‘I know you might not care for this alternative…’ Riccardo lowered his voice, a man giving great thought and consideration to a delicate issue. ‘But I can protect Gina more if she’s with me.’
‘No!’
‘Hear me out, Charlie!’ The lazy voice was suddenly as sharp as the crack of a whip, and Charlotte sat up, momentarily lost for speech. ‘The reporters that swarm around you wouldn’t dare do the same with me. I have people who fend my calls, and when my line is temporarily redirected, as it is now, they simply siphon off the unwelcomed calls. If someone I know needs to talk to me, they have my mobile number. I also have bodyguards. You wouldn’t have noticed them. They’re very discreet, and of course will disappear if I ask them to.’
‘You have bodyguards? What kind of world do you live in?’
‘The kind of world where the wealthy are possible targets. You forget, I am Italian. My country has its own past history of kidnappings. If Gina were with me, I could ensure that at least some of the inconveniences of what she is experiencing now could be dealt with.’
‘No way!’ Charlotte was still recovering from the shock of knowing that Riccardo had bodyguards. Where had they been lurking when he had been staying with her? Behind the bushes in the back garden? Under the mat at the front door? She worried at the idea now put into her head that, with all the publicity going on like a whirlpool around them—from which she was emerging in a pretty poor light through no fault of her own—Riccardo would stand a fair chance of persuading a court of law that, decent and honourable man that he was, he might be more suitable as a full-time carer. Even though he had given no hint that he might have that trick up his sleeve. Even though logic and reason told her that judge would probably file in favour of the mother. But doubts, even unreasonable doubts, had a nasty habit of creeping under the skin like a deadly virus.
‘Why no way?’ Riccardo asked in a long-suffering voice. ‘We both want what’s best for her, don’t we?’
‘Yes, well, she’s coping all right at the moment.’
‘I thought you said that she wasn’t.’
‘It’s a nuisance.’
‘And you came here to put the blame firmly at my door,’ Riccardo said dryly.
‘No!’ Charlotte flushed uncomfortably.
‘You saw a couple of reporters and blew a fuse. Look, there’s another solution to this problem, and maybe this time you’ll give it a bit more thought. Neither of us wants to be in the glaring limelight. You have a job to do, as do I, and Gina has to go to school without her life being disrupted. We continue as we are and who knows how long we’ll be a scandalous affair.’
Charlotte snorted sourly under her breath. ‘None of this would have happened if you weren’t such a big cheese.’
Riccardo raised his eyebrows and smiled slowly at her, and Charlotte reluctantly grinned back.
‘Marry me,’ he said abruptly, never imagining he would return to this place having once been rejected. He noticed that she didn’t immediately recoil. ‘As a couple, we would have no story. A normal life, Charlie. You could keep your job, even though it’s not in my nature to see my wife work, and you wouldn’t have to think that at any given time you might be pounced on by a reporter wanting an update. You’ve seen how the kids of wealthy people can become specimens under the tabloid press microscopes…’
‘Not all.’ So, he hadn’t mentioned the ‘L’ word, so she still had all her arguments about marriages of convenience being empty shells—but she had lived with him…shared the same space. She had liked it, whether she was willing to admit it or not, had liked seeing her daughter with her father. In life, people made sacrifices. She would sacrifice the perfect dream and instead live out the shared one, one in which she loved but was not loved in return. She’d be liked, though, and as the mother of his child always respected. Would it really be so bad?