Tom; if only he were here now, she thought as she squeezed back a stray tear. He would know what to do. He would know how to handle Gianfranco. Still, straightening her shoulders, she drew in a deep breath. She had matured a lot in the last three years; she was no longer the naïve pregnant girl who had jumped at Gianfranco’s offer of marriage, flattered that he had hired a detective to find her.
‘Quite a spectacular hiding place,’ a deep husky voice drawled mockingly behind her, and she jumped as if she had been shot, as she had not heard him come downstairs.
Spinning around, she faced him. ‘How did you find me?’ Kelly went straight onto the attack. ‘Detectives again,’ she sneered.
Gianfranco studied her with half-closed eyes. ‘Your friend Tom wrote and told me.’
Of all the things he could have said, that was the most hurtful; every vestige of colour drained from Kelly’s face as she looked up at him with wide, pain-filled eyes. ‘No. No, I don’t believe you.’ Tom would never have betrayed her trust.
He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Please yourself.’ Strolling across the room, he sank down on the leather sofa, his long legs stretched out before him in nonchalant ease. ‘It is immaterial now. Though I must congratulate you on doing a very good job. At first I thought it might be post-natal depression, and I checked with Dr Credo. But no… You had left his surgery one hundred per cent fit and happy, with six months’ supply of contraception pills in your hand,’ he said drily.
Colour flare
d in Kelly’s cheeks, her lie revealed. She threw Gianfranco a sharp look, deeply disturbed at his tone, but she could read nothing from his coldly remote expression.
‘You are a great actress. I take my hat off to you,’ he said with cutting cynicism. ‘I spent a fortune hiring the best detectives known, and they could find no trace of you after you left a London hotel. You have remarkably little family—a second cousin on your father’s side in Bristol, I believe, was as near as they got. Your mother was brought up in an orphanage. You were incredibly lucky—or it was great planning?—to have met Tom, my dear wife.’ His mouth twisted chillingly. ‘Or you would never have got away with it.’
Uneasily Kelly listened and frowned. Gianfranco was right in every detail about her escape, and her family, so why would he lie about Tom telling him where she was? Horrified, she knew Gianfranco was telling the truth. Suddenly her legs felt wobbly, and she moved to sit down in the nearest armchair. She couldn’t take it in. Tom had betrayed her. Kelly glanced warily across at Gianfranco. ‘When did he write to you?’ she asked quietly.
‘Ten days ago, from his hospital bed apparently. But I only received the letter last night. He knew he was going to die, so he wrote to inform me that, although he loved you as his own, he could no longer take care of you.’ He said it so dispassionately that Kelly was lulled into a false sense of security. In a way she could understand Tom’s reasoning, even though she wished with all her heart he had not done it.
‘He also said it was time I took care of my own.’ One dark brow arched sardonically. “‘Chance would be a fine thing,” I believe, is the English expression.’
Lounging back on the sofa, Gianfranco was an incredibly attractive vision of relaxed masculinity. To her horror, despite being in the midst of fear, Kelly felt the familiar flood of sensual awareness heat her whole body. He was still the same insensitive, arrogant devil, she reminded herself firmly. ‘Yes, well, now you have the chance. You made sure of that when you blurted out you were Annalou’s father,’ she declared bitterly. ‘You could have traumatised the child,’ she added for good measure.
In a blur of movement Gianfranco lunged off the sofa and hauled her to her feet by her upper arms. The transformation was incredible; his face was so taut with rage that Kelly feared for her safety.
‘You dare say that to me, you bitch! You, who deprived her of her father for three years.’ His night-black eyes, leaping with violence, bored into hers. ‘Deprived me of my child. Replaced me with your lover, Tom.’
‘No. No,’ Kelly cried, stunned by his reasoning. ‘Let go of me.’ She tried to shrug his hands off, terrified at the fury in his tone. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
She tried again to pull free, but his hands tightened on her arms. ‘Yes, it was, my beautiful, traitorous wife. Don’t take me for a fool—this house has just two bedrooms,’ he said through clenched teeth, and hauled her closer into his hard body.
‘There are two beds; I share with Annalou.’
‘For appearances’ sake, I don’t doubt,’ he snarled. ‘And tonight I share with Anna Louise. Dio, you even deprived my child of her family name, and I—I, her father—had to hear her tell me she is always called Annalou.’ He focused on her with a dark, blistering anger that heightened the tension to breaking point. ‘I saw you today on the beach and I wanted to kill you. Three years of hell you have put me through. But you are not worth losing my freedom for. Instead I am going to make sure you suffer as I have,’ he hissed with lethal intent.
The fear and tension that had held her since the moment he had walked back into her life finally snapped and Kelly exploded. ‘Make me suffer! You did that from the day you married me. You never wanted me, all you ever wanted was my child. You never even tried to get in touch with me until you discovered I was pregnant. And even—’
‘You stood me up,’ Gianfranco cut in ruthlessly. ‘I do not run after any woman.’
Kelly sucked in air convulsively. He was the same arrogant, conceited jerk he had always been. ‘Exactly,’ she ground out mockingly. ‘As I said, it was only my baby you wanted. Amazing the lengths you would go to, even marrying me for that manic Olivia you love so much. You kept me in that great mausoleum of a house like a damned broodmare; you never believed a word I said, but Olivia or your mother could do no wrong.’
One hand slid upwards to curve around her jaw, and as he tilted her head back his glittering eyes bored down into hers. ‘You dare to blame me?’ he raked back scathingly. ‘I gave you everything a woman could want, and you repaid me by running off with my child.’
‘You gave me everything but your support.’ Everything but your love, she almost added, but stopped herself in time.
‘You had that, and if you had demanded more I would have given it. But, no, shall I tell you why you ran?’ He emitted a harsh, cynical laugh. ‘Because in your usual childish fashion you listened to rumour and innuendo and jumped to a whole lot of false conclusions. I told you I had never loved Olivia as anything but a sister in poor health and needing help, but you chose not to believe me.’ His fingers tightened almost cruelly on her chin and she tried to jerk her head away.
‘Look at me,’ he demanded savagely, and she did, suddenly aware of the brush of his thighs against her own, the close proximity of his large body. ‘I might have made mistakes as a husband, but I never deserved what you inflicted on me, the loss of my child.’
Maybe not, Kelly conceded—she had felt guilt over the years, but above all she knew he was lying. She had seen him with Olivia in his arms, and heard him.
He looked at her, and subtly the atmosphere changed. He was smiling, his hard eyes glinting with a devilish light as he said silkily, ‘But you know what really gets me? I have tortured myself for three years, wondering if you were all right, staring at the one photograph of my daughter on her first birthday that you deigned to send me. Posted in London with no way to trace it.’ He traced his fingers smoothly over her cheek while his other hand closed firmly around her waist. ‘Clever, very clever. Then I discover you have a lover—“Uncle” Tom,’ he spat, in a voice laced with bitter contempt.
‘No.’ She saw it too late in his darkening eyes. Felt it in the hard length of his body pressed against her. ‘No, Gianfranco,’ she cried, but his mouth took hers and she was shamed by the incredible hunger that shook her to the depths of her being. No, her mind cried as her lips helplessly parted to his savage invasion.
Held against the hard length of his body, she tried to struggle, but the total contact was like an electric shock to her system, awakening a dormant awareness she could no longer control.