She had been adopted as a newborn baby by Stewart and Eliza Drummond. Her father had been a doctor and she had adored him. Tragically he had died from an aneurysm when she was nine and her adoptive mother had subsequently made some very bad decisions. Devastated by her husband’s death, Eliza had flailed around like a boat without a rudder, her only goal seemingly to find a man to replace the one she had lost. Unfortunately, she had found more bad than good men. The bad ones had stolen her money and beaten her up and the good ones had bored her. Alice and Jack’s father had been one of those rare, good men.
It was a long time since Lara had seen her mother. At sixteen she had moved in with her grandparents, her late father’s mum and dad, and while living with them she had begun catching up on her education. As far as she knew her mother, who ran a bar in Spain, had not returned to the UK in recent years. Eliza didn’t stay in touch with her adopted daughter. Lara’s return to the UK seemed to have killed any further interest the older woman might have had in her. The hurt caused by that lack of interest was a familiar theme in Lara’s life.
‘Of course, you’re adopted...it’s not the same,’ her father’s sister, her aunt Jo, had once declared with a fatalistic shake of her head. ‘You’re not really related to the rest of us at all and we can’t help remembering that because you don’t look remotely like any of us. It’s a shame my brother died, because he really did think of you ashisdaughter. I’m sorry you lost that relationship.’
Lara had often been desperately sorry on that score as well but there was no point crying over spilt milk. Now that she was also a parent, she had tried to leave her childhood disappointments behind her and move on.
As she took the children to feed the ducks, she noticed a man walking down the path on the far side of the lake. He was unusually well dressed for the park, clad in a dark formal overcoat worn over what looked like a suit underneath. He walked very upright with the easy confident glide of a predator and Lara froze, momentarily tense because even from this distance the man reminded her just a little of Gaetano, who had likewise possessed that almost feral grace of movement. This guy was also very tall and well built, with black hair and a bronzed complexion that spoke of warmer climes, but he wasn’t close enough for her to get a better look at him.
Of course, it couldn’t be Gaetano, she scolded herself irritably. What would the King of Mosvakia be doing in a small run-down urban park? Even less would he want to run the risk of being associated with her, the very ordinary woman he had mistakenly married! She had been ahugemistake on Gaetano’s terms, Lara made herself recall. The colour that the breeze had stung into her cheeks disappeared as she remembered the last day she had seen him two years earlier.
‘I married you... I actuallymarriedyou?’ Gaetano had realised in absolute horror, looking at her as though she must somehow have tricked him into becoming her husband, his recoil from the concept of being married to her etched in his shaken features as he studied her. ‘What the hell have I done?’
‘We’ll deal with that problem later,’ his friend and sidekick, Dario, had interrupted with smooth impatience. ‘Right now, it’s not important. Whatisimportant is that you come home to Mosvakia to recover from your ordeal. We’ve been worried sick about you for weeks!’
Lara remembered how it had felt to be lumped in as part of Gaetano’s ‘ordeal’, her tummy clenching on a nauseous wave. She gathered up the kids and walked over to the coffee van. Of course she hadn’t informed Gaetano about the fact that he had a son. That would have been very bad news on his terms when he didn’t even want Lara as a wife. And why would he?
There had been a time when she had stalked Gaetano on the Internet, hungrily absorbing every photo and atom of information, but the drip-drip effect of reading about his many, many affairs had soon cured her of that weakness. She had soon learned that the man she had married had a raunchy background with the models, actresses and socialites who had shared his bed. Seemingly, Gaetano had had no serious relationships in his past. He had pursued sex, rather than love, and none of his affairs had lasted long. In short, he was not the man she had fallen madly in love with, not the man she had happily married. He was, in truth, the ‘Playboy Prince’ he had been dubbed by the press.
Collecting her coffee, Lara sat down on one of the battered old chairs beside the van and watched Iris and Freddy chase a ball. Freddy fell over a couple of times and Iris dragged him up. She was a terrific big sister. Lara had often wished that she had had a sibling. Occasionally she had thought about the fact that she was adopted and that she might have blood relatives somewhere in the world, if only she had the guts to look into her back story. Unfortunately, the many hurts and let-downs meted out by her adoptive family had made her reluctant to risk inviting more disillusionment and disappointment into her life.
Across the grass lay the wooded area of the park and as she sipped her coffee she saw men emerge from below the trees and wondered what they were doing. They had a serious, professional look about them and she thought they might be police. Were they searching for someone? Their presence spooked her, and she glanced at the kids, ready to take them home even though she hadn’t yet finished her coffee. Somehow, her usual relaxation in the winter sunshine was absent.
‘Lara...?’
It was a voice Lara had believed she would never hear again, dark and deep, overwhelmingly male. But then almost everything about Gaetano was overwhelmingly male, she conceded as she sat there hunched, virtually afraid to lift her head because she was convinced that she was suffering some kind of auditory hallucination. Thoughts about Gaetano had overloaded her self-discipline and raised her anxiety level, she told herself irritably.
On that thought she looked up and was totally stunned when Gaetano settled down into the rusty weathered chair opposite her, his brilliant dark eyes locked to her, black lashes a thick canopy over his piercing gaze. It was those eyes of his that got to her every time. Dark, hypnotically compelling and potent. Beneath his weight, the rickety chair squeaked in protest. He was six feet four inches tall with the wide shoulders and lean hips of an athlete. He was still breathtakingly beautiful. Her mouth ran dry, her lungs compressed, butterflies fluttered. An unwelcome tightening in her pelvis made her stiffen even more as her breasts pushed against the lace of her bra in concert.
Lara’s hair was loose and tumbled round her shoulders, the strawberry blonde waves tossed by the breeze and framing her delicate face. She was not a beauty, Gaetano told himself, yet when he looked at her, he still couldn’t take his eyes off her. Either she was impossibly pretty in her delicacy or simply incredibly sexy. And covered from head to toe in jeans and an unflattering padded coat, how the hell could she be sexy? Everything about Lara was natural and unstudied, from the freckles scattered across her nose to the sensible clothing she wore. She was quite unlike any woman he had ever met before and that was probably what had drawn him in.
And yet shewassexy, Gaetano acknowledged grudgingly, his attention lingering involuntarily on the full pink pout of her lips and the brilliant blue of her eyes. As his trousers stretched taut at the groin with an arousal he could barely credit, he tensed, flashes of memory returning to haunt him as they so often did in the dark of the night in his empty bed. Skinny but curvaceous, he recalled, so skinny he had tried to feed her up until she had confessed that she never ever put on weight. She was wild and impossibly sweet in bed, so receptive to his every move he hadn’t been able to keep his greedy hands off her.
‘You have five minutes with her before there’s a risk of press intrusion,’ his chief security officer had warned him.
He was already three minutes into that time limit, and he had been silent. ‘We need to talk,’ he informed her then with chilling gravity.
Lara felt that chill, that distance in Gaetano straight down to the marrow of her bones. She remembered his warmth, his intensity, and suddenly, that clear change in him shook her. She didn’t know what she had expected from him. When she had first run away from him, she had had no plan. That had been a knee-jerk response to his wounding rejection. She had had no thought of what the future might bring and no suspicion that she was pregnant.
‘Yes, we need to talk,’ Lara conceded reluctantly, her gaze entrapped by glittering dark eyes enhanced by the lush fringe of ebony lashes. Mesmeric eyes teeming with raw allure. She swallowed the lump in her tight throat.
Gaetano slid a printed card across the small table. ‘I’m staying at this address. I’ll be waiting there for you this evening. If you want, I can send a car to pick you up.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ she whispered, grasping the card with nerveless fingers, dragging it down off the table into her pocket. For the sake of her pride, she had to take control of the encounter and intelligence had already suggested the most likely reason why Gaetano would seek her out after so long. And if that was true, that had to mean that their marriage had been legal, after all, she reasoned numbly. On the basis of that startling enough assumption, she said tightly, ‘You want to discuss a divorce, don’t you?’
Gaetano dealt her a cold hard appraisal, backed by the cold hard power of his forceful personality. ‘What do you think?’
CHAPTER TWO
GAETANOSTRODEAWAYand only then did Lara draw breath again, sucking in the icy air like a drowning swimmer. His appearance had plunged her fathoms deep in shock. In the immediate aftermath she was annoyed that she had not been the first to acknowledge their dilemma and take charge.Sheshould have contactedhimto request a divorce, she reasoned fiercely. But that would have meant throwing Freddy into the mix and Freddy was another question altogether. She didn’t want to talk about her son, but she couldn’t lie about his existence either.
Strapping Freddy into his pushchair, she left the park with Iris to walk home. She would have to meet Gaetano and put their little winter idyll behind her where it belonged. And why was she so tense and worried? Gaetano had made a mistake marrying her. The instant he had recovered his memory he had immediately recognised their marriage as a mistake. Why would he be any more interested in Freddy than he was in Freddy’s mother?
‘Are you going out tonight?’ she asked Alice when she got back to the house, because Lara didn’t clean at weekends and her friend usually went out with her boyfriend.
‘No. It’s a hot bath and an early night for me,’ Alice announced with a roll of her expressive eyes.
‘You’re not seeing Jamie?’