I didn’t have,’ Cesario extended heavily. ‘But I was kidding myself—I was really only thinking about what I wanted, not about what truly mattered. And I wanted you from the first moment I saw you.’
But Jess was not prepared to listen to that line of argument. In concert with what he was telling her, she felt as though her own life were shattering and falling down around her in broken irreparable pieces. Nothing was as she had thought, nothing was as it had seemed. The fabulous honeymoon in Italy had been a mere passage out of time—a means of distraction—and essentially meaningless. Cesario had cruelly deceived her from the start. He wasn’t going to be there for her as a husband, or as a father for their child, or even as a former partner in another country, she registered sickly. He wasn’t going to be there for her at all.
‘Everything you told me was a lie,’ she began in condemnation.
‘And honesty is very important to you…I know,’ Cesario returned with a sardonic edge to his voice. ‘I’m not trying to minimise the effect of what I did to you. It was wrong.’
Jess settled embittered eyes on him. ‘But it’s too late for regret now. I’m married to you and pregnant!’
Cesario stared at her with deep, dark bronzed eyes and it was as if she was seeing him clearly for the first time. He was so handsome and so sexy, but he was also unfathomable, with depths that she had not even come close to plumbing, she acknowledged unhappily, feeling her ignorance bite to the very foot of her soul.
‘We can separate right now if you like. It’s not a problem,’ Cesario informed her quietly. ‘I’m prepared for that.’
Jess flinched as if he had jabbed a red-hot branding iron near bare skin. She wanted to shout and scream back at him like a fishwife in response to that offhand statement, which set such a low and casual value on their marriage. It was a direct reminder of the practical agreement on which their union was based. Only fierce pride kept the tide of her rising emotions taped down and under control. He was offering her her freedom back as though their marriage had indeed only been a temporary diversion for a man whose future would be taken from him when he least expected it. He was showing her the door. He was politely letting her know that, although he had lied to her and kept her in the dark, it didn’t ultimately matter because he didn’t care enough even to try to hang onto her.
‘The baby,’ she mumbled sickly.
‘I’m sorry, I’m very sorry that I got you involved in this,’ Cesario muttered roughly. ‘I know that’s not good enough but, apart from money, it’s all I’ve got to give you right now.’
Jess lifted what shreds of dignity remained to her and dealt him a scornful smile of dismissal. ‘I don’t need your money!’
‘I’m signing the Halston Hall estate over to you this week.’
Jess was trembling; appalled by the way he was concentrating on financial arrangements for their separation when her heart was breaking up inside her and her sense of loss was dragging her down so deep and so fast she felt as if she were drowning. ‘Oh, goody, I’ll own the Dunn-Montgomery ancestral home—how fitting!’ she exclaimed with a brittle laugh, desperate to hide her pain and spinning around in an unchoreographed half circle to conceal her emotion from his keen appraisal. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘I never got around to telling you but I’m actually an illegitimate Dunn-Montgomery,’ Jess told him in an artificially bright voice. ‘Robert Martin married my mother when I was ten months old but I wasn’t his child. My father is the member of parliament, William Dunn-Montgomery, although he will never admit the fact. He was a student when he got my mother pregnant—’
‘And that’s why Luke was so taken with you at our wedding—he knows he’s your half-brother!’ Cesario guessed, frowning at her in sudden comprehension as he made that familial connection. ‘Madre di Dio! Is that why you married me? To get Halston Hall?’
Thunderstruck by that suggestion, Jess stared blankly back at him.
‘I can see that my ownership of the house would have been a major attraction to someone in your circumstances,’ Cesario said drily.
Jess had turned pale. ‘Someone in my circumstances?’
‘You said yourself how fitting it would be that you should own the former ancestral home of the Dunn-Montgomerys, when your birth father refuses to even acknowledge your relationship,’ Cesario extended. ‘I don’t mind. In fact it’s a relief if Halston Hall can in some way compensate you for the way in which I’ve screwed up your life.’
There was a note of finality to that assurance. His dark golden eyes were cool, his stubborn sensual mouth composed in a firm line. For the first time since her arrival she knew exactly what he was thinking: he had said all he had to say to her and now he was ready for her to leave. For several seconds she withstood the steady onslaught of his gaze, because a crushing sense of rejection was holding her in a near state of paralysis, and then she moved away on feet that felt as if they didn’t belong to the rest of her body.
Cesario was making a phone call in his own language but both his voice and actions seemed to be happening far away at the end of a long dark tunnel. Jess felt detached from her surroundings and horribly lightheaded.
‘You’ll be driven home…no, don’t argue with me,’ Cesario urged as her lips parted. ‘You’re pregnant. I don’t want you struggling to find a seat on a packed train during the rush hour.’
With enormous effort, Jess focused on him. She dimly recognised that she was in a state of shock so profound that she could barely think, but there was one question that she could not suppress. ‘You said your condition had got worse…how long?’ and her voice ran out of steam altogether and just vanished in the awfulness of what she was saying.
‘They’re not quite sure. Not more than six months,’ he proffered with unnatural calm. ‘I do have one favour to ask…’
‘What?’ Jess prompted shakily, for the number six was whizzing round and round inside her head as if someone had turned on a manic mixer.
‘Would you mind if Weed and Magic lived with me? For as long as that’s practical,’ Cesario extended tight-mouthed.
Jess felt as if someone had their hands squeezing round her throat: it was that hard to breathe and there was a pain building in her chest. She was recalling the patient way he had learned hand signals so that he could communicate with the deaf terrier. ‘No problem,’ she said, schooling her voice to control it. ‘No problem at all.’
Rigo Castello escorted her in silence down to the basement car park and tucked her into a limousine. She remembered the older man’s behaviour when Cesario had collapsed and realised that he had been in on the secret as well. It seemed that of all the people close to Cesario she had been just about the only one kept in the dark. Deceived, lied to, shut out of the charmed circle and, although he wanted her dogs for company, he didn’t want her.
THE instant Jess laid eyes on her mother that evening she started to cry. Once she had let that flood of pent-up grief and despair flow freely there was no stopping it.
Shaken by the state her daughter was in, Sharon Martin took some time to grasp the situation that her daughter was describing between heartbroken sobs. When Jess had finally mopped her eyes dry, her eyelids were so swollen she could
