The Sicilian's Secret Son

by Angela Bissell

  From a safety perspective, Luca was glad the upstairs flat had another route of access. But he couldn’t help surveying the concrete courtyard and the tiny terrace and comparing them to the outdoor space he and Enzo had enjoyed growing up, including landscaped gardens, citrus and olive groves, and even a vineyard.

  A fierce desire rose in him for his son to experience that, too. To have the freedom to run and play and explore the land that would one day be his. Land that Luca had thought was lost to him, along with everything else associated with the Cavallari legacy, until recently. Now he had the opportunity to shape that legacy in the way he saw fit. To take what Franco Cavallari had sullied and turn it into something good. Something worth passing on to the next generation.

  Hearing the electric kettle turn off, he glanced towards the kitchen. Annah stood on the other side of the breakfast bar, her back to him. He wandered over. A teapot sat on the bench, lid off, waiting to be filled.

  She stood motionless.

  ‘Annah?’

  She swung around and looked at him. ‘You could leave.’

  He frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You could just go,’ she said, stepping closer, eyes wide as she looked up at him, ‘and we could both pretend you were never here. You’ll never hear from us—I promise. I’ll never contact you. Never ask for money. Never ask you for anything ever.’

  Anger flickered. She thought he was the kind of man who could walk away and pretend his son—his own flesh and blood—didn’t exist?

  He clenched his jaw. ‘Make the tea, Annah.’

  ‘Luca...’ She spoke his name like a husky entreaty, and it reached inside him, evoking a memory as scorchingly vivid as if she’d lain beneath him only yesterday, driving him to the brink with her soft, seductive pleas.

  Don’t stop, Luca. Please...don’t stop.

  He nearly had. When her body’s tight resistance and her stifled cry of pain had given rise to a shocking realisation, Luca had frozen mid-thrust, then almost reflexively withdrawn. But it was too late by then. He couldn’t unbreach her innocence. He was deep inside her and she was clinging like a limpet, stubbornly—and sexily—refusing to let him go.

  Thrusting the memory aside, Luca unbuttoned his coat, took it off, and draped it over the back of a dining chair. ‘Black,’ he said, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘No sugar. And I’ll have it strong, thanks.’

  Annah blinked, and the pleading look vanished from her eyes. She finished making the tea in silence. Only once they were seated at the small dining table, steaming mugs in front of them, did she speak again. ‘When did your father die?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Two months ago.’

  She nodded slowly. Her hands were wrapped around her mug, and she stared into her tea for so long his patience began to unravel.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what happened, Annah, or will I have to drag it out of you?’

  Her gaze snapped up. ‘It’s obvious what happened, isn’t it? I didn’t do what you wanted.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Luca.’ The way she said his name this time wasn’t husky; it was hard and bitter, saturated with scepticism. ‘You might not have had the nerve to try paying me off in person, but your father made it clear he was representing your interests.’

  Dread knotted Luca’s stomach. He needed the truth, but at the same time he wanted to close his ears, sensing that whatever was coming would destroy any lingering shred of the love he’d once felt for his father.

  ‘When?’ he said.

  Annah’s eyebrows knitted. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘When did you speak to my father?’

  ‘Why are you asking—?’

  ‘Please, Annah,’ he cut in. ‘Just tell me.’

  She pulled her hands away from her mug, sat back and clasped her arms around her middle. ‘Late March. In London. At the Cavallari offices.’

  Luca’s lungs locked as if someone had sucker-punched him in the chest.

  Annah frowned. ‘What?’

  He took a moment to collect his thoughts, get the air moving in his lungs again. ‘Do you remember what I told you that night in London? About leaving for the States the next day?’

  ‘Yes. You’d left your job. You were moving to New York the next day.’

  As much as he had wanted her that night, his conscience had forbidden him to seduce her with false promises. His flight to New York had already been booked. There had been nothing left for him in Europe. In Sicily. His father had declared him an outcast, made it brutally clear that Luca would never be welcomed back. He’d been upfront with Annah about his impending departure. One night of pleasure was all he offered. Nothing more.

  He pushed his tea aside and sat forward. ‘Three days before you and I met, my father and I had a falling-out. The job I’d left was my position in the London office of Cavallari Enterprises.’ He’d vacated both his office and the company apartment on the same day, checking into a hotel and taking only his personal effects with him. He hadn’t wanted anything that was paid for with Franco Cavallari’s ill-gotten gains. ‘After I left, I had no contact whatsoever with anyone in the company, my father included.’

  Annah stared at him. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘My father and I never spoke again. The next time I saw him, he was lying in a casket.’ Luca paused, giving her a minute to process his words. ‘What did you mean about a pay-off? A pay-off for what?’

  Annah hesitated, her eyes wide. ‘An abortion,’ she whispered.

  * * *

  Annah and Luca stared at each other across the table.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he said, his expression grim.

  She sucked in her breath, her mind grappling with the implications of what he’d told her. If it was true, everything she’d believed about him in the last five years was wrong.

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ he said, his tone gentling as if he realised just how deeply he’d shocked her. ‘When did you discover you were pregnant?’

  ‘Four weeks later.’ Her voice was not as steady as she hoped. ‘It didn’t occur to me before then that I might be pregnant. I mean...we used protection.’

  Her face heated and she glanced away. She didn’t want to think about sex with Luca. Not while he was sitting at her dining table looking so handsome and compelling.

  Bringing him up here had been a calculated risk. They could have gone to the cosy café at the Wilkinsons’ farm shop half a mile down the road, or even sat on a bench in the local park to talk. But they wouldn’t have had complete privacy like they had here.

  And she wasn’t concerned for her safety. Despite her knee-jerk reaction downstairs, her gut told her Luca wasn’t a physical threat to her or Ethan.

  ‘But you weren’t on the Pill?’

  ‘No,’ Annah confirmed.

  ‘And condoms aren’t foolproof,’ he added, voicing all the same thoughts that’d run through Annah’s head in the beginning, when she’d struggled to accept she was pregnant.

  ‘Apparently not.’ She took another deep breath. ‘You were entitled to know and I wanted to tell you—but I had no idea how to contact you.’ That last sentence sounded faintly accusatory, and she cringed inwardly. She didn’t want to sound petulant because he hadn’t given her his number. He’d told her he was leaving the country. Annah had understood what he was offering: one night, no strings attached.

  Luca brushed a hand over his face, dragging his thumb and fingers down the sides of his jaw. He was clean-shaven, but his five o’clock shadow was already growing in. Annah could hear the scrape of fine stubble under his hand. ‘I hadn’t thought about the need for contact in case there were...consequences,’ he said, his expression pained.

  They were both silent.

  After a moment, he said, ‘Tell me how—and why—you ended up m
eeting with my father.’

  Annah picked up her mug and swallowed a mouthful of tea, then kept the mug in her lap, hands wrapped around it, trying to absorb the lukewarm heat from the china. ‘Does it matter now?’ she said, her chest tightening at the prospect of reliving the encounter. ‘What’s done is done. The last five years can’t be reversed.’

  ‘It matters,’ said Luca, the sudden obdurate angle of his jaw not unlike Ethan’s whenever he dug his little heels in about something.

  Annah sighed. ‘I tried to find you on social media,’ she said, omitting to mention she’d actually searched the more popular sites before discovering she was pregnant. After their night together, forgetting about him had been difficult. Eventually, curiosity had won out, although it didn’t get her far. She knew his name but not much else, and she quickly discovered dozens of online profiles for men named Luca Cavallari. Not one of them was the dark, sexy stranger she’d spent a night with in a plush hotel room in London.

  ‘I’m not on social media.’

  ‘So I discovered.’ She put her half-drunk tea on the table. ‘I searched the Internet using your name combined with New York and then Rome, since that’s where you said you were originally from.’ But that had been a lie; Luca was Sicilian. ‘It took ages, but eventually I came across a photo of you at a gala fundraiser in Rome.’

  Annah’s heart had leapt at the two-dimensional image of him, gorgeous and suave in a tuxedo, then plunged when she’d seen the glamorous woman on his arm. The photo had been two years old at the time, but her stomach had still twisted with silly jealousy. ‘The caption mentioned your family’s company. I discovered there was an office in London and called to see if someone could give me a phone number or email address for you.

  ‘I got the runaround, though. The receptionist said you’d left and they didn’t have forwarding details. I couldn’t believe that no one in your own family’s company was able to contact you. I kept calling back, but I just got transferred to a different person with the same story.’

  It had been so frustrating—and humiliating. ‘In the end I lost my cool and did something stupid,’ she confessed. ‘I blurted out that I was pregnant with your child and suggested somebody might like to pass on the information.’ She huffed out a humourless laugh. ‘It got a reaction at least. A woman called me within an hour and invited me to go in for a meeting two days later.’

  Annah looked down at her hands. ‘Until I got there, I’d thought maybe I was going to meet you,’ she said, stopping short of confessing that a part of her had fizzed with anticipation at the prospect despite the awkward circumstances. ‘But it was your father.’

  She glanced at Luca. A deep groove had settled between his eyebrows, and a muscle flickered in his jaw.

  ‘He wasn’t very kind,’ she said, vastly understating Franco Cavallari’s demeanour. ‘He treated me like a gold digger. Wrote a cheque for ten thousand pounds and told me to go have an abortion.’ Her voice wobbled at the memory. ‘I tried to leave without taking it, but he pushed it into my bag and then had me escorted out of the building. I ripped the cheque up as soon as I got home,’ she added.

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Annah.’

  She sighed again. ‘He said you would have handled it yourself if you were still in the country. Then he said you wished me well and hoped this would put an end to the matter.’

  Those words had cut deeper than any others. After a burly man had shown her the door, she’d hurried away on shaky legs, found a toilet in a shopping mall and promptly thrown up.

  ‘Did he threaten you?’

  ‘Not exactly—not in words. But he was...intimidating.’ And convincing. Annah had gone home believing the worst—that Luca had spurned her and his unborn child and not had the courage or decency to do it in person.

  Emotion clogged her throat, and she rose suddenly and rushed to the back door. With trembling hands she tried to open it, but the deadbolt jammed and she cursed under her breath—why hadn’t the landlord replaced it like he’d promised?—and then her fingers blurred alarmingly before her eyes.

  She blinked furiously. She was not going to cry. She just needed some air.

  If only this blasted lock—

  It gave way and she yanked the door open, stumbled out to the terrace, and gulped in a breath of the crisp March air. Seconds later the back of her neck tingled, alerting her to Luca’s presence before his deep voice rumbled behind her.

  ‘I didn’t know you were pregnant, Annah. If I had, all this would have turned out very differently. It’s important you understand that as we move forward.’

  Move forward?

  Annah wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that entailed.

  Curling her hands over the railing, she looked out at the treetops and the hilly fields and farmland beyond. It was quiet in Hollyfield—too quiet sometimes—but the countryside was pretty, the area safe, the villagers friendly and kind.

  She and Ethan were settled here. Content. She didn’t want his life disrupted like hers had been too often as a child.

  But Luca was here and he wasn’t going away. Annah had to deal with this. Deal with him. Straightening her back, she turned and faced him. ‘What now?’

  ‘Take me to my son,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LUCA RETURNED TO the SUV, got in the back, and instructed Mario to follow Annah’s hatchback. Apparently, his son’s daycare facility was in a neighbouring village, about a fifteen-minute drive away, according to Annah.

  She hadn’t looked thrilled about taking him to meet his son, but her grudging acquiescence was a win nonetheless. Still, Luca didn’t count on plain sailing ahead. Annah Sinclair was no pushover; she was a tougher version of the woman he’d met five years ago, and a damn sight less trusting.

  He fisted his hand on his thigh. If his father wasn’t already dead he’d wring the bastard’s neck.

  Listening to Annah’s account of what had happened, Luca had felt winded and then furious at what Franco had done.

  Had his father hated him that much?

  Bile burned the back of Luca’s throat. The answers to so many questions had gone with Franco Cavallari to his grave—including why he’d had photos of Annah and Ethan in his possession, and, more disturbingly, what he’d planned to do with them.

  For the next ten minutes Mario sat on the tail of the hatchback. Annah drove at a fair clip, obviously familiar with the winding back roads and country lanes. When they reached the village she parked on a side road and Mario pulled up behind her.

  She got out, crossed the road, and disappeared through a gate in a high wooden fence.

  A full minute passed with no sign of her, then another. Luca tapped his fingers against his thigh.

  How long did it take to collect a child?

  He watched other vehicles come and go. Other parents disappear through the gate, all of whom emerged soon after with one or more children in tow.

  He got out of the SUV and paced the footpath, stopping every few seconds to glare across the road. From behind the wheel, Mario sent him a look that was vaguely amused, and Luca gave him a dark scowl.

  He looked across the road again. Perhaps he should go in?

  No sooner had the thought formed than the gate swung open, and Annah came out holding the hand of a dark-haired boy.

  Luca froze. Suddenly, his heartbeat sped up and his hands went clammy.

  He was about to meet his child. An event for which he had no point of reference. No previous experience to help him navigate this unfamiliar territory.

  He stared at Ethan, so like himself as a boy, and a memory surfaced. A vignette of the Cavallari family in happier times, years before ugly revelations had torn them apart and planted them on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide.

  The day was hot and they were picnicking on
the family estate. Luca was young, no older than Ethan, and he was riding high on his papà’s shoulders, giggling and shrieking as Franco put his arms out like an airplane and raced across the lawn. His mother wore a pretty sundress and sat under a big oak, baby Enzo cradled in her arms. Luca could hear the sweet tinkle of her laughter, unaware that in years to come he would rarely hear his mother laugh.

  Luca had loved his father. It pained him to admit it, but he had. He’d idolised him. Wanted to be him. In the eyes of his young son, Franco Cavallari had been an important man. Wealthy and successful. Handsome and charismatic. Other men treated him with deference—and respect.

  Luca had been a teenager when he’d finally understood it wasn’t respect his father engendered in other men, but fear.

  On the night Franco initiated his eldest son into manhood, Luca’s love for him had turned into something confusing and complex. A gut-churning mix of revulsion and love and hatred he struggled for years to understand.

  His first big mistake was believing he could change his father. His second was not destroying Franco when he had the chance. Emotion had made him weak. Incapable of doing what had to be done.

  If he had been stronger, if he’d taken Franco down, he could have saved his brother.

  He took a deep breath and calmed his heart rate. He wouldn’t fail Ethan like he had failed Enzo. He could do this. He was a better man than Franco; he could be a better father. All he had to do was stay focused and control his emotions.

  * * *

  ‘Is that him, Mummy?’

  Ethan tugged on Annah’s hand. Standing with her feet glued to the pavement, she swallowed down a bubble of nervous laughter. ‘Yes, sweetheart,’ she said, staring across the road. ‘That’s him.’