A Night of No Return

by Sarah Morgan

  ‘Forty-eight hours ago you were a blushing, shy, inexperienced woman.’

  ‘So? I have a lot of time to make up for. Now be quiet and kiss me the way you kissed me the other night—’ She brushed her mouth over his and he captured her face in her hands before sliding his hands down her bare back.

  ‘The dress is beautiful but it has to come off.’

  Smiling, she released his hands and sat up, carefully drawing the dress over her head. ‘Seems a shame to take it off.’

  ‘It’s not a shame from where I’m lying.’

  The dress slid in a slippery heap to the floor and suddenly she was back in his arms and his mouth was hungry on hers. Her hands tore at his clothes, impatiently stripping away jacket and shirt until he was naked too, until there was nothing between them except feelings and the truth. His eyes were fierce but she knew hers would be too because she wanted this every bit as much as he did. Perhaps she’d always wanted it, from the moment she’d walked into his office on that first day and seen him lounging behind his desk, remote and untouchable.

  This time it was slow, where last time it had been fast. Every thing stretched out, the intensity of it as agonizing as the anticipation.

  Her mouth roamed over him and she heard his breathing change and felt powerful and desirable as she discovered how her touch affected him, how the stroke of her hands could drive him wild, how the flick of her tongue had him reaching for her. And he let her explore, until finally he could stand it no longer and closed his hands over her hips, shifting her above him in a sure movement that brought her into contact with the heat of his arousal.

  Emma held her breath as she took him into her, felt the power and the fullness and then there was nothing but the rhythm and the incredible need that consumed both of them as they surrendered to it. Still holding her, he drove himself deep and she groaned his name against his lips, holding back the words that she so desperately wanted to say, knowing that honesty would ruin the moment. None of that mattered. Nothing mattered. Not the future nor the past, just the present and she gave in to that and allowed it to take her until they hit the same peak. They kissed their way through it, sharing all of it until she thought she’d die from the pleasure.

  Lucas lay still, holding her, wondering why he had no desire to just get up and leave as he usually did.

  ‘What was her name?’ Her voice was soft in the darkness and what surprised him wasn’t the question, which he understood immediately, but the fact that he wanted to answer.

  ‘Elizabeth. I named her after my father’s mother. Her great-grandmother. I liked to think that had she still been alive perhaps she would have done the decent thing and recognised her granddaughter. Either way, I wanted Elizabeth to know who she was and be proud of it.’

  ‘I like that. He refused to acknowledge you but you created the link anyway.’ Her arms tightened around him as she showed her approval. ‘It’s a pretty name.’ There was a moment’s silence and then she held him tighter. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about your daughter, but whatever happened I know it wasn’t your fault. You are so wrong to blame yourself.’

  ‘You’re making that judgement without knowing the facts.’

  ‘I may not know the facts, but I know you. I know it wasn’t your fault. I know you would have done whatever could have been done.’

  Lucas stared into the darkness. ‘Your faith in me is touching but misplaced. I was a lousy father, Emma.’

  ‘That isn’t true. And I should know because I had one. Or rather, I didn’t have one. The man who fathered me wasn’t interested in that role. He walked out after my sister was born. He came back soon after and my mother once told me that the reason she had me was to try and bring them closer together. How she could ever have thought a man who had never wanted one child would have been suddenly happy to have a second, I have no idea. He walked out for the final time while Mum was in the hospital with me. I’ve never even met him.’

  Suddenly he understood more clearly why she would have avoided relationships. She had no reason to trust men. And she shouldn’t be trusting him. Knowing that this was going to end badly, he tightened his grip on her. ‘That must have been tough.’

  ‘It was, but tougher for my mum and my sister. My sister especially because she always felt that for him to walk out there must have been something lacking in her. Which was wrong, of course. There was something lacking in him, but that isn’t true of you so don’t ever tell me again that you were a bad father.’

  ‘I didn’t leave, but I might as well have done.’ And suddenly, wrapped in her warmth, the words that had been jammed inside him for years flowed. ‘It was snowing. Exactly like the other night. I’d been working long hours, trying to juggle several big projects. Because I often worked late and Elizabeth would be asleep by the time I arrived home, I was the one who got her up in the morning. We had breakfast together. That was our time together and it was always just the two of us because Vicky never emerged before eleven. That morning we had breakfast as usual. Nothing was different. You have no idea how many times I have gone over and over it in my mind, trying to work out if I missed something, but I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary. I made her toast. And I cut her toast into the shape of a house because I always did that.’

  ‘She must have loved that.’

  ‘She did. She always ate the chimney first. I kissed her goodbye and promised her I’d take her to the park in the morning. Then I dropped her at school.’ Remembering it was agonizing, the desire to put the clock back and do things differently almost overpowering. ‘I left a note for Vicky telling her I’d be home before she had to leave for the party.’

  ‘You weren’t going to the party with her?’

  ‘I wasn’t interested in spending an evening at a party where I knew no one. I wanted to be with my daughter. I was planning to leave the office at five to give me plenty of time to get home. Just before I left I had a phone call from Elizabeth’s teacher, wondering how she was. Apparently she’d started feeling ill at school and they’d rung Vicky.’ He paused to breathe. ‘When I rang Vicky and asked her what the doctor had said she told me she hadn’t been able to get an appointment so she’d just put Elizabeth to bed and let her sleep. At that point I knew. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew it was serious. All I wanted to do was get home but the snow had made the roads almost impassable. Just like the other night.’

  ‘It must have been terrible for you. I can imagine how helpless you must have felt.’

  ‘I cannot tell you how bad that journey was, crawling through the snow, knowing that my daughter was sick. I rang Vicky again to tell her to take her to the Emergency Department but she told me I was overreacting and anyway she was just leaving for the party. We had a row. I told her she couldn’t leave and she told me that if I’d been home on time it wouldn’t have been an issue. She could have arrived at the party any time, but she wasn’t going to let something as insignificant as a sick child ruin her social life.’ The bitterness still flowed but it was weaker now, diluted by time. ‘She left Elizabeth alone with an inexperienced babysitter. Call it instinct, but I called an ambulance and it arrived at the same time as I did. The moment I walked through the door I knew how sick she was. She was screaming. The screaming was terrible—’ He stopped because thinking about it was just too painful. ‘I saw that she had a rash. The paramedics were wonderful and they gave her antibiotics but it was too little too late. It was meningitis. The very worst type, with complications, and she went downhill so quickly it was shocking.’

  ‘That’s terrible. Truly awful.’ Her arms tightened around him. ‘But I don’t see how, even in your darkest moments, you could blame yourself for any of that.’

  ‘You want me to list the ways?’ There were so many. ‘If I hadn’t gone to work that morning, if I’d chosen to take her to the doctor instead of leaving it to Vicky, if I’d left work earlier—she’d still be alive.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘But I don�
��t not know it either, and living with that is hell.’

  ‘When you left for work did you realise how ill she was?’

  ‘Of course not. There were no signs she was ill at all.’

  ‘Precisely. You didn’t know. You had no way of knowing. Nor did you know that your wife wouldn’t pay attention to the signs.’

  ‘I should have known. She was always very clear about her priorities. Vicky never wanted Elizabeth any more than my mother had wanted me and she never made any secret of the fact that having a baby wasn’t going to affect her life.’ He turned his head to look at her, her features just visible in the semi-darkness. ‘Now you’re shocked.’

  ‘Not shocked. Sad for Elizabeth. Sad for Vicky, I suppose, for never knowing how wonderful it is to love someone other than yourself.’ She slid her hand over his chest. ‘And sad for you, because you tried to be a family and it went badly wrong. But that wasn’t your fault, Lucas.’

  ‘I made her pregnant. That was my fault. I trusted her to show some responsibility towards our daughter that day and she didn’t. I should have known she wouldn’t. That was my fault too.’

  ‘Your fault that another person put her own needs before that of a poorly child? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I knew what she was like.’

  ‘You said you trusted her to show responsibility towards your daughter, which proves to me you still had faith in her. She let you down and that’s terrible but it doesn’t make it your fault.’

  ‘Even if you’re right, it doesn’t make it better. My head is permanently filled with what-ifs. You name it, I thought it. I still think it. In the end none of it matters. All that matters is that I let my daughter down. I wasn’t able to help her or protect her and she deserved so much better.’

  ‘You’re so wrong about that.’ Her voice rang with sincerity, but her words of comfort slid off his skin like raindrops off a window, unable to penetrate the thick wall of guilt that had locked him in for years.

  ‘I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re the one who is wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes, I do. You’re forgetting I saw the photograph. I saw a little girl with her arms around her daddy—a daddy she clearly adored. She didn’t want or deserve better. She had everything she wanted and needed. You didn’t let her down, Lucas.’

  ‘If I’d been there she’d still be alive. Maybe I wasn’t looking closely enough when we ate breakfast together. Maybe I missed something a better father would have noticed.’

  ‘You were having breakfast with your daughter. I can tell you that from a child’s point of view it doesn’t get much better than that. You have to forgive yourself, Lucas. You have to accept that you did everything that could have been done. You have to accept that you were a good father but that even the best father can’t protect a child from everything. Sometimes bad stuff happens and it’s rubbish, but it’s no one’s fault and we have to stumble on the best we can until we start to function again.’

  ‘I function. I’ve built a highly successful business.’

  ‘But you don’t have a family.’

  ‘I don’t want a family.’ He’d made that decision in the weeks that had followed that terrible night. ‘I tried. I failed. I don’t want any of that. I certainly don’t want the responsibility of a child.’

  There was a long silence and then she pressed her lips to his shoulder. ‘It must be terrifying, to have had that only to lose it. You dare not love because you loved so deeply and so fiercely and you lost.’

  He grasped her hand and kissed her palm, breathing in the scent of her. ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you feeling anything for me.’

  ‘What if it’s too late? What if I tell you I already feel something?’

  ‘I’d tell you it’s the sex that makes you feel that way.’

  ‘Really? I wouldn’t know because it isn’t something I do very often.’

  ‘Which makes it even more likely that what you’re feeling is linked with the physical intimacy.’

  ‘Or that what I feel is genuine. I have felt something for you for ages. Probably the reason I put up with your unreasonable demands in the office.’ She took a deep breath and Lucas closed his eyes, willing her not to say what he guessed she was about to say.

  ‘Emma, please don’t—’

  ‘Please don’t say I love you? The trouble is, I do. I love you, Lucas.’ She said it softly and then again, more firmly. ‘I love you. And I’m not saying it because I want you to say it back or anything like that, but I want you to know how I feel. I know you don’t like people saying it.’

  So this was how it felt. ‘No one has ever said it to me before.’

  ‘What, never? What about Vicky?’

  The mention of Vicky was enough to bring him to his senses. ‘Vicky never loved me. She loved the idea of the two of us together. She loved the fact I had influential friends. And I didn’t love her either.’

  ‘Because you shut that side of yourself off when you were a child.’ Her arms tightened around him. ‘You are loved, Lucas, and you can love back.’

  ‘Is that what you’re waiting for? Because if so, you’re wasting your time.’ His voice rough, he cupped her face in his hands and looked down at her, refusing to be anything but honest. ‘I can’t say I love you. And I won’t make you false promises. For me it’s just sex and I’ll move on because I always move on. It’s the only way that works for me.’ He was brutal because he had to be and he braced himself for her reaction. At the very least she’d walk away from him and sleep in the second bedroom.

  But she did neither of those things.

  Instead she kissed him again. ‘Then we’d better make the most of tonight.’

  Lucas was wide awake when he heard the knock on the door of the suite. He turned to look at Emma but she was still fast asleep so he rose quietly from the bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt before walking through the living room and opening the door.

  It was Cristiano, and he was carrying his youngest daughter, Ella.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you so early,’ he said smoothly, ‘but we have a family crisis. Our eldest, Chiara, has slipped and banged her head. Laurel and I are about to take her to hospital but we need someone to watch Ella for a few hours.’

  Lucas stared at his friend’s child. Saw smiles and innocence. His pulse suddenly sprinted. ‘The hotel has an excellent nanny service. I’ll get you the number.’

  ‘Laurel won’t entertain leaving her with someone we don’t know. And neither would I.’

  ‘Then ask a friend.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing.’ Cristiano’s gaze didn’t shift from his. ‘I’m asking you.’

  Lucas discovered that his mouth was so dry it was almost impossible to speak. ‘You need to leave her with someone who can be trusted.’

  ‘Which is why I knocked on your door, my friend.’ Still holding his daughter, Cristiano put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. ‘Laurel and I couldn’t think of anyone we trust more than you. Will you take her? It will just be for a few hours.’

  It was the ultimate vote of confidence but never had anyone’s confidence seemed so misplaced. He was the wrong person for this task.

  Lucas looked at the little girl in his friend’s arms, stared into dark curious eyes identical to Cristiano’s. He knew her, of course, and she knew him. He’d been at her christening, at her first birthday party and endless other Ferrara events. He’d watched her grow from babe to toddler to little girl, but always from a safe distance and never from a position of responsibility.

  ‘No. I can’t—’ But before the sentence was complete he found himself with his arms full of the little girl and she was so light, so fragile that he tightened his grip instantly in case he dropped her. Panic threatened to choke him because he knew with an absolute certainty that he couldn’t do this. He didn’t trust himself. His arms shook but the result of that weakness was that Ella simply wrapped her little arms around his neck, her s
oft curls brushing against his cheek.

  ‘Fish! I want to see the fish—’ She beamed past him towards the glass wall of the living room that formed a private aquarium, oblivious to the fact that right at that moment he was drowning in his own inadequacy.

  Lucas was afraid to move in case he did something to damage this perfect human being, but she tugged at his shoulder insistently until he had no choice but to give in to her demands. Enchanted, she flattened her little hand on the glass, her fingers spread out like a starfish as she tried to ‘touch’ what she was seeing. So absorbed was she that she didn’t even look round when her father spoke.

  ‘Grazie mille. I will see you later and we’re so grateful.’

  Lucas turned his head, about to say that he couldn’t do this, that he didn’t want to do this, but Cristiano had already left and he was on his own with the child.

  Emma stood in the bedroom, holding her breath as she listened through the door. She’d known the knock was coming and it had taken all her willpower to pretend to be asleep. Her feelings were a jumbled mess. The happiness and elation of their night together was mixed in with the utter misery of knowing that he didn’t share her feelings. She knew she had a difficult decision facing her, but right now she concentrated on him. How would he cope?

  She’d heard the agony in his voice as he’d spoken to his friend. She’d felt his pain and now she had a lump in her throat because she knew how hard this was for him. Her instinct was to rush out there and give him support, but Cristiano had made her promise not to do that because it would make it too easy for Lucas to hand over responsibility. They’d agreed that this strategy was worth a try so she stood still and listened as Ella chatted away to him, pointing out all the different fish. And she understood now what Cristiano had meant when he had told her quietly that if any child could give Lucas his confidence back it was little Ella. She was outgoing and confident, fascinated by the world around her and not at all shy or intimidated by Lucas. Another child might have been asking for her daddy, but not this one. In different circumstances Emma would have smiled because the little girl had so much of her father in her. No doubt she would one day be running the business Cristiano and his brother had turned into a global corporation, but for now she was taking charge of Lucas, telling him what she wanted to play with and exactly what he needed to do to make that happen.