bench, her face turned up to the sun, her hand resting on her belly.
Her very distended belly.
Romeo swallowed hard and picked up the last picture, his body suspended in shock as he brought it up to his face.
Maisie, pushing a pram down a quiet Dublin street, her mouth tilted in a postcard-perfect picture of maternal bliss as she reached into the stroller.
‘Madre di Dio, what is the meaning of this?’ he breathed, his voice cold enough to chill the whole mausoleum of a mansion.
‘I will not insult your deductive powers by spelling it out for you,’ Lorenzo answered.
Romeo flung the photo down, but he could not look away from them. Spreading his fingers through the glossy images, he found further evidence of surveillance. Apparently his father had decided to stop following Romeo and focus instead on the woman he’d slept with on the day of his mother’s funeral. A woman whose goodness had threatened to seep into him, to threaten the foundations of his carefully barricaded emotions.
‘If these images are supposed to paint some sort of picture, then you’ve wasted your time. Sexually active individuals have brief encounters and go on to have relationships and families all the time. Or so I’m told.’
He’d never indulged in a relationship. In fact, he actively discouraged his lovers from even entertaining a glimmer of the idea. Romeo suppressed a grim smile. He knew his attitude to relationships had earned him the amusingly caustic label of Weekend Lover. Not that he cared. Hell, if it spelled out his intentions before he even asked a woman out, then all the better.
Affection was never on the table, the faintest idea of love strictly and actively forbidden. His interactions were about sex. Nothing more.
‘So you don’t care to know the time span during which these pictures were taken?’
‘Fattore must have had his own warped reason, I’m sure.’
Lorenzo continued to stare at him. ‘Then you won’t want to know that the woman gave her child an Italian name?’
Romeo snorted in disbelief. He hadn’t told Maisie his surname. He’d been very careful in that regard because he hadn’t wanted any association with either his mother or his father discovered, as tenuous as the connection could’ve been, seeing that he hadn’t set foot in Sicily in over fifteen years.
‘You two must have been desperate to clutch at so many straws. My suggestion to you would be to leave this woman alone to raise her child. She means nothing to me other than a brief dalliance. Whatever leverage you seek through her has no teeth.’
Lorenzo shook his balding grey head. ‘Once you have calmed down and learnt a little of our ways, you’ll realise that we don’t tend to leave stones unturned. Or facts unchecked. Your father certainly wouldn’t pin the future of his organisation, of his famiglia, on a whim. No, mio figlio, we checked and double-checked our facts. Three DNA tests by three different doctors confirmed it.’
‘How did you come by samples for these tests?’
‘Contrary to what you think of us, we’re not bumbling idiots. A strand of hair or a discarded juice cup is all we need, and quite easy to come by.’
The gross violation that deed would’ve entailed turned his stomach and primitive anger swelled through him. ‘You set your thugs loose on a little boy?’
‘He’s not just any little boy. Your woman gave birth exactly nine months after your encounter. And your son is very much a Fattore.’
MAISIE O’CONNELL FLIPPED the Closed sign to Open and enjoyed the tingle of excitement that never failed to come with that little action.
It had been a long, hard slog, but Maisie’s was finally ticking over very nicely, was making a steady profit, in fact. Putting her beloved restaurant in the hands of a professional chef while she’d taken the intensive course in gourmet Italian cooking had paid off. The added feature in one of Dublin’s top newspapers had given Maisie’s the extra boost that had seen her bookings go from half full to booked solid a month in advance.
Picking up the glass-topped menu stand, she pushed open the door and positioned it for maximum effect on the pavement.
As she turned to go back in, a stretch limo with blacked-out windows rolled by and stopped two doors down from where she’d paused. Maisie eyed the car. Although it wasn’t strange for luxury cars to pass through the quiet little village of Ranelagh, seeing as they were close to Dublin city centre, the presence of this car caused a different sort of tingle. Telling herself she was being too fanciful, she swiped a dishcloth over the surface of the menu stand and went back in. She checked on her kitchen and waitstaff of twelve, made sure preparations were under way for their first booking at midday, then went into her office.
She had roughly half an hour to get to grips with the restaurant’s accounts before she had to be back in the kitchen. As she sat down, her gaze fell on the picture propped up on her desk. The pulse of love that fired to her heart made her breath catch. Reaching out, she traced the contours of her son’s face, her own face breaking into a smile at the toothy, wide-eyed happiness reflected in his eyes.
Gianlucca. The reason for her existence. The reason the hard decisions she’d made five years ago had been worth every moment of heartache. Turning her back on the career she’d trained so hard for had not been easy. Certainly her parents had piled on enough guilt to make walking away feel like the betrayal they’d accused her of committing. Her own guilt for confirming their fears that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree was bone-deep and would probably always be. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant as her mother had at twenty-four but she refused to let the guilt prevent her from loving or caring for her child.
She’d known from a very young age that her parents, had they been given a choice, would’ve remained childless. As hard as it’d been, she’d tried to accept that not everyone was built to nurture a child. Her parents certainly had found raising her a challenge, one they hadn’t deemed as worthy as the academic careers they’d pursued relentlessly. She’d always known she came an indifferent second to her parents’ academic ambitions.
But she’d wanted Gianlucca the moment she’d found out he was growing inside her.
There had been nothing she wanted more than providing the very best for her son.
She had given him the very best.
The tiny niggle of ever-present guilt threatened to push its way through, but she smashed it down. She’d done everything she could when she’d found out she was pregnant. Even going against her parents’ intense disapproval to make that daunting trip back to Sicily. She’d tried.
Yes, but did you try hard enough?
She dropped her hand from the picture and resolutely opened the account books. Indulging in might have beens wouldn’t get the chequebook balanced or the staff paid. She was content enough. More important, her son was happy.
Her gaze drifted back to the almost-four-year-old face that was already taking the shape of the man he would one day be. To the deep hazel-gold eyes that looked so much like his father’s. Eyes that could sometimes make her believe he could see straight into her soul, just as the older pair had done to her that long afternoon and longer night in Palermo five years ago.
Romeo.
A portentous name if there ever was one. While her life hadn’t ended in fatal tragedy like the famous story, meeting Romeo had significantly altered it, her son being the only bright thing that had emerged from encountering that dangerously sexy, but deeply enigmatic Italian with eyes that had reflected enough conflict to last him several lifetimes.
Enough.
She switched on