She swallowed, her eyes boldly meeting and staying on his. ‘Just so you know, I don’t respond well to threats.’
‘It wasn’t a threat, gattina.’ They both froze at the term that had unwittingly dropped from his lips. From the look on her face, Romeo knew she was remembering the first time he’d said it. Her nails had been embedded in his back, her claws transmitting the depth of her arousal as he’d sunk deep inside her. His little wildcat had been as crazy for him as he’d been for her. But that was then, a moment in time never to be repeated. ‘I’m merely stating a fact.’
She opened her mouth to reply, then stopped as voices filled the restaurant. ‘I have to go. This is our busiest afternoon slot. I can’t leave Lacey on her own.’
Romeo told himself to be calm. ‘I need an answer, Maisie.’
She stared at him for a long moment before her gaze dropped to the picture he held. She looked as if she wanted to snatch it from him but he held on tight. She finally looked back up. ‘He goes to playgroup from eleven to three o’clock. I take him to the park afterwards if the weather’s good.’
‘Did you have plans to do that today?’
She slowly nodded. ‘Yes.’
Blood rushed into his ears, nearly deafening him. He forced himself to think, to plot the best way he knew how. Because rushing blood and racing hearts were for fools. Fools who let emotion rule their existence.
‘What park?’ he rasped.
‘Ranelagh Gardens. It’s—’
‘I will find it.’
She paled and her hands flew out in a bracing stance. ‘You can’t... Don’t you think we need to discuss this a little more?’
Romeo carefully set down the picture, then took out his phone and captured an image of it. He stared down at his son’s face on his phone screen, and the decision concreted in his mind. ‘No, Maisie. There’s nothing more to discuss. If he’s mine, truly mine, then I intend to claim him.’
* * *
Maisie slowly sank into the chair after Romeo made a dramatic exit, taking all the oxygen and bristling vitality of the day with him. She raised her hand to her face and realised her fingers were shaking. Whether it was from the shock of seeing him again after convincing herself she would never set eyes on him again, or the indomitability of that last statement, she wasn’t certain.
She sat there, her hand on her clammy forehead, her gaze in the middle distance as she played back every word, every gesture, on a loop in her mind.
The sound of laughter finally broke through her racing thoughts. She really needed to walk the floor, make sure her customers were all right. But she found herself clicking on her laptop, typing in his name on her search engine.
The images that confronted her made her breath catch all over again. Whereas she hadn’t given herself permission to linger on anywhere but Romeo’s face while they’d been in her office, she leaned in close and perused each image. And there were plenty, it seemed. Pictures of him dressed in impeccable handmade suits, posing for a profile piece in some glossy business magazine; pictures of him opening his world-renowned resorts in Dubai and Bali; and many, many pictures of him with different women, all drop-dead gorgeous, all smiling at him as if he was their world, their every dream come true.
But the ones that caught Maisie’s attention, the ones that made her heart lurch wildly, were of Romeo on a yacht with another man—the caption named him as Zaccheo Giordano—and a woman with two children. The children were Gianlucca’s age, possibly a little older, and the pictures were a little grainy, most likely taken with a telephoto lens from a long distance.
He sat apart from the family, his expression as remote as an arctic floe. That lone-wolf look, the one that said approach with caution, froze her heart as she saw it replicated in each rigid, brooding picture that followed. Even when he smiled at the children, there was a distance that spoke of his unease.
Trembling, Maisie sat back from the desk, the large part of her that had been agitated at the thought of agreeing to a meeting between Romeo and her son escalating to alarming proportions.
She might not know how he felt about children generally, but if the pictures could be believed, Romeo Brunetti wasn’t the warm and cuddly type.
Maisie gulped in the breath she hadn’t been able to fully access while Romeo had been in the room and tried to think rationally. She’d tried to find Romeo five years ago to tell him that they’d created a child together. It was true that at the time she’d been reeling from her parents’ further disappointment in her, and in hindsight she’d probably been seeking some sort of connection with her life suddenly in chaotic free fall. But even then, deep down, she’d known she couldn’t keep the news to herself or abandon her baby to the care of strangers as her parents had wanted.
So in a way, this meeting had always been on the cards, albeit to be scheduled at a time of her choosing and without so much...pulse-destroying drama.
Or being confronted with the evidence that made her mothering instincts screech with the possibility that the father of her child might want him for reasons other than to cement a love-at-first-sight bond that would last a lifetime.
She clicked back to the information page and was in the middle of Romeo’s worryingly brief biography when a knock announced Lacey’s entrance.
‘I need you, Maisie! A group of five just walked in. They don’t have a booking but I don’t think they’ll take no for an answer.’
Maisie suppressed a sigh and closed her laptop with a guilty sense of relief that she didn’t have to deal with Romeo’s last words just yet.
‘Okay, let’s go and see what we can do, shall we?’
She pinned a smile on her face that felt a mile from genuine and left her office. For the next three hours, she pushed the fast-approaching father-and-son meeting to the back of her mind and immersed herself in the smooth running of the lunchtime service.
* * *
The walk to Gianlucca’s nursery took less than ten minutes, but with her mind free of work issues, her heart began to race again at the impending meeting.
Every cell in her body urged her to snatch her son and take him far away.
But she’d never been the type to run, or bury her head in the sand.
She’d give Romeo the chance to spell out what he wished for, and if his parting remarks were anything to go by he would be demanding a presence in her son’s life. She would hear him out, but nothing would make her accommodate visitation with her son until she was absolutely sure he would be safe with Romeo.
Her heart lurched at the thought that she’d have to part from him for a few hours maybe once or twice a week. Maybe a full weekend when he grew older. Her breath shuddered out, and she shook her head. She was getting ahead of herself. For all she knew, Romeo would take one look at Lucca, satisfy himself that he was his and ring-fence himself with money-grubbing lawyers to prevent any imagined claims.
But then, if that was what he intended, would he have taken the time to seek them out?
Whatever
