‘This is not discreet, sir,’ Dario lamented in a studiously formal manner.
Gaetano ground his teeth together. He wasdonewith discretion. He rarely lost his temper but there was a knot of rage gradually tightening inside him. That rage had had twenty-four hours to grow. Lara had stolen his child from him, deprived him of his paternal rights and denied his son the benefit of a father. For what reason would he tolerate such treatment?
‘I’ll be out of your way in five minutes,’ the last office occupant on the floor informed Lara without even looking at her.
And cleaning while being ignored by those who did overtime was exactly how Lara preferred to work. She had learned that it was best to melt into the woodwork. Her hair was concealed by a beanie, her overall baggy enough to conceal any hint of the shape of the female body inside it. The last thing she wanted was male attention when she was alone in an almost empty office block. Her unwelcome experiences in that line from her years living with her adoptive mother had made her very cautious around men.
As the man departed, leaving her free to empty the rubbish bin and run a mop across the floor, she donned her ear buds. Soon she was humming beneath her breath while planning what she would do to keep Freddy amused the next day. Just letting him pelt round the house didn’t work. He was a lively, demanding child, better kept occupied than allowed to get bored.
Gaetano strode down the corridor of the anonymous office block where his wife worked...cleaning. Did she enjoy being a martyr? Saying she didn’t want or need his money when she was forced to do such lowly work to survive? Puttinghimin the wrong even though she had deserted him and lost herself so very efficiently? When he saw her bent down in the office, he could not initially believe that that tiny amorphous figure was Lara. She looked like a homeless person rather than a young, attractive woman. She hadn’t noticed him because she was too busy listening to music and how safe was that for a woman on her own in such a place?
And then even as he thought that Lara whirled round and almost leapt in the air in fright, the hand on the mop loosening its grip and letting it drop with a clatter against the bucket as she pressed her palm against her heart instead.
‘What on earth...?’ she gasped breathlessly, studying him with wide disbelieving eyes.
Such exotic eyes too: the aquamarine colour of the Adriatic Sea that washed the shore of Mosvakia, that indescribable peacock-blue-green shade that he had never seen in any other face. The very first thing he had noticed about her.
‘How the heck did you find me? How the hell did you even get past the security guard at the entrance?’ Lara hissed furiously.
‘You blocked me on your phone. Did you expect me to take that lying down?’ Gaetano raked at her.
Lara dragged her beanie off with an exasperated hand, her face hot with embarrassment that he had chosen to ambush her during her cleaning shift. Wildly tossed strawberry waves fell round her shoulders and she pushed them angrily back behind her ears. ‘I’m not having a fight with you, Gaetano, not here where I’m supposed to be working. I’ll see you tomorrow when I am available. I amnotavailable right now!’
As he stood in the office doorway, sheathed in a black cashmere overcoat and a dark grey suit teamed with a red shirt and a blue silk tie, Gaetano slashed a silencing hand in the air. It was, for Lara, a disturbingly regal and commanding gesture such as she had never seen from him before and it rather intimidated her.
‘I don’t care,’ he shot at her. ‘Last night you told me that I had a son and you seemed surprised that I didn’t look at him in the park. I didn’t know that he couldbemy son! And if heismy son, I don’t even know his name!’
Lara folded her lips into a flat line. ‘Naturally, since you tracked me down to the level of knowingwhenI went to the park, I assumed you also knew about him.’
‘I flew out here the instant I had an address for you. The detective agency had not completed the report. I was told that there was a child, but he was estimated as several months older and I assumed that he wasn’t mine.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gaetano...how could he be anythingotherthan yours when you were my first lover?’ Lara derided in angry dismissal of that explanation. ‘Keep your comforting self-delusions to yourself! I will not be insulted by that kind of insinuation because you want to put our marriage behind you as if it never happened!’
Gaetano’s dark eyes were now burnished by a fiery glitter, his lean darkly handsome face still taut with tension. ‘What is his name?’ he asked rawly.
‘Frederick. I named him after my grandfather, but I call him Freddy,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘I’m afraid you’re not named on the birth certificate.’
Another spear of anger pierced Gaetano’s tough hide. He felt almost as though he had been written out of existence and their marriage with it. He stalked closer to her, his dark brooding gaze intense. ‘Did you even think about what you were doing? About the legalities of lying on such a score? You are not allowed to rewrite my son’s ancestry and deny him his father just because it suited you to do so. That is not your choice to make.’
‘I thought you would want his ancestry hidden,’ Lara argued helplessly, taken aback by his vehement objections. ‘You didn’t want me as a wife...why would you have wanted a child with me?’
‘Mannaggia!’Gaetano vented in sheer frustration, barely able to cope with his loss of temper because he had been trained in childhood never ever to lose his temper. His wild tantrums as a young child had appalled his big brother. ‘We will not discuss that statement here and now,’ he bit out in a roughened undertone. ‘But you must see that, even were the first statement to be true—and I’m not saying itis—the two things are not the same.’
Lara gathered up her equipment, stacked it noisily on her cleaning trolley and moved to the next office beneath his incredulous scrutiny, which made it clear that he could not credit that she could dare to continue with her job in his presence. ‘No, I don’t see or accept that,’ she finally replied and got stuck into her job again.
She refused to give an inch to his expectations. He might be a king but he was notherking. Good grief, had she broken the law when she registered her son as a single woman and claimed that she did not know the father’s name? She hadn’t thought about stuff of that nature during her pregnancy when her only driving motivation had been to hide and ensure that nobody found out she had ever been foolish enough to marry an amnesiac, who had turned out to be so much more than she could ever have suspected. A dark horse, indeed. And the instant Gaetano had rememberedwhohe was andwhathe was, he had spurned her. Her pained ruminations as she mopped the floor in rigid silence brought her right up to the very toes of his polished and, she was certain, highly expensive shoes.
‘Stop this,’ Gaetano bit out savagely. ‘Stop trying to ignore me! I’m not going to go away. I am a very persistent, very determined man.’
‘And I am a very angry, very bitter woman,’ Lara snapped, still without looking at him.
Without warning, Gaetano lifted her off her feet and deposited her gently on the side of a desk. The mop had fallen out of her hands with a clatter. ‘That must be my fault, then,bambola,’ he breathed with regret, sharply disconcerting her. ‘You were not an angry, bitter woman when I met you...’
That truthful point released her fierce tension, and she was startled by the surge of prickling tears that hit the backs of her eyes because she was not a cry baby either.Bambola...doll...his pet name for her, a name she had believed she would never hear again, and it unleashed an anguished flood of memories inside her that hurt. ‘Go away...’ she told him shakily.
Gaetano trailed a fingertip across the single tear that had spilt down her cheek. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper and raised my voice.’
‘We’re not the same people we were two years ago.’