A Clash With Cannavaro (14 page)

With her shoulders slumping, she turned away, her hands clamped over her face against the shaming, humiliating tears.

After a moment she heard the sound of paper rustling and then Emiliano speaking in low, dulcet tones and realised that he was speaking to Daniele.

‘
Carissima
...’ His voice coming from behind her now was enticingly caressing, and the hands that were suddenly resting on her shoulders were strong and sure, their warmth penetrating even through her thick sweater. ‘Why are you crying?’

Because I love you! Loved you! But you’re too insensitive and prejudiced to be able to see it!

‘Because I want you to leave me alone. I want you to go,’ she told him in a muffled voice instead, groping blindly for the tissue she’d tucked up her sleeve.

‘And that is why you are weeping like this?’ Gently, he turned her around, bringing her hands down to expose her tear-streaked face to his relentless gaze. ‘Not because I hurt you?’

Dear God, how could he be so cruel?

‘How could you hurt me?’ she argued, grabbing the folded handkerchief he had taken out of his trouser pocket when she’d failed to extract her tissue and blowing her nose with it. It smelled of sunshine and warm sand and his own evocative scent. ‘How could you possibly hurt someone like me?’ Her words were raw, biting and sarcastic, and yet when her wet green eyes met his she recognised such an intensity of emotion in their dark depths that it almost stole her breath away. ‘I’m selfish, deceitful and thoughtless! And I make lists of rich men to target—’

His mouth descending over hers silenced anything else she had been going to say. His jaw rasped against hers where he hadn’t shaved for some hours, yet her lungs were filled with the achingly familiar scent of his aftershave lotion. His mouth was warm and insistent, and crazily she was responding to it, pressing her body against his and clinging to his hard strength with all her dignity and self-respect in tatters.

‘No, you are not.’ Emotion thickened the words he breathed against her ear. ‘I am the selfish, thoughtless and undeserving one. You have taught me nothing but love and trust and affection and I did not recognise it for what it was until you had gone. I spent our wedding night driving round the island, tramping across beaches and winding up in some cheap hotel for what was left of the night when I couldn’t drive or pace or think myself crazy any more. I slept late, till just gone lunchtime, and then drove like a madman to get back to you. I don’t know how many speed limits I broke, but when I got back to the house and Constance told me you’d gone off in a taxi with Daniele and that old battered suitcase, I nearly went out of my mind.

‘I tried telephoning you all that day and night and the day after, but I kept getting the same message: that you were unable to take my call. I knew you had shut me out deliberately and that I deserved it, and I decided that perhaps it was for the best: that I couldn’t say all I needed to say to you over the phone. I decided simply to follow you, but my pilots refused to fly anywhere because of the storms, which left me stranded—unable to reach you. You were gone five days and it seemed more like five years! I have had a lot of time to mull over my mistakes,
carissima
, and being unable to do anything to make it up to you immediately was almost more than I could bear.

‘I know it was not Claudette’s intention to do anything to deliberately hurt me. That she only had my interests at heart. But when she showed me that letter and told me all that Angelo had told her, I know I reacted badly but it was the shock of realising—thinking that all I believed in—had put my trust in—had suddenly been taken away. Like you, I have no one left. No birth family. Only Danny. The only good thing in this world my brother left me. And the crushing knowledge that he was not even my brother’s, but some other man’s—some total stranger’s child—was devastating enough. But then to find out and let myself believe that you knew about it and hadn’t even told me. That, as a result of that, I had lost you too...’ His voice was raw with the agonising emotion he couldn’t express in words. ‘I was so hurt—angry—devastated—and I know I said some unforgivable things to you. But when I had walked off my initial anger and shock and started to rationalise, I accepted...no,
knew
,’ he amended with a sudden tenderness in his voice, ‘that you could never hurt or deceive anyone like that. And you are right.’ He made a kind of self-censuring sound down his nostrils. ‘I do have a grossly impossible habit of putting two and two together and arriving at sixteen, but only where you are concerned, Lauren, and there is only one reason for that.

‘I love you,
carissima
. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything in my life. And I know I should have told you before this, but I am telling you now. And I intend to keep saying it until I manage to convince you. Say it is at least possible. Tell me,
mia amore
.’

She couldn’t believe the degree of torment she saw in the sculpted angles of his face.

‘I don’t—I can’t—’ she faltered, choking back tears of a different kind now, hardly able to grasp that he was telling her all this. Emiliano Cannavaro, who was proud and strong and so invincible, baring his soul to her as he had never done before. And as the lines scoring his wonderful and so beloved face deepened, ‘I believe you,’ she whispered, with her eyes glistening.

‘Then will you come back with me now? Today? I will understand if you say you need time. Or even if you just want to tell me to go to hell and say it is not possible.’

‘Of course I’ll come back with you,’ Lauren stressed, smiling, running a loving hand along his cheek. ‘Only...’

‘Only what?’ Concern etched his features as he held her far enough away from him to see the sudden anxiety clouding her eyes.

‘What about Danny?’ She glanced down at her nephew, sitting on the tattered rug where Emiliano had placed him. He was chattering to the fluffy blue pelican that the man had brought him, with the Border Collie looking interestedly on.

‘And Danny too.’ His gaze had followed hers to the endearing little scene in front of the Aga and, from the smile that played around his mouth and the way his dark eyes softened, there was suddenly no doubt in Lauren’s mind of just how much he cared for the little boy. ‘I don’t care who his father is—
was
. I will love him like he is my own because he makes it impossible for me not to,’ he promised, turning back to her. ‘And because he has your genes—and because there is not a part of you that it is not possible to love.’

‘Oh, Emiliano...’ It was beyond anything she could even have dreamed of just an hour ago, and she looked up at him with love in her eyes and her heart too full to say anything except, ‘I love you.’

As they kissed again Lauren wished that they could have been spared the anguish that Claudette had caused them both by her visit. But perhaps it had all happened for a reason. Emiliano was taking her and Daniele unconditionally, and she might never have realised just how much he loved her if it hadn’t happened.

‘We will be a family,’ he pledged. ‘A real family. And Danny will have brothers and sisters so that he will not be an only child for very long.’

‘Hey, steady on!’ Lauren laughed. ‘I won’t mind three or four. But you’ll have to consult the stars if you’re planning on more!’

‘I think they will leave the decision to chance when they realise how often I will be making love to you,’ he advised, with his eyes gleaming wickedly.

Then a sudden loud splash had them bursting out laughing as one of the fish did a backward flip in the tank on the dresser.

EPILOGUE

E
XCITED
BARKING
AND
childish laughter brought Lauren over to the casement window to see the five-year-old Daniele chasing his two-year-old sister, Francesca, and their two cocker spaniels around the lawn.

The red-haired little girl had been born just two weeks after Lauren and Emiliano’s first wedding anniversary, and Lauren couldn’t hide her smile as she watched her children running rings around their father. Literally! And Emiliano’s wish for siblings for Daniele was being granted yet again, with the anticipated arrival in a few weeks’ time of a new baby boy.

It had been a joint decision between her and Emiliano to give their children an English education. With that in mind, and with his American company established and running successfully now, they had decided to keep the Caribbean house purely as a tropical retreat and make their main home in England, which was why they had recently snapped up this lovely modern mansion with its sprawling grounds for children and animals alike to play in, close enough to London for Emiliano to conduct his business, and yet far enough away to enjoy the countryside too.

Space and fresh air had been a priority for Lauren, having spent so much of her life in the Lake District. She had sold the farmhouse eighteen months ago to Fiona and her new horse-trainer husband who had given the place a well-needed facelift and turned the stables and land into a thriving stud farm.

Claudette they had seen only when circumstances had demanded it during the past three years. If the woman didn’t want to spend any time with her and Emiliano and the little boy they had legally adopted, then it was her loss, Lauren thought resignedly, tearing herself away from the sunny scene beyond the open window to return to sorting through the last boxes they needed to clear out of the room she had chosen for their new baby.

With just a few items left for her ‘
Consider
’, ‘
Keep
’ or ‘
Get rid of
’ piles, she picked up something which, when she looked at it, seemed to suck the breath right out of her lungs.

The next instant she was racing downstairs and out into the garden as fast as her condition would allow.

‘Happy birthday, Mummy!’ Daniele burst out, with his baby sister like an echo just a note or two behind him, so that for a few moments Lauren had to forget what she had come out here to do as she stooped to let Daniele place the daisy chain around her neck.

‘Oh, darlings, thank you!’ She caught them both to her, hugging them fiercely, before they scampered off, whooping for joy.

They were as happy as any loving family could be. Probably more so, she decided, and thought, as she sometimes did, that although she had foregone a career to become a mother it had all been worth it, because she couldn’t imagine ever being happier than she was right at this moment with her beautiful children and the man she loved by her side.

‘You looked flushed. Are you all right?’ Emiliano asked, concerned.

‘I’m fine,’ she reassured him, with her heart bursting with love for this man who showed so much love for her, for them all in equal measure. She only wished that the happiness her children were enjoying, and which she had enjoyed in her own childhood, he could have known just a little of in his. ‘I really am fine,’ she reiterated in case he was in any doubt. ‘But you asked me to let you see anything I might think was important.’

He was looking down at what she had handed him, staring at it with a deepening groove between his thick black brows, but then he turned away so that she couldn’t see his face.

‘I found it in that box. You know, the one marked “photographs” that you’ve never had time to sort through.’ Or perhaps he just hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it, she accepted silently.

‘It seems your brother did leave you something,’ she whispered, knowing from the steeling of her husband’s broad back beneath his casual shirt that he was dealing privately with his emotion. ‘Vikki must have consented to that DNA test being done...’
hoping, or even
knowing
that it wouldn’t show Daniele as anyone else’s;
secretly, Lauren still wanted to believe that of her sister ‘...only that result came through less than a week after she died.’

‘So why did Angelo disown him? And so blatantly in front of Claudette when all the time he had this...’ Emiliano punched the piece of paper he was holding, his words thickened by angry disbelief.

‘Perhaps he just couldn’t face the responsibility of being a father when she started putting pressure on him to act like one,’ Lauren suggested, the gentle understanding in her voice finally bringing him round.

He could have taken steps to prove conclusively whether or not Daniele was his brother’s, but he had chosen not to, she thought, with the words he uttered next reminding her why.

‘You know it would never have made a scrap of difference. It has never made a difference,’ he said hoarsely, glancing towards the little boy stroking one of the dogs and whom he now knew was as much a part of him as he was of Lauren. A beloved nephew, as well as a son.

‘I know,’ she whispered with tears glistening in her eyes, slipping her arms around him, and the emotion she felt shivering through him as he pulled her close—or as close as their unborn child would allow—made her joy complete.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from THE TRUTH ABOUT DE CAMPO by Jennifer Hayward.

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