A Clash With Cannavaro (13 page)

Painfully, she acknowledged the answer she had been refusing to acknowledge all night.

Absolutely nowhere.

Now, on legs that felt as heavy as lead, she began moving around the room, unlocking her new suitcase, pulling on clothes, doing the things she knew she had to do, no matter how painful it might be, knowing there was only one possible course of action she could take.

CHAPTER TEN

T
HE
MIST
WAS
closing in over the Cumbrian hillsides, bringing with it the fine rain that had been threatening all day.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Fiona asked Lauren, who was standing by the table in the farmhouse kitchen, spooning some softly boiled egg into Daniele’s mouth. ‘I know you’ve come back home to some miserable weather, but since you’ve been back you don’t seem to have been yourself. You’re dark under the eyes—which tells me you’re not sleeping properly—and I’d say you were looking rather off-colour, despite that wonderful Caribbean tan!’ She sent a mock stern glance towards the high chair. ‘Has this little rascal been keeping you awake all hours?’

‘No,’ Lauren said swiftly, not wishing to implicate Danny as the reason for her misery.

‘What then?’ Folding a tea towel, the woman looked solemnly down her nose at Lauren. ‘It hasn’t got anything to do with that delicious-looking hunk who whisked you off at a moment’s notice, has it? Has he been making you promises that he couldn’t deliver?’

‘No, of course not,’ Lauren lied, thinking how near the mark Fiona’s observation was. She hated not telling the truth, but she was unable to share the events of the past few weeks with anyone, however kind they might be. Also, she wasn’t wearing Emiliano’s rings. She had left them on the cabinet beside the bed that had never been part of her married life, and she was only glad that she had agreed with him to keep their wedding secret from everyone but those who had needed to know, so that she wouldn’t now have to face the shame and humiliation of telling anyone that it had all been a terrible mistake. ‘I’m fine,’ she emphasised, sending her obviously concerned friend a falsely bright smile. ‘I’ve just had a lot to think about after being away for so long, that’s all,’ she added, cutting a piece of brown toast into strips for Daniele to dip into his egg.

‘Soldiers’, her mother used to call them.

Suddenly she had such a yearning to sob her heart out on those gentle maternal shoulders that she had to pull her own shoulders back under the chunky sweater she was wearing over her jeans to stop herself falling apart in front of Fiona.

‘I really am fine,’ she reiterated, managing a more convincing smile for the woman who was shrugging into her large cape of a raincoat. ‘Thanks for locking up. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘You can count on it.’ The woman knew better than to ferret information out of her if she didn’t want to give it, Lauren thought, even though she knew she hadn’t managed to fool Fiona.

‘Drive carefully,’ Lauren called after her, already rebuking herself for anticipating the relief of being alone. But how could she have told the stalwart Fiona that she had fallen in love with and married the so-called ‘delicious-looking hunk’, and that her marriage had ended even before it had begun? She couldn’t, any more than she could have told Constance why she had been taking off alone with Danny five days ago, leaving before Emiliano had even returned.

She had managed to hold back her tears until she had climbed into the taxi. But it was while she had been travelling down the drive, away from the house where she had been so happy, and seen the housekeeper standing there on the steps with her features clearly in turmoil that it had all proved too much to bear.

Had Emiliano telephoned her that day after he had discovered she’d left, she could never have handled speaking to him, Lauren thought achingly, and she had kept her cell phone switched off for the whole of that day and for the rest of that weekend. From the moment she had switched it back on, her heart had started pounding whenever it began to ring. It was with mixed emotions that she answered those calls, only to discover that it wasn’t him.

Well, what could he say?

Let’s get Daniele tested. Then I can decide whether you’ve been telling me the truth or not.

If that was what it was going to take, then she didn’t want him like that.

It had been fairly easy getting a local company with a six-seater plane to get her off the island, where she had picked up a flight to the UK from one of the larger islands.

It had been an endlessly long and bumpy ride home, especially at the outset, with storms starting to brew up over the Caribbean. During the flight she heard one of the cabin crew telling another that several of the major islands in the area had closed their runways to any further air traffic. It was with immense and yet agonising relief that she knew she was lucky to have managed to get away when she had. In a moment of wild imaginings she’d realised that if her plane went down, taking her and Danny with it, Emiliano would have been a widower. With a pain lodging in her chest that had refused to go away, she’d wondered if he would even have cared.

Now Lauren heard Fiona saying something as she was letting herself out of the house, but she had been too deep in her anguished thoughts to catch what it was. It wasn’t until Brutus trotted in—as he often did when he was out on one of his walks and found her back door open—that Lauren realised the woman had been talking to the dog.

‘Come on, darling,’ she said to Daniele, dipping one of his ‘soldiers’ into his egg. He was more interested, though, in the dog that had sunk into its favourite spot near the Aga so that he missed the spoon altogether and wound up with a bright yellow smear on his cheek.

Rushing to get some kitchen roll, Lauren’s heart went out to him.

Through no fault of his own, he’d been responsible for bringing about two Cannavaro marriages, she realised torturously, under no illusion that that was the main reason Emiliano had proposed.

As for his brother...

He probably wouldn’t even have considered getting married if Vikki hadn’t deceived him by conceiving Daniele in the first place, which meant that the little boy had had a Cannavaro man abandon him not once, but twice, she thought, aching for him—just cast him aside as if he were no more than a pawn in a game of chess.

She couldn’t cry. She
wouldn’t!

Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would pop down to the garden centre to try and get her old job back. If they’d still have her. And then, at some stage in the near future, she would take steps to see how she could go about changing Daniele’s family name to hers.

* * *

As Emiliano came silently into the farmhouse kitchen, the domestic scene that met him tugged at something way down deep inside him.

Lauren was leaning with her back to him over the high chair, wiping something diligently off her nephew’s face. The dog they had rescued, and which had trotted inside when her horsey friend had let him in, was lying on an old blanket in front of the Aga, while the illustrious trio...he remembered how shamelessly he had teased her about her fish...were swimming contentedly in a little oblong tank on the dresser. He wondered why he hadn’t even noticed them before.

‘Da. Da,’ said the toddler, pushing Lauren’s hand away. His broad grin at Emiliano sent a shaft of emotion through the man’s long lean frame.

* * *

Lauren swung round, catching her breath as she saw who it was her nephew was smiling at. Her legs felt as though they were going to buckle under her and she grasped the edge of the table for support.

‘Emiliano...’

‘Da!’ Daniele said triumphantly.

‘No, he’s not your Da, Danny.’ She wasn’t looking at her nephew, only at the heart-stopping figure of the man standing in the doorway. Raindrops were clinging to his thick dark hair and there were several damp spots on the front of his shirt beneath his dark suit jacket.

‘Hello, Lauren,’ he greeted her, more calmly than she could imagine herself feeling ever again.

‘Wh-what are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you.’ His voice was toneless above the quiet hum of the fridge.

‘Why?’ She could scarcely speak from the speed at which her heart was beating.

‘I believe we’re still married,’ he said softly, moving away from the door.

‘For what it’s worth.’ Dear heaven! Don’t crack up now! she prayed, as emotion welled up in her. Determinedly, though, she forced her shoulders back and, lifting her small chin, added, ‘Which, in your opinion, amounted to very little.’

He gave an almost indiscernible nod and his lashes came down as though in acknowledgement of what she was saying before he put a small parcel he had been carrying down on a worktop.

‘Da.
Da.’
Daniele was straining to get out of his high chair, vying for his attention.

‘Anyway, don’t worry. It’s a situation that can be easily rectified,’ Lauren steeled herself to say.

‘Because it hasn’t been consummated?’ he suggested, with his mouth pulling down at one corner. He was moving over to the straining toddler.

‘Don’t touch him!’ Her swift command stopped him in his tracks, the fingers that had been reaching out to her nephew’s cheek suspended in mid-air. ‘You have no right.’

He gave another almost imperceptible nod, and let his arm fall. ‘I guess I deserved that,’ he said, his breath coming unevenly now.

‘So why are you here?’

He sent a half-cocked smile to the little boy whose arm was outstretched in its little denim sleeve and whose face crumpled as he strained complainingly towards him.

‘I need...want you to come back with me,’ he stated, seeming to change course part-way through his mind-blowing statement.

‘Why?’ she enquired poignantly again. ‘So we can pretend to be the happily wedded couple people are imagining we are until—’

‘Until what?’ he enquired almost dispassionately.

‘Until you decide a suitable enough time has elapsed for us to go our separate ways? So you don’t have to lose face or do any awkward explaining to your staff or whoever else might have known we were getting married? Isn’t that the sort of thing people from your world do?’

She thought he was going to say something in response to her derogatory remark about his world, but all he said was, ‘
Will
you come back with me?’

If that’s what you want!

Her heart ached to say it. To grasp a few more months or weeks with him—however short—to try and change his totally wrong and hurtful opinion of her. But there were such things as dignity and self-respect. Danny’s as well as hers.

‘You mean be prepared to ignore the fact that you called me scheming and a liar? Again.’

Once more his lashes drooped, thick ebony against the surprisingly dark circles under his amazing eyes. ‘I do not recall using either of those words to you.’

‘You didn’t have to!’ It was almost a wail, like a tortured animal in pain.

‘And I suppose it would not make a scrap of difference to you if I were to apologise.’

‘And climb down from that high, superior perch?’ She uttered a tremulous little laugh. ‘I don’t think so, Emiliano.’

His hair fell forward as he dipped his head, and Lauren wasn’t sure whether it was in acknowledgement of the fact that he had been at fault or because a climb down simply wasn’t in his proud Latin nature.

‘And you are wrong. I do not care about saving face,’ he assured her.

The hair piled loosely on top of her head quivered as she viewed him obliquely. ‘What do you care about, then?’ She turned her attention to Daniele, who was getting more and more restless.

‘The fact that my bride of less than twenty-four hours, whom I obviously drove away, might possibly be pregnant,’ he said.

She looked at him, startled, as she attempted to lift Daniele from his chair. He had grown heavier since all that healthy living in Emiliano’s home, and she was finding him quite a handful to lift nowadays.

‘What makes you say that?’ she queried warily.

‘Putting two and two together and coming up with sixteen.’

With one easy movement he swung the toddler up out of his chair, leaving Lauren reeling from the accidental brush of his hand against hers as he cooed a few soft phrases to Daniele in Italian, making him laugh, before handing him back to Lauren.

‘We made love for the past three weeks without taking any precautions,’ he reminded her cruelly.

In fact, from the moment she’d accepted his proposal she’d given herself to him—body and soul, Lauren thought, hurting unbelievably as she recalled their first uninhibited lovemaking on that night-shrouded beach and every wild, abandoned moment until their wedding day.

‘If my wife
is
pregnant, then I want to know about it,’ he stressed resolutely.

Of course. A Cannavaro heir. That was all he was interested in. All he had ever been interested in. Preserving the bloodline. His lineage. His proud and influential family name.

‘If I was pregnant, do you really think I’d be stupid enough to tell you?’ she retaliated, balancing Daniele on her hip. He was still wriggling, struggling to reach Emiliano, his little starfish fingers reaching out for the man to pick him up again. The man who had rejected him, and his aunt with him, when he’d decided there were no ties to bind him with either her or the little boy.

‘I am afraid that even you could not hide the evidence of my child growing inside you. And I am afraid,
mia cara...
’ strangely, his voice seemed to crack on that endearment ‘...I intend to stick around until I find out.’

‘And what would you propose to do when it was born?’ Lauren challenged, with emotion almost clogging her throat. ‘Sue for custody now you’ve got the licence to be able to do it far more easily? Take it away from me like you were going to do with Danny? Well, for your information, I’m not pregnant, Emiliano. I’ve had my period so there isn’t going to be any baby! Or anything else you can take away from me ever again!’

She started to sob, as she had done so stupidly two days ago when she’d realised that she wasn’t expecting his baby. Not that she had really wanted to be. Not like this, but in happier circumstances, when her hopes and dreams had included a little brother or sister for Danny. But now those circumstances had gone, and with them her hopes and dreams, as well as any chance of ever carrying Emiliano Cannavaro’s child.

Now that she had started to sob, she wasn’t able to stop and, helplessly, she felt her little nephew being lifted out of her arms.