‘Madre di Dio...’ Alessio breathed unsteadily, his lean hands suddenly clenching into powerful fists.
‘And I don’t blame you for that...not really,’ Daisy admitted with innate honesty, her voice taut with the force of her own turbulent emotions. ‘But I had had enough and the last thing I could have faced was breaking back into all your lives when you thought you were finally free of me and saying, Guess what? I’m still pregnant! It was easier to let you go on thinking that that was over, finished and done with, the way you all wanted it to be. So I really didn’t want to have to come here this morning and spoil your day—’
‘Spoil my day?’ Alessio enunciated with visible difficulty.
Daisy stooped almost clumsily and dropped the certificate and the small photo on the low glass table between them. ‘I would never have told you if it had been left solely up to me,’ she revealed in a jerky undertone as she began backing away towards the door, her anxious violet gaze nailed to his low shimmering golden eyes. ‘I know you’re shocked and angry and undoubtedly thinking that you must have been cursed the night you first met me but please try to think of all this from Tara’s point of view. She would like to meet you. She’s not going to make a nuisance of herself or anything like that but she’s curious—’
‘Where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?’ In a sudden movement, Alessio sprang out of his statuelike stillness and strode after her.
‘I’ve said all I’ve got to say for now!’ Daisy confessed, and speeded up in her path to the door, wrenching it open when she got there and not bothering to look over her shoulder as she walked very fast down the corridor. She hit the call button on the lift and then looked.
‘Dio! Get back here right now!’ Alessio launched at her in a rage, from a distance of twenty feet.
Her heart leapt into her throat. She had a dazed impression of the receptionist’s stunned incredulity and then she turned and fled, heading for the stairs instead. There was no point in assisting Alessio to spring an embarrassing scene in public. Obviously he was in deep shock, otherwise he wouldn’t have shouted at her like that. He was also in a blaze of fury, and that was new—but not something Daisy planned to hang around and find out more about. She crashed through the last set of fire doors and raced down a wide set of stairs.
‘I’ll drag you up again by the hair if you don’t get back here!’ Alessio roared down at her from the flight above.
‘I’m running away for your benefit, not my own!’ Daisy hurled breathlessly back. ‘If I don’t, you’ll say a lot of things that you’ll be deeply ashamed of saying in a few hours’ time!’
‘You bitch!’ Alessio grated as he continued his enraged pursuit.
‘Don’t you dare call me that!’ Daisy paused to shout back. ‘And by the way, it was your birth control that failed and not my lack of it! The dates prove that beyond doubt!’
Alessio spat something in Italian that sounded very aggressive. Daisy blenched. This was not a mood she knew him in—Alessio in an uncontrollable dark fury, doubtless made all the more dangerous by his lack of practice in expressing such feelings. It had not once crossed her mind that she might find herself being chased through the Leopardi Merchant Bank by a male who even at nineteen had prided himself on his self-control and superhuman cool. So he was furious—well, that was no surprise, was it? But that was no excuse to attack her!
Tara had been conceived in August, not July, which meant that Alessio was the one responsible. Of course, he had tried to push that responsibility off onto her, citing the very first time they had made love, when a slight misunderstanding had occurred and he had falsely assumed that she was protected from pregnancy. Even with Alessio in hot pursuit, Daisy was childishly delighted to have finally been able to throw that important fact in his teeth.
‘Watch out! You’re going to fall and break your neck!’ Alessio blazed, sounding far too close for comfort.
In her attempt to speed up, Daisy missed her footing and lurched forward. She gasped as a powerful hand suddenly closed on the collar of her jacket to steady her and haul her back up a safe step. Whisking her round, Alessio imprisoned her between his hard, muscular length and the landing wall without noticing that her feet were no longer connected to solid ground.
‘Dio...how dare you accuse me of being relieved when you lost our baby?’ Alessio thundered down at her, glittering golden eyes splintering with violent anger, his hands anchored to her narrow ribcage to hold her entrapped. ‘I went on a binge! I got so damned drunk, I nearly killed myself! I didn’t have the guts to come to that hospital...I was too ashamed to face you! I didn’t know what to say when it was too late to say it. “Sorry” wasn’t likely to cover it when our baby was dead!’
As he slowly released her, she slid down the wall again and one of her shoes fell off but Daisy wasn’t up to fumbling blindly for it. Keeping herself balanced on tiptoe on one side, she gaped up at him, violet eyes wide with astonishment at what he was telling her.
‘I showed up three days later and you had gone,’ Alessio added unsteadily, dense dark lashes screening his gaze from her, but not before she had seen the savage pain and guilt in the stormy depths of his darkened eyes. ‘My father told me that if I put one foot onto a flight for London he would personally kill me! He said I’d done enough damage. But I didn’t listen to him until Bianca told me about the money and convinced me that that was all you had wanted from the start—’
‘I doubt you needed much persuasion.’
‘You’d gone,’ Alessio said again. ‘You agreed to a divorce without even discussing it with me!’
‘But that’s what you wanted,’ Daisy pointed out very shakily.
Aggressively taut, his strong face shuttered, Alessio took a step back from her. Her throat was working, her insides churning, but all she could think about was the fierce pain and remorse he had revealed—feelings that she had never once dreamt he might be experiencing in the aftermath of their breakup.
The noisy sound of a door swinging back on its hinges came from above them, followed by the echo of chattering female voices.
‘Come back upstairs,’ Alessio demanded harshly.
Daisy dug her foot back into her lost shoe and sidled away from him, terrified that she was about to break down in tears in front of him. Right now, she didn’t think that she could cope with any more. And she had done what she had come to do. She had told him about Tara and he needed time to think about that. Did he appreciate that himself? Was that why he had concentrated on their past rather than on the revelation that he had a daughter? Or was the reality more that he had not yet been able even to begin to absorb that news?
‘I’ll phone you...t-tomorrow,’ Daisy stammered sickly, gripping the handrail with a perspiring palm as she immediately began to head downwards again.
Alessio ground out a frustrated imprecation in his own language as the footsteps above grew louder and closer.
Daisy took advantage of the approaching company to flee, and she didn’t glance back this time. Tears were blinding her as she reached the final flight of stairs. The heel of one of her shoes went skittering off the edge of a step and she fell heavily with a bitten-off gasp of fright. Briefly her body was numbed by the force of her fall. Then the pain came in a stomach-churning surge. Slowly, painfully she breathed in deep and picked herself up, straightened her rucked skirt with a trembling hand and limped out through the doors into the ground-floor foyer.
She caught a cab back to the agency. Her hip throbbed with the bruises she had inflicted on herself. But that physical discomfort was as nothing to the terrible pain and confusion tearing at her fast-crumbling composure. Using the rear entrance from the car park, she hobbled into the stark little room that the sales team used for coffee-breaks and collapsed down on an armchair.
You’re like an accident around Alessio, she told herself wearily. But then even before she had met him her life had lurched from one disaster to the next. Why had she expected anything to change? She scolded herself for thinking like that. It was a loser’s mindset which she had put behind her a long time ago. But somehow, when a real crisis loomed, it was hard to forget the childhood which had left her so desperately insecure, that insidious, confidence-zapping feeling that everything that went wrong was always her fault.
Yet that sun-drenched summer with Alessio had, ironically, been the happiest of her life. Feeling loved and wanted and needed had been an intoxicating new experience for Daisy. They had been inseparable and at the time that intensity had seemed mutual. Of course, in actuality, she conceded painfully, she had only been one more notch on Alessio’s bedpost. A naive pushover, always available, always willing, frankly asking to be slapped in the teeth, she thought now. What little common sense she had possessed had evaporated beneath the onslaught of Alessio’s first smile.
The real reason why Alessio had not dated schoolgirls should have been obvious to her even then. He had been long past the stage of settling for a goodnight kiss at the end of a date. Daisy had been smoothly, gently but quite ruthlessly seduced by a teenager already expert in the field of sexual intimacy.