She’d thought that she would be the one reassuring Gina that her dad would still be around even if he would no longer be living under the same roof as they were but, in the end, it was Riccardo who did all the talking. This was the tender side to him she had witnessed over the past weeks in his relationship with his daughter. There was no escaping his devotion, and Gina, instinctively, must have recognised that and believed him implicitly when he told her that he was going to see her as often as he possibly could, at least twice a week.
It was so hard to think that this was the same man who could be so cold and hostile when it suited him.
Later, with Gina in bed, the cold, hostile stranger returned. He would get his lawyer to clarify financial arrangements, he informed her, and he wanted guarantees that her volatile mood swings wouldn’t influence his agreed visiting rights.
She looked terrified, curled up on the chair while he towered above her, but it didn’t suit Riccardo to lessen the impact of his forceful personality. If anything, he wanted her to know that he would do whatever it took to assume his parental rights, just in case she got it into her head that he might disappear into the background at some convenient point in the future.
‘And just to warn you,’ he said, walking towards the bay window and perching. ‘Expect a little disruption in your life. Up until now, I’ve kept this situation to myself, but that’s over.’
‘Disruption?’ Charlotte asked, bewildered. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Reporters. For Gina’s sake, I’ll try and keep them off your back, but I’m high profile in the world of business. This unusual situation is bound to generate some interest. So…’ He walked towards the door and she followed his leisurely progress across the room warily. ‘No men. There’s a thin line between reporting and scandal.’
‘I thought you didn’t care about what other people thought of you, Riccardo!’ Charlotte said, stung by his implication that she couldn’t wait to jump into a relationship the minute he walked out of the front door.
‘I don’t.’ He paused, and in his next sentence he managed to tell her exactly what he thought of her. ‘But Gina might find it very confusing. And she is the important one in the equation, isn’t she?’
CHAPTER NINE
CHARLOTTE’S only brush with the press had been a year and a half ago in an article in the local newspaper about the estate agency’s expansion into the Midlands market. It had been tucked away on one of the middle pages, where space was given to heart-warming anecdotes and readers’ views, under the corny heading of: AND NOW ON A LIGHTER NOTE! The reporter in question had been a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed school leaver who had anxiously consulted her list of questions and written a flattering report about the dynamic young executive who still managed to be a super-mum. Instead of focusing on interest rates, difficult first-time buyer markets or the surge away from London to cheaper outlying districts, she had concentrated on the feminist angle of the woman who could have it all. Frankly, Charlotte had not recognised herself in the descriptions.
She supposed that this was what happened to the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed local reporters—they hit the big time, went to work on national newspapers and mutated into sharks that could scent blood from fifty paces away.
They had homed in on the lucrative theme of ‘billionaire with a past’, and a shady one at that. She had nothing to say on the subject whenever the phone rang, and least of all when she was confronted with any of them invading her private space. But she seemed to have emerged from the whole saga as a sex siren with an agenda, though how they had arrived at that conclusion she had no idea, considering she hadn’t asked him for a penny in all the time she had been a single mother. It was a question she hadn’t put to them, too concerned to protect Gina from the invasive publicity, and too harassed from fending off the sudden surge of interest everyone seemed to be taking in her, from close friends to nodding acquaintances. She had fielded enough words of advice to fill an encyclopaedia.