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Authors: Lynne Graham

BOOK: Second-Time Bride
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Daisy was stunned by Tara's naked excitement, by the crucifying look of hope and expectation glowing in her eyes. She was being faced with a disorientatingly different side of the daughter she had believed she knew inside out. And, shorn of the world-weary teenage front, the innocence of the child had never shone through more clearly. Icy fingers clutched at Daisy's heart. Janet had been right. Tara
was
desperate to be acknowledged by Alessio but she had carefully hidden that uncomfortable truth from her mother. Only this morning she had carelessly referred to her father as a ‘major creep'.
‘No... I'm afraid I didn't,' Daisy said woodenly, traumatised by what she had seen in her daughter's face.
‘Your mother didn't get the opportunity,' Janet chipped in heavily.
Tara's face shuttered as if she realised how much she had betrayed and then raw resentment flared in her painfilled eyes. ‘Just because he didn't want
you
doesn't mean he mightn't want to know
me
!' she condemned with a choked sob.
Daisy went white. Her daughter stared at her in appalled silence and then took off. The kitchen door slammed on her hurtling exit.
‘Lord, all I've ever done,' Daisy whispered wretchedly, ‘is try to protect her from being hurt.'
‘As you were?' Janet squeezed her shoulder comfortingly. ‘Doesn't it ever occur to you that Alessio could ave changed as much as you have? That the teenager who couldn't cope with the prospect of fatherhood is now an adult male of thirty-two? Are you telling me that he couldn't scrape through a single meeting with Tara? That could well be enough to satisfy her and if he won't even agree to
that
...well, Tara will have to accept it. You can't protect her by avoiding the issue.'
‘I guess not...' Daisy's shaken voice trailed away altogether.
 
Two sleepless nights had done nothing to,improve Daisy's outlook on life. All she could think about as she walked into the Leopardi Merchant Bank was that in the space of one morning Alessio had brought her whole world down round her ears. And the pieces were still falling. Tara was still very upset about what she had flung at her mother in her distress. Quick-tempered and passionate, Tara was also fiercely loyal and protective. Nothing Daisy had so far said had eased her daughter's regret at having hurled those angry, hurtful words.
So why
were
you hurt? Daisy was still asking herself. There had to be something wrong with her that she could still flinch from the reminder of Alessio's rejection this long after the event. And how could she have been so blind to her daughter's very real need to know that her father had at least been made aware of her existence? Had Tara even thought of what might come next? Had she some naive fantasy of Alessio welcoming her with open arms and delight?
Or was that her own prejudice and pessimism talking again? But Daisy could only remember Alessio's distaste when she'd been pregnant, his indifference to her need for him when she had miscarried. That had been the final bitter blow that had driven Daisy away.
Was there the remotest possibility that a male that selfish could respond in an appropriate manner to a painfully vulnerable teenage daughter whom he had never wanted in the first place? Daisy acknowledged that she
had
known what she was doing when she'd kept quiet about Tara's existence. The risk of exposing her child to the same rejection that she herself had experienced had been too great.
Daisy got out of the lift on the top floor. If she had thought Giles's office was the last word in luxury, she was now learning her mistake. The sleek smoked-glass edifice which housed the Leopardi Merchant Bank was stunningly elegant in its contemporary decor. There were two women in the reception area. The older one moved forward. ‘Miss Thornton? I'm Mr Leopardi's secretary. Could you come this way, please...?'
Daisy reddened. Alessio's secretary wore a marked look of strain—possibly the result of Daisy's steadfast determination not to be refused an appointment. Alessio was undoubtedly furious. After all, he had made it very clear that he did not wish to see her again. However, she didn't know where he lived so she had had no choice but to approach him at the bank.
Her heart pounding at the foot of her throat and reverberating in her eardrums, she walked dizzily into Alessio's office, a great big room with a great big glass desk and...Alessio standing there, suppressed dark fury and rigid restraint emanating from every lean, poised line of his tall, muscular body.
‘What the hell are you doing here?' he demanded with icy precision.
Her head swam, her knees wobbled. She opened her mouth and closed it again. A quite sickening wave of dizziness overwhelmed her and the next thing she knew the blackness was folding in and her legs were crumpling beneath her.
CHAPTER THREE
D
AISY surfaced from her faint very slowly. She focused on Alessio's dark features as he swam gradually into focus, and a dazed smile curved her soft mouth. He was cradling her in his arms, her slight body still limp, her head resting back against his forearm. It felt wonderful. Her violet eyes dreamy, she looked up at him...and melted, a honeyed languor stealing through her as she shifted and curled her toes in wanton anticipation.
‘You have the most gorgeous eyes,' Alessio breathed in an abstracted undertone, drawing ever closer.
They were lost in his. Pools of passionate gold set between luxuriant black lashes even longer than her own. Daisy expelled a tiny sigh, the raw heat of his lean, hard body curling sensuously into her relaxed limbs. She curved instinctively closer and he lifted a hand almost jerkily and let long brown fingers thread into the fall of her hair, his thumb rubbing caressingly against her earlobe. Her heartbeat went crazy in the thrumming silence.
‘Alessio...' she mumbled.
‘
Piccola mia
...' The familiar endearment left him in an aching sigh.
Warm fingers cupped her cheekbone as he bent his dark head. He captured her moist lips in a devouring kiss and plundered them apart. From that first instant of contact, Daisy was electrified. The erotic flick of his tongue exploring the tender interior of her mouth made her jerk in shock and gasp. lightning heat sizzled through her. Her hands came up to clutch at his thick hair, his broad shoulders, his powerful arms and clung. Every clamouring sense roared off in glorious rediscovery. He crushed her to him and she surrendered with enthusiasm. As she strained up to him in a fever of desire, excitement clawed at her throbbing body in a voracious surge.
With a driven groan, Alessio dragged his mouth from hers and stared down at her with stunned intensity. He snatched in a ragged breath and abruptly stood up, carrying her slim body with him. His strong face set like cement as he gazed into her passion-glazed eyes. Swinging lithely round, he simply opened his arms and let her drop from a height back down onto the sofa he had just vacated.
‘Give me the
bad
news first!' Alessio raked down at her.
Daisy had landed in a mess of wildly tangled hair and inelegantly splayed limbs on the mercifully well-sprung sofa. She didn't know what had hit her. For an instant she didn't even know where she was but she knew that Alessio was there all right, standing over her like a hanging judge as she attempted to halt a seemingly unstoppable roll in the direction of his plush office carpet. A pair of strong hands caught her and impatiently flipped her back upright into the corner of the seat.
‘“The bad news...”?' Daisy echoed. Momentarily, utter cowardice had her in its hold. She didn't
want
to be forced to think. Not about how time had cruelly slid back to entrap and humiliate her. Not about how excruciatingly pleasurable it had felt to be in Alessio's arms. Not about how dreadful it felt to be separated from him again. No, she definitely didn't want to think.
‘You only faint when you're terrified! Do you think I don't remember that?' Alessio launched at her grimly. ‘You drop in a pathetic little heap, then you open those big blue eyes and fix them on me and I have an uncontrollable urge to give way to my baser instincts. That's how you broke the news of your pregnancy!'
‘
My
pregnancy?' Daisy questioned helplessly. ‘I didn't get that way on my own!'
‘There was nothing accidental about it,' Alessio condemned harshly.
Daisy froze, shattered by that particular accusation. Even thirteen years ago, it had not occurred to her that Alessio might believe that her pregnancy was anything other than an accident. That his family suspected her of such manipulative behaviour had been no surprise to her, but she had innocently assumed that at least Alessio did not share their suspicions. ‘Are you really trying to accuse me of having deliberately set out to...?'
Alessio spread two brown hands in a frustrated movement of dismissal. ‘We are not going to talk about this.'
‘Now just you wait a minute,' Daisy objected, springing upright. ‘You can't throw an accusation like that and then back off from it again!'
‘Did you hear me? Leave yesterday's bad news where it belongs,' Alessio spelt out. ‘We are not about to get into that again. We are not going to fight about ancient history like a couple of stupid kids!'
‘Ancient history...yesterday's bad news...' How would Alessio react when she informed him that ‘yesterday's bad news' was infinitely more current than he had had any cause to suspect? The fight went out of Daisy. She sank heavily back down on the sofa again. ‘You want to know why I told your secretary I had to see you to discuss an urgent, confidential matter—'
‘I think I'm ahead of you there.' Alessio surveyed her with innate cynicism, his lip curling. ‘You're broke, aren't you? You're in debt.'
‘I don't know where you get that idea.' But Daisy turned a guilty pink, unable to avoid thinking about that Swiss bank account filled with Leopardi money. Not just filled but positively
bursting
at the seams with Leopardi money, the original investment having grown greatly in the intervening years, according to Janet.
Alessio settled down on the matching leather sofa opposite. He looked incredibly formidable to her evasive eyes. He was wearing a superbly tailored navy pinstriped suit and a red silk tie. The expensive fabric skimmed wide shoulders and delineated long, powerful thighs. Hurriedly she tore her gaze from him but he stayed there in her mind's eye. So achingly handsome, from the top of his smooth, darkly beautiful head to the soles of his equally beautiful shoes. Her throat closed over. Her mind was a complete blank. Why couldn't he have started losing some of his hair or developed a bit of a businessman's paunch?
‘Daisy, my time is at a premium. Since you forced this meeting by giving my secretary no opportunity to deny your demand, I had to cancel an important appointment to free a space for you—'
‘A space on the sofa?' she bit out between gritted teeth.
‘At this moment, I think the less said about that development the better.'
Bitter resentment tensed Daisy. Alessio... all heat and passion one moment, polar ice the next. Daisy had never had his trick of switching off, had never been able to understand how he could make mad, passionate love to her in the night and then turn away from her when she tried to talk. When her emotions were involved, she wore everything on the surface, could not hold her feelings back. But Alessio locked everything away and kept a ferociously tight hold on the key.
‘To be frank, I'm not surprised that you have financial problems,' Alessio imparted coolly. ‘I imagine the divorce settlement went a long time ago—'
‘And why do you imagine that?'
‘At that age you would have had no idea how to handle that amount of money. But I'm relieved that you are finally acknowledging that you did receive that settlement,' he drawled. ‘It was very naive of you to assume that I wouldn't know about it and that you could afford to lie.'
‘I wasn't lying.'
‘Being inventive with the truth...
again
?' Alessio asked very drily.
Daisy went pale and involuntarily glanced up, connecting with brilliant eyes alive with derision. ‘I only ever told you one lie...
only
one. I let you think I was at university when I wasn't. You never actually asked me what age I was—'
‘Semantics,' Alessio dismissed, unimpressed and not one whit more yielding or forgiving on the point than he had been in the past. ‘I also thought we had reached an agreement, Daisy. The past is off limits. Let's strive to keep the temperature down. Perhaps I should speed up matters by admitting that because we were once married I do still feel some sense of responsibility towards you.'
Daisy stiffened and bridled. ‘I don't want you feeling responsible for me and I am not here to ask you for a loan. But, while we're on the subject, let me assure you that I would die of starvation before I would ask you for help!'
‘Then exactly what
are
you doing here?' Alessio enquired.
Daisy breathed in deep and dug into her slim handbag to extract a copy of Tara's birth certificate and a small photograph. Her slender hands were trembling, her stomach knotting up. She gripped the certificate. ‘This is going to come as a big shock to you, Alessio...but I'm afraid that there isn't any easy way to do this—'
‘Do what?' he broke in impatiently.
Daisy stood up on wobbly legs, her heart thumping as if she were tied to the rails in front of an express train. ‘I think I'll just leave these with you and then maybe I could ring you tomorrow and see how you feel.'
Alessio had already vaulted upright. His dark features were taut. ‘What the hell are you talking about?'
‘After we split up, I discovered that I had been expecting twins... and although I had lost o-one of them,' Daisy stammered, a trickle of nervous perspiration running down between her breasts below her blouse, ‘I didn't lose the other.'
Alessio stared down at her with fiercely narrowed eyes, a stark frown of bewilderment drawing his level black brows together. ‘What are you trying to say?'
‘I have a daughter of thirteen...
your
daughter,' she delivered with unconscious stress as she took an automatic step back from him.
‘That's impossible.' The faintest tremor lent an uneven quality to Alessio's usually level diction and his accent had thickened. ‘You had a miscarriage.'
‘She was born three months after I left Italy. I was kept in hospital right up until her birth...in case I lost her too. She was a couple of weeks premature. You see, I wasn't quite as pregnant as everyone assumed I was,' Daisy muttered awkwardly in the thundering silence of Alessio's total disbelief. ‘The doctor in Rome got the delivery date wrong because when he first saw me I was bigger than he thought I should be, but that was because I was carrying twins.'
‘You had a miscarriage,' Alessio delivered in stubborn repetition. ‘And if at some subsequent stage you did give birth to a baby which was premature it could not possibly have been mine—'
‘Tara was born in April.' Daisy's lips compressed tremulously.
If Alessio had been capable of rational thought, his intelligence would have told him that given the time period concerned there was no way on earth that the child could be anything other than his. But then Alessio was not reasoning out anything right now. Alessio was at a standstill, blocked from moving on by the barrier of what he had believed to be concrete fact for thirteen years.
‘You lost the baby,' he said, his rich drawl oddly attentuated and unevenly pitched.
Daisy couldn't stop staring at him. His strong bone structure was fiercely prominent below his golden skin. He was alarmingly pale. His astute eyes were curiously dark and unfocused.
‘I didn't lose Tara...I lost her twin,' Daisy whispered shakily, her eyes aching. ‘But when I left Rome I didn't know that. What I did know was that you didn't want me or the baby, and once the baby was no longer on the way there was no reason for us to stay married. You couldn't wait to get rid of me. You couldn't even bring yourself to come and commiserate at the hospital because naturally you couldn't help being relieved that it was all over—'
‘
Madre di Dio
...' Alessio breathed unsteadily, his lean hands suddenly clenching into powerful fists.
‘And I don't blame you for that...not really,' Daisy admitted with innate honesty, her voice taut with the force of her own turbulent emotions. ‘But I had had enough and the last thing I could have faced was breaking back into all your lives when you thought you were finally free of me and saying, Guess what? I'm
still
pregnant! It was easier to let you go on thinking that that was over, finished and done with, the way you all wanted it to be. So I really didn't want to have to come here this morning and spoil your day—'
‘Spoil my day?' Alessio enunciated with visible difficulty.
Daisy stooped almost clumsily and dropped the certificate and the small photo on the low glass table between them. ‘I would never have told you if it had been left solely up to me,' she revealed in a jerky undertone as she began backing away towards the door, her anxious violet gaze nailed to his low shimmering golden eyes. ‘I know you're shocked and angry and undoubtedly thinking that you must have been cursed the night you first met me but please try to think of all this from Tara's point of view. She would like to meet you. She's not going to make a nuisance of herself or anything like that but she's curious—'
‘Where the bloody hell do you think you're going?' In a sudden movement, Alessio sprang out of his statuelike stillness and strode after her.
‘I've said all I've got to say for now!' Daisy confessed, and speeded up in her path to the door, wrenching it open when she got there and not bothering to look over her shoulder as she walked very fast down the corridor. She hit the call button on the lift and then looked.

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