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‘I’ve dealt with sports injuries.’ He was on a level with her now, and only inches away as he looked up from his task, his gaze somehow distant despite his physical proximity.
She could see a few fine lines at the corners of his eyes, and the faint beard-shadow on his taut, closely shaved cheeks. A hint of some pleasant, woodsy scent came from him—aftershave or something like it. His hair was glossy black, with a slight wave. He’d removed his tie and opened the collar of his white shirt, revealing naturally olive skin. She found herself fascinated by the almost invisible beat of a pulse at the base of his throat.
Dragging her attention from it, she said, ‘You still play?’ Vaguely she recalled some mention of him having been a tennis champion in his earlier years.
‘Enough to keep me fit. Rest your arm here.’
He placed it on the arm of the sofa, but she immediately lifted it away to support it with her other hand. ‘I’ll make the upholstery wet.’
Zandro looked briefly nonplussed. With the kind of money his family had, she supposed a spoiled sofa would be a minor inconvenience. But he said, ‘I’ll fetch another towel.’
He brought a larger one and folded it so there was little chance of water seeping through. When he straightened from arranging it for her he stood regarding her with a penetrating stare before swinging away to sit in a chair facing her.
‘What are you doing here, Lia?’
She hesitated, moistening her lips. This was the point of no return. Her last chance to retreat, walk away. Steadying her voice with an act of will, she said, ‘I’ve come for my baby. To take him home.’
Zandro was so still, so expressionless, he might not have heard her. Seconds passed, and then an almost infinitesimal movement showed in his cheek, a slight tightening of the muscles in his jaw. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
Raising her chin a fraction, she fixed her gaze unwaveringly on his darkling one. ‘He belongs with…with me.’
Something glimmered in his shadowed, hostile eyes. ‘You think I’ll give him up to you, just like that?’
‘I’m his mother!’ Putting every ounce of conviction she could into her voice.
‘And I’m his legal guardian, committed to looking after his interests.’
The words sounded more suited to a business meeting than a discussion of a child’s needs. ‘You mean the interests of the Brunellesci dynasty.’
The resolute brows rose a scant millimetre. ‘I hardly think the family business qualifies as a dynasty.’
‘Isn’t Pantheon listed as one of the top ten richest Australian companies, worth how many millions? Or is it billions?’
His gaze sharpened. ‘Is that what this is about?’ The steel in his voice was unsheathed. ‘It isn’t your son you’ve come for, is it? Let’s dispense with the pretence, shall we?’
Her eyes widened, and her stomach made a sickening revolution. ‘How—’ she started to say weakly.
But he wasn’t listening. ‘You’re hoping we’ll pay you to go away again and leave him with us.’
The accusation stunned her at first. Then she shot to her feet. ‘That’s a foul suggestion! You’re even worse than I thought!’
He too stood up, meeting her hot-eyed gaze with a glittery stare. ‘I might return the compliment.’ A small pause, and then, ‘If I’m wrong, what do you really want?’
‘I told you! I want Dominic—I want…my son.’
‘You gave him up.’
A brutal reminder, further hardening her against him, if that were possible. ‘I wasn’t myself, didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘And,’ he inquired with deadly irony, ‘are you yourself now, Lia?’
Stupidly, the question sent her heart into a crazy, terrified revolution. She knew her face showed confusion, perhaps guilt, and he gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Were you thinking of kidnapping Nicky? You’d never have got away with it.’
Nicky? Who…? After a moment light dawned. Dominic had acquired a nickname. ‘I wasn’t going to kidnap him!’ No need to tell him the idea had been briefly considered, and discarded.
‘So why lurk about watching the house?’
‘What makes you think I was?’ Neither confirm nor deny. That was safest.
He looked impatient. ‘My father and the nanny saw you yesterday, and she recognised the same car parked in the same place today. They thought your behaviour was suspicious, and called me.’
On a cell phone, she presumed. They hadn’t yet returned from the beach. ‘I wanted to be sure Dominic was still here. And being properly cared for.’
‘He’s had the best care possible,’ Zandro said.
‘The best that money can buy, you mean.’ Allowing her scepticism to show. ‘You hired a nanny.’
His head tilted slightly. ‘My mother is no longer able to keep up with a lively young child. And I have a business to run. Barbara is highly qualified and came from a very reputable agency. She’s extremely competent.’
‘A professional can’t afford to get too emotionally involved with her charges.’
‘A good nanny is better for a child than an incompetent mother.’
‘Incompetent?’ Her voice shook with anger.
He was looking austere again. ‘You know you were incapable of looking after a child, Lia.’
‘A temporary state!’ she argued. ‘That you took advantage of to snatch Dominic away!’
‘We took responsibility for a vulnerable member of our family. His safety and wellbeing was our first priority. He’s a Brunellesci, after all.’
‘He’s a Cameron!’
‘The fact that his father didn’t marry you is immaterial,’ Zandro said. ‘Rico’s name is on the birth certificate, and my parents have accepted Nicky as their grandchild.’
‘That doesn’t make him yours—or theirs.’ If the Brunellescis had charge of his upbringing, would they turn that laughing, innocent little boy into an unfeeling, hard-headed brute in a business suit, like his uncle and his grandfather? It didn’t bear thinking of. ‘A mother’s claim comes first.’ Rashly she added, ‘Any court would back that!’
‘The court would take into account the best interests of the child. A mother with a drug dependency who abandoned her baby isn’t a very trustworthy prospect.’
‘I don’t…’ She should probably have expected this, but she could feel herself shaking, and clenched her hands to hide it. ‘He wasn’t abandoned, and you’re wrong. I don’t have a drug dependency.’
‘You’re clean?’ He cast her a razor-edged look. ‘You look better,’ he conceded. ‘But how long can you stay away from the stuff?’
Her teeth snapped together. ‘I was never an addict. My mind was…was mixed up.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ he said dryly. ‘You hardly knew what day it was, and as for looking after a newborn baby—if I hadn’t stepped in Nicky would have been sent to a child welfare home.’
‘I was in shock! Grieving for your brother, my…my—’
‘Your lover,’ Zandro supplied.
‘The father of my child! The child you took away.’
After that, to Lia nothing had seemed to matter any more. She’d taken pills to ease the pain, to help her sleep, to blot out the world and its cruelty. Until time and emotion blurred and she was living in another dimension, a blessedly vague world where she felt nothing, remembered nothing, knew nothing except that she had to have more pills, and more…
‘I tried to help you,’ Zandro said.
A renewed flare of anger rose. She must stay calm, keep her wits about her. ‘I don’t recall that you ever offered help,’ she said flatly.
He looked exasperated, then almost weary. ‘I don’t suppose you recall much at all, zonked out of your skull as you were.’
A faint unease stirred deep down. Had things happened at that time that she didn’t know about?
Sounds at the front door interrupted them. It opened and there were voices in the hall.
Instinctively she turned her head, catching a glimpse of the nanny crossing the hallway, the baby in her arms.
Without thought she took a step towards them, but Zandro’s hand closed about her arm, and she halted, then pulled away from him.
The old man appeared, blocking her view, and came to a stop in the doorway of the room, leaning on his cane.
At the sight of her he straightened, and his expression turned icy. Shifting his gaze to Zandro, he said, his accent betraying his Italian origin, ‘What is that woman doing here?’
It felt like a slap in the face. Renewed antipathy surfaced as she squared her shoulders and confronted him. ‘I have a name, Mr. Brunellesci,’ she said. ‘Lia.’ She pronounced it like a challenge. ‘And a right to my son.’
‘You have no rights!’ He thumped his cane on the tiled floor. Stepping into the room, he waved the walking stick at her before using it to steady himself, his knuckles whitening. ‘How can you dare to come here again?’
‘Papa,’ Zandro interrupted, his voice quiet but authoritative, ‘don’t upset yourself. I’ll deal with this.’
The old man’s glare swivelled to his son. If Domenico had mellowed in old age it certainly wasn’t apparent now. Finally he nodded, perhaps satisfied that Zandro was as relentless as himself, and with a parting haughty scowl at the intruder and a muttered word that sounded like ‘Cagna!’ he turned and left the room, the muffled tapping of his stick gradually fading.
Zandro said, ‘Please sit, Lia.’
After a slight hesitation she did so, back straight, not sinking into the tempting softness. ‘What did he call me?’
Zandro remained standing. A movement of his hand dismissed her question. ‘It’s not important. How’s your wrist?’
Numbed. ‘I’m sure it will be all right.’ But she would retain the compress a little longer. He’d find it harder to throw her out while she still had it on. ‘Your father hates me.’
‘He loves Nicky.’
As if it followed logically. ‘Is it love?’ she queried. ‘Or possessiveness?’ Dominic, named after his grandfather at Rico’s wish, was the senior Brunellesci’s only grandchild, the sole member of the new generation. ‘You’re not married yet, are you?’ she asked Zandro. ‘If you have children, what happens to Dominic?’
He frowned. ‘He will still be Rico’s son, a Brunellesci. Nothing can change that.’
‘He’s my son, too. Nothing can change that.’
A flicker of acknowledgement momentarily lessened the chilly hostility in his eyes. Then his mouth hardened and the pitiless expression returned. ‘You relinquished your rights.’
‘You bullied me into signing those papers when I couldn’t stand up to you!’
‘Bullied?’ Reciprocal anger lit his eyes. ‘Bribery I’ll admit to, but bullying? I had no need to resort to that. You were only too happy to take the money and run.’
The accusation took her breath. She opened her mouth to deny it, then reminded herself to think before she spoke. Almost choking on the words, she said, ‘It had nothing to do with money! At the time it seemed the best thing for him. But there are more important things for a child than money and what it can buy.’
‘Agreed,’ Zandro said. ‘A family, for one thing.’
‘I’m his family!’
His mouth turned down in a sceptical sneer. ‘Forgive me if I find this sudden maternal concern difficult to believe.’
‘It’s not sudden at all! You don’t know how hard it was, how much heartbreak…’ She stopped there, her eyes stinging, and quickly turned her head, trying to stem the threatening tears, her teeth sinking savagely into her lower lip. Weeping in front of this unfeeling man was humiliating.
One tear escaped and unthinkingly she lifted her towel-encased arm to swipe at it, impatient with her own weakness.
The coldness of the compress helped her steady herself. When she returned her defiant gaze to him Zandro hadn’t moved, standing as though fixed to the floor, watching her.
He shifted then, a slight movement of shoulders, feet, and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, examining her as if for flaws—she was sure he could find plenty.
Unexpectedly he said, ‘You have a case, I suppose—morally, if not legally. There will be conditions, but provided no harm comes to Nicky I’m willing to talk about visiting rights.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘VISITING RIGHTS?’ He would concede his nephew’s mother the right to visit her child? Such magnanimity.
Swallowing the sarcastic addendum, she reminded herself again that losing her temper would do no good. ‘That isn’t enough,’ she said, with an effort sticking to understatement. ‘You can’t expect me to accept it.’
‘But you expect me to tamely hand over Nicky to you—a stranger?’
Her heart jumping with panic and then rage at the callous remark, she made another effort to steady herself. ‘His mother,’ she reiterated. If she repeated the words often enough surely they would seem more real, to herself as well as to him.
Zandro’s own anger escaped his iron control. ‘You haven’t been near him since he was two months old!’
‘That’s not my fault!’ Zandro couldn’t have forgotten the promise he’d extracted, made Lia sign her name to. ‘You wouldn’t let me near him!’
‘In the state you were in, do you blame me? It was for his sake.’
Did he truly believe that? Had anything more than family pride and possessiveness been behind his insistence that Rico’s son had a right to be raised as a Brunellesci and Lia must give him up?
No, she reminded herself. Zandro and his parents could have helped without taking Dominic away. If he’d really had the child’s interests in mind he’d have found some way to support its mother, not cut her off from any contact with her son. ‘It was a mistake,’ she said, ‘leaving him with you.’
His look held contempt and disbelief. ‘You would take him away from everything—everyone—he knows?’
‘I realise I can’t uplift him without warning.’ She might not know a great deal about children, but that much was basic. ‘I hoped you and your parents would be reasonable—allow him time to get used to me before…before I take him home.’
‘This is his home.’ His autocratic tone brooked no argument. ‘Where he will stay until he’s old enough to decide for himself.’
Moistening her lips, she formed her next words carefully. ‘Perhaps your parents will think differently. You don’t know how it feels to have a child. Your mother might understand.’
