One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets

He looked down into Oliver’s eyes. Exactly the same colour and shape as his own. His heart pounded uncontrollably.

‘How are you liking Sicily?’ he asked.

‘It’s much better than home ‘cos it’s warm. I hate the cold. My great-grandparents were Sicilian. My mum’s brought their ashes here to get them buried.’

Caesar nodded his head.

Another boy was coming towards them, swinging a racquet and accompanied by a man who Caesar guessed must be his father.

‘Hi, Oliver.’ The man smiled. ‘I see you’ve got your dad with you now.’

Caesar waited for Oliver to deny their relationship, but instead, almost instinctively, he moved closer to him, so that Caesar could put his hand on Oliver’s shoulder in much the same way the other man was doing with his son.

Oliver’s bones beneath his tee shirt felt thin and young, vulnerable and very precious. So this was how it felt to have a child … a son …

And that was how Louise saw them as she came to collect Oliver, her pace quickening along with the anxious, angry too-fast beat of her heart, until both were racing as she almost ran up behind Oliver, reaching out to wrench him out of Caesar’s hold.

They turned towards her at the same time, father and son, the truth stamped so indelibly on both sets of features that the shock of it sent her heart into a flurry of frightened hammer-blows. Even worse was seeing the way in which Oliver immediately moved closer to Caesar when she tried to part them.

Caesar still had one hand on Oliver’s shoulder, and now he lifted the other hand to cover hers where she’d grabbed Oliver’s arm. Immediately a sensation of physical danger sent a trail of fiery sparks burning through her veins. Her whole body was reacting so frantically and fearfully to Caesar’s touch that she was forced to ask herself if her panic was on Oliver’s account or on her own. The awareness that was pulsing through her right now wasn’t just maternal anxiety and she knew it. It was something else. Something very different. Different and totally unwanted. But not totally unfamiliar.

It was like lightning coming out of nowhere to tear apart the sky, its brilliance throwing piercingly sharp light into previously hidden places. Louise could feel the impact of the blow on her memory breaking apart the locks she had put on it. Wasn’t it the unpalatable truth that this was the way Caesar had made her feel all those years ago? The very thought made her shudder with horror and self-loathing. How could her body possibly find Caesar attractive either now? He had humiliated her, shamed her, treated her with contempt.

She tried to snatch her hand from beneath his but he refused to let her go, so that she was forced to stand there whilst the three of them completed a small intimate circle.

‘I was just on my way to look for you,’ Caesar told her. ‘We have a great deal to discuss.’

‘The only thing I want to discuss with you is the interment of my grandparents’ ashes,’ Louise told him fiercely.

‘You can come and watch me playing tennis tomorrow if you like,’ Oliver was saying to Caesar in an offhand manner that did nothing to conceal from Louise just how quickly and easily her son could become vulnerable to his father.

Frantically she wondered if it would be possible to change their flights so that they could leave as soon as possible. She could leave her grandparents’ ashes here with the priest, surely, and deal with the practical matters of their interment from the safety of London. Caesar couldn’t really want to be involved in Oliver’s life. Even though as yet he didn’t have legitimate children, it would only be a matter of time before he married and set out to produce the next Duca di Falconari.

Knowing that should have reassured her, but her heart-rate was refusing to slow down and her body was a mass of jangled nerve-endings. Even when she finally pulled her hand away from beneath Caesar’s her body was still tingling and, yes, aching with the sensations his touch had aroused inside it. Sensations of anger and … and loathing, Louise tried to reassure herself. Given what he had done, how could it be anything else?

‘If Oliver’s ready, it’s time for our junior photography class,’ the pretty young girl who was in charge of the children’s activities announced, coming over to them.

Both her statement and her smile were for Caesar, Louise noted grimly. She could also see that her son was reluctant to absent himself from the side of his new friend. He scowled at her when she pushed him gently in the girl’s direction, and then shook off the hand she had placed on his arm. She didn’t like the anger Oliver was showing towards her, but that didn’t mean she was willing to accept Caesar’s interference, Louise decided.

But immediately Caesar remonstrated with Oliver, telling him calmly, ‘That is not a good way to behave to your mother.’

Oliver looked both upset and mortified, reacting to Caesar’s rebuke and disapproval with far more concern that he ever did to hers.

‘You had no right to speak to Oliver like that,’ she told Caesar as soon as Oliver and the children’s activities girl were out of earshot. ‘He is my son.’

‘And mine,’ Caesar told her calmly. ‘I have received the DNA results and they show that quite clearly.’

Her heart did a double somersault, sending the blood pounding through her veins. Treacherously, shockingly, in a series of unwanted flashbacks, images of the intimacy they had shared to create Oliver played in front of her eyes. She could even feel the emotions she had felt then—the excitement, the longing, the need to be wanted that had been so intense it had driven her to delude herself that she was wanted, that she mattered.

Pain as cruelly stabbing and merciless as it had been then gripped her again. In many ways she might have been the cause of her own misfortune, but Caesar could have treated her more gently. But he was Oliver’s father, and there was enough of her grandparents’ Sicilian teaching and upbringing in her for her to be unable to deny that that mattered—much as she wished she could.

Even so … ‘There is no need for you to tell me the identity of my son’s father,’ she informed him grimly.

She was like a small soft-boned cat, spitting and hissing her anger as a defence measure, Caesar recognised inwardly. And, like that cat, would she also purr warmly with delight when she was stroked and pleasured?

The way in which his body reacted to that question was like a shockwave of tidal proportions, re-awakening emotions and needs he had thought long suppressed by his self-control.

‘We have a great deal to talk about, and I would suggest that the best and most private place for us to do that would be the castello.’

‘Oliver …’ Louise began but Caesar shook his head.

‘I have already spoken with the children’s activities manager. Oliver will be taken care of until you return.’

The castello. The scene of Oliver’s conception. Although it was hardly likely that on this occasion she would be visiting Caesar’s bedroom. Not that she wanted to do that, of course. Not after the price she had paid for being there before.

‘I don’t …’ she began, but somehow or other Caesar had taken possession of her arm and was guiding her towards the foyer of the hotel and then through it, to where a long black limousine complete with driver was waiting for them.

It was only a twenty-minute drive from the hotel to the castello. Caesar probably had a financial interest in the hotel, Louise reflected, since it must have been built on land that belonged to him.

As the car swept through the magnificent gardens to the front of the castello Louise tried not to be impressed, but that was almost impossible.

The Falconari family had been on the island for many, many generations. They had married well and accumulated great wealth and it showed. The emblem from their crest, the falcon itself, was emblazoned above the main entrance to the castello and incorporated everywhere in the intricate carvings ornamenting the building. The family’s stamp on their property. Just as Oliver’s looks were his father’s stamp upon him.

Louise gave a small shiver. There had been something about the way Caesar had held Oliver earlier, about the way her son had looked up at him, that had hurt her inside—in that place her own childhood had left raw and unhealed. Instinctively, but without wanting to admit it, Louise knew that no child of Caesar’s would be denied proper paternal concern. That was the Sicilian way, and the Duca di Falconari Caesar was not just honour-bound but had been raised from birth to respect and follow that code. And what did that mean?

Louise did not want to think about what it meant. Oliver was hers. She had borne him and brought him up alone, and she was fiercely protective of him. She had given herself to his father with all the innocence of her longing to be wanted and valued. Now, in a different way, she had seen in their son’s eyes his readiness to turn to his father. She was not going to allow Caesar to hurt and reject their son the way he had done her.

The car came to a halt alongside an imposing flight of marble steps.

No one could fault Caesar’s manners, Louise acknowledged as he came round to open the car door for her before escorting her up the steps. But it took more than the outer vestments of showy good manners to make a man a worthwhile human being—the kind of human being who was going to be a good father. Her heart jumped inside her chest wall. Why was she thinking that? Caesar was not going to be Oliver’s father. And yet Louise knew that it was going to be hard for her to forget the way Oliver had turned to Caesar and not her just before they had left him, moving closer to Caesar and looking almost pleadingly at him.

The main hallway of the castello was formidably impressive. Niches in the walls contained pieces of statuary, an airy flight of stairs curled upwards, and the smell from the floral display on an antique table in the middle of the marble-floored room filled its still silence.

‘This way,’ Caesar told her, indicating a double doorway that opened off the hallway into what Louise remembered from her original visit to the castello to be a series of rooms that opened one into the other, each of them decorated and furnished in style, with contents that Louise suspected must be worth several kings’ ransoms.

Leading the way through one of them, Caesar pushed open another set of doors onto a covered walkway beyond which lay an enclosed courtyard garden, with a fountain playing and doves cooing from a small dovecote.

‘This was my mother’s garden,’ he told Louise as he gestured to her to sit down on one of the chairs drawn up at a pretty wrought-iron table.

‘She died when you were very young I remember my grandmother saying,’ Louise felt obliged to offer.

‘Yes. I was six. My parents died together in a sailing accident.’

Out of nowhere, without his seeming to do anything to summon her, a maid silently appeared.

‘What would you like? English tea, perhaps?’

‘Coffee—espresso,’ Louise told him, thinking inwardly that she needed the boost an espresso would give her to stand up to Caesar. ‘My grandparents taught me to drink it a long time before I developed any taste for English tea. They used to say that it was a taste of home, even though the smell could never be the smell of home.’ She wasn’t going to admit to him that right now she needed its strengthening qualities.

The maid had gone and come back again with their coffee, only to leave them alone again, before Caesar demanded, ‘Why did you not contact me to tell me that you were carrying my child?’

‘Do you really need to ask me that? You wouldn’t have believed me. Not after the hatchet job the headman had done on my reputation and my morals. No one else did—not even my grandparents at first. It was only when Oliver was growing up that my grandfather asked me if he could be yours. He recognised that Oliver looked like you.’

‘But you knew right from the start?’

‘Yes.’

‘How? How could you know?’

A tiny wire of pain drilled through her, but her pride refused to allow her to dwell on it, commanding her instead to suppress it.

‘That’s none of your business. Just as Oliver himself is none of your business.’

‘He’s my son, and in my book that makes him very much my business—as I have already told you.’

‘And I have already told you that I am not going to allow you to force my child to grow up as your illegitimate son—even though here in Sicily that is perfectly acceptable for a powerful man like you. I will not have my son forced to grow up as someone who is second best—an outsider to your life, forced onto the sidelines to look on and witness your legitimate and more favoured children …’ Abruptly Louise stopped speaking, knowing that she was allowing her emotions to betray her, and took a deep breath before continuing more calmly. ‘I’ve experienced first-hand the damage that can be caused to a child by its longing for a parent who cannot or will not engage emotionally. I will not allow that to happen to Oliver. Your legitimate children—’

‘Oliver is and will be my only child.’

The quiet words seemed to reverberate around the courtyard before giving way to a shocking silence that Louise was initially unable to find the words to break.

His only child?

‘You can’t say that. He might be your only child now, but—’

‘There will be no other children. That is why it is my intention to recognise and legitimise Oliver as my son and my heir. Oliver will be my only child. There can be no others.’

Louise looked at him, wishing that he wasn’t sitting in the shadows and she could see his expression better. His voice was giving him away, though, telling her quite clearly how hard he had found it to make such an admission. It wasn’t just his pride that would have made it hard either. Any man would feel a blow to his maleness at making such an admission.

And was she weakening towards him because of that? Did she feel sympathy for him? How could she? She could because she was human and she knew what it was to suffer, Louise told herself. That was all. She would have experienced that same sharp pang of disbelief followed by sympathy for anyone making such an admission in a way that told her how hard it was for them to do so. It did not mean … It did not mean what? That Caesar still meant something to her?

His admission, she realised, had her own heart slamming into her ribs and her lungs tightening with disbelief.

‘You can’t know that,’ she protested.

‘I can and do know it.’ Caesar paused, and then told her in carefully spaced, unemotional words, ‘Six years ago, when I was involved in an aid project abroad that my charitable foundation was helping to finance, I was on site when there was an outbreak of mumps. Unfortunately until it was too late I didn’t realise that I’d fallen victim to it. The medical results were incontrovertible. The mumps had rendered it impossible for me to father a child. As there is no other male of our blood to inherit the title that meant I had to reconcile myself to the fact that our line would die out with me.’

There was nothing in his voice to betray what that must have meant to him other than a slight terseness, but Louise didn’t need to hear it to understand the emotions he must have felt. Knowing his history, knowing the Sicilian way of life, knowing his arrogance, she could easily imagine what a searing, shocking blow such news must have been to him.

‘You could adopt,’ she pointed out logically.

‘And have countless generations of those with Falconari blood turning in their graves? I think not. Historically Falconari men are more used to fathering children on other men’s wives than accepting another man’s child as their own.’

‘Droit du seigneur, I suppose you mean?’ Louise challenged him cynically.

‘Not necessarily. My ancestors did not have a reputation for needing to force women into their beds. Far from it.’

There it was again, that arrogance and disdain, and yet against her will Louise was forced to acknowledge that it would be unbearably painful for a man with Caesar’s family history to accept that he could not father a child—especially a male child.

As though he had read her mind he told her, ‘Can you imagine how it felt for me to have to accept that I would be the first Falconari in a thousand years not to produce a son and heir? And, if you can imagine that, then I ask you to imagine how I felt when your grandfather’s letter arrived.’

‘You didn’t want to believe him?’

He gave her a look that enabled her to see the bleakness in his gaze.

‘On the contrary. I wanted to believe him very much indeed.’

So much so that the reins to his self-control had slipped from his grasp, and if Louise hadn’t come out to Sicily herself Caesar knew he would have gone to seek her out, even though he had warned himself that doing so could expose him to ridicule and rejection.

‘I just didn’t dare allow myself to believe him, in case he was wrong, but the DNA tests are completely conclusive—even if Oliver had not so physically obviously been a Falconari.’

‘My grandparents always said that he looked very like your father as a boy,’ Louise admitted reluctantly. ‘They remembered him from when they lived in the village.’

‘Now no doubt you will understand why I wish Oliver to grow up as my acknowledged son and heir, and I hope that has put your mind at rest with regard to the supremacy of his position in my life as my acknowledged son. Oliver will never need to fear that he will be supplanted by another child. And as I know what it is to grow up without parents you may also be sure that the fathering he receives from me will be true fathering. He will grow up here at the castello and—’

‘Here?’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Oliver’s place is with me.’

‘Are you sure that is what Oliver himself wants?’

She had been right to be wary of him.

‘Of course I am. I am his mother.’

‘And I am his father—as the DNA test confirms. I have a father’s rights to my child.’

Caesar could feel her rising panic in the air surrounding her. She was like a lioness fighting to protect her cub, he acknowledged with reluctant admiration. She might be having problems with Oliver now, as he grew towards manhood and needed a man’s guiding hand, but Caesar knew from the enquiries he had been making about both Louise and Oliver that she was a very good mother. To have grown from the girl he remembered to the woman she was now must have demanded great strength of character and determination. A child sometimes needed a mother who understood what it meant to be vulnerable. Right now, though, he needed to banish any thought of sympathy he might have towards her. Oliver was his son, and he was determined that he would grow up here on Sicily.

‘I won’t have him spending part of his time here and part in London. It wouldn’t be fair on him. He’d be torn between the two of us and two separate lives,’ Louise announced.

Silence.

She tried again.

‘I will not have Oliver sacrificed to some … some ancient role you want him to play. He’s a boy. He knows nothing of dukedoms and the history of the Falconaris.’

‘Then it’s time for him to begin to learn.’

‘It’s too much of a burden to put on him. I don’t want him growing up like you.’

The gauntlet had been thrown down now, and it lay between them in the swirling silence.

Why wasn’t Caesar objecting to her comment? Why wasn’t he saying something? Why was she feeling so panicked and anxious? Why did she feel that somehow she had walked into a carefully baited trap and that the walls of the courtyard garden were actually closing in on her?

‘Then you will no doubt agree that the best way for you to ensure that Oliver grows up with equal input from both his parents, and that he knows your views, is for you to be here with him.’

The statement was delivered smoothly, but that smoothness couldn’t conceal the formidable determination Louise could sense emanating from Caesar.

‘That’s impossible. I have a career in London.’

‘You also have a son who, according to your own grandfather, needs his father. I would have thought that he is more important to you than your career.’

‘You’re a fine one to say that when the only reason you want him is because he is your heir.’

Caesar shook his head.

‘Initially when your grandfather wrote to me, yes, that might have been true, but from the minute I saw him, even before I had the results of the DNA test, unbelievable as it may sound to you, I loved him. Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t.’ He had to turn away from her a little because he felt so vulnerable, but he knew that he had to be honest with her if he wanted his plan to succeed. ‘All I can tell you is that in that moment I felt such love, such a need to protect and guide him, that it was all I could do to stop myself from gathering him up to me there and then.’

His words evoked some of what she had felt after giving birth to Ollie, after looking at the child she hadn’t wanted, a boy so like his father—she had known immediately the surge of fiercely protective love that Caesar had just described.

‘Of course Oliver is more important to me than my work,’ she answered truthfully.

‘There is no greater gift a parent can give a child than the security of growing up in a family unit that includes both parents,’ Caesar told her, without commenting on her response. ‘For Oliver’s sake it seems to me that the very best thing we can do for our son is to provide him with the stability that comes from knowing that his parents are united, and here on Sicily, in my position, that means married.’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘MARRIED!’

Just speaking the word left her throat feeling as raw as her shocked emotions were beginning to feel.

‘It’s the best solution—not just to the situation with Oliver but also to the situation with your grandparents and the effect the past has had on their family reputation.’

‘The shame I brought on them, you mean?’ Louise demanded angrily, as she tried to focus on what Caesar was saying and fight down the panic that was threatening to seize her. How could she marry Caesar? She couldn’t. It was impossible, unthinkable.

But not, apparently, as far as Caesar was concerned, because he was continuing, ‘At the moment the village remembers you as a young woman who shamed her family with her behaviour. That shame is, according to our traditions, carried not just by you but also by your family—and that means your grandparents and Oliver. If I were simply to legitimise Oliver and make him my heir that would remove the shame from him, but it would not remove it from you or from your grandparents, and that in turn would be bound to affect Oliver. There would always be those who would seek to remind him of your shame, and in the future that could impact on his ability to be a strong duca to his people. If, on the other hand, I marry you and thus legitimise our relationship that would immediately wipe out all shame.’

So many different emotions were struggling for supremacy within her that Louise simply could not voice any of them. More than anything else she longed to be in a position to throw Caesar’s arrogant and unwanted offer back at him—just as she longed to tell him that in her opinion the people who ought to be ashamed were him, for publicly shaming her, and those who had welcomed that shaming for the opportunity it had given them to judge a naive eighteen-year-old. However she knew there was little point—not when even her own grandparents had subscribed to the values of their community and stoically borne the stigma of that shame without complaint.

‘As my wife you would be raised above the past. So would your grandparents, and so, of course, would Oliver,’ Caesar continued.

He could imagine the thoughts that would be going through her head—the battle between her love for her son and her own personal pride. Caesar frowned. It kept catching him off guard that he should feel so attuned to her, but he couldn’t deny that he did. Was it because she had borne his son, or because of Louise herself? He could feel the grim ache of an old self-inflicted wound and its shameful scar. He might not be prepared to admit it to her—after all he could barely admit it to himself—but despite that he knew he would never escape from the burden of his own responsibility for the humiliation she and her family had suffered.