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The sudden shift in the conversation caught her off guard. “I was. I began the pill a few weeks before I left for Italy.”
“In preparation for your fling abroad?”
His barb pricked her, but she’d rather he believe that he’d been the convenient choice. The one man she’d picked out of a lineup to have her supposed holiday fling with. “I was in over my head from the minute I saw you, yes.” Resentment she’d swallowed for years flared. “What’s your excuse then?”
“You think I blame you for that night.” The idea seemed to shock him.
What else was she supposed to think, she wanted to throw back at him. Even now, he looked at her as if she was his worst nightmare. There was no point in scraping old wounds however. “Even the pill is not one-hundred-percent foolproof.” He remained silent again and it began to scrape Alex raw. “If you don’t believe me, then—”
“Since I’m still feeling the consequences of that...very activity seven years ago, I believe I will refrain from it.”
“That’s not an invitation. This trip isn’t a ploy to renew that...madness. You probably find this hard to believe but not every woman wants a piece of your esteemed Conti pie.” She was so angry she wanted to thump the man.
“Really?”
He made it so easy to despise him with his insufferable attitude.
To pretend that her skin hadn’t prickled, her heart hadn’t raced, that even the thought of Izzie had disappeared in that moment when she had spied him again in that lounge. To act as though, for seven years, she hadn’t relived every moment with him a thousand times.
“Yes. I have too much self-respect to be attracted to a man who thinks I’m a liar and worse. To want a man who dismissed me like garbage back in my life.”
Faint lines appeared around his mouth before he looked away.
Bloodthirsty enough after that scene in the lounge, Alex felt feral satisfaction that she’d landed another one.
“Why did you wait seven years to...make this claim?”
“Calling it a claim will not make it less of a truth.” The taunt was instant and yet...she had a feeling it had taken him this long to work toward the subject of Isabella, to acknowledge the ticking bomb between them.
He pushed off the bed and Alex needed all her will power to not step back. “Did you think I would have no questions for you at all?” She remained silent and he continued. “Why didn’t you let me know immediately?”
“By the time I realized I was...pregnant, I was almost ten weeks along.”
“Is that why you kept...the baby?” He raised a hand to cut her off. “You were twenty. I...cannot imagine Valentina mature enough to manage herself, much less a child at that age.”
Alex swallowed, the utter strength of her conviction that day amazing her even now. Her parents, her only close friend, everyone had advised her to give up the baby for adoption. “I just...” She shied her gaze away, her throat thick with emotion.
“Tell me why.”
Jerked by his sharp tone, she lifted her gaze. “That feeling...it’s inexplicable.”
Something so raw and visceral flashed in his gaze that her skin prickled. Arrogant, heartless, cynical...she’d made her decision to come here based on the fact that Leandro was all those things. What if she was wrong?
Fear pulsed down her spine. “I called your office a week after I found out. I... I was on hold for an hour. Finally, when your secretary came on, she cut me off, said you weren’t interested.
“That I shouldn’t call back.” Alex tried to keep any complaint out of her voice now however anxious she’d been then. “I called you a few more times. Got the same answer again.”
“You could have called your friend, Luca.” He spoke softly, yet it cracked through the room like a gale of wind. “You could have come back to Italy. You could have told Valentina. You could have emailed me—”
“And what? Capitalized the subject line—I’M PREGNANT, IT’S YOURS—like some spammer!” She colored furiously. “You wanted nothing to do with me. But... I still tried.
“I bought another ticket. I...thought you should know. The day before I was supposed to leave, my parents and I argued and my dad threw out his back at the store. I... I couldn’t go off in search of you then, especially when you were determined to forget me.
“With taking care of the store and him, when Isabella came... I barely had the energy to go through each day.”
“And later?”
How dare he sound as if it was her fault? “Later,” she said, feeling suddenly tired, “it was easier to believe that Izzie was better off without your rejection.” Easier to protect herself from the hurt he had wreaked on her.
The one time she had taken a chance to reach for something she’d wanted, she’d been rejected. Firmly pushed back into the forgettable category again.
There had been nothing special or memorable about her or that night for him. As if she was a mere blip in the life of another person yet again.
A disappointment, an inconvenience, a thing with no value or feelings whatsoever.
“Why did you change your mind now?” he bit out harshly. He ran his fingers through his hair while he paced the small room like a caged animal. “Or was that your plan all along?”
“Wouldn’t that be perfect for you if I had some ultimate agenda? If I proved your worst assumptions about me right? That way you won’t have to take any responsibility in all this...”
“Dio, why now, Alexis?”
It was his hoarse voice that halted Alex’s self-indulgent tirade. This was not about her feelings. This was about her baby.
“I just... I was in an accident three months ago, a bad one.” Automatically, her fingers went to the scar down her forehead and his gaze moved there. Throat raw, she continued, “It made me realize...if something happened to me, Isabella would be alone in the world. My parents...” She swallowed the fact that they had never approved of her having Isabella. “They’re growing old. I can’t sleep wondering about her future.”
Once again, silence descended, his stare unnerving her on a whole new level.
“I brought her birth certificate,” she said, busying herself with the handbag. “Just tell me where and when to bring her for the DNA test, although it’ll be a huge help if it’s in New York because I can’t—”
“There’s no situation that fazes you, is there? You set your course and you blaze through it, come what may.”
Alex blanched. Softly delivered but his innuendo pierced just the same.
He thought this was easy for her? To see him after all these years, to realize that he still viewed her with that loathing? To know that she’d never been anything more than a quick indulgence?
But she swallowed her own feelings and focused on what she needed to do. “I’m prepared to do anything to prove that she’s yours, yes.”
“And, in return?”
“Are you so afraid of what I would demand, Leandro?” The challenge escaped her before she could catch it, her femininity rearing its head.
An almost imperceptible widening of those stormy eyes. Something she wouldn’t have even noticed if she wasn’t so greedy about every nuance on his face.
“Do you have many to make then, Alexis? These demands?”
Why was she taunting him? Why this reckless, dangerous urge to provoke him? She pulled out the envelope she’d stuffed into her handbag. “Here’s some pictures. Maybe you could visit us and meet Izzie a couple of times over the next couple of years so that you aren’t a complete stranger? I could bring her here for holiday, to meet Luca and Valentina, if they’re interested.
“All I want is a promise that if anything were to happen to me, you’d...”
Her words trailed away as Leandro became still. The muscles in his face pulled taut over his features, a white pallor to his olive skin.
Her outstretched hand lay between them. And his gaze on the envelope, frozen.
“Leandro?”
The swath of his eyelashes flickered. His rough breath rattled loud in the room.
With gut-wrenching clarity, Alex realized that he’d rather she was lying.
From the moment she’d spoken Isabella’s name, it wasn’t the veracity of her claim he’d doubted. What had kept him silent, even as his grandfather had shredded her, was that Leandro needed her to be lying.
“You wish Isabella didn’t exist.” Horror filled her, turning her voice into a whiplash. “Do you despise me that much?”
He jerked around, pain streaking through his eyes. “What I feel about her has nothing to do with you.”
That’s good, she told herself. She couldn’t bear it if he despised Isabella like he did her. She wouldn’t allow it.
How much do you know of that man? Her mom’s question came back to her now.
She didn’t know that much, really.
Her intense attraction to him seven years ago, her fascination with him, the connection she’d felt with him, had been inexplicable. She stole another greedy glance at him, unable to stop herself. Lean and tall, he wore his power effortlessly and she wondered if that had been the draw for her.
Hands shaking, she stuffed the envelope back into her handbag. She needed to leave. Before she made this about her. Before she asked any more of those stupid questions...
Before she forgot that this man had crushed her tender heart in such a way that it hadn’t mended again.
* * *
“Show me the pictures,” Leandro finally forced himself to say.
Alexis stilled with her back to him, her slender shoulders a tense line.
His voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it in years, as if forming such simple words was beyond his capability. Told himself again and again that he was composed.
If he acted like it, he hoped his rioting emotions would catch on that he was composed, that he would survive through this new development in his life like he always did.
Giving in to the shame that he had behaved in a way he detested was only self-indulgent. Giving in to the guilt that clawed at him that he had abandoned his child...would only render him useless.
His head jerked up, the realization that he believed Alexis stunning him anew.
He believed that she was telling the truth, that her daughter was his?
Antonio would call him a fool, their lawyers would tell him to demand a DNA test. The rational, sensible part of him, which had been born out of necessity at a young age, warned that he was being reckless. That Alexis’s poise, her self-sufficiency, her declaration that she wanted nothing from him, that they all could be lies.
She could have waited all these years just so she could make a bigger splash, demand a bigger payoff.
He wasn’t unaware of his draw for women. If they fell like flies for Luca’s charm, they went rabid because of how sacrosanct his privacy was to him, because the media, frequently and fervently, painted him as the perfect man, still mourning his wife.
Yet that same instinct that had drawn him to her drowned out everything else. “Show me the pictures.”
Knuckles turning white, her fingers tightened over the straps of her bag. Her reluctance now would have been comical, if not for the fierce churning in his gut. “I didn’t come to force you to be a father.”
He moved closer, uncaring of the tremble in her lips, the slight widening of her eyes. Crowded her lithe body against the door, his self-discipline in tatters now. “You are afraid now? After you came all this way?”
Something in his tone must have finally registered because she pulled out the envelope.
He moved back toward the bed and spread them out on the dark cover.
There were ten, different sizes and in different poses.
His heart thundering, he picked up one eight-by-ten, a close-up. With jet-black hair that framed her face and serious gray eyes, and the cast of her features, drawn in chubbiness instead of sharp planes, the little girl was his mirror image.
The girl, no, Isabella...was his daughter. His own flesh and blood.
“There is nothing of me in her,” came Alexis’s reply behind him. Tentative and reverberating with a quiet joy. “Every morning, I look at her and I’m amazed that she’s mine.”
Inhaling roughly, he turned.
Raw emotion glittered in her eyes. Walking closer, unaware of her own actions, he was sure, she studied him avidly. He knew she was seeing her daughter, no, their daughter in his face.
Still, her gaze was like a physical caress. Possessive and hungry and intent. And deeply disconcerting for the instant ache it evoked in him.
He looked at the picture and then at Alex. “That determined chin, that’s you.”
A smile curved her mouth, transforming her into a stunning beauty. “Really?”
“Where is she now?” he asked, more to distract himself from the scent of her fluttering toward him. Subtle yet lingering. Like the woman herself.
“With my parents. Isabella and I live with them. A friend of mine has a boy of Izzie’s age and she takes her during the day. You can keep the pictures.” She looked through her bag and extracted visiting cards and extended them to him. Like a salesgirl pushing a product. “These have all my numbers and email address. Just call me in advance, because after the accident and this trip, I can’t take off more—”
“In advance for what?” he repeated.
She shrugged but hurt shadowed her eyes. “Y’know...if you decide to see her.”
He emerged from the emotional knockout, her intention in all the things she had told him tonight shaping into coherence. His gut tightened.
When he made no move to take the cards, she put them on the small study table. “I’ll be in Milan for two more days if you have any questions.” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “If you can arrange a car for me, I’ll be off.”
A growl he couldn’t control emerged low in Leandro’s throat.
She thought she would show him pictures of his daughter and then bid him goodbye? That he would call her and make an appointment like some distant relative?
Did she think he had no honor, no sense of duty?
Have you treated her like you have any?
“Stay tonight,” he finally said, somehow managing to keep his tone smooth. A herculean feat seeing that his head was in a whirl, his world precariously tilted on its axis. And this woman, whom he’d tried to forget at all costs, suddenly was at the center of it. “You look like you’ll faint any minute.”
