“There is no amount!”
“A million euros? Ten?”
“No! Leave us alone!” she cried and whirled away. He grabbed her wrist.
“I can’t let you go.”
“You can’t force me to stay.” She wrenched her wrist from his grasp. “Surrogacy is illegal in Italy.”
His eyes tightened. “You’re right. Surrogacy with no biological connection is illegal in my home country.” As he saw her exhale, he continued smoothly, “But that’s not relevant in this case. You are the mother, Miss Brown, and I am the father—it’s as simple as that. I have rights. I will not let you go.”
“I will die before I leave my baby to be raised in that museum, with a father who has ice for a heart!”
Alex let her insult of his family home pass without comment, but—“Ice?”
She glared at him. “Your wife was desperate to be free of you. Desperate! Why couldn’t you face reality? Why couldn’t you just let her go?” Her eyes glittered. “If you’d just given her what she wanted, I wouldn’t have been dragged into it. I thought I was doing something good in the world—something that would make another family happy, and that I’d feel...something...other than—”
Her voice choked off as she looked away.
Alex remembered what the investigator had told him about her parents’ deaths. They’d died last autumn, just weeks before the girl had contacted the fertility clinic. There had been horrifying pictures of burned fields, her childhood home razed to the foundations. An entire farm village in Northern California had been lost by the raging fire. Sixty people had died, including Ernst and Mireille Brown.
Could that be why the girl had agreed to the surrogacy? Could she really be such an idealist—believing in true love, trying to save others to heal her own pain?
“You lost your parents,” he said slowly. Her shoulders snapped back.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He came closer. “Your parents had just died in a fire. You felt sad and alone. So you decided to help strangers have a baby.”
He saw her swallow, furiously blinking back tears. She looked away. “My mother used to say that if I was feeling sad, I should try to make someone else’s life better, and maybe it would make my life a little better too.” She looked up at him, and he saw the heartbreak in her beautiful face. “Then I realized what a mistake I’d made, thinking I could ever give up my baby. So I went to Venice. That’s when the miracle happened.”
“You discovered Chiara was dead.”
She looked at him, her expression horrified. “No! Whatever she might have done, her death was a tragedy.” She took a deep breath. “The miracle was when you said you didn’t want my baby. When you accused me of lying and told me to get the hell out. Those were the sweetest words I’d ever heard in my life. Like angels singing.”
Her words were so ludicrous they almost made him smile. His cursing had sounded like a choir of angels?
“But there are no miracles.” Her voice cracked as she looked up at the highest spire of the thousand-year-old abbey crowning the island. “Just tragedy.”
Alex stared at her. Up here on the ramparts with the wind blowing, he could taste the salt of the sea like tears.
When he’d first met Rosalie Brown, he’d imagined her to be like Chiara. She wasn’t. He saw that now. She was a do-gooder, romantic and naive. She’d tried to channel her grief into making the world a better place.
It had been a long time since he’d met anyone so unselfish. Certainly not since his sister, Margaret, had died. No wonder he hadn’t recognized it at first.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “we can raise the baby together.”
“Together?” He saw the flash of longing in her eyes, then dismay. She clearly wanted to be with her baby, but however much his opinion of her had improved, her opinion of him was obviously more dismal than ever.
Usually, he didn’t care what people thought. But for some reason, in this case he did. “Why not?”
“How? I live in California.”
“Not anymore. You will live with me in Italy until the baby is born. And after I get a DNA test, you will remain. Forever.”
“What are you saying?” she whispered. She wiped a trembling hand over her eyes. “You—you want to marry me?”
He barked a laugh, which echoed across the ramparts. It was only when he saw her flinch that he bit it back. “Forgive me. But marry? No.” He snorted. “I was married once. Never again.”