Читать книгу Salzano's Captive Bride - Daphne Clair - Страница 7

CHAPTER FOUR

AMBER’S breath stuck in her throat. She could feel her face going cold, then hot. Marco had been married? Had a child? Children, perhaps. “I’m so sorry,” she said, stricken. “I had no idea.”

He shrugged, apparently in total control of himself. “How should you? Your sister and I did not talk about such private things during our brief…liaison. But the day we met was the anniversary of their deaths.” Only a slight thickening of his voice suggested emotion. “I had been persuaded by friends to join them for the festival. They meant well, but I was not in the mood, and when we became parted I had no desire to find them and continue celebrating. Instead I kept drinking on my own. A mistake. And continued to drink with your sister—more than I realised at the time. Another mistake.”

“I’m sorry,” Amber said again, “about your family. Do you—did you and your wife have other children?”

“No. She had a difficult pregnancy and the birth was also not easy. I was not willing to see her suffer like that again. But the boy…” His tone softened, and in his eyes Amber saw both pleasure and pain. “The boy was remarkably healthy, quick to learn, but also loving, affectionate, like his mother. And always laughing.” He stopped, and his hand went to his heart for a moment before dropping to the table.

“No,” he amended, shaking his head, “that is not true of any child. Sometimes he wept—even roared.” Briefly amusement mingled with sorrow in the dark eyes. “He had a temper, like his father.” The beautiful male mouth curved self-deprecatingly at the admission. “But that is how I remember him. Laughing.”

Amber was unable to speak. This aspect of Marco Salzano she would never have expected. A loving, grieving father.

Marco picked up his glass and drained it, then turned to signal a waiter for more. “What about you?” he asked, nodding at her half-empty glass.

Amber shook her head, and took a couple of tacos to hide her reaction. They seemed to lodge in her throat so she drank some more wine. She didn’t feel she could ask how Marco’s son and his wife had died. An accident?

He had banished the sadness from his eyes. Now they were neutral, all emotion hidden. Obviously he wanted to dismiss the subject.

But didn’t this change everything?

A man who had lost his only child and then thought he’d been presented with another wasn’t simply selfish and possessive. His insistence on seeing the little boy was understandable.