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When she laughed, it’d be the sweetest, most alluring sound he’d ever heard.
He closed his eyes, his mind catapulting him back to a frigid February night in London. He’d been walking the streets, headed back to his hotel, lost in a dark mire of thought until he’d collided with something soft that bounced off his hard body, reeled backwards, and landed in a clump of dirty snow with a small oomph.
Not something but someone, he’d realised, staring down at the young woman he’d accidentally bowled off her feet.
She should have yelled at him. Told him to look where he was going. Instead she pushed off her hood, revealing a head of golden hair and a pair of striking blue eyes, and grinned up at him.
Luca had stood dumbstruck for long seconds before he’d finally roused himself, helped her up and found his voice to apologise. And then he’d whisked her into the hotel’s swanky lounge bar and ordered her an enormous hot chocolate.
Which was where their random encounter should have ended.
But her natural beauty, her easy smile, her infectious laughter...everything about her captivated him, and the temptation to touch, to hold her close and lose himself in her sweetness—to pretend for one night his world was not tainted with ugliness—was too strong to resist.
Breathing hard, Luca riffled through the photos, searching for something more, some clue, anything to help him understand how the woman he’d spent one unforgettable night with five years ago had become not only his father’s mistress but the mother of Franco’s illegitimate child.
Hatred flared. How typical of his father to corrupt the one pure thing Luca had ever had.
He upended the envelope and a piece of paper, folded in half, fell out. He flipped it open. It was a photocopy of a birth certificate for an Ethan Sinclair, the boy in the photos presumably.
He skipped down to the mother’s name.
Annah Sinclair.
And just like that, the memory of her sweet, melodic voice filled his head.
‘Annah with an “h”,’ she’d said, smiling at him over the frothy rim of her hot chocolate.
He’d misunderstood. ‘Hannah?’
She’d laughed, shaking her head, then spelt it for him.
Luca thrust aside the memory and focused on the certificate. The father was listed as unknown. The kid’s birth date was October the thirty-first in the year—
He froze.
‘Signor Cavallari?’
He looked at Victor but didn’t see him. In his head, he swiftly calculated the number of months and weeks between February the seventeenth and October the thirty-first.
Victor spoke again, but the sudden rush of blood in Luca’s ears and the loud rasp of his breathing drowned out the older man’s words.
Wrong.
He had it all wrong.
The boy wasn’t Luca’s half-brother; he was his son.
* * *
‘Oh, don’t you dare,’ Annah muttered, throwing down her shears and lunging for the spool of silver ribbon rolling across her worktop.
She was fast, but the renegade ribbon was faster. Before her outstretched fingers could reach it, the reel had gathered momentum and shot off the counter.
Annah groaned, listened to the clatter of the cylinder hitting the floor, and imagined the hideously expensive organza ribbon unravelling beneath her workbench.
Excellent.
She pulled a face at the bunch of purple tulips in her hand. ‘Sorry, you lot. I’m afraid you’ll have to hang tight.’ She set the flowers on the bench and crouched down to search the floor.
No trail of ribbon.
No reel in sight, either.
Puffing a strand of hair out of her face, she got to her hands and knees and crawled beneath her work space.
Please don’t let a customer walk in right now.
She loved customers. Who didn’t when you ran your own business? But with Chloe—her friend and co-owner of their floral studio—in London visiting a sick friend, Annah was operating alone and stretched to capacity.
She stuck her hand in a gap between some boxes of coloured binding wires stacked against the wall. ‘There you are,’ she said, closing her fingers around the spool—just as the vintage shopkeeper’s bell over the front door of the studio jangled.
Blast.
Hoping to see the scrawny bare legs of her delivery man, she peeped under the front of the counter.
Nope. Not Brian’s legs. He didn’t wear dark tailored trousers and expensive-looking leather shoes. Handmade shoes, by the look of them.
Her walk-in wasn’t a local, then. The men who lived in and around the small rural village of Hollyfield in South Devon typically wore wellies or work boots, not the kind of shoes that wouldn’t survive a muddy field or a half-decent snowfall.
‘I’ll be right with you,’ she called, backing out of the crawl space.
‘Please, do not rush on my account,’ replied a deep masculine voice.
An accented voice.
Annah stiffened for a second and then, in her haste to stand, misjudged her clearance of the bench. With a loud crack, the top of her skull connected with solid wood. Pain knifed across her scalp. Clutching her head, she dropped back to her knees. ‘Ow!’
The man walked around the counter. ‘Are you all right?’
His deep voice floated somewhere above her in the flower-scented air.
‘Yes,’ she lied, not moving, her heart racing in her chest. ‘I’m fine.’
You’re not fine. You’re about to have one of those silly paranoia attacks. After all these years!
Lowering her hands to the floor, she took a deep breath and steadied herself. She mustn’t overreact. A man had walked into her shop. He had a sexy Italian accent. Those facts could mean nothing.
Or they could mean—
No.
She shut down the thought and clenched her teeth against the swell of panic. She would not become that woman again. The one who looked over her shoulder and flinched at shadows, seeing threats where none existed. It wasn’t fair to Ethan. Her son was an intuitive little boy who deserved better than a nervous wreck for a mother.
‘Are you sure?’ the man said.
She pushed to her feet. She would look at him and prove she was being ridiculous. With any luck he’d be short and rotund, nothing at all like the tall, dark-haired devil who’d seduced her with hot chocolate and a hint of torment in his deep brown eyes on a cold night in London five years before.
More importantly, he’d be nothing like Ethan’s paternal grandfather—a man she hoped never to have the misfortune of meeting again.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, placing the reel of ribbon on the counter. The top of her head throbbed, but she turned towards the man with a professional smile. He was probably passing through and had stopped to buy flowers for his girlfriend or wife. ‘How can I help?’
The lapels of a sleek, single-breasted camel coat worn over a black polo-neck jumper confronted her at eye level, along with a set of extremely broad shoulders. Although Annah couldn’t see the body beneath the coat, her immediate impression was of solidity and power.
Her smile faltered, and, in the same way people peek through their fingers at a scary movie, afraid to look yet helplessly compelled to do so, she lifted her gaze.
A pair of dark brown eyes, deep-set in a brutally handsome face, connected with hers.
‘Hello, Annah.’
She gasped, her heart lunging into her throat, and stumbled backwards, colliding with the workbench.
Luca Cavallari moved towards her. ‘Careful—’
‘Don’t touch me,’ she blurted, and grabbed the first object to hand—her florist shears—and stuck them out in front of her.
He looked down at the small pair of secateurs and then back at her, his expression more quizzical than alarmed. He spoke softly. ‘You would stab me, Annah?’
‘Maybe.’ She firmed her grip on the shears. Of course she wouldn’t stab him, but he didn’t know that. He didn’t know her. They were strangers, regardless of the fact that they’d created an amazing little person together.
Anyway, people were capable of all sorts of things when something dear to them was threatened. Annah would do anything to protect her son, especially from the people who’d wanted him gone long before he’d drawn his first breath.
The bell over the door tinkled and Annah glanced towards the entrance. Mistake, she realised as Luca Cavallari seized her wrist and deftly disarmed her, tossing the shears down the far end of the bench beyond her reach. ‘No!’ she cried, tugging her wrist, but his one-handed grip was too strong.
Annah cast a panicky look at the newcomer—a thick-necked behemoth dressed in black—and her stomach plummeted. She glared at Luca with false bravado. ‘Really? You brought reinforcements?’
He frowned as if her hostility perplexed him, and that incensed her. What had he expected? Not a warm reception, surely. If only she’d had the presence of mind to act as if she didn’t recognise him. She’d spent one night with him five years ago; it was entirely plausible that his face had faded from her memory.
Except the truth was it hadn’t.
How could she forget the man she’d recklessly given her virginity to—the only man she’d ever slept with—when every day she looked at a tiny, living replica of him?
Thoughts of Ethan spiked her anxiety. Her one chance to play it cool was gone. She’d overreacted. Tipped her hand by revealing her fear. If he hadn’t already known she had something to hide, he knew now.
She looked at the man in black, her heart beating so hard her chest hurt, then back to Luca, whose eyes narrowed as he scrutinised her face.
His frown deepened. He switched his gaze to the other man and said something in Italian. Immediately, the man exited the studio and crossed the street to a big black SUV parked up by the village shop, two wheels perched on the footpath so it didn’t block the narrow road.
The shop owner was nowhere in sight, and Annah felt a glimmer of relief. She liked Dorothy Green. The fifty-something widow was kind and well meaning, but she was also incurably nosy. Little happened in Hollyfield without Dot knowing, and new faces always garnered special attention.
‘You have nothing to fear,’ Luca said in that crushed-velvet voice she knew better than to trust. ‘I simply wish to talk.’
And yet he still held her wrist as if he didn’t trust her not to reach for a sharp object again. Annah put her shoulders back, pretending her skin wasn’t tingling where he touched her and her hormones weren’t leaping with awareness of those chiselled good looks and thick-lashed, espresso-coloured eyes.
Setting her jaw, she made herself recall his father’s callous treatment of her. His cold dismissal of the child who at the time had been little more than a lentil-sized embryo in her womb, but his grandchild nevertheless!
Where had Luca been then, when she wanted to talk? Conveniently absent. In the arms of another woman for all Annah knew, his memory of her already gathering dust while she came to terms with a far more permanent reminder of their night together. Of the one time in her life she’d chosen desire and spontaneity over the inclination to be sensible.
‘Talk about what?’ she said, clinging to the possibility, remote as it was, that his walking into her floral studio in the middle of the Devon countryside was just a crazy coincidence and he knew nothing of Ethan’s existence.
A flimsy hope at best, and Luca crushed it with two words.
‘Our son.’
His gaze challenged her to look him in the eye and deny it.
‘My son,’ she said, more ferociously than she’d intended. But he didn’t get to show up on her doorstep after four years and pretend he was interested in the son he hadn’t wanted. She tugged her wrist again. ‘Let me go.’
He released her, and she clasped her arms around her middle, a thousand questions hammering her brain. How and when had he found out she’d gone through with the pregnancy? Why show up now? More specifically, what did he want?
Not Ethan. Please, not Ethan.
She didn’t want her little boy anywhere near his paternal family!
By all accounts, Ethan’s grandfather was little better than a modern-day gangster. Admittedly, those accounts were based on rumour and originated from an Italian chef with a flair for dramatics whom Chloe had briefly dated in London. But Annah hadn’t needed much convincing. She’d met Franco Cavallari, and he’d terrified the living daylights out of her. She’d never met anyone more formidable or intimidating—or so devoid of compassion.
‘Annah—’
She held up a hand, closing her eyes, light-headed all of a sudden. ‘I... I just need a moment,’ she said, because the conversation they were about to have was one she’d believed would never happen. Which meant that she, the woman Chloe had dubbed the Queen of Preparedness, was woefully ill prepared.
She opened her eyes and mentally braced for the visual impact of him. Predictably, her pulse spiked at the sight of all that dark, chiselled masculinity. But at least he wasn’t touching her now, inflaming the nerves in her wrist and making her body tingle in very inappropriate places.
She did not want to feel sexually attracted to this man.
‘Are you all right?’ he said suddenly. ‘Your head. Perhaps it should be checked?’
He shifted towards her, lifting his hands, and she instinctively shrank back. Having Luca Cavallari run his fingers over her scalp would undo her completely.
‘My head’s fine,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’m just a little...overwhelmed. I never imagined having this conversation, to be honest.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You never imagined I would one day wish to know my son?’
Annah didn’t like how that question made her insides twist, as if she had some reason to feel guilty. It made her want to push back. ‘You haven’t met my son. What makes you so certain he’s yours?’
‘I’ve seen his birth certificate. And photos.’
Annah blinked. Photos of Ethan? How? She was always so careful. She only used social media for business and she never posted photos of her or Ethan online.
Luca slid his hands into the pockets of his expensive-looking coat. With his dark looks, his lean, broad-shouldered physique and his stylish attire, he wouldn’t have looked out of place on a catwalk in Paris or Milan. In Hollyfield, he looked about as alien as Annah had felt the first time she and Chloe had driven into the quaint country village.
