

‘Selfish, monstrous and intolerable,’ she supplied without hesitation. ‘I’ve called you all those things and I don’t take back one word.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘But it doesn’t stop you being attractive, and there are millions of women out there.’

He was silent for so long that she wondered if she’d offended him.

‘It could work the other way too, couldn’t it?’ he said at last.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Suppose there weren’t millions of women? Suppose there was only one woman with whom I had any hope of having children?’