Demanding His Hidden Heir. Jackie Ashenden

made him want to fight her, push her. See what she was really made of.

      She had a strength to her that he hadn’t seen before, glimpses of an iron determination that equalled his own.

      But of course. She was protecting her child.

      He almost would have approved if he hadn’t been the thing she was protecting his child from.

      ‘You think you can stop me?’ he growled.

      ‘I think that ripping a child away from the only home he’s ever known is criminal, so yes. Yes, I bloody well would.’

      Her choice of words hit him in a place he shouldn’t have been vulnerable, and certainly not these days.

       Ripping a child away from the only home he’s ever known...

      It had been night when his father’s bodyguards had woken him, dragging him and a still sleepy Dante from their beds and onto the boat that would take them from Monte Santa Maria and to the Italian mainland. They’d had no time to take anything with them, no time to say goodbye to their friends or the places they’d loved. It had taken twenty minutes to be ripped away from his home and everything he’d known, and two days later he’d found himself in a one-roomed apartment in Milan, his father raging at his ‘ungrateful subjects’, his mother pale and silent, saying nothing at all.

      Could he really do the same thing to his own child?

       Like your father did to you?

      His jaw was so tight it ached. No, he couldn’t do what had been done to him, no matter how intensely he wanted to take his son and hold him fast. Keep him safe.

      Selfishness had been a characteristic of his father’s that he’d inherited, something his mother had flung in his face before she’d left, and he owned it. But right now Simon and what was best for him seemed more important.

      And Matilda was right. He couldn’t simply take the boy from everything that was familiar to him.