why are you here now as O’Reilly? Was it to throw me off the scent? Did you think I wouldn’t recognise you?’
She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. ‘I genuinely do not know what you’re implying.’
‘There is nothing genuine about you,’ he said roughly. ‘You knew you would see me today. Your brother and I are old friends. You’re staying in my hotel. The wedding reception’s in my hotel.’ He squeezed the back of his neck. ‘You took a huge risk in coming here and an even bigger risk bringing Finn with you.’
‘I wasn’t going to come without him,’ she protested hotly. ‘Dante never mentioned your name. If he had I would have remembered you sooner, but he didn’t. Aislin organised the wedding—she made the booking and checked me in. Aislin has her father’s surname because our mother married him. Our mum registered me as Orla O’Reilly when I started school, so I had the same surname as them. Most people know me as Orla O’Reilly.’
‘Why didn’t you change it legally?’
‘That would have been up to my mother and she couldn’t be bothered.’
He grimaced and took another large drink of his wine, angry with himself for diverting from the only subject that should matter to him. His son. ‘What name have you given Finn?’
‘My legal name. McCarthy.’
‘Why doesn’t he have my name?’
‘Because I’d forgotten it,’ she answered through gritted teeth.
Anger swelled like a cobra poising to strike. ‘Then who the hell is named as his father?’
‘No one.’
‘Now I know you’re lying,’ he snarled. He’d interrupted his lawyer’s evening meal to demand he look into the legalities of Irish paternity for him. ‘It is illegal not to name the father on an Irish birth certificate.’
She rubbed her eyes again then fixed them on him with a sigh that sounded more exasperated than defeated. ‘It isn’t if there’s a compelling reason.’
‘And what compelling reason did you give?’ he demanded. ‘Your amnesia?’
‘Keep your voice down or you’ll wake Finn.’ For the first time since he’d entered her suite, a fierceness entered her tone.
He hadn’t realised he was shouting.
But, Dio, it was taking all his strength not to grab her by the shoulders and shake all the lies out of her until only the truth remained. What kind of a fool did she take him for? Did she seriously think she could play the amnesia line and that he would fall for it? What did she think? That they were players in one of those over-acted soap operas his grandmother watched?
Green eyes, wide and wary but unflinching, stayed on him. ‘Aislin registered Finn’s birth. I’d never told her who the father was so she couldn’t name you—’
‘You denied my existence?’ he roared.
‘Keep your voice down,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to be sympathetic but you’re not making it easy when you keep interrupting me with all your stupid assumptions. Everything I am telling you is provable—you do not have to take my word for it.’
‘Good because I will never take you at your word for anything.’
‘Good because now you know how I feel about you.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘That you are in no position to act all holier than thou when you consider all the lies you told me.’
Her assertion was almost as outrageous as her lies about having amnesia. ‘You dare try to deflect?’
‘Deflection? Okay, then, explain this to me, buster. Why did you tell me you were the hotel manager and not the owner?’
‘I never told you anything. You assumed it.’ He would not feel guilty about this. He’d intended to tell her the truth about who he was the day she’d run away from Sicily.
Tired eyes blazed with the same anger as coursed through his veins. ‘You let me assume. I only found out who you really were the day I left Sicily when your fiancée paid me a little visit.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sophia,’ she spat. ‘The fiancée you forgot to tell me about. She tracked me down when you were in Tuscany.’
Tonino swirled the wine in his glass and stared hard at her, a rancid feeling forming in his guts. Sophia had taken the ending of their engagement as badly as his parents had taken it. He’d shielded Orla from the fallout. Shielding her had been bliss; the pair of them cocooned in his smallest and plainest apartment, just the two of them, the rest of the world locked out. ‘What did she want?’
Orla’s skin chilled and a throb pounded in her head to remember the encounter that had broken her heart. ‘To tell me you belonged to her and warn me off you. What else?’
He nodded in a thoughtful way, but the blackness of his eyes revealed something very different. ‘Let me be clear on this—you are telling me that Sophia Messina, the daughter of one of Sicily’s oldest families, tracked you down and warned you off me?’
‘That’s exactly what happened.’
‘She threatened you?’
‘Not in words but her meaning was very clear. She knew you’d been cheating on her with me. I can’t say I liked the threats she made but I understood where her anger came from. No one likes to be made a fool of.’
He’d made a fool of her and Sophia both. The other woman’s threats had been almost as sickening as the proof she’d put before her. So sickening had Orla found it that the minute Sophia had left her room, she’d vomited.
She half feared she could vomit now, from both the memories and the growing ache in her head.
‘I ended my engagement with Sophia the day I met you,’ he stated flatly. ‘If you had stuck around and asked, I would have set you straight. Sophia was playing games with you.’
‘You expect me to believe that when all the evidence points otherwise and when we both know you’re loose with what truth means?’
He let out a Sicilian word she instinctively knew was a curse but, on a roll, she ignored it.
‘You let me believe you were a hotel manager. That was a lie. Everything you told me about yourself was a stinking fat lie. Can you blame me for being scared when I learned I was pregnant? All I knew for sure was that you were a liar and a powerful one at that. I refused to tell anyone about you because I was frightened and ashamed and an emotional wreck, and all I could focus on was delivering my baby safely into the world. I was going to tell you about him after he was born but then I had the accident and it changed everything. I couldn’t amend Finn’s birth certificate after I left hospital because I couldn’t remember your name.’
When Orla had finished her venomously delivered rebuke, the
