The Italian’s Baby

‘You knew who I was. You knew I’d been married, and my married name. You knew everything before I arrived at the house, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘In other words, you had a dossier on me too.’

He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Does it-? Of course it matters. All this time I thought we just chanced to bump into each other, and you let me think it. But you’d planned everything. Calculated everything. You deceived me.’

‘I never deceived you,’ he shouted. ‘Not you.’

‘Just everybody else?’

He shrugged.

‘What does anyone else matter? I wanted to find you, and I found you.’

‘But how? You had me hunted down like a block of shares, didn’t you? Luca Montese, financier and predator, gets the prey in his sights and moves in for the kill.’

‘If you want to find someone you put it in the hands of an expert. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, if you’d told me. But you let me think it was just life working out naturally.’

‘Life never works out. You have to tell it where you want it to go, and then make sure it does. Your father would have said the same.’

‘Don’t. It makes you sound like him, and I don’t want that.’

‘Then tell me what you do want,’ he said.

‘I want to turn back the clock to before this happened,’ she said desperately. ‘You were never this kind of man before.’

‘You’re wrong,’ he said harshly. ‘I was always this kind of man. You just never saw it.’

‘Then I’m glad I never saw it,’ she cried. ‘Because I couldn’t have loved you as a bully and a schemer, twisting people, twisting facts, anything as long as you get your own way. That’s what my father used to do, and I can’t bear it. If you’ve turned into him, it spoils what we had then and I wanted to keep it.’

‘We can’t keep it,’ he shouted. ‘It was destroyed long ago. We’ve created something else, and that’s what we have to hold on to. Don’t endanger it by brooding about things that don’t matter.’

‘Don’t matter?’ she echoed. ‘You don’t know what matters and what doesn’t. You say we’ve created something else, but what have we created? What can it be when it’s based on lies?’

‘I had to find you, Becky. I had to. I couldn’t let anything stand in my way.’

‘No, nothing stands in your way, does it, Luca? Not honour or fair dealing or decent behaviour, or other people’s feelings. Nothing. I’m seeing a lot of things now.’

‘I had to find you,’ he repeated stubbornly. ‘It was more important than you’ll ever know.’

‘So why not be honest? All those pretty delusions you fed me, about fate! And it was a lie because you set it all up.’

She looked at him curiously.

‘Luca, just how much did you know about me, that night at Philip Steyne’s house?’

‘A good deal,’ he admitted unwillingly.

‘Did you know I was going to be there?’

‘I was pretty sure. I knew Jordan was going to be there, and you were seeing him, so it figured. I also knew you worked for the Allingham, so I was bound to find you sooner or later.’

‘You knew I worked for the Allingham?’ she echoed. ‘Is that why you bought shares?’

‘Yes.’

She gave a wild laugh. ‘All that, just to find me again?’

‘Does it matter how it happened, as long as we found each other again?’

‘But we haven’t found each other, can’t you see that? No, you can’t, can you? And that means we’re further apart than we ever were. At one time you would never have deceived me.’

He flinched, and she knew she’d struck home.

‘I would have told you the truth eventually,’ he growled. ‘But this was important. I couldn’t take chances. It has to be you, it can’t be anyone else.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve been pining with love for me all these years. You married, remember.’

‘Yes, and it was no good.’

‘It must have been good for part of the time.’

‘She had a son by a damned hairdresser,’ he snapped.

‘So she was unfaithful, but that doesn’t mean-’

‘Six years and never a hint of a baby. Barren for me, fertile for him. Dear God!’

He said the last words violently, his face distorted. Rebecca stared at him, aghast. She had partly known this from Nigel Haleworth, but now a dreadful suspicion had come into her mind. It was impossible. She was imagining crazy things. In a moment he would say something that proved it couldn’t be true.

He was still talking, but more to himself than her.

‘I had a child once. She died, but she need not have done. She would have been fifteen.’

‘I know,’ she said, stony-faced.

‘Fifteen! Think of it.’

‘I think of it all the time,’ she cried. ‘I think of it every year on what would have been her birthday, and I never stop grieving. But we can’t bring her back to life.’

‘But we can create new life. You and I. What we’ve done once we can do again.’

‘Luca, what are you saying?’

He turned on her, eyes blazing with intensity.

‘I want a child, Becky. Your child.’

‘And that was in your mind when you searched for me?’ she asked slowly.

‘Yes. It’s important.’

‘I can imagine it would be. And now, of course, I realise why you didn’t tell me at once.’

‘I could hardly do that,’ he said, misled by her reasonable tone.

‘Of course not,’ she agreed. ‘It wouldn’t be easy to say, would it? “Good evening Rebecca, nice to see you after fifteen years, and will you be my brood mare?”’

‘It’s not like that-’

‘It’s exactly like that, you cold-blooded, insensitive, calculating machine. Luca, I’ll never forgive you for this, and if you can’t see why, then you’ve moved further down the wrong path than any man I’ve ever known.’

‘All right, all right, I haven’t handled it well, but-’

‘Listen to yourself!’ she cried, tormented beyond endurance. ‘Handled it! Do you know how often you use that phrase? That’s how life is to you, something to be “handled”. Do this, and everything will work out according to the Luca Montese book of sharp practice. Do that, and it’ll all go wrong, because you weren’t ruthless enough. Well, nobody could accuse you of not being ruthless enough, but I promise you it’s gone wrong. And it’ll never be right again.’

‘You’re determined to misunderstand everything I say.’

‘On the contrary, I’ve understood only too well. You want a son-’

‘I want your son. Yours. Nobody else’s. No other woman’s child would mean the same to me.’

But her face was unforgiving.

‘You mean,’ she said bitterly, ‘that I’ve already proved myself with you, so I’m a safer bet than a stranger?’

He paled. ‘That’s a hard way of putting it.’

‘Tell me another way that comes anywhere near the truth.’

She turned away and began to stride the room.

‘I can’t believe myself. To think I actually let you touch me after what I heard from Danvers.’

‘But you did,’ he said harshly. ‘Doesn’t that prove how strong the bond between us still is?’

‘No, it only proves we’re good in bed together. There’s no true bond between us now, Luca. Just sex, sex and more sex. And then more sex. You’re the most sexually exciting man I’ve ever known, or ever will know, and it makes quite a bond, I admit. In fact it’s such a wonderful bond that I’ve told myself fairy tales about it ever since