she deserved. The sharp reminder of just how little she knew about Marco’s life and routine twisted a cruel knife in her heart.
‘I’m sorry.’
Moving rather clumsily as she adjusted to the unfamiliar weight of her son in her arms, she tried to put Marco into the high chair. Luckily, he seemed prepared to help her and, obviously recognising that this meant food was on its way, began banging on the tray with an enthusiastic hand, slapping his palm on to the surface.
‘Da!’ he said excitedly, waving the other hand wildly in the air. ‘Da!’
He was too young to be talking properly yet, Lucy told herself, fighting with the twist of misery that sound brought her. And, besides, having only ever been spoken to in Italian, Marco was unlikely to be trying to form the word ‘Daddy’. But it was another way of bringing home to her how much she had lost by being away from him at this important stage of his life. The pain that cut at her had her digging her teeth down hard into the softness of her lower lip as she fought with the tears that burned at the back of her eyes.
Ricardo bent to wipe the high chair’s tray, receiving enthusiastic pats on his face from his son as he did so. Careful cleaning of those grasping fingers followed.
‘Here—give him this…’
Ricardo passed her a sliced banana on a plate.
‘Just put it onto the tray and let him help himself.’
The small domesticated tasks, the time taken to feed the baby, brought a new and unexpected peace between them. Ricardo passed her the food that the nanny had left prepared and Lucy put it before the little boy, some of the tension seeping from her face, a light switching on in her eyes.
Had he been mistaken or had there been the glisten of tears in those eyes just a moment before? Ricardo found himself wondering. And did she know what it did to him to see the way that her sharp white teeth had dug into the pink softness of her lower lip as she had looked down at their little boy?
He had lost any ability to read her expression, thrown off balance by what he had just learned. He had trusted her once and that had had such shocking repercussions that he had vowed never to do so again. But this was very different. Vicious guilt clawed at him at the thought that his already hardened prejudice against her might have blinded him to the truth, driving him to misinterpret her behaviour after Marco’s birth.
He should wait and watch, see what happened, he resolved in the same moment that another more primitive response shook his mental balance even harder.
Dio santo, but he had had to fight with himself not to react on the most basic instinctive level. Every male impulse had urged him to reach out for her and pull her to him. To kiss away the imprint of her teeth in her flesh and soothe it with his tongue. He wanted to taste her again, know the soft sweetness of her mouth, explore the moist interior and kiss them both to the verge of oblivion.
He wanted to tangle his hands in the golden fall of her hair and hold her just so—exactly where he could kiss her hardest, strongest, with the deepest passion.
But there was something else he wanted too. Something that combined with the sensual hunger, taking it and twisting it brutally inside him until, looking across at her, he had to push his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans against the temptation to use them in another, very different way.
She was looking down at Marco, laughing softly as the little boy squished his banana in his hand, obviously revelling in the mess he was making and the feel of it between his fingers. And Marco was watching her, his wide smile a beam of delight as he held up the sticky mess for her to see.
A child and his mother. That was what a stranger looking in through the wide open French windows would see in the scene before them. A child and his mother enjoying the moment, sharing the experience of food and fun, while the father, the husband, looked on and laughed with them.
A family.
That was how it should be. It was why he had married her, after all. Because his child, unlike Ricardo himself, his mother before that, should have two caring parents. And, having seen Lucy with Marco, having heard her story, how could he refuse her—and Marco—that in the future? He had to let her back into their son’s life.
And back into his?
The cold stab of anger at the thought was like a blade of ice between his ribs, making him clench his teeth tight against it.
He couldn’t blame her for the way she had run out on her marriage if she had been as ill as she had described. The evidence of her feelings for Marco were there before him in a natural warmth that no one could mistake. But where did that leave their marriage?
Was Marco truly all she had come back for or was there more to it than that? She needed money, obviously, because she had admitted that she had none now. So was she back, looking for the means of support that he as her wealthy husband was obliged to provide? Did she really just want to be with her son or was the fact that she was Marco’s mother still her key to the luxurious lifestyle for which she had married him?
‘Oh, Marco! What a mess!’
Lucy’s voice, soft and warm with amusement, broke into his thoughts, shattering them and sending them spinning off onto another tangent entirely. As she bent her head, leaning down towards the little boy, laughing again as he reached up and smeared the fall of her hair with banana, he found that he was once more seeing the scene as someone else might see it.
That person would see a happy family. Not knowing the events that had torn the little group apart, they would assume it was still the perfect setting in which to bring up the little boy.
Which it was. Or once had been.
He had wanted a family for his child. Still wanted it more than he could say. And if he played his cards right then there was a way that he could still make it come true for the future. For Marco.
And if there were other reasons—private reasons—for him wanting to keep things the way they had been, could he admit them, even to himself? He had no wish to let anyone know the way that, after just twenty-four hours, he was once more fighting the irresistible, burningly sensual passion that Lucy’s slender beauty had always been able to arouse in him. And certainly he was damned if he was ever going to let Lucy begin to suspect that those feelings were there. Sex and money had been the reasons why they had gone into this marriage that was not a marriage in the first place. And sex and money had been the things that had torn it apart too. Those two dangerous elements had ruined his past. He was not going to let them ruin his future too.
She seemed to have been honest with him. And she truly seemed to want to be back with Marco, for the baby’s sake, not for anything she could get out of this, but her concern could easily be faked. Could he really trust her with his beloved son’s future? Why should she be so very different from the other women in his past?
The only way to be sure was to test her sincerity one more time. To make absolutely sure that her reasons for being here were as she claimed. He would offer her the sort of deal that, if she was lying, would surely tempt her into showing her true colours. And the way she responded would tell him all he needed to know.
But if he could get what he wanted out of this situation—if he could keep her here, for Marco’s sake, on the terms that suited him—then he would do just that.
Конец
