‘You can stay home with Freddy until we get all this sorted out,’ Gaetano suggested. ‘I’d be very grateful.’
He was sayingpleasethe only way he knew how. Underneath he was still the man she had married, she registered, just a smoother, slicker version, superbly well groomed and with his phenomenal intensity currently muted. And he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy at all that she had let him kiss her—she could tell by the furrow on his brow, the tightness round his mouth, even the veiled darkness of his gaze. There was no triumph and nothing nasty or threatening about his brooding silence. Unfortunately, Lara didn’t want tobeaware of such things, not with a man she had had to learn to get by without, not with a man who was in the process of divorcing her. She had to stiffen her backbone and be...what was that word? That impossible word he had voiced to her the night before?
Impersonal.
Gaetano lowered his mobile phone as she repacked the cleaning trolley. ‘Just leave it here. They’re sending another cleaning operative out to finish the job.’
‘And why would they do that when I’m letting them down?’
‘You’re not letting anyone down, Lara,’ Gaetano sliced back at her grimly. ‘I’m paying them to let you go without a fuss just as I paid the guard to let me into the building. That’s how I handle problems in my world, and you may be grimacing right now because you see that as immoral but some day you’ll be watching our son do the exact same thing.’
Lara reddened that he had read her so accurately and then paled at the thought of her precious Freddy growing into the same kind of man. ‘I don’t approve,’ she admitted stiffly.
‘You don’t need to approve. It is expected that people of my status pay for their privilege and that if others go that extra mile for our benefit, we reward them. That’s my life and it hasalwaysbeen that way. Billionaires don’t generally get handed something for nothing,’ he said gently, borrowing one of the phrases she had once taught him, a phrase her grandmother had taught her.
With that final explanation, he stooped and grasped the hem of the overall she wore to whip it over her head and scrunch it into a ball that he tossed into a waste basket as they waited for the lift. The beanie had already gone missing. Lara was too shocked by what he had just said to react.
‘Billionaires? You? Your family?’ Lara croaked, shocked almost to silence by that concept, that reminder that they came from totally different worlds. ‘You’rethatrich? Seriously?’
A smile broke out on Gaetano’s lean darkly handsome face. He didn’t bother mentioning that he didn’t have a family aside of her and the son he had yet to meet. He simply savoured the shock on her startled face and wished Dario had had the opportunity to both see and hear that little snatch of dialogue. But then, possibly, Dario would never understand that the kind of woman he had married didn’t have a mercenary bone in her body. Just like him she had flaws, but that was not one of them.
‘I wrecked your hair.’ Lara sighed, standing on tiptoe to brush it out of his eyes and smooth it down again and then stilling in mortification at that act of overfamiliarity. ‘Sorry, I think I’m too tired to be doing this with you...’
‘We’ll go and get a bite to eat,’ Gaetano announced, urging her into the lift.
‘No, let’s keep things a little more...detached,’ she selected, striving to employ the vocabulary he had used on her. ‘I have Alice’s car parked outside, so I don’t need a lift, and then you can come and see Freddy tomorrow when he’s awake.’
It was sensible advice, but Gaetano discovered that he didn’t want to hear it. He frowned. ‘We have to talk some time.’
‘But it doesn’t have to be right now this very minute,’ she stated calmly, recognising his innate impatience from the past. The more time she spent with Gaetano, the more she caught glimpses of the guy she had married, and she couldn’t afford to encourage that painful sense of connection that was now so out of place in their broken relationship.
Alice was in the hall waiting for her the moment she put her key in the front door. ‘Are you on your own?’ she asked, peering over the top of her diminutive friend and all around her. ‘Gaetano issogorgeous, Lara. Not at all surprised that you fell for him like a ton of bricks! I couldn’t believe my eyes when he said who he was.’
‘He was here?’ Lara queried in dismay.
‘Yes, looking for you and Freddy. He said he’d forgotten that you worked in the evenings.’
Lara flushed and avoided her friend’s gaze. ‘He came to see me at work. He’s going to visit tomorrow to meet Freddy.’
‘That sounds like a keen parent-to-be, at least,’ Alice quipped, switching on the kettle as Lara followed her through to the kitchen. ‘But I’ll be frank... I saw him getting into a limousine out there. Clearly, he’s wealthier than the average baby daddy.’
‘Yes, Gaetano’s not average in any way,’ Lara conceded awkwardly, still reluctant to share the entire truth with her friend, especially after Gaetano had referred to his desire for discretion. She loved Alice to death but was painfully conscious that she would talk her head off to everyone she knew if she learned that Gaetano was a royal.
‘He’s definitely going to pay support for Freddy,’ she told the brunette, willing to share other information. ‘He asked me to quit my job and stay home with him and, to be honest, while he’s this young I would enjoy that. I can’t say being a cleaner is so much fun that I will stick with it if I don’t have to.’
‘And you could study while you’re at home, start catching up again,’ Alice commented with enthusiasm. ‘I still think it’s so unfair that your mother was so thoughtless about your education.’
For thoughtless, read selfish, Lara ruminated wryly. Every time her mother, Eliza, had broken up with a boyfriend, she had moved to another city and Lara had been pulled out of school to be changed to another one. Once they had moved abroad, Eliza had pretty much stopped worrying altogether about her daughter receiving an education. After all, Lara had been more useful to her helping out at home or working in a bar kitchen or waitressing.
Alice gave her a warm smile. ‘I’m so happy that Gaetano is willing to give you support without making a fight out of it like some men do.’
‘No, he’s not likely to be difficult in that line.’ Lara drained her cup and put it in the dishwasher. ‘I’m going to go to bed early. I’m very tired and I want to be fresh for tomorrow.’
She hovered over Freddy’s cot. He was fast asleep, stretched out like a little starfish, as good as his father had once been at hogging all the available mattress space. As soon as she thought that she tried to squash such thoughts because looking back in time did her no favours. What was gone wasgone.
But by the time she was climbing into bed, the weight of memories had grown too heavy to avoid and just as quickly she slid back into that very first week spent with Gaetano.
Right from the start there had been a curious synchronicity between them, an ease as if they had known each other for years. It had probably been the hothouse effect of it being just the two of them in an isolated snowbound house, she reflected now. The day after the first night she had climbed up the hill and found his rucksack, dragging it back to the house and presenting it to him as if she had won the lottery, somehow expecting his every question to be magically answered by what they found within. They had discovered only a passport and an extraordinary amount of cash concealed in a hidden security pocket.