by Abby Green
Rose stopped talking when she saw Zac’s hand tighten on his wine glass. He was still looking at her, and she saw him pale slightly under his olive skin. Suddenly he stood up, his chair making a harsh sound on the stone terrace.
Completely perplexed by his reaction, Rose put down her napkin and said hesitantly, ‘Zac...?’
She got up and walked over to where he stood, facing out over the countryside. Dusk gathered around them, lengthening the shadows. Rose felt as if she’d intruded onto something intensely private.
She looked up at his strong profile. And then, before he even said anything, it clicked. This was why he looked so at ease here and spoke fluent Italian. He was from here. This was his land. She could see it now, stamped indelibly onto his proud features. That aquiline Italian profile. She said faintly, ‘They’re your relations... But how...?’
A muscle pulsed in Zac’s jaw, but eventually he said, ‘My father. He was Luca Valenti. Born and raised here in the village. He worked in the local mine until he emigrated to New York when he was twenty-five, looking for a better life.’
Rose frowned, not comprehending. ‘But your parents... I mean your mother...she is—’
He cut in, looking at her now, and said almost accusingly, ‘She is not who you think. Jocelyn Lyndon-Holt is my grandmother—not my mother.’
‘But how?’ Rose couldn’t get her head around it. She caught Zac’s dry look and said, ‘Well, obviously your mother must have been...’
‘Her daughter. Her only child. Simone Lyndon-Holt.’
Rose realised then that she’d never really given much thought to why Zac had taken the name Valenti; she’d gone to work at the Lyndon-Holt house shortly after he’d left and had vague memories of the press assuming at the time that he’d plucked it from obscurity. But it was his name—his actual real name.
‘But how did your mother meet your father if he was—?’
‘An immigrant?’ Zac supplied with a bitter tone.
Rose half shrugged and nodded. She was the daughter of immigrants, so she hadn’t meant it like that.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, clearly reluctant to speak of this. But Rose was too greedy for information to tell him he didn’t need to go on. This, she was just discovering, was her child’s heritage. Its real heritage.
‘My mother met my father when he was hired as a labourer to work on the grounds at the house. She was twenty-one and promised in marriage to a man from a family of similar standing. She was ripe for rebellion after a lifetime of being brought up in that mausoleum and, after meeting my father, she broke off her engagement.’
There was no mistaking the bitterness in Zac’s tone now, and his mouth was a thin line. Rose suspected that he wasn’t just talking about his mother’s experience and her heart squeezed.
‘By all accounts their affair was passionate, and my father encouraged my mother to elope with him—which she did. They got married in upstate New York, and by the time they came back she was pregnant with me.’
Rose was aware of her heart pounding with dread, wanting to know more but not wanting to know at the same time, because it wouldn’t be good. How else had Zac ended up with his grandparents posing as his parents?
‘When they returned to confront my grandparents—to present them with a fait accompli—my grandfather, who was still alive at that point, told my mother she was dead to them and that if she crossed the threshold again they would ensure my father would be run out of the country, exposed for not having a proper working visa. Needless to say they cut her off from her inheritance and all funds.’
Zac glanced at Rose for a moment before looking away again.
‘My father wanted to bring my mother back here, to Italy, but her pregnancy was difficult so they had to stay in New York to ensure her safety—and mine.’
Rose wondered if that was why Zac had made sure she had access to doctors and a hospital, and why he’d been concerned about her well-being earlier.
He was continuing. ‘Things got fraught. My father was under more and more pressure to earn money to support them. He was working four jobs at one point, and it was while he was on a construction job that he was involved in an accident.’
Rose sucked in a breath.
‘He was taken to hospital, but he had no ID with him and he was barely conscious. He slipped into a coma and it was a week before my mother was able to track him down. The shock made her go into early labour, and by the time I was born—a month prematurely—my father had died.’
Rose put her hand up to her mouth, as if that could stifle the shock she felt.
Zac’s voice was leached of all expression now. ‘My mother was destitute by then—cut off from her parents and qualified to do nothing except be a social butterfly. In her desperation she did the only thing she felt she could do. She took me to them and asked them to take care of me. They told her that they would only take me in and care for me under one condition: if she left and never returned.’
‘Oh, God... Zac...’
But he continued relentlessly. ‘All they cared about was having a male heir. My grandmother had only had one child—my mother—and my grandfather had never forgiven her for that, so they seized the opportunity to restore the balance when they could.
‘My mother left that day and a week later her body was washed up on the shores of the East River. My parents had kept her disappearance quiet, somehow, and her death barely got a mention in the papers. The scandal was simply absorbed into Manhattan society and hidden—like countless other scandals. I was accepted as their child...as if it was entirely normal for a couple in their late forties to emerge with a baby out of nowhere. As I grew up I heard talk of an older sister who had committed suicide, but I never knew who she really was.
‘Years later, on the morning I was due to get married, a woman came to visit me—she was an old friend of my parents...someone who had lived in the same building as them. She’d been pregnant at the same time as my mother... She told me everything, and also that my mother had gone to her after she’d left me with my grandparents, torn apart but knowing that she’d done the only thing she could to ensure my security and future. She’d made this friend of hers promise to keep an eye on my progress, and one day, when she felt the time was right, to tell me the real story. When I confronted my grandparents they didn’t even deny it.’
Zac stopped talking, and Rose asked quietly, ‘Why did you never go public with this?’
His jaw clenched, and then he said, ‘I told my grandparents that if they left me alone to get on with my life, cutting all ties, then I’d let them keep their rotting skeletons in the closet. It was enough at the time for me to take my father’s name as my own.’
Rose reeled. She longed to reach out and touch Zac, who seemed so remote, but she couldn’t. All she could say was, ‘I’m so sorry. Your parents didn’t deserve that, and neither did you.’
He looked at her, cynicism stamped into his features, twisting them. ‘Oh, I don’t know... I had a privileged upbringing, wanted for nothing. Every opportunity was afforded to me. There was even talk of me running for office in the distant future...it was all mapped out.’
His barbed sarcasm grated on Rose’s nerves, and she said in a low voice, ‘I know that it can’t have been easy—or else why would you have left as soon as you knew?’
Zac turned to face her fully and said with quiet devastation, ‘You don’t know anything of what it was like. The only reason I’ve divulged this to you is because I want you to understand what’s behind my determination to bring this child up as a Valenti. Nothing will stop me, Rose.’
After a long, intense moment he turned and walked back to the table, picked up his half-empty glass of wine and downed it in one swallow, and then left the terrace.
Rose hugged her arms around herself and thought, I do know what it’s like, actua
lly. She’d lived in that house too, albeit in the staff quarters, and only while working. She could imagine all too well what that cold and sterile environment must have been like for a small child who carried the genes of his Italian immigrant father but didn’t even know it.
And clearly Zac saw her as just another part of the ongoing betrayal of his parents.
Rose looked out sightlessly over the moonlit countryside as her hand dropped instinctively to feel for her small reassuring bump. Emotion gripped her. How could she deny this child its true birthright now? After everything Zac had just told her? No wonder he had reacted the way he had to the news of a baby.
Rose had never felt more powerless than she did right at that moment, or more alone. She wanted desperately to be able to do the right thing...but how?
CHAPTER EIGHT
AS ZAC STRODE into the villa the following evening, after a day in Siena at the hotel, he was battling all sorts of emotions that had never ruffled his life before now. Primary of them all was regret—for having spilled his guts so comprehensively to Rose the previous evening.
There was a handful of people who knew the truth about his heritage, and now she was one of them. She, of all people, who had the potential to damage him the most.
But he’d been blindsided when she’d unearthed something as simple as the fact that the name Valenti was a local one. And who the hell went for a walk in a graveyard anyway? Rose. The woman who remained like quicksilver—impossible to pin down, shimmering and throwing up different facets, and still refusing to behave as he expected her to.
The emotion in her eyes last night had reached into his gut and squeezed hard. It had reminded him too forcibly of that first night, when she’d looked at him with such naked yearning only to run out on him.
The familiar refrain sounded in his head: it was all part of an act. In every moment of those two meetings she’d been aware of exactly what she was doing and who he was. And she was doing it again.
Once she’d known she was pregnant she could have tried to evade him in Manhattan and sought refuge with his grandmother, but she hadn’t. She’d come to him when he’d sent for her and she was here now. So she was canny enough to keep him on her side. Or perhaps this was something she and his grandmother had agreed on... The not knowing killed him.
He shoved away the regret for spilling his guts. He was glad he’d told her how it was. Glad that she now knew he would stop at nothing to keep his child away from the poisoned Lyndon-Holt inheritance. She could pass that message on to his grandmother.
Zac stopped in his tracks at the pool and felt irritation rise when he saw it was empty. He’d looked in every conceivable place that Rose might be. Where the hell was she?
Unbidden, the memory of carrying her sleeping form into the villa the previous afternoon rose up. The way she’d felt in his arms—so slight, yet solid, all those soft curves curled into him so trustingly. When Zac had deposited her on her bed he’d stood looking down at her for a long time, certain she was just feigning sleep. But she hadn’t woken. She’d just lain there, breathing evenly, tempting him on so many levels that eventually he’d walked out in disgust.
A sharp metallic noise suddenly emerged from the nearby kitchen area, along with a colourful curse. Welcoming the distraction, Zac followed the sound. He was intrigued, because he knew it was Maria’s evening off.
When he stood in the doorway of the kitchen it took a moment for his eyes to register what he was seeing, and when they did a ball of sheer heat and lust exploded in his solar plexus.
Rose was barefoot and wearing a loose and flowing knee-length flowered sundress. Her cheeks were flushed with exertion. Her hair was tied back, but unruly tendrils clung to her visibly damp skin.
And all Zac wanted to do was go over to her, lift her onto the massive kitchen table behind her, strip off that dress, bury his aching erection into the hot, tight sheath between her legs and finally find some release.
His body screamed with need.
He gritted his jaw hard, clawing back control.
Other things finally registered on Zac’s overwrought brain: a delicious smell of cooking and the fact that Rose was biting her lip and holding her hand under the tap. When it finally dawned on him that she’d hurt herself he was by her side in an instant, taking her hand and looking at the red welt.
‘What happened?’ he demanded in a harsh voice. ‘What are you even doing in here?’
* * *
Rose would have jumped ten feet in the air if Zac hadn’t been holding onto her hand and looking at her as if she’d just stolen the Crown Jewels. Shock and fright at his sudden and overwhelming proximity made her yank her injured hand back and place it under the cold water again.
‘I just burnt my hand on a baking tray. I was making dinner... Maria left me instructions.’
Thankfully Zac was no longer touching her, but he was still too close and all but breathing fire down her neck.
She wasn’t prepared to see him like this. She’d been vacillating all day between telling herself that she had to be honest with Zac now, in light of what he’d revealed, and then remembering the signed contract and its non-disclosure agreement, and her father...still so vulnerable.
She couldn’t trust Zac—no matter what he’d told her. He hated her so much... Why wouldn’t he take an opportunity to punish her by allowing her father to suffer? Even though deep down she suspected that he couldn’t possibly hurt an innocent person, still it was too great a risk.
‘Maria left you to cook dinner? She usually just leaves food in the fridge.’
Water splashed from the tap onto Rose’s dress and she was very aware of her casual attire and bare feet next to his suited glory. He must have been in business meetings...
She struggled to focus. ‘I told her I’d look after it— I wanted to try her lasagne recipe.’
She felt embarrassed now—exposed. As if it might be obvious that she’d been indulging in an extended version of that illicit little daydream she’d had, pretending that this was her home and she was cooking for people who loved her. This wasn’t her home and never would be. This was just a relocation of her gilded prison.
‘Is your hand okay?’
Zac’s voice broke through her fevered recriminations. She lifted it out from under the water and could see that the red was dying down to a faintly throbbing pink line. She turned off the tap. ‘It’ll be fine. The lasagne is almost cooked, if you want some—’
‘I didn’t bring you here to be my cook, Rose.’
She wrapped a damp towel around her hand and glared at him, hating his effect on her. ‘I know exactly why I’m here, Zac. I like cooking and I was making dinner for myself—and possibly you if you wanted it—that’s all.’
His eyes swept over her in a searing glance and she felt every particle of her skin prickle in reaction. And then he backed away, almost as if something about her was contagious. No doubt she presented a pretty picture: sweaty, burnt, smelling of food...
‘I’ve got tickets to the opera in Siena this evening. You eat, and we’ll leave in an hour.’
Rose opened her mouth to reject Zac’s non-offer, but he was already walking away from her before she could respond. And then she thought mutinously: Hang Zac Valenti. For whatever reason, he was offering her a night at the opera. She wouldn’t let him ruin a chance for her to get out and see more of this amazing country.
And as for her ridiculous daydreams of cooking for loved ones...? Well, cooking for one wasn’t so bad, and the rest of the lasagne would freeze well.
The fact that this brought back painful memories of the period after her mother’s death, when her father had taken to working late in order to avoid coming back to the house that reminded him of his wife’s absence, wasn’t so welcome. Because Zac Valenti was the last person who should be inspiring feelings of want
ing to nourish and connect.
* * *
Zac had expected some equanimity to be restored once he’d got out of that kitchen and away from all the delicious smells of home cooking, and the even more tantalising and earthy image of Rose, fairly glowing with a kind of erotic domesticity that Zac had never encountered before.
He could remember stumbling into the kitchen of his grandparents’ house one day when he’d been about six and looking around in wonder at this alien place full of delicious smells and people and things. Until his nanny had come and scolded him for wandering off. That had literally been the first time he’d seen a kitchen.
For Rose to unlock some dark, repressed erotic kitchen fantasy was disturbing in the extreme.
He’d only invited her to the opera to shatter that image of her in the kitchen. Anything to put her back in an environment where he’d feel more in control.
But in spite of his best efforts, a sense of control eluded him. Rose sat beside him in the VIP section of Siena’s stunning opera house. It had undergone massive reconstruction in recent years—thanks to a major investment from him—and now the roof was open to the elements and the moon lit up the stage as the opera Tosca was performed.
Rose was wearing a black silk dress. The neckline was scooped, showing what appeared to Zac to be acres of soft pale cleavage, and then it fell from under her bust to the floor. Short capped sleeves drew the eye to her toned upper arms. On any other woman Zac would suspect they came from hours being honed at a gym, but he knew she’d earned them from hours of arduous menial work. As much as he’d prefer to think of her as being lazy or idle, he couldn’t fault her that.
For the first time, Zac had to admit to understanding a sliver of why someone like Rose might seize on a chance to get out of her situation. Yet he still hadn’t seen evidence of someone who was overly avaricious or greedy.
