The Italian's Bride on Paper, page 5
He laughed and said something that sounded pretty rude in Italian before he tacked on a polite translation in English. ‘She is really devious.’
‘She’s probably suffering from postnatal depression—new mothers need support, you know.’ As if he’d know the meaning of the word, she thought, throwing a look of seething contempt at him.
‘She left her baby and you’re still defending her. You really don’t know your sister very well at all, do you?’
‘I know enough, about her and about you too...’
His dark eyes narrowed on her flushed face his expression assessing as his long lashes rested briefly on the cutting angle of his cheekbones. ‘Ah, so my reputation precedes me,’ he drawled with a slow smile that Maya found almost as disturbing as his apparent ability to read her mind. ‘So what has the absent mother been saying? Actually, don’t bother, I can guess most of it, but maybe you should allow for a little bit of artistic licence on her part.’
‘You probably make her feel inadequate!’
‘Projection, much?’
The hot angry colour flew to her cheeks. ‘You don’t make me feel inadequate.’ Her chin lifted to another defiant angle as she claimed boldly, ‘Nobody makes me feel inadequate.’
The overreaction hinted at a vulnerability that was none of his business, he told himself, swiftly closing down that line of speculation.
‘You don’t strike me as an inadequate woman,’ he mused, allowing his eyes to move in a slow sweep up her slim body before settling on her vivid heart-shaped face inside the frame of wild silky waves. The delicate features qualified as high on the catch-your-breath index but there was a determination to the round chin and a fierceness in her direct gaze that he seriously admired.
Taken aback by his response, Maya took an involuntary step away from him.
What do I strike you as, then? She pushed away the question as irrelevant and reclaimed the space she had given up. She tightened the sash on her robe another breath-restricting inch while somewhere in the back of her mind a voice reiterated, It’s past midday and you’re still in your night clothes.
‘I wasn’t talking about me.’ Would he have been saying that if he’d seen the person she had been? Her defensive wall wavered and then held against the wave of self-disgust, and she met his dark stare with a semblance of calm.
He arched a dark brow. ‘No?’ His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug as his gaze moved beyond her to the closed bedroom door. ‘If you say so...’ He sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. ‘I am here to see Mattio. Is he in here?’ He tipped his head towards the right of the two doors they stood outside.
‘That’s my bedroom.’ God, Maya, how old are you? she thought as she felt the heat rise up her neck. Deciding the best way to deal with the juvenile blush was to pretend it wasn’t there, she glared up at him.
‘You’re not here to see him, you’re here to take him away and I won’t let you,’ she asserted, sounding more confident than she felt at her ability to follow through with this claim.
‘I haven’t made any secret of what I’m here to do and if you’re about to threaten me with the law again...’ The prospect didn’t alarm Samuele overly. ‘I’d think that one through if I were you. Bring in the authorities on this one, and, red tape being what it is, I probably won’t walk out of here with Mattio, but he will leave in the arms of some child protection social worker. And then when my court order granting me temporary guardianship comes through—which it will—I’ll be able to take Mattio home.’
‘You have a court order...?’
‘I will have, soon.’ It was not strictly a lie, but it would not have bothered Samuele if it had been.
‘But,’ she quavered out defiantly, ‘Violetta is his mother! Don’t courts always give a child to the mother?’
He gave a hard laugh and slung her a pitying look. ‘That’s often true—but it does kind of depend on the mother, don’t you think?’
‘Violetta’s not here to defend herself,’ Maya argued, knowing that words could be weaponised and a disparaging word here, a scathing comment there, could over time alter people’s perception of someone, as she knew to her cost.
‘Isn’t that the point?’ he suggested drily, looking bored with the discussion. ‘She dumped a baby on a virtual stranger in a foreign country. That might raise a few legal brows.’
‘Foreign...?’
‘Mattio is Italian, he is an Agosti!’
‘So is Violetta.’
‘Not if Charlie has any say in the matter,’ he shot back.
‘Charlie?’
‘Her next meal ticket,’ he outlined with a thin smile.
‘I’m not listening to you,’ she bit back through clenched teeth.
‘Because the truth hurts?’
‘You twist everything I say.’
‘Twist,’ he echoed, raising his hands in a gesture that reinforced the scornful incredulity written on his face.
‘For a woman to leave her baby...’ Shaking her head, she scanned his face for any sign that he was capable of understanding what a massive thing that was. ‘Have you any idea of what a terrible place she must have been in?’
‘You really are determined to see her as some sort of victim, aren’t you? I promise you that is the very last thing Violetta is. Look, Mattio is not your responsibility—’
‘It’s not about responsibility,’ she retorted. ‘It’s about—’ Struggling to put her feelings into words, she clenched her hands and tried to focus.
‘It’s about what?’
‘It’s about...’ She made herself meet his eyes even though she knew the experience would not be comfortable. ‘A child needs to be loved, to be wanted, and you don’t really want him.’
‘Now you’re telling me what I want?’
‘You just want to control everything.’
Samuele sketched a thin-lipped smile that he knew didn’t reach his eyes. At that moment he’d settle for controlling his own baser urges, which at that moment... He shook his head slightly and thought, Better not to go there. The main thing was that he was in control.
‘You really have swallowed Violetta’s fiction hook, line and sinker, haven’t you?’
‘I haven’t swallowed anything!’ she fired back. ‘I’m not some sort of gullible idiot—though I can see that it would suit you if I were!’
He didn’t react immediately to her claim...there seemed little point. As he studied her face it was obvious she believed everything she was saying. His frustration levels threatened to bubble through his enforced calm.
He’d thought that he’d mentally prepared for every scenario he might face to get Mattio back, but in all of those he’d been dealing with Violetta, a known quantity.
This woman was definitely not a known quantity; in fact, she was the biggest unknown quantity that he had encountered—ever. A woman who looked as she did but made no conscious effort to use her allure was a mystery to him. She could bewitch a man with a flutter of her eyelashes if she wanted to, but all she did was try and batter him into submission with her totally flawed logic and stubborn arguments.
If he didn’t have more important things on his mind, he might have been tempted to find out more about her, against his better judgement, though instinct told him that Maya Monk came with serious complications and possibly not the ones that he was armoured against. All the same, she was intriguing and quite incredibly beautiful.
How was it possible to want to taste a woman and at the same time want to...? He shook his head, despairing that anyone could be so wilfully stupid. This would have been a hell of a lot easier if she hadn’t believed everything she was saying, and the fact he had not detected the sort of artifice he always expected from a beautiful woman made him uneasy.
His unease deepened when without warning a Eureka smile spread across her face.
‘What about Violetta’s mother? Could she come and look after Mattio until Violetta gets back?’ Maya knew it was a compromise but maybe one that he might accept. ‘What...why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Your mother too, if I’m understanding your relationship correctly.’
‘We’re not in contact. Olivia has her own family.’ Some of it was in her spare bedroom. ‘And I have mine.’ What would she not have given for her mum or sister to be in the same time zone right now?
If they had been, they would be here in this room offering her back-up and some much-needed baby advice.
‘It’s tough being rejected.’
She flinched, really disliking his ability to wander around inside her head. ‘I’m not a victim. I was adopted as a baby, and, I told you, I have my own family now.’
‘Olivia died six months ago.’
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS LIKE watching the life story of a flower in time-lapse photography on a natural history programme; blooming, fading and shrivelling in mere seconds.
It was irrational, but he felt as guilty as hell for killing her hope.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know that.’
She was apologising to him? ‘There’s no need to be sorry, she was nothing to me.’ From what Samuele had seen Olivia was a vain, selfish woman who had passed on all those delightful qualities to her daughter.
‘Oh...no...me neither, I suppose... I mean, I didn’t really know her either. How—?’ she began and then stopped.
‘She didn’t suffer, did she?’
Samuele only knew the bare clinical facts, namely that Olivia had died after complications from a botched cosmetic surgery. He opened his mouth to share these when he met her anxious eyes and paused.
‘No, she didn’t,’ he heard himself say.
Samuele caught a look of relief on her face before she tipped her head in acknowledgement, and her expression was concealed by her wild mass of dark hair as she lowered her head.
So this was what lying to make someone feel better felt like—a novel experience but not one that he was likely to repeat any time soon.
‘So this was something your sister clearly didn’t share with you before she dumped her kid on you.’
Maya sighed. ‘She was upset, and she probably assumed I already knew.’ Even as she gave voice to the excuse Maya was thinking of the occasions that that there had been for her half-sister to tell her that their mother had died. ‘She was desperate.’ She felt ashamed of the doubt that she struggled to conceal but could hear in her own voice.
Not desperate, no—Samuele’s eyes moved around the room—but the woman he knew would have to be very determined indeed to consider spending a night here.
‘She is a widow with a baby, who is being undermined at every move.’
‘You don’t appear totally naive.’ In his view, being idealistic was probably worse. ‘So please listen to me when I tell you that this was totally planned, cara. She played you, as they say, for a sucker.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Was it? Little details of the previous evening surfaced in her head that she would not even have thought about if it hadn’t been for him planting seeds of doubt. ‘I saw her, she was... Why would anyone...?’ Her eyes suddenly widened. ‘What did you call me?’ Not Mia at least, said the catty voice in her head.
He shook his head in a pretty unconvincing attitude of bewildered innocence—she was pretty sure that Samuele Agosti was neither; it was hard to imagine he ever had been.
When she replayed it in her head the casual endearment on his lips sounded like honey, liquid and warm. Just thinking about it ignited another burst of heat low in her belly.
‘She isn’t coming back, you do know that?’
His expression came as near to sympathy as she’d seen, so she looked over his shoulder, refusing to allow the suspicions he had planted growing room in her head, worried because her hormones could be skewing her judgement. On the other hand, if what he said was true... Despite her determination the thought dropped into her consciousness and the ripples spread.
‘I’m not leaving without Mattio,’ Samuele stated.
I’m not leaving without Maya.
Maya swallowed past an emotional occlusion in her throat. She could suddenly see her dad so clearly, standing there smiling sunnily in response to being told that there was no parent accommodation available at the hospital—and besides, his little girl would be discharged from the overspill ward attached to the accident department after the cast that encased her broken arm had been checked by a doctor in the morning. She remembered willing him not to go and leave her in this big scary place and being glad he’d stayed even when she had cried that she wanted her mum, not him.
Mum had wanted to be there, he’d told her, but the rail strike meant she and Beatrice couldn’t get back from the town where her sister had been competing in an athletics competition until the next day.
Her eyes lifted. There was no resemblance at all between the gangly dad of her memory, with his beard and untidy gingerish hair, and this tall, impossibly handsome man. But nevertheless, they had something in common.
‘I need to see him,’ he reiterated.
She offered up a suspicious look but couldn’t bury the memories rising up in her...seeing the expression in her dad’s eyes—the one that had made someone produce a chair for him to sit on.
After a moment she found herself nodding, not, she told herself, because of an expression in anyone’s eyes, but because there was nothing she actually could do to prevent him.
She stood back and opened the door.
The curtains were drawn in the room; she had never reached the point of opening them. Light seeped between them and there was a lamp on the bedside table that cast more shadow than light.
Hovering uncertainly in the doorway, she watched him move across to the travel cot. He was not a man she would associate with hesitancy, but if he’d been anyone else that was how she would have termed his approach. As he reached it and looked down at the sleeping baby he was half turned to her so she could see his face in profile.
The subdued lighting exaggerated the dramatic bone structure of his face, and maybe it did the same to his expression, but what she saw or thought she saw was an almost haunted look of loss that made her feel almost as if she were intruding. Shaking her head at her irrational response as if to loosen the grip of the uncomfortable feelings, she quietly left the room without a word, wishing she could unsee that look. Empathy for him was the last thing she needed to be experiencing; she already felt bad enough for even imagining a fleeting similarity to her dad, who had been her hero. It felt like a betrayal.
She refused to concede that maybe Violetta’s monster wasn’t a total monster, so she focused on the indisputable fact that he quite definitely wasn’t a hero, not her definition of one anyhow. She would save her empathy for the baby caught in the middle of a conflict.
Conscience pricking, she walked into her bedroom, musing over her struggle to feel anything sisterly towards baby Mattio’s mother, despite her hot defence of the woman. She closed the door behind her, knowing that, as the walls were paper-thin between the two rooms, she’d hear a pin drop let alone someone making off with a baby.
Not that he would do that... On her way across the room she paused as she realised this confidence in him was actually based on nothing more than a very non-evidence-based gut feeling. Her self-reflective line of thought was abruptly terminated when she caught sight of herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. Just when she thought things could not get worse!
She thought longingly of a shower as she left a trail of clothes in her wake, struggling to open a drawer in the tall heavy chest of drawers of stripped pine to reveal the neatly folded and brightly coloured selection of sweaters inside.
Walking out of the adjoining bedroom, Samuele was struggling to suppress immense waves of sadness, anger and guilt after looking at the child his brother had never met. Life is unfair; live it, he’d been told, except his brother hadn’t lived and life wasn’t just unfair—it was bloody unfair.
He hadn’t been able to protect Cristiano, but he was sure as hell going to protect his child no matter what it took. Still lost in his thoughts, he turned his head in response to a sound at the exact moment he was in line with a crack in the slightly open door, delivering an image of a slim, graceful and totally naked figure sitting back on her heels as she pulled open a cavernous drawer.
Smooth, sleek, supple, with perfect curves, she looked like an iconic art deco figure made warm flesh.
He turned his head sharply away, a stab of self-disgust piercing his conscience as his body reacted independently of his brain to the indelible image printed on it.
Flinging the pair of jeans she had grabbed backwards onto the bed, Maya sifted through the sweaters and hastily selected one.
Still resisting the pull of the shower, she turned the basin taps on full and washed her face. She fought her way into her clothes and cast another despairing glance at her image in the mirror as, brush in hand, she decided to just give up on her hair, choosing instead to secure the wild mass of dark curls at the nape of her neck.
She was halfway through brushing her teeth when she heard a noise from the living-room monitor, followed by a gentle whimper from the adjoining bedroom.
‘I think Mattio has woken up again!’ Samuele called.
‘I’ll be right there!’ she replied, hastily rinsing her mouth and remembering wryly not taking seriously Beatrice’s claim during the early sleep-deprived days of motherhood that she’d struggled to get dressed before midday.
She erupted into the living room like someone reaching the finishing line of a sprint. ‘What...why are you looking at me like that?’
He shook his head and crossed the room in a couple of fluid strides. Holding her gaze, he reached out and, before she could react, gently touched the corner of her mouth.
