Of course, he had also talked with passionate conviction about how much he loved her and how he would fly over and see her at weekends after she went home, but then he would have said that, wouldn’t he? Such assurances were par for the course. Daisy was convinced that if she hadn’t got pregnant, if she had returned to London she would never have heard from Alessio Leopardi again. After all, he had already had a steady girlfriend at university, but Sophia had been abroad that summer...
Daisy swam back to the present, feeling utterly drained. She asked herself why she had been so devastated to hear Alessio admit that he had been too ashamed and upset to face her after her miscarriage. That he had got drunk, been ripped apart by guilt and an obvious inability to cope with either her feelings or his own. She had been shattered by the realisation that her image of Alessio had been inexplicably trapped in a time-warp.
At seventeen, she had looked up to him, depended on him, viewed him as an experienced and strong adult in comparison with herself. It had not occurred to her then that Alessio might have weaknesses of his own. Only now did she think he was only six years older than Tara is now; beneath the glossy, cool front he was only a kid too. But Daisy had made a hero of him because nothing less than a hero could have made her feel safe in the new and threatening world in which he and his family lived.
Tears had dampened her face. Daisy pressed unsteady hands to her wet cheeks. Telling Alessio about Tara had somehow brought all those painful feelings of inadequacy back again. But that was the past and far behind her now, she reminded herself. Taking a deep breath, she stood up again and set about eradicating the evidence that she had been crying.
Her phone was ringing when she reached her desk. She swept up the receiver a split second before Barry the Barracuda reached for it. He lounged back against her desk, curious brown eyes nailed to her, a faint smirk on his handsome mouth. ‘You seem a little harassed ... anything wrong?’
Daisy shook her head, carefully avoiding his hotly appreciative appraisal. Even though she was as encouragingly warm as an ice sculpture around Barry, he had buckets of persistence. One minor pleasantry and Barry would be back to embarrassing the hell out of her by telling her what a good time an older woman could have with a younger man.
She put the receiver to her ear.
‘Daisy?’
Her heart lurched violently against her breastbone. It was Alessio. ‘What do you want?’ she whispered.
‘You... now,’ Alessio spelt out succinctly. ‘I’m in the wine bar on the corner. You have five minutes to get here.’
The line went dead. Daisy straightened, deathly pale, and then reached for her bag again.
Alessio was in the darkest corner of the bar. As she walked, towards him, he sprang fluidly upright and surveyed her with glittering eyes that were as hard as jet, his lean, powerful frame whip-taut with sizzling tension.
‘I promised I’d ring you tomorrow,’ Daisy reminded him defensively.
‘I want to meet my daughter and I am not prepared to await your convenience,’ Alessio gritted in a fierce undertone.
‘She’s at school.’
‘Where?’
As she sat down, Daisy looked at him in appalled comprehension. ‘You can’t go there—’
‘When does she get out?’ Alessio growled.
‘You’re not thinking straight,’ Daisy protested, shaken by the immediacy of his demand. ‘Tara didn’t even know I was coming to see you today.’
His eyes flared. ‘Dio...you should be locked up! You breeze into the bank after thirteen years of silence and tell me I have a daughter! Then you walk out again and tell me I’m not thinking straight? What kind of a woman are you?’
A woman who had not enjoyed being forced to break the same ‘bad news’ twice in one lifetime, she thought.
‘I still can’t credit that you have done this to me,’ Alessio confessed with barely suppressed savagery, driving not quite steady fingers through his luxuriant black hair and surveying her with more than a glimmering of stark incredulity. ‘That you could be so bitter you would conceal the birth of my child from me—’
‘I wasn’t bitter then. I thought I was doing you a favour.’
‘A favour?’ Alessio queried in rampant disbelief.
A suffocating silence hummed.
‘I believed you would be happier not knowing,’ Daisy finally admitted.
‘Happier...?’
‘Obviously I was wrong,’ Daisy conceded in a tense rush. ‘I wish you would stop looking at me like that...like I belong in a lunatic asylum or something... I never had the slightest idea that you would feel like this about it!’
As Alessio got a grip on his seething emotions, chilling dark golden eyes closed in on her. ‘It was a despicable act. Whatever mistakes I made, I did not deserve to be kept in ignorance of my daughter’s existence. We were still married when she was born. Your silence was indefensible. Don’t try to excuse it—’
‘Maybe I could take this kind of talk better if you had once shown the slightest interest or concern for your child before she was born!’ Daisy dared shakily, for there was something about the way Alessio was talking now which sent a compulsive shiver down her spine.
‘I demonstrated my concern by marrying you. I did not once suggest any other means of dealing with our predicament. Nor, you may recall, did my family,’ Alessio reminded her coldly.
‘But you still didn’t want the baby,’ Daisy argued feverishly, desperate to hear him admit that fact.
Alessio sent her a look of derision. ‘Why else did I marry you if not for our child’s sake?’
Daisy snatched in a shaken breath, stunned by the whiplash effect of that one dauntingly simple question.
‘I think I need a little time to come to terms with this before I meet my daughter.’ Having made that charged acknowledgement from between clenched teeth of reluctance, Alessio abruptly thrust his glass away. ‘Keep Tara home on Wednesday. I’ll call around ten. I’ll take her out somewhere. At this moment,’ he asserted with icy conviction, ‘I have nothing more to say to you.’
‘You’ll need the address.’
In the shattering, pulsing silence which followed, Daisy, employing his gold pen, scrawled her address on the back of the business card he presented to her.
Alessio stood up. ‘If it is the last thing I do in this lifetime, I will punish you for this,’ he swore half under his breath.
Daisy was left alone with an uncorked bottle of vintage wine and two untouched glasses. Her knees were knocking together under the table. For a weak moment, she was seriously tempted to try drowning her sorrows. Guilt and bewilderment were tearing her apart. Alessio was outraged and appalled by what she had done. And Daisy was in shock. Alessio, who had once blithely leapt in where angels feared to tread, was backing off for two days to take stock of the situation. Why did that frighten her even more?
CHAPTER FOUR
THE doorbell went in two short, impatient bursts. It was only twenty past nine.
‘Do you think it’s him?’ Tara shrieked in panic from her bedroom. ‘My hair’s still wet!’
Daisy skimmed damp palms down her slender thighs, breathed in deep and opened the door. It was Alessio, strikingly elegant in a pearl-grey suit, pale blue silk shirt and tie.
‘I thought you’d be at work.’
‘I took the morning off,’ Daisy told his tie.
‘Does that mean you’re planning to accompany us?’ The ice in that rich dark drawl let her know how unwelcome an idea that was.
‘No...but Tara’s not ready yet. Would you like to come in?’ Daisy enquired, her fingernails scoring purple crescents into her palms. His cold hostility bit deep.
‘I’ll wait in the car.’
Her tremulous mouth tautened. ‘Alessio...please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is.’
There was a sharp little silence.
He released his breath in a hiss and thrust the door shut. The fierce tension in Daisy’s slight shoulders gave a little. She walked into the lounge. ‘Would you like some coffee?’
He uttered a cool negative.
‘She’ll be a while. She’s not even dressed yet. She was earlier, though. She got up at seven and trailed out her whole wardrobe. Then she decided she needed to wash her hair...’ Conscious that she was babbling, Daisy compressed her lips and jerkily folded her arms. She no longer had any excuse to avoid looking at him.
Alessio’s vibrantly handsome features were ferociously tense, his strong jawline harshly set. A frown drew his ebony brows together. He looked back at her with glittering golden eyes that chilled her to the marrow. ‘What did I do that was so bad that you had to steal my child from me?’
Daisy’s strained eyes burned and she spun away, not trusting herself to speak. An intimidating amount of bitter incomprehension had splintered through that demand.
‘With that poor a start to our marriage, we were bound to have some problems,’ Alessio continued harshly. ‘But we had no arguments.’
Daisy almost smiled. To argue with someone you had to speak to them, didn’t you? And doormats did not start arguments. Alessio had been able to stride about being mean, moody and silently macho without the smallest challenge from her corner. Indeed, Daisy had grown steadily more afraid of what she might hear if he did break that silence.