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A Secret Disgrace
PENNY JORDAN











‘Louise.’


She could feel her heart thudding. This close to him she was so conscious of everything about him—especially all those things she didn’t want to be conscious of: his maleness and her own vulnerability to it, the scent of his skin, the ache deep down in her own body caused by his proximity.

She tried to push past him but he stopped her, taking hold of her, and then she was in his arms and he was kissing her—fiercely, determinedly, almost as though he was laying claim to her. And she was kissing him back. Such a hunger possessed her, such a need, such an aching, tearing, irresistible yearning that she couldn’t withstand its call. She wanted to hold him, to touch him, to own him as she had done all those years ago. A need it was impossible for her to control had come out of nowhere to crush all the opposition in its way.

Everything she’d believed she had learned was forgotten as the desire only he could arouse within her took control …




About the Author


PENNY JORDAN is one of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged 65. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. She wrote a total of 187 novels for Harlequin Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’, and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In May 2012 Penny launched the new continuity The Santina Crown with THE PRICE OF ROYAL DUTY. A SECRET DISGRACE is Penny’s final original novel.

Recent titles by the same author:

THE PRICE OF ROYAL DUTY

THE POWER OF VASILII (Russian Rivals) THE MOST COVETED PRIZE (Russian Rivals)

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk




A Secret

Disgrace

Penny Jordan







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CHAPTER ONE


‘YOU say it was your grandparents’ wish that their ashes be buried here, in the graveyard of the church of Santa Maria?’

The dispassionate male voice gave away as little as the shadowed face. Its bone structure was delineated with strokes of sunlight that might have come from Leonardo’s masterly hand, revealing as they did the exact nature of the man’s cultural inheritance. Those high cheekbones, that slashing line of taut jaw, the hint of olive-toned flesh, the proud aquiline shape of his nose—all of them spoke of the mixing of genes from the invaders who had seen Sicily and sought to possess it. His ancestors had never allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted. And now his attention was focused on her.

Instinctively she wanted to distance herself from him, to conceal herself from him, she recognized, and she couldn’t stop herself from stepping back from him, her ankle threatening to give way as the back of her pretty wedged shoe came up against the unseen edge of the gravestone behind her.

‘Take care.’

He moved so fast that she froze, like a rabbit pinned down by the swift, deathly descent of the falcon from which his family took its name. Long, lean tanned fingers closed round her wrist as he jerked her forward, the mint-scented warmth of his breath burning against her face as he leaned nearer to deliver an admonishment.

It was impossible for her to move. Impossible, too, for her to speak or even think. All she could do was feel—suffer beneath the lava-hot flow of emotions that had erupted inside her to spill into every sensitive nerve-ending she possessed. This was indeed torture. Torture … or torment? Her body convulsed on a violent surge of self-contempt. Torture. There was no torment in this man’s hold on her, no temptation. Nothing but self-loathing and … and indifference.

But her whispered, ‘Let go of me,’ sounded far more like the broken cry of a helpless victim than the cool, calm command of a modern and independent woman.

She smelled of English roses and lavender; she looked like an archetypical Englishwoman. She had even sounded like one until he had touched her, and she had shown him the fierce Sicilian passion and intensity that was her true heritage.

‘Let go of me!’ she had demanded.

Caesar’s mouth hardened against the images her words had set free from his memory. Images and memories so sharply painful that he automatically recoiled from them. So much pain, so much damage, so much guilt for him to bear.

So why do what he had to do now? Wasn’t that only going to increase her deserved animosity towards him, and increase his own guilt?

Because he had no choice. Because he had to think of the greater good. Because he had to think, as he had always had to think, of his people and his duty to his family line and his name.

The harsh reality was that there could be no true freedom for either of them. And that was his fault. In every way, all of this was his fault.

His heart had started to pound with heavy hammer-strokes. He hadn’t built in to his calculations the possibility that he would be so aware of her, so affected by the sensual allure of her. Like Sicily’s famous volcano, she was all fire, covered at its peak by ice, and he was far more vulnerable to that than he had expected to be.

Why? It wasn’t as though there weren’t plenty of beautiful, sensual women all too ready to share his bed—who had, in fact, shared his bed before he had been forced to recognise that the so-called pleasure of those encounters tasted of nothing other than an emptiness that left him aching for something more satisfying and meaningful. Only by then he’d had nothing he could offer the kind of woman with whom he might have been able to build such a relationship.

He had, in effect, become a man who could not love on his own terms. A man whose duty was to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. A man on whom the future of his people depended.

It was that duty that had been instilled into him from childhood. Even as an orphaned six-year-old, crying for his parents, he had been told how important it was that he remember his position and his duty. The people had even sent a deputation to talk to him—to remind him of what it meant to stand in his late father’s shoes. By outsiders the beliefs and customs of his people would be considered harsh, and even cruel. He was doing all he could to change things, but such changes could only be brought in slowly—especially when the most important headman of the people’s council was so vehemently opposed to new ideas, so set in his ways. However, Caesar wasn’t a boy of six any more, and he was determined that changes would be made.

Changes. His mind drifted for a moment. Could truly fundamental things be altered? Could old wrongs be put right? Could a way be found …?

He shook such dreams from him and turned back to the present.

‘You haven’t answered my question about your grandparents,’ he reminded Louise.

As little as she liked his autocratic tone, Louise was relieved enough at the return of something approaching normality between them to answer curtly, ‘Yes.’

All she wanted was for this interview, this inspection, to be over and done with. It went against everything she believed in so passionately that she was patently expected to virtually grovel to this aristocratic and arrogant Sicilian duke, with his air of dangerously dark sexuality and his too-good looks, simply because centuries ago his family had provided the land on which this small village church had been built. But that was the way of things here in this remote, almost feudal part of Sicily.

He was owner of the church and the village and heaven knew how many acres of Sicilian land. He was also the patronne, in the local Sicilian culture, the ‘father’ of the people who traditionally lived on it—even if those people were members of her grandparents’ generation. Like his title and his land, it was a role he had inherited. She knew that, and had grown up knowing it, listening to her grandparents’ stories of the hardship of the lives they had lived as children. They had been forced to work on the land owned by the family of this man who now stood in front of her in the shaded quiet of the ancient graveyard.

Louise gave a small shiver as she looked beyond the cloudless blue sky to the mountains, where the volcano of Etna brooded sulphurously beneath the hot sun. She checked the sky again surreptitiously. She had never liked thunderstorms, and those mountains were notorious for conjuring them out of nothing. Wild and dangerous storms, capable of unleashing danger with savage cruelty. Like the man now watching her.

She wasn’t what he had expected or anticipated, Caesar acknowledged. That wheat-blonde hair wasn’t Sicilian, nor those sea-green eyes—even if she did carry herself with the pride of an Italian woman. She was around medium height, fine-boned and slender—almost too much so, he thought, catching sight of the narrowness of her wrist with its lightly tanned skin. The oval shape of her face with its high cheekbones was classically feminine. A beautiful woman. One who would turn male heads wherever she went. But her air of cool serenity was, he suspected, worked for rather than natural.

And what of his own feelings towards her now that she was here? Had he expected them? Caesar turned away from her so that she wouldn’t be able to see his expression. Was he afraid of what it might reveal to her? She was a trained professional, after all—a woman whose qualifications proved that she was well able to dig down deep into a person’s psyche and find all that they might have hidden away. And he was afraid of what she might find in him.

He was afraid that she might rip away the scar tissue he had encouraged to grow over his guilt and grief, his pride and sense of duty, over the dreadful, shameful demands he had allowed them to make on him. So was it more than just guilt he felt? Was there shame as well? He almost didn’t need to ask himself that question when he had borne those twin burdens for over a decade. Had borne them and would continue to bear them. He had tried to make amends—a letter sent but never replied to, an apology proffered, a hope expressed, words written in what at the time had felt like the blood he had squeezed out of his own heart. A letter never even acknowledged. There would be no forgiveness or going back. And, after all, what else had he expected? What he had done did not deserve to be forgiven.

His guilt was a burden he would carry throughout his life, just as it had already been, but that guilt was his private punishment. It belonged solely to him. After all, there could be no going back to change things—nor, he suspected, anything he could offer that would make recompense for what had been done. So, no, being here with her had not increased his guilt—he already bore it in full measure—but it had sharpened its edge to a keenness that was almost a physical stab of pain every time he breathed.

They were speaking in English—his choice—and anyone looking at her would have assumed from the understated simplicity and practicality of her plain soft blue dress, her shoulders discreetly covered by simple white linen, that she was a certain type of educated middle class professional woman, on holiday in Sicily.

Her name was Louise Anderson, and her mother was the daughter of the Sicilian couple whose ashes she had come to bury in this quiet churchyard. Her father was Australian, also of Sicilian origin.

Caesar moved, the movement making him aware of the letter he had placed in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

Louise could feel her tension tightening like a spring being wound with deliberate manipulation by the man watching her. There was a streak of cruelty to those they considered weaker than themselves in the Falconari family. It was there in their history, both written and oral. He had no reason to behave cruelly towards her grandparents, though. Nor to her.

It had shocked her when the priest to whom she had written about her grandparents’ wishes had written back saying that she would need the permission of the Duke—a ‘formality’, he had called it—and that he had arranged the necessary appointment for her.

She would rather have met him in the bustling anonymity of her hotel than here in this quiet, ancient place so filled with the silent memories of those who lay here. But his word was law. That knowledge was enough to have her increasing the distance between them as she stepped further back from him, this time checking first to make sure there were no potential obstructions behind her, as though by doing so she could somehow lessen the powerful forcefield of his personality. And his sexuality …

A shudder racked her. She hadn’t been prepared for that. That she would be immediately and so intensely aware of his sexuality. Far more so now, in fact, than …

As she braked down hard on her accelerating and dangerous thoughts, she was actually glad of the sound of his voice commanding her concentration.

‘Your grandparents left Sicily for London shortly after they married, and made their home there, and yet they have chosen to have their ashes buried here?’

How typical it was of this kind of man—a powerful, domineering, arrogant overlord—that he should question her grandparents’ wishes, as though they were still his serfs and he still their master. And how her own fiercely independent blood boiled with dislike for him at that knowledge. She was glad to be given that excuse for the antagonism she felt towards him. No—she didn’t need an excuse for her feelings. They were hers as of right. Just as it was her grandparents’ right to have their wish to have their ashes interred in the earth of their forebears fulfilled.

‘They left because there was no work for them here. Not even working for a pittance on your family’s land, as their parents and theirs before them had done. They want their ashes buried here because to them Sicily was still their home, their land.’

Caesar could hear the accusation and the antagonism in her voice.

‘It seems … unusual that they should entrust the task of carrying out their wishes to you, their grandchild, instead of your mother, their daughter.’

Once again he was aware of the pressure of the letter in his pocket. And the pressure of his own guilt …? He had offered her an apology. That was the past and it must remain the past. There was no going back. The guilt he felt was a self-indulgence he could not afford to recognise. Not when there was so much else at stake.

‘My mother lives in Palm Springs with her second husband, and has done so for many years, whilst I have always lived in London.’

‘With your grandparents?’

Even though it was a question, he made it seem more like a statement of fact.

Was he hoping to provoke her into a show of hostility he could use against her to deny her request? She certainly didn’t trust him not to do so. If that was indeed his aim, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. She could hide her feelings well. She had, after all, a wealth of past experience to fall back on. That was what happened when you were branded as the person who had brought so much shame on her family that her own parents had turned their back on you. The stigma of that shame would be with her for ever, and it deprived her of the right to claim either pride or privacy.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘I went to live with them after my parents divorced.’

‘But not immediately after?’

The question jolted through her like an arc of electricity, touching sensitive nerve-endings that should have been healed. Not that she was going to let him see that.

‘No,’ she agreed. But she couldn’t look at him as she answered. Instead she had to look across the graveyard—so symbolic, in its way, as a graveyard of her own longings and hopes which the end of her parents’ marriage had brought about.

‘At first you lived with your father. Wasn’t that rather unusual for a girl of eighteen? To choose to live with her father rather than her mother?’

Louise didn’t question how he knew so much about her. The village priest had requested a history of her family from her when she had written to him with regard to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes. Knowing the habits of this very close Sicilian community, she suspected enquiries would have also been made via contacts in London.

The thought of that was enough to have fully armed anxiety springing to life inside her stomach. If she couldn’t fulfil her grandparents’ final wishes because this man chose to withhold his permission because of her …

Automatically Louise bowed her head, her golden hair catching the stray beams of sunlight penetrating the green darkness of the cypress-shaded graveyard.

It had been an unwelcome shock, and the last thing she had felt prepared for, to see him, and not the priest as she had anticipated. With every look he gave her, every silence that came before another question, she was tensing her nerves against the blow she knew he could deliver. Her desire to turn and flee was so strong that she was trembling inside as she fought to resist it. Fleeing would be as pointless as trying to outrun the deathly outpouring from a volcano. All it would achieve would be a handful of heart-pounding, stomach-churning, sickening minutes of time in which to imagine the awfulness of her fate. Better, surely, to stand and defy it and at least have her self-respect intact.

All the same, she had to grit her perfectly straight, neat white teeth very hard to stop herself giving vent to her real feelings. It was none of his business that she and her mother had never been close, with her mother always being far more concerned with her next affair or party than having a conversation with her daughter. In fact she’d been absent more than present throughout Louise’s life. When her mother had announced she was leaving for Palm Springs and a new life Louise had honestly felt very little other than a faint relief. Her father, of course, was rather a different story—his constant presence served as an endless reminder of her own failings.

It was a moment before she could bring herself to say distantly, ‘I was in my final year of school in London when my parents divorced, so it made sense for me to move in with my father. He had taken a service apartment in London, since the family house was being sold and my mother was planning to move to Palm Springs.’

His questions were far too intrusive for her liking, but she knew that to antagonise this man—even if she was coming to resent him more with every nerve-shattering dagger-slice he made into the protective shield she had wrapped around her past—would prove to be counterproductive. She was determined not to do so.

All that mattered about this interview was getting this arrogant, hateful overlord’s agreement to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes in accordance with their wishes. Once that was done she could give vent to her own feelings. Only then could she finally put the past behind her and live her own life, in the knowledge that she had discharged the almost sacred trust that had been left to her.

Louise swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her mouth. How she had changed from that turbulent eighteen-year-old who had been so governed by emotion and who had paid such a savage price.

She still hated even thinking about those stormy years, when she’d witnessed the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the resulting fall-out, never mind being forced to talk about it. That fall-out had seen her passed like an unwanted parcel between her parents’ two separate households, welcome in neither and especially unwelcome where her father’s new girlfriend had been concerned. As a result of which, according to both her parents and their new partners, she had brought such shame on them that she had been no longer welcome in the new lives they were building for themselves.

Looking back, it was no wonder that her parents had considered her to be such a difficult child. Was it because her father’s work had made him an absent father that she had tried so desperately to win his love? Or had she known instinctively at some deep atavistic level even then that her conception and with it his marriage to her mother had always been bitterly regretted and resented by him?

A brilliant young academic, with a glowing future ahead of him, the last thing he had wanted was to be forced into marriage with a girl he had got pregnant. But pressure had been brought to bear on him by a Senior Fellow at Cambridge whose family had also been members of London’s Sicilian community. The brilliant young Junior Research Fellow had been obliged to marry the pretty student who had seen him as an escape from the strictures of an old-fashioned society or risk having his career blighted.

Louise didn’t consider herself to be Sicilian, but perhaps there was enough of that blood in her veins for her always to have felt not just the loss of love but also the public humiliation that came from not being loved by her father. Italian men—Sicilian men—were usually protective and proud of the children they fathered. Her father had not wanted her. She had got in the way of his plans for his life. As a crying, clingy child and then a rebellious, demanding teenager she had first irritated and then annoyed him. For her father—a man who had wanted to travel and make the most of his personal freedom—marriage and the birth of a child had always been shackles he did not want. Because of that alone her attempts to command her father’s attention and his love had always been doomed to failure.

Yet she had clung determinedly to the fictional world she had created for herself—a world in which she was her father’s adored daughter. She’d boasted about their relationship at the exclusive girls’ school her mother had insisted on sending her to, with daughters of the titled, the rich and the famous, clinging fiercely to the kudos that went with having such a high-profile and good-looking parent. He’d had a role as the front man of a hugely popular quasi-academic TV series, which had meant that her fellow pupils accepted her only because of him.

Such a shallow and fiercely competitive environment had brought out the worst in her, Louise acknowledged. Having learned as a child that ‘bad’ behaviour was more likely to gain her attention than ‘good’, she had continued with that at school, deliberately cultivating her ‘bad girl’ image.

But at least her father had been there in her life, to be claimed as being her father—until Melinda Lorrimar, his Australian PA, had taken him from her. Melinda had been twenty-seven to Louise’s eighteen when they had gone public with their relationship, and it had perhaps been natural that they should compete for her father’s attention right from the start.

How jealous she had been of Melinda, a glamorous Australian divorcee, who had soon made it clear that she didn’t want her around, and whose two much younger daughters had very quickly taken over the room in her father’s apartment that was supposed to have been hers. She had been so desperate to win her father’s love that she had even gone to the extent of dying her hair black, because Melinda and her girls had black hair. Black hair, too much make-up and short, skimpily cut clothes—all an attempt to find a way to be the daughter she had believed her father wanted, an attempt to find the magic recipe that would turn her into a daughter he could love.

Her father had obviously admired and loved his glamorous PA, so Louise had reasoned that if she were more glamorous, and if men paid her attention, then her father would be bound to be as proud of her as he was of Melinda and as he had surely once been of her mother. When that had failed she’d settled for trying to shock him. Anything was better than indifference.

At eighteen she had been so desperate for her father’s attention that she’d have done anything to get it—anything to stop that empty, hungry feeling inside her that had made it so important that she succeed in becoming her father’s most loved and cherished daughter instead of the unloved failure she had felt she was. Sexually she had been naive, all her emotional intensity invested in securing her father’s love. She’d believed, of course, that one day she would meet someone and fall in love, but when she did so it would be as her father’s much loved daughter, someone who could hold her head up high—not a nuisance who was constantly made to feel that she wasn’t wanted.

That had been the fantasy she’d carried around inside her head, never realising how dangerous and damaging it was, because neither of her parents had cared enough about her to tell her. To them she had simply been a reminder of a mistake they had once made that had forced them into a marriage neither of them had really wanted.

‘But when you started your degree you were living with your grandparents, not your father.’

The sound of Caesar Falconari’s voice brought her back to the present.

An unexpected and dangerous thrill of sensation burned through her—an awareness of him as a man. A man who wore his sexuality as easily and unmistakably as he wore his expensive clothes. No woman in his presence could fail to be aware of him as a man, could fail to wonder …

Disbelief exploded inside her, caused by the shock of her treacherous awareness of him. Where on earth had it come from? It was so unlike her. So … Sweat beaded her forehead and her body was turning hot and sensually tender beneath her clothes. What was happening to her? Panic rubbed her nerve-endings as raw as though they had been touched with acid. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t … wasn’t permissible. It wasn’t … wasn’t fair.

A stillness like the ominous stillness that came just before the breaking of a storm gripped her. This should not be happening. She didn’t know why it was. The only awareness of him she could permit herself to have was an awareness of how dangerous and damaging he could be to her. She must not let him realise the effect he was having on her. He would enjoy humiliating her. She knew that.

But she wasn’t an emotionally immature eighteen-year-old any more, she reminded herself as she struggled to free herself from the web of her own far too vulnerable senses to find safer ground.

‘As I’m sure you know, given that you obviously know so much about my family history, my bad behaviour—especially with regard to my father’s new wife-to-be and the impact she felt it might have on her own daughters—caused my father to ask me to leave.’

‘He threw you out.’

Caesar’s response was a statement, not a question.

There it was again—that twisting, agonising turning of the knife in a new guilt to add to the old one he already carried.

Given that for the last decade he had dedicated himself to improving the lot of his people, what he had learned about Louise and the uncaring and downright cruel behaviour she had been subjected to by those who should have loved and protected her, could never have done anything other than add to his burden of guilt. It had never been his intention to hurt or damage her—far from it—and now, knowing what he did, he could well understand why she had never responded to that letter he had sent, acknowledging his guilt and imploring her to forgive him.

It went against the grain of everything that being a Sicilian father meant to abandon one’s child, yet at the same time for a family to be so publically shamed by the behaviour of one of its members left a stain on that family’s name that would be passed down unforgotten and unforgiven throughout the generations.

Louise could feel her face starting to burn. Was it through guilt or a still-rebellious sense of injustice? Did it matter? It certainly shouldn’t. The counselling she had undergone as part of the training for her career as a much sought after reconciliation expert, working to help bring fractured families back together again, had taught her the importance of allowing oneself errors of judgement, acknowledging them, and then moving on from them.

‘He and Melinda had plans to start a new life together in Australia. It made sense for him to sell the London apartment. Technically I was an adult anyway, as I was eighteen. I was going to university. But, yes, in effect he threw me out.’

So she had been left alone and uncared for whilst he had been on the other side of the world, learning all he could about improving the lot of the poorest people in that world in a bid to expiate his guilt and find a new way of living his life that would benefit his own people.

There was no point in telling her any of that, though. It was plain how antagonistic she was towards him and anything he might have to say.

‘And that was when you moved in with your grandparents?’ he continued. It was, after all, easier to stick to practicalities and known facts than to stray onto the dangerous unstable territory of emotions.

Louise felt the tension gripping her increase. Hadn’t he already done enough, damage, hurt and humiliated her enough without dragging up the awfulness of the past?

Even now she could hardly bear to think about how frightened she had been, or how abandoned and alone she had felt. Her grandparents had saved her, though. With the love they had shown her, they had rescued her.

That had been the first time in her life she had truly understood the importance of giving a child love and security, and all that family love could mean. That was when her whole life had changed and she herself with it. That was when she had promised herself that, whatever it took, one day she would repay her grandparents for their love for her.

‘Yes.’

‘That must have been a very brave gesture on their part, given …’

‘Given what I had done? Yes, it was. There were plenty of people in their local community who were ready to criticise and condemn them, just as they had already condemned me. I had brought shame on my grandparents and by association could potentially bring shame on their community. But then you know all about that, don’t you? You know how shamefully and shockingly I behaved, and how I humiliated and damaged not just myself but my grandparents and all those connected with them. You know how my name became a byword for shame in our community and how my grandparents suffered for that. Suffered for it but still stood by me. And because of that you will also know why I am here now, enduring this further humiliation by you.’

He wanted to say something—to tell her how sorry he was, to remind her that he had tried to apologise—but at the same time he knew that he had to stand strong. There was far more at stake here than their own emotions. Whether they liked it or not they were both part of a much greater pattern, their lives woven into the fabric of the society into which they had both been born. That was something neither of them could ignore or walk away from.

‘You want to carry out the promise you made to your grandparents that their ashes will be buried here?’

‘It was what they always wanted, and of course it became more important to them after … after the shame I brought them. Because burial of their ashes here was their only means of returning to being fully accepted members of their community, being accepted as having the right to be at rest here in the church in which they were christened, confirmed and married. There is nothing I will not do to make that happen—even if that means having to beg.’

Caesar hadn’t expected her honesty. Hostility and antagonism towards him, yes, he had expected those, but her honesty had somehow slipped under his guard. Or was it that part of him—the modern, educated part, that was constantly striving to align the desire to bring his people into the twenty-first century with being custodian of their ancient customs—was looking on with modern-day compassion? This was a young girl caught up in a system of values that had punished her for modern-day behaviour that contravened the old rules.

He could feel the weight of the letter in his pocket. Like pressure on a raw wound, grinding into it painfully sharp shards of broken glass.

She was beginning to lose her self-control, Louise recognised. That mustn’t happen. She must accept that, whilst it was only natural that she shouldn’t want to answer him, she must resist the impulse to be defensive. What mattered was the debt of love she owed her grandparents, and no one—especially not this arrogant, lordly Sicilian, whose very presence in the same airspace as her was causing her body to react with angry contempt—was going to compromise that. After all, given what she had already been through, what was a little more humiliation? The words straw, broke and camel’s back slid dangerously into her mind, lodging there like small yet effective barbs.

She had almost been out of her mind with shock and shame and anger when her grandparents had taken her in, incapable of thinking for herself, never mind looking after herself. She had virtually crawled into bed, barely noticing the bedroom they had given her in their pretty Notting Hill house—the house they had bought so proudly when, after years of working for others, their restaurant had finally made them financially independent. She had wanted only to hide away from everyone. Including herself.

Her grandparents and their house had been her sanctuary. They had given her what she had been denied by both her mother and her father. They had taken her in and loved her when others had rejected her, ashamed of her and for her. Shame. Such a terrible word to a proud Sicilian. The scar that covered her shame throbbed angrily and painfully. She’d have done anything rather than come here, but she owed her grandparents so much.

In all the calculations she had made about what might be asked of her, what penance she might have to pay in order to remove the stain of dishonour from their family name and win agreement for the burial of her grandparents’ ashes, she had never thought to factor in the fact that she would be confronted by this man and forced to answer to him for her sins. The truth was that she had thought he’d be as antagonistic towards such a meeting as she was herself. She had obviously underestimated his arrogance.

‘As you know, I alone am not responsible for any decision made with regard to your request. The village elders—’

‘Will take their cue from you. As you must know perfectly well that I know that. You are the one who holds the authority to grant my grandparents’ request. To deny them this, their chosen final resting place, would be beyond unfair and cruel. To punish them because—’

‘That is the way of our society. The whole family suffers when one member of it falls from grace. You know that.’

‘And you think that is right?’ she demanded scornfully, unable to prevent herself from saying acidly, ‘Of course you do.’

‘Here in this part of Sicily people live their lives to rules and customs that were laid down centuries ago. Of course I can see many faults in those customs and rules, and of course I want to assist in changes that will be for the benefit of my people, but those changes can only come about slowly if they are not to lead to distrust and unhappiness between the generations.’

Louise knew that what he was saying was true, even if she didn’t want to admit it. Even if something in the trained, professional part of her was thinking eagerly of the opportunities for good that must surely come from being in a position to put in place changes that would ultimately benefit so many people and help them to understand and reach out for the gifts of the future, whilst laying to rest the ghosts of the past. Besides it was her grandparents’ wishes she wanted to discuss with him.

‘My grandparents did a great deal for their community. In the early days they sent money home here, for their parents and their siblings. They went without to do that. They employed people from the village who came to London. They housed them and looked after them. They gave generously to the church and to charity. It is their right to have all that they were and all that they did recognised and respected.’

She was a passionate advocate for her grandparents, and he couldn’t doubt the strength of her feelings, Caesar acknowledged. A discreet bleep from his mobile phone warned him of an impending appointment. He hadn’t expected this interview with her to take as long as it had, and there were still things he needed to say—questions he needed to ask.

‘I have to go. I have an appointment. However, there are things we still need to discuss,’ he told her. ‘I shall be in touch with you.’

He was turning to walk away, having made it clear that he intended to keep her on edge and anxious. A cruel act from a man who had cruelty and pride bred into his blood and his bones. Perhaps she shouldn’t have expected anything else. And the relief she felt because he was going? What did that say about her and her own reserves of strength?

He was only a couple of metres away from her when he turned. The sun slanting through the cypresses caught against the sharp, hard bones of his face, throwing it into relief so that he looked as if he could easily have traded places with one of his own fierce warrior ancestors—that toxic mix of pre-Christian Roman and Moor was stamped clearly on his features.

‘Your son,’ he said. ‘Have you brought him to Sicily with you?’




CHAPTER TWO


WAS this how it felt when the sky fell in on you? And yet she should have been prepared for such a question.

‘Yes.’ Her answer was terse, because that one word was all she could manage with the angry fear that was crawling with sickening intensity through her veins. Not that she had anything to fear. It was no secret, after all, that she was a single mother with a nine-year-old son.

‘But you didn’t choose to bring him here with you? Was that wise? He is only nine years old. A responsible mother—’

‘As a “responsible mother” I decided that my son would be safer and happier, whilst we conducted our interview, keeping his appointment for a tennis lesson as part of the children’s club activities provided by our hotel. Oliver, my son, was very close to his great-grandfather. He misses him. Bringing him here today wouldn’t have helped Ollie.’

Even if he could have been persuaded to come.

She was shaking inside with mortified anger, but she wasn’t going to let him see it. She couldn’t let him see it. The truth was that for the last eighteen months her relationship with Ollie had been going through an increasingly difficult time, with Oliver making it very plain to her that he blamed her for the fact that he didn’t have a father. This had led to problems at school, with Ollie getting into trouble because of arguments and scraps with other boys who did have fathers in their lives, and a painful gulf was growing between her and the son she loved so very much.

She would have done anything to protect Ollie from the pain he was going through—anything. She loved her work, and was proud of what she had achieved—of course she was—but she knew that without Ollie to be responsible for she would probably never have pushed herself to go back into education, get her qualifications and then start to climb the career ladder. It was for Ollie that she had worked long into the night, studying and working, so that she would always be able to provide him with a secure financial future. But what Ollie was now insisting he wanted more than anything else was the one thing she could not give him. A father.

Whilst her grandfather had been alive he had been able to provide a stabilising and loving male influence in Ollie’s life, but even then Ollie had started to become withdrawn and angry with her because she would not give him any information about his father.

Oliver was a clever boy at a good school. The private fees soaked up a large part of her income. But even though there were plenty of other boys there whose fathers were absent from their lives for one reason or another, unlike Oliver they at least seemed to have some contact with those fathers. Her grandfather had been very concerned about the effect the lack of any information about his father was having on Oliver, but he had known as well as she did how impossible it was for her to tell Ollie the truth—and she certainly wasn’t prepared to lie to him by concocting a comforting, sanitised version.

Louise loved her son. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him to make him happy. But she couldn’t tell him about his father. At least not yet—not until he was old enough to understand something of the demons that had driven her. And old enough to forgive her for them. Her transgressions might not have given him a father, but they—and the loving care of his great-grandparents, who had stood by her when she had totally refused to have the termination her parents had tried to insist on—had given him life. Surely that was a gift worth having?

‘We still have things to discuss. I shall call on you at your hotel tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock in the coffee shop.’

Not a single word as to whether or not it might be convenient for her to see him at eleven o’clock, or indeed if she would have preferred to meet him somewhere else. But what else had she expected? Arrogance was this man’s middle name—along with cruelty and over-weaning pride. It was a great pity that someone didn’t cut the all-powerful, judgemental Duca di Falconari down to size and make him as mortal and vulnerable as those he obviously thought so far beneath him.

From the churchyard Louise could just see the polished shine of the black metal bonnet of the waiting limousine as it drew away, the dark-tinted windows obscuring any view she might have had of its passenger. Not that she wanted to look at him, or indeed have anything to do with him, but she had no choice.

From the path that wound through the hotel’s gardens and ran past the tennis courts Caesar had a good view of the young boy who had just arrived as part of a group under the care of the hotel’s children’s club team, to begin a lesson with one of the hotel’s tennis coaches.

Louise Anderson’s son. He was tall and strongly muscled for his age, and he hadn’t inherited his mother’s colouring Caesar recognised. The boy was olive-skinned and dark-haired—but then that was hardly surprising given his Sicilian blood. He was a good player, focused and with a strong backhand.

Caesar looked at his watch and quickened his pace. He had taken a roundabout route to the hotel coffee shop, knowing it would take him past the tennis courts, and he didn’t want to be late for his appointment with Louise. As always when he thought about her he could feel his long-standing burden of guilt and regret.

Louise checked her watch. Eleven o’clock. Her son had been surprised and pleased when she had suggested that he have another tennis lesson. Such lessons were ‘extras’ on top of their holiday budget, and she’d warned him before they came that there wouldn’t be much money for such things. A stab of guilt stung her conscience. Right now she needed to be spending time with Ollie and trying to find a way to put things right between them. Wasn’t that exactly the kind of advice she would be giving another parent in her circumstances? The trouble was that child-rearing was easier when it was shared not just between two parents but with an extended family. And she and Ollie only had one another.

Louise closed her eyes briefly as she sat on one of the banquettes in the hotel coffee shop. She missed both her grandparents dreadfully, but especially her grandfather. And if she missed his wise, loving kindness and guidance then how much more must Ollie miss him?

They had been close, the two of them, and now Ollie had no male influence on his life to guide and love him.

When she opened her eyes again she saw that Caesar Falconari was striding towards her. More casually dressed today, he was still looking very Italian in his buff-coloured linen jacket, black tee shirt and light-coloured chinos. No other man but an Italian could carry off such an outfit with so much cool sexuality. It was no wonder that every female head within looking distance swivelled in his direction, Louise acknowledged. Not that she would ever find him attractive. Far from it.

Liar, liar … a wickedly rebellious voice inside her head taunted. She must not think about that moment yesterday when, out of nowhere, she had suffered the awful, shaming indignity of a feeling as though she had been stripped of her defences, her body left nakedly vulnerable to an attack from its own sensuality. Logically it should have been impossible for her to have felt that searing, possessing jolt of female awareness, and all she could do now to comfort herself was to pretend to ignore it. It meant nothing, after all. But what if somehow her body …? No. She was not going to go down that route or start asking those questions. She needed to focus on the here and the now.

Of course the moment Caesar sat down next to her a waitress miraculously appeared, even though she had been sitting there without anyone coming anywhere near her for close on ten minutes prior to his arrival, and of course he ordered an espresso in contrast to her own caffè latte.

‘I see that your son is having another tennis lesson this morning.’

‘How do you know that?’ There was no real reason for her to feel alarmed—no reason at all—but somehow she did.

‘I happened to walk past the tennis courts as the children’s club leaders arrived with their charges.’

‘Well, hopefully I’ll be able to go and watch him play myself if our meeting can be kept short.’

There was nothing wrong in her letting him know that she wanted this matter concluded. He might be lord of all he surveyed here on Sicily, but she wasn’t going to bow and scrape to him even if she couldn’t afford to actually offend him, she thought mutinously.

The waitress brought their coffee and handed Caesar Falconari his with so much deference that Louise half expected her to back away from him, bowing.

‘As to that … there is a second matter I need to discuss with you in addition to your request for the burial of your grandparents’ ashes.’

Another matter? She had been about to pick up her latte but now she left it where it was. Her heart-rate had picked up and was thumping heavily as alarm bells started ringing throughout her body.

‘You see, just prior to your arrival here, and following on from your late grandfather’s demise, I received a letter from his solicitors which he had written and given instructions to be posted to me following his death.’

‘My grandfather wrote to you?’

Her throat had gone dry and her breath caught.

‘Yes. It seems he had certain concerns for his great-grandson’s welfare and his future. He felt he could not entrust you to deal with them, so he felt it necessary to write to me.’

Louise struggled to prevent her pent-up breath leaking away in an unsteady jerky movement that might betray her to him. It was true that her grandfather had had concerns about the growing anger and resentment Ollie was demonstrating towards her. He had even warned her that with so many families in their community knowing what they believed to be the story of her disgrace it wouldn’t be long before Ollie was given that version of events at school. Children could be cruel to one another, both deliberately and accidentally, and Louise knew that Ollie already felt alienated enough from his peers because of his inability to name and claim a father, or even the family of his father, without the situation being made worse. However, as her grandfather had known, her hands had been tied.

It came as a dreadful shock to know that despite everything they had discussed, and despite the fact that she had believed her grandfather understood and accepted her decision, he had fallen victim to centuries of tradition and in his last weeks of life reverted to the Sicilian way of life she herself so much resented. Despite her love for him, and all that she owed him, after listening to Caesar Falconari’s revelation it was impossible for her to stop her anger spilling over.

‘He had no right to do that even if he did think he was acting in Ollie’s best interests,’ she said sharply. ‘He knew how I felt about this whole Sicilian community thing of referring everything that is seen as some kind of problem to the community’s patronne for judgement. It’s totally archaic.’

‘Basta! Enough! Your grandfather did not write to me as his patronne. He wrote to me because he claims that I am Oliver’s father.’

The pain was immediate and intense, as though someone had ripped away the top layer of her skin, flooding her emotions, opening the locked gates to the past with all its shame and humiliation. She was eighteen again, shamed and disgraced, filled with confusing and only half-understood emotions that had come out of nowhere to change the path of her life for ever and marked her out in public as a fallen woman.

She could still see her father’s face, with its expression of anger mixed with rejection as he’d looked at her, whilst Melinda had given her a gloating smile of triumph as she’d drawn her own daughters close to her and taken hold of her father’s hand so that they formed a small close group that excluded her. Her grandfather’s face had lost its colour, and her grandmother’s hands had been trembling as she’d folded them together in her lap. No one seated in the popular café-bar in the small village square could have failed to hear the awful denunciation the headman of her grandparents’ home village had made, labelling her as a young woman who had shamed her family by what she had done.

Automatically she’d turned to Caesar Falconari for support, but he had turned away from her, getting up from his seat to walk away, leaving her undefended and unloved—just as her father had done.

Hadn’t she already been punished enough for her vulnerability and foolishness, without the added horror of this?

Louise winced, unable to stop that small betraying reaction to her memories of the past. She was still sensitive to his rejection. That should have been impossible. It was impossible, she assured herself. Her body was merely reacting to the memory of the pain he had once caused her, that was all. She needed to be here, in the present, not retreating to the past.

The very fact that he had spoken to her in Italian, with a harshly critical edge to his voice, was enough to warn Louise that Caesar was losing his patience with her—but why should she care about that when she had so much more to worry about? Oliver was her son—hers. He had nothing to do with Caesar, and if she had her way he never ever would. Even if Caesar had fathered him.

Caesar watched and saw the emotion she was struggling to suppress. The muscles in his own body tightened as he recognised that he would have preferred it had she immediately flown into a practised and fluent verbal assertion that her grandfather was right rather than accept that she was very obviously shocked, angry and afraid, and fighting not to show any of those feelings instead of laying claim to them. Hardly the action of a woman who wanted to claim him as the father of her child.

Louise shivered inwardly. How could her grandfather have done this to her? How could he have betrayed her like that? Shock, disbelief, pain, fear, and anger—Louise felt them all. And yet at the same time part of her could understand what might have motivated him.

She could so vividly remember that night—beaten down by the insistence of both her parents that she should have her pregnancy terminated, weeping in her grandmother’s arms, feeling abandoned and afraid. She had finally told her grandparents what she had previously kept a secret: namely that, far from there being any number of young men to have potentially fathered her child, as the headman of the village had insinuated, there was only one who could have done so. And that one was no other than Caesar Falconari, Duca di Falconari, overlord of the vast wealth and estates on Sicily that had been her grandparents’ birthplace.

Her grandparents had promised her that they would never betray that secret—but then they must have recognized, as she had known herself, that no one would ever believe her if she were to make such a claim. Especially not when Caesar himself … But, no. She was not going to go down that road. Not now and not ever. The bitterness of her past was best left buried beneath the new flesh she had grown over her old wounds. And besides she had Oliver to think of now.

She lifted her head and confronted Caesar. ‘All you need to know about Oliver is that he is my son and only my son.’

He had been afraid of this, Caesar admitted. His mouth compressing, he reached into his jacket pocket and produced the envelope containing her grandfather’s letter, which he removed and placed on the table. As he did so the photographs her grandfather had enclosed with the letter fell onto the table.

Louise saw them immediately, her breath catching in a sharp drawn-in sound of rejection.

How different she looked in that old photograph taken that summer … They had all come here to Sicily, supposedly for a family holiday that would establish the new family dynamics that were being put in place following her parents’ divorce. It had been Melinda’s idea that she and her girls and Louise’s father should join Louise and her grandparents on their visit to their original home, whilst Louise’s mother was spending the summer with her ‘friend’ in Palm Springs.

Right from the start Louise had been in no doubt about Melinda’s motives for suggesting the holiday. Melinda had wanted to reinforce yet again how unimportant she was to her father, and in contrast how important she and her own children were. That had been made obvious right from the start. And she had stupidly reacted exactly as Melinda had no doubt hoped she would, by doing everything she could to focus her father’s attention on herself by the only means she knew—behaving so badly that he was forced to take notice of her.

Looking at herself in that photograph, it was hard for her not to cringe. She remembered that she had been attempting not just to emulate what she had naively perceived as Melinda’s ‘sexy’ dressing, she had also attempted to outdo it. So she had translated the smooth sleekness of Melinda’s dark brown hair into a black-dyed stringy mess that had clung to her scalp stiff with product. Melinda’s favourite clingy short white jersey dress she had translated into a far too short, tight black jersey number, which she’d worn with stiletto heels instead of the pretty sandals of Melinda’s choice. The tongue stud she had had put in in a mood of defiance at fifteen, long-gone now, had still been in place then, and black kohl surrounded her eyes. Her face was caked in far too much make-up.

On the face of it the photograph might depict an eighteen-year-old who looked far too sexually available, but the image looking back at her stabbed at Louise’s heart. It wasn’t just because she was looking at herself that she could see the vulnerability behind the overt sexuality. Anyone with her training and experience would be able to see the same thing. A caring father should surely also have seen it.

Louise looked again at the photograph. All that holiday she had deliberately worn clothes so provocative that it was hardly surprising she’d had virtually every boy in the village looking for easy sex, hanging around the villa they’d been renting. She’d looked cheap and available, and that was how she had been treated. Of course her grandparents had tried to suggest she wore something more discreet, and of course she had ignored them. She’d been very young for her age, despite her appearance—sent to an all-girls school, and just desperate to fit in and be accepted by the coterie of girls who mattered there. By changing her appearance she’d wanted to provoke her father, to force him to notice her. Of course he had not wanted anything to do with her, preferring instead to be with Melinda and her two pretty little girls.

What a fool she had been. And more than a fool.

‘Quite a change,’ Caesar couldn’t help saying wryly when he saw her looking at the photograph her grandfather had included in his letter to jog his own memory about the identity of the young woman who had conceived what the dying man had claimed was his son. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised you.’

‘I was eighteen and I wanted …’

‘Male attention. Yes, I remember.’

Louise could feel her face beginning to burn.

‘My father’s attention …’ she corrected him in a cool voice.

Was it the way she was looking at him or his own memories that stung with such unpalatable force? He had been twenty-two to her eighteen, newly in full control of his inheritance and free of the advisers who had previously guided him, and very much aware that his people were judging his ability to be the Duke they wanted—one who would preserve their traditions and way of life.

At the same time he’d been searching for a way to discreetly pursue his own plans for modernisation in the face of hostility to any kind of change amongst the older generation of headmen in charge of the villages. In particular the leader of the largest village, where Louise had been staying, had vetoed any idea of new developments—especially when it came to the role of women who, as far as he was concerned, must always be subservient to their menfolk and their family. That headman, Aldo Barado, had been able to marshal the support of many of the leaders from the other villages, which had led to Caesar feeling he had to tread very carefully and even make some concessions if he was to achieve his goals.

Whilst time and the growing insistence of the younger members of the community on modernising had helped to bring in many of Ceasar’s plans, Aldo Barado remained unconvinced and still insisted on the old ways.

Louise’s modern views, and her determination to be herself, had immediately caused Aldo Barado to be antagonistic towards her. He had come up to the castello within two days of Louise’s arrival in the village to complain about the effect she was having on the young people, especially the young men, and even more especially on his only son who, despite the fact that he was engaged to be married in a match arranged and sanctioned by his father, had been openly pursuing Louise.

Of course Caesar had had no option other than to listen to the headman’s demands that he do something about the situation and the girl who was openly flouting the rules of their society, and that was the reason and the only reason he had gone down to the village to introduce himself to her family—so that he could observe her behaviour and if necessary have a word with her father.

Only the minute he had set eyes on Louise any thought of remaining detached and ducal had been swept away, and he had known instantly, with gut-wrenching certainty, just why the village youths found her so compellingly attractive. Not even her atrocious hairstyle and choice of clothes had been able to dim the light of her extraordinary natural beauty. Those eyes, that skin, that softly pouting mouth that promised so much …

Caesar had been shocked by the force of his own response to her, and even more shocked by his inability to control that response. From the day he had been told of his parents’ death, at six years old, he had developed emotional strategies to protect himself from the bewildering and often frightening aloneness he felt. He must be brave, he had been told. He must be strong. He must remember always that he was a Falconari and that it was his destiny and his duty to lead his people. He must put them, his family name and its history first. His own emotions didn’t matter and must be controlled. He must always be a duca before he was a vulnerable human being.

After Aldo Barado’s visit to complain about Louise he had, of course, tried to behave as he knew he should—even going to the extent of seeking out her father to express the headman’s concern. But he knew now, after receiving Louise’s grandfather’s letter, that whilst he had listened to Aldo Barado, and to Louise’s father and his wife-to-be, he had not made any attempt to listen to Louise herself. He had not looked beneath the surface. He had not seen what he should have seen.

Now, knowing how she had been rejected and treated by her father, he had to ask himself how much of that was down to him.

He looked at the photograph again. He had been so caught up in his own fear of the emotions she aroused in him that he had not seen what he could so plainly see now, and that was the unhappiness in the eyes of the girl in the photograph. Because he had not wanted to see it. It was guilt that was fuelling his anger now, he knew.

‘And you expected to get your father’s attention by going to bed with me?’ he demanded caustically.

He was right. Of course he was right. Her behaviour had driven her father away, not brought them closer. Encouraged by the combined denunciations of both Aldo Barado and Melinda, her father, who had never been able to deal well with anything emotional, had turned on her, joining their chorus of criticism.

How naive she had been to expect that somehow Caesar would materialise at her side as her champion, her saviour, and tell them all that he loved her and he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her ever again. Caesar’s very absence had told her all she needed to know about his real feelings for her, or the lack of them, even before the headman had told her father that he was acting on Caesar’s instructions.

Now, when she looked back with the maturity and expertise she had acquired, she could see so clearly that what she had taken for Caesar’s celebration of a shared love and a future for them, when he had abandoned his self-control to take them both to the heights of intimate physical desire, had in reality been a breaching of his defences by an unwanted desire for her that he had bitterly resented. Those precious moments held fast in his arms in the aftermath of their intimacy, which had filled her with such hope for the future and such joy, had filled him with a need to deny that what they had shared had any real meaning for him.

He might want to deceive himself about his own motivations, but she wasn’t going to lie to him about the motives of that girl he had hurt so very badly.

Lifting her head, she gathered herself and let him hear the acid truth. ‘Well, I certainly didn’t go to bed with you so that I could be publicly humiliated by the headman of my grandparents’ village whilst you remained aloof and arrogant in your castello! My father was furious with me for being, as he put it, “stupid enough to think that a man like Caesar could ever have wanted anything from you other than physical release.” He said I’d brought shame on the whole family. My poor grandparents bore the worst of everything. Word spread quickly through the village, and if I wasn’t actually stoned physically then I was certainly subject to critical glares and whispers. All because I’d been stupid enough to think I loved you and that you loved me.’

She paused for breath, savagely enjoying the release after keeping her pain locked away.

‘Not that I’m sorry that you rejected me like that now. In fact I believe that you did me a favour. After all, you’d have dropped me anyway sooner or later, wouldn’t you? A girl like me, with grandparents who were little more than your family’s serfs, could never be good enough for il duca. That’s what Aldo Barado told my grandparents when he did your dirty work for you and demanded that we leave.’

‘Louise …’ His throat felt dry, aching with the weight of the emotions crushing down on him. Only just like before he could not afford to give in to those emotions. Too much was at stake. Right or wrong, he couldn’t turn his back on so many centuries of tradition.

He could apologise and try to explain. But to what purpose? In his letter Louise’s grandfather had warned him of Louise’s antagonism—not just towards him but also towards everything he represented. In her eyes they were already enemies, and Caesar knew that what he was going to tell her would only increase her hostility towards him.

Her grandfather had claimed in his letter that the intimacy he had shared with Louise had led to the birth of a child—a son. That should have been impossible, given that he had taken precautions. But if this child was his …

The heavy slam of his heart was giving away far too much and far more than he could afford to give away—even to himself.

She might not be able to defend her grandfather’s behaviour in telling Caesar Falconari that Oliver was his son, but she could and would defend her own past, the victim she had in reality been, Louise decided grimly.

‘When children grow up in an environment in which bad behaviour is rewarded with attention and good behaviour results in them being ignored, they tend to favour the bad behaviour. All they care about is the result they want,’ she informed him.

And Caesar’s love? Hadn’t she wanted that as well? She had been too young, too immature to know properly what love—real love—meant. She speedily dismissed such a thought.

Louise was very much the educated professional in that statement, Caesar recognized.

‘And you, of course, speak from personal experience?’

‘Yes,’ Louise agreed. She wasn’t going to make excuses for her past—not to anyone. The love and forgiveness her grandparents had shown her had taught her so much, been such priceless gifts. She knew that Oliver’s life would be the poorer for their loss.

‘Is that why you trained as a specialist in family behaviour?’

‘Yes.’ There was no point in her denying it, after all. ‘My own experiences, both bad and good, made me realise that I wanted to work in that field.’

‘But despite that your own grandfather believed you were not dealing properly with your own son?’

It was too late now to regret that she hadn’t been able to deal more positively with her grandfather’s concerns about the way in which Oliver was reacting to his lack of a father. She herself believed that her son had certain distinctive character traits that could only have come down from the Falconaris—chief amongst them perhaps pride, and the hurt it caused to that pride that he did not have a father.

‘Oliver has issues over the identity of his father,’ she felt forced to admit. ‘But, as my grandfather was perfectly well aware, I plan to put him in possession of the facts when I think he is old enough to deal with them.’

‘And those facts are …’

‘You know what they are. After all, Aldo Barado made them public enough. I came here to Sicily with my family. I went to bed with you. According to the headman of my grandparents’ village I chased after and seduced his son. According to my father and Melinda I disgraced myself and shamed them by hanging around with boys who were quite obviously only after one thing, and then running after you. And they were right. I did humiliate and shame myself by going to bed with you. I wanted my father to sit up and take notice of me and—naively—I thought that being bedded by the most important man in the area was a good way to do that.’

She certainly wasn’t going to tell him of the other reason she had pursued him so relentlessly. She could hardly bear to admit to herself even now the existence of that unfamiliar, shockingly sweet and half-frightening burgeoning of an emotional ache within her that had driven a genuine longing for physical intimacy with him.

For so long all Louise’s emotional drive had been embedded in her quest for her father’s love, so the sudden urgency of her feelings for Caesar had been her first true experience of the dangerous intensity of sexual desire. The strength of her instinctive impulse to reject that feeling had been almost as strong as the feeling itself. Initially she hadn’t wanted anything to come between her and her goal. But over the days and weeks of their time in Sicily something had changed, and she had begun to see in Caesar, very dangerously, her future as the woman Caesar loved.

How naive she had been—and how vulnerable. And how blind to everything else. Brushing off the unwanted attentions of the headman’s son as a mere nuisance, not realising how much her continued rejection of him had damaged his pride, in a way that would demand retribution. That retribution had been the lies he had told about her when he had claimed she had seduced him. Lies that both his father, her family and Caesar himself had been all too ready to believe.

From a professional point of view she could see how much Caesar had been trapped in the demands imposed on him by his culture. She was lucky. She had escaped from its confining strictures. She was her own woman. Although wasn’t it the truth that she was still tied to the past via her son? Like her, Ollie craved his father’s love, and his presence in his life.

Friends and colleagues had urged her to be open to the prospect of a new relationship with a man who would be a good role model for Ollie—a relationship based on love and mutual respect—but no amount of professional self-awareness or knowledge could banish her determination not to love again. For Ollie’s sake as much as her own. The raw truth was that she simply didn’t trust herself not to love yet another man who would hurt her. She had given everything she had to give to Caesar and he had rejected her, allowed her to be humiliated and shamed. Now, for her, the thought of sexual desire and of abandoning herself to that desire was locked into a fear of giving too much. Better not to allow any man into her life and her bed than risk that happening.

‘I used a condom on the night we had sex.’

She could hear Caesar even now denying the son he had fathered, just as all those years ago he had denied her. Well, she didn’t care. Neither she nor Ollie needed him in their lives—even if her grandfather had believed otherwise. Her heart thumped heavily against her ribs. If only her grandfather hadn’t died. If only he was still here to guard and guide Ollie’s growth to adulthood. If only she had never met Caesar. If only she had never gone to bed with him.




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