by Lynne Graham
‘I’m sorry about the fight,’ Dante said drily. ‘One of your men took a swing at me when I became insistent on entering and one of mine took offence.’
‘You can’t see Topsy,’ Mikhail retorted harshly.
‘I won’t let you tell me no,’ Dante countered without hesitation, striding forward like man with a death wish.
Topsy leapt into the space between the two men. Mikhail was as tall as he was wide and much more heavily built than Dante. She registered that she could not bear to see Dante physically hurt. She knew she should want to see him smashed through the nearest wall and slung from the house, but for some peculiar reason she didn’t.
‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on him!’ she warned Mikhail instead.
‘Topsy!’ Kat interposed in shaken reproach.
‘I do not require your protection, Topsy,’ Dante growled from behind her as he carefully set her to one side of him.
‘Actually, you do,’ Mikhail informed him grimly. ‘Anyone who hurts or harms Topsy is liable to get damaged here.’
Zahir’s handsome and charming kid brother, Prince Akram, walked over and grabbed Topsy’s hand without ceremony. ‘Let your family handle this,’ he advised. ‘Let’s go and have some supper.’
‘And who the hell are you?’ Dante suddenly roared at poor Akram like a lion watching someone stroll in to try and steal his prey.
‘Exactly what have you got to be all jealous and possessive about?’ Topsy roared back at him, losing her own temper with an abruptness that startled her and everyone around her. ‘You’re the one with the girlfriend you didn’t mention!’
‘Kick him out, Mikhail!’ Kat snapped suddenly.
‘I do not have a girlfriend. I am not involved with Cosima,’ Dante spelled out between clenched teeth. ‘Now will you listen to me?’
‘I was kind of looking forward to kicking you,’ Mikhail told him cheerfully.
‘Is your family always like this?’ Dante groaned, his emerald-green eyes almost radiant with raw-edged tension in his handsome face. ‘Is nothing private?’
‘Very little, I’m afraid,’ Zahir dropped in gently. ‘And cross one and you cross them all.’
‘I do want to hear what you have to say,’ Topsy admitted tightly, her eyes suddenly stinging with tears because she had thought she would never ever see Dante again and seeing him in Kat’s home so unexpectedly was extremely disconcerting and had knocked her right off balance. Had he followed her to London? Or had he been coming to London anyway on banking business? And what did it matter either way? Couldn’t she even control her own brain any more?
‘We’ll go back to my hotel.’
Saffy dug a set of keys from her clutch bag and dropped them into Topsy’s hand. ‘Use our place. It’s more private.’
‘You can’t just walk out of here with that man,’ Kat argued worriedly. ‘He’s got a bad temper. He looked at Akram as if he was going to hit him. Suppose he loses that temper with Topsy?’
A pained light entered Dante’s eyes. ‘I am not going to lose my temper or hit anyone.’
‘You lost your temper when I smashed your car!’ Topsy reminded him resentfully.
Mikhail closed a comforting arm gently round his wife’s taut shoulders. ‘Topsy’s all grown up, Kat. It’s time to cut her loose.’
‘You’ve got the family from hell,’ Dante told her darkly outside the front door. ‘I’ve never met a more interfering bunch of people.’
‘But they love me a lot,’ Topsy replied ruefully. ‘I’m lucky to have them.’
‘Not your mother though. I saw an article about her in a tabloid newspaper,’ he admitted curtly, a hand at her elbow as he guided her out to the limo parked outside. ‘It was only thanks to that article that I was able to track you down. The sole address my mother had for you was your mother’s apartment, which is, of course, empty. I assume that was another attempt to cover up your connections with your family.’
‘You read about Mum?’ Topsy felt totally humiliated by that admission. She had deliberately not read any of the newspaper reports about their mother’s arrest. She knew that studying highly coloured revelations about Odette’s turbulent life would only upset her because Kat was doing exactly that and had already been in tears over the stories several times. Mikhail had begged his wife not to read the newspapers, pointing out that the inaccurate articles were written to shock, rather than inform, and that Odette’s plight would only attract tabloid interest for a few days at most. Fortunately nothing more was likely to appear in the media until the older woman was tried in court.
‘Yes,’ Dante confirmed with a forbidding jerk of his stubborn jaw. ‘I thought I did badly in the parental lottery but clearly you didn’t do very much better.’
‘Your mother’s lovely. How can you say that?’ she demanded in bewilderment, sliding into the limousine and leaning forward to give his driver the address of Zahir and Saffy’s house.
As he buzzed the partition shut between the front and the back of the car Dante’s jaw line clenched hard, his eyes glinting like crushed green ice below the fringe of his black lashes. ‘I wasn’t referring to her. My father was a violent man, who used my mother like a punch bag,’ he confessed, every word seemingly wrenched from him against his will. ‘Worst of all, he got away with it because she was too scared of him to report him to the police and when he developed a brain tumour she nursed him right to the end.’
‘Couldn’t you have done something to help her?’
‘I tried. She was terrified of anyone finding out about what went on in our home. She was deeply ashamed of it and blamed herself for everything that was happening.’
‘How could she do that?’
‘She said she never loved him and he always knew it and hated her for it.’
‘I think she was in love with Vittore when she married your father. It wasn’t as though she wanted to marry him, so I suppose he got what he deserved when he used his power and influence to get the girl he wanted.’
Dante frowned at her in bemusement. ‘Vittore? How could she have been in love with Vittore when my father married her when she was only seventeen?’
And at that point Topsy realised she had spoken out of turn, revealing facts Dante had not been told. At the same time, she felt he should know that story to understand the strength of the ties between his mother and his stepfather. That conviction in mind, she shared what she had learned.
Dante was very much disconcerted. ‘I didn’t know she knew him when she was young. Why didn’t she tell me? They got married so fast. I wouldn’t have been as concerned had I known.’
‘Well, you know now,’ Topsy responded, thinking that in some ways Sofia and Vittore had contributed unfairly to Dante’s reserved response to their marriage. Greater candour could well have changed his attitude.
‘It’s not important now,’ Dante breathed in sudden dismissal. ‘But the reason my mother almost died during that last pregnancy with my father was because his violence had caused internal bleeding...’
Topsy grimaced in silence.
‘Soon after that I tried to protect her from him and I hit him but, unluckily for me, I was a weedy teenager, who didn’t grow big and strong until I was much older,’ he volunteered tight-mouthed.
She wondered if that was the time he had been found badly beaten up by the side of the road and her heart squeezed, the awareness that he had grown up in a profoundly disturbed and unhappy home somehow punching a small hole in the wall of her angry resistance to him. She couldn’t forgive him for Cosima and still couldn’t comprehend why he had come to London, for what could he possibly hope to achieve by seeing her again?
Yet she felt better for understanding him a little more and could only wonder if his childhood experience of violence and his parents’ unhappy marriage had damaged his ability to deeply care f
or someone else. And then she remembered, with a sense of utter foolishness and sheepish self-loathing, that he had married a woman at the age of twenty-one. After that recollection she could only question why on earth her brain should be set on trying to find excuses for his inexcusable behaviour!
She unlocked the door of the town house and stepped inside. Lamps were already lit and the temperature made it clear that the heating was on: Saffy must have contacted their caretaker/housekeeper to forewarn her of their arrival.
A gas fire flamed in the grate and Dante examined his surroundings, pausing to glance at a large collection of family photos arranged on a side table. ‘There’s a lot of children in your family,’ he commented.
Topsy breathed in deep. ‘Dante?’ He swung round, stunning green eyes locking to her with sudden unexpected intensity, the power of his compelling attraction washing over her like a potent drug. ‘Will you please tell me what you’re doing here in London?’
‘I had to see you,’ he declared.
‘But we have absolutely nothing to say to each other,’ she reasoned in a voice strung tight with the strain of self-discipline.
‘I care about you, Topsy,’ he breathed thickly.
‘Well, you have a funny way of showing it,’ Topsy told him, unimpressed, indeed resenting that statement when his lack of concern for her feelings had been paraded in front of her at the ball. ‘Until tonight I don’t believe you’ve ever told me anything really personal about yourself. I even had to find out that you were once married from your mother. We had fun as you once said but it stopped being fun and I want out...I am out.’
His spectacular bone structure was rigid below his bronzed skin. ‘When I mentioned my father tonight, it was to lessen your discomfort over your mother’s arrest. I’m not used to talking about myself. I’m not used to sharing private matters with people.’
‘Which only underlines how right I was to walk away.’
‘But I’m not the only one of us who chose to keep secrets,’ Dante countered suddenly, his green eyes ablaze with sudden condemnation.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Topsy said defensively.
Dante pulled a small envelope from his pocket and extended it to her. ‘Perhaps this will explain.’
Brow indenting, Topsy grasped the envelope. It felt like a greetings card but it wasn’t her birthday. She tore it open to extract the card and flick it open.
Welcome to the family. Vittore.
Dante crossed the room to look over her shoulder and read the same message.
‘What does he mean?’ Topsy whispered, afraid to believe that those words meant what she hoped they meant.
‘The DNA tests were a match...’ He skimmed her with a cool telling scrutiny. ‘Yes, Vittore told me that you thought he might be your father but that you only approached him the night of the ball. Were you ever planning on sharing that possibility with me?’
Topsy was reeling, both from the news that the DNA testing had confirmed that Vittore was indeed her father and the wording of the card that seemed to offer to include her in the family circle. It seemed too good to be true. ‘How does Vittore feel about it?’
‘Since he’s had a couple of days to absorb the shock of your existence, he seems pleased. He’s also broken the news to my mother. She was certainly disconcerted when he explained about his unfortunate experience with your mother years ago, but my mother seems to have spent every moment since finding delightfully sentimental comparisons between you and her husband,’ Dante revealed with an edge of derision. ‘She says you have the same smile. Frankly I’ve never noticed.’
‘I’m so glad your mother’s not been distressed by all this coming out,’ Topsy commented breathlessly. ‘And of course you won’t recognise any similarity in smiles when Vittore so rarely smiles around you. Why would he smile? Do you expect him to bask in your disapproval?’
‘You realise this makes you my stepsister?’ Dante prompted with a sardonic twist of his handsome mouth, ignoring her admonition with regard to his attitude towards his stepfather. ‘And that the child my mother carries will be a half-sibling to both of us?’
Topsy smiled, thinking that over, and nodded. ‘You have no idea what it’s like not to know who your father is, particularly when your mother is as uninterested as Odette. Finding out the truth meant a lot to me, and Vittore and your mother are handling this in such a positive way. I’m very, very lucky,’ she conceded gratefully.
‘The information you required from your mother that persuaded you to work as an escort for an evening,’ Dante recounted in a flat tone that could not hide his disapproval. ‘Was that information the name of your father?’
‘Yes,’ Topsy confirmed, hating the fact that for the first time they were talking almost like polite strangers. Yet she wondered what other relationship they could possibly hope to establish in the wake of their unfortunate fling. At the same time she knew she would have to work on her own feelings because Vittore was her real father and Dante would always be a part of Vittore and Sofia’s life.
In pursuit of that objective, she added in a rush, ‘I grew up believing that another man, who lived abroad, was my father. I only met him a couple of times but when I was eighteen I discovered that he wasn’t my father at all.’
‘And finding out who was was so important to you that you took a job with my mother...for precisely what purpose?’ Dante prompted tautly.
‘I wanted the chance to get to know Vittore a little before I decided whether or not to approach him and then everything got so complicated.’ She sighed with a wry roll of her big dark eyes. ‘Before I came to Italy I hadn’t thought anything through. I saw the job offer on the castle website and decided it was a heaven-sent opportunity. But once I arrived, there they were—Sofia and Vittore, a newly married happy couple—and I was scared that if I did turn out to be Vittore’s daughter, it would damage their marriage.’
‘It could have done,’ Dante conceded reflectively. ‘Fortunately my mother isn’t threatened by the discovery that her husband has an adult daughter but probably more important in this case is the fact that she already likes you, so you’re not an unknown quantity she is being forced to accept.’
‘Your mother’s still been very generous,’ Topsy responded.
‘But I was quite right to be suspicious of your motives in coming to work for her. You accuse me of keeping secrets but really you kept many more secrets from all of us,’ Dante condemned grimly. ‘You came into my home and earned my mother’s trust on false pretences.’
‘That’s not a fair criticism,’ Topsy objected sharply.
‘You know it is. I can understand the reasoning behind your masquerade but you also concealed who your family were and any hint that you were from a privileged background.’
Topsy flushed because that was more or less a true charge. ‘I wasn’t born into a privileged background. In fact there was nothing privileged about my life until Kat met Mikhail and married him. That was when everything changed and suddenly I was staying in a country mansion with servants at the weekends and Kat was buying me designer jeans.’
Someone rapped on the door of the lounge and Dante went to answer it.
‘Would you like coffee?’ Dante enquired over his shoulder. ‘Or anything to eat?’
‘No, thanks.’ She didn’t think she could get any sort of a drink past her tight throat and she was angry that Dante had put her on the defensive by reminding her that she had been downright dishonest when she deliberately took a job working for his mother simply to get close to Vittore. The acknowledgement embarrassed her. She hadn’t set out to hurt anyone and, luckily, nobody had been hurt and surely that should be the bottom line that judged her behaviour.
‘I wasn’t honest about my family circumstances because I didn’t want anyone questioning why I should need the job in the first place. I was als
o trying to take a break from my sisters and their expectations for a while and be independent,’ she explained unwillingly, watching an ebony brow quirk. ‘I love them all but they do meddle a lot in my life. I’ve never been allowed to make my own decisions. My sisters made the decisions for me, right down to who I dated and who I didn’t date.’
‘I wouldn’t have even got on the list of potentials,’ Dante quipped.
‘Don’t kid yourself, Dante.’ Topsy wrinkled her slightly snub nose. ‘You’re rich and successful and those are exactly the qualities my sisters and their husbands respect.’
‘Kusnirovich knows who I am and he was ready to throw me out of his house tonight,’ Dante observed grimly, his passionate mouth tightening into a hard line. ‘There was neither respect nor acceptance in my reception. In all fairness, you’re misjudging your family, cara mia. The instant you accused me of having another woman, it didn’t matter who I was or what I was worth, they didn’t want me anywhere near you.’
Topsy could see the truth of that for herself and her shoulders drooped, emotional exhaustion settling in as she sank down wearily on a well-padded sofa, allowing her rigid spine to sink into the cushions. ‘I was tired of my family watching my every move, trying to fix me up with a job they picked, and that was another reason to come to Italy, except Mikhail tracked me down there as well.’
‘They care about you,’ Dante reasoned, oddly hesitant in his delivery, his accent purring along every syllable. ‘As do I.’
Topsy froze, her small face rigid. ‘I don’t want to talk about Cosima. I still don’t know what you’re even doing here. Are you in London on business?’
‘No. I’m here solely to see you,’ Dante delivered.
‘Why did you get married at twenty-one?’ she asked him abruptly, determined to steer him off that subject lest it upset her and she let herself down by getting emotional. Attack, she thought, was the best part of defence. ‘And why did you never mention that you had been married?’
