“I came to tell you, Mr. Fabbrini, that you have a child. A daughter. Her name is Nicola.”

The silence stretched between them as agonizingly taut as a piece of elastic, then he laughed with incredulous disbelief.

“So, Miss Nash, I’m a papa! You must have harbored the strange notion that I was some kind of gullible fool!”

“Caroline became pregnant two weeks before you split up,” Julia informed him in a stony voice. “You can choose to believe it or not, but it’s the truth, and that’s what I came to say. I felt that you ought to know the existence of your daughter. I’ve said what I had to say. I tried.”

She proudly made her way through the crowd when his voice roared through the room, stopping conversation, killing laughter.

“Get back here!”

Relax and enjoy our fabulous series about couples whose passion ends in pregnancies…sometimes unexpected! Of course, the birth of a baby is always a joyful event, and we can guarantee that our characters will become wonderful moms and dads—but what happened in those nine months before?

Share the surprises, emotions, drama and suspense as our parents-to-be come to terms with the prospect of bringing a new baby into the world. All will discover that the business of making babies brings with it the most special love of all….

Delivered only by Harlequin Presents®

Riccardo’s Secret Child
Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

RICCARDO FABBRINI stood towards the back of the dim, overcrowded bar, his black eyes narrowed as they moved methodically through the room. He felt another swell of intense irritation hit him as he realised the disadvantage of his situation.

The call had come this morning and the voice at the other end of the phone had been persuasive enough to bypass the rigid series of obstacles that siphoned off all but the most important callers. He hissed an oath under his breath as he continued to scour the room, seeking out the lone female, the woman who had left the message to meet him at an appointed time in this smoky wine bar. If he had personally handled the call he would have made sure to have found out what the hell this meeting was all about. In fact, if he had handled the call there would have been no meeting, but Mrs Pierce, competent to the point of meticulousness, had obviously been conned by a soft voice and a fairy story.

Whatever she had to say, it must be good, he thought grimly. It had better be good. He was not a man who found it amusing to have his time wasted.

‘May I help you, sir?’

Riccardo’s dark, impatient gaze focused on a small woman dressed in a waitress’s uniform standing next to him, peering up at him, her oval face tinged with pleasure.

He was used to this kind of reaction from the opposite sex and normally he would have automatically fallen back on his charm and flirted with the pretty little thing hovering with her tray tucked neatly under one arm, but this was not a normal situation. He had been manoeuvred into coming here by some woman who had only conveyed to Mrs Pierce that her message was of the utmost importance, relying, no doubt, on his curiosity to grab at the mysterious carrot that had been dangled provocatively in front of his eyes.

Just the thought of it made him catch his breath in another surge of frustrated anger.

‘I’m meeting someone,’ he answered in a clipped voice.

‘What’s the name?’ The petite blonde moved three steps to a desk at the side and picked up a sheet of paper on which were listed a series of names, most with ticks alongside them, customers who had arrived to take up their reservations.

‘That’s the one.’ He pointed at a name on the sheet, Julia N., with the tick alongside it. ‘She’s here, is she?’ he said grimly, casting his eyes around the room again and failing to find anyone matching up to the woman he had mentally conjured up.

Because conjured her up he had. He would have gone out with her at some point, of that he was sure, which hardly narrowed his options, but he knew his preferences. She would be tall, leggy, blonde and, he had to admit, fairly lightweight in the brains department. That was the way he liked them. Their vanity was his protection from emotional involvement. They enjoyed being seen on his arm, relished the privileges he could offer them but understood their place. Emotional baggage, he had discovered to his cost, did not sit easily on his shoulders.

He also had a good idea of what the woman in question would be after. Money. Weren’t they always? However simpering and ingenuous they appeared, his vast bank balance never failed to impress. And he also knew how he intended to deal with any gold-diggers, whatever their trumped-up sob stories. Ruthlessly.

He bit back his anger at finding himself engineered into a meeting he had not initiated and decided, grimly, that now that he had found himself here he would enjoy the situation for what it was worth.

‘Just follow me, sir.’ The little blonde with the curly hair and the very cute behind walked in front of him and he followed, curious, now that he had come this far, to see where she was leading him. Riccardo anticipated, with a certain amount of relish, a short, sharp and illuminating conversation. Illuminating for the woman in question. Illuminating enough for her to realise that no one, but no one, got the better of Riccardo Fabbrini.

His sensuous lips curved coldly into a smile of anticipated victory.

He was still feverishly scanning the crowd for the single, blonde female, when he realised that his brief tour of the wine bar, which had taken them from the bustling front to a slightly quieter section at the back, had come to an end. He found himself in front of a table at which was seated a slender, mousy-haired woman who had half risen to her feet and appeared to be holding out her hand in greeting.

‘May I get you a drink, sir?’ enquired the waitress.

Riccardo ignored the polite question and stared in disbelief at the figure in front of him, who had now subsided back into her chair, though she continued to watch him. Very cautiously indeed. As though he might very well bite.

Who the hell was she?

‘Mr Fabbrini?’ Julia stared up at the towering, olive-skinned stranger and nervously tried to gather herself, already regretting her decision to meet him, even while she knew that the meeting was as inevitable as the sun rising and setting. Inevitable and every bit as difficult as she had imagined it would be, judging from the expression on his face.

‘Would you care to sit down?’ Julia persisted politely, her anxious eyes briefly meeting those of the waitress, whose expression was sympathetic.

‘No, I would not like to sit down. What I would like is for you to tell me who you are and why you have wasted my time dragging me here.’

Julia felt clammy perspiration break out over her body like a rash. She took a deep, steadying breath and reminded herself that the man in front of her, menacing though he seemed, could do absolutely nothing to her.

The waitress, having hovered indecisively for a few minutes, had retreated to safer waters, clearly intimidated by him.

‘I did think about coming to see you at your office,’ Julia said weakly, ‘but I decided that a neutral zone might be better. I really wish you’d sit down, Mr Fabbrini. It will be impossible holding a conversation with you if you continue to glare down at me like that.’

‘Is this better?’ Instead of sitting down, Riccardo leant forward, hands firmly planted on the table so that his eyes were on her level and provided Julia, up close, with a vision of such disconcerting masculinity that she flinched back, an automatic response to his aggressive invasion of her space.

Of course, she knew what he looked like. She had seen pictures of him, and she had heard all about his terrifying personality, but nothing had prepared her for the impact of it full-on. Nothing had prepared her for his height, his overpowering maleness that had her breath catching uncomfortably in her throat, the constricting force of his swarthy good looks.

‘No,’ Julia said as calmly as she could. ‘No, it’s not, Mr Fabbrini. You’re doing your best to threaten me and it won’t work. I won’t be threatened by you.’ Thank goodness she had made sure that their table was situated at the back of the wine bar, where they were at least out of the range of curious ears and eyes. Thank goodness she had chosen somewhere large and very lively, where this little scene was lost amid the babble of voices and the roars of laughter from the groups of after-work men lounging on stools by the bar.

Riccardo continued to look at her without saying a word. Her smoky voice, so at odds with her average appearance, was controlled and self-contained but her hands were trembling. There was nothing her body could do about containing the effect he was having on her, he thought with a hot stab of satisfaction, even though she was doing her best to quell it.

He pulled out his chair and sat. ‘My personal assistant said you refused to supply a surname. I don’t like mysteries and I don’t like women who mistakenly think that I am gullible enough to be taken in by sob stories or fairy tales. You got me here, and now that I’m here you will give me a few answers. Starting with your name. Your full name.’

‘Julia Nash.’ She waited to see whether he would react, but he didn’t. She hadn’t been certain whether he would have recognised the name, but Caroline must have kept it to herself after she had made her grand confession all those years ago. Even in the throes of her emotional distress, she had been quick-witted enough to foresee possible consequences.

‘The name means nothing to me,’ he said dismissively. He inclined his body slightly to catch their waitress’s eye, which seemed remarkably easy. She had removed herself physically from the scene of the action, but had remained at a close distance, fascinated by the strikingly commanding man in his impeccably tailored grey suit. As if an outward show of civilised dress could disguise the primitive male beneath. What a joke, Julia thought.

‘Nor,’ he continued, after he had ordered a whisky on the rocks, ‘have I ever met you before in my life.’ He had leaned back into his chair but his presence was still as unsettling as when he had been looming over her.

Riccardo had delved into his memory banks and could state that without fear of contradiction. The name meant nothing to him, even though his antennae had sensed her fear that it might have, and he certainly would have recognised her, if only because she would have stuck out like a sore thumb amidst the parade of beautiful blondes who littered his life.

He took his drink from the waitress without even bothering to glance in her direction, instead choosing to focus his unremitting attention on the woman sitting across the table from him.

‘Can I get either of you something to eat?’

‘I doubt I will be here long enough,’ Riccardo said, briefly looking at the waitress, who nodded in utter confusion at her abrupt dismissal.

‘How do you know you haven’t met me before?’ Julia asked, clutching cravenly at any postponement to what she had to impart, and his lips curled into a coldly speculative smile.

‘I have never been attracted to little sparrows,’ he drawled, knowing that his uncalled-for and cunningly placed attack had a lot to do with the residue of anger lingering inside him.

That stung, but Julia refused to allow her hurt to show. She would also refuse to allow her loathing for the man sitting in front of her to show either. Loathing that had been already formed by the opinions she had made about him from what she had heard.

‘You can be reassured that little sparrows find vainglorious hawks equally unappealing,’ Julia said with a tight smile.

‘So, now that we have done away with the pleasantries, why don’t we just get down to business, Miss Nash? Because business is what you have in mind, is it not?’ He rested his elbows on the table and swallowed back the remainder of his drink. ‘Perhaps you mistakenly thought that an unusual approach might reward you with a job in one of my companies? If so, then I regret to inform you that I am not a man who favours the unusual approach, especially when it encroaches on my limited and hence very valuable personal time.’

‘I’m not after a job, Mr Fabbrini.’

The hesitation was back in her eyes. Through thick black lashes he continued to observe her barely concealed nervousness, the way her slim fingers tried to find refuge in clasping her glass, cradling it, using it as something to steady her apprehension.

Very few things in life evoked Riccardo Fabbrini’s curiosity. His meteoric rise through his father’s ailing firm had been achieved through cold, calculated hard-headedness and a logical ability to scythe through problems. Curiosity was an emotion that deflected from his sense of purpose and nothing in his adult life had had much power to arouse it.

Even women were as predictable as the ocean tides, despite their reputation to the contrary.

Now, though…

The little sparrow in front of him was stirring something in him. Certainly nothing of a sexual nature, although, behind those prim little spectacles, her eyes were an unusual shade of grey and her body wasn’t bad, for someone who could do with putting on a bit of weight. Especially around the bust. And her voice. No wonder Mrs Pierce had been taken in. He was almost looking forward to whatever outrageous lie was hovering behind those delicate lips.

‘Money, then,’ he said carelessly. ‘Are you some kind of charity worker? Mission: hunt down prospective bank balances and tout for donations? If that’s the case then make an appointment with my secretary. I’m sure something could be arranged.’

‘It’s not as easy as that.’

Riccardo was almost disappointed that he had guessed correctly and that money was at the root of this ridiculous charade that had forced him to cancel a date with his latest blonde bombshell. Although, to be perfectly honest, the blonde bombshell was due to be cancelled anyway. Regrettably. She had overstepped boundaries which he himself was only vaguely aware of imposing.

‘I beg to differ, Miss Nash. It seems a simple equation and not one that called for this level of subterfuge. You want money, I have money. Just tell me the cause and you’ll find that I can be generous with my donations.’ He pushed back his chair at an angle so that he could cross his legs and draped his arm over the back of the chair, glancing around him.

‘There’s no equation to be worked out.’

Riccardo glanced at her. ‘No equation? Then tell me what you want and let’s get this over with. As I said to you, I am not a man who appreciates mysteries and this one is outstaying its limited welcome.’

Julia paled, realising that retreat was no longer an option. Had never really been an option, although there had always been the illusion of one. But how was she going to phrase what she had to say? She was a teacher. She should have had a thousand words at her disposal, but none that catered for this particular reality. Unfortunately.

She lifted her eyes bravely to look at him and was overwhelmed by the dark, brooding intensity of his gaze.

‘It’s about your wife. Your ex-wife. Caroline.’ She watched as the darkly handsome contours of his face stilled. When he made no response, Julia took a deep breath. ‘I thought you might have recognised my name,’ she said quietly. ‘Well, Nash. I thought you might have recognised my surname. But Caroline must not have ever told you…’

Surprises are always unpleasant. Riccardo could remember his father telling him that, many years ago, when the biggest surprise of his life had heralded the receivers coming into his company.

This surprise, though, left him winded. Caroline was the memory he had put behind him, buried beneath other willing women and only seeping out in the angry thrashing of his nightmares. And even those had disappeared.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Julia’s anxious eyes met his and he summoned up all the will-power at his disposal, which was considerable, to maintain his cold, unshaken exterior.

‘What is there to say?’ he rasped tautly. ‘I have no intention of having a cosy chat to you about my ex-wife. May she rest in peace.’ He began to stand up and one slender hand reached out, touching him lightly on his forearm.

‘Please.’ Julia’s voice was gentle. ‘I’m not finished.’

Riccardo looked at the offending hand with distaste, but remained where he was, locked into place by the vile-tasting surge of memories that had risen unbidden from deep inside, like ghouls breaking through the barriers of the earth to roam freely.

Julia had half risen from her chair. Now she sat back down and was relieved when he did as well, though not before he had ordered another drink and wine for her, even though she had not asked for any.

‘Why should I have recognised your name?’ His voice was flat and hard, like the expression in his eyes.

‘Because,’ she faltered, ‘because my brother was Martin Nash. The man who…who…’

‘Why don’t you say the words, Miss Nash? The man who replaced me.’ His mouth twisted into lines of bitter cynicism. ‘And to what do I owe the pleasure of this trip down memory lane? From what I recall, she was a very wealthy divorcee when we finally parted company. She and her lover. So, did they thoughtlessly not see fit to leave you in their will when they died?’ His voice was an insulting mimicry of sympathy and Julia’s back stiffened in a flare of rage.

This man was every bit as bad as Caroline had described. Worse. Julia felt a trace of sympathy for the decision her sister-in-law had made. To break off all contact. To say nothing. At the time she had done her best to persuade her otherwise. Through all those shared confidences she had had to steel herself against the unquiet feelings in her heart that a momentous decision was just morally wrong.

Had she known the true nature of the beast, perhaps she wouldn’t have made quite such an effort.

‘I loved my brother, Mr Fabbrini. And I loved Caroline as well.’ Her voice sounded unnaturally still.

Riccardo felt such rage at that admission that he had to clench his hands into tight balls to stop them doing what they wanted to do. His eyes were blazing coals, however, and Julia could feel them burning her skin, searing through her head like knives of scorching steel.

‘In which case, please accept my condolences,’ he sneered coldly.

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘No. I don’t, and I am quite sure you can understand why. You might have loved my ex-wife. You might have seen her as the paragon of beauty and gentleness that she convincingly portrayed, but she was neither so gentle nor was she so compassionate that she couldn’t conduct a rampant affair with another man behind my back!’ His voice cracked like a whip around her, causing a group of people at the nearby table to glance around in sudden interest at the explosive scenario unfolding in front of them.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Julia protested with dismay.

‘It hardly matters now, does it,’ he said in a dangerously soft voice. ‘It was five years ago and life has moved on for me. So why don’t you just get to the point of all of this and then leave? Go and find a life to live. If you imagine that you are going to find a sympathetic listener in me then you are very much mistaken, Miss Nash. Any feeling I had for my dearly departed ex-wife dried up the day she told me that she had been seeing another man and was in love with him.’

‘I haven’t come here searching for your sympathy!’ Julia retorted.

‘Then why did you come here?’

‘To tell you that…’ The sheer magnitude of what she was about to say made the words dry up in her throat. She removed her spectacles and went through the pretence of cleaning the lenses, her hands unsteady on the wire rims.

Without her glasses, she looked wide-eyed and vulnerable. But Riccardo wasn’t about to let himself feel sympathy for this girl. The mere thought that she was his replacement’s sister was enough to fill his throat with bile. He could imagine her sitting down in a cosy threesome, nodding and listening to their vilification of him, ripping him apart when he hadn’t been there to defend himself.

He finished his second drink and was contemplating a third, which might at least blunt the edge of his mood, when she replaced her spectacles and looked at him. He decided that he wasn’t going to help her. Let her stutter out the reason for this bizarre meeting.

‘Caroline and my brother had, well…had been seeing each other for the last four months of your relationship before it all came to a head.’ The wine had arrived and Julia gulped down a mouthful to give herself some much-needed Dutch courage. ‘But they hadn’t been sleeping together.’

Riccardo gave a derisive snort of laughter. ‘And you believed them, did you?’

‘Yes, I did!’ Julia’s head snapped up in angry rebuttal of his jeering disbelief.

‘Well, I may be a little more cynical than you, Miss Nash, but I could not imagine a man and a woman, both in their prime, spending four months holding hands and whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears without the whispering turning to lovemaking. My ex-wife was remarkably beautiful and highly desirable. I doubt if your brother could have kept his hands to himself even if he had wanted to!’

‘They never slept together,’ Julia repeated stubbornly. That was what Caroline had told her and Julia had believed every word. It had had nothing to do with sexual attraction and everything to do with the man studying her blackly from under his brows. Caroline had been afraid of him. She had confided that to her over and over in the beginning, and the truth of what she had confided had been plain enough to read on her beautiful, pained face.

Riccardo Fabbrini had terrified her. During their brief courtship, she had seen his dark, brooding personality as exciting, but the reality of it had only sunk home once they had married and she had become suffocated by the sheer explosive force of it. Nothing in her sweet-tempered reserves had equipped her to deal with someone so blatantly and aggressively male. The more dominant he became, the less she responded, wilting inside herself like a flower deprived of essential nutrients, and the more she wilted, the more dominant he had become, like a raging bull, she had whispered, baffled by her tongue-tied retreat.

Martin, with his conventional, unthreatening good looks and his easy smile and shy, compassionate nature, had been like balm to her wounded soul.

But they had not slept together. The thought of physical betrayal had been abhorrent to her. They had talked, communicated through those long, empty evenings when Riccardo had taken himself off to his penthouse suite in central London, nursing his frustration in ways, Caroline had once confessed, she could only shudder to imagine.

‘Perhaps not,’ he now conceded with a curl of his beautiful mouth. ‘She did have a bit of a problem when it came to passion. So is this what you came here for? To make your peace with the devil and clear your brother’s name now that he can answer only to God?’ He laughed coldly. ‘Consider it an effort well-done.’

Julia drew in her breath and shivered. ‘I came to tell you, Mr Fabbrini, that you have a child. A daughter. Her name is Nicola.’

The silence stretched between them as agonisingly taut as a piece of elastic; then he laughed. He laughed and shook his head in incredulous disbelief. He laughed with such unrestrained humour that the group of eavesdroppers decided that whatever had been brewing had obviously been nothing or else jokes wouldn’t have been cracked. Eventually his laughter died, but he continued to grin and this time there was a trace of admiration in his expression.

‘So, Miss Nash, I’m a papa. I thought you had come for money, but I confess I was having a little difficulty knowing what platform you would stand on to get it. Now I know and I take my hat off to you. It is the most ingenious platform imaginable. Except for one small detail. You obviously have not catered for my personality. You must have harboured the strange notion that I was some kind of gullible fool, that you could produce your brother’s offspring from behind your back and I would fall for it.’ He laughed again, but this time there was no humour in his laughter and his black eyes, when they raked over her, contained no admiration. Only distaste.

‘Caroline fell pregnant two weeks before you split up,’ Julia informed him in a stony voice. ‘You can choose to believe it or not, but it’s the truth, and that’s what I came here to say. I don’t want any money from you, but I felt you ought to know the existence of your daughter. It looks as though I made a mistake.’

She stood up, her head held high, and reached for her bag next to the chair.

‘Where do you think you are going?’ Having coerced him here against his will, the blasted woman was now about to sally forth with her nose in the air, leaving him sitting at a table, nursing a thousand questions which refused to surface. He did not for one minute believe that he had fathered any child, but now that the seed had been planted he intended to get to the bottom of it and force her to confess that she had made the whole thing up.

‘I should never have come here, but I felt I had to. I said what I had to say. I tried.’ She proudly made her way through the crowd and was on the verge of acknowledging that she was about to make her escape, when his voice roared through the room, stopping conversation, killing laughter and compelling every head to turn in his direction.

‘Get back here!’

Julia didn’t look back. She did begin to walk more quickly, though, breaking into a slight run as the exit came into sight, then, once outside, she was running, with the wind bitingly cold against her face and rain slashing down on her head. The pavements were slick and empty and she only slowed her pace because there was the very real possibility that she would fall ingloriously on her face in her heels. They were sensible-enough shoes but by no means the sturdy wellingtons she would have needed for the sudden torrential downpour.

She was concentrating so closely on her feet, her head bowed against the driving rain as she scuttled towards the underground, that she was not aware of the sound of footsteps behind her, increasing in speed until she did finally pause, only to find herself whipped around by Riccardo’s hand on her arm.

‘You walked out on me!’ he threw at her furiously.

‘I realise that!’ Julia shouted back.

‘You think you can just show up from nowhere, start talking about my ex-wife and throw some wild story in my face before walking away!’

‘I said what I had to say, now let me go! You’re hurting me!’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Some small satisfaction for me for the stunt you pulled back there.’

‘Let me go or else I shall yell my head off! You don’t want to end up in a police station for assault, do you?’

‘You are absolutely right. That is the last thing I want.’ He began pulling her behind him while she swatted her hand at his fingers gripping her trench coat.

‘Where are you dragging me? You might be able to get away with this caveman behaviour in Italy, but there are laws over here about men who manhandle women!’

‘There are also laws against women who think they can blackmail men out of money using a phoney story!’

He was still pulling her and eventually Julia gave up the unequal fight. If he thought he could spirit her away somewhere to prolong their nightmare conversation then he had another think coming. He would no doubt be heading for a cab, and the minute her feet hit the floor of the taxi she would insist on being driven to the nearest underground. She had said what she had come to say, what she had felt morally compelled to say, and if he chose to disbelieve her story then that was his prerogative.

He wasn’t pulling her so that he could hail a taxi.

He was pulling her towards his car, a sleek black Jaguar parked discreetly down a side-road.

Julia shied away but he was much bigger and stronger than her and suffused with angry determination.

There was no way that Riccardo was going to let this little madam escape until she confessed that the whole ridiculous thing had been a web of lies.

He realised that he was furiously trying to remember when he and Caroline had made love for the last time. He knew that it was certainly towards the end of their doomed marriage. He had returned home very late and a little the worse for wear with drink, but clutching a bunch of flowers, his attempt to woo the wife who had already mentally left him. The wife, he only acknowledged later, he had already also left behind.

It hadn’t worked. She had patiently allowed herself to be awakened, to be presented with the sad bunch of flowers. She had been polite enough to stick them in a vase of water, even though she would surely have been tired at nearly one in the morning. And she had been polite enough to make love, or rather to allow him to make love to her. If nothing else, he had finally realised that it was over between them. But when had it happened…?

‘You’re lying,’ he said harshly. ‘And I want you to admit it.’

‘I will not get into that car with you.’

‘You will do as I say.’

The sheer arrogance of the man left Julia speechless. ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

‘Get in the car! We haven’t finished talking!’

‘I refuse…’

‘Why?’ he mocked. ‘Do you imagine that your womanly assets aren’t safe with me? I told you, I don’t favour the sparrows.’ With which he yanked open the car door and waited for Julia to finally edge into the seat.

She hoped she left a huge, soaking, permanent stain on the cream leather.

‘Now,’ he said, turning to her once he was inside the car, ‘where do you live? I’m going to drop you back to your house and you’re going to explain yourself to me on the way. Then, and only then, do we part company, Miss Nash.’

In the ensuing silence Julia seemed to hear the flutter of her own heartbeat.

This was different from when they were in the wine bar, surrounded by people and noise. Locked in this car with him, she became frighteningly aware of his power and of something else: his potent sex appeal, something she had hidden from in the restaurant, choosing to concentrate her mind on the task at hand. The sparrow, she thought in panic, surely couldn’t be drawn to the eagle!

‘Well?’ he prompted with silky determination, and Julia stuttered out her address.

‘Not nervous, are you?’ He turned on the engine and smoothly began driving towards Hampstead. ‘I told you, your maidenly honour is safe with me. Unless…’ he appeared to give this some deep thought ‘…your fear has suddenly kick-started an attack of nerves. Is that it, Miss Nash? Are you afraid of being found out for the liar that you are?’

‘I’m not nervous, Mr Fabbrini,’ Julia lied. ‘I’m just amazed at your arrogance and your high-handedness. I’ve never encountered anyone like you in my life before!’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘Don’t be!’ she snapped back, her body pressed as far against the door as it was physically possible to be. She looked at his averted profile and shivered. Not a man to cross. Those had been Caroline’s words and Julia now had no problem in believing them.

‘So when did you decide to concoct your little scheme?’ he enquired with supreme politeness.

‘I haven’t concocted anything!’

Riccardo ignored the interruption. The girl was lying, of that he was convinced, and he would break her before the drive was over. Break her and return to his vastly energetic but essentially uncluttered life.

‘So…this so-called child of mine is…what did you say? Four? Five?’

‘Five,’ Julia said tightly, ‘and her name is Nicola.’

‘And not once did my beloved ex-wife choose to mention this little fact to me. Surprising, really, wouldn’t you say? Considering she always prided herself on her high morality?’

‘She thought it was for the best.’

Riccardo felt a pulse begin to beat steadily in his temple. Merely contemplating deception of that magnitude was enough to stir him. Just as well none of it was true. He slid a sideways glance at the slight creature sitting in the car, her body pushed against the car door in apprehension. So convincing, but so misguided. The most successful gold-diggers were the ones who hid their intent well.

The girl might not be a stunner, but she could act. She could act because she had brains, he considered. Which would make it doubly satisfying when she finally confessed all…

CHAPTER TWO

THE remainder of the drive was completed in uncomfortable silence. Rain slashed down against the window-panes, a harsh, clattering noise for which Julia was immensely grateful, because without that background din the silence between them would have been unbearable.

Towards the end she gave him terse directions to her house, which he followed without speaking.

By the time the sleek Jaguar pulled up in front of the three-storeyed red-brick Victorian house, her nerves were close to snapping. She pushed open the car door, almost before the car had drawn to a complete stop, and muttered a rapid thank-you for the lift. There was not much else she could thank him for. He had been insensitive, hostile and frankly insulting throughout those tortuous couple of hours in the wine bar. He had refused point blank to believe a word she had told him and had accused her of being a gold-digger.

Julia hurried up to her front door, the rain washing down on her as she fumbled in her bag for the wretched front-door key. She was only aware of his presence when he removed the key from her hands and shoved it into the lock smoothly.

‘I want you to tell me what you hoped to gain by spinning me that ridiculous, far-fetched story,’ he rasped, following her into the hall and slamming the door behind him.

Julia looked anxiously over her shoulder towards the staircase, which was shrouded in darkness.

And Riccardo, following her gaze, ground his teeth in intense irritation. She had clung to her fabrication like a drowning man clinging to a lifebelt and he was determined to hear her admit the truth. In fact, hearing her admit the truth had become a compulsion during the forty-minute drive to the house. If not, it would remain unfinished business, even if he never saw or heard from her again, and he was not a man interested in unfinished business.

‘I told you…’ Her voice was half-plea, half-resigned weariness. Both heated his simmering blood just a little bit more.

‘A lie! Caroline would never have kept such a thing from me, whatever her feelings.’

‘OK. If you want me to admit that I made up the whole thing then I admit it. All right? Happy?’

Wrong response. She could see that from the darkening of his eyes and the sudden tightening of his mouth. When she had set out on her mission to be honest she had had no idea about the man she would be meeting. She should have. She had heard enough about him over the years, and particularly in that first year, when Caroline had been pregnant and her hormones had unleashed all the pent-up emotion she had managed to keep to herself during her marriage. But time had dulled the impact of her descriptions, and certainly for the past six months Julia had begun to wonder whether her sister-in-law’s opinions might not have been exaggerated. Moreover, people changed. He would have mellowed over time.

Looking at his dark, hard face and the ruthless set of his features, she wondered whether anything or anyone was capable of mellowing Riccardo Fabbrini.

‘No. No, I am not happy, Miss Nash.’ He gripped her arm and leant down towards her so that his face was only inches away from hers. Julia felt herself swamped by him, struggling just to breathe, never mind control the situation.

But her eyes never left his. She was angry and, yes, intimidated, but he could see that inside she was as steady as a rock and he wanted to shake her until the steadiness turned to water.

No woman had ever roused him as much. This was a contest and he sensed that he was losing.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ she finally said wearily, shaking her arm, which he released. ‘I’ll explain it all to you, but you’ll damned well stop calling me a liar and listen to what I have to say!’

‘No one speaks to me like that,’ he rasped.

‘Sorry, but I do.’ Julia didn’t give him time to contemplate that assertion. Instead, she turned on her heels and began walking through the dark flagstoned hallway into the kitchen, her backbone straight, refusing to be totally squashed by the powerful man following in her wake.

She could feel him and the sensation sent little shivers racing along her spine. It was a bit like being stalked by a panther, a sleek, dangerous animal that was waiting to pounce.

‘Sit down,’ she commanded as soon as they were in the kitchen and she had closed the door gently behind them.

This had been Martin and Caroline’s house and she wondered whether he would recognise any of the artefacts in the room. Doubtful. Caroline had sold their marital home almost as soon as the divorce had come through and had disposed of the majority of the contents, sending the valuable paintings back to him and selling the rest of their possessions, none of which, she had later told Julia, he wanted. She, along with her lover and every single thing in the house, could go to hell and stay there, for all he cared. The few things she had kept had been little mementoes she had personally collected herself, ornaments and one or two small paintings that had been passed on to her by her own parents when they had been alive.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘This is not your house, is it? Was it theirs?’

Julia looked at him, watched as his shuttered gaze drifted through the room, picking out the homely array of plates displayed on the old pine dresser, the well-worn, much-loved kitchen table with all its scratches and peculiar markings, the faded, comfortable curtains, now blocking out the dark, rain-drenched night.

‘Yes, it was. It belongs to me now.’

He began prowling through the room, divesting himself of his jacket in the process and slinging it on the kitchen table. The notice-board, pinned to the wall, was littered with Nicola’s drawings. He stared at them for such a long time that Julia could feel the tension searing through her body mount to breaking point. Abruptly she took her eyes off him and began making some coffee.

‘Your daughter’s works of art,’ she said with her back to him.

When she finally turned around it was to find him looking at her, his coal-black eyes narrowed. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

‘She started school in September and…’

‘Why do you insist on sticking to your ridiculous story?’

Julia didn’t reply. Instead, she moved to one of the kitchen drawers and with trembling fingers extracted a photo of her brother, which she handed to him. Martin had been the fair one of them. Even in his thirties, his hair had remained blond, never turning to the mousy brown that hers had. His eyes were blue and laughing.

‘That’s my brother.’

Riccardo glanced at the picture and very deliberately crumpled it and threw it on the table. ‘Do you imagine that I am in the least interested in seeing what your brother looked like?’ he asked in a frighteningly controlled voice. ‘I was not curious then and I am not curious now.’

‘I didn’t show you that picture because I thought you might be interested or curious,’ Julia told him. She walked towards the kitchen table and rested his cup of coffee on the surface. She had no idea how he took his coffee but somehow she assumed that it would be black, sugarless and very strong. And she was right. He took the cup, sipped and placed it back on the table, his eyes never leaving her face.

‘I showed you the picture so that you could see for yourself how fair Martin was. Almost as fair as Caroline. Of course, he was not nearly as striking as she was, but from a distance they could almost have passed for brother and sister, their colouring was so similar.’

‘Where is all this going?’

‘I want you to follow me. Very quietly.’ She didn’t give him time to question her. The more she tried to explain, the more obstinately dismissive he became, the more convinced that she wanted something from him. Money. She would reveal her trump card now and hope that proof of her words would make him see reason.

She put her cup on the counter and began walking back through the house but this time up the dark staircase, pausing only to turn on the light so that she could see where she was putting her feet. For a large man he moved with surprising stealth. She could barely hear his footsteps behind her and, once at the top of the stairs, she turned round just to check and make sure that he was still there. He was. His face grim and set. Julia placed one finger over her lips in a sign for silence and began walking towards Nicola’s bedroom.

Her mother, who was already asleep in the guest room, would have switched on the small bedside light on Nicola’s dressing table. Nicola had always been afraid of complete dark. Monsters in cupboards and bogey men lurking under the beds. The stuff of childhood nightmares which no amount of calm reasoning could assuage.

Julia pushed open the door to the room very quietly and went across to the bed and stared down at the child.

Nicola was a living, breathing replica of her father. Her hair, which had never been cut, was thick and long and very black and her skin was satiny olive, the colour of someone accustomed to the hot Italian sun, even though it was a place she had never visited. Her eyes were closed now, but they, too, were dark, dark like her father’s, who had joined Julia in contemplation of the sleeping figure.

‘You could take a paternity test, but look at her. She’s the spitting image of you.’

There was complete, deathly silence at her side, then Riccardo abruptly turned around and began walking out of the room. The sleeping child had aroused sudden, overwhelming confusion in him such as he had never felt before. It had instantly been replaced by rage.

Was it possible to feel such rage? He would have thought not, but he felt it now. Five years! Five years of being kept in ignorance of his own child’s existence! His own flesh and blood. Because the minute he had laid eyes on her he had known that the child was his. There could be no doubt.

He thought of his ex-wife and her husband, bringing up his child, laughing with his daughter, relishing the precious moments of watching those milestones, and his fingers itched with the desire to avenge himself for what he had missed. What had been his by right.

He heard Julia running down the stairs behind him and, in the absence of Caroline and her cursed lover, he could feel his body pulsating to unleash his terrible wrath on the slightly built woman following him.

She would have been party to the decision to keep him in the dark about the birth of his child. Whatever her motives for contacting him now, and those motives would surely have something to do with money, she had agreed with the plan to say nothing to him.

He reached the bottom of the staircase and strode into the kitchen. He had to stop himself from smashing things on the way, destroying the contented little nest around him, a contented little nest in which his daughter had been raised. By another man.

Once in the kitchen, he paused and tried to control himself, to regain some of his natural self-composure, which had been blown to smithereens in the space of three short hours.

Somehow he would deal with this. And somehow Julia Nash would be made to pay for the torture she had subjected him to. It mattered not that Caroline and her lover were now no longer around to be held accountable for their vile actions.

Julia Nash was here, accessory to the crime as far as he was concerned, and she would pay the price.

She ran into the kitchen, her face distressed, and he looked at her in stony silence.

‘Don’t even dare think that you can make excuses for Caroline and what she did! Don’t even imagine for one minute that you can justify the immorality of her decision!’

Their eyes locked, Julia helpless to break free from the ice-cold blackness of his stare.

‘How dared she think that she could play God and make decisions that would affect my life and the life of my own flesh and blood? And you…’ he added in a voice thick with contempt, ‘how did you feel watching your brother do the job that should rightfully have been mine?’

‘That’s not fair!’ Julia protested, even though she knew that she was doing little more than shouting in a wind because he was not going to listen to a word she said. But still, she had to defend them both. She might not have agreed with what they had decided to do, but she had been able to see their point. Caroline was terrified that Riccardo, had he known of the existence of his daughter, would do his best to gain custody. The thought of having the fruit of his loins raised by another man would have been anathema to him. So she had silenced Julia’s objections. She had reasoned that, however much the courts decided in favour of the mother, Riccardo Fabbrini had the power and the wealth to get exactly what he wanted.

‘How dare you talk to me about fair?’ he gritted. He slammed his fist on the counter, tipping the edge of the saucer resting beneath her cup, and sent both shattering to the ground. She doubted that he was even aware of it.

‘You wouldn’t have been married to her!’ she persisted, mutinously defying the warning in his eyes. ‘You’re not comparing like with like. You might have seen Nicola on weekends, but you still wouldn’t have shared the completeness of a family home. The marriage was over well before she was born. Before she was conceived, even!’

Riccardo refused to hear the sense behind what she was saying. He felt like a man who had suddenly and inexplicably had the rug pulled from under his feet and in the process found himself freefalling through thin air off the edge of a precipice. No, reason was the last thing that appealed.

The small brown sparrow in front of him might be pleading for his understanding, but understanding was the least emotion accessible to him right now.

‘Now that you know, we need to talk about Nicola, decide how often you want to see her.’ Julia spoke even though her mouth felt dry, and she had to move to the kitchen table and sit down, because her legs were beginning to feel very uncooperative.

She sat down and ran her fingers through her thick shoulder-length hair, tucking it nervously behind her ears. This meeting had all gone so very wrong that she had no idea where anything was heading any more. She had expected a more civilised reaction, a more accommodating approach. She knew that he was a force to be reckoned with in the world of business. She had reasonably deduced that, that being the case, he would respond with the efficient detachment which would have been part and parcel of his working persona. She had not banked on his natural passion, which now flowed around him in invisible waves, putting paid to any thoughts of a reasonable approach.

‘A calm, phlegmatic British approach to a problem, is that it? I am supposed to quietly accept years of premeditated deceit with a smile on my face and then get down to visiting rights. Is that it?’

‘Something like that,’ Julia admitted hopefully.

‘I might have been educated in your fine British system, but I am not a phlegmatic British man,’ Riccardo informed her icily. ‘When it comes to business I may don the clothes of the businessman and speak with the civilised tongue of your country and deal with the savagery of the concrete jungle with cold-headed judgement, but when it comes to my personal life I am a man of passion.’

Julia felt an involuntary shiver of awareness run through her body like an electric shock.

A man of passion. She had seen that for herself and how! When it comes to my personal life… The blood rushed to her head as she imagined the personal life he had in mind. His passion had overwhelmed Caroline. His powerful drive, instead of sweeping her along, had left her flailing. Had it been that way in bed too? Had his passion driven her into a state of numbed frigidity? She imagined that wild, un-tamed side of him making love, bringing all his suffocating masculinity to bear upon the object of his desire. The picture shocked her with its vividness and for a few seconds reduced her to a state of confusion.

She shook her head, feeling winded. ‘Passion won’t help us deal with this situation,’ Julia said carefully, treading on thin ice. ‘Nicola has never met you. She has no idea who you are and she’ll be terrified if you suddenly appear on the scene and try to take her over. She’s finding it hard enough to come to terms with losing her…’ she nearly fell into the trap of saying her parents and reined in the instinct at the last moment ‘…Martin and Caroline. She will need to be approached with gentleness.’

It took supreme will-power not to give vent to the violent host of objections Julia’s little speech produced inside him. He could understand her reason, but, like a wounded and raging bull, he simply wanted to strike out.

Had this calmly spoken girl ever felt anything like the hurt searing through his every muscle now? Had she ever felt what it was like to have your world upended through no fault of your own? Because that was how he felt.

This morning he had been in control of his vastly successful life. He had held his dynasty in the palm of his hand and was gratifyingly aware of the sensual magnetism with which he was blessed, and which could draw any woman he wanted to him.

Now he was being lectured to by this seemingly demure but frustratingly obstinate, mousy-haired woman on how to handle a situation the likes of which he had never expected to encounter. Now he was father to a child and a stranger to her as well.

‘I need something stiffer than a cup of coffee,’ he said abruptly. Julia thought that perhaps she did as well, especially considering that her own cup of coffee lay in splinters on the ground, something she had temporarily forgotten about. She wearily bent down and began gathering the shards of blue porcelain, tipping them into the bin, while he watched her, his face showing his own intense preoccupation with his thoughts.

She was so busy watching him from under her lashes, wondering whether she could second-guess what he would say next, that when the stray splinter of china rammed into her finger it took her a few seconds to register the pain, and only then because of the sight of the blood.

She stood up quickly, holding the injured finger and biting down on her lower lip to stifle the edge of pain. Pain was not a problem, but the blood threatened to bring on a fainting fit.

She hardly expected him to play the knight in shining armour to her damsel in distress, but perhaps it was just part of his nature to take over.

‘What have you done?’

‘What does it look like? I’ve cut my finger!’

He took hold of her hand, inspecting the gash left by the shard, and, with a gentleness that took her by surprise, slowly and efficiently pulled out the offending splinter. His hands were steady and assured. Julia felt the warmth of his hand around hers, the slight abrasiveness of his skin, and she stifled a tremor.

‘First-aid kit?’

‘It’s in the… I’ll just go and fetch it…’

Instead of releasing her hand, he walked with her to the small utility room, and when she indicated a cupboard to the left he reached up and extracted a cardboard box that was crammed to overflowing with medication of every variety, most of them suitable for young children. He still had her hand in his. Considering what they had just been through and the currents of hostility that had flowed between them, their physical closeness now was like a parody of intimacy.

‘This is your first-aid kit?’ he demanded, and Julia’s grey eyes clashed stormily with his.

‘Yes, it is. And before you start telling me that it’s not up to your high regulation standards, I’d just like to remind you that I didn’t ask for your help! I’m quite capable of seeing to a cut finger!’

‘You are as white as a sheet. Where are the plasters? All I can see are cough medicines.’

‘They’re in there somewhere.’ She rummaged through the box and extracted a sad-looking packet wherein lay a stack of plasters adorned with brightly coloured cartoon characters. ‘Nicola likes Winnie the Pooh,’ she told him tersely, extracting one of the plasters. ‘I’ll wash my finger before I put this on.’

There was no need. Before she could pluck it from his grasp, he took her finger to his mouth and sucked. The action was so shockingly intimate that Julia stared at him open-mouthed. His dark head was bent, but he raised his eyes to meet hers. Was he caressing her finger with his tongue? she thought dazedly. No, of course not. Her body appeared to be on fire. Another illusion, she thought, distracted.

‘Saliva is the best antiseptic,’ he said, finally removing her finger and holding it up to inspect it. ‘There, that looks a lot cleaner now. Give me the plaster.’

She handed him the plaster and, still ridiculously shaken, watched while he gently wrapped it around the slither of open skin. The sight of the blood must have destabilised her more than she had thought at first, Julia decided. She had always had a peculiarly strong aversion to blood. That was probably why her breathing was as laboured as if she had just completed a ten-mile marathon.

That was probably why she wasn’t even aware of her mother’s presence until she said, mildly but inquisitively, ‘Julia! What’s going on here? Have I interrupted something?’

‘No, of course not, Mum.’

Riccardo watched the play of emotion shadowing the fine-boned, pale face through narrowed eyes. Her mother had startled her, that was for sure, but more than that. She had sprung back guiltily. Afraid of what…?

‘You’ve been on a date? I thought you said you were going to the pub with some friends! You never told me you had a young man.’ Her voice was full of misdirected pleasure and Julia felt herself reddening.

She should have told her mother what she was going to do, that she was going to contact Nicola’s father, but she had kept it to herself, reasoning that she would confess when everything had been settled. If he had not turned up or else had walked away from the problem then there would have been no need for painful explanations to her mother afterwards.

‘Mum…’ Her eyes flickered resentfully towards Riccardo. ‘This is…’

‘Riccardo Fabbrini. Nicola’s father.’ The biting sting of anger resurfaced as he extended his hand towards the small, grey-haired woman standing in the doorway.

‘Nicola’s father.’ Jeannette Nash tentatively took his hand while her eyes flicked past him to search out her daughter. ‘I do apologise. I thought…’

‘Yes, Mum.’ Julia briskly stepped away from Riccardo and edged past her mother back into the sanctuary of the brightly lit kitchen. ‘I know what you thought. I didn’t want to tell you that I was contacting Mr Fabbrini, just in case…’ Her voice faltered and when she turned around it was to meet his steely gaze.

‘Just in case the meeting was unsuccessful,’ he expanded coldly on her behalf. ‘Just in case I was the sort of man who would walk out on his responsibilities. As your daughter has discovered, I am very far from being that sort of man.’

‘I wish you’d told me, Julia,’ her mother accused and Julia sighed. ‘What were the two of you doing in the utility?’

Julia had always known how deeply her mother had felt about Caroline’s deception and, in the absence of all those telling confidences about Riccardo’s personality, Jeannette had stifled her instinct to intervene with great difficulty. All she had seen was a brief, loveless marriage born in haste and rued at leisure. Something to be mourned but for which he should never have been punished by the absence of his own flesh and blood.

‘Cleaning up a cut finger,’ Riccardo answered. He shoved his hands inside his pockets and perched against the kitchen counter, his long legs casually crossed at the ankles.

‘Nicola isn’t awake, is she?’ Julia asked suddenly and her mother shook her head with a smile.

‘Sleeping like a log. I only woke up to use the bathroom and then I thought I’d come down here and fetch myself a glass of water. You know how difficult it is for me to sleep these days, my love.’ She turned to Riccardo and said, with forthright honesty, ‘This must be a very difficult situation for you. I’m so very sorry but, well, I’m glad that you’re here now.’

Riccardo found that he couldn’t resist the genuine sincerity in the faded blue eyes and he offered a half-smile, the first Julia had witnessed since she had first clapped eyes on him.

‘I’ll leave you two alone. I’m sure there’s a lot that you need to sort out between yourselves.’ She bustled over to a cupboard and poured herself a glass of water. ‘I shall see you again very soon, Mr Fabbrini.’

‘Riccardo. You can call me Riccardo.’ His mouth twisted. ‘After all, I am a member of the family now.

‘Several years too late,’ he said softly as her mother left the kitchen. ‘But here now, Miss Nash. Are you not thrilled to have accomplished what you set out to do?’ He flashed her a bitterly mirthless smile and pushed himself away from the counter.

How many more members of this cosy little unit from which he had been ruthlessly excluded? he wondered. Aunts and uncles in the background? Cousins maybe? A full life just lacking the ingredient of father?

Except, he thought with hard-edged cynicism, Nicola had had a father. This woman’s brother. The only father she had ever known. She’d called him Daddy and sat on his shoulders when they went to the park.

Riccardo’s shuttered gaze concealed his white-hot fury. For a few seconds back there, as he had dealt with her finger, he had felt a certain uninvited empathy with her. It hadn’t lasted. Nor would it return.

‘You said you wanted something stronger than coffee,’ Julia said, avoiding his rhetorical question. ‘I have some wine in the fridge, but that’s about it.’

‘As frugal in matters of alcohol as your sister-in-law was?’

‘I prefer to keep my head.’ Especially now, she thought as she opened the fridge and extracted a bottle of Sauvignon. She could feel his heavy-lidded dark eyes raking over her as she poured them both a glass of wine, his a large glass, which might do something to take the edge off that ferocious fury which she could feel him tightly keeping in check, hers a smaller glass, just enough to cope.

So in control, Riccardo thought, or at least determined to be. Which made her little slip-ups all the more intriguing. She hadn’t been in control when he had taken her finger into his mouth. Her body had become rigidly still and he had breathed in her unwilling response to him, to the warmth of his tongue rubbing against the soft flesh of her finger. And then when her mother had surprised them she had been startled. The obvious answer was that she felt guilty to have gone behind her mother’s back and contacted him, but there was something else.

He imagined what it would be like for her to see her carefully planned life brought to a standstill, just as his had been.

‘Why did you decide to contact me?’ he asked, sitting down at the table and pushing back the chair so that he could extend his long legs in front of him. His fingers caressed the rounded contours of the wine glass before he brought it to his lips, sipping some of the wine while he continued to direct his unsettling gaze on Julia’s face. ‘Would it not have been easier to have maintained the secret rather than risk kick-starting a situation you might end up having no control over?’ Here’s where the money angle comes in, he thought cynically.

Julia, sitting opposite him, elbows on the table like a child being interviewed, lowered her eyes. ‘I did what I thought I had to do,’ she said. ‘When Caroline was alive I respected her wishes…’

‘Because you agreed with her, because you saw nothing wrong in writing off my existence…’

‘Because it was what she wanted. Because I loved my brother and wanted what I thought was best for them both.’ Her jaw hardened and she challenged him to try and prolong the probing. ‘What we have to deal with is reality. What’s happening now.’

Riccardo forced himself to let it go. He was so unused to having to let anything go when his instinct told him to pursue that the withdrawal felt like bile in his mouth. ‘For which you no doubt have a plan.’

‘I don’t think you should tell Nicola who you are to start with…’ When his mouth opened in outrage she firmly stood her ground, refusing to back away. ‘I know this is hard for you to accept, but I don’t think she can cope with too much now. Get to know her and when she trusts you then perhaps you can tell her who you are, tell her that you are her blood father.’

‘As opposed to what your brother was, you mean?’ His lips curled and she met his eyes evenly.

‘That’s right. She’s always known that Martin wasn’t her real father. Neither he nor Caroline pretended to her otherwise.’

‘I will come and see her tomorrow. When she finishes school. What time does she get home? Do you bring her home with you? Does she attend the same school where you teach?’

More at home with being the one who answered the questions as opposed to posing them, Riccardo grudgingly acknowledged the shift in emphasis.

‘Yes, I teach at her school, but not in the junior section. I teach the older pupils, and I’ve been leaving school early so that she can come home with me. I do a lot of my work from home now, after school hours.’

Riccardo had a glimpse of her view of things and it irked him to realise that she was due some sympathy as well. Her life had been changed too, though, he reminded himself grimly, not quite to the same extent as his. He finished his wine and refused the offer of a refill. She, he noted, had toyed with hers, barely drinking any.

‘We’re normally back home by around four-thirty. If you like, you can drop by around five. She should have had her bath by then.’

Riccardo stood up. It had, he conceded, been the longest day of his life. He slung on his jacket while Julia hovered by the table, keeping herself at a distance, he noticed. He wanted to have another look at his daughter, drink in her sleeping face before he left, but no, there would be time enough tomorrow.

‘Does your mother live here with you both?’ he asked, as they walked towards the front door, Julia virtually sprinting to keep pace with his long strides.

‘She has her own place. She was here to babysit.’

‘And you? Where did you live?’ He paused by the door, frowning at her as he tried to complete the pieces to this jigsaw that had now become a part of his well-ordered life.

‘I rented a flat,’ Julia told him vaguely.

‘This arrangement must have dented your freedom,’ he said without the slightest indication of sympathy in his voice, and when she returned his look with a puzzled one of her own he shrugged. ‘Men. A five-year-old chaperon can’t have been welcome.’

‘It hasn’t been a problem,’ Julia told him stiffly. She yanked open the front door to find that the rain had softened to a steady, bone-chilling drizzle.

‘Because there’s no man.’ Riccardo watched as her face reddened and the defiant shake of her head couldn’t quite hide the fact that his offhand assumption had struck home. ‘Is that why your mama sounded so pleased when she thought you had brought home a date?’ He felt a curl of satisfaction as he watched her flounder. He had spent the past few hours floundering. Now it felt good to have the shoe on the other foot, even though the situations could not be compared.

‘You’re here because of your daughter,’ Julia informed him coldly. ‘My personal life has nothing to do with you.’ The jeering mockery in his eyes sent her reeling back to that secret place where all her insecurities lay hidden, but never in a million years would she let him see that.

‘Which suits me,’ he countered smoothly, the hard lines of his face accentuated by the play of shadows from the dim front porch light overhead. ‘Till tomorrow. And I am warning you, from now, I will not be open to debate on when I see my daughter. You may hold the upper hand at the moment, Miss Nash, but time has a nasty habit of changing things…’

CHAPTER THREE

‘HE SEEMS like a nice man, considering.’

‘Considering?’ Julia finished plaiting Nicola’s hair and tugged both ends so that the child swung around to look at her. Her eyes were almond-shaped and probably not quite as onyx-black as her father’s, but the thick lashes were the same. Nice man?

‘Who seems like a nice man?’

Julia and her mother exchanged a look. ‘Just someone who’s going to be coming around in a little while, honey.’

‘Oh. Can I watch cartoons on TV before tea?’

‘Not at the moment. In a while, maybe.’

‘Considering…’ her mother hissed, doing something comical with her eyebrows that would have made Julia burst out laughing if the subject matter at hand had not been quite so grim.

‘What’s for tea, Aunty Jules?’

‘Chicken.’

‘I hate chicken. Do I have to eat it?’ Nicola stuck her hands in the pockets of her dungarees and made a face.

‘Chicken nuggets.’

‘I do wish…’ her mother began and Julia flashed her a warning glare. ‘Well…and he’s very handsome.’

Julia, who had spent the day in a state of muted dread, almost found herself wishing that the doorbell would ring. She had been down this conversational route with her mother countless times before, daily, it seemed to her, since Caroline and Martin were no longer around to provide a buffer, and she wasn’t about to go down it again.

‘Not interested,’ Julia hissed, edging her mother away from curious infantile ears. Amazing, she had discovered, what they managed to pick up when you could swear that their concentration was focused firmly on something else. ‘I’m fine, Mum. I have my job. I’m perfectly happy. I certainly don’t need a man.’ And I most certainly don’t need a man like Riccardo Fabbrini, she added silently to herself.

‘But it would be nice to see you sorted out, Jules. It won’t be easy, you know…’ her mother’s eyes flitted tellingly to Nicola, who was absorbed in drawing a picture, her face a study in concentration ‘…bringing up Nicola all on your own.’

‘Mum. Please. Not now. Please? He’s going to be here any minute now.’

‘And look at you. Old jeans, checked shirt, flat shoes…’

Julia grinned. ‘You know me. Twenty-seven going on twelve. It’s a reaction to having to deal with nine-and ten-year-olds all day long.’

‘Well, darling, that’s as maybe, but…’

Fortunately, Julia was not required to hear the end of her mother’s predictable sermon on the joys of marital bliss and the sadness of an old woman’s heart when her only daughter appeared to be doing nothing about acquiring any of the said marital bliss.

She wiped her clammy hands on her jeans and slowly pulled open the front door.

Riccardo Fabbrini was every bit as daunting as she remembered. One night’s restless sleep had not managed to steel her against the reaction she instinctively felt as their eyes met and the force of his aggressive personality settled around her like a miasma.

This time he was not in a suit. Perhaps he had thought that a suit might have been a little offputting for a casual meeting with his five-year-old daughter.

His informal attire did nothing to deaden his impact, however. The cream jumper and dark green trousers only served to emphasise the striking olive tones of his colouring.

‘Is she here?’ he asked tersely and Julia nodded, standing well back as he walked into the hall, carrying in his hands two large boxes.

‘In the kitchen, with Mum.’ No preliminaries. He had come, she thought without much surprise, with his hostility firmly in place. It was stamped in the harsh coldness of his face as his black eyes had swept over her. A night’s sleep certainly had done nothing for his temper.

‘Your mother is here as well? To give you a bit of moral support, Miss Nash? What do you imagine I am going to do? Kidnap my daughter and spirit her away to foreign shores?’

‘For her sake, perhaps, you might want to maintain a semblance of courtesy.’

Riccardo nodded curtly. He had taken the day off work, had gone to Hamley’s and spent more hours than he would ever have imagined possible to spend in a toy store, looking for the perfect toy. A difficult task, considering he had not the slightest idea what five-year-old girls liked, and now here he was, already being outmanoeuvred by this chit of a woman with her bookish spectacles and neat outfit.

Overnight, his rage had quietened. But only marginally. He had, however, managed to recognise that he would have to play along with her rules for the moment. Whatever his paternal status, Julia Nash knew his child and he didn’t. It was as simple as that. The recognition, far from slaying his thirst for revenge, a revenge thwarted as his ex-wife was no longer around, only muted it slightly. The blood that ran through his veins was too grounded in passion to lightly release the past and calmly accept the future without demur.

The kitchen was warm and cosy. That was his first impression as he walked through the door behind Julia. A scene of perfect domesticity. At the kitchen table, Nicola sat with her head bowed over a piece of paper, and Jeannette Nash bustled by the kitchen counter, stirring custard in a saucepan. He felt like an intruder with his packages clutched in his hands.

Jeannette was the first to break the ice, much to Julia’s relief. She turned around and smiled, wooden spoon still in her hand.

‘Riccardo, how lovely to see you again. Nicola, darling, we have a visitor.’

Nicola looked up from what she was doing and Riccardo felt a wave of unsteadiness wash over him as he looked at the little girl at the table, her dark hair braided away from her face, her dark brown eyes staring back at him with mild curiosity.

‘Hello…’ This was such new terrain for him, a man normally in command of any situation life had ever been able to throw at him, that he instinctively looked towards Julia, who read the awkwardness in his eyes and felt her heart soften towards the powerful, aggressive man now hovering uncertainly in front of his daughter.

‘Nicola,’ she said quietly, ‘why don’t you show Riccardo what you’re drawing? He loves art and he’s never seen what a talented five-year-old girl can do.’ Loves art indeed, she thought wryly. Although, he did, didn’t he? The memory struggled out from the dim recesses of her brain, the memory of Caroline telling her that that was one of the first things that attracted her to him. They had met at an art show and he had been deeply and genuinely interested in the pieces, had been able to talk at length and knowledgeably about paintings. She had misread his interest for an insight into a sensitive nature. Time, she had said more than once, had put paid to that illusion.