Italian Bachelors: Unforgotten Lovers: The Change in Di Navarra's Plan / Bound by the Italian's Contract / Visconti's Forgotten Heir

But it was already too late. She sat up ramrod straight to find Drago looking at her, his gaze as hard as diamonds, his face some combination of both disgust and rage.

She’d had every chance in the world, and she’d blown it. Drago wasn’t stupid. He would have realized by now she hadn’t told him the truth. And he would never believe she hadn’t meant to deceive him.

He held a blue passport in his hand, opened to the first page. He turned it toward her. She didn’t need to look at it to know what it said.

“Tell me, Holly, precisely how old your child is again. And then I want you to tell me once more about this married man you had an affair with.”

* * *

Drago felt as if someone had put a vise around his neck and started twisting. He couldn’t breathe properly and he had to concentrate very, very hard on dragging each breath in and then letting it out again. It was the only thing keeping him from raging at her and demanding a definitive answer right this instant.

He held the passport in a cold grip and watched the play of emotions across her face. Her eyes were wide, the whites showing big and bright, and her skin was flushed. Her mouth was open, but there was no sound coming out.

Then she went deadly pale as all that heat drained away. He kept waiting for her to explain. To tell him why her baby was three months old and not two. Not that it meant anything that the child was three months old. It didn’t make the boy his. He kept telling himself that.

Drago hadn’t noticed the baby’s real age at first. Hadn’t realized the implications. She’d been soft and sleepy and he hadn’t wanted to wake her, but he’d needed the passports for when they went through the checkpoint to reach the private jets. She’d handed them to him and gone back to her nap, and he’d flipped them open, studying the details as the car crawled closer to the guard stand. He was a detail-oriented man.

Holly was twenty-four, which he already knew, and she’d been born in Baton Rouge. Nicholas Adrian Craig had been born in New Orleans a little over three months ago.

That detail had meant nothing to him at first. Nothing until he started to think about how long ago it had been that he’d first met Holly when she’d come to New York. It was a year ago, he remembered that, because he remembered quite well when he’d had to scrap all the photos from the false shoot and start over. The numbers were imprinted on his brain.

Even then, he’d had a moment’s pause while he’d pictured pretty, virginal Holly rushing home to Louisiana and falling into bed with another man. He didn’t like the way that thought had made him feel.

But then, as he’d pondered it, as he’d watched her sleep and let his gaze slide over to the sleeping baby in his car seat—the baby with a head of black hair and impossibly long eyelashes—another thought had taken hold.

And when it did, Drago felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. He’d struggled to breathe for the longest moment.

There was no way. No way this child could be his. Black hair and long lashes meant nothing. He’d used protection. He always used protection.

But there’d been that one time when the condom had torn as he was removing it, and he started to wonder if it had perhaps torn earlier.

And as that thought spiraled and twisted in his brain, doubt ignited in his soul. If it were true, how could she do such a thing? How could anyone do such a thing?

But he did not know that she had, he reminded himself. He did not know.

“Whose child is he, Holly?” Drago demanded, his voice as icy cold and detached as he could make it. Because, if he did not, it would boil over with rage and hurt.

She’d lied to him. And she’d used him, used the opportunity to get what she wanted from him. He thought of the contract she’d insisted on, the money he’d agreed to pay her, and his blood ran cold.

Her gaze dropped and a sob broke from her. She crammed her fist against her mouth and breathed deeply, quickly. And then, far quicker than he’d have thought possible, she faced him. Her cheeks and nose were red, and her eyes were rimmed with moisture.

“I tried to tell you,” she said, and his world cracked open as she admitted the truth. Pain rushed in, filling all the dark and lonely corners of his soul. The walls he’d put up, the giant barriers to hurt and feeling—they tumbled down like bricks made of glass. They shattered at his feet, sliced deep into his soul.

“What does that mean?” he snapped, still hoping she would tell him it was a mistake, that this child was not his and she hadn’t kept that fact hidden from him for the past three months. For nine long months before that.

But he already knew she wouldn’t. He knew the answer as certainly as he knew his own name. This child was a Di Navarra, and Drago had done exactly as his father had done—he’d fathered a child and abandoned it to a mother who thought nothing of living in squalor and leaving her baby with strangers.

He wanted to reach out and shake her, but he forced himself to remain still.

“It means,” she said, her voice soft and thready, “that I wrote you a letter. That I called. That you turned me away and refused all contact.”

He was still reeling from her admission.

“And I will wager you didn’t try hard enough,” he growled. “I never got a letter.”

It staggered him to think she’d spent all those months carrying his child, and he hadn’t even known it. He hadn’t specifically refused contact with her, but he had a long-standing policy of not accepting phone calls from people—especially women—not on his approved list of business associates. As for the letter, who knew if she’d even sent one?

“Well, I sent it. It’s not my fault if you didn’t get it.”

His vision was black with rage. “How convenient for you,” he ground out. “You say you sent a letter, but what proof do I have? You could be lying. And you could have done more, if you’d really wanted to.”

“Why would I lie about this? I was alone! I needed help! And not only that, but what else would you have had me do?” she snapped tearfully. “Fly to New York with my nonexistent credit cards and prostrate myself across the floor in front of your office? I tried to get in touch with you, but it was like trying to call the president of the United States. They don’t just let anyone in—and no one was letting me in to you!”

The moment she finished, her voice rising until it crackled with anger, the baby started to cry. Drago looked at the child—Nicky, Nicholas Adrian—and felt a rush of confusion like he hadn’t known since he was a boy, when his mother would come into his bedroom and tell him they were leaving whatever place he’d finally gotten settled into.

He didn’t like that feeling. If they were still in the apartment, he would have stalked out and gone for a run in the park. Anything to put some distance between him and this lying, treacherous woman. But he was stuck in this car and his head was beginning to pound.

Holly bent over and started trying to soothe the baby, ignoring him as she did so. She talked in a high voice, offered the child a pacifier and made shushing noises. A tear slipped down her cheek, and then another, and her voice grew more frantic.

“Holly.”

She looked up at him, her eyes so full of misery. He felt a rush of something akin to sympathy, but he shoved it down deep. Locked it in chains. How could he feel sympathy for her when she’d lied to him? When she’d used him?

He hated her. And he would not let her get away with keeping his child from him. Not any longer.

“Calm down,” he ordered tightly. “He senses your distress.”

“I know that,” she snapped. She turned back to the baby—his son—and began to unbuckle the straps holding him in the seat. Then she pulled him out and cradled him against her, rocking and shushing until his tears lessened. Finally, he took a pacifier and Holly seemed to wilt in relief.

“You’ve been in my house for nearly a week now,” Drago said, his voice so icy it made him cold. “And you’ve kept the truth from me. You had every chance to tell me, Holly. Every chance. Just like before.”

She didn’t look at him, and he wanted to shake her until she did. The violence whipping through his body frightened him, though he knew he would never give in to it.

But he’d never been this shocked, this betrayed, before. His mother had sold him in the end, sold him for money and freedom to do as she liked, and even the pain of that didn’t quite compare to this.

He had a child, a baby, and the only reason he knew it was because he could do math. If he hadn’t figured it out, would she have ever told him? Or would she have done the job, taken the money and disappeared with his child?

Until she’d spent it all and needed more....

Drago shook himself. “You have nothing to say to me?” he demanded. “You would sit there after what you’ve done and refuse to explain yourself?”

Her head came up then. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I thought you might throw me out again.”

He reeled. She was unbelievable. A user. A schemer. First it was perfume; now it was a child.

He despised her.

“I might still,” he growled. He wouldn’t be as tender as his uncle had been. He knew what could happen when you let a woman keep a child she couldn’t take care of properly, and he would never allow that to happen to his own son. He would use the might and money at his disposal to make sure she never saw this boy again.

Her eyes widened with fear. God help him, he relished it. He wanted her to wonder, wanted her to suffer as he was suffering.

“You would do that to your own son?” she asked, her voice wavering.

The violence in his soul whipped to a frenzy. “Not to him, Holly. To you.”

* * *

Fear was an icy finger sliding down her spine. It sank into her body, wrapped around her heart and squeezed the breath from her. Drago sat beside her, his handsome face far colder than she’d ever seen it before.

He hated her. She could see it clearly, and her heart hurt with the knowledge that any sort of closeness they might have been building was lost. Crushed beneath the weight of this new reality.

She was frozen in place, frightened with the knowledge that he could kick her out of his life and keep her son. That he would even try.

And then, like the sun’s rays sliding from behind the clouds to melt an ice-encrusted landscape, the first fingers of flame licked to life inside her belly. They were weak at first, vulnerable to being crushed out of existence.

But Nicky stretched and reached up to curl his fingers into the edge of her cardigan, and a wave of pure love flooded her with strength.

She met Drago’s cold stare with a determined look of her own. Her heart was a fragile thing in her chest, but she didn’t intend to let him know it. “You will not separate me from my son. Not ever.”

“You forget who has the power here, cara,” he said tightly.

“And you forget who Nicky’s legal parent is,” she threw back at him.

His jaw was a block of granite. “There are ways of remedying that,” he said, and her stomach dropped through the floor.

“No,” she choked out. “No. There’s nothing you can do to change it.”

She would fight him with every ounce of strength she had left in her body to prevent it. He would never take Nicky away. Never.

He was not the same man she’d spent the past few days with. This man was infinitely darker, more frightening. “Everyone has a price, Holly. Even you.”

She hugged her baby’s little body to her. “You’re wrong, Drago. I’m sorry if you had a bad childhood, and I’m sorry you think your mother traded you for money. But I love my son and I’m not giving him up. You don’t have enough money to even make me think about it, much less ever do it.”

His eyes glittered and she shivered. “We’ll see about that, cara.”

He didn’t say another word to her for the rest of the car trip. Instead, he got on the phone and started talking in rapid Italian. He made two or three calls before they reached the jet parked on the tarmac, and Holly’s nerves were scraped raw by that time.

She wondered who he was talking to, what he was saying and what he planned to do. Was he talking to his lawyers? To someone who would bar her from the plane while he took Nicky and jetted off for Europe?

She held her baby tighter. She would never let him take this child from her. She wouldn’t let anyone bar her from the plane and she would never accept money in exchange for Nicky.

There simply wasn’t enough money in the world to make it worth her while.

When they reached the jet, Drago told her to hand Nicky over to Sylvia, who stood at the bottom of the stairs, smiling warmly. Holly cradled her baby close and refused, her heart hammering in spite of Sylvia’s friendly greeting.

“You could fall on the steps,” he said sharply, and her stomach banged with fear.

“I won’t fall,” she said. And then she started up the steps, one arm around her son, the other holding the metal railing until she was at the top and walking onto the plane. Drago was right behind her, so close she could smell his scent over the lingering aroma of jet fuel and the new smell of the plane’s interior.

She could also smell the sharp scent of his anger, steely and cold. His body, however, was hot at her back, and she stepped away quickly, emerging into a spacious cabin.

The plane was much larger than the jet they’d flown on just a few days ago. This one was also incredibly luxurious. The interior gleamed with white leather, dark shiny wood finishes and chrome. There was a bar at one end, a couch with a television, and several other plush chairs.

“There are two bedrooms,” Drago informed her. “And several bathrooms.”

In the end, it turned out that one of the bathrooms was bigger than her entire bedroom had been in New Orleans. She knew Drago was wealthy—he was the head of a multinational corporation and heir to a cosmetics fortune—but she’d never quite realized the impact of all that money until this very moment, when she feared it was about to be arrayed against her. Yes, she’d signed a contract for half a million dollars, but she now realized how very tiny a drop in the ocean of wealth that was to a man like Drago di Navarra.

And it worried her. What if he did try to take Nicky away? She flinched as the door to the Jetway closed with a solid thump. Panic bloomed. She wanted off this plane. She wanted to take her baby—who she’d finally handed over to Sylvia now that they were firmly inside—and run down the stairs and into the terminal. Away from Drago. Away from the vessel that was about to take her across an ocean and put her somewhere she knew no one.

And had no power. Holly swallowed hard. She turned to go after Sylvia, to find her baby and at least be with him for the duration of the trip, since escape was now impossible.

But Drago was there, tall and commanding and so very distant as he gazed down at her, his handsome features set with disdain. An aching sadness unfolded itself within her as she thought back to last night and the Chinese food. She’d almost felt close to him then.

Almost.

“You will need to sit and buckle up,” Drago said. “We’ll be off the ground in a few minutes.”

“I want to be with Nicky.”

“Sylvia is taking care of him. That is what she is paid to do.”

Holly tossed her ponytail over her shoulder. She could not let him see that he intimidated her, no matter how much he did. “My idea of how to raise a child isn’t paying people to take care of him. Nicky needs me.”

His eyes narrowed and she had a sudden, visceral feeling that she’d crossed a line somewhere.

“He will have only the best from now on, Holly. Sylvia is the best.”

“And I am his mother,” she said, her heart stinging with pain. She’d given Nicky everything she had, but of course it wasn’t the best money could buy. She tilted her chin up. She had to be brave, assertive. “There’s more to taking care of a child than money. He needs love and attention, and I give him that.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Such as when you dropped him with your neighbor and went to work in a casino. I’m sure he had plenty of love and attention then.”

She felt as if he’d hit her. “I did the best I could,” she told him. “It wasn’t as if you were there to help. And you weren’t going to be there because I couldn’t get in touch with you. You made it very clear that I was never to do so.”

He shot up out of his seat and she took a step back instinctively. “To sell me perfume,” he thundered. “You were never to contact me about your damn perfume!”

Her breath razored in and out of her lungs. “And how was I supposed to make sure you knew the difference if you’d already ordered your secretary to deny my calls?” she yelled back. “Was I supposed to send you mental signals and hope that did the trick?” She picked up a pretend phone and held it to her ear. “Oh, look,” she mimicked, “it’s Holly Craig calling. But this time it’s important!”

His teeth ground together and anger clouded his features. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flight attendant moving carefully around them. That was when she realized they were making a spectacle.

She turned and flung herself down in a plush club chair and buckled her seat belt. Her cheeks sizzled with heat and her nerves snapped with tension. Her fingers trembled as she gripped the arms of the seat.

Drago dropped into a chair beside her, though there were plenty of other empty seats, and buckled himself in. Anger rolled off his body like fallout from a nuclear explosion.

“If you had wanted to tell me,” he snarled, “you would have found a way. Instead, you let me believe this baby belonged to another man. A married man who abandoned you and left you to starve in the cold. You lied to me, Holly. And you would have kept on lying if I hadn’t figured it out.”

“I didn’t say it was a married man. You assumed—”

“And you agreed!” he shot back. “What else was I to think, the way you acted?” His voice sliced into her. “You were worried about getting caught in your lies.”

She whipped around to face him. “Yes, I was worried, Drago! I was worried because you promised me a way out of my situation. And if you learned the truth, and reacted the way you had the last time, I’d be back at square one. Only, this time I had my son to think about. And no way in hell was I letting you hurt him.”

His eyes narrowed dangerously. She realized then, looking at him, that the roiling surface of his anger went far, far deeper than she’d ever thought. He was civilized—but barely.

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