One Night: Red-Hot Secrets. Penny Jordan
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had held Oliver earlier, about the way her son had looked up at him, that had hurt her inside—in that place her own childhood had left raw and unhealed. Instinctively, but without wanting to admit it, Louise knew that no child of Caesar’s would be denied proper paternal concern. That was the Sicilian way, and the Duca di Falconari Caesar was not just honour-bound but had been raised from birth to respect and follow that code. And what did that mean?
Louise did not want to think about what it meant. Oliver was hers. She had borne him and brought him up alone, and she was fiercely protective of him. She had given herself to his father with all the innocence of her longing to be wanted and valued. Now, in a different way, she had seen in their son’s eyes his readiness to turn to his father. She was not going to allow Caesar to hurt and reject their son the way he had done her.
The car came to a halt alongside an imposing flight of marble steps.
No one could fault Caesar’s manners, Louise acknowledged as he came round to open the car door for her before escorting her up the steps. But it took more than the outer vestments of showy good manners to make a man a worthwhile human being—the kind of human being who was going to be a good father. Her heart jumped inside her chest wall. Why was she thinking that? Caesar was not going to be Oliver’s father. And yet Louise knew that it was going to be hard for her to forget the way Oliver had turned to Caesar and not her just before they had left him, moving closer to Caesar and looking almost pleadingly at him.
The main hallway of the castello was formidably impressive. Niches in the walls contained pieces of statuary, an airy flight of stairs curled upwards, and the smell from the floral display on an antique table in the middle of the marble-floored room filled its still silence.
‘This way,’ Caesar told her, indicating a double doorway that opened off the hallway into what Louise remembered from her original visit to the castello to be a series of rooms that opened one into the other, each of them decorated and furnished in style, with contents that Louise suspected must be worth several kings’ ransoms.
Leading the way through one of them, Caesar pushed open another set of doors onto a covered walkway beyond which lay an enclosed courtyard garden, with a fountain playing and doves cooing from a small dovecote.
‘This was my mother’s garden,’ he told Louise as he gestured to her to sit down on one of the chairs drawn up at a pretty wrought-iron table.
‘She died when you were very young I remember my grandmother saying,’ Louise felt obliged to offer.
‘Yes. I was six. My parents died together in a sailing accident.’
Out of nowhere, without his seeming to do anything to summon her, a maid silently appeared.
‘What would you like? English tea, perhaps?’
‘Coffee—espresso,’ Louise told him, thinking inwardly that she needed the boost an espresso would give her to stand up to Caesar. ‘My grandparents taught me to drink it a long time before I developed any taste for English tea. They used to say that it was a taste of home, even though the smell could never be the smell of home.’ She wasn’t going to admit to him that right now she needed its strengthening qualities.
The maid had gone and come back again with their coffee, only to leave them alone again, before Caesar demanded, ‘Why did you not contact me to tell me that you were carrying my child?’
‘Do you really need to ask me that? You wouldn’t have believed me. Not after the hatchet job the headman had done on my reputation and my morals. No one else did—not even my grandparents at first. It was only when Oliver was growing up that my grandfather asked me if he could be yours. He recognised that Oliver looked like you.’
‘But you knew right from the start?’
‘Yes.’
‘How? How could you know?’
A tiny wire of pain drilled through her, but her pride refused to allow her to dwell on it, commanding her instead to suppress it.
‘That’s none of your business. Just as Oliver himself is none of your business.’
‘He’s my son, and in my book that makes him very much my business—as I have already told you.’
‘And I have already told you that I am not going to allow you to force my child to grow up as your illegitimate son—even though here in Sicily that is perfectly acceptable for a powerful man like you. I will not have my son forced to grow up as someone who is second best—an outsider to your life, forced onto the sidelines to look on and witness your legitimate and more favoured children …’ Abruptly Louise stopped speaking, knowing that she was allowing her emotions to betray her, and took a deep breath before continuing more calmly. ‘I’ve experienced first-hand the damage that can be caused to a child by its longing for a parent who cannot or will not engage emotionally. I will not allow that to happen to Oliver. Your legitimate children—’
‘Oliver is and will be my only child.’
The quiet words seemed to reverberate around the courtyard before giving way to a shocking silence that Louise was initially unable to find the words to break.
His only child?
‘You can’t say that. He might be your only child now, but—’
‘There will be no other children. That is why it is my intention to recognise and legitimise Oliver as my son and my heir. Oliver will be my only child. There can be no others.’
Louise looked at him, wishing that he wasn’t sitting in the shadows and she could see his expression better. His voice was giving him away, though, telling her quite clearly how hard he had found it to make such an admission. It wasn’t just his pride that would have made it hard either. Any man would feel a blow to his maleness at making such an admission.
And was she weakening towards him because of that? Did she feel sympathy for him? How could she? She could because she was human and she knew what it was to suffer, Louise told herself. That was all. She would have experienced that same sharp pang of disbelief followed by sympathy for anyone making such an admission in a way that told her how hard it was for them to do so. It did not mean … It did not mean what? That Caesar still meant something to her?
His admission, she realised, had her own heart slamming into her ribs and her lungs tightening with disbelief.
‘You can’t know that,’ she protested.
‘I can and do know it.’ Caesar paused, and then told her in carefully spaced, unemotional words, ‘Six years ago, when I was involved in an aid project abroad that my charitable foundation was helping to finance, I was on site when there was an outbreak of mumps. Unfortunately until it was too late I didn’t realise that I’d fallen victim to it. The medical results were incontrovertible. The mumps had rendered it impossible for me to father a child. As there is no other male of our blood to inherit the title that meant I had to reconcile myself to the fact that our line would die out with me.’
There was nothing in his voice to betray what that must have meant to him other than a slight terseness, but Louise didn’t need to hear it to understand the emotions he must have felt. Knowing his history, knowing the Sicilian way of life, knowing his arrogance, she could easily imagine what a searing, shocking blow such news must have been to him.
‘You could adopt,’ she pointed out logically.
‘And have countless generations of those with Falconari blood turning in their graves? I think not. Historically Falconari men are more used to fathering children on other men’s wives than accepting another man’s child as their own.’
‘Droit du seigneur, I suppose you mean?’ Louise challenged him cynically.
‘Not necessarily. My ancestors did not have a reputation for needing to force women into their beds. Far from it.’
There it was again, that arrogance and disdain, and yet against her will Louise was forced to acknowledge that it would be unbearably painful for