Happy Mother's Day!

by Sharon Kendrick

  So when after weeks of being pretty elusive Francesco had telephoned out of the blue and announced he was getting married Valentina had been delighted for him.

  A secret ceremony in a tiny chapel with only herself and Sam to witness the event had seemed the height of romance until she’d realised the couple had only met five days earlier!

  That had really set the alarm bells ringing!

  It was hard not to conclude, given the timing, that his totally out-of-character whirlwind marriage had been some sort of backlash to his twin brother’s death.

  She hadn’t really been surprised when the marriage had folded after a month.

  ‘I for one,’ Sam added, ‘would do a hell of a lot more than tell a few white lies for him. He believed in me when nobody else did, or have you forgotten how much we owe him? We’d have lost this house … the stud, everything!’

  ‘I know … I know … and I’d do anything for him normally, but we’re lying to Erin. How’s she going to feel when she realises we’ve been tricking her?’

  In the end they’d come to a compromise: she would not spill the beans to Erin, but if the other girl asked her a direct question she wouldn’t lie.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ERIN, who was curled up on the sofa, put the book she was reading to one side and rose to her feet when Valentina walked in.

  ‘Who were you talking to?’ Valentina asked, looking around the empty room.

  ‘The heroine,’ Erin explained, indicating the book that lay open. ‘She is so good it makes me nauseous.’

  ‘Then why are you reading the book?’

  ‘I’m hoping she’ll wake up and realise that the hero she’s been waiting for doesn’t exist.’ The problem with heroiclooking men was it was a massive disappointment when you discovered they were just as incapable of knowing the meaning of fidelity as any other man.

  ‘That makes you a terrible cynic.’

  ‘That makes me an optimist,’ Erin retorted, running a hand through her hair before tightening the knot in the orange scarf that secured it in a loose ponytail at her nape. The vibrant colour clashed gloriously with the equally vibrant shade of her copper-red curls. ‘She might not be as stupid as she seems.’

  Her glance drifted to the plump baby gurgling contentedly in his mother’s arms. Valentina made motherhood look so easy … just watching her made Erin feel inadequate. Were good mothers born or could you learn? she wondered.

  Erin hoped, for the sake of her unborn baby, that the latter was true!

  ‘So, being an optimist, do you think people can change?’

  Erin tore her eyes from the golden-skinned baby and caught Valentina watching her with an expression that made her wonder uneasily if she didn’t suspect something. It wasn’t the first time she had received that impression.

  For a moment Erin was tempted to tell her; she ached to have someone to confide in, someone to tell her that the doubts and fears that kept her awake nights were normal.

  But then sanity intervened.

  Francesco was Valentina’s cousin and to ask her to keep the information from him would put her in an awful position. Valentina would no doubt consider that Francesco had a right to know and Erin could not disagree, she knew she had to tell Francesco about the baby.

  She had actually been on the point of putting pen to paper to do just that earlier that week, not having mentioned it in her earlier letter, when she had picked up the phone and without warning heard his voice.

  But when the moment had presented itself, she hadn’t told him; she hadn’t said anything.

  She hadn’t been able to—the protective defences she had struggled to construct had disintegrated and so had she! Her eyes had still been puffy and red the next day from the orgy of weeping just hearing his voice had triggered.

  It would be so much simpler if her conscience would allow her to delay telling him until after the divorce. Because once he did know Erin knew that realistically there would be no question of a smooth, uncontested divorce.

  It just wasn’t going to happen.

  Not given Francesco’s inflexible and unforgiving attitude when it came to the subject of fathers who tried to evade their responsibilities.

  Francesco held the view that absentee fathers came slightly lower on the evolutionary scale than lice! And while he had once expressed some admiration for single mothers who brought up children and juggled careers, he had added the rider that it was inevitable the child would suffer.

  The moment he knew about the baby Erin knew that he would use all his considerable powers of persuasion to make her give up the idea of a divorce completely.

  But even if he had turned up on his knees begging her to come back, a scenario slightly less likely than snow in the desert, Erin would not have considered trying again, especially only for the sake of their unborn child.

  It wasn’t as if it would work out any better the second time around. Nothing had changed. Essentially they were the same people, the same totally incompatible people. If they got back together she would only end up having to walk away a second time.

  And that was something she had to avoid at all costs. Leaving the first time had hurt more than anything in her life and the thought of feeling pain like that again … Oh, my God, I just can’t go through that again! she thought, gulping as she bent to pick up the stuffed toy Gianni had thrown on the floor.

  ‘No, I don’t think people can change,’ she said, putting the toy back in the baby’s plump hand.

  In order to change you had to admit you were in the wrong—something that her estranged husband had refused point-blank to do. As her thoughts lingered on the subject of Francesco her soft features grew bleak.

  It wasn’t difficult to work out what she had seen in him. He had had more raw sexual magnetism in his little finger than a normal man had in his entire body.

  Erin could forgive herself for the physical attraction, but what she couldn’t forgive herself for was seeing emotional depth in his brooding silences and strength in his reticence.

  It seemed laughably pathetic now, but she had really thought she had found her soul mate, the one man in the world that she was meant to be with. She had seen what she wanted, when in reality there had been nothing to see.

  He had been shallow, selfish and cruel.

  How had she ever imagined that their marriage could work?

  She was confident that walking out and turning her back on him and a lifestyle to which she had been patently unsuited had been the right thing to do. She had no doubts at all … if only she could forget that look of bleak devastation she had seen in his dark eyes …

  ‘But sometimes …’ Valentina’s voice interrupted her thoughts.

  Erin shook her head. ‘My mum believed my dad could change for thirty years.’

  It was the first reference that Erin had made to her parents’ marriage. On the one occasion Valentina had met Erin’s mother, she had been far less restrained when it came to disclosing the gory details of her husband’s numerous infidelities! Much to her daughter’s obvious discomfiture.

  ‘When you were growing up … did you know what was going on?’ Valentina asked curiously.

  Erin shrugged, her expression tight as she admitted, ‘The entire village knew what was going on.’

  Valentina gave a grimace of sympathy. She herself had found it difficult to warm to Clare Foyle. She couldn’t rid herself of the uncharitable conviction that the older woman rather enjoyed her status as tragic, dumped wife.

  What Erin still struggled to understand was that, after all these years and numerous affairs, all her father had to do was look sheepish and contrite and his wife would welcome him with open arms no matter how many times he humiliated her.

  Erin knew better than to challenge her father or attempt to make her mother see he would ever change. The only thing her previous interventions had never done was make her mother accuse her of not wanting to see her happy.

  She gave a philosophical mental shrug. She had long a
go accepted that where her father was concerned her mother could not think rationally.

  And who was she to criticize? Hadn’t she almost gone down the same road herself?

  ‘They’re planning a trip to France to tour the winemaking regions.’

  ‘My cousin married an Australian winemaker …’ Valentina stopped and gave a self-conscious grimace. ‘But then you’d know that. Sorry, I didn’t mean to …’

  ‘No need to be sorry,’ Erin said, pretending a pragmatism she was a million miles away from achieving. ‘And actually there are entire chunks of Francesco’s life which are a total mystery to me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose that is so surprising—you actually didn’t know one another very long. That isn’t a criticism,’ she added quickly. ‘Sam said he knew he was going to marry me five minutes after we met!’

  ‘But I’m assuming that you waited a little longer than five days before you got married.’

  Most sane people did, she reflected, still unable three months after the event to explain the reckless way she had jumped into marriage with a man whom she hardly knew. A man who she had already discovered had lied more than once to her.

  But then there had not been a whole lot of sanity involved in her steamy relationship with Francesco Romanelli!

  ‘This entire divorce thing is going to be a total nightmare. I wish we could just do it without involving a lawyer. I really don’t care about the money … I just want to put it all behind me, but Mum says …’ Erin shrugged and bit her lip. ‘She never really took to Francesco,’ she admitted.

  Valentina suspected that Clare Foyle would never take to any man who took away the daughter she used as an emotional prop, but she maintained a tactful silence.

  The baby in her arms began to cry. ‘Gianni is a bit cranky today.’

  Erin ran a tentative finger down the baby’s soft cheek, swallowing past the emotional lump in her throat. ‘He’s a lovely baby,’ she observed huskily. ‘You’re very lucky.’

  Valentina nodded. ‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘So shall we go find Sam? I think he’s in the library.’

  ‘Library?’

  ‘Yes, he’s dying to take you on a tour of the stud,’ she said, taking Erin’s arm and steering her towards the door.

  ‘That would be interesting,’ Erin admitted, puzzled by her hostess’s urgency. ‘But I wouldn’t want to be an imposition. Couldn’t I give you a hand?’

  Valentina looked blank. ‘A hand?’

  ‘Well, aren’t the other guests arriving this morning?’

  ‘Everyone who’s coming should be here by eleven-thirty, but everything’s under control.’

  Her strained smile made Erin suspect that organising the weekend had been more fraught than Valentina had anticipated.

  ‘I’m sure everything will go smoothly,’ Erin said soothingly.

  For some reason this comment drew a nervous laugh from her increasingly anxious-looking hostess.

  Valentina paused, her hand on the door of the library. ‘I was wondering.’ she began.

  ‘You were wondering what?’

  ‘I was wondering if you’re really serious about this divorce thing … I know it’s none of my business.’ ‘I’m deadly serious.’

  Valentina sighed. ‘Well, I think it’s sad. You and Francesco on your wedding day looked so … you looked so right together.’

  Erin swallowed the lump in her throat. She remembered how it had felt right when his mouth had covered her own. How right it had felt when they had lain skin to skin touching … but sometimes, she reflected grimly, instincts were wrong. What felt right was anything but!

  ‘Sometimes things don’t work out,’ she said lamely; she could hardly bad-mouth Francesco to his cousin.

  Actually she hadn’t bad-mouthed him to anyone, and bizarrely there had been more than one occasion when she had even found herself defending him in the face of her mother’s savage criticism. Well, whatever else he was, Francesco was the father of her unborn child.

  ‘Sam and I had some spectacular rows when we first married,’ Valentina revealed candidly. ‘Living with someone even when you love them can be difficult in the early days.’

  ‘Look, I appreciate what you’re saying,’ Erin said. ‘But you and Sam … well, it isn’t comparing like with like. Did Sam ever pretend to be someone he wasn’t? Did you have to learn by accident that the man you were marrying the next day was someone quite different?’

  Valentina, looking confused, shook her head. ‘You didn’t know who Francesco was?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know he was some filthy-rich banker with a family tree that can trace itself back to the year dot, and I’d be grateful if you tell that to anyone who suggests I married him for his money.’

  ‘Nobody thinks that!’ Valentina exclaimed, horrified by the suggestion.

  ‘I’ve no doubt they will,’ Erin retorted as her thoughts were dragged inexorably back to the moment when she had accidentally discovered the true identity of her future husband.

  She had experienced no flicker of premonition as she had picked up a paper that had wafted onto the floor from the desk piled high with Francesco’s files.

  The letterhead on the heavy vellum paper had pronounced it came from the Romanelli Bank.

  She remembered being struck by the coincidence of Francesco doing business with a bank that had his own name. It had been a sudden concern, not suspicion, that had made her go back and study it. Why did banks write to people?

  What if Francesco had financial problems? She had had to remonstrate with him on more than one occasion about his generosity.

  Guiltily she had skimmed the typewritten letter. The convoluted wording and technical language it was couched in meant she hadn’t understood one word in five, but one thing she had understood was the signature at the bottom of the page.

  She would have recognised that distinctive bold flourish anywhere.

  What was Francesco’s name doing at the bottom of a letter from a bank?

  She had suddenly remembered an incident that had not seemed important at the time. It had been the first time he had driven her up to his remote home two days earlier. On the way she had pointed at the name plaque on a large automated gate and laughingly asked if that was where he lived.

  ‘Romanelli is a common name around here.’

  Around the next bend she caught a fleeting glimpse of a vast honey-coloured stone building that resembled a fairytale castle.

  ‘The people who live there must be very rich,’ she commented.

  ‘They own the estate.’ ‘Is it large?’

  ‘Many thousands of acres.’

  Of course, she forgot the rich people in their castle when he brought her to his home. Though only half the conversion was completed, Francesco’s home, which he explained he was converting with his own hands, totally enchanted her.

  It was a perfect marriage of rustic and contemporary. All the materials, he proudly explained, were locally sourced, many reclaimed from other old buildings which had fallen into disrepair.

  Francesco’s plans for the place were ambitious.

  ‘When it is finished there will be a glass corridor linking the two wings and that gable end will be glass.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, Francesco,’ she said, her imagination fired by the picture he drew.

  ‘It is perfectly habitable at the moment. Is it somewhere you could imagine living?’

  ‘I’ll never live anywhere half so beautiful.’

  ‘You could.’

  ‘You mean for the rest of my holiday?’ ‘I mean stay here. Live here with me?’ The request startled her, but she still did not understand the sigificance. ‘You mean permanently? But I have a job, a life … I …’

  ‘You misunderstand. I am asking you to marry me.’

  Thinking of that castle, she had opened his laptop.

  A few moments later the Internet had confirmed her suspicions.

  Erin had confronted him immediately.

  She had
expected him to be defensive and perhaps annoyed that she had gone behind his back, but Francesco had been totally relaxed about the entire thing.

  ‘Quite the little detective,’ he murmured indulgently.

  ‘But you said that you work with horses.’

  ‘And so I do. I did not lie to you. I just do other things, too.’

  ‘Like make lots of money.’

  ‘So long as I have enough to support a family I don’t see that the state of my bank balance is relevant.’

  Not relevant? She stared at him in disbelief. ‘But you own the bank! Your name is in the first column of the European Rich List. You can trace your family tree back to royalty.’

  ‘Well, you can see why I don’t shout it from the rooftops, can’t you? You tell people you are a banker and they begin to yawn straight away.’

  ‘This is not a joke, Francesco. Things are going too fast.’

  ‘Then let us be serious for a moment. I do not own a bankmy family, and specifically my father, does. Money is a byproduct of what I do, but it is not intrinsically important to me.’

  ‘But it’s not just the money. You have a family, Francesco. Do they even know about me?’

  ‘My family will love you, cara,’ he purred in his sinfully sexy voice.

  She felt her anger slip away as he tangled his fingers into the mesh of her hair, massaging his fingers into her scalp. He tilted her head back and kissed her.

  A long, tremulous sigh left her lips when his head lifted.

  ‘My parents are staying with my sister in Australia. I have contacted them and told them about our marriage. They are ringing this evening to speak to you. They can’t wait to meet you. They would have flown back but my mother had an accident—nothing serious, but she cannot make the trip.

  ‘They have had some sad times recently. You will bring some joy into their lives. As you have brought joy into mine,’ he said, holding her face in his hands and staring down at her with an expression that made her traitorous heart skip a beat.

  ‘But shouldn’t we wait until they get back? I don’t understand the hurry.’