Birdsong pierced her concentration. Blinking, in a daze, Mina was dragged back out of the past and she focused on the fading sunlight and the garden but she didn’t see them. She was still reliving the unutterable humiliation of that encounter—Sandro’s smirking face, his suggestive voice pawing over something which had until that moment been precious and oh, so private. He had made her feel grubby but she hadn’t believed that Cesare would behave like that, had initially refused even to entertain the idea that he could have swept her off to bed on nothing more than a lustful impulse.
‘Mummy?’
She glanced up. Susie was sidling along the wall towards her, her small face stiff with uncertainty. Mina’s throat closed over and she opened her arms. Susie flew into them, locking her arms round her mother’s throat in a stranglehold, with all the fierce affection that was the other side of that temper of hers.
‘Sorry,’ she sniffed.
Mina smoothed the dark head buried against her shoulder, wanted to squeeze her to death with the force of her own disturbed emotions.
‘Not be bad any more,’ Susie promised.
‘Darling, you’re only bad sometimes.’
‘I get cross.’
‘I know,’ Mina soothed. ‘But you mustn’t bite people.’
‘When you going on the train?’
Mina swallowed back the thickness in her throat. She had told Susie repeatedly over the past fortnight that she wasn’t going to be leaving on the train again but Susie couldn’t quite accept that yet. She had been accustomed to Mina’s departures for so long. Was Cesare right? Had she done everything wrong with Susie? Should she have buried her wretched pride and asked for his help? But she had envisaged so many even more humiliating scenarios when she had considered telling Cesare that she was pregnant.
After all, her knowledge of Cesare then had been formed on the basis of that one fatal night and his subsequent conduct. She had pictured him denying that he was the father of the child she was expecting or, perhaps even worse, furiously and resentfully accepting responsibility and making it very clear that she was now an even more unwanted embarrassment.
But now she knew that Cesare had sacked her not because she had shared his bed but because he believed that she had acted dishonestly and betrayed him. In a veil of pain, she recalled his accusation that she had betrayed him ‘as an employee and as a lover’. Yet, even crediting that, Cesare had still sought reassurance that she was not pregnant, had tried to contact her, find her…
Dear God, what a mess, Mina reflected wretchedly. If only she had the power to turn the clock back and know what would have happened and how he would have behaved had he found her! Maybe the whole mess could have been sorted out then, but would it really have made any great difference in the long run?
True, he might have given her financial help but it was not as though he had loved her or even been interested enough to toy with the idea of a continuing relationship with her. For Cesare that night had been a mistake and on that basis Susie had to be an even bigger mistake in his book.
‘Hi…’ Mina smiled but there was an air of uneasiness about her as she hovered in the aisle of the giant greenhouse.
Steve straightened from the pricelist he was checking and dealt her a sullen look which made her heart sink. ‘Why didn’t you join the rest of us for dinner at the Coach last night?’
‘Sorry; I didn’t feel much like going out.’
The past two days had been very tense for Mina. She had been waiting for the phone to ring, the doorbell to shrill. But there hadn’t been a single word from Cesare, only a silence which could be read in half a dozen ways and which had merely increased the burden of her anxiety. How did Cesare intend to deal with the discovery that he was the father of a three-year-old daughter? Or indeed did he intend to deal with it at all?
‘I didn’t feel much like socialising either but I went.’ Steve moved closer without warning and reached for her hands, holding them in a tight grip, preventing her retreat. ‘How the hell could you go off with Falcone like that?’ he demanded furiously. ‘You made me look a right fool!’
Mina had tensed. ‘I——’
Unhidden bitterness had darkened his blue eyes. ‘Seeing him brought it all back. If it hadn’t been for him——’
‘Cesare had nothing to do with our break-up!’ Mina protested, finding that her worst apprehensions had been justified. Cesare’s descent had reanimated Steve’s resentment and she had little doubt that his unreasonable attitude had been encouraged by her sister over the dinner the night before.
‘I really loved you——’
‘But you’ve got Jenny now,’ Mina whispered tautly, looking up at him with pain-filled eyes, inwardly begging him not to lay that guilt-trip on her as well.
‘You are so very beautiful.’ Steve lifted a hand and touched a glossy strand of her golden hair. ‘So perfect——’
‘Mina…?’
Both their heads spun round. Mina froze at the sight of Cesare where he stood in the doorway. More casually dressed than she had ever seen him, he sported cream chino trousers and a black open-necked shirt under a light jacket, but, for all that, the entire outfit was exquisitely tailored, stamped with Italian designer chic. He looked gorgeous. Her heart skipped a beat. Her mouth ran dry.
Surprise had made Steve loosen his grip and she freed her other hand from his belatedly, her skin burning. She could have screamed at the fate which had decreed that Cesare should witness this particular encounter. She knew exactly how he would translate what he had seen. Now he would probably think she had been lying when she had said that Steve was not her lover.
‘Baxter told me I had just missed you. Susie showed me the short cut.’