by Lynne Graham
Faith’s eyes smarted. Even at this age, her son had clearly felt the difference between himself and his friend Peter. She would never have suspected that. She had thought he was too young to appreciate the absence of a father in his life, had once assumed that the presence of her own father would fill that gap. Unfortunately, Robin Jennings worked long hours, and Connor was invariably in bed when his grandfather was at home. And Edward found the high-octane energy of a toddler difficult to handle, had frankly admitted that he would feel more at home with Connor when he was a little older.
Yet Gianni’s damp eyes shone. Edward had never looked at her son with such pride and emotion and fascination. And why should he have done? Edward was not Connor’s father.
‘Down!’ Connor demanded.
Gianni lowered him to the thick carpet of bark on the ground. Connor got cheerfully down on all fours, stuck his bottom in the air and cried, ‘Woof! Woof!’
‘He’s doing his dog impression. You’re getting his whole repertoire,’ Faith explained tightly. ‘He’s showing off like mad.’
‘He’s so full of life…so sweet,’ Gianni murmured huskily, hunkering down again, careless of the muddy bark welling round his superb Italian leather shoes, to stay close to his son.
Connor got bored with being a dog very quickly. ‘Ducks!’ he reminded his mother.
Gianni regarded Faith enquiringly.
‘On the lake. He likes to see them.’
Connor had already scampered off in the direction of the lake path and Faith hurried after him. The light was fast beginning to fade. Gianni fell into step beside her. The mature trees on the woodland trail cast dark shadows. When a man suddenly stepped into view several feet ahead of them, Faith gave a start of dismay.
Gianni spoke to him in Italian, and only then did she recall the other man who had been standing above the playground.
‘What’s going on?’ she questioned nervously as they moved on. ‘Who are those men?’
‘I was really surprised when I got your message earlier, particularly when you styled yourself “Milly”,’ Gianni admitted.
Faith coloured. ‘It seemed more discreet to do that.’
‘Unfortunately my security staff were convinced the message was a set-up.’
‘Security staff?’ Those men worked for him?
‘The park is swarming with them. They’ve had the time of their lives staking out this place over the past hour. They love stuff like this,’ Gianni conceded with wry amusement.
‘Why a set-up?’ she queried. ‘Why would anybody think that?’
‘People don’t, as a rule, ask me to meet them in such public places. I did wonder if the press had finally got on to us and whether you might have received a similar message purporting to be from me. The tabloids would pay a fortune for a photo of us all together—’
‘Tabloids?’ she exclaimed, thoroughly taken aback.
‘Wake up, cara. The news that I have a child will be a major scoop. And sooner or later it will come out,’ Gianni informed her. ‘I could only protect you from that exposure by staying away from my son, and I’m not prepared to do that. I won’t behave as if Connor is some grubby secret in my life.’
Faith was horrified by what he was telling her. His very arrival had already exploded her quiet life out of existence. Now he was calmly admitting that there would be worse to come. Naturally the press would have an interest in the private life of a male as wealthy and powerful as Gianni. But threat of such public exposure made Faith feel ill. If it happened, her parents would be devastated, and once again she would be responsible for hurting them.
Since Connor had got down on the grass verge to play with the gravel on the path, Faith came to a halt and rested back weakly against the trunk of a tall beech tree. ‘You don’t give a damn, do you?’ she muttered shakily. ‘No matter how it affects me and my family, you’ll still go ahead and demand access to Connor.’
‘Guilty as charged,’ Gianni said drily. ‘I’ve been excluded from my son’s life long enough.’
In the twilight, Faith focused on his lean bronzed features with a heart that was chilled even as its beat involuntarily quickened. His dark, deep-set eyes had an aggressive golden glimmer that challenged. He was tougher than titanium and he wasn’t going to quit. ‘You’re so unfeeling,’ she condemned unevenly.
Moving fluidly forward, Gianni braced one lean hand against the trunk and stared down at her, spiky black lashes low over his slumbrous gaze. ‘Am I?’ he questioned in a lazy undertone as smooth as black silk.
That deep, dark drawl sent tiny little shivers running down her taut spinal cord. Her bemused eyes locked to his and feverish tension snaked through her. For the space of a heartbeat she wanted to move away, and then she wasn’t sure what she had wanted or even why she might have wanted it. As rational thought blurred, other more intrusive physical sensations took precedence.
That close, Gianni truly mesmerized her. Her breathing quickened, her mouth running dry. Dark excitement flowered into being inside her. Her muscles tightened on a delicious thrilling edge. The sudden aching fullness of her breasts and the urgent sensitivity of her nipples made her tremble, every pulse racing at fevered speed.
She could hardly breathe as Gianni watched her with the still golden eyes of a hunter. He brought up his other hand and let his thumb slowly graze the full curve of her lower lip. At the first touch of his hand, heat burst into being low in her pelvis, and she was betrayed into a tiny startled gasp. As Connor played at their feet, Gianni let long fingers curve to her flushed cheekbone and slowly he smiled. Faith braced herself against the tree to stay upright. That smile dazzled her, knocked her sideways, and filled her with an elemental hunger so powerful it hurt.
‘Poor Edward…’ Gianni husked with indolent satisfaction as he withdrew his hand and straightened again with innate grace. ‘This is all about to blow up in his face. Let him go before it gets dirty, cara.’
Only slowly emerging from what felt vaguely like a partial black-out, Faith stared with darkened eyes up at the tall, dark male towering over her as if he had suddenly become the devil incarnate. Now she recognised the studied insolence of that smile. The frantic heat that had filled her with such mindless yearning seconds earlier now engulfed her in shame. How could she be attracted to him like this? How could she be? Maybe it was the disorientating sense of having one foot lodge in the past and the other foot threatening to buckle in the present. All of a sudden it was so difficult to know what she was really feeling.
‘Leave Edward out of this!’ she told him, with all the fierceness of her own guilty mortification.
‘But he’s right in the middle,’ Gianni responded with supreme cool. ‘So why drag out his demise? There’s no contest, is there?’
‘I don’t know wh-what you’re talking about,’ Faith stammered, although she was dreadfully afraid that she did, and what he was now suggesting terrified her.
Gianni dealt her a long, slow, sardonic look. ‘I don’t have much compassion to spare in Benson’s direction, but I’m fair enough to concede that he didn’t know he was poaching on my territory…so let him go now.’
‘Your territory?’ Faith parroted, scarcely believing her ears.
Gianni ran a mocking fingertip down the exposed line of her extended throat and watched her jerk and instinctively lean closer. ‘You’re still mine, cara. You don’t have any resistance to me at all. But then you never did have… I want you back, Milly.’
‘You couldn’t possibly! You’re nothing to do with me any more. Our only connection now is Connor!’ Faith asserted in a feverish rush of protest. Hurrying forward, she stooped to grab her son’s hand and turn back the way they had come. ‘It’s getting dark…it’s time I went home.’
‘Ducks?’ Connor cried in plaintive surprise.
‘The ducks have gone to bed,’ Faith told him with desperate urgency.
And the last sound she heard was Gianni’s husky appreciative laughter.
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER buckling a squirming complaining Connor into his car seat, Faith ruefully acknowledged that she had done it again. She had reached saturation point and fled when she could take no more. Once more Gianni D’Angelo had breached the boundaries of her expectations and forced her into uncharted waters.
His territory. She recalled that assertion with a shiver. Gianni wanted her back. And with that shattering statement of intent Gianni D’Angelo had plunged her into shock again. Just as she was struggling to regard and accept him as Connor’s father, Gianni had revealed a motivation she had never dreamt might exist.
He had been so casual about it too, but in the cool fatalistic fashion of a male referring to an inevitable event. And he had totally unnerved her when he had urged her to let Edward go. Edward was the man she loved, the man she was to marry in a few months’ time! Yet with frightening confidence Gianni had talked as though her fiancé was already on the way out of her life.
But mightn’t she herself have unwittingly encouraged that attitude? Faith squirmed, steeped in shame over behaviour which had merely increased her emotional turmoil. Gianni was incredibly attractive, but he had one trait more disturbing and more dangerous than all the rest put together, and that was a high-voltage aura of pure sex.
She had never recognised that in a man before. But she had been susceptible, indeed had found it quite impossible to control her own intense awareness of him. But then, around Gianni she was steadily becoming a person she didn’t know…
Edward hadn’t come into her mind once while her wretched body had come alive like an insidious enemy. And then, as she sat there fighting to understand what was happening to her, Faith suddenly found an escape route from the daunting conviction that in responding in any way to Gianni she had betrayed Edward.
Why was she being so tough on herself? What a fool she was being! That flashback about that long-ago phone call had destabilised her. The instant she’d realised that she had once loved Gianni it had become a huge challenge to deal with him as a stranger. So for a few minutes her barriers had slipped. The line between the past and the present had blurred. And in the enervated state she was in, she had reacted in a way she would never normally have reacted…
Now that she knew the problem it wouldn’t ever happen again, she told herself urgently. She had behaved as if she was still the woman making that phone call, hadn’t she? She had behaved as if Gianni was her lover. So she wasn’t really still attracted to Gianni. Involuntarily, she had responded to an eerie sense of familiarity.
Since Faith hadn’t heard the limousine pulling into the car park, and certainly hadn’t seen it, she almost leapt from her seat in fright when a hand gently rapped on the windscreen to attract her attention. Her head twisted round. She recognised Gianni’s burgundy silk tie and it was like an instant shot of adrenalin.
Gianni opened the car door to subject her to a fulminating appraisal.
‘What are you doing?’ Faith demanded defensively.
‘You’re sitting in the dark in an unlocked car in a deserted park. You’ve got a lot on your mind. Let me run you home,’ Gianni urged, his dark, deep drawl sending an odd little shiver through her.
‘If I’ve got a lot on my mind, whose fault is it?’ she condemned tautly. ‘Why can’t you give me five minutes of peace?’
‘You shouldn’t be on your own here.’ Delivering that assurance with the supreme confidence of a male making an unarguable statement, Gianni lowered his arrogant dark head to glance into the back of the car. His brilliant dark eyes connected with hers again. ‘Connor looks pretty miserable too.’
‘Daddy!’ Connor squealed in sudden excitement.
Flinching from that cry of recognition, Faith bowed her forehead down against the steering wheel and fought off an urge to bang it hard. But she had seen the reproof in his gaze. He hadn’t needed to say anything. ‘Go away, Gianni…’
‘Only if you go straight home and go to bed. You’re exhausted.
Faith tensed even more. She didn’t want to go home. No longer did she feel up to dealing with her parents, who were likely to be very upset by the news that Connor’s father had surfaced. Her past had caught up with her with a vengeance, and nobody was going to escape the fall-out, she acknowledged guiltily.
Lifting her head again, Faith turned the ignition key. ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow. I’m taking Connor to a fast-food restaurant for tea,’ she announced defiantly, and, reaching out, she slammed the door loudly on Gianni.
Connor sobbed when she drove off, which really bothered her. Had he already taken that much of a liking to Gianni? Half a mile down the road, she stopped at a callbox to ring home and yet again excuse herself from a family meal. The phone rang a long time before it was answered by her father.
After she’d explained why she wouldn’t be home, her father said in a curiously quiet voice. ‘That’s fine. Actually, we’re dining out ourselves, and we’ll probably be late back, so don’t wait up for us. By the way, Edward’s home.’
‘He is?’ Faith exclaimed in surprise.
‘He caught an earlier flight and called in at the plant just as I was leaving,’ Robin Jennings told her.
Faith drove to the restaurant. Connor ate with gusto. Faith nibbled at the odd chip and surveyed her son with her anguished heart in her eyes. Gianni had rights she couldn’t deny. Gianni had had a tough deal. At lot of men who fathered children outside marriage sought to evade their responsibilities, but her son had a father who had spent three years trying to track him down. A father who showed every sign of wanting to be very much a part of Connor’s life. But a father whose very existence was likely to cause Connor’s mother endless hassle and grief.
Edward was home, so she knew where she was heading next. More than anybody else, her fiancé deserved to hear her news first. Edward was always calm, she reminded herself. He certainly wouldn’t be happy, but surely he would ultimately take this unexpected development in his stride?
Beginning to feel like a traveller who had no place to lay her head, Faith wearily parked outside the Edwardian villa where Edward still lived with his mother. She thanked heaven that it was one of Mrs Benson’s bridge nights. Connor was half asleep, and she carried him up the steps feeling like the worst of mothers for keeping him out beyond his bedtime.
Edward opened the front door and studied her in surprise. ‘Faith?’
Faith chewed at her lower lip. ‘Dad told me you’d got back early and I needed to see you…so here I am.’
‘But why didn’t you leave Connor at home?’ Edward enquired.
‘Mum and Dad are dining out.’
‘Are you sure of that? Your father’s with your mother? When I walked into Robin’s office this afternoon, he was cancelling the business dinner he had arranged for tonight.’ Her fiancé continued with pronounced disapproval, ‘And, believe me, Bill Smith is too valuable a customer to cancel at such short notice!’
Engaged in settling Connor’s limp little body into a corner of the sofa in the chilly lounge, Faith made no response. She was too worked up about what she had to tell Edward.
‘Something rather unexpected has happened,’ she said stiltedly.
‘Everybody does seem to be acting in a very unexpected way today. Your father’s evasive manner with me was distinctly odd,’ Edward informed her flatly, his pale blue eyes reflecting his annoyance at what he had clearly taken as a snub.
‘Look, this is really important, Edward,’ Faith stressed.
Edward planted himself by the fireplace, a rather irritating air of indulgence in his scrutiny. ‘What’s up? Wedding stationery not up to scratch?’
‘Something I never, ever thought was likely to happen. Connor’s father, Gianni D’Angelo, has turned up!’ Faith shared in a driven rush.
Edward stiffened. She certainly had his attention now. He began shooting questions at her as if she was in the witness box, charged with some kind of crime.
‘Gianni D’Angelo…’ Edward repeated incredulously. ‘Let me g
et this straight. You are telling me that the electronics tycoon Gianni D’Angelo is Connor’s father?’
‘Yes, I was pretty shocked too,’ Faith admitted heavily.
‘Stop talking as if when all this took place it happened to somebody else!’ Edward suddenly snapped accusingly. ‘Believe me, I’m not too happy with the sound of all this. It’s hardly what I expected, is it? Gianni D’Angelo! How on earth did you meet a man like that?’
‘I don’t remember, Edward—’
‘Did you work for him?’
‘No…’ Faith began pleating a fold in her shirt with tense fingers.
‘I’m starting to suspect your loss of memory might be based on a very sound instinct to bury a less than presentable past,’ Edward told her in a derisive undertone.
‘That’s a horrible thing to say. It’s not like it’s something I can help,’ Faith whispered painfully.
‘Gianni D’Angelo…so once you moved in distinctly rarefied circles,’ Edward remarked snidely, and she winced. ‘What sort of relationship did you have with him?’
Stress made Faith’s stomach twist. Edward’s anger was already greater than she had naively anticipated, and his contempt was an equally unpleasant surprise. I can’t tell him the whole truth now. I can’t, she thought in desperation.
‘As your future husband, I have the right to know, and if you don’t tell me I have every intention of asking him!’
‘He said…he said I was his mistress,’ Faith admitted in a deadened voice. She was too exhausted to withstand any more pressure.
The silence went on and on and on. Finally she raised enough courage to look up.
Edward had gone all red in the face. He was also surveying her as if she had turned into an alien before his eyes.
‘I’m very ashamed of it,’ she told him unevenly.
‘So that’s who I’m about to marry…Gianni D’Angelo’s slut.’ Edward labelled her with cold venom. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
