One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ heavy slam of his heart was giving away far too much and far more than he could afford to give away—even to himself.

      She might not be able to defend her grandfather’s behaviour in telling Caesar Falconari that Oliver was his son, but she could and would defend her own past, the victim she had in reality been, Louise decided grimly.

      ‘When children grow up in an environment in which bad behaviour is rewarded with attention and good behaviour results in them being ignored, they tend to favour the bad behaviour. All they care about is the result they want,’ she informed him.

      And Caesar’s love? Hadn’t she wanted that as well? She had been too young, too immature to know properly what love—real love—meant. She speedily dismissed such a thought.

      Louise was very much the educated professional in that statement, Caesar recognized.

      ‘And you, of course, speak from personal experience?’

      ‘Yes,’ Louise agreed. She wasn’t going to make excuses for her past—not to anyone. The love and forgiveness her grandparents had shown her had taught her so much, been such priceless gifts. She knew that Oliver’s life would be the poorer for their loss.

      ‘Is that why you trained as a specialist in family behaviour?’

      ‘Yes.’ There was no point in her denying it, after all. ‘My own experiences, both bad and good, made me realise that I wanted to work in that field.’

      ‘But despite that your own grandfather believed you were not dealing properly with your own son?’

      It was too late now to regret that she hadn’t been able to deal more positively with her grandfather’s concerns about the way in which Oliver was reacting to his lack of a father. She herself believed that her son had certain distinctive character traits that could only have come down from the Falconaris—chief amongst them perhaps pride, and the hurt it caused to that pride that he did not have a father.

      ‘Oliver has issues over the identity of his father,’ she felt forced to admit. ‘But, as my grandfather was perfectly well aware, I plan to put him in possession of the facts when I think he is old enough to deal with them.’

      ‘And those facts are …’

      ‘You know what they are. After all, Aldo Barado made them public enough. I came here to Sicily with my family. I went to bed with you. According to the headman of my grandparents’ village I chased after and seduced his son. According to my father and Melinda I disgraced myself and shamed them by hanging around with boys who were quite obviously only after one thing, and then running after you. And they were right. I did humiliate and shame myself by going to bed with you. I wanted my father to sit up and take notice of me and—naively—I thought that being bedded by the most important man in the area was a good way to do that.’

      She certainly wasn’t going to tell him of the other reason she had pursued him so relentlessly. She could hardly bear to admit to herself even now the existence of that unfamiliar, shockingly sweet and half-frightening burgeoning of an emotional ache within her that had driven a genuine longing for physical intimacy with him.

      For so long all Louise’s emotional drive had been embedded in her quest for her father’s love, so the sudden urgency of her feelings for Caesar had been her first true experience of the dangerous intensity of sexual desire. The strength of her instinctive impulse to reject that feeling had been almost as strong as the feeling itself. Initially she hadn’t wanted anything to come between her and her goal. But over the days and weeks of their time in Sicily something had changed, and she had begun to see in Caesar, very dangerously, her future as the woman Caesar loved.

      How naive she had been—and how vulnerable. And how blind to everything else. Brushing off the unwanted attentions of the headman’s son as a mere nuisance, not realising how much her continued rejection of him had damaged his pride, in a way that would demand retribution. That retribution had been the lies he had told about her when he had claimed she had seduced him. Lies that both his father, her family and Caesar himself had been all too ready to believe.

      From a professional point of view she could see how much Caesar had been trapped in the demands imposed on him by his culture. She was lucky. She had escaped from its confining strictures. She was her own woman. Although wasn’t it the truth that she was still tied to the past via her son? Like her, Ollie craved his father’s love, and his presence in his life.

      Friends and colleagues had urged her to be open to the prospect of a new relationship with a man who would be a good role model for Ollie—a relationship based on love and mutual respect—but no amount of professional self-awareness or knowledge could banish her determination not to love again. For Ollie’s sake as much as her own. The raw truth was that she simply didn’t trust herself not to love yet another man who would hurt her. She had given everything she had to give to Caesar and he had rejected her, allowed her to be humiliated and shamed. Now, for her, the thought of sexual desire and of abandoning herself to that desire was locked into a fear of giving too much. Better not to allow any man into her life and her bed than risk that happening.

      ‘I used a condom on the night we had sex.’

      She could hear Caesar even now denying the son he had fathered, just as all those years ago he had denied her. Well, she didn’t care. Neither she nor Ollie needed him in their lives—even if her grandfather had believed otherwise. Her heart thumped heavily against her ribs. If only her grandfather hadn’t died. If only he was still here to guard and guide Ollie’s growth to adulthood. If only she had never met Caesar. If only she had never gone to bed with him.

      And never had Ollie? No … never.

      ‘I am not the one who is claiming you as Oliver’s father,’ she pointed out to Caesar. ‘That was my grandfather’s decision.’

      ‘But since he did make that claim …’

      Louise stopped him. ‘I suggest that you ignore it. Oliver has no need of an unwilling, doubtful father in his life who doesn’t want him, and I have no intention of pursuing any kind of claim against you. That is not why I have come to Sicily. There is only one thing I want from you, and that is your authority for the burial of my grandparents’ ashes in the churchyard of the church of Santa Maria.’

      ‘But you do believe that the boy is mine?’

      Why was he asking her such a question when she had just told him that she was prepared to let him off the hook?

      ‘The only person I intend to discuss the matter of who might be Oliver’s father is Oliver himself—once he is old enough to be able to deal with the circumstances surrounding his conception.’

      ‘Surely it would be far easier simply for a DNA test to be done?’

      ‘Why? Or do I need to ask? That could only be for your benefit and not Ollie’s. You are obviously very sure that he isn’t yours.’

      ‘What I am very sure of is that I have no intention of allowing a child who might be mine—no matter how slender that possibility might be—to grow up thinking that I have abandoned him.’

      His words shocked her—and all the more so because she could tell how heartfelt they were.

      That cold feeling chilling right through her veins wasn’t anger, Louise recognised, it was fear.

      ‘And I have no intention СКАЧАТЬ