‘I have not come to do anything,’ Alegra replied haughtily, ‘but be formally introduced to your daughter.’
Looking at her standing there, a diminutive figure dressed in blue, who held herself with a pride which gave her stature, Natalia had to admire just what it must be costing Alegra Knight to say that. And for a moment—just a moment—she saw Alegra’s resemblance to her brother, the same arrogant tilt to her head, the same darkly challenging eyes, the same—
No. She shook the comparison away, not wanting to think about Giancarlo right now.
‘Not if you’re going to start spitting out insults again,’ Edward refused harshly.
The eyes flashed once more, Natalia thought of Giancarlo again—and again she thrust the comparison away. ‘The only person in this room who deserves insulting is you,’ Alegra hit back. ‘So you may climb out of that defensive hole you are trying to hide in and behave like the gentleman I used to think you!’
To Natalia’s surprise, Edward smiled—albeit wryly. ‘You have the silken tongue of a Sicilian asp,’ he dryly informed his wife.
‘I have the power to bite like one also,’ Alegra returned.
And suddenly Natalia was beginning to feel definitely in the way as something she had never been privy to before began to fill the air space.
It was love. It was affection. Despite all the lies and pain and anger, it was a deep and abiding togetherness nurtured through years and years of tender loving care administered from one constant soul to another.
Bearing witness to it brought the tears back to Natalia’s eyes because this was exactly what her father had been protecting when he’d kept her a secret from everyone. Now the secret was out, and she was afraid it was going to spoil everything he had worked so hard to hold on to.
‘I have been sent to instruct you that it is time to rest,’ his wife firmly changed the subject. ‘So make these introductions so we two can go away and leave you to recover from your sinful life.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ Edward said harshly. ‘Natalia was born before I married you!’
‘Two months?’
Natalia winced, understanding the curt thrust. So did her father, who became very weary suddenly. And for her the tears became harder to fight, because in the end, and once Alegra had time to think it all over properly, the fact that Edward had married her instead of standing by his ex-lover and child said a lot about his love for Alegra.
A nurse arrived then, insisting they leave now, and a few minutes later Natalia found herself outside in the corridor with her father’s wife.
‘Don’t weep, child,’ Alegra Knight murmured, and a gentle hand came to rest on her shoulder. ‘We fight. It means nothing. We know that, even if you do not.’
‘I never wanted to come between you,’ she whispered painfully. ‘I j-just needed to know him. It was…’
‘I know.’ The gentle hand squeezed her into a thickened silence. ‘Edward has explained all. You do not need to justify yourself to me—or to anyone else concerned here, come to that,’ she added carefully.
‘He was never unfaithful to you after you married,’ Natalia felt compelled to say. ‘He never saw either me or my mother again, from the day I was born. If I’ve forgiven him for all the years of rejection, can’t you forgive him too?’
The hand was removed. Alegra began walking. ‘He was unfaithful during our betrothal,’ she said coldly. ‘Would you find it easy to forgive that?’
No, she wouldn’t, Natalia had to admit.
‘And while I was busy grieving the death of our beloved son, he was discovering he had another child to help salve his broken heart.’
‘I didn’t know about Marco until after Edward and I met, or I wouldn’t…’ Her voice trailed away on a guilty thickening of her throat, which required her to swallow before she could try again. ‘M-my mother had passed away, you see, and I found all these private papers relating to a father I never knew existed. It…’
This time she really couldn’t go on. It had been one of the lowest points in all her life to discover that the mother she had adored had lied when she’d told her that her father was dead. Twenty-four relatively happy years suddenly soured on a medley of remembered conversations about a man called Nathaniel Deyton, a merchant seaman with eyes and hair the same colour as her own, who’d had the chance to meet his baby girl only once before the sea had taken him. There had never been such a person as Nathaniel Deyton. It was a name her mother had made up and taken up when she’d moved out of London with her daughter, to live the rest of her life in a quiet little village in Suffolk where nobody knew her so could not dispute her story.
From the moment Natalia had found out about her real father, she had made it an obsession to trace him and try to get to know him. It had taken several months to locate the right Edward Knight. Yet it had taken him mere days to reply to her tentative letter of introduction. They’d met in a crowded wine bar not far from his office building, and in minutes had been so at peace with each other that it seemed strange now to look back and know that first meeting had been only six months ago.
‘He gave you the Fabergé watch, didn’t he?’
Pulling herself back to the present, Natalia sucked in a thick breath of air and nodded. ‘If you want it back, I’ll be very happy to—’
‘No, I was not asking for it,’ Alegra responded. ‘It belongs to you. You had a right to receive it. I just—missed it, that was all, several months ago, and Edward refused to say what he had done with it. So I began to worry—as wives do—whether he had found some other woman he preferred to give it to.’
‘So you mentioned as much to Giancarlo,’ Natalia murmured, beginning to see a whole new way of looking at the scene she and Giancarlo had had about the watch.
‘But it was Howard Fiske who gave the silly imaginings of a grieving woman their hard substance,’ Alegra added. ‘He rang Giancarlo in Milan and voiced his—suspicions about your relationship with Edward. Giancarlo being Giancarlo—’ she shrugged with true Sicilian understanding ‘—decided to put a stop to it before I had to find out.’