Читать книгу Modern Romance - The Best of the Year - Ким Лоренс, Miranda Lee - Страница 25

CHAPTER TWO

‘MUMMY, CAN WE watch the cars on TV now?’

Sam put her hand to Milo’s head and said faintly, ‘Why don’t you go on and I’ll be there in a minute, okay?’

Milo ran off again and the silence grew taut between Sam and Rafaele. He knew. She felt it in her bones. He’d known as soon as he’d looked into his son’s eyes. So identical. She hated that something about his immediate recognition of his own son made something soften inside her.

He was looking at her so hard she felt it like a physical brand on her skin. Hot.

‘Let me in, Samantha. Now.’

Feeling shaky and clammy all at once, Sam stepped back and opened the door. Rafaele came in, his tall, powerful form dwarfing the hallway. He smelt of light spices and something musky, and through the shock Sam’s blood jumped in recognition.

She shut the door and walked quickly to the kitchen at the end of the hall, passing where Milo sat cross-legged in front of the TV watching a popular car programme. His favourite.

She was about to pull the door shut when a curt voice behind her instructed, ‘Leave it.’

She dropped her hand and tensed. Rafaele was looking at Milo as he sat enraptured by the cars on the screen. He was holding about three of his favourite toy cars in his hands. If his eyes and pale olive skin hadn’t been a fatal giveaway then this might have been the worst kind of ironic joke.

Sam stepped back and walked into the kitchen. She couldn’t feel her legs. She felt sick, light-headed. She turned around to see Rafaele follow her in and close the door behind him, not shutting it completely.

Rafaele was white beneath his dark colouring. And he looked murderous.

He bit out, ‘This is where you tell me that by some extraordinary feat of genetic coincidence that little boy in there isn’t three years and approximately three months old. That he didn’t inherit exactly the same colour eyes that I inherited from my own mother. That he isn’t my son.’

Sam opened her mouth. ‘He is...’ Even now, at this last second, her brain searched desperately for something to cling onto. Some way this could be justified. He was his father. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t have the right any more. She’d never had the right. ‘He is your son.’

Silence, stretching taut and stark, and then he repeated, ‘He is my son?’

Sam just nodded. Nausea was churning in her belly now. The full implications of this were starting to hit home.

Rafaele emitted a long stream of Italian invective and Sam winced because she recognised some of the cruder words—they were pretty universal. Her belly was so tight she put a hand to it unconsciously. She watched as Rafaele struggled to take this in. The enormity of it.

‘No wonder you were so keen to get rid of me the other day.’

He paced back and forth in the tiny space. She could feel his anger and tension as it lashed out like a live electrical wire, snapping at her feet.

Suddenly he stopped and looked at her. ‘Are you married?’

Sam shook her head painfully. ‘No.’

‘And what if I hadn’t decided to pay you a visit? Would you have let me remain in blissful ignorance for ever?’

Stricken, Sam whispered, ‘I don’t...I don’t know.’ Even as she admitted that, though, the knowledge seeped in. She wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt. She would have told him.

He pinned her to the spot with that light green gaze which had once devoured her alive and was now colder than the arctic.

‘You bitch.’

Sam flinched. He might as well have slapped her across the face. It had the same effect. The words were so coldly and implacably delivered.

‘You didn’t want a baby,’ she whispered, unable to inject more force into her voice.

‘So you just lied to me?’

Sam could feel her cheeks burning now, with shame. ‘I thought it was a miscarriage, as did you. But at the clinic, after the doctor had done his examination, he told me that I wasn’t miscarrying.’

Rafaele crossed his arms and she could see his hands clenched to fists. She shivered at the threat of violence even though she knew he would never hit her. But she sensed he wanted to hit something.

‘You knew then and yet you barefaced lied to me and let me walk away.’

Clutching at the smallest of straws, Sam said shakily, ‘I didn’t lie...you assumed...I just didn’t tell you.’

‘And the reason you didn’t inform me was because...?’

‘You didn’t...didn’t want to know.’ The words felt flimsy and ineffectual now. Petty.

‘Based on...?’

It was as if he couldn’t quite get out full sentences, Sam felt his rage strangling his words.

Her brain felt heavy. ‘Because of how you reacted when I told you in the first place...’

Sam recalled the indescribable pain of realising that Rafaele had been about to break it off with her. His abject shock at the prospect of her pregnancy. It gave her some much needed strength. ‘And because of what you said afterwards...at the clinic. I heard you on the phone.’

Rafaele frowned and it was a glower. ‘What did I say?’

Sam’s sliver of strength started to drain away again like a traitor. ‘You were talking to someone. You said you were caught up in something unimportant.’ Even now those words scored at Sam’s insides like a knife.

Rafaele’s expression turned nuclear. His arms dropped, his hands were fists. ‘Dio, Samantha. I can’t even recall that conversation. No doubt I just said something—anything—to placate one of my assistants. I thought you’d just miscarried. Do you really think I was about to announce that in an innocuous phone call?’

Sam gulped and had to admit reluctantly, ‘Maybe...maybe not. But how did I know that? All I could hear was your relief that you didn’t have to worry about a baby holding your life up and your eagerness to leave.’

He all but exploded. ‘Need I remind you that I was also in shock, and at that point I thought there was no baby!’

Sam was breathing hard and Rafaele looked as if he was about to kick aside the kitchen table between them to come and throttle her.

Just then a small, unsure voice emerged from the doorway. ‘Mummy?’

Immediately Sam’s world refracted down to Milo, who stood in the doorway. He’d opened it unnoticed by them and was looking from one to the other, his lower lip quivering ominously at the explosive tension.

Sam flew over and picked him up and he clung to her. Her conscience struck her. He was always a little intimidated by men because he wasn’t around them much.

‘Why is the man still here?’ he asked now, slanting sidelong looks to Rafaele and curling into Sam’s body as much as he could.

Sam stroked his back reassuringly and tried to sound normal. ‘This is just an old friend of Mummy’s. He’s stopped by to say hello, that’s all. He’s leaving now.’

‘Okay,’ Milo replied, happier now. ‘Can we look at cars?’

Sam looked at him and forced a smile, ‘Just as soon as I say goodbye to Mr Falcone, okay?’

‘Okey-dokey.’ Milo used his new favourite phrase that he’d picked up in playschool, squirmed back out of Sam’s arms and ran out of the kitchen again.

Sam watched Rafaele struggle to take it all in. Myriad explosive emotions crossing his face.

‘You’ll have to go,’ she entreated. ‘It’ll only confuse and upset him if you stay.’

Rafaele closed the distance between them and Sam instinctively moved back, but the oven was behind her. Rafaele’s scent enveloped her, musky and male. Her heart pounded.

‘This is not over, Samantha. I’ll leave now, because I don’t want to upset the boy, but you’ll be hearing from me.’

After a long searing moment, during which she wasn’t sure how she didn’t combust from the anger being directed at her, Rafaele turned on his heel and left, stopping briefly at the sitting room door to look in at Milo again.

He cast one blistering look back at Sam and then he was out through the front door and gone. Sam heard the powerful throttle of an engine as it roared to life and then mercifully faded again.

It was then that she started to shake all over. Grasping for a chair to hold onto, she sank down into it, her teeth starting to chatter.

‘Mummeeee!’ came a plaintive wail from the sitting room.

Sam called out, ‘I’ll be there in one second, I promise.’

The last thing she needed was for Milo to see her in this state. Her brain was numb. She couldn’t even quite take in what had just happened—the fact that she’d seen Rafaele again for the first time since those cataclysmic days.

When she was finally feeling a little more in control she went in to Milo and sat down on the floor beside him. Without even taking his eyes off the TV he crawled into her lap and Sam’s heart constricted. She kissed his head.

Rafaele’s words came back to her: ‘This is not over, Samantha. I’ll leave now, because I don’t want to upset the boy, but you’ll be hearing from me.’

She shivered. She didn’t even want to think of what she’d be facing when she heard from Rafaele again.

* * *

On Monday morning Sam filed into the conference room at the university and took a seat at the long table for the weekly budget meeting. Her eyes were gritty with tiredness. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t slept all weekend, on tenterhooks waiting for Rafaele to appear again like a spectre. In her more fanciful moments she’d imagined that she’d dreamt it all up: the phone call; his appearance at the house. Coming face to face with his son. A small, snide voice pointed out that it was no less than she deserved but she pushed it down.

Robustly she told herself that if she’d had to go back in time she would have done the same again, because if she hadn’t surely the stress of Rafaele being reluctantly bound to her and a baby would have resulted in a miscarriage for real?

Gertie, the secretary, arrived then and sat down breathlessly next to Sam. She said urgently, ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened over the weekend...’

Sam looked at her, used to Gertie’s penchant for gossip. She didn’t want to hear some salacious story involving students and professors behaving badly, but the older woman’s face suddenly composed itself and Sam looked to see that the head of their department had walked into the room.

And then her heart stopped. Because right on his heels was another man. Rafaele.

For a second Sam thought she might faint. She was instantly light-headed. She had to put her hands on the edge of the table and grip it as she watched in mounting horror and shock as Rafaele coolly and calmly strode into the room, looking as out of place in this unadorned academic environment as an exotic peacock on a grubby high street.

He didn’t even glance her way. He took a seat at the head of the table alongside their boss, looking stupendously handsome and sexy. He sat back, casually undoing a button on his pristine suit jacket with a big hand, long fingers...

Sam was mesmerised.

This had to be a dream, she thought to herself frantically. She’d wake up any moment. But Gertie was elbowing her none too discreetly and saying sotto voce, ‘This is what I was about to tell you.’

The stern glare of their boss quelled any chat and then, with devastating inevitability, Sam’s stricken gaze met Rafaele’s and she knew it wasn’t a dream. There was a distinct gleam of triumph in those green depths, and a more than smug smile was playing around that firmly sculpted mouth.

Her boss was standing up and clearing his throat. Sam couldn’t look away from Rafaele, and he didn’t remove his gaze from hers, as if forcing her to take in every word now being spoken, but she only heard snippets.

‘Falcone Industries...most successful...honoured that Mr Falcone has decided to fund this research out of his own pocket...delighted at this announcement...funding guaranteed for as long as it takes.’

Then Rafaele got up to address the room. There were about thirteen people and, predictably, you could have heard a pin drop as his charismatic effect held everyone in thrall. He’d finally moved his gaze from Sam and she felt as if she could breathe again, albeit painfully. Her heart was racing and she took in nothing of what he said, trying to wrap her sluggish brain around the ramifications of this shocking development.

‘Samantha...’

Sam looked up, dazed, to see her boss was now addressing her, and that Rafaele had sat down. She hadn’t noticed, nor heard a word.

‘I’m sorry, Bill, what did you say?’ She was amazed she’d managed to speak.

‘I said,’ he repeated with exaggerated patience, clearly disgruntled that she appeared to be on another planet while in such illustrious company, ‘that as of next week you will be working from the Falcone factory. You’re to oversee setting up a research facility there which will work in tandem with the one here in the university.’

He directed himself to the others again while this bomb detonated within Sam’s solar plexus.

‘I don’t think I need to point out the significance of being allowed to conduct this research within a functioning factory, and especially one as prestigious as Falcone Motors. It’ll put us streets ahead of other research in this area and, being assured of Falcone funding for at least five years, we’re practically guaranteed success.’

Sam couldn’t take any more. She rose up in a blind panic, managed to mumble something vague about needing air and fled the room.

* * *

Rafaele watched Sam leave dispassionately. Since the other evening he’d been in shock. Functioning, but in shock. His anger and rage was too volcanic to release, fearsome in its intensity. And fearsome for Rafaele if he contemplated for a second why his emotions were so deep and hot.

Sam’s boss beside him emitted a grunt of displeasure at her hasty departure, but Rafaele felt nothing but satisfaction to be causing her a modicum of the turbulence in his own gut. Through his shock Rafaele had felt a visceral need to push Sam off her axis as much as she’d pushed him off his.

He recalled bitterly how reluctant she’d been to talk to him in the first place about the job he was offering, all the while knowing her secret. Harbouring his son. With one phone call to his team Rafaele had put in motion this audacious plan to take over the research programme at her university and had relished this meeting.

While Sam’s boss continued his speech Rafaele retreated inwardly, but anyone looking at him would have seen only fierce concentration.

He breathed in and realised that he hadn’t taken a proper breath since he’d seen Sam looking at him with that stricken expression on her face in the doorway of her house the other evening. The initial punch to his gut he’d received when he’d first thought that Sam was married, with someone else’s child, was galling to remember—and more exposing than he liked to admit.

Nothing excused her from withholding his son from him for more than three years. Rafaele had been about Milo’s age when his world had imploded. When he’d witnessed his father, on his knees, sobbing, prostrating himself at Rafaele’s mother’s feet, begging her not to leave him.

‘I love you. What am I if you leave? I am nothing. I have nothing...’

‘Get up, Umberto,’ she’d said. ‘You shame yourself in front of our son. What kind of a man will he be with a crying, snivelling wretch for a father?’

What kind of a man would he be?

Rafaele felt tight inside. The kind of man who knew that the most important things in life were building a solid foundation. Security. Success. He’d vowed never to allow anything to reduce him to nothing, as his father had been reduced, with not even his pride to keep him standing. Emotions were dangerous. They had the power to derail you completely. He knew how fickle women were, how easily they could walk away. Or keep you from your child.

Rafaele had driven back to Sam’s house on Sunday, fired up, ready to confront her again, but just as he’d pulled up he’d seen them leaving the house. Milo had been pushing a scooter. He’d followed them to a small local park and watched like a fugitive as they played. Dark emotions had twisted inside him as he’d watched Sam’s effortless long-legged grace and ease. He’d known that if he hadn’t reappeared in their lives this would have just been another banal Sunday morning routine trip to the park.

Seeing his son’s small sturdy body, watching him running around, laughing gleefully, something alien inside him had swelled. It was...pride. And something else that he couldn’t name. But it had reminded him of that day again—the darkest in his memory—when his mother had gripped his hand painfully tight and pulled him in her wake out of their family palazzo outside Milan, leaving his father sobbing uncontrollably on the ground. A pathetic, broken man.

That was one of the reasons Rafaele had never wanted to have children. Knowing how vulnerable they were had always felt like too huge a responsibility to bear. No one knew better than he how events even at that young age could shape your life. And so he’d never expected that, when faced with his son, there would be such a torrent of feelings within him, each one binding him invisibly and indelibly to this person he didn’t even know properly yet. Or that when he’d watched him running around the other day there would be a surge of something so primal and protective that he just knew without question, instantly, that he would do anything to prevent his son from coming into harm’s way.

From far too early an age Rafaele had been made aware that the absence of a father corroded at your insides like an acid.

Resolve firmed like a ball of concrete inside him. There was no way on this earth that he was going to walk away from his son now and give him a taste of what he’d suffered.

Cutting off Sam’s boss curtly, Rafaele stood up and muttered an excuse, and left the room. There was only one person he wanted to hear talk right now.

* * *

Sam’s stomach felt raw after she’d lost her breakfast, minute as it had been, into a toilet in the ladies’ room. She felt shaky, weak, and looked as pale as death in the reflection of the cracked mirror. She splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth out, knowing that she had to go back out there and face—

The door suddenly swung open and Sam stood up straight, hands gripping the side of the sink. For once she prayed it might be Gertie, even though she knew it wasn’t when every tiny hair seemed to prickle on her skin.

She turned around and saw Rafaele, looking very tall and very dark as he leant back against the door, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Even now her body sang, recognising the man who had introduced her to her own sensuality, and she clamped down on the rogue response, bitterly aware that not even the harsh fluorescent lighting could strip away his sheer good looks.

Welcome anger rose up and Sam seized on it, crossing her arms over her chest. Her voice felt rough, raw. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Rafaele? How dare you come in here and use your might to get back at me? These are people you’re playing with—people who have invested long years of study into their area—and suddenly you sweep in and promise them a glimpse of future success when we both know—’

‘Enough.’

Rafaele’s voice sounded harsh in the echoing silence of the cavernous tiled ladies’ bathroom.

‘I am fully committed to following through on my promise of funding and support to this university.’ His mouth tightened. ‘Unless you’ve already forgotten, I had contacted you initially to ask you to work for me. I had every intention of using your expertise to further this very research for my own ends.’

He shrugged minutely. ‘There’s nothing new in that—any motor company worth its salt is on the lookout for new research and ways of beating the competition with new technology. You have single-handedly elevated this research to a far more advanced level than any other facility, in a university or otherwise.’

His words sent Sam no sense of professional satisfaction. She was still in shock. ‘That may be the case,’ she bit out tightly, ‘but now that you know about Milo you’re seeking to get back at me personally.’

She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.

‘It just so happens that you have the means to be able to come in and take over the entire department to do your bidding.’

Fresh panic gripped her when she recalled her boss saying something about Sam herself going to work from his factory. Her arms grew tighter over her chest when she recalled the hothouse environment of working in Rafaele’s Milan factory four years ago and how easily he’d seduced her. The thought of going back into a similar environment, even if Rafaele would prefer to throttle her than sleep with her, made her clammy.

‘I will not be going to work for you. I will remain here at the university.’

Rafaele took a few paces forward and Sam saw the light of something like steel in his eyes and his expression. Her belly sank even as her skin tightened with betraying awareness.

‘You will be coming to work for me—or I will pull out of this agreement and all of your colleagues are back to square one. Your boss has informed me that if I hadn’t come along with the promise of funding he was going to have to let some people go. He can’t keep everyone on the payroll due to reduced projected funding this year. You would have been informed of that at this very meeting.’

Vaguely Sam was aware of the veracity of what he said. It had been rumoured for weeks. Once again she was struck by how little she’d appreciated how ruthless Rafaele was. ‘You bastard,’ she breathed.

Rafaele looked supremely unperturbed. ‘Hardly, when I’m saving jobs. It’s very simple if you do the right thing and accede to my wishes. And this is just the start of it, Samantha.’

Ice invaded her bloodstream. ‘Start of what?’

To her shock she realised belatedly how close Rafaele had come when he reached out a hand and cupped her jaw. She felt the strength of that hand, the faint calluses which reminded her of how he loved tinkering with engines despite his status. It was one of the things that had endeared him to her from the start.

In an instant an awful physical yearning rose up within her. Every cell in her body was reacting joyously to a touch she’d never thought she’d experience again. She was melting, getting hot. Damp.

Softly, he sliced open the wound in her heart. ‘The start of payback, Samantha. You owe me for depriving me of my son for more than three years and I will never let you forget it.’

* * *

For a moment Rafaele almost forgot where he was, who he was talking to. The feel of Sam’s skin under his hand was like silk, her jaw as delicate as the finest spun Murano glass. He had an almost overwhelming urge to keep sliding his hand around to the back of her neck, to tug her towards him so that he could feel her pressed against him and crush that pink rosebud mouth under his— Suddenly Rafaele realised what he was doing.

With a guttural curse he took his hand away and stepped back. Sam was looking at him with huge grey eyes, her face as pale as parchment with two pink spots in each cheek.

She blinked, almost as if she’d been caught in a similar spell, and then something in her eyes cleared. The anger was gone.

She changed tack, entreated him. She held out a hand and her voice was husky. ‘Please, Rafaele, we need to talk about this—’

‘No.’ The word was harsh, abrupt, and it cut her off effectively. Everything within Rafaele had seized at her attempt to try and take advantage of a moment when she might have perceived weakness on his part. To play on his conscience. With the shadows under her eyes making her look fragile and vulnerable.

He’d witnessed his mother for years, using her wiles to fool men into thinking she was vulnerable, fragile. Only to see how her expression would harden again once they were no longer looking and she’d got what she wanted. She’d been so cold the day she’d left his father, showing not an ounce of remorse.

Once, he mightn’t have believed Sam was like that, but that was before she’d kept his son from him, demonstrating equal, if not worse, callousness.

Rafaele took another step back and hated that he felt the need to do so. That volcanic anger was well and truly erupting now. He gritted out, ‘If you were a man...’

Sam tensed and her chin lifted. Gone was the soft look of before, the husky entreaty.

‘If I were a man...what? You’d thrash me? Well, what’s stopping you?’

Rafaele could see where her hands had clenched to fists by her side. He looked at her disgustedly. ‘Because I don’t raise my hands to women—or anyone, for that matter. But I felt like it for the first time when I realised that boy was my son.’

He couldn’t stop the words spilling out. That initial shock was infusing him all over again.

‘My son, Sam, my flesh and blood. He’s a Falcone. Dio. How could you have played God like that? What gave you the right to believe you had the answer? That you alone could decide to just cut me out of his life?’

Sam seemed to tense even more, her chin going higher. Those spots of red deepened, highlighting her delicate bone structure. ‘Do I need to remind you again that you practically tripped over your feet in your hurry to get out of the clinic that day? You could barely disguise your relief when you thought there was nothing to worry about. You just assumed the worst. It didn’t even occur to you to question whether or not I’d actually had a miscarriage, because you didn’t want a baby.’

Rafaele coloured, his conscience pricked by the reminder of how eager he’d been to get away from those huge bruised eyes, the raw emotion. The shock. The awareness that Sam had strayed too far under his skin.

Tightly he admitted, ‘I never had any intention of having children. But you gave me no reason to doubt the inevitable conclusion of what we’d both believed to be a miscarriage.’

Sam choked out, ‘You were quite happy to wash your hands of me, so don’t blame me now if I felt the best course was to leave you out of my decision-making process.’

Rafaele looked at Sam across the few feet that separated them and all he could see was her eyes. Huge, and as grey as the rolling English clouds. She was sucking him in again but he wouldn’t let her. She’d wilfully misdirected him into believing she’d miscarried when all the while she’d held the knowledge of their baby, living, in her belly.

He shook his head. ‘That’s just not good enough.’

Sam’s voice took on a defensive edge. ‘I was hardly encouraged to get in touch and tell you the truth when I saw you with another woman only a week after that day.’

She was breathing heavily under her shirt and he could see her breasts rise and fall. A flash of heat went straight to his groin and Rafaele crushed it ruthlessly. He focused on her face and tried to forget that he actually hadn’t slept with another woman for about a year after Sam had left, despite appearances and despite his best efforts. Every time he’d come close something inside him had shut down. And since then...? His experiences with women had been anything but satisfactory. To be reminded of this now was galling.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t you dare try to put this on me now, just to deflect your own guilt.’

But the guilt that had struck Rafaele wouldn’t be banished, much as he wanted it to be. Damn her! He wouldn’t let her do this to him now. She’d borne his child. His son. And said nothing.

Sam’s voice was bitter. ‘God forbid that I would forget what our relationship was about. Sex. That was pretty much it, wasn’t it? Forget conversation, or anything more intimate than being naked in bed. It wasn’t as if you didn’t make that abundantly clear, Rafaele, telling me over and over again not to fall for you because you weren’t about that.’

‘But you did anyway, didn’t you?’ Rafaele couldn’t keep the accusing note out of his voice and he saw Sam blanch.

‘I thought I loved you.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘After all, you were my first lover, and isn’t it normal for a virgin to develop an attachment to her first? Isn’t that one of the helpful warnings you gave me?’

Rafaele saw nothing right then but a memory of Sam’s naked and flushed body as she’d lain on his bed before him, her breasts high and round, her narrow waist, long legs. Skin so pure and white it had reminded him of alabaster—except she’d been living, breathing, so passionate. And she’d been innocent. He’d never forget how it had felt to sink into that slick, tight heat for the first time. It was his most erotic memory. Her gasp of shock turning to pleasure.

She continued, ‘But don’t worry. I soon got over it and realised how shallow those feelings were. Once I was faced with the reality of pregnancy and a baby.’

‘A reality,’ Rafaele gritted out, angry at that memory and at how easily it had slipped past his guard, ‘that you decided to face alone.’

Reacting against her ability to scramble his thought-processes, Rafaele changed tack.

‘Was it a punishment, Sam? Hmm?’ He answered himself. ‘Punishment for my being finished with you? For not wanting more? For letting you go? For not wanting to have a baby because that’s not what our relationship was about?’

Rafaele couldn’t stop the demon inside him.

‘I think the problem is that you fell for me and you were angry because I didn’t fall for you, so you decided to punish me. It’s so obvious...’