your sister just threaten me?’ he asked when Orla sat back down, this time on an armchair away from him. She was finding it hard enough to concentrate properly without Tonino’s scent and body heat addling her brain further.
‘Yep.’ The only downside with the armchair was that she was forced to look at him. Looking at him definitely addled her brain because it quickly became a struggle to stop herself from looking at him. To stop herself staring at him.
Her eyes yearned to stare. They wanted to soak in every perfect feature on the face she had come so close to believing she could trust with her heart.
‘Why would she do that?’
‘She’s very protective of me. She didn’t mean it. She wouldn’t actually kill you. Probably just castrate you or something.’
She couldn’t hold back the burst of laughter when Tonino reflexively crossed his legs and nor could she stop the laughter turning into tears.
This was all too much. Seeing Tonino again, remembering what they’d shared, how it had ended, his loathing of her, his refusal to listen, his threats… It had been a long, emotional roller coaster of a day and now her body was telling her enough was enough.
Tonino watched the tears fall down Orla’s beautiful face with a healthy dose of cynicism. When they’d been lovers he would never have imagined her capable of using feminine wiles to save her own skin. He’d believed her to be too genuine for those kinds of games—for any kind of game.
What would she do if he pulled her into his arms for fake comfort? Would she cling to him and produce a few more crocodile tears to soak into his shirt? Would she tilt her head and stare at him with those beguiling eyes, silently pleading with him to kiss her?
And what would he do if that course of action became reality?
The burn in his loins gave him the answer.
Every breath he’d taken in this suite had filled his lungs with Orla’s scent. He was literally breathing her in, and every atom of his body responded to it.
Furious that his attraction for this duplicitous woman still blazed with such luminescence, he jumped back to his feet and helped himself to more wine.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not usually a cry-baby. I’m just finding it difficult to get my head around everything.’
‘You’re finding it difficult?’ he sneered. ‘How the hell do you think I feel?’
‘I can guess.’
‘I don’t need your fake empathy.’ He took a large swallow of wine with a grimace. ‘I have discovered that I’m a father and that the mother of my child kept him a secret from me for three years and now I have to deal with threats from my oldest friend’s new wife who is also my son’s aunt. I didn’t even know you had a sister.’ And neither had he known she was Salvatore Moncada’s secret daughter. Until that day, he’d had no idea Dante’s recently discovered sister was the lover who’d run away from him.
While outwardly open about who she was, Orla had actually kept her cards very close to her chest. He’d known she’d studied for a degree in zoology—he’d never met anyone who’d studied that subject before so it had stuck in his mind—and that she’d travelled to Sicily in the downtime between ending her graduate job as a veterinary technician and starting her dream job on an Irish conservation project, but it wasn’t until she’d disappeared that he’d realised he knew nothing of importance about her.
‘Well, I didn’t know you had a fiancée so that makes us even,’ she fired back.
‘I didn’t have a fiancée. I ended it with Sophia the day I met you.’
‘You would say that.’ Orla squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temples. Her head was now pounding. ‘Even if I accepted that you’re telling me the truth on this…’
A memory flashed in her mind of sitting on her bed at home, palm flat against her still-flat belly, masochistically searching Tonino’s name for the hundredth time and seeing the press report that his engagement to Sophia was over.
How long after she’d returned to Ireland had she read that report? A couple of weeks? The report had made clear that Tonino had ended the engagement.
She could scream. Even if he were speaking the truth about when he ended it, he’d still lied about everything else.
Rubbing her temples even harder, trying not to wince at the pain shooting through her head every time she spoke, she said, ‘Whose apartment did you take me to?’ She remembered more than waking in his bed now. She remembered the apartment itself.
‘Mine.’
‘Codswallop. Don’t forget my brother is a billionaire like yourself—that was not a billionaire’s apartment.’
‘It was the first apartment I bought with my own money when I was twenty. I use it when I want privacy…’
His words rang loud in her head, adding to the growing agony, but pushing at her mind were flashes of what he’d wanted privacy with her for. Those particular memories were still nothing but shimmers yet powerful enough to send a bolt of heat down low in her abdomen.
Once she had craved this man’s touch. She’d craved everything about him.
She’d made love to him and created a life with him.
‘And as for your brother,’ he continued, ‘you never told me you were Dante’s sister and Salvatore Moncada’s daughter. You accuse me of hiding things…’ He downed his wine and blew out a long puff of air. ‘We are losing focus. We are here, now, for one reason only and that is for my son. He is the only thing that matters.’
If he referred to Finn as ‘his son’ again she would swing for him. Well, she would if she had the energy, but she could feel it draining from her body. Since the accident Orla had suffered from frequent, often debilitating headaches and this one was turning into a whopper. No doubt stress and exhaustion had conspired together and she wanted Tonino gone before he witnessed it go into full bloom.
When she answered, it took all her remaining strength not to let the pain in her head infect her voice. ‘At least we can agree on that. Look, Tonino, can we call it a night? Finn’s an early riser and I really need to get some sleep before he wakes up. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will put us both in a better frame of mind and we can talk again in the morning about where we go from here.’
For a long time he didn’t speak, just stared at her, his jaw clenched, firm lips tightly pursed, a pulse throbbing in his temple. ‘Where we go is simple. We tell Finn I am his father and that from now on I am a permanent part of his life.’
‘Fine.’ At that point she would have agreed to anything to be rid of him. It felt as if she had a big bass drum bashing in her head.
The smile he gave chilled her to the bone. ‘And, dolcezza, to be clear, if you attempt to leave my hotel with my son before the morning, I will have no hesitation in launching a full custody battle—and it’s a battle I will win.’
He let himself out of the suite without a backwards glance.
