Visconti's Forgotten Heir(47)

When Marcus had found out he had slapped her—hard. There was no way he was going to promote her, he had said, if she didn’t take the necessary steps to do what she had to do.

She’d cried for a week, she remembered, reliving the anguish of that time. And at the end of it had told him there was no way that she would harm her baby. She’d taken a bus ride to the neighbourhood where she’d used to live, having decided that she would have to tell Andreas. She hadn’t planned on asking him to take her back. She’d known she had behaved far too badly for that, and suspected that he probably wouldn’t even believe that the child she was carrying was his, but she’d owed it to Andreas to at least give him the chance of making up his own mind.

When she had got within shouting distance of the restaurant, however, her nerve had failed her. She’d shrunk back into the doorway of a baker’s shop, fear gripping her at something she’d remembered him saying.

‘If you got pregnant with my baby and insisted on bringing it up alone—’ as she’d threatened to do after one of their more impassioned scenarios ‘—then you’d better know now that I’d do all in my power to get custody of my child rather than see it brought up by a fame-crazed mother and a man-crazy, seasoned drunk of a grandmother!’

Fear such as she had never known had pressed down on her in that doorway. It was there she had realised that she wanted Andreas’s baby more than she had wanted anything in her life.

She’d tried ringing him once after that, phoning the restaurant under the guise of making a booking in the hope that he would answer. Not to speak to him particularly, but simply to hear his voice. When someone else had answered she had put down the phone, too cowardly to say who she was. Later, someone whose name she couldn’t even remember had told her he had gone to America.

Marcus had tried to put pressure on her when it had become clear to him that she wasn’t going to give up her baby. She would blow her chances of ever becoming a model, he’d kept reminding her, pulling no punches in telling her what pregnancy would do to her figure. Either she did the sensible thing now, he’d reiterated, or she could kiss goodbye to her career and his apartment. It was as simple as that. Stardom or the streets.

She’d chosen the streets—or as good as. With her mother growing stronger, and renting a one-bedroom flat, Magenta had taken up her offer to let her stay on a temporary basis. Sleeping on the sofa at night, taking any job from cleaning to waitressing during the day, her only goal had been to try and save enough for a place for herself and the coming baby to live. That was until the day fate had taken a hand and she’d woken up two months later, paralysed, with a beautiful baby boy and the memory of its father and those terrible months following wiped clean from her mind.

Creeping back into the bedroom, making sure Andreas was still asleep, she gathered up her underwear and stockings and the few belongings in the bag he had bought her, and very quietly made her way back to her own room.

She had blanked it out because it had been too painful to remember, and now it was agony coming to terms with the way she had behaved.

She recalled what Andreas had said to her in the lift that day, about her scarf hiding the marks of another man’s lust, and she cringed, knowing now exactly why he had said it. But he didn’t know the truth, and suddenly she was seized by the startling realisation that she couldn’t tell him even now. That if she did then he’d realise that Theo was his. And she couldn’t risk letting him know—not when he despised her so much. Even if it was with good reason, she accepted despairingly. That didn’t alter the fact that he obviously thought she could still be bought, and that he had only made love to her now for his own satisfaction—to show her that he could. And like a fool she had fallen into his tender trap...

She was sobbing and she couldn’t stop, the breath-catching pain after so much joy sending violent shudders through her entire body.

How could she have let it happen? she wondered despairingly. She’d known he despised her and now, having recalled how badly she had treated him, it wasn’t any wonder that he thought her not only heartless, but promiscuous too. She had had his love and she had blown it—thrown it away as if it didn’t matter. And with it whatever respect he had had for her.

Curled up in a tight ball on the bed, she thought how incredible making love with him had been. But all it had succeeded in doing was to make her fall more deeply and hopelessly in love with him. And he...

No matter how much it hurt, she thought, she had to face the truth. He had had his payback in her willing and unconditional surrender. He was too proud a man ever to allow himself to become emotionally involved with her again.