He saw it all again, that tormenting flashback to Freya and Luca lying in a twisted clinch of limbs on his bed with her slender white fingers gripping his head.
She had not been holding him to her in throes of passion; she had been tugging viciously at his hair! And she had not been kissing him hungrily; she had been desperately trying to bite!
‘Leave me,’ Enrico rasped at Fredo without lifting his head up.
‘Enrico, you—’
‘Just go.’ He interrupted whatever Fredo’s anxious voice was going to say next.
Enrico needed to be alone. The details he had never allowed himself to look at before were coming to him fast now: the whitened look of shock on her face that had changed to relief when she’d seen him standing there; the way she’d hit Luca hard enough to send him rolling off her; the dizzy manner in which she’d scrambled off the bed. ‘Enrico—thank God,’ she’d sobbed out at him.
The door closed behind the retreating Fredo. Tears were stinging at Enrico’s eyes and his throat. He was seeing the bruised swelling that had been on her bottom lip now and the finger marks on the creamy globes of her breasts as she’d dragged her robe around her to cover herself up.
He was also seeing himself standing there frozen and unyielding as she’d stumbled towards him.
‘Por Dio,’ he repeated hoarsely, then dropped into the chair and covered his face with his hands.
Upstairs, Freya was standing in the bedroom, still shaking in the aftermath of the ugly scene with Enrico, when her mobile phone began to ring. Unearthing it from the depths of her bag, she then just stood there staring at it while it jangled in her hand.
Its caller-display was telling her it was Cindy. She did not want to speak to anyone right now but she couldn’t ignore her bridesmaid.
With a flick of a button she made the connection. ‘Hi, Cindy,’ she said as casually as she could.
‘So, cara, you have a son,’ a deep, smooth-as-silk voice murmured pleasantly. ‘I congratulate you on convincing my cousin that the child is his—or is he convinced? Maybe I should check this bambino out for myself.’
Freya tossed the phone away as if it had bitten her, her feet backing her away from it as she watched it land on the floor by the bed. Her eyes had turned black with staring horror, a line of white tension circling her trembling mouth.
It wasn’t! It couldn’t be. It was as if she’d conjured him up out of the morass of ugliness she’d just been through with Enrico. Though it was Cindy’s phone number on the display, she had heard Luca’s voice! How could it be his?
Luca, she repeated. Dear heaven. Her stomach turned over as the truth really hit. Luca had somehow got his hands on Cindy’s mobile phone and was using it to call her!
A sound outside the bedroom window told her that Nicky and Lissa were back from the park and playing in the walled garden. Her mobile began to ring again, flipping her attention from one familiar sound to the other. Her shaken brain took seconds to realise that the way she’d tossed the phone away must have severed the original connection.
That was the moment it really sank in, what Luca had said, and she dived down to snatch the phone up.
‘Y-you stay away from my son!’ she bit out shrilly.
‘And miss this opportunity to pluck my cousin’s god-like wings?’ Luca mocked. ‘How much do you think the tabloids will pay for my kiss-and-tell exposé, cara? I can see the headline: Tycoon’s Sex Shame! Cousin tells all about bed-swapping with Enrico Ranieri’s bride! What do you think—it would be a nice wedding present?’
‘It’s a lie!’ Freya breathed.
‘Where in what I can describe is the lie?’ he challenged. ‘Were we or were we not discovered together in Enrico’s bed?’
Freya was so icy cold now she was shivering, the sickness clawing at the walls of her throat. In some other part of her brain she was aware of Nicky’s laughter drifting up from the garden, and the addition of Enrico’s voice as he spoke to his son.
His son!
Drawn by something she could not put a name to, Freya moved on shaking limbs to the window and looked down in time to watch Nicky run to his father, who was squatting down with his arms held open to receive the little boy.
Tears blurred the image out. ‘W-why don’t you crawl back into your dark hole again, Luca?’ she said thickly. ‘No one wants to listen to your lies here.’
‘Enrico will listen—as he did the last time. All of Europe will listen when I tell how he threw both of us out three years ago after he caught us together in his bed.’
‘He will kill you before he will let you do something so vile.’
‘He would need to find me first,’ Luca laughed. ‘Mud sticks, cara, and I will be long gone before this particular mud hits its target, with my fat payment from the lucky tabloid safely stashed inside my wallet.’
‘So why are you bothering to warn me about it?’