before he gave a brief shake of his head, then descended the shallow steps and strode away.
Tempted to yell a rude word or two after him, she resisted and instead closed the door with a snap and leaned back against it until her legs regained some strength.
Never in her life had she imagined being caught in a trap like this.
One day she’d stop feeling so damned guilty, because wasn’t it all for the best?
Of course, she assured herself. For him as well as for…well, everyone.
She hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true.
A flimsy excuse. But she ought to be happy at emerging unscathed and just forget the whole thing ever happened.
Forget?
She lifted the back of her hand to scrub at her lips, which still tingled with the memory of Marco Salzano’s kiss.
CHAPTER THREE
THE following day, instead of driving home after work, Amber took the route to her sister’s home.
The seventies house that Azure and her husband, Rickie, were gradually restoring with Amber’s occasional help was in an outer suburb where real estate was less horrendously expensive than in more fashionable areas.
Sitting at the scarred auction-bargain table in the big kitchen, Amber sipped at the cheap wine her sister had poured. Azure was on her second glass, and was now smiling at the plump, rosy-cheeked baby on her knee—a smile so special it caught at Amber’s heart—but the baby, unimpressed, wrinkled his face up and whimpered crossly.
Azure handed him over to his aunt while she poured milk into a plastic sippy cup.
Amber bent to kiss the amazingly smooth, warm skin of the baby’s temple and studied him while he looked at her interestedly with round eyes so dark she couldn’t determine their colour, and he babbled in his own private language interspersed with the odd Mama and Dada and even Namba which Amber hoped was his effort at Auntie Amber.
Rickie’s eyes were dark too, inherited from his Maori grandfather along with the black curls that Benny’s soft fuzz promised to duplicate.
In the baby’s blob of a nose, chubby face and tiny pouting little mouth there was certainly no hint of the man who had filled Amber’s flat with his utterly adult male presence and striking features.
Seeing his mother approach with the cup, the little boy wriggled to the floor with a demanding “Ma!”
“At the table,” she said firmly, perching him again on her own knee as she sat down.
“Azure,” Amber felt driven to say, “you’re sure there’s no chance he’s Mr. Salzano’s baby?”
She recognised with a sinking feeling a flicker of fear in her sister’s guileless eyes, belying Azure’s defiant, “I told you, he misunderstood my letter. I never said that!”
“But you did have sex with him.” Unbelievable though it seemed, Azure had confessed to that when Amber pressed her about the mysterious Venezuelan.
“Once. Oh, don’t remind me!” Azure wailed. Benny stopped drinking his milk and began to wail too.
She soothed him, and when he settled again she said, “I didn’t stop taking the pill until after that night. Once Rickie and I had decided we’d get married when we came home it didn’t seem important. And I’ve never slept with anyone but Rickie before or since. So it can’t be—”
“You did use a condom that night?” Something she’d assumed when she’d cornered her sister the day previously.
Azure shrugged. “What does it matter?” she muttered, her eyes fixed on the baby.
Amber was horrified. “You took an awful risk with a stranger!”
“We weren’t thinking. Too much wine, I guess. He was mortified when he realised… It’s okay, I had all kinds of tests when I found out I was pregnant. I don’t want to talk about it any more, now Benny’s safe. You didn’t tell Marco about him, did you? You promised!”
Amber had promised in the end despite huge reluctance, faced with an hysterical but persuasive sister whose reasoning seemed fireproof, and who fervently swore there was no way her baby’s father could be anyone other than the man who was now her husband. “No. But if there’s any chance Benny’s his—”
“Everyone says Benny looks like his dad. You did!”
Amber had, before a dark-haired, dark-eyed man appeared on her doorstep with a fantastic accusation that Azure had later convinced her wasn’t possible.
Amber closed her eyes—a mistake. The shadowy figure lurking in the back of her mind became a full-blown living-colour picture of a tall, gorgeous man with a blaze of anger in his almost-black eyes and a mouth that, despite its seductive contours, expressed an unbending will when it wasn’t twisted in contemptuous disbelief.
A mouth that could also be gentle, persuasive, despite his suspicion of her and his angry frustration—a mouth that had wrought some kind of erotic magic on her senses.
And though his eyes had blazed in fury, they had shown unwilling but genuine concern when he’d seen she felt ill.
Opening her own eyes, she demanded, “Why ask Marco Salzano for money, then?”
“Like I said before,” Azure retorted, “money’s nothing to people like him. His family made a fortune mining gold and diamonds way back—and later, oil.”
“He told you that?” Boastful on top of everything.
“Sort of. He was so casual about it I knew he wasn’t having me on. And I picked up some information later about the family. They’re big landowners, well-known and still seriously rich. You should have seen the place he took me to.” Awe momentarily lit Azure’s eyes, then she blushed. “And that was just his city pad.”
No sleazy by-the-hour hotel, then. Of course not, for a man with his innate male elegance and what her and Azure’s grandmother would call breeding, undiminished by the rough beard shadow and his cavalier attitude towards Amber. He had, after all, mistaken her for her sister.
Despite the three years’ difference in their ages, people often mistook one of the Odell girls for the other.
Azure said, “It was lucky you hadn’t told him who you really were. I’m sorry you had to get involved. I know you hated the idea.”
Maybe, Amber thought, she should have stood firm in her initial shocked refusal, but Azure’s denials had been very convincing, and since childhood Amber had taken seriously her role of elder sister, warning her younger sibling to look both ways when crossing the road, defending her in schoolyard scraps, and forever getting her out of trouble. A hard-to-break habit.
Benny pushed away the sippy cup, tipping it over. Righting it, Azure continued, “I’m really, really grateful you made him go away, Ammie.”
From what Amber had seen of the man, it would take a team of wild horses to make Marco Salzano do anything. Whereas she herself had allowed her sister’s reasoning to override her aghast objections, her deeply held principles and her better judgement.
The baby, who had been playing with his mother’s hair, turned to Amber with a heart-melting dimpled grin.
A clutch of fear for him gave her a taste of Azure’s terror when she’d learned of Marco Salzano’s visit. “You could get a DNA test,” she suggested.
Azure flatly vetoed that. “Rickie and I have only just got back together again. I daren’t rock the boat. He’d go ballistic if he knew Marco was here. I can’t ask him to take a test now!”
Amber had to concede the potential complications were horrendous. Surely Benny’s welfare was the most important thing. “You didn’t miss any of your pills before…?”