The Brabanti Baby

by Catherine Spencer

  “You don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking her away from me, Gabriel.”

  The ring of certainty in her voice sent a chill up his spine, but he’d have walked through fire before he’d let her see it. “And why is that, Marcia?

  “It’s very simple,” she said, the supreme satisfaction in her voice reminding him of a cat toying with a mouse whose life hung by a thread. “You’re not her father.”

  Sometimes, the most outrageous statements carried with them an incontestable ring of truth. And this, he thought, fighting his way through the numbing haze of shock floating out to entrap him, was one of those times.

  If she lived to be a hundred, Eve knew she’d never forget the seconds following Marcia’s unconscionable remark. Each one was marked by the astounded thud of her heart. Every last, minute detail of the scene was burned in her memory. The blank disbelief on Gabriel’s face, and the way he rocked slightly from side to side, as though trying to steady himself more firmly on a world suddenly tilting under his feet. The necklace that slipped from his hand and slid to the rug where it lay in a cold, glittering tangle of platinum and diamonds. Marcia’s look of malicious triumph. The jarring, unbearable sound of her laughter mingling with Nicola’s sudden frantic whimpering.

  Aghast, Eve said, “For heaven’s sake, Marcia, this is no time to be playing cruel jokes.”

  “Who’s joking, cuz?” Marcia hooted, almost doubled over with unholy mirth.

  “You are! You have to be!” She darted forward and plucked Nicola from her arms. “Hush, darling,” she whispered, cuddling the baby. “It’s okay. Mommy’s just being silly.”

  “Mommy’s telling the truth, kiddo! Jason’s your real daddy, and he’s downstairs, waiting to take us home.”

  “You’ve elevated the art of lying to new heights, Marcia.” Gabriel’s voice sounded as hollow as a tomb. “Either that, or you’re insane!”

  “And you’re a fool, Gabriel, if you thought I’d make such an allegation without absolute proof that it’s true.” She withdrew an envelope out of the side pocket of the bag hanging from her shoulder. “Here, take a look for yourself. It’s Nicola’s birth certificate. Check out the date, caro. She was born May 14, nearly eleven months after you booted me out of Malta.”

  “Impossible!” he scoffed. “You informed me in the middle of April that I had a daughter who was almost three weeks old. How the hell could you do that, if she didn’t arrive for another three weeks after that?”

  “Ever heard of an ultrasound, Gabriel—those clever, informative little videos of infants still in utero? I’d known for a full two months prior to her birth that she was a girl.”

  He turned to Eve, gray faced, and she could have wept at the agony she saw sketched on his features. “It’s sometimes possible, Gabriel,” she confirmed, “especially with today’s sophisticated technology.”

  He flinched as if he’d been dealt a blow to the side of the head that had left him brain dead. Only his eyes were alive, and they almost seared the flesh from her bones. “You’ve been a part of this hellish charade, and have the brazen nerve to accuse me of using you?”

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I swear to you that I had no idea what Marcia was up to.”

  “You must have!” he bellowed. “You carried Nicola’s passport.”

  “But I never examined it closely. I had both hands full coping with Nicola while we were traveling. And once we’d arrived here, I had no reason to look at it again. You know yourself that I gave it to you along with mine and our airline tickets, sealed in a manila envelope which you locked away in your safe.”

  “Don’t yell at her,” Marcia said.

  “Sta zitto, strega!”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up! I don’t take orders from you anymore.”

  “Under my roof, you do exactly as I tell you, or face the consequences,” he thundered, covering the distance separating her from him in long, threatening strides. “Dio, but I should have killed you instead of divorcing you!”

  “Lay a hand on me and I’ll sue you for assault!” she yelled back, taking a swing at him with her bag.

  Nicola, who’d calmed down and almost fallen asleep, burst into tears again at the noise and tension swirling about the room. “Stop it, both of you!” Eve hissed, doing her best to soothe the sobbing baby. “Neither of you is fit to be this child’s parent. All you care about is scoring off one another, and it’s making me sick to my stomach.”

  Marcia made a face and tossed her head. Gabriel, though, looked momentarily contrite, and turned back as if to try to comfort Nicola. But at the last minute, his hand hovered in the air and then slowly fell back at his side.

  “I don’t believe any of this,” he muttered, staring around the room as if he’d never seen it before.

  “I do,” Eve said, all the pieces at last slotting neatly into place. “It explains everything, Gabriel, don’t you see? Why Nicola seemed so small for her age. Why she was so weak and irritable. Why she never slept through the night.” She swung an accusing glare on Marcia. “You sent me halfway around the world with a baby who was practically still a newborn. For God’s sake, Marcia, what were you thinking?”

  “That she’d be in excellent hands,” Marcia said defiantly. “So she fussed a lot. Plenty of babies do, at that age. And if she was half as bad as you’re trying to make out, you ought to be able to understand how impossible it would have been for us to take her on tour.”

  Again, Gabriel almost lunged at her in fury. Again, Eve intercepted him. “I understand how you did it, Marcia,” she said coldly, “but I don’t understand why.”

  Gabriel let out a blast of bitter laughter. “After everything you already knew about your cousin, plus what you’ve just learned, you can’t put two and two together and come up with four? She did it for the money, Eve. She’s the only woman I know who’d sell her child’s birthright for the sake of a few thousand extra dollars in her bank account every month.”

  “Not just for the money,” Marcia sneered. “It was payback time for a lot of things, not the least being the way you shipped me out of here as if I were nothing but a load of dirty laundry.”

  “An apt description, I’d say,” he retorted, “and one you thoroughly deserved.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever! The point is, the money lasted long enough to finance my husband’s new play which, I’m happy to tell you, has turned out to be quite a hit. It’s opening on Broadway in the fall. I’d send you front row tickets to come and see it, Gabriel, if I thought you were at all interested.”

  Eve thought if he ever looked at her with the kind of loathsome disgust he turned on Marcia then, that she’d curl up and die. “Your capacity for cruelty astounds even me, Marcia,” he said, “and someone needs to put a stop to it.”

  “Well, it’s not going to be you, honey, because this time, I’m the one holding all the cards. How does it feel to know you’re powerless, for a change?”

  “Powerless? I don’t think so. If you think this ends here, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  Marcia came to Eve and very firmly took Nicola from her. “It ends, Gabriel, because this is my baby and I intend to walk out of here with her, and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me.”

  “You think not?” he asked her scornfully. “You seriously believe, do you, Marcia, that the fact that you gave birth to this beautiful infant protects you from the long arm of the law? Have you never heard of the sort of social system in America designed to protect innocent children from mothers like you?”

  For the first time, Marcia actually looked afraid. “Just because I let you borrow her for a few weeks doesn’t mean I don’t love her,” she stammered, clutching Nicola tightly. “It’s been horrible without her. Every time I listened to your messages, it broke my heart. Why else do you think I never called you back? I couldn’t have held it together long enough to say ‘hello”’.

  “She’s probably telling the truth on that, Gabriel,” Eve felt compelled to
tell him. “She burst into tears when she saw Nicola again. All she’s done since she got here this morning is cuddle her and talk to her, and promise she’ll never leave her again. In her own warped way, she really does love her baby.”

  “And her love is exceeded only by a thirst for revenge that borders on criminal!”

  “I’m not excusing what she did. I’m just trying to make it easier for you to let Nicola go. She has two parents, Gabriel, and they flew here at a moment’s notice when they thought they were in danger of losing her. You can’t contest that. And you have to admit, at no time was Nicola in any kind of danger here. She was with people who loved her unconditionally. Everyone who met her, adored her.”

  He stared at Eve—no, through her, for perhaps a minute, the muscle in his jaw knotting furiously. At last, he said, “Get out of my sight and out of my house, both of you.

  “As soon as you hand over the passports,” Marcia spat.

  “Gladly,” he shot back. “I can’t be rid of you soon enough. And may God help that poor child.”

  “Come on, Eve,” Marcia muttered, almost sprinting to the door before he could change his mind. “Let’s tell Jason we’re ready to go. Leave the suitcases. One of the hired hands can lug them downstairs. It’s what they get paid to do, after all.”

  Eve picked up her carry-on bag and purse, a lump the size of an orange clogging her throat. Before leaving the room, she turned for one last look at the man who’d taught her everything about love. He was watching Nicola, an expression of poignant sorrow marking his face.

  No, Eve would never forget what her cousin had done. And she’d never forgive her for it, either.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BY THE end of October, summer was a distant memory in Chicago, and the wind howling in from the lake carried with it the bite of winter. But it couldn’t sever the ties that bound Eve to Gabriel. Though gossamer fine, they were stronger than tempered steel. And just how indestructible they’d always be was borne out, the morning she paid a visit to her doctor.

  “Yup, you’re two and a half months pregnant,” Daphne O’Neil confirmed. “And I don’t suppose I’m telling you anything you haven’t already figured out for yourself.”

  “No,” Eve said. Pretending not to notice she’d missed two periods had been one thing; the fact that she was throwing up around the clock was rather more difficult to ignore.

  Still, she hadn’t dared dream too much. Instead, she’d let the possibility that she’d conceived tiptoe quietly at the back of her mind, and hadn’t even taken a home pregnancy test because of the superstitious belief that forcing the issue might jinx it.

  “So is this happy news,” Daphne asked, “or should we be talking about options?”

  It was the best news in the world! She might have managed to keep busy enough during the days, but at night, with nothing to shield her from the memories, she was haunted by the grief in Gabriel’s eyes during those last wretched moments they’d spent together.

  If some of the things he’d done were regrettable, she’d made mistakes, too. She’d taken sides and, only when it was too late, realized she’d taken the wrong side. The person she should have suspected was not the man who’d never once given her reason to doubt him, but the cousin whose self-interest formed a legacy of deceit that went back a lifetime.

  At the end of it all, the one constant was that she loved him regardless. If he could forgive her, she could forgive him. Because such a deep, enduring love wasn’t something to be tossed aside. It was too rare; too precious. It was worth fighting for.

  So often, she’d almost phoned to tell him this, and once, when she was talking to her mother, a long-distance call-alert signal had interrupted their conversation. Whoever it was at the other end hung up before she could connect to it, but deep in her heart she’d been sure it was Gabriel. She’d known for a fact it wouldn’t have been Marcia. Relations between her and Eve were strained past breaking point.

  In the end, Eve had let matters lie because she hadn’t known how to heal the gaping wound he’d suffered when he’d lost Nicola. Hadn’t known what she could offer him that might possibly make up for the pain Marcia had caused him.

  Until now.

  Now, she could give him a child. His child, and if it took medical proof to convince him he was the father, she could give him that, too.

  Within the week, she was en route to Malta, via London, and was delighted when, on the last leg of her journey, she found herself boarding the same flight as Carolyn Santoro, who’d just spent a week in England visiting her new grandson.

  “I’m so happy to see you!” she exclaimed, returning Carolyn’s hug.

  “I’m even happier to see you,” Carolyn said, her initial burst of enthusiasm dwindling into a gravity that made Eve’s blood run cold. “Please tell me you’re coming back to help Gabriel.”

  “Help him?” she repeated, hollow with sudden dread. “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

  “Oh, my dear, where to begin?” Carolyn exhaled a long sigh of distress. “I told you once before that when his marriage broke up, he shut himself off from everyone who cares about him. But that was nothing compared to how he is now.”

  “Which is how?” The ever-present nausea rose up in protest and she broke out in a fine dew of perspiration. “Carolyn, please just tell me what’s happened, before you give me a heart attack!”

  “Well, for a start, no one ever sees him anymore. He’s closed up the villa, with only a skeleton staff to keep an eye on the place, and is staying at the farmhouse on Gozo. He comes into Valletta when he has to, of course, for business purposes, or to stock up on anything he can’t get locally, but he’s dropped out of the social scene completely. Nico happened to run into him last week, and said he looks just dreadful. Very drawn, he said, and just not himself, at all.”

  “When did all this start?”

  “Pretty much the day you and Nicola returned to the U.S.” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “I really despise gossip, Eve, but servants talk and it’s common knowledge among his circle of friends that Marcia came back and caused a terrible scene, so please forgive me if this question offends you, but I simply have to ask. Is it true that he’s not Nicola’s father?”

  “I’m afraid it is. I had no idea, Carolyn—none at all. I found out the same time that he did.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. I know you’d never be party to such an appalling deception.” She clasped Eve’s hands. “Oh, you have no idea how glad I am to see you!”

  “And I, you! At least now I know what to expect.”

  Hearing from someone else, though, and seeing for herself, were two different things. Nothing could have prepared Eve for her first glimpse of Gabriel.

  She had the taxi drop her off at the end of the road leading to the farmhouse, and went the rest of the way on foot, arriving just as the shadows deepened toward dusk. Unaware of her approach, he sat in the garden, staring out to sea, an open book lying face down on his lap, and the fat tabby cat snoozing at his feet.

  Eve’s heart clenched at the sight of him. He’d lost weight and looked so solitary, so terribly alone. We did this to him, she thought. Between us, Marcia and I drained all the joy from his life and left behind a shell of a man.

  Suddenly she wasn’t at all sure he’d be glad to see her. Wasn’t certain anything she could say or do could close the yawning distance between them.

  She must have made a sound—stepped on a dried twig, perhaps, or a loose flagstone—because without shifting his gaze he said, “Is that you, Beryl?”

  “No,” Eve said, and swept up in a tide of emotion by the sound of his voice, she dropped her suitcase and ran toward him. “It’s me, Gabriel.”

  He turned his beautiful, empty eyes on her. “Eve? How did you get here?”

  “The usual way,” she said, caught in a vicious undertow of regret at having waited so long to come back. “By jet, from Chicago, via London.”

  He nodded, still so far removed in spirit
that she wasn’t sure he’d even heard her. Unable to bear the strained silence, she glanced at the lighted interior of the farmhouse. “Did I hear you correctly, a minute ago? Beryl’s here?”

  “Si.”

  “What happened to Fiora?”

  “She died. So much did, with the end of summer.” He sighed heavily. “Why are you here?”

  “I’ve come to tell you I’m sorry for my part in Marcia’s unspeakably cruel hoax, and to ask you to forgive me.”

  He might have been cast in stone, for all the reaction he showed. Only the cat moved, slinking away under the grape arbor as if it felt the electricity in the atmosphere and wanted to take cover before the storm broke. “Is that all?”

  “Not by a long shot,” she said, aching to touch him but afraid he’d recoil from any contact. “I’ve missed you, Gabriel. So much that there’ve been times I’ve had to wrap my arms around myself and hold on tight because I was afraid I was going to fly apart at the seams without you.”

  He didn’t answer, and the silence beat between them like the widespread wings of a hovering eagle.

  “I took a leap of faith in coming here,” she went on desperately, “because I believe in you, in us.”

  His glance flickered. “I’m not sure I believe in anything in anymore.”

  “Don’t say that!” she cried. “What happened to the man I used to know—the one who never gave up?”

  “He’s changed. A little girl stole a piece of his heart, and he’ll never be the same again.”

  “Neither of us will be. Hurt like that never really goes away. But one thing I’ve learned is that the human heart has a boundless capacity for love, and although Nicola owns a piece of mine, too, there’s still so much room in it for you.”

  “Really? The last time we spoke, you didn’t believe I loved you. You thought I was merely going through the motions in order to win your support before a judge.”

  “I’ll believe you now, if you tell me I was mistaken.”

  He mulled over the proposition for so long that she wished she’d never suggested it. Finally he hauled himself out of the chair and turned to face her. “You want the truth?”