by Lynne Graham
‘I wasn’t lying.’
‘Being inventive with the truth…again?’ Alessio asked very drily.
Daisy went pale and involuntarily glanced up, connecting with brilliant eyes alive with derision. ‘I only ever told you one lie…only one. I let you think I was at university when I wasn’t. You never actually asked me what age I was—’
‘Semantics,’ Alessio dismissed, unimpressed and not one whit more yielding or forgiving on the point than he had been in the past. ‘I also thought we had reached an agreement, Daisy. The past is off limits. Let’s strive to keep the temperature down. Perhaps I should speed up matters by admitting that because we were once married I do still feel some sense of responsibility towards you.’
Daisy stiffened and bridled. ‘I don’t want you feeling responsible for me and I am not here to ask you for a loan. But, while we’re on the subject, let me assure you that I would die of starvation before I would ask you for help!’
‘Then exactly what are you doing here?’ Alessio enquired.
Daisy breathed in deep and dug into her slim handbag to extract a copy of Tara’s birth certificate and a small photograph. Her slender hands were trembling, her stomach knotting up. She gripped the certificate. ‘This is going to come as a big shock to you, Alessio…but I’m afraid that there isn’t any easy way to do this—’
‘Do what?’ he broke in impatiently.
Daisy stood up on wobbly legs, her heart thumping as if she were tied to the rails in front of an express train. ‘I think I’ll just leave these with you and then maybe I could ring you tomorrow and see how you feel.’
Alessio had already vaulted upright. His dark features were taut. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘After we split up, I discovered that I had been expecting twins… and although I had lost o-one of them,’ Daisy stammered, a trickle of nervous perspiration running down between her breasts below her blouse, ‘I didn’t lose the other.’
Alessio stared down at her with fiercely narrowed eyes, a stark frown of bewilderment drawing his level black brows together. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I have a daughter of thirteen…your daughter,’ she delivered with unconscious stress as she took an automatic step back from him.
‘That’s impossible.’ The faintest tremor lent an uneven quality to Alessio’s usually level diction and his accent had thickened. ‘You had a miscarriage.’
‘She was born three months after I left Italy. I was kept in hospital right up until her birth…in case I lost her too. She was a couple of weeks premature. You see, I wasn’t quite as pregnant as everyone assumed I was,’ Daisy muttered awkwardly in the thundering silence of Alessio’s total disbelief. ‘The doctor in Rome got the delivery date wrong because when he first saw me I was bigger than he thought I should be, but that was because I was carrying twins.’
‘You had a miscarriage,’ Alessio delivered in stubborn repetition. ‘And if at some subsequent stage you did give birth to a baby which was premature it could not possibly have been mine—’
‘Tara was born in April.’ Daisy’s lips compressed tremulously.
If Alessio had been capable of rational thought, his intelligence would have told him that given the time period concerned there was no way on earth that the child could be anything other than his. But then Alessio was not reasoning out anything right now. Alessio was at a standstill, blocked from moving on by the barrier of what he had believed to be concrete fact for thirteen years.
‘You lost the baby,’ he said, his rich drawl oddly attentuated and unevenly pitched.
Daisy couldn’t stop staring at him. His strong bone structure was fiercely prominent below his golden skin. He was alarmingly pale. His astute eyes were curiously dark and unfocused.
‘I didn’t lose Tara…I lost her twin,’ Daisy whispered shakily, her eyes aching. ‘But when I left Rome I didn’t know that. What I did know was that you didn’t want me or the baby, and once the baby was no longer on the way there was no reason for us to stay married. You couldn’t wait to get rid of me. You couldn’t even bring yourself to come and commiserate at the hospital because naturally you couldn’t help being relieved that it was all over—’
‘Madre di Dio…’ Alessio breathed unsteadily, his lean hands suddenly clenching into powerful fists.
‘And I don’t blame you for that…not really,’ Daisy admitted with innate honesty, her voice taut with the force of her own turbulent emotions. ‘But I had had enough and the last thing I could have faced was breaking back into all your lives when you thought you were finally free of me and saying, Guess what? I’m still pregnant! It was easier to let you go on thinking that that was over, finished and done with, the way you all wanted it to be. So I really didn’t want to have to come here this morning and spoil your day—’
‘Spoil my day?’ Alessio enunciated with visible difficulty.
Daisy stooped almost clumsily and dropped the certificate and the small photo on the low glass table between them. ‘I would never have told you if it had been left solely up to me,’ she revealed in a jerky undertone as she began backing away towards the door, her anxious violet gaze nailed to his low shimmering golden eyes. ‘I know you’re shocked and angry and undoubtedly thinking that you must have been cursed the night you first met me but please try to think of all this from Tara’s point of view. She would like to meet you. She’s not going to make a nuisance of herself or anything like that but she’s curious—’
‘Where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?’ In a sudden movement, Alessio sprang out of his statuelike stillness and strode after her.
‘I’ve said all I’ve got to say for now!’ Daisy confessed, and speeded up in her path to the door, wrenching it open when she got there and not bothering to look over her shoulder as she walked very fast down the corridor. She hit the call button on the lift and then looked.
‘Dio! Get back here right now!’ Alessio launched at her in a rage, from a distance of twenty feet.
Her heart leapt into her throat. She had a dazed impression of the receptionist’s stunned incredulity and then she turned and fled, heading for the stairs instead. There was no point in assisting Alessio to spring an embarrassing scene in public. Obviously he was in deep shock, otherwise he wouldn’t have shouted at her like that. He was also in a blaze of fury, and that was new—but not something Daisy planned to hang around and find out more about. She crashed through the last set of fire doors and raced down a wide set of stairs.
‘I’ll drag you up again by the hair if you don’t get back here!’ Alessio roared down at her from the flight above.
‘I’m running away for your benefit, not my own!’ Daisy hurled breathlessly back. ‘If I don’t, you’ll say a lot of things that you’ll be deeply ashamed of saying in a few hours’ time!’
‘You bitch!’ Alessio grated as he continued his enraged pursuit.
‘Don’t you dare call me that!’ Daisy paused to shout back. ‘And by the way, it was your birth control that failed and not my lack of it! The dates prove that beyond doubt!’
Alessio spat something in Italian that sounded very aggressive. Daisy blenched. This was not a mood she knew him in—Alessio in an uncontrollable dark fury, doubtless made all the more dangerous by his lack of practice in expressing such feelings. It had not once crossed her mind that she might find herself being chased through the Leopardi Merchant Bank by a male who even at nineteen had prided himself on his self-control and superhuman cool. So he was furious—well, that was no surprise, was it? But that was no excuse to attack her!
Tara had been conceived in August, not July, which meant that Alessio was the one responsible. Of course, he had tried to push that responsibility off onto her, citing the very first time they had made love, when a slight misunderstanding had occurred and he had falsely assumed that she was protected from pregnancy. Even with Alessio in hot pursuit, Daisy was childishly delighted to have finally been able to throw that important fact in his t
eeth.
‘Watch out! You’re going to fall and break your neck!’ Alessio blazed, sounding far too close for comfort.
In her attempt to speed up, Daisy missed her footing and lurched forward. She gasped as a powerful hand suddenly closed on the collar of her jacket to steady her and haul her back up a safe step. Whisking her round, Alessio imprisoned her between his hard, muscular length and the landing wall without noticing that her feet were no longer connected to solid ground.
‘Dio…how dare you accuse me of being relieved when you lost our baby?’ Alessio thundered down at her, glittering golden eyes splintering with violent anger, his hands anchored to her narrow ribcage to hold her entrapped. ‘I went on a binge! I got so damned drunk, I nearly killed myself! I didn’t have the guts to come to that hospital…I was too ashamed to face you! I didn’t know what to say when it was too late to say it. “Sorry” wasn’t likely to cover it when our baby was dead!’
As he slowly released her, she slid down the wall again and one of her shoes fell off but Daisy wasn’t up to fumbling blindly for it. Keeping herself balanced on tiptoe on one side, she gaped up at him, violet eyes wide with astonishment at what he was telling her.
‘I showed up three days later and you had gone,’ Alessio added unsteadily, dense dark lashes screening his gaze from her, but not before she had seen the savage pain and guilt in the stormy depths of his darkened eyes. ‘My father told me that if I put one foot onto a flight for London he would personally kill me! He said I’d done enough damage. But I didn’t listen to him until Bianca told me about the money and convinced me that that was all you had wanted from the start—’
‘I doubt you needed much persuasion.’
‘You’d gone,’ Alessio said again. ‘You agreed to a divorce without even discussing it with me!’
‘But that’s what you wanted,’ Daisy pointed out very shakily.
Aggressively taut, his strong face shuttered, Alessio took a step back from her. Her throat was working, her insides churning, but all she could think about was the fierce pain and remorse he had revealed—feelings that she had never once dreamt he might be experiencing in the aftermath of their breakup.
The noisy sound of a door swinging back on its hinges came from above them, followed by the echo of chattering female voices.
‘Come back upstairs,’ Alessio demanded harshly.
Daisy dug her foot back into her lost shoe and sidled away from him, terrified that she was about to break down in tears in front of him. Right now, she didn’t think that she could cope with any more. And she had done what she had come to do. She had told him about Tara and he needed time to think about that. Did he appreciate that himself? Was that why he had concentrated on their past rather than on the revelation that he had a daughter? Or was the reality more that he had not yet been able even to begin to absorb that news?
‘I’ll phone you…t-tomorrow,’ Daisy stammered sickly, gripping the handrail with a perspiring palm as she immediately began to head downwards again.
Alessio ground out a frustrated imprecation in his own language as the footsteps above grew louder and closer.
Daisy took advantage of the approaching company to flee, and she didn’t glance back this time. Tears were blinding her as she reached the final flight of stairs. The heel of one of her shoes went skittering off the edge of a step and she fell heavily with a bitten-off gasp of fright. Briefly her body was numbed by the force of her fall. Then the pain came in a stomach-churning surge. Slowly, painfully she breathed in deep and picked herself up, straightened her rucked skirt with a trembling hand and limped out through the doors into the ground-floor foyer.
She caught a cab back to the agency. Her hip throbbed with the bruises she had inflicted on herself. But that physical discomfort was as nothing to the terrible pain and confusion tearing at her fast-crumbling composure. Using the rear entrance from the car park, she hobbled into the stark little room that the sales team used for coffee-breaks and collapsed down on an armchair.
You’re like an accident around Alessio, she told herself wearily. But then even before she had met him her life had lurched from one disaster to the next. Why had she expected anything to change? She scolded herself for thinking like that. It was a loser’s mindset which she had put behind her a long time ago. But somehow, when a real crisis loomed, it was hard to forget the childhood which had left her so desperately insecure, that insidious, confidence-zapping feeling that everything that went wrong was always her fault.
Yet that sun-drenched summer with Alessio had, ironically, been the happiest of her life. Feeling loved and wanted and needed had been an intoxicating new experience for Daisy. They had been inseparable and at the time that intensity had seemed mutual. Of course, in actuality, she conceded painfully, she had only been one more notch on Alessio’s bedpost. A naive pushover, always available, always willing, frankly asking to be slapped in the teeth, she thought now. What little common sense she had possessed had evaporated beneath the onslaught of Alessio’s first smile.
The real reason why Alessio had not dated schoolgirls should have been obvious to her even then. He had been long past the stage of settling for a goodnight kiss at the end of a date. Daisy had been smoothly, gently but quite ruthlessly seduced by a teenager already expert in the field of sexual intimacy.
Of course, he had also talked with passionate conviction about how much he loved her and how he would fly over and see her at weekends after she went home, but then he would have said that, wouldn’t he? Such assurances were par for the course. Daisy was convinced that if she hadn’t got pregnant, if she had returned to London she would never have heard from Alessio Leopardi again. After all, he had already had a steady girlfriend at university, but Sophia had been abroad that summer…
Daisy swam back to the present, feeling utterly drained. She asked herself why she had been so devastated to hear Alessio admit that he had been too ashamed and upset to face her after her miscarriage. That he had got drunk, been ripped apart by guilt and an obvious inability to cope with either her feelings or his own. She had been shattered by the realisation that her image of Alessio had been inexplicably trapped in a time-warp.
At seventeen, she had looked up to him, depended on him, viewed him as an experienced and strong adult in comparison with herself. It had not occurred to her then that Alessio might have weaknesses of his own. Only now did she think he was only six years older than Tara is now; beneath the glossy, cool front he was only a kid too. But Daisy had made a hero of him because nothing less than a hero could have made her feel safe in the new and threatening world in which he and his family lived.
Tears had dampened her face. Daisy pressed unsteady hands to her wet cheeks. Telling Alessio about Tara had somehow brought all those painful feelings of inadequacy back again. But that was the past and far behind her now, she reminded herself. Taking a deep breath, she stood up again and set about eradicating the evidence that she had been crying.
Her phone was ringing when she reached her desk. She swept up the receiver a split second before Barry the Barracuda reached for it. He lounged back against her desk, curious brown eyes nailed to her, a faint smirk on his handsome mouth. ‘You seem a little harassed … anything wrong?’
Daisy shook her head, carefully avoiding his hotly appreciative appraisal. Even though she was as encouragingly warm as an ice sculpture around Barry, he had buckets of persistence. One minor pleasantry and Barry would be back to embarrassing the hell out of her by telling her what a good time an older woman could have with a younger man.
She put the receiver to her ear.
‘Daisy?’
Her heart lurched violently against her breastbone. It was Alessio. ‘What do you want?’ she whispered.
‘You… now,’ Alessio spelt out succinctly. ‘I’m in the wine bar on the corner. You have five minutes to get here.’
The line went dead. Daisy straightened, deathly pale, and then reached for her bag again.
Alessio was in
the darkest corner of the bar. As she walked, towards him, he sprang fluidly upright and surveyed her with glittering eyes that were as hard as jet, his lean, powerful frame whip-taut with sizzling tension.
‘I promised I’d ring you tomorrow,’ Daisy reminded him defensively.
‘I want to meet my daughter and I am not prepared to await your convenience,’ Alessio gritted in a fierce undertone.
‘She’s at school.’
‘Where?’
As she sat down, Daisy looked at him in appalled comprehension. ‘You can’t go there—’
‘When does she get out?’ Alessio growled.
‘You’re not thinking straight,’ Daisy protested, shaken by the immediacy of his demand. ‘Tara didn’t even know I was coming to see you today.’
His eyes flared. ‘Dio…you should be locked up! You breeze into the bank after thirteen years of silence and tell me I have a daughter! Then you walk out again and tell me I’m not thinking straight? What kind of a woman are you?’
A woman who had not enjoyed being forced to break the same ‘bad news’ twice in one lifetime, she thought.
‘I still can’t credit that you have done this to me,’ Alessio confessed with barely suppressed savagery, driving not quite steady fingers through his luxuriant black hair and surveying her with more than a glimmering of stark incredulity. ‘That you could be so bitter you would conceal the birth of my child from me—’
‘I wasn’t bitter then. I thought I was doing you a favour.’
‘A favour?’ Alessio queried in rampant disbelief.
A suffocating silence hummed.
‘I believed you would be happier not knowing,’ Daisy finally admitted.
‘Happier…?’
‘Obviously I was wrong,’ Daisy conceded in a tense rush. ‘I wish you would stop looking at me like that…like I belong in a lunatic asylum or something… I never had the slightest idea that you would feel like this about it!’
