The Surprise Conti Child. Tara Pammi

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СКАЧАТЬ Maybe you could visit us and meet Izzie a couple of times over the next couple of years so that you aren’t a complete stranger? I could bring her here for holiday, to meet Luca and Valentina, if they’re interested.

      “All I want is a promise that if anything were to happen to me, you’d...”

      Her words trailed away as Leandro became still. The muscles in his face pulled taut over his features, a white pallor to his olive skin.

      Her outstretched hand lay between them. And his gaze on the envelope, frozen.

      “Leandro?”

      The swath of his eyelashes flickered. His rough breath rattled loud in the room.

      With gut-wrenching clarity, Alex realized that he’d rather she was lying.

      From the moment she’d spoken Isabella’s name, it wasn’t the veracity of her claim he’d doubted. What had kept him silent, even as his grandfather had shredded her, was that Leandro needed her to be lying.

      “You wish Isabella didn’t exist.” Horror filled her, turning her voice into a whiplash. “Do you despise me that much?”

      He jerked around, pain streaking through his eyes. “What I feel about her has nothing to do with you.”

      That’s good, she told herself. She couldn’t bear it if he despised Isabella like he did her. She wouldn’t allow it.

      How much do you know of that man? Her mom’s question came back to her now.

      She didn’t know that much, really.

      Her intense attraction to him seven years ago, her fascination with him, the connection she’d felt with him, had been inexplicable. She stole another greedy glance at him, unable to stop herself. Lean and tall, he wore his power effortlessly and she wondered if that had been the draw for her.

      Hands shaking, she stuffed the envelope back into her handbag. She needed to leave. Before she made this about her. Before she asked any more of those stupid questions...

      Before she forgot that this man had crushed her tender heart in such a way that it hadn’t mended again.

      * * *

      “Show me the pictures,” Leandro finally forced himself to say.

      Alexis stilled with her back to him, her slender shoulders a tense line.

      His voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it in years, as if forming such simple words was beyond his capability. Told himself again and again that he was composed.

      If he acted like it, he hoped his rioting emotions would catch on that he was composed, that he would survive through this new development in his life like he always did.

      Giving in to the shame that he had behaved in a way he detested was only self-indulgent. Giving in to the guilt that clawed at him that he had abandoned his child...would only render him useless.

      His head jerked up, the realization that he believed Alexis stunning him anew.

      He believed that she was telling the truth, that her daughter was his?

      Antonio would call him a fool, their lawyers would tell him to demand a DNA test. The rational, sensible part of him, which had been born out of necessity at a young age, warned that he was being reckless. That Alexis’s poise, her self-sufficiency, her declaration that she wanted nothing from him, that they all could be lies.

      She could have waited all these years just so she could make a bigger splash, demand a bigger payoff.

      He wasn’t unaware of his draw for women. If they fell like flies for Luca’s charm, they went rabid because of how sacrosanct his privacy was to him, because the media, frequently and fervently, painted him as the perfect man, still mourning his wife.

      Yet that same instinct that had drawn him to her drowned out everything else. “Show me the pictures.”

      Knuckles turning white, her fingers tightened over the straps of her bag. Her reluctance now would have been comical, if not for the fierce churning in his gut. “I didn’t come to force you to be a father.”

      He moved closer, uncaring of the tremble in her lips, the slight widening of her eyes. Crowded her lithe body against the door, his self-discipline in tatters now. “You are afraid now? After you came all this way?”

      Something in his tone must have finally registered because she pulled out the envelope.

      He moved back toward the bed and spread them out on the dark cover.

      There were ten, different sizes and in different poses.

      His heart thundering, he picked up one eight-by-ten, a close-up. With jet-black hair that framed her face and serious gray eyes, and the cast of her features, drawn in chubbiness instead of sharp planes, the little girl was his mirror image.

      The girl, no, Isabella...was his daughter. His own flesh and blood.

      “There is nothing of me in her,” came Alexis’s reply behind him. Tentative and reverberating with a quiet joy. “Every morning, I look at her and I’m amazed that she’s mine.”

      Inhaling roughly, he turned.

      Raw emotion glittered in her eyes. Walking closer, unaware of her own actions, he was sure, she studied him avidly. He knew she was seeing her daughter, no, their daughter in his face.

      Still, her gaze was like a physical caress. Possessive and hungry and intent. And deeply disconcerting for the instant ache it evoked in him.

      He looked at the picture and then at Alex. “That determined chin, that’s you.”

      A smile curved her mouth, transforming her into a stunning beauty. “Really?”

      “Where is she now?” he asked, more to distract himself from the scent of her fluttering toward him. Subtle yet lingering. Like the woman herself.

      “With my parents. Isabella and I live with them. A friend of mine has a boy of Izzie’s age and she takes her during the day. You can keep the pictures.” She looked through her bag and extracted visiting cards and extended them to him. Like a salesgirl pushing a product. “These have all my numbers and email address. Just call me in advance, because after the accident and this trip, I can’t take off more—”

      “In advance for what?” he repeated.

      She shrugged but hurt shadowed her eyes. “Y’know...if you decide to see her.”

      He emerged from the emotional knockout, her intention in all the things she had told him tonight shaping into coherence. His gut tightened.

      When he made no move to take the cards, she put them on the small study table. “I’ll be in Milan for two more days if you have any questions.” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “If you can arrange a car for me, I’ll be off.”

      A growl he couldn’t control emerged low in Leandro’s throat.

      She thought she would show him pictures of his daughter СКАЧАТЬ