shop which was several sizes too big. Recalling the scornful glances of the party guests when she had walked into the ballroom, she had a sudden flashback to when she was sixteen and had attended the school prom in a dress that the manager of the care home had lent her. Mrs Clarke had said she looked lovely, but of course she hadn’t. She had looked what she was: a girl with no parents and no money, in a dress that didn’t belong to her.
Sophie would never suffer that kind of humiliation, Beth vowed fiercely. Not if she could help it. She loved the baby with all her heart, but she knew from bitter experience the importance of money. She wanted Sophie to have all the things she had never had: nice clothes, a good education, the confidence that came with feeling that you were somebody rather than a nobody.
Carefully cradling the baby in one arm, she delved into the pocket of her coat and withdrew a photograph.
‘Sophie is not my child.’
She lifted her chin to meet Cesario’s hard stare and held out the photo to him. ‘This is her mother—Melanie Stewart. Mel attended a party in London exactly a year ago. It was a big event, to celebrate something to do with Piras-Cossu taking over an English bank. I don’t know the details. But Mel met you at the party and later you invited her up to your hotel room. It was a one-night stand. She never even knew your name. But she fell pregnant that night with your baby.’
‘What utter nonsense,’ Cesario snapped witheringly. ‘I don’t appreciate having my time wasted, Ms Granger.’
Her story was so unbelievable it was almost laughable, but he was not amused. He plucked the photograph from Beth’s fingers and glanced down at the image of a voluptuous blonde. The picture meant nothing to him. He did not remember the woman. But then he did not remember much at all about the party at the exclusive Heskeath Hotel in Mayfair a year ago, his conscience taunted him.
It had been his duty to attend the reception, organised by the managing director of the new UK subsidiary of the Piras-Cossu Bank. But that night, just as tonight, Cesario’s thoughts had been with his son. For a couple of hours he’d forced himself to make polite small-talk, but he’d spent the latter part of the evening at the bar, drowning his emotions in neat bourbon.
There might have been a woman. He frowned as fractured memories forced their way into his mind. He vaguely remembered a blonde at the bar. He recalled buying her a drink, and he had a hazy memory of dancing with her.
Shock ricocheted through him. Could there be any truth in Beth Granger’s story? Could he have slept with this Melanie Stewart and have no memory of it? He’d been so drunk that it would have been a miracle if he had managed to perform, let alone father a child, he thought derisively. A miracle—but he could not discount the possibility.
Conflicting emotions surged through him: disbelief, followed by self-disgust that he might have had sex with the woman in the photograph and yet retain no knowledge of her or what had taken place between them. He could not profess that he lived like a monk. He’d had one-night stands occasionally, but they had been a mutual exchange of sexual pleasure—not a drunken fumble he had no memory of and which, if this woman Beth Granger could be believed, had resulted in a child—his child.
His eyes were drawn to the baby. A girl—named Sophie. Inferno! Was she his daughter? He felt a pain in his gut, an ache of longing for the child he had lost. Beth Granger could be lying, he reminded himself. For a start, he did not understand why she had brought the baby to Sardinia. Where was the child’s mother?
A tiny cry broke from the baby as she began to wake.
‘She’s due a feed,’ Beth explained, looking at him anxiously. ‘I need to make up her formula.’
The sound of the child’s cry pierced Cesario’s soul. He remembered the first cry his son had given as he had entered the world, and he closed his eyes for a few seconds, praying that when he opened them again he would find that he had imagined the woman and the baby.
She was still there, her attention focused on the child that she was now rocking in her arms. The baby could not be his. His mind refused to accept such an astounding idea. But he realised that he could not send Beth Granger away without listening to what she had to say.
Cesario withdrew his phone from his jacket and pressed a number on the keypad. Almost instantly there was a knock on the door and the butler entered the room.
‘Escort Ms Granger to the library and ensure that she has everything she requires,’ he instructed Teodoro. ‘I will join her shortly.’
The butler dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Please follow me, Signorina Granger.’
Feeling horribly self-conscious, Beth walked back through the great hall after the butler and expelled a sigh of relief when he closed the doors behind them and she was no longer the subject of dozens of curious glances. Her legs felt shaky. She gave a rueful grimace as she acknowledged that her encounter with the master of the Castello del Falco had left her feeling as limp as a wrung-out rag.
He was so intimidating. And so ruggedly handsome, a little voice in her head whispered. Even with that shocking scar. She wondered what had happened to him. How had he come by such a terrible injury? But, recalling his steel-hard gaze, she knew she would never have the courage to ask.
The taxi driver had carried Sophie’s pushchair and nappy bag into the castle and left them on the porch, she explained to Teodoro when he ushered her into the library. While he went to fetch them she laid the now wide-awake Sophie on the rug, and was rewarded with a winsome smile that melted her heart.
‘You are too cute,’ she told the baby girl softly. At the sound of her voice Sophie chuckled and kicked her legs. But Beth knew from experience that Sophie’s smiles would quickly turn to a demanding cry if she was not fed soon. Taking responsibility for her best friend’s baby had been a steep learning curve, she acknowledged ruefully. But never once, not even on the nights when Sophie had simply refused to sleep and cried for hours, had she regretted that Mel had appointed her as the baby’s guardian.
Even though Mel’s wishes had been clearly stated in her will, Beth had had to go through several nerve-racking interviews with Social Services before she had been deemed suitable to have Sophie and allowed to take her home from the hospital. But none of that mattered. The important thing was that Sophie would not grow up in a children’s home, as her mother and Beth had both done.
‘Your mummy wanted me to look after you, and be a mum to you in her place,’ she whispered to Sophie. ‘I will always love you, and I’ll never let anyone take you away from me. It’s just you and me, my angel.’
But that wasn’t quite true. The thought struck Beth as she shrugged out of her coat. There was also Sophie’s father to consider. Her stomach muscles tightened involuntarily as she wondered how long it would be before Cesario Piras appeared. She could not forget those moments in the ballroom when he had studied her with unconcealed contempt, as if she was something unpleasant that had crawled out from beneath a stone. She knew perfectly well that she was plain, and usually she did not care overmuch about her lack of looks, but for some reason Cesario’s dismissive expression had made her wish that she was beautiful and glamorous—like so many of his female party guests.
She sighed. There was no point wanting to be something she was never going to be, she told herself firmly. But she could at least make sure that she looked tidy and presentable. A glance in the mirror above the fireplace confirmed that her hair was no longer secured in a neat chignon but was hanging in damp rats’ tails around her face. There was no time to tie it up again when Sophie needed her nappy changed, and so she quickly removed the last of the pins and pulled a comb through her hair before she knelt down on the rug to attend to the baby.
Cesario strode across the entrance hall towards the library, his tension evident in the rigid set of his jaw. He had delegated to his chief executive the task of making a speech to the guests, and now he was intent on getting to the bottom of Beth Granger’s extraordinary story. His initial shock at her startling claim that he was the father of the child she had brought to the castle had been replaced by a healthy