called out, ‘I’ll be there in one second, I promise.’
The last thing she needed was for Milo to see her in this state. Her brain was numb. She couldn’t even quite take in what had just happened—the fact that she’d seen Rafaele again for the first time since those cataclysmic days.
When she was finally feeling a little more in control she went in to Milo and sat down on the floor beside him. Without even taking his eyes off the TV he crawled into her lap and Sam’s heart constricted. She kissed his head.
Rafaele’s words came back to her: ‘This is not over, Samantha. I’ll leave now, because I don’t want to upset the boy, but you’ll be hearing from me.’
She shivered. She didn’t even want to think of what she’d be facing when she heard from Rafaele again.
* * *
On Monday morning Sam filed into the conference room at the university and took a seat at the long table for the weekly budget meeting. Her eyes were gritty with tiredness. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t slept all weekend, on tenterhooks waiting for Rafaele to appear again like a spectre. In her more fanciful moments she’d imagined that she’d dreamt it all up: the phone call; his appearance at the house. Coming face to face with his son. A small, snide voice pointed out that it was no less than she deserved but she pushed it down.
Robustly she told herself that if she’d had to go back in time she would have done the same again, because if she hadn’t surely the stress of Rafaele being reluctantly bound to her and a baby would have resulted in a miscarriage for real?
Gertie, the secretary, arrived then and sat down breathlessly next to Sam. She said urgently, ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened over the weekend...’
Sam looked at her, used to Gertie’s penchant for gossip. She didn’t want to hear some salacious story involving students and professors behaving badly, but the older woman’s face suddenly composed itself and Sam looked to see that the head of their department had walked into the room.
And then her heart stopped. Because right on his heels was another man. Rafaele.
For a second Sam thought she might faint. She was instantly light-headed. She had to put her hands on the edge of the table and grip it as she watched in mounting horror and shock as Rafaele coolly and calmly strode into the room, looking as out of place in this unadorned academic environment as an exotic peacock on a grubby high street.
He didn’t even glance her way. He took a seat at the head of the table alongside their boss, looking stupendously handsome and sexy. He sat back, casually undoing a button on his pristine suit jacket with a big hand, long fingers...
Sam was mesmerised.
This had to be a dream, she thought to herself frantically. She’d wake up any moment. But Gertie was elbowing her none too discreetly and saying sotto voce, ‘This is what I was about to tell you.’
The stern glare of their boss quelled any chat and then, with devastating inevitability, Sam’s stricken gaze met Rafaele’s and she knew it wasn’t a dream. There was a distinct gleam of triumph in those green depths, and a more than smug smile was playing around that firmly sculpted mouth.
Her boss was standing up and clearing his throat. Sam couldn’t look away from Rafaele, and he didn’t remove his gaze from hers, as if forcing her to take in every word now being spoken, but she only heard snippets.
‘Falcone Industries...most successful...honoured that Mr Falcone has decided to fund this research out of his own pocket...delighted at this announcement...funding guaranteed for as long as it takes.’
Then Rafaele got up to address the room. There were about thirteen people and, predictably, you could have heard a pin drop as his charismatic effect held everyone in thrall. He’d finally moved his gaze from Sam and she felt as if she could breathe again, albeit painfully. Her heart was racing and she took in nothing of what he said, trying to wrap her sluggish brain around the ramifications of this shocking development.
‘Samantha...’
Sam looked up, dazed, to see her boss was now addressing her, and that Rafaele had sat down. She hadn’t noticed, nor heard a word.
‘I’m sorry, Bill, what did you say?’ She was amazed she’d managed to speak.
‘I said,’ he repeated with exaggerated patience, clearly disgruntled that she appeared to be on another planet while in such illustrious company, ‘that as of next week you will be working from the Falcone factory. You’re to oversee setting up a research facility there which will work in tandem with the one here in the university.’
He directed himself to the others again while this bomb detonated within Sam’s solar plexus.
‘I don’t think I need to point out the significance of being allowed to conduct this research within a functioning factory, and especially one as prestigious as Falcone Motors. It’ll put us streets ahead of other research in this area and, being assured of Falcone funding for at least five years, we’re practically guaranteed success.’
Sam couldn’t take any more. She rose up in a blind panic, managed to mumble something vague about needing air and fled the room.
* * *
Rafaele watched Sam leave dispassionately. Since the other evening he’d been in shock. Functioning, but in shock. His anger and rage was too volcanic to release, fearsome in its intensity. And fearsome for Rafaele if he contemplated for a second why his emotions were so deep and hot.
Sam’s boss beside him emitted a grunt of displeasure at her hasty departure, but Rafaele felt nothing but satisfaction to be causing her a modicum of the turbulence in his own gut. Through his shock Rafaele had felt a visceral need to push Sam off her axis as much as she’d pushed him off his.
He recalled bitterly how reluctant she’d been to talk to him in the first place about the job he was offering, all the while knowing her secret. Harbouring his son. With one phone call to his team Rafaele had put in motion this audacious plan to take over the research programme at her university and had relished this meeting.
While Sam’s boss continued his speech Rafaele retreated inwardly, but anyone looking at him would have seen only fierce concentration.
He breathed in and realised that he hadn’t taken a proper breath since he’d seen Sam looking at him with that stricken expression on her face in the doorway of her house the other evening. The initial punch to his gut he’d received when he’d first thought that Sam was married, with someone else’s child, was galling to remember—and more exposing than he liked to admit.
Nothing excused her from withholding his son from him for more than three years. Rafaele had been about Milo’s age when his world had imploded. When he’d witnessed his father, on his knees, sobbing, prostrating himself at Rafaele’s mother’s feet, begging her not to leave him.
‘I love you. What am I if you leave? I am nothing. I have nothing...’
‘Get up, Umberto,’ she’d said. ‘You shame yourself in front of our son. What kind of a man will he be with a crying, snivelling wretch for a father?’
What kind of a man would he be?
Rafaele felt tight inside.
