she’d envisaged for them. No doubt Lio would take over the business eventually. What a future.
But would her nephew have what truly mattered: total, unconditional love? She went cold, envisaging the kind of loveless existence she’d been subjected to at home. Without her friends at school, she would have been utterly miserable.
And who would offer Lio a mother’s love? Would he find an ever-changing string of women in his father’s bed? And…would he be farmed out to nannies and be visited by his father only at teatime?
Her fists clenched. That wouldn’t be good enough! Bewildered, frightened little Lio needed affection and love like a fish needs water. And he needed Vittore’s rotten kind of fathering like a hole in the head.
But…what was she going to do? Start a siege? And look what a bag of nerves she was! She was trembling all over!
Time she dived into a warm shower. And found the courage to persuade Vittore that he couldn’t take Lio away right now.
She dared not fail. Her stomach lurching uncomfortably, she checked that Lio was all right. Looking down on his sweet face, her heart somersaulted at the thought of the next hour or so which would decide his fate as well as hers. Her finger stroked his fair cheek.
‘Oh, Lio,’ she whispered brokenly. ‘I love you so very much!’
A sob escaped in a wobbly kind of sound through her trembling lips and she hurried to peel off her sopping wet dress. Shakily she stepped into the shower, where tears mingled with the water that poured over her head and where all the daisy petals from that lovely, blissful afternoon were swept away, to sit in a limp and miserable heap blocking the shower drain.
Still only half-dry, her hair wrapped in a virgin white towel, she wriggled into the first pair of briefs that came to hand and yanked what she thought was her cotton turquoise dress from the wardrobe, her fingers shaking so much she could hardly cope with the tiny buttons which ran from neckline to hem.
Too late, she discovered it was a similar one of Linda’s: too late, too short and too tight, she thought moodily, diving for the buttons in order to take it off again. Just then, the gate buzzer rang shrill and loud, and she jumped, fearing that Lio would wake.
‘Damn whoever forgot to make you waterproof!’ she muttered, glaring at the ruined entry phone remote control which she’d flung on the bed. ‘Where were you when I needed you?’ she demanded.
The wretched thing might have let Vittore in without any further risk of awakening the sleeping Lio. As it was, Vittore had apparently decided to lean on the buzzer till she answered and it was screaming through the silence of the house like a banshee.
And so, barefoot and muttering all the rude words she knew, she hitched up the pelmet skirt to hip level and hurtled down the stairs to punch in the code that opened the gates. Remembering, of course, to snuggle the skirt back as far as it would go—which wasn’t far. Not that she cared.
All she could think of was that Vittore could destroy her happiness and turn a bewildered, distressed child into a total wreck. Her heart leapt erratically, her mind focussed only on Lio. His interests came above everything else.
Wiping her clammy hands on her hips, she opened the front door and drew in a horribly shaky breath as the scowling threat to Lio’s welfare came up the drive and strode grimly up the wide steps towards her, his intention crystal clear.
He’d demand to see Lio. Order baby things to be packed.
And there wouldn’t be a thing she could do to stop him.
CHAPTER THREE
‘COME IN,’ she whimpered in an appallingly silly, breathless voice.
Vittore obviously thought she was ditzy because he frowned.
‘Lio,’ he stated starkly, not beating about the bush.
‘You mustn’t wake him!’ she declared tremulously.
The rich chocolate eyes hardened. ‘Sweet Madonna—!’ He checked himself, his sultry mouth a thin, angry line. ‘Just point me in his direction. Upstairs, is he?’
Seething with anger, Vittore started striding towards the opulently grand staircase and she had to scurry frantically to catch him up, the towel falling off her hair in the process.
With water dropping onto her bare shoulders, she reached out and grabbed his arm. He stopped dead, gazing at her inscrutably.
It was like gripping tensile steel. Alarmed by the illogical intimacy of what she was doing, Verity snatched her hand away. Tingles were whizzing up and down her arm. The man was electric, she thought in confusion. And, heaven help her, she’d just been switched on.
‘Yes?’ he growled, in a deeply husky voice that somehow made her knees turn to water.
She swallowed, some crazily diverted part of her brain mulling over the fact that he seemed to extend words, savouring them in his mouth and letting them roll out in an unnervingly sexy way. That was Italians for you.
‘You’ve got to promise,’ she breathed, astonishingly still not in full control of her lungs. Or anything else for that matter. Fear did funny things to the body.
‘Promise what?’
Valiantly she pulled the wandering strands of her brain together and licked her dry lips till she could speak again.
‘Promise not to wake him!’ she croaked.
‘So. You care about my son,’ he observed, scrutinising her anxious face as if interested in every detail.
‘Yes! I adore him, every little scrap of him!’ she cried, all the passion in her heart filling that declaration with a fierce intensity. ‘From his little toes to the top of his blond head!’
For a moment his watchful eyes seemed to soften. She did, too. He was mesmeric. She couldn’t tear her gaze from his.
‘I won’t wake him,’ he promised, solemnly gazing deep into her eyes. ‘Just…’ It seemed that emotion had got the better of him. For a second or two she watched wide-eyed while he steadied himself again. ‘You will understand,’ he said softly, ‘that naturally I am anxious to see him after all this time.’
‘But not take him!’ she faltered.
‘That, Verity, is why I’m here,’ he pointed out drily.
She felt faint. ‘You mean you’re just going to pick him up out of his bed and shove him in your car and drive away?’ she cried in horror.
Vittore flinched. ‘Do I look like a barbarian?’ he asked coldly.
‘I don’t know what barbarians look like, do I? I have to protect him!’ she jerked in distress. ‘I am his guardian!’
His brows dipped together alarmingly and she realised she’d insulted him unforgivably by suggesting he was an uncouth savage.
‘Is this a legal guardianship? An official arrangement with signed agreements, ratified by a solicitor?’ he shot at her unfairly.
She
