Claiming His Scandalous Love-Child

He hadn’t even intended for her to stay in Rome at all, had he?

I was just going to be stashed away in some little love-nest in Amalfi, to be visited for sordid, secret sex sessions, kept as his convenient mistress.

She felt the nausea rise again from the pit of her stomach, revulsion filling her. And, more than that, pain, a sense of the deepest betrayal. Misery swept over her and she closed her eyes, feeling hot tears seeping beneath her lashes. It hurt—oh, how it hurt!

Memories, a thousand of them, pushed aside that tormenting video loop, crowded it out. Memories right from that very first moment when she’d gazed up from her sprawl on the airport concourse to see Vito looking down at her. She’d been captivated from the start, from that very first glance of his dark, melting eyes.

Memory after memory bombarded her—the sense of heady excitement and wonder, the tremor of desire building up in her, that incredible, unforgettable first night together, when he had taken her with him to a place so wonderful, so beautiful, that she had never known her body could take her there. And, thereafter, day after day, night after night. Vito...always Vito.

Always Vito.

She choked back a sob. All gone—gone, gone, gone! Ripped from her by a truth so ugly that she could not bear it.

Yet bear it she must. There was no other option. No other option but to flee, as she was doing, broken and tearful, yet steeling herself with a bitter anger at how he had lied to her—oh, not in words, but in deeds.

He had no right—no right to romance me! No right to have an affair with me! No right to let me think...

Another sob choked in her throat. No right to let her think...hope...that theirs was a passion that might lead to emotions that would bind them together for all their lives...

When all along he had been planning a very different future for himself.

And there it was, back again in her head, that hideous video loop—his fiancée bursting in, denouncing him, throwing savage pity at her, ripping her stupid, stupid illusions from her. Trampling on everything she had been starting to hope.

Trampling on the dreams she had started to long to come true.

Her hands clenched in her lap and she closed her eyes tighter shut.

And still the flight went on, and on.

When—after a lifetime, it seemed to her—the plane finally landed at JFK, she knew there was only one resolution to keep. She had said it all in that single text she had sent to him, after deleting unread the storm of texts that had arrived on her phone, deleting unheard all the voicemails. One single response from her had said all that needed to be said.

You are the most despicable man I know. Stay away from me for ever. Eloise.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS STILL afternoon in New York, despite the hours since she’d fled Rome. But her mind was in some strange, dislocated no-man’s-land which let her stare out of the taxi’s window at the busy concrete canyons passing her by on her way through Manhattan.

She’d texted ahead from the airport and received a directive to go straight to her mother’s apartment. As she whooshed up in the elevator, having collected a key from the concierge, a little ripple of nausea hit again, but she banked it down. A wave of weariness followed—weariness that went much deeper than the physical, was much more than jet lag. She needed to sleep—to claim oblivion from the devastation in her head.

Inside the apartment, she found the spare room she’d used before, and dumped her case. Her eyes felt as if they were being pressed with weights—she could barely take off her shoes before collapsing down on the bed, pulling back the covers to slide beneath the quilt.

Moments later she was asleep.

She must have slept for hours, adjusting overnight to New York time, for it was morning again when she surfaced. She opened her eyes, blinking. A cup of coffee was being placed on the bedside table beside her.

She shuffled up to a sitting position, pushing her long hair out of her eyes, looking at the person who had put it there, who was standing looking down at her with a questioning look on her face.

She took a breath. ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Eloise.

* * *

‘Let me get this straight.’

Eloise’s mother’s voice was clear, and it penetrated right into her head like a drill.

‘You let some spoiled, self-indulgent Italian playboy pick you up—literally!—and you went off with him without a thought, without the slightest hesitation or consideration, got tumbled into bed by him within twenty-four hours, and then you trotted along at his heels like a little poodle, only to discover—’ her expression was scathing ‘—that, lo and behold, he not only turns out to have a fiancée waiting for him in Rome, but fully intends to keep you as his handy mistress on the side! Eloise, how could you waste yourself on a man like that?’

Eloise closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know...’ she whispered. But she did know—knew exactly how it had happened. Why it had happened. ‘He seemed so wonderful,’ she said brokenly.