by Abby Green
* * *
That evening when the doorbell rang Sam looked up from washing the dinner things in the sink. Milo was playing happily on the floor in the sitting room with his cars, oblivious. As she went to answer it she assured herself it was probably just Bridie, who had forgotten her keys to the flat again.
But when she opened the door on the dusky late winter evening it wasn’t Bridie, who stood at five foot two inches in heels. It was someone over a foot taller and infinitely more masculine.
Rafaele Falcone.
For a long, breathless moment, the information simply wouldn’t compute. Suspended in time, Sam seemed to be able to take in details almost dispassionately. Faded jeans. Battered leather jacket. Thin wool jumper. Thick dark brown hair which still had a tendency to curl a little too much over his collar. The high forehead. The deep-set startling green eyes. The patrician bump of his nose, giving him that indelible air of arrogance. The stunning bone structure and that golden olive skin that placed him somewhere more exotic than cold, wet England.
And his mouth. That gorgeous, sculpted-for-wicked-things mouth. It always looked on the verge of tipping into a sexy half-smile, full of the promise of sensual nirvana. Unless it was pulled into a grim line, as it had been when she had seen him last.
Reality slammed into Sam like a fist to her gut. She actually sucked in a breath, only realising then that she’d been starving her lungs for long seconds while she gawped at him like a groupie.
‘Samantha.’
His voice lodged her even more firmly in reality. And the burning intensity of his green eyes as they swept down her body. Sam became acutely aware of her weekend uniform of skinny jeans, thick socks and a very worn plaid shirt. Her hair was scraped up into a bun and she wore no make-up.
Rafaele smiled. ‘Still a tomboy, I see. Despite my best efforts.’
A memory exploded into Sam’s consciousness. Rafaele, in his palazzo, presenting her with a huge white box. Under what had seemed like acres and acres of silver tissue paper a swathe of material had appeared.
Sam had lifted it out to reveal a breathtaking evening gown. Rafaele had stripped her himself and dressed her again. One-shouldered and figure-hugging, in black and flesh-coloured stripes, the dress had accentuated her hips, her breasts, and a long slit had revealed her legs. Then he’d taken her out to one of Milan’s most exclusive restaurants. They’d been the last to leave, somewhere around four o’clock in the morning, drunk on sparkling wine and lust, and he’d taken her home to his palazzo...
‘Still a tomboy, I see...’
The memory vanished and the backdrop of Sam’s very suburban street behind Rafaele came back into view.
Sexy smile. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in? It’s cold out here.’
Sam’s hand clenched tight around the door. Milo. Panic rushed into her blood. Finally. Rousing her.
‘Now isn’t a good time. I don’t know why you’ve come here. I thought I made it clear the other day that I’m not interested.’
Sam forced herself to look at him. Four years had passed and in that time she’d changed utterly. She felt older, more jaded. Whereas Rafaele only looked even more gorgeous. The unfairness of it galvanised her. He’d known nothing of her life the last few years. Because you didn’t tell him, a voice pointed out.
‘Why did you come here, Rafaele? I’m sure you have more important things to do on a Saturday evening.’
The bitterness in Sam’s voice surprised her.
Rafaele’s jaw tightened, but he answered smoothly. ‘I thought if I came to see you in person you might be persuaded to listen to my offer.’
A dull flush accentuated Rafaele’s cheekbones, but Sam was barely aware of it as she heard a high-pitched ‘Mummy!’ which was accompanied by small feet running at full speed behind her.
She felt Milo land at her legs, clasping his arms around them, and could almost visualise his little round face peeping out to see who was at the door. Like trying in vain to halt an oncoming train, Sam said in a thready voice, ‘Like I said, now really isn’t a good time.’
She could see awareness dawn on Rafaele’s face as he obviously took in the fact of a child. He started to speak stiltedly. ‘I’m sorry. I should have thought... Of course it’s been years...you must be married by now. Children...’
Then his eyes slid down and she saw them widen. She didn’t have to look to know that Milo was now standing beside her, one chubby hand clinging onto her leg. Wide green eyes would be staring innocently up into eyes the exact same shade of green. Unusual. Lots of people commented on how unusual they were.
Rafaele stared at Milo for what seemed like an age. He frowned and then looked as if someone had just hit him in the belly...dazed. He looked up at Sam and she knew exactly what he was seeing as clearly as if she was standing apart, observing the interplay. Her eyes were wide and stricken, set in a face leached of all colour. Pale as parchment. Panicked. Guilty.
And just like that, something in his eyes turned to ice and she knew that he knew.
CHAPTER TWO
‘MUMMY, CAN WE watch the cars on TV now?’
Sam put her hand to Milo’s head and said faintly, ‘Why don’t you go on and I’ll be there in a minute, okay?’
Milo ran off again and the silence grew taut between Sam and Rafaele. He knew. She felt it in her bones. He’d known as soon as he’d looked into his son’s eyes. So identical. She hated that something about his immediate recognition of his own son made something soften inside her.
He was looking at her so hard she felt it like a physical brand on her skin. Hot.
‘Let me in, Samantha. Now.’
Feeling shaky and clammy all at once, Sam stepped back and opened the door. Rafaele came in, his tall, powerful form dwarfing the hallway. He smelt of light spices and something musky, and through the shock Sam’s blood jumped in recognition.
She shut the door and walked quickly to the kitchen at the end of the hall, passing where Milo sat cross-legged in front of the TV watching a popular car programme. His favourite.
She was about to pull the door shut when a curt voice behind her instructed, ‘Leave it.’
She dropped her hand and tensed. Rafaele was looking at Milo as he sat enraptured by the cars on the screen. He was holding about three of his favourite toy cars in his hands. If his eyes and pale olive skin hadn’t been a fatal giveaway then this might have been the worst kind of ironic joke.
Sam stepped back and walked into the kitchen. She couldn’t feel her legs. She felt sick, light-headed. She turned around to see Rafaele follow her in and close the door behind him, not shutting it completely.
Rafaele was white beneath his dark colouring. And he looked murderous.
He bit out, ‘This is where you tell me that by some extraordinary feat of genetic coincidence that little boy in there isn’t three years and approximately three months old. That he didn’t inherit exactly the same colour eyes that I inherited from my own mother. That he isn’t my son.’
Sam opened her mouth. ‘He is...’ Even now, at this last second, her brain searched desperately for something to cling onto. Some way this could be justified. He was his father. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t have the right any more. She’d never had the right. ‘He is your son.’
Silence, stretching taut and stark, and then he repeated, ‘He is my son?’
Sam just nodded. Nausea was churning in her belly now. The full implications of this were starting to hit home.
Rafaele emitted a long stream of Italian invective and Sam winced because she recognised some of the cruder words—they were pretty universal. Her belly was so tight she put a hand to it unconsciously. She watched as Rafaele struggled to take this in. The enormity of it.
‘No wonder you were so keen to get rid of me the other day.’
He paced
back and forth in the tiny space. She could feel his anger and tension as it lashed out like a live electrical wire, snapping at her feet.
Suddenly he stopped and looked at her. ‘Are you married?’
Sam shook her head painfully. ‘No.’
‘And what if I hadn’t decided to pay you a visit? Would you have let me remain in blissful ignorance for ever?’
Stricken, Sam whispered, ‘I don’t...I don’t know.’ Even as she admitted that, though, the knowledge seeped in. She wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt. She would have told him.
He pinned her to the spot with that light green gaze which had once devoured her alive and was now colder than the arctic.
‘You bitch.’
Sam flinched. He might as well have slapped her across the face. It had the same effect. The words were so coldly and implacably delivered.
‘You didn’t want a baby,’ she whispered, unable to inject more force into her voice.
‘So you just lied to me?’
Sam could feel her cheeks burning now, with shame. ‘I thought it was a miscarriage, as did you. But at the clinic, after the doctor had done his examination, he told me that I wasn’t miscarrying.’
Rafaele crossed his arms and she could see his hands clenched to fists. She shivered at the threat of violence even though she knew he would never hit her. But she sensed he wanted to hit something.
‘You knew then and yet you barefaced lied to me and let me walk away.’
Clutching at the smallest of straws, Sam said shakily, ‘I didn’t lie...you assumed...I just didn’t tell you.’
‘And the reason you didn’t inform me was because...?’
‘You didn’t...didn’t want to know.’ The words felt flimsy and ineffectual now. Petty.
‘Based on...?’
It was as if he couldn’t quite get out full sentences, Sam felt his rage strangling his words.
Her brain felt heavy. ‘Because of how you reacted when I told you in the first place...’
Sam recalled the indescribable pain of realising that Rafaele had been about to break it off with her. His abject shock at the prospect of her pregnancy. It gave her some much needed strength. ‘And because of what you said afterwards...at the clinic. I heard you on the phone.’
Rafaele frowned and it was a glower. ‘What did I say?’
Sam’s sliver of strength started to drain away again like a traitor. ‘You were talking to someone. You said you were caught up in something unimportant.’ Even now those words scored at Sam’s insides like a knife.
Rafaele’s expression turned nuclear. His arms dropped, his hands were fists. ‘Dio, Samantha. I can’t even recall that conversation. No doubt I just said something—anything—to placate one of my assistants. I thought you’d just miscarried. Do you really think I was about to announce that in an innocuous phone call?’
Sam gulped and had to admit reluctantly, ‘Maybe...maybe not. But how did I know that? All I could hear was your relief that you didn’t have to worry about a baby holding your life up and your eagerness to leave.’
He all but exploded. ‘Need I remind you that I was also in shock, and at that point I thought there was no baby!’
Sam was breathing hard and Rafaele looked as if he was about to kick aside the kitchen table between them to come and throttle her.
Just then a small, unsure voice emerged from the doorway. ‘Mummy?’
Immediately Sam’s world refracted down to Milo, who stood in the doorway. He’d opened it unnoticed by them and was looking from one to the other, his lower lip quivering ominously at the explosive tension.
Sam flew over and picked him up and he clung to her. Her conscience struck her. He was always a little intimidated by men because he wasn’t around them much.
‘Why is the man still here?’ he asked now, slanting sidelong looks to Rafaele and curling into Sam’s body as much as he could.
Sam stroked his back reassuringly and tried to sound normal. ‘This is just an old friend of Mummy’s. He’s stopped by to say hello, that’s all. He’s leaving now.’
‘Okay,’ Milo replied, happier now. ‘Can we look at cars?’
Sam looked at him and forced a smile, ‘Just as soon as I say goodbye to Mr Falcone, okay?’
‘Okey-dokey.’ Milo used his new favourite phrase that he’d picked up in playschool, squirmed back out of Sam’s arms and ran out of the kitchen again.
Sam watched Rafaele struggle to take it all in. Myriad explosive emotions crossing his face.
‘You’ll have to go,’ she entreated. ‘It’ll only confuse and upset him if you stay.’
Rafaele closed the distance between them and Sam instinctively moved back, but the oven was behind her. Rafaele’s scent enveloped her, musky and male. Her heart pounded.
‘This is not over, Samantha. I’ll leave now, because I don’t want to upset the boy, but you’ll be hearing from me.’
After a long searing moment, during which she wasn’t sure how she didn’t combust from the anger being directed at her, Rafaele turned on his heel and left, stopping briefly at the sitting room door to look in at Milo again.
He cast one blistering look back at Sam and then he was out through the front door and gone. Sam heard the powerful throttle of an engine as it roared to life and then mercifully faded again.
It was then that she started to shake all over. Grasping for a chair to hold onto, she sank down into it, her teeth starting to chatter.
‘Mummeeee!’ came a plaintive wail from the sitting room.
Sam called out, ‘I’ll be there in one second, I promise.’
The last thing she needed was for Milo to see her in this state. Her brain was numb. She couldn’t even quite take in what had just happened—the fact that she’d seen Rafaele again for the first time since those cataclysmic days.
When she was finally feeling a little more in control she went in to Milo and sat down on the floor beside him. Without even taking his eyes off the TV he crawled into her lap and Sam’s heart constricted. She kissed his head.
Rafaele’s words came back to her: ‘This is not over, Samantha. I’ll leave now, because I don’t want to upset the boy, but you’ll be hearing from me.’
She shivered. She didn’t even want to think of what she’d be facing when she heard from Rafaele again.
* * *
On Monday morning Sam filed into the conference room at the university and took a seat at the long table for the weekly budget meeting. Her eyes were gritty with tiredness. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t slept all weekend, on tenterhooks waiting for Rafaele to appear again like a spectre. In her more fanciful moments she’d imagined that she’d dreamt it all up: the phone call; his appearance at the house. Coming face to face with his son. A small, snide voice pointed out that it was no less than she deserved but she pushed it down.
Robustly she told herself that if she’d had to go back in time she would have done the same again, because if she hadn’t surely the stress of Rafaele being reluctantly bound to her and a baby would have resulted in a miscarriage for real?
Gertie, the secretary, arrived then and sat down breathlessly next to Sam. She said urgently, ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened over the weekend...’
Sam looked at her, used to Gertie’s penchant for gossip. She didn’t want to hear some salacious story involving students and professors behaving badly, but the older woman’s face suddenly composed itself and Sam looked to see that the head of their department had walked into the room.
And then her heart stopped. Because right on his heels was another man. Rafaele.
For a second Sam thought she might faint. She was instantly light-headed. She had to put her hands on the edge of the table and grip it as she watched in mounting horror and shock as Rafaele coolly and calmly strode i
nto the room, looking as out of place in this unadorned academic environment as an exotic peacock on a grubby high street.
He didn’t even glance her way. He took a seat at the head of the table alongside their boss, looking stupendously handsome and sexy. He sat back, casually undoing a button on his pristine suit jacket with a big hand, long fingers...
Sam was mesmerised.
This had to be a dream, she thought to herself frantically. She’d wake up any moment. But Gertie was elbowing her none too discreetly and saying sotto voce, ‘This is what I was about to tell you.’
The stern glare of their boss quelled any chat and then, with devastating inevitability, Sam’s stricken gaze met Rafaele’s and she knew it wasn’t a dream. There was a distinct gleam of triumph in those green depths, and a more than smug smile was playing around that firmly sculpted mouth.
Her boss was standing up and clearing his throat. Sam couldn’t look away from Rafaele, and he didn’t remove his gaze from hers, as if forcing her to take in every word now being spoken, but she only heard snippets.
‘Falcone Industries...most successful...honoured that Mr Falcone has decided to fund this research out of his own pocket...delighted at this announcement...funding guaranteed for as long as it takes.’
Then Rafaele got up to address the room. There were about thirteen people and, predictably, you could have heard a pin drop as his charismatic effect held everyone in thrall. He’d finally moved his gaze from Sam and she felt as if she could breathe again, albeit painfully. Her heart was racing and she took in nothing of what he said, trying to wrap her sluggish brain around the ramifications of this shocking development.
‘Samantha...’
Sam looked up, dazed, to see her boss was now addressing her, and that Rafaele had sat down. She hadn’t noticed, nor heard a word.
‘I’m sorry, Bill, what did you say?’ She was amazed she’d managed to speak.
‘I said,’ he repeated with exaggerated patience, clearly disgruntled that she appeared to be on another planet while in such illustrious company, ‘that as of next week you will be working from the Falcone factory. You’re to oversee setting up a research facility there which will work in tandem with the one here in the university.’
