A roaring sounded in Faith’s ears. Her lips parted. She stared back at him in horror as that cosy little world he had referred to with such perceptible scorn lurched and tilted dangerously on its axis.
‘Connor is my son,’ Gianni spelt out levelly.
The very floor under Faith’s feet seemed to shift. Her eyes were blank with shock.
As she swayed, Gianni strode forward. Curving a powerful arm to her spine to steady her, he took her out of the conservatory and back through the hall. ‘No, don’t pass out on me again. Let’s get out of this dump. We both need some fresh air.’
The winter sunlight that engulfed her at the front of the house seemed impossibly bright. She blinked and shifted her aching head. ‘No, not Connor…it’s not possible…not you!’
Ignoring those objections, Gianni guided her over to a worn bench and settled her down on it with surprisingly gentle hands. He hunkered down in front of her and reached for her trembling fingers, enclosing them firmly in his. ‘There is no easy way to tell you these things. I’m working really hard to keep the shocks to the minimum.’
That one shock had temporarily left her bereft of the ability to even respond. And yet he could call that one bombshell keeping the shocks to the “minimum”? Dear God, what worse could he tell her than he had already told her? Her face was pale as parchment. ‘My head hurts,’ she mumbled, like a child seeking sympathy in an effort to ward off punishment for some offence.
Gianni’s hands tightened fiercely on hers. ‘I’m sorry, but I had to tell you. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I’ve spent three endless years trying to trace you both?’ he demanded emotively.
Faith focused on him numbly. The father of her child. Why hadn’t that possibility occurred to her sooner? But she knew why, didn’t she? Connor might as well have sprung into being without benefit of any male input whatsoever.
Once she had been frantic to know who had fathered her child, but when she had admitted that need to her parents they had gone all quiet and looked at each other uncomfortably. And when she had questioned their attitude to what seemed to her an absolutely crucial question that had to be answered, she had recognised what they didn’t want to put into words.
They were afraid that
she had been promiscuous, that she might not even know for sure who had actually got her pregnant. And she had been very upset to realise that her parents could harbour such sordid suspicions about a life she could no longer remember.
‘The father of my baby might love me…might be looking for me right now!’ she had sobbed in distraught self-defence.
‘If he loved you, why were you on your own?’
‘If you disappeared, why hasn’t he been in touch with the police?’
‘And why hasn’t he come here looking for you? Surely he would at least have known where your parents lived? Even though you hadn’t been in touch with us recently, wouldn’t he have arrived here to check us out as a last resort?’
Faced with those unanswerable questions, Faith had finally let go of the idea that she might have conceived her baby in a caring relationship. And from that moment on she had begun suppressing her own curiosity, shrinking from the idea that Connor might be the result of some casual sexual encounter. Yet those suspicions had only fronted worse fears, she conceded now, a hysterical laugh lodging like a giant stone in her throat. These days you read so many horror stories about the level penniless and homeless teenagers could be reduced to just to survive…
‘Milly…’ Gianni tugged her upright.
‘That’s n-not my name,’ she stated through chattering teeth.
He raised his hands to capture her taut cheekbones and she shivered because he was so very close. ‘That’s the name I knew you by,’ he murmured softly.
‘Please let go of me…’
‘You’re shaking like a jerry-built building in an earthquake,’ Gianni countered drily.
She realised that she was. Involuntarily, she braced her hands on his chest. Instantly the heat of him sprang out at her and she swiftly removed her hands again, almost off-balancing in her eagerness to put some distance between them. But the distinctive scent of him still flared in her nostrils. Clean, warm, intrinsically male and somehow earthy in a way Edward was not. Edward always smelt of soap. Oh, my God, Edward, a voice screamed inside her pounding head.
Another moan was dredged from her. She covered her distraught face with trembling hands in growing desperation. Connor, whom she loved beyond life itself. Connor’s father was here to stake a claim in his son’s life. What else could he be here for? Why else had he searched for them?
‘Let me tell you something…’ Gianni breathed in a charged undertone that reeked of menace but somehow didn’t frighten her. ‘Three years without me has turned you into a basket case! I’m taking you back to my hotel and getting a doctor to look you over!’
By sheer force of will he got her down the path and out onto the pavement. She wasn’t capable of matching the speed of his reactions, but she dimly registered that what he thought he acted on simultaneously, with terrifying decisiveness. She gawped at the sight of the long silver limousine waiting, not to mention the chauffeur surging round the bonnet as if he was running a race to get the passenger door open in time.
‘Your hotel…?’ she repeated belatedly, her brain functioning only in tiny, cripplingly slow bursts of activity. ‘I can’t go to your hotel!’
Gianni ducked her head down as carefully as an officer of the law tucking a suspect into a police car and settled her onto the rich leather-backed seat. He swung in beside her, forcing her to move deeper into the opulent car, and a split second later the door slammed on them both.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’ Faith protested frantically. ‘I’ve got to get back to the shop—’
‘I’m sure your partner will manage without you for a couple of hours.’