“ENOUGH!” ALEX BIT OUT, her throat raw. Leandro’s silence distressed her more than his grandfather’s words. “I won’t stand quietly while you call my little girl names.”
She felt Luca’s hand on her shoulder and drew strength from it.
Faking defiance she didn’t feel, Alex held Leandro’s gaze.
Disbelief? Disgust? Something finally flickered in his expression and she felt as if she was bucking, bending against the force of it.
Aquiline nose, thinly sculpted mouth and the sleek, sharp planes of his face...he was just as arrogantly beautiful as she remembered.
Seven years hadn’t changed his feelings about that night then. She hadn’t hoped differently, neither would she let him shame her.
She had done nothing to be shameful of. Not then, not now.
“You stay silent even as you know there’s a chance that it’s true? I was wrong to come here, wrong to think Izzie...” She took a bracing breath. “You and your family, you don’t deserve to know her.”
Alexis turned her back on them with her head held high.
Out into the corridor she went, her pumps clicking hard on the gleaming marble floor, ignoring the hollow ache in her gut.
It was the uncertainty caused by the accident, the uncertainty about Isabella’s future, she told herself. Nothing to do with the man who stood there, unmoving like a rock while his family castigated her.
Having arrived at the end of the corridor, Alex stilled.
Approaching dusk hadn’t dimmed the beauty of the villa one bit.
The corridor opened into a semicircular balcony, offering a view to the ground floor, the acreage surrounding the house lit up by solar lights and the dark waters of the lake beyond.
A tinkle of laughter from the guests below her brought her attention back. Pressing a hand to her throbbing temples, she faced her current problem.
She couldn’t ask Valentina for a ride back. Would Luca help?
She turned and slammed headlong into a solidly male body. Threaded her fingers in that hard chest for purchase. “Luca, can you please...”
Crisply masculine and with a hint of aqua, the scent that filled her nostrils arrested the words on her lips. Her head jerked up so fast that she felt dizzy.
Penetrating gray eyes studied her.
“Why assume Luca?”
“Because he seems like the only decent person in your family.”
She tugged at her arm but Leandro didn’t relent. Her legs tangled with his, the hard, muscular length of his thighs against hers knocking the breath out of her.
Hard and hot, he made her head spin. “I have nothing more to say to you,” she breathed into his shoulder.
“You think to announce what you did and walk away calmly? Probably into the media’s mouthpiece? Make a mockery of the Contis?”
His grip viselike, he dragged her through a turn in the corridor that led to another sit-out area and then past a dark oak door. The hard thud of the door cut off the noise from the party, locking them away.
Breath rattling, Alex kept her back to him.
Her skin prickled at his nearness, her senses still jarred at the impact with his hard body. She rubbed fingers over her forehead, willing her heart to calm.
Slowly, she took in the sumptuous furnishings in the huge room, a dark mahogany study table to the side with papers strewn on it, the large four-poster king bed with dark blue sheets. That same cool aqua scent clung to the room. A small, framed picture sat on the nightstand on the opposite side, of a pretty woman with dark hair and delicate features.
Dear Lord, was this his room? Who was that woman then?
With her gut in a tight knot, Alex forced her gaze to the window. The view afforded here of Lake Como was even better. Spectacularly maintained gardens, acres of it, lit softly by moonlight and solar lights along the paths greeted her. Silence lingered in this part of the gardens.
Even his guests were not allowed to impinge on his private slice of heaven, she realized slowly.
This estate was not just beautiful but huge.
And this was only one of the many properties they owned.
The Contis were a dynastic family with an old-world wealth and Leandro...at the helm of it. And she had barged in on their illustrious party and told them that he had a daughter.
If her chest wasn’t so tight, Alex would have laughed at the absurdity of it.
“You’re afraid to face me now? After that performance in front of everyone.”
Low and crisp, his tone was like fingertips sliding over her bare skin. As if it was yesterday he had touched her and not seven long years ago.
Alex turned slowly, loathe to betray how unbalanced she felt in his presence.
He stood leaning against the closed door, minus the suit jacket, the gray of his dress shirt making his eyes gleam doubly. Leaner than she remembered, his features sharper. Even more settled into that powerful aura that had always clung to him.
The austere severity of his features from the sculpted jaw to that aquiline nose, the lean, wiry breadth of his chest tapering to a waist, the thinly sculpted curve of his lower lip, everything about Leandro Conti said leashed power.
Any moment now, she wouldn’t find him attractive. Any moment now, she’d remember that the same mouth that could kiss so passionately and tenderly could also shred her to pieces as soon as he was done.
“I’m trying to overcome my shock that you cared enough to stop me.” Instead, her insides thrummed with a thrill. “And if that was a performance, then you forced me to it.”
Those eyes of his studied her relentlessly. Why didn’t the infuriating man say anything? Demand a DNA test? Throw her out if he didn’t believe her? Threaten her like his grandfather had done?
She had been prepared for all of that. Except his impenetrable silence, this unnerving composure.
It made her want to take a sledgehammer and smash it to pieces.
“You pulling me into a room like this, away from prying eyes should bring back memories for you,” she threw recklessly. “Lucky for me, because it seems you erased that evening from your mind.”
His chin jerked, and his eyes lost that inscrutable expression. “I was successful. Until this very evening.”
Alex blinked at the hurt that pinged through her, as if her poisonous dart had found its way back to her. She didn’t think he was saying it to get a rise out of her, like she’d done.
No, he merely stated fact.
“What would you have dared to remind me, Alexis?”
Her name on his lips was a possessive caress that threatened her paper-thin composure.
Suppressing the dangerous urge to take up the challenge in his tone, she said, “Your assumption that I’m dying to...renew our acquaintance smacks of arrogance. I’m here only for Isabella.”
Whether he believed her or not, Alex didn’t know. But then, from what little she knew of Leandro, he thrived on self-control. That he hadn’t instantly called her a liar like his grandfather had done, his utter silence in the face of her declaration, said something else entirely, she realized with a little panic.
He circled the room, moving a thing here and there and finally, leaned against the bed. “How are you here, today?”
“I don’t understand.”
“How did you come to be here at the villa, tonight of all nights? Did you know—?”
“About the party? Of course not. You think I wanted to make a spectacle of myself in front of your exalted family? Valentina must have decided tonight was best.”
One haughty brow rose on his face. “For what?”
“I hinted, pretty heavily, that I wanted to say hello to you and Luca. She assumed that I was eager to renew my friendship with Luca.”
“And Luca?” The two words rang with his displeasure.
Frustration made her voice sharp. “What about Luca?”
Something flashed in his gaze, the first sign that maybe he wasn’t so composed. “How did you arrive on his arm?”
Of all the things he had said and unsaid today, this annoyed her most. “He was kind enough to escort me to you when I insisted on seeing you.”
“You told me that night that you were protected.”
The sudden shift in the conversation caught her off guard. “I was. I began the pill a few weeks before I left for Italy.”
“In preparation for your fling abroad?”
His barb pricked her, but she’d rather he believe that he’d been the convenient choice. The one man she’d picked out of a lineup to have her supposed holiday fling with. “I was in over my head from the minute I saw you, yes.” Resentment she’d swallowed for years flared. “What’s your excuse then?”
“You think I blame you for that night.” The idea seemed to shock him.
What else was she supposed to think, she wanted to throw back at him. Even now, he looked at her as if she was his worst nightmare. There was no point in scraping old wounds however. “Even the pill is not one-hundred-percent foolproof.” He remained silent again and it began to scrape Alex raw. “If you don’t believe me, then—”
“Since I’m still feeling the consequences of that...very activity seven years ago, I believe I will refrain from it.”
“That’s not an invitation. This trip isn’t a ploy to renew that...madness. You probably find this hard to believe but not every woman wants a piece of your esteemed Conti pie.” She was so angry she wanted to thump the man.
“Really?”
He made it so easy to despise him with his insufferable attitude.
To pretend that her skin hadn’t prickled, her heart hadn’t raced, that even the thought of Izzie had disappeared in that moment when she had spied him again in that lounge. To act as though, for seven years, she hadn’t relived every moment with him a thousand times.
“Yes. I have too much self-respect to be attracted to a man who thinks I’m a liar and worse. To want a man who dismissed me like garbage back in my life.”
Faint lines appeared around his mouth before he looked away.
Bloodthirsty enough after that scene in the lounge, Alex felt feral satisfaction that she’d landed another one.
“Why did you wait seven years to...make this claim?”
“Calling it a claim will not make it less of a truth.” The taunt was instant and yet...she had a feeling it had taken him this long to work toward the subject of Isabella, to acknowledge the ticking bomb between them.
He pushed off the bed and Alex needed all her will power to not step back. “Did you think I would have no questions for you at all?” She remained silent and he continued. “Why didn’t you let me know immediately?”
“By the time I realized I was...pregnant, I was almost ten weeks along.”
“Is that why you kept...the baby?” He raised a hand to cut her off. “You were twenty. I...cannot imagine Valentina mature enough to manage herself, much less a child at that age.”
Alex swallowed, the utter strength of her conviction that day amazing her even now. Her parents, her only close friend, everyone had advised her to give up the baby for adoption. “I just...” She shied her gaze away, her throat thick with emotion.
“Tell me why.”
Jerked by his sharp tone, she lifted her gaze. “That feeling...it’s inexplicable.”
Something so raw and visceral flashed in his gaze that her skin prickled. Arrogant, heartless, cynical...she’d made her decision to come here based on the fact that Leandro was all those things. What if she was wrong?
Fear pulsed down her spine. “I called your office a week after I found out. I... I was on hold for an hour. Finally, when your secretary came on, she cut me off, said you weren’t interested.
“That I shouldn’t call back.” Alex tried to keep any complaint out of her voice now however anxious she’d been then. “I called you a few more times. Got the same answer again.”
“You could have called your friend, Luca.” He spoke softly, yet it cracked through the room like a gale of wind. “You could have come back to Italy. You could have told Valentina. You could have emailed me—”
“And what? Capitalized the subject line—I’M PREGNANT, IT’S YOURS—like some spammer!” She colored furiously. “You wanted nothing to do with me. But... I still tried.
“I bought another ticket. I...thought you should know. The day before I was supposed to leave, my parents and I argued and my dad threw out his back at the store. I... I couldn’t go off in search of you then, especially when you were determined to forget me.
“With taking care of the store and him, when Isabella came... I barely had the energy to go through each day.”
“And later?”
How dare he sound as if it was her fault? “Later,” she said, feeling suddenly tired, “it was easier to believe that Izzie was better off without your rejection.” Easier to protect herself from the hurt he had wreaked on her.
The one time she had taken a chance to reach for something she’d wanted, she’d been rejected. Firmly pushed back into the forgettable category again.
There had been nothing special or memorable about her or that night for him. As if she was a mere blip in the life of another person yet again.
A disappointment, an inconvenience, a thing with no value or feelings whatsoever.
“Why did you change your mind now?” he bit out harshly. He ran his fingers through his hair while he paced the small room like a caged animal. “Or was that your plan all along?”
“Wouldn’t that be perfect for you if I had some ultimate agenda? If I proved your worst assumptions about me right? That way you won’t have to take any responsibility in all this...”
“Dio, why now, Alexis?”
It was his hoarse voice that halted Alex’s self-indulgent tirade. This was not about her feelings. This was about her baby.
“I just... I was in an accident three months ago, a bad one.” Automatically, her fingers went to the scar down her forehead and his gaze moved there. Throat raw, she continued, “It made me realize...if something happened to me, Isabella would be alone in the world. My parents...” She swallowed the fact that they had never approved of her having Isabella. “They’re growing old. I can’t sleep wondering about her future.”
Once again, silence descended, his stare unnerving her on a whole new level.
“I brought her birth certificate,” she said, busying herself with the handbag. “Just tell me where and when to bring her for the DNA test, although it’ll be a huge help if it’s in New York because I can’t—”
“There’s no situation that fazes you, is there? You set your course and you blaze through it, come what may.”
Alex blanched. Softly delivered but his innuendo pierced just the same.
He thought this was easy for her? To see him after all these years, to realize that he still viewed her with that loathing? To know that she’d never been anything more than a quick indulgence?
But she swallowed her own feelings and focused on what she needed to do. “I’m prepared to do anything to prove that she’s yours, yes.”
“And, in return?”
“Are you so afraid of what I would demand, Leandro?” The challenge escaped her before she could catch it, her femininity rearing its head.
An almost imperceptible widening of those stormy eyes. Something she wouldn’t have even noticed if she wasn’t so greedy about every nuance on his face.
“Do you have many to make then, Alexis? These demands?”
Why was she taunting him? Why this reckless, dangerous urge to provoke him? She pulled out the envelope she’d stuffed into her handbag. “Here’s some pictures. Maybe you could visit us and meet Izzie a couple of times over the next couple of years so that you aren’t a complete stranger? I could bring her here for holiday, to meet Luca and Valentina, if they’re interested.
“All I want is a promise that if anything were to happen to me, you’d...”
Her words trailed away as Leandro became still. The muscles in his face pulled taut over his features, a white pallor to his olive skin.
Her outstretched hand lay between them. And his gaze on the envelope, frozen.
“Leandro?”
The swath of his eyelashes flickered. His rough breath rattled loud in the room.
With gut-wrenching clarity, Alex realized that he’d rather she was lying.
From the moment she’d spoken Isabella’s name, it wasn’t the veracity of her claim he’d doubted. What had kept him silent, even as his grandfather had shredded her, was that Leandro needed her to be lying.
“You wish Isabella didn’t exist.” Horror filled her, turning her voice into a whiplash. “Do you despise me that much?”
He jerked around, pain streaking through his eyes. “What I feel about her has nothing to do with you.”
That’s good, she told herself. She couldn’t bear it if he despised Isabella like he did her. She wouldn’t allow it.
How much do you know of that man? Her mom’s question came back to her now.
She didn’t know that much, really.
Her intense attraction to him seven years ago, her fascination with him, the connection she’d felt with him, had been inexplicable. She stole another greedy glance at him, unable to stop herself. Lean and tall, he wore his power effortlessly and she wondered if that had been the draw for her.
Hands shaking, she stuffed the envelope back into her handbag. She needed to leave. Before she made this about her. Before she asked any more of those stupid questions...
Before she forgot that this man had crushed her tender heart in such a way that it hadn’t mended again.
* * *
“Show me the pictures,” Leandro finally forced himself to say.
Alexis stilled with her back to him, her slender shoulders a tense line.
His voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it in years, as if forming such simple words was beyond his capability. Told himself again and again that he was composed.
If he acted like it, he hoped his rioting emotions would catch on that he was composed, that he would survive through this new development in his life like he always did.
Giving in to the shame that he had behaved in a way he detested was only self-indulgent. Giving in to the guilt that clawed at him that he had abandoned his child...would only render him useless.
His head jerked up, the realization that he believed Alexis stunning him anew.
He believed that she was telling the truth, that her daughter was his?
Antonio would call him a fool, their lawyers would tell him to demand a DNA test. The rational, sensible part of him, which had been born out of necessity at a young age, warned that he was being reckless. That Alexis’s poise, her self-sufficiency, her declaration that she wanted nothing from him, that they all could be lies.
She could have waited all these years just so she could make a bigger splash, demand a bigger payoff.
He wasn’t unaware of his draw for women. If they fell like flies for Luca’s charm, they went rabid because of how sacrosanct his privacy was to him, because the media, frequently and fervently, painted him as the perfect man, still mourning his wife.
Yet that same instinct that had drawn him to her drowned out everything else. “Show me the pictures.”
Knuckles turning white, her fingers tightened over the straps of her bag. Her reluctance now would have been comical, if not for the fierce churning in his gut. “I didn’t come to force you to be a father.”
He moved closer, uncaring of the tremble in her lips, the slight widening of her eyes. Crowded her lithe body against the door, his self-discipline in tatters now. “You are afraid now? After you came all this way?”
Something in his tone must have finally registered because she pulled out the envelope.
He moved back toward the bed and spread them out on the dark cover.
There were ten, different sizes and in different poses.
His heart thundering, he picked up one eight-by-ten, a close-up. With jet-black hair that framed her face and serious gray eyes, and the cast of her features, drawn in chubbiness instead of sharp planes, the little girl was his mirror image.
The girl, no, Isabella...was his daughter. His own flesh and blood.
“There is nothing of me in her,” came Alexis’s reply behind him. Tentative and reverberating with a quiet joy. “Every morning, I look at her and I’m amazed that she’s mine.”
Inhaling roughly, he turned.
Raw emotion glittered in her eyes. Walking closer, unaware of her own actions, he was sure, she studied him avidly. He knew she was seeing her daughter, no, their daughter in his face.
Still, her gaze was like a physical caress. Possessive and hungry and intent. And deeply disconcerting for the instant ache it evoked in him.
He looked at the picture and then at Alex. “That determined chin, that’s you.”
A smile curved her mouth, transforming her into a stunning beauty. “Really?”
“Where is she now?” he asked, more to distract himself from the scent of her fluttering toward him. Subtle yet lingering. Like the woman herself.
“With my parents. Isabella and I live with them. A friend of mine has a boy of Izzie’s age and she takes her during the day. You can keep the pictures.” She looked through her bag and extracted visiting cards and extended them to him. Like a salesgirl pushing a product. “These have all my numbers and email address. Just call me in advance, because after the accident and this trip, I can’t take off more—”
“In advance for what?” he repeated.
She shrugged but hurt shadowed her eyes. “Y’know...if you decide to see her.”
He emerged from the emotional knockout, her intention in all the things she had told him tonight shaping into coherence. His gut tightened.
When he made no move to take the cards, she put them on the small study table. “I’ll be in Milan for two more days if you have any questions.” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “If you can arrange a car for me, I’ll be off.”
A growl he couldn’t control emerged low in Leandro’s throat.
She thought she would show him pictures of his daughter and then bid him goodbye? That he would call her and make an appointment like some distant relative?
Did she think he had no honor, no sense of duty?
Have you treated her like you have any?
“Stay tonight,” he finally said, somehow managing to keep his tone smooth. A herculean feat seeing that his head was in a whirl, his world precariously tilted on its axis. And this woman, whom he’d tried to forget at all costs, suddenly was at the center of it. “You look like you’ll faint any minute.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble—”
“Little late for that, yes?” He slid the pictures back into the cover. “Someone from the staff will show you to a bedroom. Buenonotte, Alexis.”
* * *
Leandro paced inside his bedroom, the scent of a woman lingering inside the walls after so many years as disconcerting as the one who had left it behind. A million thoughts crowded him.
He remembered his secretary telling him that Ms. Sharpe had called. Again and again. He remembered the self-disgust at the mere thought of that night, the poisonous thoughts that Alexis was making a nuisance of herself.
Because he had had enough with his father’s mistresses and one-night stands making a spectacle of them.
And the intervening years, if he focused too much on that, he would take it out on her.
Despite everything, she had finally come to tell him of his daughter’s existence. The what if she hadn’t scenario didn’t bear thinking about...not if he wanted to remain sane.
With control he had learned in his teens, because someone had had to be strong for his mother and Luca, he bottled away the anger.
The Rossis would be waiting for an explanation, as would Antonio. His engagement to Sophia had been the biggest event of the summer among society and Salvatore wouldn’t react to this new development lightly.
Leandro would have to make sure Salvatore didn’t poison anyone on the Conti board against him because of any decision he took now.
He’d have to make sure Antonio didn’t interfere with Leandro’s intentions.
He’d have to tread carefully so that his sheer arrogance in dismissing Alexis seven years ago didn’t ripple over anyone now. Like Valentina and Sophia. And now Isabella.
She was his to protect, to cherish, to love. A shock or not, he could never neglect his duty as a father. A child needed both parents, he knew that better than anyone.
He vowed in that minute that the next generation of Contis would be different, beginning with Isabella. Much as he’d tried, he’d failed Luca.
He wouldn’t fail Isabella. He wouldn’t let his daughter spend a day without knowing that she was loved and wanted.
If Alexis had other ideas, he would convince her otherwise.
The weight of the world seemed to lie on his shoulders and yet, Leandro felt energized for the first time in years.