The Italian's Baby of Passion: The Italian's Secret Baby / One-Night Baby / The Italian's Secret Child

‘There’s nothing wrong with womanly curves.’

‘That’s what my Bob says.’

Scarlet, who couldn’t believe that any woman could fall for such a corny line, stared at her friend—her old-enough-to-know-better friend—who was visibly preening.

Roman, head tilted to one side, considered the older woman, a smile playing about his fascinating mouth. ‘Is that a Donegal accent I’m hearing?’

Angie laughed. ‘Not many people here can tell the difference.’

Without any apparent effort, he slipped into a wildly attractive soft brogue. ‘I’m a Kerry man myself, on my da’s side anyhow.’

‘I have to tell you, Mr O’Hagan,’ Angie gushed, ‘those photos in Scarlet’s magazine didn’t do you justice.’ She turned to her friend for support. ‘Did they, Scarlet?’

‘Angie, I think it might be an idea if you got back to the story.’ Scarlet gave a significant nod towards the children. They were growing restive.

God bless restive children.

To her immense relief the distraction worked.

‘Timothy Jones, don’t pull Bethany’s hair!’ Angie exclaimed, wading in to calmly separate two small figures.

‘She pulled mine.’

‘Angie, if I could just see Sam for a minute.’

‘Sure thing, you go with your mum, Sam. Now, children, say goodbye to Mr O’Hagan and thank him for this lovely present. My, isn’t he just gorgeous?’ she exclaimed.

Scarlet was pretty certain she wasn’t talking about the stuffed toy; she certainly wasn’t looking at it.

Roman had a choice; he could tell the eager faces that the toy wasn’t for them or he could hand it over. He handed it over.

Scarlet hid a smile as she tucked Sam’s hand in her own.

‘Don’t worry, Sam knows about sharing, don’t you, sweetheart?’

Sam, who was looking with saucer-like eyes up at the tall man standing beside his mother, didn’t reply.

‘However, he doesn’t always like it,’ she admitted drily. ‘Say hello to Mr O’Hagan, Sam. He’s not normally so tongue-tied,’ she added, bending down to speak in her son’s ear. ‘Say hello to Mr O’Hagan, darling.’

‘Hello,’ Sam grunted, looking at his toes.

Scarlet gave an affectionate sigh and ruffled his dark hair before standing up.

‘Hello there, Sam.’

Scarlet happened to be looking at Roman O’Hagan at the moment Sam lifted his head—so nothing unusual there—but what she saw was unusual. Unusual and inexplicable. At least as far as she could see there was no immediately obvious reason why the colour would seep out of Roman’s face until his vibrant golden skin looked like marble. He stilled, the nerve that throbbed in the hollow of his lean cheek about the only movement in his body. There was no evidence that he was breathing until a deep, soundless sigh shuddered through his body, lifting his ribcage.

As she watched he dropped casually down on his haunches. ‘Hello, Sam. I’m Roman.’

He sounded so normal and his whole body language was so relaxed that Scarlet wondered if she had imagined what had gone before.

‘Do you like teddy bears, Sam?’ Roman ran his hand over the little boy’s dark head.

‘They’re all right, but I’m a big boy—I prefer footballs.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ Roman promised.

‘I’m going to be a footballer when I grow up.’

Roman made the appropriate impressed noises.

‘Are you Mummy’s friend?’ she was deeply embarrassed to hear Sam ask.

Roman lifted his head; his eyes, which considering his manner with the child had been so relaxed and friendly, were bewilderingly cold. The hostility emanating from his lean body was equally pointed.

He turned back to the boy.

‘I’m going to be, Sam, so we’ll be seeing each other a lot,’ he promised with a smile before he straightened up.

Scarlet held in her indignation until they got out to the corridor.

‘Why on earth did you say that to Sam?’ she demanded, turning on him angrily. ‘He may only be three, but he remembers things.’

‘Good. He won’t be surprised the next time he sees me.’

‘He won’t be seeing you and neither will I. To be blunt, Mr O’Hagan, I don’t actually like you very much.’

‘Actually, Miss Smith, I’m not wild about you either…but I think you’ll find you’ll be seeing a lot more of me.’

Scarlet stared after him with a baffled expression as he retreated. To say his behaviour was bizarre would have been an understatement.

Still, one thing was certain: if she had anything to do with it neither she nor Sam would be seeing him again, despite his odd claim to the contrary!

CHAPTER SEVEN

SAM was spending Friday night at his best friend Thomas’s house. This was the second time he had had a sleep-over. The first time Scarlet had spent the entire night worrying and hanging around the phone just in case an emergency had arisen that necessitated her rushing out of the house.

She had even mentally worked out the quickest routes to the two local hospitals, working on the assumption you couldn’t be too prepared and it was always better to assume the worst.

The telephone hadn’t rung and, far from crying for her, Sam had had a great time. The reciprocal sleep-over had gone equally well.

This time Scarlet was determined not to go weird again; she was not going to let the over-anxious mum thing turn her into a basket case. Instead she was going to look on this as an opportunity to enjoy a few self-indulgent hours alone. She would relax if it killed her! she determined grimly.

Her plans included a long, luxurious soak in a hot bath of decadent bubbles and using the moisturising face mask that guaranteed to bring the youthful bloom back to tired skin. After that there were a box of chocolates and a feelgood video with her name on them.

The opening credits of It’s a Wonderful Life had just finished when the doorbell rang. She had forgotten that plans were an invitation for things to go wrong, especially when that plan was an evening of unadulterated indulgence.

‘Damn!’ she swore as she paused the film, hitched up the legs of her slightly too long pyjama bottoms and slid her feet into her slippers. ‘Hold your horses,’ she muttered crossly under her breath as she trudged to the door.

If Sam had been home she would have been a lot crankier; the chance of him sleeping through the racket their caller was making was just about nil. The doorbell was so insistent that she almost missed the sound of the phone ringing as she passed by.

Scarlet dived for it.

Her heart thudding with trepidation, she lifted it to her ear. I knew the sleep-over was a daft idea. Three is much too young to be encouraging independence in a child…a child of three should be home with his mother.

By the time she had politely heard out the person on the line selling double glazing, her heart rate had almost returned to normal and the person ringing the doorbell had begun to hammer on the door with their fist.

It was a very angry sound.

Though not always as security conscious as she might be Scarlet had no problem remembering in this instance to leave the safety chain on as she opened the door a crack. Of all the people she had imagined to discover standing there, Roman O’Hagan had not even featured on the list.

Her exclamation of, ‘Gracious!’ hardly covered her feelings as she peered up at the tall, commanding figure standing in the hallway.

She swallowed convulsively as her pulse rate shot off the scale. The fluttering sensation low in her belly combined with the difficulty she had breathing made it hard for her to do anything but gape. He was worth gaping at. Gosh, but he looked good, and my, she thought, attempting to nudge her appreciation towards the safer direction of scorn, didn’t he know it?

He removed the designer shades he wore and tucked them into the breast pocket of his jacket. The dark, wintry eyes that surveyed her coldly were even less reassuring than the mirrored lenses had been!

It had been ten days since she’d last seen him…I was counting? He could not have altered since then, but the hard angles on his face did seem more defined this evening, as though he might have lost weight. But his greyhound-lean frame had not carried any excess flesh the last time. Perhaps it was the black leather jacket and tailored dark trousers that hugged the muscular contours of his long thighs that made him look longer and leaner and just generally harder.

If he’d been auditioning for the part of a dangerous but fatally attractive gangster he’d have got the job on the spot! The sprinkling of designer stubble across his jaw and hollow cheeks only intensified the aura of menace that hung around his sinfully gorgeous person.

The discovery that it was hard to maintain your anger with someone who was blinking innocently up at you did not improve Roman’s mood. His jaw clenched because he knew that under baggy pyjamas and the glowing, baby smooth contours of her make-up-free face there lurked a woman who was living a lie.

Even if she didn’t know he was the boy’s father, she sure as hell knew she wasn’t the mother! Besides, what was it his mother had said?

‘Ignorance is no defence’ Scarlet Smith—if that was her name?—was about to find out it was no defence in his eyes either.

His son was growing up without a father—that wasn’t something that had happened by accident. Oh, yes, there were a lot of questions he wanted answered.

Scarlet Smith was going to do the answering.

For all he knew, everything about her was a lie. The curly knot scrunched casually on the top of her head, which made her look simultaneously vulnerable and sexy, was probably contrived to do just that.

‘What the hell kept you?’ he growled. ‘Open the door.’

‘I was on the phone.’ Scarlet’s beleaguered brain having finally accepted the fact that it was actually Roman standing out in the hallway and not some hallucination, she began to move on to other stuff, such as what was he doing here? ‘What are you…how…?’ She stopped, the blood draining from her face as a possible explanation presented itself to her.

‘The Bradleys sent you.’ Her worst fears were realised when he didn’t deny it.

The Bradleys were exactly the sort of people he would know.

Tom was something important in films and Nancy, who wore floaty clothes and cooked like an angel, wrote a foodie newspaper column in a national newspaper; in short the sort of female that left Scarlet feeling sadly inadequate. They lived in a fantastic house, employed an au pair and a gardener, and most likely had dinner guests like Roman.

Her imagination went into overdrive. Oh, my God, it was so bad they hadn’t been able to break the news over the phone.

‘What’s happened to Sam? You can tell me,’ she added, an icy calm settling over her as she prepared herself to hear the worst.

Roman’s dark eyes scanned her distressed features; the only trace of colour in her face was supplied by her jewel-bright eyes. He appeared about to say something and then changed his mind.

‘Just tell me,’ she begged. Imagining was so bad, could the reality be worse?

‘Let me in.’

‘Of course, of course,’ she cried, fumbling with the door chain, her hands trembling. ‘Have they taken him to the hospital?’ She pushed her fingers into her hair, dislodging one of her hair grips; a section of hair slithered free, falling across her cheek as she flung the door wide and stepped aside for him to enter.

Think, Scarlet, think…‘Now let me think…’ she said out loud as she tried to organise her thoughts and keep panic at arm’s length. ‘Yes, get dressed.’ She flashed him a whitefaced but encouraging smile. ‘It won’t take me a minute to get dressed,’ she promised, turning to suit her words to action.

Roman closed the front door. ‘I don’t know who the Bradleys are.’

Halfway to the bedroom door, Scarlet stopped. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know the Bradleys and, as far as I am aware, Sam is not in hospital.’

Her marble-pale brow creased. ‘But you said…’

‘No, actually, I didn’t, you said.’

She started shaking in reaction as a massive wave of relief hit her. Impetuously she wrapped her arms around him and hugged hard. ‘Thank God!’ she breathed fervently.

Roman looked at the heart-shaped face complete with misty eyes and trusting sunny smile tilted up to him and felt his focus slipping. He’d come here to uncover some truths, not fantasise about a sexy mouth and what he’d like to do with it.

It wasn’t until she encountered his broodingly black and icy cold mesmeric eyes that Scarlet recalled with a rush of scalding embarrassment that she wasn’t dealing with someone into spontaneous hugs. Feeling a total idiot, she unpeeled herself from him and stepped away with a self-conscious grimace and a murmur of, ‘Sorry.’

She tucked her hands behind her back and resisted the self-indulgent impulse to smooth down the non-existent creases in his jacket, recognizing that the impulse to touch his lithe body no longer had anything to do with spontaneity and a hell of a lot to do with sexual curiosity. It was deeply mortifying to have to acknowledge she had enjoyed the contact with a very well-developed male physique.

She felt she had to offer some sort of explanation for her strange behaviour.

‘I know he’s perfectly safe with the Bradleys, but when I saw you I thought the worst…’ She released a small self-derisive chuckle. ‘But I expect you’ve already gathered that much.’

Her brow wrinkled as an inconsistency she had been too panic stricken to notice earlier struck her.

‘Why didn’t you say straight off that you didn’t know the Bradleys?’

It wasn’t as if he could have missed the fact she had been two steps away from hysteria.

‘I wanted to talk to you and I wasn’t sure you’d let me in.’

Scarlet stared at him. Staggeringly there was no hint of apology in his manner. His behaviour was so extraordinary that it took her a while to get her head around what he had done. ‘You wanted to come in,’ she repeated in a dangerously flat tone as her temper fizzed dramatically into life. ‘You wanted to come in.’

Only someone totally callous could act with such calculated cruelty.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Oh, that makes it all right, then!’ she said contemptuously.

His classically pure jawline tautened as a dark line appeared across his cheekbones. ‘Will you calm yourself, woman?’

‘I’m not a woman…well, not your woman, anyhow, and for that,’ she added with incoherent fervour, ‘I shall be eternally grateful. Nothing makes it all right for you to scare me half to death that way. It was a totally despicable thing to do!’

And it also proved her first impressions had been right; he was a man who didn’t care about anything but getting what he wanted! If other people got hurt in the process, so what? It didn’t matter to Roman.

‘You disgust me!’ Her voice rose a quivering octave. ‘Get out, get out of my home right now!’

‘I think you’re overreacting just a little here.’

Her eyes flashed pure green fire as she glared up at him. ‘Overreacting? I thought that Sam was—’ She broke off, her voice suspended by tears as the nightmare images crowded into her head. ‘Maybe I am overreacting,’ she conceded huskily. ‘But this is only the second time Sam has spent a night away from home and…’ She shook her head. ‘If you had a child maybe you’d understand.’

His nostrils flared and something she couldn’t identify flashed in his eyes. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

From his expression she couldn’t imagine he wanted to say anything nice.

‘I realise that I should be thanking my lucky stars, but strangely I’m not.’ She strode to the door and pulled it open. ‘I don’t want to talk to you, Mr O’Hagan, and you were right, I wouldn’t have let you in.’

Why would she? To allow someone who was broadcasting dangerous and volatile into your home was asking for trouble. Every inch of his powerful frame suggested he was struggling to contain his anger and with limited success.

‘If this has something to do with the university you should be speaking to David.’

His dark brows arched. ‘University?’ he repeated, his lip curling. ‘You’re a nursery nurse. Why would I come here if I wanted to discuss anything involving the university.’

‘Frankly, I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But it makes about as much sense as anything else I could come up with to explain you being here.’

And it was a lot more feasible than the inspired, but seriously misguided notion that Scarlet was embarrassed to admit she had entertained for a brief mad moment when she had seen him standing there. The one that relied on him having spent the last ten days wrestling with an overpowering attraction for her he could no longer resist.

So it wasn’t exactly plausible, but it was a well-known fact that some men liked glasses and flat chests, and if you were going to fantasise you might as well do it properly.

He walked towards her and for a moment Scarlet thought he was going to carry on past her and through the door, but her optimism proved premature. Instead of walking through the door he casually wrenched it from her grasp. It closed with a very decisive click.

‘I’m sorry if I alarmed you.’ He watched her rub her shoulder and the indentation between his brows deepened. ‘Did I hurt you?’

She looked from the closed door to the man—he was alarming her some more and also, much more disturbingly, he was exciting her. ‘And that would bother you?’ She delivered a brittle laugh. ‘Credit me with a little intelligence.’ Even if I’ve shown precious little of it to date. ‘You obviously get a kick out of bullying women. And you’re not sorry, so don’t say you are,’ she hissed furiously.

His eyes narrowed on her belligerent face. ‘You make it extremely difficult for a man to be sorry,’ he ground out grimly.

‘Yes, I know you don’t like me, which makes it even more difficult to imagine why you’d want to talk to me or what you’d want to say, and quite frankly I don’t want to know!’ she lied grandly as she opened the door again. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, it’s late and I’m busy.’

His even teeth flashed white in his dark face as a smile that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour formed on his sensual lips. ‘You won’t sleep tonight…’

Scarlet froze, her body stiffening as if in anticipation of a blow.

‘Curiosity killed the cat and you’re going to be wondering what I did it for,’ he warned. ‘Admit it, you will.’

Scarlet exhaled. She was light-headed with relief and willing to admit almost anything. For a split second she had jumped to the totally irrational conclusion that he possessed some insider knowledge of the dreams that had given her several nights of broken sleep recently.

Dark, erotic dreams.

Angie is always telling me I need to get out more—she’s right!

Was it possible that at some subconscious level she was as frustrated as her friend claimed? That could account for the dreams and the fact she hadn’t been able to get him out of her head.

‘I’ve told you, I’m busy,’ she repeated dismissively.

‘Well, you can tell him to clear off.’ His fine nostrils quivered in distaste. ‘I will not be dismissed.’

He might not know much about bringing up a child, but even he knew that a single mother with a series of boyfriends hardly provided the sort of stable background a child needed—his child needed.

She blinked, and tore her eyes from the nerve clenching spasmodically in the hollow of his lean cheek. This conversation was like walking in halfway through a film after the vital scene when the hero’s motivations had been explained.

Roman would be the hero, of course; he had hero written all over him. She, on the other hand, would be one of the character actors, which would suit her—nobody remembered your name and you were always in work.

Fame was not something she craved.

Roman O’Hagan’s touch, however, was; you had to face your weaknesses if you were going to overcome them.

‘Him who?’ she enquired, still without the faintest idea what he was getting at.

He swallowed, the action causing the muscles in his brown throat to visibly ripple, and gave her a look of simmering hostility.

Scarlet heard a door in the hallway outside open and heard the distant murmur of voices.

‘Whoever you are so busy with,’ he elaborated, totally ignoring the warning hand she raised to her lips.

Scarlet, who didn’t want the world to know her business, closed the door. ‘Whoever?’

He shot her an impatient look and strode purposefully towards the bedroom door. Before Scarlet had any clue of his intention or could cry out in protest he yanked it open with such force it thudded loudly against the wall.

‘You can’t go in there!’

Ignoring her outraged yell, he stepped inside her bedroom. Breathless with anger, she brushed past him. ‘What the—?’ she began, planting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.

Roman O’Hagan is in my bedroom…talk about a reality-fantasy clash!

When Roman discovered no lover on the bed, but a neat pile of freshly laundered clothes on the bottom of a narrow single bed waiting to be put away, his sneering expression relaxed into bafflement.

‘Where is he?’

The fantasy version had not involved him growling at her contemptuously. She pulled back in alarm as her thoughts shifted in the dangerous direction of what he had done. It wasn’t soon enough to prevent a wave of warm, sexual lethargy working its way through her body.

‘Where’s who…?’ She gave her head a little shake to focus her thoughts.

‘The innocent act is quite unnecessary,’ he assured her in a cold, clipped voice. ‘It’s nothing to me who you choose to sleep with.’ Even as he said it it struck Roman rather forcibly that his behaviour suggested the exact opposite.

A disinterested observer who didn’t know any better might actually have concluded he was the wronged lover. Making a conscious effort, he forced his hands to unclench.

Belatedly Scarlet caught his meaning; her eyes widened. ‘You thought…’ The low laugh began softly and increased to a full-blooded husky chuckle as the humour of the situation struck her.

She didn’t know which was funnier: Roman O’Hagan, the man who had probably slept with more women than she had had hot dinners, having the nerve to get all sniffy because she was entertaining a man, or the idea that she was indulging in an evening of lust!

In these pyjamas too. She looked down at her casual but not sexy attire and released another low gurgle of mirth.

Roman inhaled, his nostrils flaring. ‘You think this is funny?’

Scarlet stared at him incredulously. ‘Not funny—hilarious—!’ she corrected, cracking up again.

Bringing up Sam and holding down a full-time job did not exactly leave her with much time or energy for romantic adventures. Dating when you were a single mum was not a simple business and Scarlet had decided it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

As her laughter faded away she weighed the odds; he didn’t seem drunk, but in view of a dearth of any other possible explanation for his presence, or his bizarre behaviour, she voiced her suspicions out loud.

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘I have not been drinking.’ The denial was issued between clenched teeth.

‘Do you mind? Entry to my bedroom is on an invitation-only basis.’ She tossed her head and centred her scornful gaze on his devastatingly handsome dark face. ‘And you’re not invited.’

‘I’m devastated.’ The derisive look he gave her brought an angry glitter to Scarlet’s eyes.

‘You would be if you knew what you were missing!’ she heard herself jeer.

‘If that was an invitation, I’ll pass,’ he replied, continuing his suspicious visual examination of the room.

‘It wasn’t.’ If he was going to insult her, the least he could do was look at her while he did it.