The vehemence in his voice was searing, and the burning in his gaze was upon her like a laser.
She looked at him, her expression twisting. There was a gaping hole inside her that was getting larger every second, swallowing her.
‘Do you really think, Vito—’ the words were gritted from her, each one heavier than a stone, harder than granite ‘—that I would have let you come near me again here in the USA if I had been carrying another man’s child? Do you really think that?’
His expression changed. She could see it happening, see logic morphing through his eyes to create an entirely different expression. One that chilled her even more than his horror had chilled her.
* * *
‘So when were you going to tell me?’
The question was tautly spoken, with a distant dispassion that made it sound almost remote. Yet there was nothing remote in the emotion that was surging through him now, leaping in his blood, his heart. Nothing remote in the voice that was crying out in his head.
She carries my child! My child—our child!
He felt faint with it...with the knowledge of it. With the wonder of it. But another emotion was slicing through him, freezing his face as she stumbled into her answer.
‘Today. Later—I mean...’ She swallowed, stumbling, stammering again, hardly knowing what she was saying so huge was the hole inside her, swallowing her. ‘This afternoon. I was going to tell you while Johnny was having his nap, but then you kissed me and...’ Her voice trailed off.
He did not reply, only went on looking at her. His face was shuttered still, and it reminded her with a blow of how he’d looked when she had come to him in the bar of the hotel that was no longer his—that her mistrust of him had caused him to lose, along with half of his inheritance.
Wary. He looked wary. As if she could do him irreparable damage. As if she already had.
Again.
She reached a hand towards him, but he stood too far from her. ‘Vito, I—’
There was urgency in her voice. Desperation. But he would not hear it. Refused to hear it. Emotion was storming inside him, but he refused to hear that too. Refused everything except the harsh, harrowing question he wanted to throw at her now. Even as he prepared to speak it he knew it was not what he wanted to say. What he wanted to do.
Wrap your arms around her—sweep her to you. Hug her closer than the child she carries so that you are inseparable from her, inseparable from your child.
But his voice cut across all that.
‘How could you not tell me the very moment you knew? How could you keep it from me? How?’ he demanded again.
Emotion stormed through him—and horror too.
‘Dio mio,’ he breathed as realisation hit him. ‘I might be married to Carla! Do you not see that? I could have married another woman.’
Cold pooled in him. Had he not jilted Carla... The horror of what he might have done, in total ignorance, made him harsh.
‘I could have married Carla and never known I had a son, or a daughter! Were you insane to do such a thing? To carry my child without my knowledge? To risk denying our child its father? How dare you do such a thing?’ Anger lashed from him at the enormity of what she’d done. ‘How dare you?’
The cold was pooling in him again, arctic in its horror. Had he not found her again—had he not come to America—she would have borne his child—their child—without his knowledge. A child who would not know its own father—who would be deprived of his love, his devotion.
Memory thrust into him of his own father, whom he had loved so much, and to whom he had been the apple of his eye, his beloved only child. There was memory and there was grief—always that stab of grief that would always be there—for the loss of his father, taken before his time. And now he might have been a father parted from his child—parted by his total ignorance of its existence.
I would not have known I had a child to love!
His mother, so despairingly bereft since his father’s untimely death, would never have known she had a grandchild.
Pain convulsed him at the thought of what had so nearly been lost. A child bereft of its father, never to know its doting grandmother, to be raised in an alien land by a woman who thought it acceptable to deny a father his child...to deny her child a father who would love his child with all his heart and being.
‘How dared you not tell me?’ he hurled at her again.
His fury excoriated her, made her gasp with the force of it. She had never felt it before—never known it. She had always been the cherished one, the desired one, the wooed one, the one Vito had sought only to win her back. And now the tide of his fury was drowning her so that she could not breathe, could not speak, could do nothing but stand there, aghast, as it poured over her.
His was face was contorted as a harsh intake of breath ravaged his lungs. His mouth twisted as he spoke.