скачать книгу бесплатно
* * *
Annah and Luca stared at each other across the table.
‘Tell me everything,’ he said, his expression grim.
She sucked in her breath, her mind grappling with the implications of what he’d told her. If it was true, everything she’d believed about him in the last five years was wrong.
‘Start at the beginning,’ he said, his tone gentling as if he realised just how deeply he’d shocked her. ‘When did you discover you were pregnant?’
‘Four weeks later.’ Her voice was not as steady as she hoped. ‘It didn’t occur to me before then that I might be pregnant. I mean...we used protection.’
Her face heated and she glanced away. She didn’t want to think about sex with Luca. Not while he was sitting at her dining table looking so handsome and compelling.
Bringing him up here had been a calculated risk. They could have gone to the cosy café at the Wilkinsons’ farm shop half a mile down the road, or even sat on a bench in the local park to talk. But they wouldn’t have had complete privacy like they had here.
And she wasn’t concerned for her safety. Despite her knee-jerk reaction downstairs, her gut told her Luca wasn’t a physical threat to her or Ethan.
‘But you weren’t on the Pill?’
‘No,’ Annah confirmed.
‘And condoms aren’t foolproof,’ he added, voicing all the same thoughts that’d run through Annah’s head in the beginning, when she’d struggled to accept she was pregnant.
‘Apparently not.’ She took another deep breath. ‘You were entitled to know and I wanted to tell you—but I had no idea how to contact you.’ That last sentence sounded faintly accusatory, and she cringed inwardly. She didn’t want to sound petulant because he hadn’t given her his number. He’d told her he was leaving the country. Annah had understood what he was offering: one night, no strings attached.
Luca brushed a hand over his face, dragging his thumb and fingers down the sides of his jaw. He was clean-shaven, but his five o’clock shadow was already growing in. Annah could hear the scrape of fine stubble under his hand. ‘I hadn’t thought about the need for contact in case there were...consequences,’ he said, his expression pained.
They were both silent.
After a moment, he said, ‘Tell me how—and why—you ended up meeting with my father.’
Annah picked up her mug and swallowed a mouthful of tea, then kept the mug in her lap, hands wrapped around it, trying to absorb the lukewarm heat from the china. ‘Does it matter now?’ she said, her chest tightening at the prospect of reliving the encounter. ‘What’s done is done. The last five years can’t be reversed.’
‘It matters,’ said Luca, the sudden obdurate angle of his jaw not unlike Ethan’s whenever he dug his little heels in about something.
Annah sighed. ‘I tried to find you on social media,’ she said, omitting to mention she’d actually searched the more popular sites before discovering she was pregnant. After their night together, forgetting about him had been difficult. Eventually, curiosity had won out, although it didn’t get her far. She knew his name but not much else, and she quickly discovered dozens of online profiles for men named Luca Cavallari. Not one of them was the dark, sexy stranger she’d spent a night with in a plush hotel room in London.
‘I’m not on social media.’
‘So I discovered.’ She put her half-drunk tea on the table. ‘I searched the Internet using your name combined with New York and then Rome, since that’s where you said you were originally from.’ But that had been a lie; Luca was Sicilian. ‘It took ages, but eventually I came across a photo of you at a gala fundraiser in Rome.’
Annah’s heart had leapt at the two-dimensional image of him, gorgeous and suave in a tuxedo, then plunged when she’d seen the glamorous woman on his arm. The photo had been two years old at the time, but her stomach had still twisted with silly jealousy. ‘The caption mentioned your family’s company. I discovered there was an office in London and called to see if someone could give me a phone number or email address for you.
‘I got the runaround, though. The receptionist said you’d left and they didn’t have forwarding details. I couldn’t believe that no one in your own family’s company was able to contact you. I kept calling back, but I just got transferred to a different person with the same story.’
It had been so frustrating—and humiliating. ‘In the end I lost my cool and did something stupid,’ she confessed. ‘I blurted out that I was pregnant with your child and suggested somebody might like to pass on the information.’ She huffed out a humourless laugh. ‘It got a reaction at least. A woman called me within an hour and invited me to go in for a meeting two days later.’
Annah looked down at her hands. ‘Until I got there, I’d thought maybe I was going to meet you,’ she said, stopping short of confessing that a part of her had fizzed with anticipation at the prospect despite the awkward circumstances. ‘But it was your father.’
She glanced at Luca. A deep groove had settled between his eyebrows, and a muscle flickered in his jaw.
‘He wasn’t very kind,’ she said, vastly understating Franco Cavallari’s demeanour. ‘He treated me like a gold digger. Wrote a cheque for ten thousand pounds and told me to go have an abortion.’ Her voice wobbled at the memory. ‘I tried to leave without taking it, but he pushed it into my bag and then had me escorted out of the building. I ripped the cheque up as soon as I got home,’ she added.
‘What else did he say?’
‘Not much.’
‘Annah.’
She sighed again. ‘He said you would have handled it yourself if you were still in the country. Then he said you wished me well and hoped this would put an end to the matter.’
Those words had cut deeper than any others. After a burly man had shown her the door, she’d hurried away on shaky legs, found a toilet in a shopping mall and promptly thrown up.
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘Not exactly—not in words. But he was...intimidating.’ And convincing. Annah had gone home believing the worst—that Luca had spurned her and his unborn child and not had the courage or decency to do it in person.
Emotion clogged her throat, and she rose suddenly and rushed to the back door. With trembling hands she tried to open it, but the deadbolt jammed and she cursed under her breath—why hadn’t the landlord replaced it like he’d promised?—and then her fingers blurred alarmingly before her eyes.
She blinked furiously. She was not going to cry. She just needed some air.
If only this blasted lock—
It gave way and she yanked the door open, stumbled out to the terrace, and gulped in a breath of the crisp March air. Seconds later the back of her neck tingled, alerting her to Luca’s presence before his deep voice rumbled behind her.
‘I didn’t know you were pregnant, Annah. If I had, all this would have turned out very differently. It’s important you understand that as we move forward.’
Move forward?
Annah wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that entailed.
Curling her hands over the railing, she looked out at the treetops and the hilly fields and farmland beyond. It was quiet in Hollyfield—too quiet sometimes—but the countryside was pretty, the area safe, the villagers friendly and kind.
She and Ethan were settled here. Content. She didn’t want his life disrupted like hers had been too often as a child.
But Luca was here and he wasn’t going away. Annah had to deal with this. Deal with him. Straightening her back, she turned and faced him. ‘What now?’
‘Take me to my son,’ he said.
CHAPTER THREE (#u3b506625-e70c-563d-aaef-09a29e356ca2)
LUCA RETURNED TO the SUV, got in the back, and instructed Mario to follow Annah’s hatchback. Apparently, his son’s daycare facility was in a neighbouring village, about a fifteen-minute drive away, according to Annah.
She hadn’t looked thrilled about taking him to meet his son, but her grudging acquiescence was a win nonetheless. Still, Luca didn’t count on plain sailing ahead. Annah Sinclair was no pushover; she was a tougher version of the woman he’d met five years ago, and a damn sight less trusting.
He fisted his hand on his thigh. If his father wasn’t already dead he’d wring the bastard’s neck.
Listening to Annah’s account of what had happened, Luca had felt winded and then furious at what Franco had done.
Had his father hated him that much?
Bile burned the back of Luca’s throat. The answers to so many questions had gone with Franco Cavallari to his grave—including why he’d had photos of Annah and Ethan in his possession, and, more disturbingly, what he’d planned to do with them.
For the next ten minutes Mario sat on the tail of the hatchback. Annah drove at a fair clip, obviously familiar with the winding back roads and country lanes. When they reached the village she parked on a side road and Mario pulled up behind her.
She got out, crossed the road, and disappeared through a gate in a high wooden fence.
A full minute passed with no sign of her, then another. Luca tapped his fingers against his thigh.
How long did it take to collect a child?
He watched other vehicles come and go. Other parents disappear through the gate, all of whom emerged soon after with one or more children in tow.
He got out of the SUV and paced the footpath, stopping every few seconds to glare across the road. From behind the wheel, Mario sent him a look that was vaguely amused, and Luca gave him a dark scowl.
He looked across the road again. Perhaps he should go in?
No sooner had the thought formed than the gate swung open, and Annah came out holding the hand of a dark-haired boy.
Luca froze. Suddenly, his heartbeat sped up and his hands went clammy.
He was about to meet his child. An event for which he had no point of reference. No previous experience to help him navigate this unfamiliar territory.
He stared at Ethan, so like himself as a boy, and a memory surfaced. A vignette of the Cavallari family in happier times, years before ugly revelations had torn them apart and planted them on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide.
The day was hot and they were picnicking on the family estate. Luca was young, no older than Ethan, and he was riding high on his papà’s shoulders, giggling and shrieking as Franco put his arms out like an airplane and raced across the lawn. His mother wore a pretty sundress and sat under a big oak, baby Enzo cradled in her arms. Luca could hear the sweet tinkle of her laughter, unaware that in years to come he would rarely hear his mother laugh.
Luca had loved his father. It pained him to admit it, but he had. He’d idolised him. Wanted to be him. In the eyes of his young son, Franco Cavallari had been an important man. Wealthy and successful. Handsome and charismatic. Other men treated him with deference—and respect.
Luca had been a teenager when he’d finally understood it wasn’t respect his father engendered in other men, but fear.
On the night Franco initiated his eldest son into manhood, Luca’s love for him had turned into something confusing and complex. A gut-churning mix of revulsion and love and hatred he struggled for years to understand.
His first big mistake was believing he could change his father. His second was not destroying Franco when he had the chance. Emotion had made him weak. Incapable of doing what had to be done.
If he had been stronger, if he’d taken Franco down, he could have saved his brother.
He took a deep breath and calmed his heart rate. He wouldn’t fail Ethan like he had failed Enzo. He could do this. He was a better man than Franco; he could be a better father. All he had to do was stay focused and control his emotions.
* * *
‘Is that him, Mummy?’
Ethan tugged on Annah’s hand. Standing with her feet glued to the pavement, she swallowed down a bubble of nervous laughter. ‘Yes, sweetheart,’ she said, staring across the road. ‘That’s him.’
‘Holy Moly,’ breathed a woman’s voice.
Annah glanced to her left. Harriet, a frazzled but good-humoured mother of five, stood with her youngest—a little girl with ginger ringlets—balanced on her hip.
Harriet, like Ethan, stared across the road. So did several other mothers as they trotted along the street and bundled their kids into cars. Annah couldn’t blame them. Luca Cavallari was a knee-weakening mix of smouldering sex appeal and unadulterated machismo.
‘Who is that?’ said Harriet.
Ethan leaned around Annah’s legs. ‘That’s my daddy,’ he said proudly.
Oh, God. The footpath swayed beneath Annah’s feet. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Harriet was looking at her, bug-eyed.
‘Wow,’ said Harriet. ‘That’s...unexpected?’
This time she couldn’t stop the nervous laughter escaping. ‘You could say that.’
Harriet put a hand on Annah’s arm and squeezed gently. ‘Let me know if you need anything, hon.’
Annah managed a smile. ‘Thanks.’
Harriet headed off to her car, and Annah looked across the road again. Luca wasn’t even looking at her. His gaze was fixated on Ethan.
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re holding on too tight.’
‘Oh!’ Annah loosened her grip on Ethan’s hand and looked into his upturned face. ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’ She smiled, hoping it looked less strained than it felt, and he beamed back.
‘Are we crossing now?’
His little voice rang with eagerness, and Annah’s heart clenched. Ethan was excited to meet his father, but she was still grappling with shock and anxiety. She would have appreciated a few days’ grace—time to get her emotions under control before introducing Ethan to his father—but Luca had different ideas.
Annah had tried to put herself in his shoes. He had missed out on the first four years of his son’s life. Wanting to meet his child without further delay perhaps wasn’t unreasonable.
Reminding Ethan to look both ways for traffic, she crossed the road with him. Luca waited on the other side. He wasn’t wearing his coat, and his all-black attire combined with his sheer size and the intense expression he wore made him look rather intimidating. But as they drew close he squatted down, bringing his face level with Ethan’s, a smile curving his lips that not only softened his hard features but caused Annah’s pulse to hitch.
‘Hello, Ethan,’ he said. ‘My name is Luca.’
Ethan blinked and then looked to Annah, shyness overtaking him now that he was face to face with the commanding figure of his father.
Annah smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s okay, sweetheart. Say hello.’
He turned back to Luca. ‘Hello.’ His hand reached out and touched Luca’s bent knee, as though to make sure he was real. He pulled his hand back, broke into a grin, and boldly announced, ‘You’re my daddy.’
Luca shot Annah a surprised look.
She lifted one shoulder. ‘I thought honesty was best.’ She could have made something up. Introduced Luca as her ‘friend’. But then what? Ethan would learn the truth eventually, and then he’d know she’d lied to him.
Their eyes held for a moment.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
