by Kate Walker
Was Marco truly all she had come back for or was there more to it than that? She needed money, obviously, because she had admitted that she had none now. So was she back, looking for the means of support that he as her wealthy husband was obliged to provide? Did she really just want to be with her son or was the fact that she was Marco’s mother still her key to the luxurious lifestyle for which she had married him?
‘Oh, Marco! What a mess!’
Lucy’s voice, soft and warm with amusement, broke into his thoughts, shattering them and sending them spinning off onto another tangent entirely. As she bent her head, leaning down towards the little boy, laughing again as he reached up and smeared the fall of her hair with banana, he found that he was once more seeing the scene as someone else might see it.
That person would see a happy family. Not knowing the events that had torn the little group apart, they would assume it was still the perfect setting in which to bring up the little boy.
Which it was. Or once had been.
He had wanted a family for his child. Still wanted it more than he could say. And if he played his cards right then there was a way that he could still make it come true for the future. For Marco.
And if there were other reasons—private reasons—for him wanting to keep things the way they had been, could he admit them, even to himself? He had no wish to let anyone know the way that, after just twenty-four hours, he was once more fighting the irresistible, burningly sensual passion that Lucy’s slender beauty had always been able to arouse in him. And certainly he was damned if he was ever going to let Lucy begin to suspect that those feelings were there. Sex and money had been the reasons why they had gone into this marriage that was not a marriage in the first place. And sex and money had been the things that had torn it apart too. Those two dangerous elements had ruined his past. He was not going to let them ruin his future too.
She seemed to have been honest with him. And she truly seemed to want to be back with Marco, for the baby’s sake, not for anything she could get out of this, but her concern could easily be faked. Could he really trust her with his beloved son’s future? Why should she be so very different from the other women in his past?
The only way to be sure was to test her sincerity one more time. To make absolutely sure that her reasons for being here were as she claimed. He would offer her the sort of deal that, if she was lying, would surely tempt her into showing her true colours. And the way she responded would tell him all he needed to know.
But if he could get what he wanted out of this situation—if he could keep her here, for Marco’s sake, on the terms that suited him—then he would do just that.
CHAPTER TEN
‘I THINK he’s had enough…’
Lucy bent down to pick up yet another piece of bread that Marco had flung onto the floor, narrowly dodging the plastic mug of milk that landed right beside her as he discarded that too.
‘Shall I clean up here and then…’
‘Marissa will do that.’
He saw the look she gave him and acknowledged it with a faint inclination of his head.
‘She’ll take him for a walk too, to get some air. It’s better to stick to his routine.’
Ricardo pressed the bell to summon Marco’s nanny before wiping the little boy’s face and hands with a clean cloth and hoisting him out of the high chair and hitching him on to one hip.
‘And we have things we need to discuss.’
‘We do?’
But, as she expected, there was no way that Ricardo was going to answer that as he shook his head and concentrated on wiping a stubborn piece of dried banana out of his son’s eyebrow, managing Marco’s wriggles of protest with an easy skill that wrenched at Lucy’s heart.
‘Not here.’
Not here. Not now. Not in front of Marco. Lucy added the words he didn’t use, acknowledging the cold creeping sense of fear that welled up inside her as she did so.
So was this it? Was this the moment when Ricardo sent her packing? When her all too brief idyll with her little son came to an end and her husband made sure that she left the island?
And if she did, then would she ever see her baby again?
‘No…’
Her hands went out to the child in his father’s arms, but at that moment the door opened and the nanny she had seen before stepped into the room. After a brief conversation in Italian, too rapid for her to catch, Ricardo passed the little boy to Marissa and turned to Lucy. Something about the look on her face must have hit home to him because, as he took her elbow to turn her away towards the door, he bent his head and spoke swiftly, close to her ear.
‘I promised,’ he said roughly and just for a moment she stared at him, not quite understanding.
But then her memory cleared and she had a sudden rush of recollection. Ricardo saying, ‘You will see him again,’ and the conviction in his words that had had her believing him on that when she couldn’t trust him on anything else.
And so she didn’t fight but let herself be led from the room, with a long lingering glance back at the little boy who had taken over her heart without a chance of ever letting go.
He had always had her love, of course. It was just that her illness had blurred that love and preyed on her fears of not being a good enough mother. The thoughts she had experienced had been the depression, not the reality. She could see that now. But, at the time, lost and lonely, even if never alone, she had not been able to cope.
Now she knew the depth of her love, the way it had always been there underneath all the horror and the misery. So how would she cope if Ricardo was once more going to deny her access to her child? Could he do that? And, if he did, then how would she ever be able to afford to fight him in the courts if she had to?
‘Where are we going?’
‘Just here…’
Ricardo pushed open a door to his left, in a position that Lucy recognised. Her heart sank as she walked into the room he had opened, the setting making it plain that her husband had nothing kind or considerate on his mind. His island home’s office, with its dark wood furniture, the big L-shaped desk, the array of computer equipment, was a place for business deals, for cold-blooded decisions with nothing of the heart about them.
‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down?’ Ricardo waved a hand in the direction of a chair, one of three gathered around a small coffee table set in the window overlooking the bay.
‘Will I need to?’
His beautiful mouth twisted at the sharpness of her response and he met her attacking tone with a half shrug of one of his broad shoulders.
‘It depends on how you’re going to react to getting everything you wanted.’
‘What?’
That nearly did take her legs from under her and she had to reach out for the back of a chair to support herself as the shock hit home.
‘You’d do that?’ Her voice shook in disbelief.
‘Why not?’
This time he shrugged both shoulders, dismissing her stunned question as totally unimportant.
‘It’s only money. And I can soon make more.’
Only money.
Lucy’s fingers had to clench tight over the back of the chair to keep her from letting her trembling give her away. And at the same time she felt her jaw tighten hard against the impulse to let a cry of distress escape. Of course. Only money. Did she really think that Ricardo was going to let her walk out of here with Marco? Simply hand the baby over to her and let her go?
Never in a million years.
But she had hoped for something. For a hint of recognition that he had recognised how ill she had been to leave her child, that he had seen how she cared for her little boy. A suggestion that he would let her see Marco—have some sort of access to the baby.
‘In return for a quick and quiet divorce, I will give you a small fortune,’ Ricardo stated bluntly. ‘Enough cash to keep you in luxury for many years, without raising a hand to do a thing.’
He moved round to the other sid
e of the desk, pulling out a drawer and snatching up a cheque book from its interior. Tossing it down onto the desk, he flipped it open, grabbed a pen and started to write. Firm bold strokes of the pen wrote numbers, words—and finished it all off with the slashing force of his signature, firmly underlined.
‘I don’t…’ Lucy began but the sound of the cheque being ripped from the stub drowned her attempt to speak. And when he tossed the paper towards her, landing on the edge of the desk where she could see it, all the strength in her vocal cords evaporated in a sense of shock as hard and cruel as if he had actually punched her in her chest, driving all the breath from her body.
It couldn’t be true. She had to be seeing things. Either that or Ricardo was playing with her. A small fortune, he had said. There was nothing small about the amount on the cheque in front of her. It was an enormous amount—an obscenely large amount. More money than she had ever seen in her life. And Ricardo had tossed it at her as if it were a donation of a few pounds or so.
‘You don’t mean this.’ The hand that she used to point at the cheque was trembling in bewilderment. She could barely read the figures clearly because of the disbelief that was blurring her eyes. You can’t mean it.’
‘Why not? Isn’t it enough?’ His eyes challenged her to object.
‘It’s enough for any human being—but it’s not what I want.’
‘If you want a divorce, then that’s all that’s on offer.’
It was that word—divorce—that felt like a slap in the face. But then he had made no secret of the fact that he wanted her out of his life permanently. The momentary kindness and understanding he had shown her earlier had misled her. She had thought they had come close to at least the beginnings of an understanding. And that had distracted her from the cold-blooded declaration he had made the night before.
How much will you take to leave now, get out of here—and stay out of my life for good?
Taking her silence as agreement, Ricardo jabbed a finger onto a button on the phone, not even looking at her. Speaking in fast Italian, he was obviously issuing instructions. She caught the name Enzo, the word nave and could only assume that the order had gone out to prepare the motor launch. He was really determined to get rid of her as quickly as possible. Which put her right in her place. Paid off, dealt with, dismissed from his thoughts. And about to be divorced by the sound of it. So much for his promise that she would see Marco again.
‘Your boat is waiting.’
Could his voice get any colder? Could the long body express hostility any more clearly than the way he stood, rigidly upright, half-turned away from her as if he couldn’t wait to move on? Lucy felt a volatile blend of anger and pain well up inside her, pushing her into unguarded speech.
‘No—your boat is waiting. The boat you’ve decided I should take. You never even waited for an answer…’
‘So tell me, Lucy, what would you have said if I had asked you? Last night you were so determined to get away from here. Now are you telling me that you want to stay?’
She didn’t dare to answer that truthfully. In fact her response was so clear and strong in her mind that she lowered her eyes, afraid that the truth would show in her gaze. It seemed that since she had first made her way onto the island—was it really less than twenty-four hours ago?—she had been on a wild roller coaster of emotions, shooting up and down with dizzying force and speed, never quite knowing which was true and which was safe.
Safer. None of the choices before her had been really safe. Last night she had been finding her way, groping blindfolded through the pitch-darkness, with only vaguely formed ideas of what she wanted most, and little understanding of how to approach things. Now she knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to be a mother to her child and…
It was that and that made her thought processes stop dead, made her heart jolt in fear and apprehension and had her concealing her eyes and her thoughts from the man in front of her.
She didn’t yet know quite what that and implied and until she did then she wasn’t prepared to reveal the truth to him. Perhaps even then—perhaps even more than ever then—she would need to conceal the facts from him.
‘I don’t want to stay here but I do want to be with Marco. I want my son.’
It was the perfect summer afternoon, with the sun streaming in through the window, beyond which the lake water sparkled clear and blue in the light, but when Ricardo’s face closed up like that it seemed to drain all the warmth from the atmosphere, dim the light, as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun.
‘And you know that I would rather die than let you take him from me.’
‘I want my rights as his mother…And, before you tell me that I gave those up when I ran out on him, I defy you to take me to court over it! We’ll see what a judge has to say when I explain how things happened.’
‘So you would fight for him?’ He actually sounded pleased that she had challenged him on this. ‘I was beginning to wonder.’
It wasn’t that she hadn’t been prepared to fight for Marco before. More that, until now, she hadn’t been sure that she was the right person to do so. Until she had actually spent time with Marco, touched him, held him, felt the heavy warmth of his little body, inhaled the scent of his skin, that she had known this was what she had to do. That she could no longer live without her baby in her life.
‘But, be warned, I’ll fight right back. I’ll see you in court if I have to.’
‘You’d use the fact that I was ill against me?’
‘What sort of monster do you think I am? But because I understand that you were ill it doesn’t mean that I am going to hand my son over to you without a thought. If I have to fight you for custody then I will and I warn you, Lucy—I intend to win.’
Tension was tying Lucy’s over stretched nerves into painful knots. Deep inside she quailed at the prospect of a court battle with Ricardo and the legal team that his wealth would bring him. And the truth was that she couldn’t fault the way Marco’s father had cared for the little boy. The thought of taking the baby from his father tore at her heart.
‘Ricardo, neither of us wants this—surely it doesn’t have to be this way? I was the subject of a battle between my parents, both of them wanting me, both of them using me just as a pawn in their private battle. I don’t want to do that to Marco.’
‘And I don’t want the Emiliani name dragged through the gossip columns, my private life exposed. But Marco is my son. I didn’t go through a marriage I didn’t want just to see you take him from me and turn me into an absentee father.’
‘And I don’t want to be an absentee mother either…’
What had she said to put that sudden gleam of dark satisfaction into those black eyes? It looked almost as if she had done exactly as he had wanted. Lucy had the sudden, deeply uncomfortable feeling that she had been manoeuvred into a corner, checkmated somehow, and she hadn’t even seen it happen.
‘Then it seems that there is only one way to handle this.’
‘There is? And what’s that?’
To her astonishment, Ricardo leaned forward and snatched up the cheque from where it still lay on his desk between them.
‘Look at that,’ he said and, totally bemused, Lucy let him push the slip of paper into her unresisting hand.
‘A small fortune,’ he said, his voice disturbing in its icy intensity. ‘“Enough for any human being”. And it’s yours—if you leave.’
He saw the way that her head came up, the defiant words forming on her lips to fling his offer back at him and the faintest flicker of something that was almost a smile curled the corners of his mouth.
‘Or…’
If Ricardo’s tone had been glacial, then his eyes seemed to sear right to the core of her soul.
‘You can have it the way you want it—if you stay here.’
Unnerved and mentally armed for a fight as she was, Lucy at first didn’t catch the apparent concession. But when she did it was with a sense of shocked realisation.
> ‘Stay?’ she queried uncertainly. ‘For how long?’
Ricardo’s stony gaze burned into her, unflinching, unyielding.
‘For good.’
One arrogant wave of his hand towards the window indicated where the boat waited, Enzo standing at the wheel, the subdued pulse of the engine seeming unnaturally loud in the silence. Another took in the room they stood in, the whole of the beautiful villa.
‘There is your choice. The boat or the island. If you want to talk about this, then you stay here. If you want to leave, then the subject is closed. For ever.’
‘But…’
Lucy’s thoughts were spinning in a new and different kind of panic. She had the terrible feeling of being trapped. She had been manoeuvred into a very tight corner and it seemed that there was no way out of it.
‘You can’t keep me here!’
‘No, but Marco can.’
‘I…don’t understand.’
Despairingly, Lucy shook her head, unable to make sense of what he was saying.
‘It’s quite simple. If you want the money, then you leave—get on the boat and let Enzo take you wherever you want. But if you want contact with Marco—and I think you do—then you stay here.’
‘You’d let…’
‘But, in that case, then the money is no longer yours. I’ll stop the cheque…’
‘You won’t need to.’
The rush of delight at the thought that he might let her stay was dizzying in its force. How would this work? Perhaps Ricardo had some idea of letting her replace the nanny, or at the very least act as back-up…She didn’t know and didn’t care. She wanted to stay.
Without thinking, she took the cheque in a firm grip and ripped it into a thousand tiny pieces, tossing them wildly in the air so that they scattered around their heads, floating down softly to the ground like a fall of confetti. Drifting around Ricardo’s dark head, several tiny white pieces lodged in the silk of his hair, on the broad straight shoulders, settling softly. He barely spared them a glance, his dark-eyed gaze still locked with hers as he watched her response with cool, distant assessment.
