Married For His One-Night Heir. Jennifer Hayward
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his.
Maybe it had been easier to run than to face what she’d done. How she’d felt about Santo. Maybe she’d convinced herself he would move on as he always did and she would end up brokenhearted. And maybe, it had been the coward’s way out, exactly as he’d suggested.
She finally stumbled to bed in the early hours. She woke bleary-eyed, sure her safe little world was about to be blown to smithereens, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She dropped off Leo at the hotel day care, her heart in her throat as she watched him toddle off to join the others, a smile on his face. She couldn’t lose him. He was all that she had. It had been them against the world for the past three years. She felt helpless in a way she hadn’t in forever and it threw her back to a version of herself she never wanted to be again. Never would be again. Powerless. At the mercy of the forces surrounding her.
Delilah, always a lethally accurate barometer of her moods, appeared in her office shortly thereafter. Clad in a brilliant scarlet suit, her perfectly manicured nails colored to match, she looked as impeccable as always.
“Clearly, I have failed in my efforts,” she observed, her ever-present coffee cup in hand. “Poor Justin left brokenhearted. Although I think I might have been sabotaged by outside forces. Is there something I should know about you and Santo Di Fiore?”
Gia’s stomach curled. “You picked up on that?”
“It was hard not to,” Delilah said drily. “The tension between you two was palpable. He was barely paying attention to anything I said.”
She swallowed past the giant knot in her throat. “Santo is Leo’s father. His real father.”
Delilah’s jaw dropped. Coffee sloshed out of her cup and over the side. She set it down on the cabinet, shaking the liquid from her hand. “I’m sorry. Could you say that again?”
Gia found a napkin in her desk and handed it to Delilah. “Santo and I had a night together before Franco and I married. We conceived Leo.”
Delilah stared at her, gobsmacked. “But how? Why? You knew you were going to marry him.”
“I was frightened. Scared. Santo was there.” She sat back in her chair and drew in a deep breath. “We had known each other since high school. He was a senior in my freshman year. The most popular boy in school—the star athlete everyone loved. I was persona non grata. A Castiglione. No one wanted to hang out with me, and even on the rare occasion they did, Dante made quick work of them.”
“But Santo,” she reminisced, her heart pulsing, “walked right up to my table in the cafeteria. Sat down and started chatting away as if it was the most natural thing in the world that the most popular guy in school would want to talk to me.” She sank her teeth into her lip, remembering how tongue-tied she’d been. “I was completely dazzled by him.”
“You fell in love with him,” Delilah concluded.
“It wasn’t so simple. I was promised to Franco. We—” she hesitated, searching for the right words “—became friends. We use to run together in the mornings. Talk afterward in the stands. And there was more,” she conceded. “An attraction that grew between us. Dante caught on to what was going on and my father sent a message through him. That I was not a possibility for Santo. That I never would be.”
She told Delilah how her friendship with Santo had grown into something special. How he’d been the one she’d always run to. The night her sixteenth birthday party had fallen apart at the seams when her new friend, the one she’d thought might actually become a best friend, hadn’t shown up because she’d been forbidden to. The afternoon she’d found out she’d been accepted for a glamorous exchange program to France, only to be told it posed too much of a security risk. The day she’d secured a spot on the track team only to find out her father had ensured it instead with his strong-arm techniques. Santo had always been there.
And then, there had been that night with him that had turned her life upside down. She told Delilah about Franco’s fury, and the promise she had made to him to never see Santo again.
Delilah’s sapphire gaze deepened with understanding. “Which was why your marriage to Franco was so rocky. Because of Leo.”
“Yes.”
Delilah frowned. “How did Santo take the news about him?”
“Not well.” The understatement of the year.
Delilah sighed and took a sip of her coffee. “This is a mess,” she said finally. “You know that. Santo is one of the most powerful men on the planet. Does he want his son?”
She nodded. That much was clear.
“Then I would suggest,” Delilah advised, “that you attempt to reason with him. It’s your only option. And,” she added quietly, eyes on Gia’s, “you might want to figure out how you feel about him while you’re at it. There are clearly some unresolved feelings there between you two.”
She intended to ignore the latter piece of advice completely, because Santo clearly hated her for what she’d done. She wasn’t sure about the first part, either. The Santo who had walked away from her last night had been a cold, hard stranger she couldn’t hope to know. She didn’t think reasoning with him was going to work.
But she had to try, because everything banked on her succeeding. Convincing Santo she had done the right thing.
* * *
Santo stood leaning against the railing of the terrace of his suite as a stunning pink sunset blazed its way across the sky. He’d spent the night before attempting to absorb the mind-numbing news that he had a three-year-old son. Walking for hours on the beach in an effort to work past the emotion consuming him. To figure out his next step. Which had produced a single, yet irrefutable solution to the situation he now found himself in.
He’d gone through it with his lawyer in New York this morning, his proposed solution the one his chief legal counsel deemed “the cleanest one possible.” The complex process of having Leo’s paternity corrected was another story. It was a land mine of red tape to negotiate that left him with a dark cloud in his head. Which hadn’t necessarily been lessened by his brother’s parting words that morning.
You know what I’m thinking.
Yes. And it would never be him. His father had married his mother, a Broadway dancer, when she’d become pregnant with his child. Had been so blindingly in love with her, with the thought of her, he hadn’t considered the consequences of tying himself to a woman who would never be happy. Who had never wanted to be a wife or a mother. Who had married him for his money and then proceeded to make his life miserable from that day forward.
Which was not how his relationship with Gia was going to proceed. His father might have allowed his emotion to rule him, he might have allowed emotion to rule him the first time around with Gia, but this iteration of their relationship would be based on rationality. On putting their child first.
She showed up at six-thirty sharp, exactly as he’d known she would, because he held all the cards in this unspeakably difficult situation she’d created, and he intended to use them. His plan, however, was momentarily derailed when he opened the door and found her on the threshold.
Clad in a knee-length, olive-green dress with a halter-style top, the soft drape of the material accented her perfect curves, doing particular justice to her amazing backside, which had used to make every boy in school stop and stare. Then walk the other way when they remembered who she was.
Hauling his gaze upward, he refused to allow himself to fall into that trap. He focused, instead, on Gia’s pinched face. Bare of makeup, except for a light-coloured gloss on her lips, there were shadows painted beneath her brilliant green eyes. She looked vulnerable. Apprehensive. Scared. Which normally would have tugged at his heartstrings, but not this time.
He waved her into a seat. “Would