child? A half-sibling to Luca and his brother Enzo?
He ground his teeth together. Another goddamned mess to clean up, but this went beyond the realm of money laundering and illegal business activities.
This involved a child. A child who could one day stake a legitimate claim for a share of the Cavallari wealth.
Luca flicked through the rest of the photos, found one of the woman without her sunhat, and held it up for a better look.
Blonde and beautiful. Of course. If nothing else, Franco Cavallari had had good taste in women. And she really was exquisite. Startling blue eyes, amazing bone structure, flawless skin...
Luca frowned.
A voice whispered in his head. You know her.
No. He shoved the notion away. It was crazy. Fanciful. The world was full of blue-eyed, flaxen-haired beauties. Why would his mind even go there after all these years?
And yet...
He drew the photo closer, trailing his gaze over an elegant cheekbone and down to her pretty mouth.
The camera had caught her at a circumspect moment, and, as such, no smile adorned her face. But Luca realised with sudden, heart-stopping certainty that he already knew this woman’s smile. Knew the exact angle at which her lips would tilt, how perfect her teeth would look, and how prominently those incredible cheekbones would stand out. Her blue eyes would sparkle like sunlight on water and when she laughed...
Luca swallowed, his throat gone dry.
When she laughed, it’d be the sweetest, most alluring sound he’d ever heard.
He closed his eyes, his mind catapulting him back to a frigid February night in London. He’d been walking the streets, headed back to his hotel, lost in a dark mire of thought until he’d collided with something soft that bounced off his hard body, reeled backwards, and landed in a clump of dirty snow with a small oomph.
Not something but someone, he’d realised, staring down at the young woman he’d accidentally bowled off her feet.
She should have yelled at him. Told him to look where he was going. Instead she pushed off her hood, revealing a head of golden hair and a pair of striking blue eyes, and grinned up at him.
Luca had stood dumbstruck for long seconds before he’d finally roused himself, helped her up and found his voice to apologise. And then he’d whisked her into the hotel’s swanky lounge bar and ordered her an enormous hot chocolate.
Which was where their random encounter should have ended.
But her natural beauty, her easy smile, her infectious laughter...everything about her captivated him, and the temptation to touch, to hold her close and lose himself in her sweetness—to pretend for one night his world was not tainted with ugliness—was too strong to resist.
Breathing hard, Luca riffled through the photos, searching for something more, some clue, anything to help him understand how the woman he’d spent one unforgettable night with five years ago had become not only his father’s mistress but the mother of Franco’s illegitimate child.
Hatred flared. How typical of his father to corrupt the one pure thing Luca had ever had.
He upended the envelope and a piece of paper, folded in half, fell out. He flipped it open. It was a photocopy of a birth certificate for an Ethan Sinclair, the boy in the photos presumably.
He skipped down to the mother’s name.
Annah Sinclair.
And just like that, the memory of her sweet, melodic voice filled his head.
‘Annah with an “h”,’ she’d said, smiling at him over the frothy rim of her hot chocolate.
He’d misunderstood. ‘Hannah?’
She’d laughed, shaking her head, then spelt it for him.
Luca thrust aside the memory and focused on the certificate. The father was listed as unknown. The kid’s birth date was October the thirty-first in the year—
He froze.
‘Signor Cavallari?’
He looked at Victor but didn’t see him. In his head, he swiftly calculated the number of months and weeks between February the seventeenth and October the thirty-first.
Victor spoke again, but the sudden rush of blood in Luca’s ears and the loud rasp of his breathing drowned out the older man’s words.
Wrong.
He had it all wrong.
The boy wasn’t Luca’s half-brother; he was his son.
* * *
‘Oh, don’t you dare,’ Annah muttered, throwing down her shears and lunging for the spool of silver ribbon rolling across her worktop.
She was fast, but the renegade ribbon was faster. Before her outstretched fingers could reach it, the reel had gathered momentum and shot off the counter.
Annah groaned, listened to the clatter of the cylinder hitting the floor, and imagined the hideously expensive organza ribbon unravelling beneath her workbench.
Excellent.
She pulled a face at the bunch of purple tulips in her hand. ‘Sorry, you lot. I’m afraid you’ll have to hang tight.’ She set the flowers on the bench and crouched down to search the floor.
No trail of ribbon.
No reel in sight, either.
Puffing a strand of hair out of her face, she got to her hands and knees and crawled beneath her work space.
Please don’t let a customer walk in right now.
She loved customers. Who didn’t when you ran your own business? But with Chloe—her friend and co-owner of their floral studio—in London visiting a sick friend, Annah was operating alone and stretched to capacity.
She stuck her hand in a gap between some boxes of coloured binding wires stacked against the wall. ‘There you are,’ she said, closing her fingers around the spool—just as the vintage shopkeeper’s bell over the front door of the studio jangled.
Blast.
Hoping to see the scrawny bare legs of her delivery man, she peeped under the front of the counter.
Nope. Not Brian’s legs. He didn’t wear dark tailored trousers and expensive-looking leather shoes. Handmade shoes, by the look of them.
Her walk-in wasn’t a local, then. The men who lived in and around the small rural village of Hollyfield in South Devon typically wore wellies or work boots, not the kind of shoes that wouldn’t survive a muddy field or a half-decent snowfall.
‘I’ll be right with you,’ she called, backing out of the crawl space.
