One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets

‘Hi, Oliver.’ The man smiled. ‘I see you’ve got your dad with you now.’

Caesar waited for Oliver to deny their relationship, but instead, almost instinctively, he moved closer to him, so that Caesar could put his hand on Oliver’s shoulder in much the same way the other man was doing with his son.

Oliver’s bones beneath his tee shirt felt thin and young, vulnerable and very precious. So this was how it felt to have a child … a son …

And that was how Louise saw them as she came to collect Oliver, her pace quickening along with the anxious, angry too-fast beat of her heart, until both were racing as she almost ran up behind Oliver, reaching out to wrench him out of Caesar’s hold.

They turned towards her at the same time, father and son, the truth stamped so indelibly on both sets of features that the shock of it sent her heart into a flurry of frightened hammer-blows. Even worse was seeing the way in which Oliver immediately moved closer to Caesar when she tried to part them.

Caesar still had one hand on Oliver’s shoulder, and now he lifted the other hand to cover hers where she’d grabbed Oliver’s arm. Immediately a sensation of physical danger sent a trail of fiery sparks burning through her veins. Her whole body was reacting so frantically and fearfully to Caesar’s touch that she was forced to ask herself if her panic was on Oliver’s account or on her own. The awareness that was pulsing through her right now wasn’t just maternal anxiety and she knew it. It was something else. Something very different. Different and totally unwanted. But not totally unfamiliar.

It was like lightning coming out of nowhere to tear apart the sky, its brilliance throwing piercingly sharp light into previously hidden places. Louise could feel the impact of the blow on her memory breaking apart the locks she had put on it. Wasn’t it the unpalatable truth that this was the way Caesar had made her feel all those years ago? The very thought made her shudder with horror and self-loathing. How could her body possibly find Caesar attractive either now? He had humiliated her, shamed her, treated her with contempt.

She tried to snatch her hand from beneath his but he refused to let her go, so that she was forced to stand there whilst the three of them completed a small intimate circle.

‘I was just on my way to look for you,’ Caesar told her. ‘We have a great deal to discuss.’

‘The only thing I want to discuss with you is the interment of my grandparents’ ashes,’ Louise told him fiercely.

‘You can come and watch me playing tennis tomorrow if you like,’ Oliver was saying to Caesar in an offhand manner that did nothing to conceal from Louise just how quickly and easily her son could become vulnerable to his father.

Frantically she wondered if it would be possible to change their flights so that they could leave as soon as possible. She could leave her grandparents’ ashes here with the priest, surely, and deal with the practical matters of their interment from the safety of London. Caesar couldn’t really want to be involved in Oliver’s life. Even though as yet he didn’t have legitimate children, it would only be a matter of time before he married and set out to produce the next Duca di Falconari.

Knowing that should have reassured her, but her heart-rate was refusing to slow down and her body was a mass of jangled nerve-endings. Even when she finally pulled her hand away from beneath Caesar’s her body was still tingling and, yes, aching with the sensations his touch had aroused inside it. Sensations of anger and … and loathing, Louise tried to reassure herself. Given what he had done, how could it be anything else?

‘If Oliver’s ready, it’s time for our junior photography class,’ the pretty young girl who was in charge of the children’s activities announced, coming over to them.

Both her statement and her smile were for Caesar, Louise noted grimly. She could also see that her son was reluctant to absent himself from the side of his new friend. He scowled at her when she pushed him gently in the girl’s direction, and then shook off the hand she had placed on his arm. She didn’t like the anger Oliver was showing towards her, but that didn’t mean she was willing to accept Caesar’s interference, Louise decided.

But immediately Caesar remonstrated with Oliver, telling him calmly, ‘That is not a good way to behave to your mother.’

Oliver looked both upset and mortified, reacting to Caesar’s rebuke and disapproval with far more concern that he ever did to hers.

‘You had no right to speak to Oliver like that,’ she told Caesar as soon as Oliver and the children’s activities girl were out of earshot. ‘He is my son.’

‘And mine,’ Caesar told her calmly. ‘I have received the DNA results and they show that quite clearly.’

Her heart did a double somersault, sending the blood pounding through her veins. Treacherously, shockingly, in a series of unwanted flashbacks, images of the intimacy they had shared to create Oliver played in front of her eyes. She could even feel the emotions she had felt then—the excitement, the longing, the need to be wanted that had been so intense it had driven her to delude herself that she was wanted, that she mattered.

Pain as cruelly stabbing and merciless as it had been then gripped her again. In many ways she might have been the cause of her own misfortune, but Caesar could have treated her more gently. But he was Oliver’s father, and there was enough of her grandparents’ Sicilian teaching and upbringing in her for her to be unable to deny that that mattered—much as she wished she could.

Even so … ‘There is no need for you to tell me the identity of my son’s father,’ she informed him grimly.

She was like a small soft-boned cat, spitting and hissing her anger as a defence measure, Caesar recognised inwardly. And, like that cat, would she also purr warmly with delight when she was stroked and pleasured?

The way in which his body reacted to that question was like a shockwave of tidal proportions, re-awakening emotions and needs he had thought long suppressed by his self-control.

‘We have a great deal to talk about, and I would suggest that the best and most private place for us to do that would be the castello.’

‘Oliver …’ Louise began but Caesar shook his head.

‘I have already spoken with the children’s activities manager. Oliver will be taken care of until you return.’

The castello. The scene of Oliver’s conception. Although it was hardly likely that on this occasion she would be visiting Caesar’s bedroom. Not that she wanted to do that, of course. Not after the price she had paid for being there before.

‘I don’t …’ she began, but somehow or other Caesar had taken possession of her arm and was guiding her towards the foyer of the hotel and then through it, to where a long black limousine complete with driver was waiting for them.

It was only a twenty-minute drive from the hotel to the castello. Caesar probably had a financial interest in the hotel, Louise reflected, since it must have been built on land that belonged to him.

As the car swept through the magnificent gardens to the front of the castello Louise tried not to be impressed, but that was almost impossible.

The Falconari family had been on the island for many, many generations. They had married well and accumulated great wealth and it showed. The emblem from their crest, the falcon itself, was emblazoned above the main entrance to the castello and incorporated everywhere in the intricate carvings ornamenting the building. The family’s stamp on their property. Just as Oliver’s looks were his father’s stamp upon him.

Louise gave a small shiver. There had been something about the way Caesar had held Oliver earlier, about the way her son had looked up at him, that had hurt her inside—in that place her own childhood had left raw and unhealed. Instinctively, but without wanting to admit it, Louise knew that no child of Caesar’s would be denied proper paternal concern. That was the Sicilian way, and the Duca di Falconari Caesar was not just honour-bound but had been raised from birth to respect and follow that code. And what did that mean?

Louise did not want to think about what it meant. Oliver was hers. She had borne him and brought him up alone, and she was fiercely protective of him. She had given herself to his father with all the innocence of her longing to be wanted and valued. Now, in a different way, she had seen in their son’s eyes his readiness to turn to his father. She was not going to allow Caesar to hurt and reject their son the way he had done her.

The car came to a halt alongside an imposing flight of marble steps.

No one could fault Caesar’s manners, Louise acknowledged as he came round to open the car door for her before escorting her up the steps. But it took more than the outer vestments of showy good manners to make a man a worthwhile human being—the kind of human being who was going to be a good father. Her heart jumped inside her chest wall. Why was she thinking that? Caesar was not going to be Oliver’s father. And yet Louise knew that it was going to be hard for her to forget the way Oliver had turned to Caesar and not her just before they had left him, moving closer to Caesar and looking almost pleadingly at him.

The main hallway of the castello was formidably impressive. Niches in the walls contained pieces of statuary, an airy flight of stairs curled upwards, and the smell from the floral display on an antique table in the middle of the marble-floored room filled its still silence.

‘This way,’ Caesar told her, indicating a double doorway that opened off the hallway into what Louise remembered from her original visit to the castello to be a series of rooms that opened one into the other, each of them decorated and furnished in style, with contents that Louise suspected must be worth several kings’ ransoms.

Leading the way through one of them, Caesar pushed open another set of doors onto a covered walkway beyond which lay an enclosed courtyard garden, with a fountain playing and doves cooing from a small dovecote.

‘This was my mother’s garden,’ he told Louise as he gestured to her to sit down on one of the chairs drawn up at a pretty wrought-iron table.

‘She died when you were very young I remember my grandmother saying,’ Louise felt obliged to offer.

‘Yes. I was six. My parents died together in a sailing accident.’

Out of nowhere, without his seeming to do anything to summon her, a maid silently appeared.

‘What would you like? English tea, perhaps?’

‘Coffee—espresso,’ Louise told him, thinking inwardly that she needed the boost an espresso would give her to stand up to Caesar. ‘My grandparents taught me to drink it a long time before I developed any taste for English tea. They used to say that it was a taste of home, even though the smell could never be the smell of home.’ She wasn’t going to admit to him that right now she needed its strengthening qualities.

The maid had gone and come back again with their coffee, only to leave them alone again, before Caesar demanded, ‘Why did you not contact me to tell me that you were carrying my child?’

‘Do you really need to ask me that? You wouldn’t have believed me. Not after the hatchet job the headman had done on my reputation and my morals. No one else did—not even my grandparents at first. It was only when Oliver was growing up that my grandfather asked me if he could be yours. He recognised that Oliver looked like you.’

‘But you knew right from the start?’

‘Yes.’

‘How? How could you know?’