Riccardo's Secret Child (2 page)

Surprises are always unpleasant.
Riccardo could remember his father telling him that, many years ago, when the biggest surprise of his life had heralded the receivers coming into his company.

This surprise, though, left him winded. Caroline was the memory he had put behind him, buried beneath other willing women and only seeping out in the angry thrashing of his nightmares. And even those had disappeared.

‘Aren't you going to say anything?' Julia's anxious eyes met his and he summoned up all the will-power at his disposal, which was considerable, to maintain his cold, unshaken exterior.

‘What is there to say?' he rasped tautly. ‘I have no intention of having a cosy chat to you about my ex-wife. May she rest in peace.' He began to stand up and one slender hand reached out, touching him lightly on his forearm.

‘Please.' Julia's voice was gentle. ‘I'm not finished.'

Riccardo looked at the offending hand with distaste, but remained where he was, locked into place by the vile-tasting surge of memories that had risen unbidden from deep inside, like ghouls breaking through the barriers of the earth to roam freely.

Julia had half risen from her chair. Now she sat back down and was relieved when he did as well, though not
before he had ordered another drink and wine for her, even though she had not asked for any.

‘Why should I have recognised your name?' His voice was flat and hard, like the expression in his eyes.

‘Because,' she faltered, ‘because my brother was Martin Nash. The man who…who…'

‘Why don't you say the words, Miss Nash? The man
who replaced me
.' His mouth twisted into lines of bitter cynicism. ‘And to what do I owe the pleasure of this trip down memory lane? From what I recall, she was a very wealthy divorcee when we finally parted company. She and her lover. So, did they thoughtlessly not see fit to leave you in their will when they died?' His voice was an insulting mimicry of sympathy and Julia's back stiffened in a flare of rage.

This man was every bit as bad as Caroline had described. Worse. Julia felt a trace of sympathy for the decision her sister-in-law had made. To break off all contact. To say nothing. At the time she had done her best to persuade her otherwise. Through all those shared confidences she had had to steel herself against the unquiet feelings in her heart that a momentous decision was just morally wrong.

Had she known the true nature of the beast, perhaps she wouldn't have made quite such an effort.

‘I loved my brother, Mr Fabbrini. And I loved Caroline as well.' Her voice sounded unnaturally still.

Riccardo felt such rage at that admission that he had to clench his hands into tight balls to stop them doing what they wanted to do. His eyes were blazing coals, however, and Julia could feel them burning her skin, searing through her head like knives of scorching steel.

‘In which case, please accept my condolences,' he sneered coldly.

‘You don't mean that.'

‘No. I don't, and I am quite sure you can understand why. You might have loved my ex-wife. You might have seen her as the paragon of beauty and gentleness that she convincingly portrayed, but she was neither so gentle nor was she so compassionate that she couldn't conduct a rampant affair with another man behind my back!' His voice cracked like a whip around her, causing a group of people at the nearby table to glance around in sudden interest at the explosive scenario unfolding in front of them.

‘It wasn't like that,' Julia protested with dismay.

‘It hardly matters now, does it,' he said in a dangerously soft voice. ‘It was five years ago and life has moved on for me. So why don't you just get to the point of all of this and then leave? Go and find a life to live. If you imagine that you are going to find a sympathetic listener in me then you are very much mistaken, Miss Nash. Any feeling I had for my dearly departed ex-wife dried up the day she told me that she had been seeing another man and was in love with him.'

‘I haven't come here searching for your sympathy!' Julia retorted.

‘Then why
did
you come here?'

‘To tell you that…' The sheer magnitude of what she was about to say made the words dry up in her throat. She removed her spectacles and went through the pretence of cleaning the lenses, her hands unsteady on the wire rims.

Without her glasses, she looked wide-eyed and vulnerable. But Riccardo wasn't about to let himself feel sympathy for this girl. The mere thought that she was his replacement's sister was enough to fill his throat with bile. He could imagine her sitting down in a cosy threesome, nodding and listening to their vilification of him, ripping him apart when he hadn't been there to defend himself.

He finished his second drink and was contemplating a
third, which might at least blunt the edge of his mood, when she replaced her spectacles and looked at him. He decided that he wasn't going to help her. Let her stutter out the reason for this bizarre meeting.

‘Caroline and my brother had, well…had been seeing each other for the last four months of your relationship before it all came to a head.' The wine had arrived and Julia gulped down a mouthful to give herself some much-needed Dutch courage. ‘But they hadn't been sleeping together.'

Riccardo gave a derisive snort of laughter. ‘And you believed them, did you?'

‘Yes, I did!' Julia's head snapped up in angry rebuttal of his jeering disbelief.

‘Well, I may be a little more cynical than you, Miss Nash, but I could not imagine a man and a woman, both in their prime, spending four months holding hands and whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears without the whispering turning to lovemaking. My ex-wife was remarkably beautiful and highly desirable. I doubt if your brother could have kept his hands to himself even if he had wanted to!'

‘They never slept together,' Julia repeated stubbornly. That was what Caroline had told her and Julia had believed every word. It had had nothing to do with sexual attraction and everything to do with the man studying her blackly from under his brows. Caroline had been afraid of him. She had confided that to her over and over in the beginning, and the truth of what she had confided had been plain enough to read on her beautiful, pained face.

Riccardo Fabbrini had terrified her. During their brief courtship, she had seen his dark, brooding personality as exciting, but the reality of it had only sunk home once they had married and she had become suffocated by the sheer
explosive force of it. Nothing in her sweet-tempered reserves had equipped her to deal with someone so blatantly and aggressively male. The more dominant he became, the less she responded, wilting inside herself like a flower deprived of essential nutrients, and the more she wilted, the more dominant he had become, like a raging bull, she had whispered, baffled by her tongue-tied retreat.

Martin, with his conventional, unthreatening good looks and his easy smile and shy, compassionate nature, had been like balm to her wounded soul.

But they had not slept together. The thought of physical betrayal had been abhorrent to her. They had talked, communicated through those long, empty evenings when Riccardo had taken himself off to his penthouse suite in central London, nursing his frustration in ways, Caroline had once confessed, she could only shudder to imagine.

‘Perhaps not,' he now conceded with a curl of his beautiful mouth. ‘She did have a bit of a problem when it came to passion. So is this what you came here for? To make your peace with the devil and clear your brother's name now that he can answer only to God?' He laughed coldly. ‘Consider it an effort well-done.'

Julia drew in her breath and shivered. ‘I came to tell you, Mr Fabbrini, that you have a child. A daughter. Her name is Nicola.'

The silence stretched between them as agonisingly taut as a piece of elastic; then he laughed. He laughed and shook his head in incredulous disbelief. He laughed with such unrestrained humour that the group of eavesdroppers decided that whatever had been brewing had obviously been nothing or else jokes wouldn't have been cracked. Eventually his laughter died, but he continued to grin and this time there was a trace of admiration in his expression.

‘So, Miss Nash, I'm a
papa
. I thought you had come for
money, but I confess I was having a little difficulty knowing what platform you would stand on to get it. Now I know and I take my hat off to you. It is the most ingenious platform imaginable. Except for one small detail. You obviously have not catered for my personality. You must have harboured the strange notion that I was some kind of gullible fool, that you could produce your brother's offspring from behind your back and I would fall for it.' He laughed again, but this time there was no humour in his laughter and his black eyes, when they raked over her, contained no admiration. Only distaste.

‘Caroline fell pregnant two weeks before you split up,' Julia informed him in a stony voice. ‘You can choose to believe it or not, but it's the truth, and that's what I came here to say. I don't want any money from you, but I felt you ought to know the existence of your daughter. It looks as though I made a mistake.'

She stood up, her head held high, and reached for her bag next to the chair.

‘Where do you think you are going?' Having coerced him here against his will, the blasted woman was now about to sally forth with her nose in the air, leaving him sitting at a table, nursing a thousand questions which refused to surface. He did not for one minute believe that he had fathered any child, but now that the seed had been planted he intended to get to the bottom of it and force her to confess that she had made the whole thing up.

‘I should never have come here, but I felt I had to. I said what I had to say. I tried.' She proudly made her way through the crowd and was on the verge of acknowledging that she was about to make her escape, when his voice roared through the room, stopping conversation, killing laughter and compelling every head to turn in his direction.

‘Get back here!'

Julia didn't look back. She did begin to walk more quickly, though, breaking into a slight run as the exit came into sight, then, once outside, she was running, with the wind bitingly cold against her face and rain slashing down on her head. The pavements were slick and empty and she only slowed her pace because there was the very real possibility that she would fall ingloriously on her face in her heels. They were sensible-enough shoes but by no means the sturdy wellingtons she would have needed for the sudden torrential downpour.

She was concentrating so closely on her feet, her head bowed against the driving rain as she scuttled towards the underground, that she was not aware of the sound of footsteps behind her, increasing in speed until she did finally pause, only to find herself whipped around by Riccardo's hand on her arm.

‘You walked out on me!' he threw at her furiously.

‘I realise that!' Julia shouted back.

‘You think you can just show up from nowhere, start talking about my ex-wife and throw some wild story in my face before walking away!'

‘I said what I had to say, now let me go! You're hurting me!'

‘Good,' he said. ‘Some small satisfaction for me for the stunt you pulled back there.'

‘Let me go or else I shall yell my head off! You don't want to end up in a police station for assault, do you?'

‘You are absolutely right. That is the last thing I want.' He began pulling her behind him while she swatted her hand at his fingers gripping her trench coat.

‘Where are you dragging me? You might be able to get away with this caveman behaviour in Italy, but there are laws over here about men who manhandle women!'

‘There are also laws against women who think they can blackmail men out of money using a phoney story!'

He was still pulling her and eventually Julia gave up the unequal fight. If he thought he could spirit her away somewhere to prolong their nightmare conversation then he had another think coming. He would no doubt be heading for a cab, and the minute her feet hit the floor of the taxi she would insist on being driven to the nearest underground. She had said what she had come to say, what she had felt morally compelled to say, and if he chose to disbelieve her story then that was his prerogative.

He wasn't pulling her so that he could hail a taxi.

He was pulling her towards his car, a sleek black Jaguar parked discreetly down a side-road.

Julia shied away but he was much bigger and stronger than her and suffused with angry determination.

There was no way that Riccardo was going to let this little madam escape until she confessed that the whole ridiculous thing had been a web of lies.

He realised that he was furiously trying to remember when he and Caroline had made love for the last time. He knew that it was certainly towards the end of their doomed marriage. He had returned home very late and a little the worse for wear with drink, but clutching a bunch of flowers, his attempt to woo the wife who had already mentally left him. The wife, he only acknowledged later, he had already also left behind.

It hadn't worked. She had patiently allowed herself to be awakened, to be presented with the sad bunch of flowers. She had been polite enough to stick them in a vase of water, even though she would surely have been tired at nearly one in the morning. And she had been polite enough to make love, or rather to allow him to make love to her. If nothing
else, he had finally realised that it was over between them. But when had it happened…?

‘You're lying,' he said harshly. ‘And I want you to admit it.'

‘I will not get into that car with you.'

‘You will do as I say.'

The sheer arrogance of the man left Julia speechless. ‘How dare you speak to me like that?'

‘Get in the car! We haven't finished talking!'

‘I refuse…'

‘Why?' he mocked. ‘Do you imagine that your womanly assets aren't safe with me? I told you, I don't favour the sparrows.' With which he yanked open the car door and waited for Julia to finally edge into the seat.