‘Give me the bad news first!’ Alessio raked down at her.
Daisy had landed in a mess of wildly tangled hair and inelegantly splayed limbs on the mercifully well-sprung sofa. She didn’t know what had hit her. For an instant she didn’t even know where she was but she knew that Alessio was there all right, standing over her like a hanging judge as she attempted to halt a seemingly unstoppable roll in the direction of his plush office carpet. A pair of strong hands caught her and impatiently flipped her back upright into the corner of the seat.
‘“The bad news...”?’ Daisy echoed. Momentarily, utter cowardice had her in its hold. She didn’t want to be forced to think. Not about how time had cruelly slid back to entrap and humiliate her. Not about how excruciatingly pleasurable it had felt to be in Alessio’s arms. Not about how dreadful it felt to be separated from him again. No, she definitely didn’t want to think.
‘You only faint when you’re terrified! Do you think I don’t remember that?’ Alessio launched at her grimly. ‘You drop in a pathetic little heap, then you open those big blue eyes and fix them on me and I have an uncontrollable urge to give way to my baser instincts. That’s how you broke the news of your pregnancy!’
‘My pregnancy?’ Daisy questioned helplessly. ‘I didn’t get that way on my own!’
‘There was nothing accidental about it,’ Alessio condemned harshly.
Daisy froze, shattered by that particular accusation. Even thirteen years ago, it had not occurred to her that Alessio might believe that her pregnancy was anything other than an accident. That his family suspected her of such manipulative behaviour had been no surprise to her, but she had innocently assumed that at least Alessio did not share their suspicions. ‘Are you really trying to accuse me of having deliberately set out to...?’
Alessio spread two brown hands in a frustrated movement of dismissal. ‘We are not going to talk about this.’
‘Now just you wait a minute,’ Daisy objected, springing upright. ‘You can’t throw an accusation like that and then back off from it again!’
‘Did you hear me? Leave yesterday’s bad news where it belongs,’ Alessio spelt out. ‘We are not about to get into that again. We are not going to fight about ancient history like a couple of stupid kids!’
‘Ancient history...yesterday’s bad news...’ How would Alessio react when she informed him that ‘yesterday’s bad news’ was infinitely more current than he had had any cause to suspect? The fight went out of Daisy. She sank heavily back down on the sofa again. ‘You want to know why I told your secretary I had to see you to discuss an urgent, confidential matter—’
‘I think I’m ahead of you there.’ Alessio surveyed her with innate cynicism, his lip curling. ‘You’re broke, aren’t you? You’re in debt.’
‘I don’t know where you get that idea.’ But Daisy turned a guilty pink, unable to avoid thinking about that Swiss bank account filled with Leopardi money. Not just filled but positively bursting at the seams with Leopardi money, the original investment having grown greatly in the intervening years, according to Janet.
Alessio settled down on the matching leather sofa opposite. He looked incredibly formidable to her evasive eyes. He was wearing a superbly tailored navy pinstriped suit and a red silk tie. The expensive fabric skimmed wide shoulders and delineated long, powerful thighs. Hurriedly she tore her gaze from him but he stayed there in her mind’s eye. So achingly handsome, from the top of his smooth, darkly beautiful head to the soles of his equally beautiful shoes. Her throat closed over. Her mind was a complete blank. Why couldn’t he have started losing some of his hair or developed a bit of a businessman’s paunch?
‘Daisy, my time is at a premium. Since you forced this meeting by giving my secretary no opportunity to deny your demand, I had to cancel an important appointment to free a space for you—’
‘A space on the sofa?’ she bit out between gritted teeth.
‘At this moment, I think the less said about that development the better.’
Bitter resentment tensed Daisy. Alessio... all heat and passion one moment, polar ice the next. Daisy had never had his trick of switching off, had never been able to understand how he could make mad, passionate love to her in the night and then turn away from her when she tried to talk. When her emotions were involved, she wore everything on the surface, could not hold her feelings back. But Alessio locked everything away and kept a ferociously tight hold on the key.
‘To be frank, I’m not surprised that you have financial problems,’ Alessio imparted coolly. ‘I imagine the divorce settlement went a long time ago—’
‘And why do you imagine that?’
‘At that age you would have had no idea how to handle that amount of money. But I’m relieved that you are finally acknowledging that you did receive that settlement,’ he drawled. ‘It was very naive of you to assume that I wouldn’t know about it and that you could afford to lie.’
‘I wasn’t lying.’
‘Being inventive with the truth...again?’ Alessio asked very drily.
Daisy went pale and involuntarily glanced up, connecting with brilliant eyes alive with derision. ‘I only ever told you one lie...only one. I let you think I was at university when I wasn’t. You never actually asked me what age I was—’
‘Semantics,’ Alessio dismissed, unimpressed and not one whit more yielding or forgiving on the point than he had been in the past. ‘I also thought we had reached an agreement, Daisy. The past is off limits. Let’s strive to keep the temperature down. Perhaps I should speed up matters by admitting that because we were once married I do still feel some sense of responsibility towards you.’
Daisy stiffened and bridled. ‘I don’t want you feeling responsible for me and I am not here to ask you for a loan. But, while we’re on the subject, let me assure you that I would die of starvation before I would ask you for help!’
‘Then exactly what are you doing here?’ Alessio enquired.
Daisy breathed in deep and dug into her slim handbag to extract a copy of Tara’s birth certificate and a small photograph. Her slender hands were trembling, her stomach knotting up. She gripped the certificate. ‘This is going to come as a big shock to you, Alessio...but I’m afraid that there isn’t any easy way to do this—’
‘Do what?’ he broke in impatiently.
Daisy stood up on wobbly legs, her heart thumping as if she were tied to the rails in front of an express train. ‘I think I’ll just leave these with you and then maybe I could ring you tomorrow and see how you feel.’
Alessio had already vaulted upright. His dark features were taut. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘After we split up, I discovered that I had been expecting twins... and although I had lost o-one of them,’ Daisy stammered, a trickle of nervous perspiration running down between her breasts below her blouse, ‘I didn’t lose the other.’
Alessio stared down at her with fiercely narrowed eyes, a stark frown of bewilderment drawing his level black brows together. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I have a daughter of thirteen...your daughter,’ she delivered with unconscious stress as she took an automatic step back from him.
‘That’s impossible.’ The faintest tremor lent an uneven quality to Alessio’s usually level diction and his accent had thickened. ‘You had a miscarriage.’
‘She was born three months after I left Italy. I was kept in hospital right up until her birth...in case I lost her too. She was a couple of weeks premature. You see, I wasn’t quite as pregnant as everyone assumed I was,’ Daisy muttered awkwardly in the thundering silence of Alessio’s total disbelief. ‘The doctor in Rome got the delivery date wrong because when he first saw me I was bigger than he thought I should be, but that was because I was carrying twins.’
‘You had a miscarriage,’ Alessio delivered in stubborn repetition. ‘And if at some subsequent stage you did give birth to a baby which was premature it could not possibly have been mine—’
‘Tara was born in April.’ Daisy’s lips compressed tremulously.
If Alessio had been capable of rational thought, his intelligence would have told him that given the time period concerned there was no way on earth that the child could be anything other than his. But then Alessio was not reasoning out anything right now. Alessio was at a standstill, blocked from moving on by the barrier of what he had believed to be concrete fact for thirteen years.
‘You lost the baby,’ he said, his rich drawl oddly attentuated and unevenly pitched.
Daisy couldn’t stop staring at him. His strong bone structure was fiercely prominent below his golden skin. He was alarmingly pale. His astute eyes were curiously dark and unfocused.
‘I didn’t lose Tara...I lost her twin,’ Daisy whispered shakily, her eyes aching. ‘But when I left Rome I didn’t know that. What I did know was that you didn’t want me or the baby, and once the baby was no longer on the way there was no reason for us to stay married. You couldn’t wait to get rid of me. You couldn’t even bring yourself to come and commiserate at the hospital because naturally you couldn’t help being relieved that it was all over—’