Claiming His Secret Love-Child. Cathy Williams

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      ‘About us?’ she asked, her eyes going wide. ‘What do you mean “about us”?’

      He walked over to Roxanne’s desk, picked up the paper and opened it to the page where a small paragraph was headed: Billionaire Hotelier involved with Local Interior Designer.

      Scarlett read the accompanying paragraph with her heart kicking like a wild brumby in her chest. It was only a few words about her and the studio, and thankfully no photograph accompanied it. It simply stated she was the new love interest of Alessandro Marciano.

      She closed the paper and handed it back to him. ‘Well, that just goes to show you can’t believe everything you read in the press,’ she said with an embittered look. ‘I am not your love interest, am I, Alessandro? I am just someone to sleep with, someone to slake your lust with. You just want a fill-in affair while you are here—let’s not go calling it anything else.’

      His hazel eyes caught and held hers. ‘Love is a favourite word of yours, is it not?’

      ‘It’s not just a word,’ she said. ‘It’s a feeling, and in some ways almost a way of life. You’ve always shunned it, but you don’t know what living is all about until you allow yourself to love someone more than life itself.’

      She swallowed as he stepped towards her again, his hand tilting her face so she couldn’t avoid his penetrating gaze.

      ‘Love is a very cruel mistress,’ he said with a rueful twist to his mouth. ‘She takes hold of you, and then dumps you when you least expect it.’ He released her chin to brush the curve of her cheek with the pad of his thumb, the touch so light she wondered if she had imagined it. ‘I learned not to love a number of years ago, long before I met you,’ he continued. ‘I decided it was not worth the suffering once that person is no longer with you.’

      ‘That seems a very selfish way of viewing things. What if the person you loved didn’t leave?’

      He dropped his hand from her face and moved back from her. ‘Sometimes there is no way to control such things, Scarlett.’

      ‘Alessandro…’ She took a step towards him, but his eyes had already shifted from hers and before she could stop him he moved past her to look at the screen-saver that had come up on her computer. She watched with baited breath as he looked at the montage of images of Matthew she had constructed, his body becoming as still as a lifeless statue as his eyes roved each and every photo.

      Every milestone was there—the first ultrasound picture, the first few minutes after birth, Matthew’s first tooth, his first birthday, his first wobbly steps, even his recent third birthday with the racing-car cake she had made for him.

      The silence stretched to the point of pain.

      Alessandro was not aware of his hands gripping the edge of the desk until he finally registered his fingers were numb. His heart was beating, but too fast and too hard. His stomach contents were liquefying, his vision was blurring. He couldn’t swallow, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t even think.

      ‘His name is Matthew.’ Scarlett’s soft voice carved through his swirling thoughts. ‘He turned three a couple of months ago.’

      Alessandro counted back the months and gripped the desk even tighter. It couldn’t be true. It was a lie. He had seen the test results. He was infertile, as planned.

      But the child looked like him.

      God, he even looks like Marco, Alessandro thought with a gut-wrenching pang of grief that he’d deluded himself into thinking he had locked down long ago.

      Somehow he found the wherewithal to turn away from the computer screen and face Scarlett. His heart was still doing leap-frogs in his chest but, seeing her there, standing so still and silently before him, was like a stake being driven right through his body.

      ‘He’s yours, Alessandro, even if you don’t want to ever acknowledge it,’ she said, holding his gaze determinedly.

      He scraped a hand through his hair and drew in a breath that scalded his throat. ‘I need proof. I am sorry if it offends you, but I need to have proof. It is…’ He swallowed deeply. ‘It is important.’

      She gave him one of her scathing looks as she folded her arms across her body. ‘I believe you can buy a DNA kit off the internet. I am quite willing to allow you to use it.’

      She wasn’t supposed to say that, Alessandro thought with another wave of dread. Not if she had lied to him. The way she had suggested a test the other day and then instantly backed down had made him think she was still lying. But there was no way she would give him the go-ahead for a test that would prove without a doubt who was the child’s father. Besides, she’d had three years to try and force a paternity test on him and yet she hadn’t done so. The legal system was full of such cases these days—men who had been paying out large sums of money for children had begun to fight back, insisting on proof the children they were supporting were actually biologically theirs.

      ‘I don’t know what to say…’ He hated admitting it, but it was true. He was lost for words. He had never been in a situation like this before. He had always prided himself on being in control, which was why he had insisted on having a vasectomy in the first place. He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened to Marco. He couldn’t bear to put a child of his through it, not knowing what he knew about himself and his family.

      ‘“Sorry for not believing you” would be a very good start,’ she said with crispness in her tone.

      He swallowed again to clear his throat. ‘I will have to save that for when I know for sure.’

      She rolled her eyes in disdain. ‘You can’t do it, can you? You can’t even for a moment harbour the possibility that you got it wrong.’

      His jaw felt so tight he thought his teeth were going to crack. ‘Do you have any idea of what this is like for me? Do you?’ he asked.

      She glared at him with chips of grey-blue fire in her gaze. ‘You’re not going to get the sympathy vote from me, Alessandro. I was the one who carried your child for nine miserable months, and delivered him after an eighteen-hour labour without his father there to support me.

      ‘Don’t talk to me about how this is for you. You don’t even know half of what it’s been like for me. I have struggled to provide for my child. I’ve had to put him in crèche when I would much rather be at home with him, but what other choice did I have? I can’t even afford to send him to the school of my choice when the time comes, because his arrogant, always-right untrusting bastard of a father wouldn’t accept that he might have somehow got it wrong.’

      Alessandro felt as if an avalanche had hit him. The first glimmer of tears in her eyes was like the blunt end of a telegraph pole hitting him in the mid-section. He moved towards her, but she swung away and snapped up a tissue from a pretty little box with primroses on it. Funny, the little inconsequential things you noticed when everything else was spinning out of control, he thought as he watched her wipe at her eyes and discreetly blow her nose.

      ‘I’ll arrange to see a doctor tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It might take a day or two to get the sperm-test results back from Pathology.’

      Scarlett turned and looked at him with a puzzled frown. ‘Sperm tests?’

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