The Sicilian's Unexpected Duty

But Grace had married and moved countries. Grace had also disappeared for the best part of a year, forcing Cara to get her own life in order. She couldn’t keep living her life through her best friend. She needed a life that was her own.

And she’d been getting there. She’d moved back to Ireland, landed a job she loved, albeit at the lowest rung, but it was a start, and even made some new friends. She had truly thought she’d found her own path to some kind of fulfilling life.

Pepe hadn’t just blocked the path, he’d driven a ruddy great bulldozer through it and churned it into rubble.

He’d left her alone, scared and pregnant, with a future that loomed terrifyingly opaque.

Eventually he inclined his head and nodded at the door. ‘Come with me.’

Relieved to get away from all the prying eyes, relieved to have a moment to gather her wits together, she followed him out and into the wide corridor.

Pepe leaned against the stone wall and ran a hand through his thick black hair.

A maid appeared carrying a fresh tray of canapés, which she took into the vast living room.

No sooner had the maid gone when a couple of elderly uncles came out of the same door, laughing between themselves. When they saw Pepe, they pulled him in for some back-breaking hugs and fired a load of questions, all of which Pepe answered with gusto and laughter, as if he hadn’t a single care in the world.

The minute they were alone though, the smile dropped. ‘Let’s get out of here before any more of my relatives try and talk to me.’ He set off in a direction within the converted monastery she’d never been in before.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To my wing.’

He made no allowances for her legs being half the length of his, and she struggled to keep up. ‘What for?’

He flashed her a black look over his shoulder, not slowing his pace for a moment. ‘You really wish to have this conversation in front of fifty Mastrangelos and Lombardis?’

‘Of course not, but I really don’t want to have it in your personal space. Can’t we go somewhere neutral?’

‘No.’ He stopped at a door, unlocked it and held it open. He extended an arm. ‘I’m getting on a flight to Paris in exactly two hours. This is a one-off opportunity to convince me that I have impregnated you.’

She stared at him. She couldn’t read his face. If anything, he looked bored. ‘You think I’m lying?’

‘You wouldn’t be the first woman to lie over a pregnancy.’

Throwing him the most disdainful look she could muster, Cara slipped past him and into his inner sanctum.

Thank God she had no hankering for any sort of future for them. He was a despicable excuse for a human being.

Pepe’s wing, although rarely used, what with him having at least three other places he called home, was exactly what she expected. Unlike the rest of the converted monastery, which remained faithful and sympathetic to the original architecture, this was a proper bachelor pad. It opened straight into a large living space decked with the largest flat-screen television she had seen outside a cinema, and was filled with more gizmos and gadgets than she’d known existed. She doubted she would know how to work a quarter of them.

She stood there, in the midst of all this high-tech luxury, and suddenly felt the first seed of doubt that she was doing the right thing.

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘No. Let’s just get this over with.’ Of course she was doing the right thing, she castigated herself. Her unborn child deserved nothing less.

‘Well, I need one.’ He picked up a remote control from a glass table in the centre of the room and pressed a button.

Eyes wide, she watched as the oak panelling on the wall behind him separated and a fully stocked bar emerged.

Pepe mixed himself some concoction she didn’t recognise. ‘Are you sure I can’t get you anything?’

‘Yes.’

He tipped it down his neck and then fixed his deep blue eyes back to her. ‘Go on, then. Convince me.’

Pursing her lips, she shook her head in distaste. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘So you’ve already said.’

‘That’s because I am.’

‘How much?’

‘How much what?’

‘Money. How much money are you going to try and extort from me?’

She glared at him. ‘I’m not trying to extort anything from you.’

‘So you don’t want my money?’ he said, his tone mocking.

‘Of course I do.’ It gave great satisfaction to watch his ebony brows shoot up. ‘You have lots of money. I have nothing. I am broke. Boracic. Poor. Whatever you want to call it, I am skint. I’m also carrying a child whose father can afford to pay for a decent cot and wardrobe and a decent place for him or her to live.’

He sucked in air through his teeth. ‘So you are trying to extort money from me.’

‘No!’ Clamping her lips together, Cara opened her handbag and took out a brown envelope, from which she pulled a square piece of paper. She handed it to him. ‘There,’ she said tightly. ‘There’s your proof. I’m not trying to extort anything from you. I’m sixteen weeks pregnant. You are going to be a father.’

For a moment Pepe feared he would be sick. His stomach was certainly churning enough for it to happen. And his skin...his skin had gone all cold and clammy; his heart rate tripled.

And no wonder.

If this were a forgery, Cara had done an excellent job.

The square piece of paper clearly showed a kidney bean. Or was it that alien thing he had watched as a child? E.T.? Either way, this was clearly an early-stage foetus. He studied it carefully. There was the name of the Dublin hospital on it, her name, Cara Mary Delaney, her date of birth and the due date of the foetus. He did the maths. Yes. This put her at sixteen weeks pregnant.

It had been sixteen weeks since he’d been to Dublin...

‘You don’t look very pregnant.’ She looked thinner than he had ever seen her. She’d never been fat as such, more cuddly. While she hadn’t transformed into a rake, she’d lost some of her, for want of a better word, squishiness.

‘I’ve been under a lot of stress.’ She gave him a tight smile. ‘Unexpected pregnancy can do that to a woman. But the baby’s perfectly healthy and I’m sure I’ll start showing soon.’

He looked again at the scan picture. Cara was a smart woman but he doubted even she could forge something of this standard. The resolution on this picture was more clearly defined than the one he had held and gazed at for hours on end over a decade ago, but everything else was the same.

Cara was pregnant.

He looked back at her, realising for the first time that she was shaking. It took all his control to keep his own body still.

Dragging air into his lungs, he considered the situation as dispassionately as he could, which was hard. Very hard. His brain felt as if someone had thrown antifreeze into it. ‘Congratulations. You’re going to be a mother. Now tell me, what makes you so certain I’m the father?’

She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. ‘What kind of stupid question is that? Of course you’re the father. You’re the only man I’ve been stupid enough to have sex with.’

‘And I’m supposed to take your word on that, am I?’

‘You know damn well I was a virgin.’

‘I am not disputing that you were a virgin. What I am questioning is my paternity. I have no way of knowing what you got up to after I left. How do I know that after discovering all you’d been missing, you didn’t go trawling for sex—?’

Her hand flew out from nowhere. Crack. Right across his cheek, the force enough to jerk his face to the side.

‘Don’t you dare pull me down to your own pathetically low standards,’ she hissed, her face contorted with anger.

His cheek stung, smarted right where her hand and fingers had made contact. She might be small but she packed a proper punch. He could feel her imprint burrowing under his skin. He raised a hand to it. Her finger marks lay on the long scar that had been inflicted on him when he’d been eighteen. There were still times when he could feel the blade of the knife burn into his skin.

‘I will let you do that this one time,’ he said, speaking carefully, controlling his tone. ‘But if you ever raise a hand to me again you will never see me or my money again.’

Her breaths were shallow. ‘You deserved it.’

‘Why? Because I pointed out that you are expecting me to take you at your word? Trust me, I take no one at their word, especially a woman purporting to be carrying my child.’

‘I am carrying your child.’

‘No—you are carrying a child. Until the child is born and we can get a paternity test done, I do not want to hear any reference to it being mine.’ After what Luisa had done to him, he would never take anything to do with paternity at face value again. Never.

Only fools rushed in twice.

* * *

Cara itched to slap the arrogance off his face again, so much so that she dug her nails into the palms of her hands to find some relief.

If she could, she would leave. But she couldn’t. She hadn’t been exaggerating about the state of her bank balance. Paying for the return flight to Sicily had left her with the grand total of forty-eight euros to last her until payday, which was still a fortnight away. It was one thing living on baked beans on toast when she had only herself to support, but it was quite another when she would soon have a tiny mouth to feed and clothe. And she needed to find a new home, one that allowed children.

When she’d first discovered she was pregnant, her fear had been primitive, a cold, terrifying realisation that within her grew a life, a baby.

Jeez. A baby. She couldn’t remember ever even holding a baby.

That real terror had morphed when the freeze in her brain had abated and the reality of everything that having a child meant had hit her.

A child would depend on her for everything. Love. Stability. Nourishment. Of the three, came the sharp knowledge that she would only be able to provide the first.

At that precise moment, even more so than when she’d taken the pregnancy test, her life had changed irrevocably.

What stability did she have living in a shared rented home that banned children? What nourishment could she provide when she barely earned enough to feed herself? Nappies alone cost a fortune on her salary. Maybe if this had all happened a few years down the line, when she’d scaled the career ladder a little higher and was earning more, things would have been more manageable. But they weren’t. At that moment she had nothing.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ she demanded, fighting with everything she had to keep her tone moderate, to fight the hysteria threatening to take control. ‘What do you want me to do? Give you a ring in five months and tell you if it’s a boy or a girl?’

He speared her with a look. ‘Not at all, cucciola mia.’

Cucciola mia: the endearment that had appropriated itself as his pet name for her during their weekend together. Curiosity had driven her to translate it on the same phone he had stolen from her. She had been more than a little chagrined to learn it meant something along the lines of my puppy. The way he said it though...in Pepe’s thick Sicilian tongue it sounded tantalisingly sexy.

Momentarily distracted at the throwaway endearment, it took a second before she realised he was studying the scan picture.

‘I notice this was taken a month ago,’ he said, referring to the date of the scan shown clearly on the corner.

‘And?’

‘And it’s taken you all this time to tell me. Why is that?’

How she hated his mocking scepticism, as if he were looking for a conspiracy in every little thing.

‘I didn’t tell you any sooner because I don’t trust you an inch—I wanted to be sure I was too far gone for you to force an abortion on me.’

Pepe’s firm, sensuous lips tightened and his eyes narrowed, lines appearing on his forehead. After too long a pause, he said, ‘Why would you think that?’

She almost laughed aloud. ‘You have loved and left so many women it’s become a second career for you. What do you, Playboy of the Year, want with a child?’

His features darkened for the split of a second before his usual laconic grin replaced it. ‘It might make a nice accessory for pulling more women.’

She would have believed he was serious if the granite in his eyes hadn’t said otherwise. She gave an involuntary shiver.

‘Do you think I was oblivious to the disparaging comments you made about babies?’ she demanded. ‘Do you think I didn’t notice you rolling your eyes whenever Grace and Luca discussed having kids?’

‘So that’s proof I would demand an abortion, is it?’

‘You made it perfectly clear that kids are not and never will be on your agenda.’

A tiny pulse pounded on his jawline. After a loaded pause, he said, ‘Say a paternity test proves it is mine. What do you expect from me? Marriage?’

‘No!’ She practically shouted her denial. ‘No. I do not want to marry you. I don’t want to marry anyone.’

‘That’s a relief,’ he drawled, heading back to his bar to pour himself another glass of his concoction. ‘But in case you’re only saying what you think I want to hear, know marriage will never be on the cards, whatever the outcome of the paternity test.’

Had he drugged her? For a moment she actually considered the possibility. She could hardly credit she had allowed him to seduce her so thoroughly.

She looked back on their weekend together. It was as if she had been under some kind of drug that allowed the hormones so prevalent in the rest of society to actually work in her. For the first time in her life she had experienced desire. It had been the headiest feeling imaginable.

She had wanted to believe he was serious about her.

She had wanted to believe they could have a future together.

An image of her parents flashed in her head. Was this what it had been like for them? Especially her father, who’d hooked up with a new woman on a seemingly weekly basis. With all the affairs he’d had and all her parents’ fights and making up, had they constantly experienced that same headiness? Was that what had caused their monstrous selfishness?

She blinked the image away. She would not be like her mother and think only of her own needs. Her unborn child’s needs would always take priority, whatever the personal sacrifice.

‘I’m glad you think that way because, believe me, I have no intention of marrying you.’ She’d rather marry an orang-utan.

‘Good. People who marry for the sake of the baby are fools. And I am not a fool.’

She glared at him. ‘I can think of many a choice word to describe you but fool isn’t one of them.’

‘Then we are on the same page,’ he mocked.

‘About marriage, then yes, but, Pepe, I need help. Financially, I am in no position to support a child.’

‘So you thought you would come to me.’ He tipped his drink down his neck in one swallow.

‘If you think for a second I like the idea of having to beg you for money then you have a very twisted view of me. I’ve come to you for help because this is your responsibility...’

‘You’re going to pin the blame for this on me?’

‘I’m not the one who got carried away,’ she countered pointedly. Warmth spread inside her as she recalled lying in his arms after they’d made love for the first time. Pepe’s usual languidness had gone. A more serious, reflective side of his nature had come to the fore, a side she’d never seen before. As they’d talked and his face had come closer to hers, she’d found herself staring at his lips. And he’d been staring at hers. And even though they had made love barely ten minutes before, the heat he had created inside her and she in him had flared back to life, and he’d rolled on top of her and kissed her—devoured her—and before either of them had been fully aware of it, he’d been inside her. If she’d thought having him inside her the first time had been something special...this had been indescribable. For what had felt an age, they had simply lain there, gazing into each other’s eyes, before he had reluctantly withdrawn to get a condom.

That one stolen moment had been enough to create a life.

‘I hardly think that was enough to make a baby,’ he said, his tone becoming grim.

‘Well, it was. You used me, Pepe. Whether you like it or not, you are responsible.’

It sickened him to know she could be right.

You are responsible.

Despite the playboy image he had cultivated—an image he exulted in—Pepe couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so reckless.

Actually, he could remember. The last time he’d made love to a woman without using a condom he’d been eighteen. Young and believing himself to be in love. A lethal combination.

It hadn’t been a conscious decision to enter Cara unsheathed. At the time it had felt like the most natural thing in the world. Not that he’d been thinking properly. He’d been reeling from the discovery that she was—had been—a virgin. He’d also been struggling to understand everything going on inside him.

Usually he would make love to a woman and get back into bed, have a fun conversation, drink a glass of wine or whatever, maybe make love again and then leave without a second thought or a backward glance. He’d never got back into bed with a churning stomach and a tight chest before. He could only assume it was guilt he’d been feeling. Guilt at her virginity or guilt at what he’d had to do, he did not know.

Guilt or not, he’d never got back into bed with a woman and needed to make love to her all over again. Not straight away. For all his reputation, Pepe thought with his brain, not the appendage between his legs. At least he had until that night with Cara.

But he hadn’t been inside her for long enough to make a baby. It had been a minute at the most. But caro Dio, he’d had to force himself to withdraw and get that condom. Being inside her without a barrier...

His groin twitched as more sweet memories filled him.

For that one minute inside her, he’d felt a sense of sheer wonderment and belonging...

‘I need a coffee,’ he muttered. He wanted another drink—a proper drink—but knew it was time to stop. A plan was formulating and he needed to think clearly. ‘Can I get you anything?’

Cara shook her head. She was leaning against the wall, arms folded, chin jutted up, looking ready for a fight.

By the time he’d made a quick call to the kitchen, his plan was fully developed. Cara could like it or lump it. If she wanted a fight, she had to learn it was one she would never win.

CHAPTER THREE

‘SIT DOWN.’

It was a definite command.

Cara tightened her arms around her chest and pressed harder into the wall, which was the only thing keeping her upright—her legs were shot. Not that she could trust the wall. For all she knew, it might be hiding a secret bathroom. The only saving grace was that her dress was long enough to hide her knocking knees.

But even if her legs could be trusted to behave, there was no way she would obey. She didn’t care how rich and powerful Pepe was in his world, she would not grant him power over her, no matter how petty. Not without a fight.

‘Suit yourself.’ He lowered himself onto one of the oversized chocolate leather sofas, stretched out his long legs, kicked off his shoes and flashed a grin.

Her knees shook even harder.

How she hated that bloody grin. It was so...fake. And it did something ridiculous to the beat of her heart, which was hammering so hard she wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it burst through her chest.

‘I can see you are in a difficult predicament,’ he said, hooking an arm behind his head and mussing his hair.

She inhaled slowly, getting as much oxygen into her lungs as she could. ‘That’s one way to describe it.’

‘I have a solution that will suit us both.’

Her eyes narrowed.

‘It involves sacrifice on both our parts.’ He shot her a warning glance before displaying his white teeth. ‘But I can assure you that if I am the father of your child as you say, the sacrifice will be worth it.’

What the heck did Pepe Mastrangelo know about sacrifice? His whole life revolved around nothing but his pleasure.

She nodded tightly. ‘Go on.’

‘You will live with me until the child is born. Then we shall have a paternity test. If it proves positive, as you say it will, then I will buy you a home of your choice. And, of course, support you both financially.’

‘You want me to live with you until the baby’s born?’ she asked, certain she had misheard him.

‘Sì.’

‘Why?’ She couldn’t think of a single reason. ‘All I need from you at the moment is enough money to rent a decent flat in a nice area, and buy some essentials for the baby. Obviously you’ll have to pay child support when the baby’s born.’

‘Only if the baby proves to be mine. If it isn’t, I won’t have to pay you a single euro.’

Cara spoke through gritted teeth. ‘The baby is yours. But seeing as you’re proving to be such a disbeliever, I’m happy to sign a contract stating I have to repay any monies in the event the paternity test proves the Invisible Man is the father.’

He gave a quick shake of his head and turned his mouth down in a regretful fashion. ‘If only it were that simple. The problem, for me, is that there exists the possibility that the child you carry inside you is mine. I cannot take the risk of anything happening to it.’

‘I told you I delayed telling you about the baby so you couldn’t force me into an abortion. I’m four weeks too late for one in Sicily and it’s completely illegal in Ireland.’ She blinked rapidly, fighting with everything she had not to burst into angry tears. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She would not give him the power her mother had given her father.

She might have no choice but to throw her pride at his feet but she had to retain some kind of dignity.

‘I never said anything about an abortion,’ he pointed out. ‘What does concern me is your health. You’re clearly not taking care of yourself if your weight loss is anything to go by, and by your own admittance you don’t have enough money to support a child. Or so you say. For all I know, you could be on the make, using this pregnancy as a means to help yourself to my bank account.’

It was Cara’s turn to swear under her breath. ‘Do you have any idea how offensive you are?’

He shrugged, utterly nonchalant. He clearly couldn’t care less. ‘Finances aside, if that is my child growing inside you then I want to make damned sure you’re taking care of it properly.’

‘I am taking care of myself as best I can under the circumstances, but, I can promise you, our child’s welfare means more to me than anything.’ Her unborn child meant everything to her. Everything. Its well-being was the only reason she was here.

Did Pepe think she wanted to throw herself at his financial mercy?

He shook his head in a chiding fashion and stretched his arms out. ‘My conditions are non-negotiable. If you want me to support you during the rest of the pregnancy then I will. But I will not give you cash. All you have to do is move in with me, travel where I travel, and I will feed and clothe you, and buy anything else you may need. If paternity is established after the birth, then I will buy you a house in your name, anywhere you choose, and give you an allowance so large you will be set up for life.’

He made it sound so reasonable. He made it sound as if it were such a no-brainer she wouldn’t even need to think about it.

And there she’d been, worrying for months against telling him because she’d convinced herself he would demand an abortion.

‘You see, cucciola mia, I am not the baby-aborting monster you thought I would be,’ he said chidingly, reading her mind.

A sharp rap on the main door to the wing provided a moment’s relief for her poor, addled brain.

At Pepe’s invitation, a maid entered the room carrying a tray with a pot of coffee, a pot of tea covered by a tea cosy and two cups.