The Sicilian's Secret Son. Angela Bissell

face heated and she glanced away. She didn’t want to think about sex with Luca. Not while he was sitting at her dining table looking so handsome and compelling.

      Bringing him up here had been a calculated risk. They could have gone to the cosy café at the Wilkinsons’ farm shop half a mile down the road, or even sat on a bench in the local park to talk. But they wouldn’t have had complete privacy like they had here.

      And she wasn’t concerned for her safety. Despite her knee-jerk reaction downstairs, her gut told her Luca wasn’t a physical threat to her or Ethan.

      ‘But you weren’t on the Pill?’

      ‘No,’ Annah confirmed.

      ‘And condoms aren’t foolproof,’ he added, voicing all the same thoughts that’d run through Annah’s head in the beginning, when she’d struggled to accept she was pregnant.

      ‘Apparently not.’ She took another deep breath. ‘You were entitled to know and I wanted to tell you—but I had no idea how to contact you.’ That last sentence sounded faintly accusatory, and she cringed inwardly. She didn’t want to sound petulant because he hadn’t given her his number. He’d told her he was leaving the country. Annah had understood what he was offering: one night, no strings attached.

      Luca brushed a hand over his face, dragging his thumb and fingers down the sides of his jaw. He was clean-shaven, but his five o’clock shadow was already growing in. Annah could hear the scrape of fine stubble under his hand. ‘I hadn’t thought about the need for contact in case there were...consequences,’ he said, his expression pained.

      They were both silent.

      After a moment, he said, ‘Tell me how—and why—you ended up meeting with my father.’

      Annah picked up her mug and swallowed a mouthful of tea, then kept the mug in her lap, hands wrapped around it, trying to absorb the lukewarm heat from the china. ‘Does it matter now?’ she said, her chest tightening at the prospect of reliving the encounter. ‘What’s done is done. The last five years can’t be reversed.’

      ‘It matters,’ said Luca, the sudden obdurate angle of his jaw not unlike Ethan’s whenever he dug his little heels in about something.

      Annah sighed. ‘I tried to find you on social media,’ she said, omitting to mention she’d actually searched the more popular sites before discovering she was pregnant. After their night together, forgetting about him had been difficult. Eventually, curiosity had won out, although it didn’t get her far. She knew his name but not much else, and she quickly discovered dozens of online profiles for men named Luca Cavallari. Not one of them was the dark, sexy stranger she’d spent a night with in a plush hotel room in London.

      ‘I’m not on social media.’

      ‘So I discovered.’ She put her half-drunk tea on the table. ‘I searched the Internet using your name combined with New York and then Rome, since that’s where you said you were originally from.’ But that had been a lie; Luca was Sicilian. ‘It took ages, but eventually I came across a photo of you at a gala fundraiser in Rome.’

      Annah’s heart had leapt at the two-dimensional image of him, gorgeous and suave in a tuxedo, then plunged when she’d seen the glamorous woman on his arm. The photo had been two years old at the time, but her stomach had still twisted with silly jealousy. ‘The caption mentioned your family’s company. I discovered there was an office in London and called to see if someone could give me a phone number or email address for you.

      ‘I got the runaround, though. The receptionist said you’d left and they didn’t have forwarding details. I couldn’t believe that no one in your own family’s company was able to contact you. I kept calling back, but I just got transferred to a different person with the same story.’

      It had been so frustrating—and humiliating. ‘In the end I lost my cool and did something stupid,’ she confessed. ‘I blurted out that I was pregnant with your child and suggested somebody might like to pass on the information.’ She huffed out a humourless laugh. ‘It got a reaction at least. A woman called me within an hour and invited me to go in for a meeting two days later.’

      Annah looked down at her hands. ‘Until I got there, I’d thought maybe I was going to meet you,’ she said, stopping short of confessing that a part of her had fizzed with anticipation at the prospect despite the awkward circumstances. ‘But it was your father.’

      She glanced at Luca. A deep groove had settled between his eyebrows, and a muscle flickered in his jaw.

      ‘He wasn’t very kind,’ she said, vastly understating Franco Cavallari’s demeanour. ‘He treated me like a gold digger. Wrote a cheque for ten thousand pounds and told me to go have an abortion.’ Her voice wobbled at the memory. ‘I tried to leave without taking it, but he pushed it into my bag and then had me escorted out of the building. I ripped the cheque up as soon as I got home,’ she added.

      ‘What else did he say?’

      ‘Not much.’

      ‘Annah.’

      She sighed again. ‘He said you would have handled it yourself if you were still in the country. Then he said you wished me well and hoped this would put an end to the matter.’

      Those words had cut deeper than any others. After a burly man had shown her the door, she’d hurried away on shaky legs, found a toilet in a shopping mall and promptly thrown up.

      ‘Did he threaten you?’

      ‘Not exactly—not in words. But he was...intimidating.’ And convincing. Annah had gone home believing the worst—that Luca had spurned her and his unborn child and not had the courage or decency to do it in person.

      Emotion clogged her throat, and she rose suddenly and rushed to the back door. With trembling hands she tried to open it, but the deadbolt jammed and she cursed under her breath—why hadn’t the landlord replaced it like he’d promised?—and then her fingers blurred alarmingly before her eyes.

      She blinked furiously. She was not going to cry. She just needed some air.

       If only this blasted lock—

      It gave way and she yanked the door open, stumbled out to the terrace, and gulped in a breath of the crisp March air. Seconds later the back of her neck tingled, alerting her to Luca’s presence before his deep voice rumbled behind her.

      ‘I didn’t know you were pregnant, Annah. If I had, all this would have turned out very differently. It’s important you understand that as we move forward.’

       Move forward?

      Annah wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that entailed.

      Curling her hands over the railing, she looked out at the treetops and the hilly fields and farmland beyond. It was quiet in Hollyfield—too quiet sometimes—but the countryside was pretty, the area safe, the villagers friendly and kind.

      She and Ethan were settled here. Content. She didn’t want his life disrupted like hers had been too often as a child.

      But Luca was here and he wasn’t going away. Annah had to deal with this. Deal with him. Straightening her back, she turned and faced him. ‘What now?’

      ‘Take me to my son,’ he said.