He lifted his head to meet her stare. ‘When you say the first time it happened in front of you…?’
She sighed and took another tiny sip. ‘When the convulsions started, I was still in the rehab centre. Aislin was the one to deal with it. She had to deal with everything about his condition until I was well enough to play my part.’
His dark brown eyes stayed on hers thoughtfully. She thought he was going to say something but he didn’t.
With the warmth from the liquor making her feel calmer inside, she decided now was the time to tell him.
‘I’ve been thinking about your suggestion of Finn and I moving in with you,’ she said tentatively.
He raised a brow.
‘And I think you’re right. It would be better for Finn to live here.’
He continued staring at her expressionlessly.
‘We’ll move in with you…if the offer still stands,’ she added when the lack of emotion on his face injected a jolt of ice up her spine.
He took a much larger drink of his liquor. ‘Are you prepared to marry me?’
‘You already know the answer to that.’
‘You still refuse my proposal?’
‘Come on, Tonino, it’s nothing personal. I just don’t want us to marry.’
‘Then I decline.’
She uncurled her legs and sat upright. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have been thinking too and I have decided it has to be marriage or nothing.’
‘What? But why?’
‘Because it’s the only way I can trust that you’re committed to us.’
‘Living with you would show that commitment.’
He shook his head violently and downed the last of his drink. ‘No, dolcezza, all it would show is that you’re committed for the next five minutes.’
‘You still don’t trust me?’
His burst of laughter was loud and bitter. ‘Unfortunately I have the opposite problem. I do trust you. I know you well enough now that I believe you always intended to tell me about Finn. I know you well enough to say with confidence that your reasons for keeping the pregnancy secret from me were justified—I still think they were wrong, but I believe you believed you were doing the right thing.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
He unscrewed the bottle and poured himself another full glass. ‘I’m saying that you always do what you think is best for Finn. He is your priority.’
‘As he should be.’
‘Agreed. But not at the cost of tying yourself to a man you don’t love or trust. If you loved or trusted me, you would marry me. But you don’t so all you’re prepared to give is a half-hearted commitment that you can walk away from any time you like.’
‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘No? You say that when you don’t deny you neither love nor trust me?’
‘Well, it’s hardly as if you love me.’
‘Don’t I?’
She blinked. ‘Do you?’
His gaze held hers before he shook his head grimly and had another drink. ‘When we were on the beach last week, you accused me of treating you like a joke four years ago. The truth is, you were the one who treated me like a joke. You treated me like I was nothing.’
Indignant, she snapped, ‘I did not…’
‘Then why did you not give me a chance to defend myself against Sophia’s lies? You have never explained that to me.’
She opened her mouth to answer but nothing came out.
Why hadn’t she confronted him?
‘Why did you run?’ he asked roughly. ‘Why block my number? If you’d cared for me in any way, you would have given me that chance.’
‘I ran because I was already an emotional wreck,’ she blurted out.
He stared at her grimly. His mouth clamped shut, forcing her to fill the silence.
‘The day you went to Tuscany, I went to see my father. I knew he was due back in Sicily that day and I was desperate to finally meet him.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them back. The last thing she needed right then was to cry but the memory had surfaced with painful vividness. She wished it would lock itself back in its box. ‘He wouldn’t see me. He refused. The dirty little secret had to remain a dirty little secret. And then I got to the hotel and found Sophia waiting for me with evidence that the man I’d been sleeping with was engaged to another woman and I felt sick with myself and so ashamed.’
Not a flicker of emotion crossed his stony face. ‘Even if Sophia had been telling the truth it wouldn’t have been your fault.’
‘Maybe not but that’s not how it felt. In the space of two hours I’d been rejected by my father and learned the man I was falling in love with was a cheat and a liar. All I could think of was getting out of Sicily and away from the Sicilian men who’d lied and hurt me.’
‘So because your father was a womanising coward, you decided I was of the same mould? Without giving me the right to reply, you grabbed the chance to run away, and when you found you were pregnant and discovered the family I come from is powerful, it gave you another excuse to keep your distance for that bit longer, didn’t it? You don’t trust anyone.’
‘I trust you…’
‘Do not lie to me,’ he snarled with such force she jumped. ‘The only person you trust is your sister. If you trusted me even a little you wouldn’t go to such great lengths to hide from me. You share your body with me every night, you sleep in my arms, yet you think me a shallow misogynist who runs at the first sight of a blemish on a woman’s skin.’
‘I don’t think that about you.’
‘Then explain yourself. Tell me why I am not good enough to look at you.’
‘It isn’t like that,’ she beseeched, fighting even harder to stop the tears from falling. ‘My scars will disgust you.’
‘Your opinion of me is even worse than I thought.’
‘No, that is not what I’m saying. My scars…’ She tugged at her hair and tried to verbalise everything racing through her burning brain. ‘I remember the woman I was—the woman you remember—and then I look in the mirror and see the woman I’ve become, and I’m reminded of everything I’ve lost and everything Finn’s lost. That seizure he had today…that was mild compared to the ones he used to have. He has suffered every single day of his life and he will never have a normal childhood. I woke up in a hospital unable to move and unable to communicate. I didn’t know if the child in my belly was dead or alive. I couldn’t hold him until he was a year old and even then Aislin had to help because I was too weak to hold him on my own. I screamed with pain every day for a year and pushed myself harder than I would have believed possible to get home to my child and all I have to show for it now are the scars on my body. My pain is over, but his suffering will never end. I look at my scars and my heart shreds for the suffering our child has to bear, which he will have to bear every day for the rest of his life, and you think I should flaunt them to you?’
His jaw throbbed. ‘No, dolcezza, I do not expect you to flaunt them. I expect you to share them with me as the father of your child who feels terrible guilt that his bit of fun with a beautiful Irishwoman had such tragic consequences.’
Feeling all the emotions inside her leech out, Orla put her glass on the floor and buried her face in her hands. ‘You have nothing to feel guilty about. You have only tried to do the right thing since you learned about Finn.’
‘I missed the first three years of his life. Those are years I will never get back.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We are both beyond apologies, do you not think? We both feel guilt, but we have to try and accept that it does not solve anything. You have put our child first since the day you learned you carried him. It is time for me to put him first too. I want to be a permanent part of his life, but I see that it is impossible.’
‘What are you sayi
ng?’
‘That you should return to Ireland with him. It’s his home. His language. Where he is comfortable and familiar.’
‘But…’
‘I will still see him. I visit Ireland regularly. And I will have him visit for holidays.’
‘That does not sound like the joint custody we spoke of.’
‘Joint custody will not work for Finn. He needs stability. You are his stability.’ Tonino squeezed his eyes shut as he recalled the look in Finn’s eyes when he’d come out of the seizure and locked onto Orla’s loving stare. Orla was his son’s world. He had to accept that.
‘Stay here for a few more days to let him recover from the seizure. I will take myself away somewhere.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Dragging air into his tightened lungs, he picked up the bottle, got to his feet and took three heavy paces to the bar.
‘Tonino…’ she said tentatively. ‘Are you calling it a day between us?’
He laughed. ‘Dio, you nearly sound upset.’
Four years ago Orla hadn’t known of his trappings of wealth and had fallen for him regardless. She’d looked into his heart as no one else had done and fallen for him…but only to a point. The moment doubts had crept in she’d run away like the coward she was. And now, four years on, when she knew perfectly well his wealth, still she looked in the heart of him and decided he wasn’t enough. She did not love him. She did not trust him.
He did not believe she would ever trust him. Without trust there could never be love.
‘But is that what you’re saying?’ she persisted. ‘You want to call it off because I won’t marry you? And you’re the one who laughed at me for being old-fashioned?’
‘Do not dare use humour to wriggle out of this,’ he snarled, twisting round to face her. ‘I have done nothing but my best to accommodate you.’
‘For Finn’s sake,’ she whispered. All the colour had drained from her face.
‘And for yours.’ He swore loudly and poured himself another drink. ‘Everything I have done has been with you in mind too and all you do is resist me. You won’t give an inch and you won’t trust me, not with your heart, your body or our son’s health.’
‘That’s not fair and it’s not true—’
‘For the last time, stop lying!’ He slammed his glass on the bar, spilling amber liquid all over his hand and the bar surface. There was clarity in the spilled liquid that focused the mind and made him take a long breath to find clarity in his thoughts. ‘If you can’t stop lying to me then at least stop lying to yourself.’
Tonino would not lie to himself any more either. After four years of lies, the truth he had buried deep in his subconscious had risen up as clear as the spilt liquor on his hand.
He had never got over Orla.
He suspected that he’d fallen in love with her four years ago. He’d certainly never forgotten her or got over her, even when he’d carried on with his life and pushed her from his mind. Only in his dreams had she come back to him. Orla was the reason he’d never settled down. It was nothing to do with punishing his parents—it was because there was no room left in his heart for anyone else.
He suspected too that his purchase of the Bally House Hotel in Dublin had been a subconscious effort to put himself on the same soil as her.
And he suspected, too, that if he continued to live under the same roof as her, knowing his love for her would be unrequited for ever, he would drive himself insane.
All these years he’d been waiting for Orla to come back to him and he hadn’t even known it.
He’d finally had a taste of life as a family with the woman he loved and the child he worshipped but it wasn’t enough for her. He wasn’t enough for her.
Any ties they’d forged together had been ripped apart.
It was time to say goodbye.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ORLA INSPECTED FINN from head to toe, ensuring not a speck of lint or dust marred his miniature tuxedo, then rewarded him with a beaming smile. ‘You, young man, look delicious.’
He beamed.
‘In fact, if your daddy wasn’t about to whisk you to the wedding, I would gobble you all up!’
‘Tell your mummy to save some of that deliciousness for me,’ Aislin piped up.
‘I don’t do sharing.’
‘Then you won’t mind if I eat the giant chocolate bar Dante bought for me all by myself.’
Orla stuck her tongue out at her sister, then felt familiar panic skittle through her veins when the doorbell rang.
That would be Tonino here to collect Finn.
In the month since they’d decided—since he’d decided—that they should call time on their relationship, Orla’s life had changed immeasurably. For a start, she’d put her Dublin house up for sale and moved in with Aislin and Dante. One thing her time with Tonino had taught her was that she didn’t have to do everything alone. She’d thought when Aislin moved to Sicily that she would be fine coping with Finn alone with the medical team on-hand.
She’d been wrong.
She’d been lonely.
She’d proved to herself that she could cope but coping wasn’t living.
Tonino had shown her what it was like to live and have fun again. To be a woman, not purely a mother. And, for all Tonino’s selflessness, he and Finn deserved to be in each other’s lives. Living in Sicily allowed them to spend plenty of time together. It also allowed his family to drop by at all hours to see Finn too. Mercifully, Dante and most of his staff spoke excellent English and translated when needed.
She wouldn’t stay with Aislin and Dante for too long. Dante had convinced one of his neighbours that they really wanted to accept an astronomical amount of money for Orla and Finn to buy their home.
Turning to her sister, hoping she would handle the handover as she usually did, she found Aislin with her feet up on the coffee table munching her way through the chocolate bar. She’d hinted darkly a number of times that it was time for Orla to face him alone. She supposed that time was now.
It was fine. She could do it. All she had to do was open the door and wheel Finn to him. Tonino had everything else in hand. She wouldn’t have to worry about her son at all. He was never safer and in better care than with his father.
‘Come on, Finn,’ she said brightly, plastering a smile to her face so big a clown would be envious. One of Tonino’s cousins was getting married at his Tuscan hotel. He and Finn and two nurses would fly on his private jet there and stay the night, returning at lunchtime tomorrow.
The smile died when she looked into Tonino’s expressionless handsome face and her heart erupted.
He stood at the front door dressed in an identical tuxedo to Finn, the scent of a recent shower and recently applied cologne coming off him in waves.
He nodded at her but avoided her eye. ‘All well?’
She nodded back. ‘All well.’
‘Bene. I will see you tomorrow.’
She kissed Finn on the cheek, told him she loved him then stepped back to let Tonino take over.
Another whiff of cologne caught in her senses. A whisper of memory emerged…
Knees suddenly weakening, she pressed herself against the wall by the door.
The missing pieces of her time with Tonino flashed through her retinas with the speed of a bullet.
She remembered.
She remembered making love to him. She remembered the first wonderful, tender time. She remembered all the others.
She remembered the abandon. The hedonism. The wantonness. The feeling that what they were sharing together was so wonderful and perfect that it could never be wrong.
The car pulled away. She watched, blurry eyed, until it disappeared from sight, the world only coming back into focus when another memory shot through her brain. The final memory. The last missing piece.
> Her heart began to hammer and she put a fist in her mouth to stop herself from howling.
With his baby growing in her belly, she’d cyber-stalked him. She’d cyber-stalked him for months, bracing herself for a picture of Tonino and a new lover to appear. When she’d translated the article accompanying the photo of Tonino and Giulia and learned she was his sister, not his lover, Finn had kicked her so hard it had physically hurt. That kick had delivered some much-needed sense into her.
That had been the moment she’d realised she loved Tonino.
She sank to the ground and hugged her knees to her chest as the memories flooded her and the truth she’d hidden from screamed at her.
In her heart, Orla had been waiting for the real Tonino to reveal himself. He’d been too handsome, too sexy and too chivalrous for it to all be true. She’d put him on a pedestal fully expecting him to be knocked off it and knocked off he had been. Sophia’s confrontation with her, however much it had sickened her, had almost come as a relief.
Because there was no way a man like Tonino could return her feelings. Her father didn’t want her, her mother had abandoned her…why would a man like Tonino want her when he could have any woman in the whole wide world? She’d believed that long before she’d learned he was as rich as Croesus.
But he had wanted her! He’d lied about his identity but no one could fake the affection he’d shown her or fake his desire.
Orla had known then that whatever fears she had, she needed to go to him. She’d needed to see him in the flesh and tell him of the life they’d created together. To give him the chance to defend himself, as she should have done from the start. To tell him that she loved him. To see if they could possibly have a future together.
So desperate had she been to get to him that she’d booked a flight online without caring who the carrier was, grabbed her passport and set off to Dublin airport, barely registering the atrocious weather conditions.
She’d been on her way to Tonino.
She remembered slowing to a crawl, intending to pull over when visibility got to less than zero, but the accident itself was a blank. That was one memory she would never get back.
Her Sicilian Baby Revelation (Mills & Boon Modern) Page 15
