She would have to be back at the supermarket for her lunchtime shift in ten minutes, Cass realised, glancing at her phone. She had called Marco every day at different times of day, hoping that eventually she’d be put straight through to him. She still couldn’t believe that she’d slept with such a cold-hearted man—or that she had never asked for his private number, but there was no point in regretting that now.
The same PA picked up, and Cass received the same stock answer, but this time she interrupted before the PA had a chance to hang up. ‘I’m sorry...did you say Signor di Fivizzano is too busy to speak to me?’
‘That is correct, signorina. I do apologise—’
‘He wasn’t too busy to sleep with me.’ She paused—not that she needed to as the silence was crushing. ‘He wasn’t too busy to make me pregnant. Could you tell him that, please? Thank you,’ she added politely before she cut the line.
Sitting back, she firmed her chin. The die had been cast. She’d done her part. She wanted nothing from Marco in the material sense, but it was her duty to let him know. What he did next was up to him. What she did next would be all about her baby’s future.
* * *
He didn’t say a word when his red-faced PA recited Cassandra’s call back to him, but his mind was racing.
‘Thank you.’ His curt nod of the head revealed nothing of the turmoil inside him.
A child?
He had given life to a child?
How could that have happened when he was always so careful?
Had he been so careful that night? Hadn’t he been out of control for the first time in his adult life...because of Cassandra, and the way she had made him feel?
He was never out of control. He was confident on that point. But had he been as meticulous as he usually was when it came to using protection? They had indulged so many times it was hard to be certain. He had been consumed by a fever of lust and so had she. He’d never known anything like it, which made her behaviour afterwards—leaving him without a word of explanation—all the harder to understand. Until he brought up the past and put what he’d learned from it into the equation.
This ruse had been used before, he remembered, getting up to pace the floor—false pregnancies, floods of tears, women trying to tell him that it was better without using protection, and of course they were on the Pill. Not one of those women had been telling the truth. He’d had them all investigated. There were no babies, just dishonest women looking for an easy ride.
Did that sound like Cassandra?
He didn’t want children. Why would he, with his history?
Could he find feelings? Could he buy them? Since learning that he’d been unwanted, he had learned not to care. He’d been doing that for too long now to change, and a child needed more. A child needed everything.
He struggled with the thought that Cassandra had done this on purpose to secure a meal ticket, like other women, like his mother. But was he the father of her child? Cass hadn’t been a virgin when he’d met her. How could he be sure?
He couldn’t go on like this. Thoughts of Cassandra were interfering with his life. He’d have to ring and have it out with her.
In a trick that only fate could play on him, he discovered she had changed her number.
Don’t you trust your own judgement? Cassandra is different from all those other women. Have you forgotten that so easily?
The past vied uncomfortably with what he knew about Cassandra. She wasn’t weak. She wasn’t greedy. She had never asked him for anything. It was he who had pressed things on her—the dress, the makeover, the sketch, and then the cheque.
He called the team that handled his business investigations. ‘I want protection for her around the clock,’ he told the head of the investigative team. The man he was talking to was an expert in surveillance, and Marco was confident that from day one he would know as much about Cassandra as if he were standing next to her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE HAD GIVEN up trying to contact Marco. If they did meet again, it would be on her terms. She may not have his power and money, but she was not going to take this insulting behaviour from a man who apparently refused to believe she was carrying his child.
Being a prospective single mother with no money wasn’t easy, but it taught her a lot of things—things she had never imagined learning—things about her mother, for example. If she had one complaint, it was that she felt isolated sometimes in the tiny house she was renting. She realised now that her mother must have felt just the same in the grand mansion where Cass had been born. She only wished she had been old enough to understand her mother’s loneliness, and that she could cross time and space now to put things right. Her father would still have slept with all his groupies—she doubted anyone could have changed him—but she hoped she could have helped her mother. No wonder her mother had wandered around in a drug-fuelled stupor. She must have been desperate to work out how to compete for the attention of a man who’d no longer wanted her.