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‘Pixie’s like that. We’re very close.’ Holly lifted the plates and set out the main course.
‘You’re a good cook,’ Vito commented.
‘My foster mother, Sylvia, was a great teacher. Cooking relaxes me.’
‘I eat out a lot. It saves time.’
‘There’s more to life than saving time. Life is there to be savoured,’ Holly told him.
‘I savour it at high speed.’
The meal was finished and Holly was clearing up when Vito stood up. ‘I feel like some fresh air,’ he told her. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’
From the window, Holly watched him trudge down the lane in the snow. There was an odd tightness in her chest and a lump in her constricted throat. Vito had just rebelled against their enforced togetherness to embrace his own company. He hadn’t invited her to join him on his walk, but why should he have? Out of politeness? They weren’t a couple in the traditional sense and he didn’t have to include her in everything. They were two people who had shared a bed for the night, two very different people. Maybe she talked too much, maybe he was tired of her company and looking forward to the prospect of some silence. It was not a confidence-boosting train of thought.
Vito ploughed up the steep gradient, his breath steaming on the icy air. He had needed a break, had been relieved when Holly hadn’t asked if she could accompany him. A loner long accustomed to his own company, he had felt the walls closing in while he’d sat surrounded by all that cosy Christmas spirit.
And that really wasn’t Holly’s fault, Vito conceded wryly. Even her cheerful optimism could not combat the many years of bad Christmas memories that Vito harboured. Sadly the stresses and strains of the festive season were more likely to expose the cracks in an unhappy marriage. His mother’s resolute enthusiasm had never contrived to melt his father’s boredom and animosity at being forced into spending time with his family.
They had never been a family, Vito acknowledged heavily, not in the truest sense of the word. His father had never loved him, had never taken the smallest interest in him. In fact, if he was honest with himself, his father sincerely disliked him. From an early age Vito had been treated like the enemy, twinned in his father’s mind with the autocratic father-in-law he fiercely resented.
‘He’s like a bloody calculator!’ Ciccio had condemned with distaste when his five-year-old son’s brilliance at maths was remarked on. ‘He’ll be as efficient as a cash machine—just like his grandfather.’
Only days earlier, Vito’s relationship with his father had sunk to an all-time low when Ciccio had questioned his son’s visit to the hospital where he was recovering from his heart attack. ‘Are you here to crow over my downfall?’ his father had asked nastily while his mother had tried to intervene. ‘My sins have deservedly caught up with me? Is that what you think?’
And Vito had finally recognised that there was no relationship left to rescue with his father. Ciccio bitterly resented his son’s freedom from all financial constraints yet the older man’s wild extravagance and greed had forced Vito’s grandfather to keep his son-in-law on a tight leash. There was nothing Vito could do to change those hard facts. Even worse, after his grandfather had died it had become Vito’s duty to protect his mother’s fortune from Ciccio’s demands, scarcely a reality likely to improve a father and son relationship.
For the first time Vito wondered what sort of relationship he would have with his son if he ever had one. Momentarily he was chilled by the prospect because his family history offered no encouragement.
Holly had just finished clearing up the dishes when the knocker on the front door sounded loudly. She was stunned when she opened the door and found Bill, who ran the breakdown service, standing smiling on the doorstep.
‘I need the keys for Clementine to get her loaded up.’
‘But it’s Christmas Day... I mean, I wasn’t expecting—’
‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes last night but I knew I’d be coming up this way some time this afternoon. My uncle joins us for lunch and he owns a smallholding a few fields away. He has to get back to feed his stock, so I brought the truck when I left him at home.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Holly breathed, fighting her consternation with all her might while turning away to reach into the pocket of her coat where she had left the car keys. She passed the older man the keys. ‘Do you need any help?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll come back up for you when I’m done.’
‘I’ll get my stuff together.’ With a weak smile and with every sensitive nerve twanging, Holly shut the door again and sped straight upstairs to gather her belongings. She dug her feet into her cowboy boots and thrust her toiletries and make-up bag back into her rucksack.
And throughout that exercise she wouldn’t let herself even think that she could be foolish enough to be disappointed at being picked up and taken home. Clearly, it was time to leave. She had assumed that she would have one more night with Vito but fate had decreed otherwise. Possibly a quick, unexpected exit was the best way to part after such a night, she thought unhappily. There would be neither the time nor the opportunity for awkward exchanges. She closed her rucksack and checked the room one last time. Reminding herself that she still had to pack the Christmas tree, she went back down wondering anxiously if Vito would make it back before she had to leave.
She flipped open her cardboard box and stripped the tree of ornaments and lights, deftly packing it all away while refusing to think beyond the practical. She raced into the kitchen to dump the foil containers she had used to transport the meal, pausing only to lift a china jug and quickly wash it before placing it in the box. That was that then, all the evidence of her brief stopover removed, she conceded numbly.
She didn’t want to go home, she didn’t want to leave Vito, and the awareness of that stupid, hopeless sense of attachment to him crushed and panicked her. He would probably be relieved to find her gone and he would have cringed if he saw tears in her eyes. Men didn’t like messy and there could be nothing more messy or embarrassing than a woman who got too involved and tried to cling after one night. This one-night-and-walk-away stuff is what you signed up for, Holly scolded herself angrily. There had been no promises and no mention of a future of any kind. She would leave with her head held high and no backward glances.
All the same, she thought hesitantly, if Vito wasn’t coming back in time to see her leave, shouldn’t she leave a note? She dug into her rucksack and tore a piece of paper out of a notebook and leant on the table. She thanked him for his hospitality and then hit a brick wall in the creative department. What else was there to say? What else could she reasonably say?
After much reflection she printed her mobile-phone number at the foot of the note. Why not? It wasn’t as if she was asking him to phone her. She was simply giving him the opportunity to phone if he wanted to. Nothing wrong with that, was there? She left the note propped against the clock on the shelf inside the inglenook.
Holly wore a determined smile when Bill’s truck backed into the drive. She had her box and her rucksack on the step beside her in a clear face-saving statement that she was eager to get going but there was still no sign of Vito. She climbed into the truck with a sense of regret but gradually reached the conclusion that possibly it was preferable to have parted from Vito without any awkward or embarrassing final conversation. This way, nobody had to pretend or say anything they didn’t mean.
* * *
Vito strode into the cottage and grimaced at the silence. He strode up the stairs, calling Holly’s name while wondering if she had gone for a bath. He studied the empty bathroom with a frown, noting that she had removed her possessions. Only when he went downstairs again did he notice that the Christmas decorations had disappeared along with her. The table was clear, the kitchen immaculate.
Vito was incredulous. Holly had done a runner and he had no idea how. He walked out onto the doorstep and belatedly registered that the old car no longer lay at the foot of the lane in the ditch. So much for his observation powers! He had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed that the car had gone. Holly had walked out on him. Well, that hadn’t happened to him before, he acknowledged grimly, his ego stung by her sudden departure. All his life women had chased after Vito, attaching strings at the smallest excuse.
But would he have wanted her to cling? Vito winced, driven to reluctantly admit that perhaps in the circumstances her unannounced disappearance was for the best. After all, what would he have said to her in parting? Holly had distracted him from more important issues and disrupted his self-control. Now he had his own space back and the chance to get his head clear. And that was exactly what he should want...
* * *
‘When you’re finished throwing up you can do the test,’ Pixie said drily from the bathroom doorway.
‘I’m not doing the test,’ Holly argued. ‘I’m on the pill. I can’t be pregnant—’
‘You missed a couple of pills and you had a course of antibiotics when you had tonsillitis,’ her friend and flatmate reminded her. ‘You know that antibiotics can interfere with contraception—’
‘Well, actually I didn’t know.’ Holly groaned as she freshened up at the sink, frowning at her pale face and dark-circled eyes. She looked absolutely awful and she felt awful both inside and out.
‘Even the pill has a failure rating. I don’t know... I leave you alone for a few weeks and you go completely off the rails,’ the tiny blonde lamented, studying Holly with deeply concerned eyes.
‘I can’t be pregnant,’ Holly said again as she lifted the pregnancy testing kit and extracted the instructions.
‘Well, you’ve missed two periods, you’re throwing up like there’s no tomorrow and you have sore boobs,’ Pixie recounted ruefully. ‘Maybe it’s chickenpox or something.’
‘All right, I’ll do it!’ Holly exclaimed in frustration. ‘But there is no way, just no way on earth that I could be pregnant!’
Some minutes later she slumped down on the side of the bath. Pixie was right and she was wrong. The test showed a positive. The door opened slowly and she looked wordlessly up at her friend and burst into floods of tears.
‘Remember how we used to say that the babies we had would be precious gifts?’ Pixie breathed as she hugged her sobbing friend. ‘Well, this baby is a gift and we will manage. We don’t need a man to survive.’
‘I can’t even knit!’ Holly wailed, unable to concentrate, unable to think beyond the sheer immensity of the challenges she was about to face.
‘That’s OK. You won’t have time to knit,’ her friend told her, deadpan.
Holly was remembering when she and Pixie had talked innocently about their ideal of motherhood. Both of them had been born unwanted and had suffered at the hands of neglectful mothers. They had sworn that they would love and protect their own babies no matter what.
And the vague circumstances suggested by ‘no matter what’ had actually happened now, Holly reflected heavily, her sense of regret at that truth all-encompassing. Her baby would not be entering the perfect world as she had dreamt. Her baby was unplanned, however, but not unwanted. She would love her child, fight to keep him or her safe and if she had to do it alone, and it looked as though she would, she would manage.
‘If only Vito had phoned...’ The lament escaped Holly’s lips before she could bite it back and she flushed in embarrassment.
‘He’s long gone. In fact, the more I think about him,’ Pixie mused tight-mouthed, ‘the more suspicious I get about the father of your child. For all you know he could be a married man.’
‘No!’ Holly broke in, aghast at that suggestion.
‘Well, what was Vito doing spending Christmas alone out in the middle of nowhere?’ Pixie demanded. ‘Maybe the wife or girlfriend threw him out and he had nowhere better to go?’
‘Don’t make me feel worse than I already do,’ Holly pleaded. ‘You’re such a pessimist, Pixie. Just because he didn’t want to see me again doesn’t make him a bad person.’
‘He got you drunk and somehow persuaded you into bed. Don’t expect me to think nice things about him. He was a user.’
‘I wasn’t drunk.’
‘Let’s not rehash it again.’ Her flatmate sighed, her piquant face thoughtful. ‘Let’s see if we can trace him online.’
And while Pixie did internet searches on several potential spellings of Vito’s surname and came up with precisely nothing, Holly sat on the sofa hugging her still-flat stomach and fretting about the future. She had already secretly carried out all those searches weeks earlier on Vito and was too proud to admit to the fact, even to her friend.
‘I can’t find even a trace of a man in the right age group. The name could be a fake,’ her friend opined.
‘Why would he give me a fake name? That doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to be identified. I don’t know...you tell me,’ Pixie said very drily. ‘Do you think that’s a possibility?’
Holly reddened. Of course it was a possibility that Vito had not wanted to be identified. As to why, how could she know? The only thing she knew with certainty was that Vito had decided he didn’t want to see her again. Had he felt otherwise, he would have used the phone number she had left him and called her. In the weeks of silence that had followed her departure from the cottage, she had often felt low. But that was foolish, wasn’t it? Vito had clearly made the decision that he had no desire to see her again.
And why should she feel hurt by that? Yes, he had said that night with her was amazing but wasn’t that par for the course? The sort of thing a man thought a woman expected him to say after sex? How could she have been naive enough to actually believe that Vito had truly believed they were something special together? And now that little bit of excitement was over. What was done was done and what was gone, like her innocence, was gone. Much as her tidy, organised life had gone along with it, she conceded unhappily, because, although she would embrace motherhood wholeheartedly, she knew it would be incredibly tough to raise a baby alone without falling into the poverty trap.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ua7fac7a5-f29f-502e-8957-dc182485175d)
Fourteen months later
HOLLY SUPPRESSED A groan as she straightened her aching back. She hated parcelling up the unsold newspapers at the end of her evening shift in the local supermarket but it also meant she would be going home soon and seeing Angelo snugly asleep in his cot.
Picturing her son’s little smiling face made her heart swell inside her. There was nothing Holly wouldn’t do for her baby. The minute she had laid eyes on Angelo after his premature birth she had adored him with a fierce, deep love that had shaken her to the roots.
Without Pixie’s help she would have struggled to survive, but, fortunately for Holly, her friend had supported her from the start. When waitressing had become impossible, Holly had taken a course to become a registered childminder and now by day she looked after her baby and two other children at home. She also worked in the shop on a casual basis. If evening or weekend work came up and Pixie was free to babysit, Holly did a shift to earn some extra cash.
And it was right then when she was thinking about how much she was looking forward to supper and her bed that it happened: she looked down at the bundle of newspapers she was tying up and saw a photograph on the front page of a man who reminded her of Vito. She stopped dead and yanked out the paper to shake it open. It was a financial broadsheet that she would never normally have even glanced at and the picture showed a man standing behind a lectern, a man who bore a remarkable resemblance to the father of her son.
‘Are you nearly done, Holly?’ one of her co-workers asked from the doorway.
‘Almost.’ Her shoulders rigid with tension, Holly was frantically reading the italicised print below the photograph. Vittore Zaffari, not Sorrentino. It was a man who resembled Vito—that was all. Her shoulders dropped again but just as she was about to put the newspaper back in the pile she hesitated and then extracted that particular page. Folding it quickly, she dug it into the pocket of her overall and hurriedly finished setting out the newspapers for collection.
It was after midnight before Holly got the chance to check out Vittore Zaffari online. Holly had studied the photograph again and again. He looked like her Vito but the newsprint picture wasn’t clear enough for her to be certain. But the instant she did a search on Vittore Zaffari the images came rolling in and she knew without a doubt that she had finally identified her child’s father.
‘My word,’ Pixie groaned, performing her own search on her tablet. ‘Now I know why he gave you a fake name and was hiding out on Dartmoor. He was involved in some drugs-and-sex orgy. Hold on while I get this document translated into English.’
‘Drugs and sex?’ Holly repeated sickly. ‘Vito? It can’t be the same man!’
But it was. The photos proved that he was her Vito, not some strange lookalike character. Of course, he had never been hers even to begin with, Holly reminded herself doggedly. And it was two in the morning before the two women finished digging up unwelcome facts about Vito, the billionaire banker ditched by his fabulously beautiful blonde fiancée only days before Holly had met him.
‘Of course, you don’t need to concern yourself with any of that nonsense,’ Pixie told her ruefully. ‘All you want from him now is child support and he seems to be wealthy enough that I shouldn’t think that that will be a big deal.’
Holly lay sleepless in her bed, tossing and turning and at the mercy of her emotions. Vito had lied to her by deliberately giving her a false name. He too had been on the rebound but he hadn’t mentioned that either. How would he react when she told him that he was a father? And did she really want to expose her infant son to a drug-abusing, womanising father? The answer to that was a very firm no. No amount of money could make a parent who was a bad influence a good idea.
But that really wasn’t for her to decide, she reasoned over breakfast while she spooned baby rice into Angelo, who had a very healthy appetite. She studied her son with his coal-black curls and sparkling brown eyes. He was a happy baby, who liked to laugh and play, and he was very affectionate. Vito had been much more reserved, slow to smile and only demonstrative in bed. Holly winced at that unwelcome recollection. Regardless, Vito had a right to know that he was a father and in the same way she had a right to his financial help. She had to stop considering their situation from the personal angle because that only muddied the waters and upset her.
Angelo was the main issue. Everything came back to her son. Set against Angelo’s needs, her personal feelings had no relevance. She had to be practical for his benefit and concentrate on what he needed. And the truth was that financially she was really struggling to survive and her baby was having to do without all the extras that he might have enjoyed. That was wrong. Her son didn’t deserve to suffer because she had made a bad choice.
On the other hand, if Vito truly was the sort of guy who got involved in sex-and-drug orgies, he wasn’t at all the male she had believed him to be. How could she have been so wrong about a man? She had honestly believed that Vito was a decent guy.
Even so, he was still Angelo’s father and that was important. She was very much aware of just how much she had longed to know who her own father was. There was no way she could subject Angelo to living in the same ignorance. Nor could she somehow magically estimate whether Vito would be a good or bad influence on his son. The bottom line was that Angelo had the right to know who his father was so that he did not grow up with the same uncertainty that Holly had been forced to live with.
Holly acknowledged the hurt she had felt when Vito failed to make use of her phone number and contact her. Naturally her pride had been wounded and she had been disappointed. No woman wanted to feel that forgettable, but Angelo’s birth had cast a totally different light on her situation. She had to forget her resentment and hurt and move on while placing her son’s needs first. That would be a tall order but she believed that she loved her son enough to do it. She had to face Vito in the flesh and tell him that he was a father.
* * *
One week later, Holly handed over her package to the receptionist on the top floor of the Zaffari Bank in London. ‘It’s for Mr Zaffari. I would like to see him.’
The elegant receptionist set the small parcel down on the desktop and reached for something out of view. ‘Mr Zaffari’s appointments are fully booked weeks in advance, Miss...er...?’
‘Cleaver. I believe he will want to see me,’ Holly completed quietly while she wondered if that could possibly be true. ‘I’ll just wait over there until he’s free.’
‘There’s really no point in you waiting,’ the receptionist declared curtly, rising from her chair as two security guards approached. ‘Mr Zaffari doesn’t see anyone without a prior appointment.’
Stubbornly ignoring that assurance, Holly walked over to the waiting area and sat down, tugging her stretchy skirt down over her thighs. It had taken massive organisation for Holly to make a day trip to London but she knew that if she wanted to confront Vito she had to take advantage of his current presence in the UK. Her internet snooping had revealed that he was giving a speech at some fancy banking dinner that very evening and was therefore highly likely to be at the Zaffari Bank HQ throughout the day. Pixie had taken a day off to look after Angelo, and the children Holly usually minded were with their grandparents instead.
Holly had made a very early start to her day and had been appalled by the price of the train fare. Pixie had urged her to dress up to see Vito but, beyond abandoning her usual jeans and putting on a skirt with the knee boots Pixie had given her for Christmas, Holly had made no special effort. Why? As she continually reminded herself, this wasn’t a personal visit and she wasn’t trying to impress Vito. She was here to tell him about Angelo and that was all. Her restive fingers fiddled with the zip on her boots while she watched the two security guards carrying off her parcel with the absurdly cautious air of men who feared they could be carrying a bomb. Did she look like a terrorist? Like some kind of a madwoman?
Vito was in a board meeting and when his PA entered and slid a small package in front of him, which had already been unwrapped, he frowned in incomprehension, but when he pulled back the paper and saw the Santa hat and the small sprig of holly, he simply froze and gave his PA a shaken nod of immediate acceptance. Interrupting the proceedings to voice his apologies, he stood up, his cool dark eyes veiled.
What the hell was Holly doing here at the bank? Why now? And how had she tracked him down?
Hearing about that night, Apollo had scoffed. With all your options you settled for a stranger? Are you crazy? You’re one of the most eligible bachelors in the world and you picked up some random woman? A waitress? he had scoffed in a tone of posh disbelief.
In fact, Apollo’s comments had annoyed Vito so much that he had fiercely regretted confiding in his friend. He had told himself that it was for the best that Holly had walked away without fanfare, freeing them both from the threat of an awkward parting. He had also reminded himself that attempting to repeat a highly enjoyable experience invariably led to disappointment. With the information he had had he could have traced her but he had resisted the urge with every atom of discipline he possessed. Self-control was hugely important to Vito and Holly had obliterated his self-control. He remembered that he had acted oddly with her and that memory made him uncomfortable. Even so he still hadn’t forgotten her. In fact he was eager to see her because his memories of her had lingered to the extent that he had become disturbingly indifferent to other women and more particular than ever in his choices. He wanted to see Holly in full daylight, shorn of the schmaltzy sparkle of the festive season. He was suddenly convinced that such a disillusionment would miraculously knock him back to normality.
But why the hell would Holly be seeking him out now so long after the event? And in person rather than more tactfully by phone? And how had she linked him to the Zaffari Bank? Black brows lowering over cold dark eyes suddenly glittering with suspicion, Vito strode back into his office to await his visitor without an appointment.
Holly smiled and stood up when the receptionist approached her. In spite of her apprehension, Vito had remembered her and she was relieved. The Santa hat had been designed to jog his memory. After all, a male who indulged in sex parties might well not recall one night with an ordinary woman from over a year earlier. When it came to a question of morals he was a total scumbag, Holly reminded herself doggedly while walking down the corridor after another woman—even more thin and elegant—had asked her to follow her. She wondered why the other people working there seemed to be peering out of their offices in her direction and staring.
Suddenly she wondered what she was doing. Did she really want a man of Vito’s dissolute proclivities in her life and Angelo’s? Common sense warned her not to make snap judgements and to give Vito a chance for Angelo’s sake. Her son would want to know who his dad was. Hadn’t she wondered all her life who had fathered her? Hadn’t that made her insecure? Made her feel less of a person than others because she didn’t know that most basic fact about herself? No, Angelo deserved access to the truth of his parentage right from the start and that was what Holly would ensure her son had, no matter how unpleasant seeing Vito again proved to be.
Vito was a total scumbag, Holly reminded herself afresh while wondering why she was experiencing the strangest sense of...elation. Why was her heart pounding and her adrenaline buzzing? Her guide opened a door and stood back for her to enter. My goodness, he had a big office, typical scumbag office, she rephrased mentally. She would not be impressed; she refused to be impressed. And then Vito strode in through a side door and she was paralysed to the carpet because he simply looked so drop-dead amazing that she could not believe that she had ever slept with him and that he was the father of her child.
Her mouth ran dry. She felt dizzy. Butterflies danced in her tummy as she focused on those lean, darkly handsome features, and she knew that Pixie would have kicked her hard. Total scumbag, she told herself, but her brain would not engage with that fact and was much more interested in opening a back catalogue on Vito’s sheer perfection. To look at—perfect to look at, she rephrased doggedly, striving to get back to the scumbag awareness. Drugs...sex with hookers, she fired at herself in desperation.
‘The hat and the holly were an original calling card,’ Vito drawled, the dark, deep accent tautening every muscle in her already tense body. ‘But I did remember your name. I didn’t need the prompt.’
Holly turned the red-hot colour of a tomato because she hadn’t expected him to grasp the reasoning behind her introduction that easily.
‘It would have been much easier to phone me,’ Vito assured her silkily.
‘And how could I have done that without your phone number?’ Holly asked stiffly, because she was determined to make no reference to the fact that she had left her phone number with him and that he had decided not to make use of it. Discussing that would be far, far too humiliating.
