‘Yes.’ He straightened up. ‘Your mother invited me. Is that all right with you?’
Ethan clapped his hands. ‘Yes!’
Annah forced herself to smile. It was stupid, but Ethan’s enthusiasm towards his father felt like a kick in her ribs. ‘Come on, then,’ she said, imbuing her voice with a cheerfulness she didn’t feel. ‘Let’s go before it gets too cold.’
* * *
Half an hour later, Annah sat on a bench seat carved out of an old gnarled tree trunk and hunched her shoulders inside her jacket.
It wasn’t all that cold. This part of the nature reserve was sheltered from the cool breeze, and the early spring sunshine lent a modicum of warmth to the afternoon.
The chill was inside her. A cold knot of anxiety that wasn’t going to shift any time soon, at least not until she knew what Luca’s long-term intentions were.
She watched him and Ethan at the water’s edge, scooping handfuls of oats, seeds and food pellets out of a paper bag and tossing them into the midst of a noisy gathering of ducks. Farther out, a pair of white swans glided across the calm surface of the landscaped lake.
It was a pretty spot and one of her and Ethan’s favourite haunts. Throughout the reserve, wild daffodils already bloomed in bright patches of cheerful yellow. In another few weeks, spring would start throwing its confetti of colour across the countryside in earnest. The wedding season would gear up, and work would get busy. Annah and Chloe had made a name for themselves specialising in wedding flowers and event styling. Last year they’d even won an award for South West Wedding Florist of the Year.
She wished Chloe were here now. She wasn’t only Annah’s business partner, she was her best friend. Her only close friend really. Annah knew plenty of people, was friendly with most, but she struggled to make that leap from acquaintance to friend. Learning to rely on herself as a child had made her fiercely independent, inclined to put walls up when she didn’t necessarily mean to.
But walls could be good. Especially if you didn’t know who to trust.
Could she trust Luca?
According to Chloe’s ex, Franco Cavallari had been a corrupt and powerful businessman with ties to organised crime. Just because Luca had fallen out with his father, it didn’t mean he wasn’t a bad guy, too.
And bad guys didn’t mind doing bad things, did they? Things like...kidnap their own children?
Oh, Lord.
Annah jammed the brakes on her imagination. Luca’s behaviour so far had been perfectly civilised, she reminded herself. He’d sat down and had a cup of tea with her, for goodness’ sake!
And now he stood on a muddy lakeside feeding a bunch of ducks with Ethan. It almost made her smile. She’d bet his fancy leather shoes were toast.
‘All gone, Mummy,’ Ethan called to her, tipping the paper bag upside down to show it was empty. ‘Can we go see Sandy now?’
‘Yes.’ Annah stood and pushed a smile onto her face as Ethan and Luca came towards her. Seeing them together like this, side by side, made her jumbled emotions even more difficult to untangle. The physical similarities—dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin—brought a lump to her throat.
Shoving the empty paper bag at Annah, Ethan said to his father, ‘Sandy’s got eight babies!’
Luca returned a suitable look of surprise. ‘Eight?’ he said, raising a quizzical eyebrow at Annah.
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‘Puppies,’ she clarified. ‘Sandy’s a golden retriever. She belongs to the family who runs the café and lives in the house up by the entrance.’
‘They were too small to hold last time but they might be big enough now,’ Ethan chipped in, then chattered excitedly all the way to the café, something like awe lighting up his face every time he tipped his head back to gaze up at his father.
As they stepped into the warmth of the café, Annah wrestled down a pang of jealousy. She didn’t need to compete for Ethan’s affections. He loved her. She was his mummy. Luca’s sudden arrival didn’t change that.
Going straight to the window table where she and Ethan usually sat, she unzipped her puffer jacket and then hung it on the back of a chair. Not until she glanced up did she notice Luca’s burly associate sitting at a table in a back corner.
He got to his feet, and Annah’s pulse did a nervous skitter. While he wasn’t the same man who had wrapped a bruising hand around her arm five years ago and ‘escorted’ her from the Cavallari Enterprises offices after Luca’s father had carelessly dismissed her, the likeness was enough to make the hairs on the back of her neck lift.
Instinctively, without taking her eyes off the man, she reached for Ethan and dragged him close.
* * *
Luca narrowed his gaze on Annah’s face and watched her complexion go from peaches and cream to chalky white. Her hands clutched Ethan’s shoulders and she stared at Mario as if expecting him to try to snatch up her child and steal him away.