The Italian's Christmas Secret

Keira flushed to the roots of her hair because she could remember her mother’s shame when she’d finally blurted out the story, no longer able to evade the curious questions of her young daughter. Would her mother be appalled if she knew that Keira was now repeating the sorry tale, to a man with a trace of steel running through his veins?

‘My mother was a student nurse,’ she said slowly, ‘who came to London and found it was nothing like the rural farm she’d grown up on in Ireland. She was quite shy and very naïve but she had those Irish looks. You know, black hair and blue eyes—’

‘Like yours?’ he i

nterrupted softly.

She shook her head. ‘Oh, no. She was much prettier than me. Men were always asking her out but usually she preferred to stay in the nurses’ home and watch something on TV, until one night she gave in and went to a party with a group of the other nurses. It was a pretty wild party and not her kind of thing at all. People were getting wasted and Mum decided she didn’t want to stay.’ She swallowed. ‘But by then it was too late because someone had...had...’

‘Someone had what, Keira?’ he questioned as her words became strangled and his voice was suddenly so gentle that it made her want to cry.

‘Somebody spiked her drink,’ she breathed, the words catching like sand in her throat because even now, they still had the power to repulse her. ‘She...she woke up alone in a strange bed with a pain between her legs, and soon after that she discovered she was pregnant with me.’

He gave a terse exclamation and she thought he was going to turn away in disgust but to her surprise he reached out to push away the lock of hair which had fallen over her flushed cheeks, before slipping his hand round her shoulder and pulling her against the warmth of his chest. ‘Bastardo,’ he swore softly and then repeated it, for added emphasis.

She shook her head and could feel the taste of tears nudging at the back of her throat and at last she gave into them, in a way she’d never done before. ‘She didn’t know how many men had been near her,’ she sobbed. ‘She had to go to the clinic to check she hadn’t been given some sort of disease and of course they offered her...’ She swallowed away the tears because she saw from the tightening of his jaw that she didn’t actually need to spell it out for him. ‘But she didn’t want that. She wanted me,’ she said simply. ‘There wasn’t a moment of doubt about that.’

He waited until she had composed herself before he spoke again, until she had brushed the remaining tears away with the tips of her fingers.

‘Why are you telling me all this, Keira?’ he questioned softly. ‘And why now?’

‘Because I grew up without a father and for me there was no other option—but I don’t want the same for my baby. For... Santino.’ Her voice wavered as she looked into the hardness of his eyes and forced herself to continue, even though the look on his face would have intimidated stronger people than her. ‘Matteo, you don’t...you don’t seem to feel anything for your son.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Why, you’ve barely touched him. It’s as if you can’t bear to go near him and I want to try to understand why.’

Matteo released his hold on her and his body tensed because she had no right to interrogate him, and he didn’t have to answer her intrusive question. He could tell her to mind her own damned business and that he would interact with his son when he was good and ready and not according to her timetable. Just because she wanted to spill out stuff about her own past, didn’t mean he had to do the same, did it? But in the depths of her eyes he could read a deep compassion and something in him told him there could be no going forward unless she understood what had made him the man he was.

He could feel a bitter taste coating his throat. Maybe everyone kept stuff hidden away inside them—the stuff which was truly painful. Perhaps it was nature’s way of trying to protect you from revisiting places which were too dark to contemplate. ‘My mother died in childbirth,’ he said suddenly.

There was a disbelieving pause as the words sank in and when they did, her eyes widened. ‘Oh, Matteo. That’s terrible,’ she whispered.

Matteo instantly produced the self-protective clause which enabled him to bat off unwanted sympathy if people did find out. ‘What is it they say?’ He shrugged. ‘That you can’t miss what you’ve never had. And I’ve had thirty-four years to get used to it.’

Her muffled ‘But...’ suggested she was about to disagree with him, but then she seemed to change her mind and said nothing. Leaving him free to utter the next words from his set-piece statement. ‘Maternal death is thankfully rare,’ he bit out. ‘My mother was just one of the unlucky ones.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve established that.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘I’ve never come into contact with babies before. To be honest, I’ve never even held one, but you’re right—it isn’t just inexperience which makes me wary.’ His jaw tightened. ‘It’s guilt.’

‘Guilt?’ she echoed, in surprise.

He swallowed and the words took a long time in coming. ‘People say they feel instant love for their own child but that didn’t happen to me when I looked at Santino for the first time. Oh, I checked his fingers and his toes and was relieved that he was healthy, but I didn’t feel anything.’ He punched his fist against his heart and the words fell from his lips, heavy as stones. ‘And I don’t know if I ever can.’

Keira nodded as she tried to evaluate what he’d told her. It all made sense now. It explained why he’d thrown a complete wobbly when she’d kept her pregnancy quiet. What if history had grimly repeated itself and she’d died in childbirth as his mother had done? Nobody had known who the father of her baby was because she’d kept it secret. Wasn’t it possible that Santino could have been adopted by her aunt and her cousin and grown up without knowing anything of his roots?

She felt another wrench as she met the pain in his eyes. What must it have been like for him—this powerful man who had missed out on so much? He had never experienced a mother’s love. Never even felt her arms hugging him in those vital hours of bonding which followed birth. Who had cradled the tiny Matteo as the cold corpse of his mother was prepared for her silent journey to the grave, instead of a joyous homecoming with her newborn baby? No wonder he’d been so reluctant to get close to his little boy—he didn’t know how.

‘Didn’t your father make up for the fact that you didn’t have a mother?’

His mouth twisted and he gave a hollow laugh. ‘People cope in their own way—or they don’t. He left my care to a series of young nannies, most of whom he apparently slept with—so then they’d leave—or the new stepmother would fire them. But it didn’t seem to matter how much sex he had or how many women he married, he never really got over my mother’s death. It left a hole in his life which nothing could ever fill.’

Keira couldn’t take her eyes away from his ravaged face. Had his father unconsciously blamed his infant son for the tragic demise of his beloved wife—would that explain why they weren’t close? And had Matteo been angry with his father for trying to replace her? She wondered if those different stepmothers had blamed the boy for being an ever-present reminder of a woman they could never compete with.

And blame was the last thing Matteo needed, Keira realised. Not then and certainly not now. He needed understanding—and love—though she wasn’t sure he wanted either. Reaching out, she laid her hand on his bunched and tensed biceps but the muscle remained hard and stone-like beneath her fingers. Undeterred, she began to massage her fingertips against the unyielding flesh.

‘So what do we do next, now we’ve brought all our ghosts into the daylight?’ she questioned slowly. ‘Where do we go from here, Matteo?’

His gaze was steady as he rolled away from her touch, as if reminding her that this was a decision which needed to be made without the distraction of the senses. ‘That depends. Where do you want to go from here?’

She recognised he was being open to negotiation and on some deeper level she suspected that this wasn’t usual for him in relationships. Because this was a relationship, she realised. Somehow it had grown despite their wariness and private pain and the unpromising beginning. It had the potential to grow even more—but only if she had the courage to give him the affection he needed, without making any demands of her own in return. She couldn’t demand that he learn to love his son, she could only pray that he would. Just as she couldn’t demand that he learn to love her. ‘I’ll go anywhere,’ she whispered. ‘As long as it’s with Santino. And you.’