A Secret Disgrace Read online

  With his free hand he tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear, his gaze fixed on her mouth as though he was having to restrain himself from kissing her.

  How was it possible for her lips to burn and swell as they were doing just because he was looking at them, almost caressing them with that assured, tormenting male gaze that lied when it said so publicly that he couldn’t wait to crush their softness beneath the fierce pressure of a passionate kiss.

  Her face was burning now, her throat aching, her instinctive betraying, ‘Don’t,’ a suffocating sound of frantic denial.

  ‘Don’t what?’ Caesar challenged her.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘And how am I looking at you?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Louise said shakily. ‘You were looking at me as though …’

  ‘As though I want to take you to bed? Isn’t that exactly what we’ve agreed that we want people to think?’

  Was it? She couldn’t remember them ever discussing the reality of having him look at her the way he was doing now, but somehow her brain was refusing to work, and any idea of cool logical thought was impossible to formulate in the fierce aching heat within her body and her frantic attempts to smother those flames.

  What was happening to her? It was ten years since she had last lain in a man’s arms—ten years since the one and only time she had experienced the intensity of physical desire allied to what she had naively then thought of as love.

  ‘We’re married. Surely that’s enough to convince them that we want to be together? After all we aren’t going to … That is we won’t be …’

  For all that little tremor earlier, Louise was showing him what really mattered to her—and the truth was that she didn’t want him, Caesar recognised. Logic told him that he should be pleased, because the last thing he wanted was the complication that would come from allowing a sexual relationship to develop between them. So why, instead of being pleased, did he feel a sense of chagrin? Male vanity? He hadn’t thought himself so shallow. The focus of their marriage was going to be their son. They both knew that. But her reaction now reminded him of an issue they had not discussed.

  to be their son. They both knew that. But her reaction now reminded him of an issue they had not discussed.

  ‘Our marriage might be sexless, but I am sure you will that agree that that is something that only you and I should know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Louise was forced to agree, and a small shiver chilled through her. Why should she feel so cold and so … so … alone just because Caesar had stated the obvious? After all, she didn’t want to have sex with him, did she? Of course she didn’t.

  ‘And whilst we are on this subject, when it comes to sexual relationships outside our marriage … for the present, whilst Oliver’s emotional security must be our priority, it is my opinion that celibacy must be the order of the day for both of us. Since neither of us is currently involved in a relationship—or has been for some time—’

  Louise stopped him. ‘You’ve been checking up on me? Digging into my private life?’

  ‘Naturally I wanted to know what kind of men you might have been introducing into my son’s life as potential future stepfathers,’ Caesar answered her.

  ‘You really think that I would take risks with Oliver’s emotional security? The only reason I have agreed to marry you is because you are Oliver’s father and he needs you. No matter what my personal opinion of you, I believe that you will put him first and be a proper father to him. Not like … not like what I experienced with my own father.’

  Abruptly Louise turned away from him. She was saying too much, giving away too much, revealing her own vulnerability.

  It was a relief to see Oliver coming towards her, accompanied by Caesar’s cousin’s sons. The boys were getting on very well together. Just to see her son’s confidence growing and to know he was happy meant that whatever sacrifices she personally had to make would be worthwhile, she assured herself as she listened to Oliver’s enthusiasm for a trip that was being planned to a newly opened water park on another part of the island.

  One of the happiest and best moments of the day for her was when Anna Maria’s husband toasted them as a newly married couple and Oliver, standing next to Caesar, demanded, pink-faced with delight, ‘I really have a proper dad now, don’t I?’

  Caesar immediately got up from his chair to go and hug his son tightly as he told him emphatically, ‘You have a father, Oliver, and I have a son. Nothing can ever take that relationship away from us.’

  Those words, and the emotions that so plainly went with them, touched a place in her heart that had long hurt her on Oliver’s behalf—a place that was now beginning to be salved. It was still a huge risk, a huge act of faith for her to put her trust in Caesar’s promise to love their son, but what other choice did she really have when Ollie so plainly wanted Caesar as his father?

  Under cover of the others’ smiles, she had turned to Caesar and warned him quietly, ‘If you ever, ever let Ollie down I shall never forgive you.’

  In response Caesar had told her, equally quietly but fiercely, ‘If I were ever to let him down I would never forgive myself.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘OH, CAESAR, I nearly forgot! I think the excitement of your marriage must have been a bit too much for your housekeeper. I overheard Signora Rossi telling the maids to make up your parents’ old interconnecting state bedrooms for you and Louise this morning, just before I came down to the chapel for the ceremony.’

  Caesar’s cousin wrinkled her nose and laughed, whilst Louise froze. The adults of the family were in the ‘small’ dining room—all fifty feet of it—having a brief post mortem on the undeniable success of the day, before retiring.

  ‘So old-fashioned of her—but then, of course, she was your parents’ housekeeper. As though you and Louise would want to have separate rooms! I told her to instruct the maids to move Louise’s things to your own suite instead. Apart from anything else your suite is so much more modern and comfortable than those dreadfully old-fashioned state bedrooms your parents occupied. I know that for a fact from when she allocated them to Ricardo and me on our first visit after our marriage.’ She stifled a small yawn.

  Louise had to take a small sip from the brandy glass she had been nursing, her lips trembling against the glass as she did so. She wasn’t really a drinker, but Anna Maria’s lightly amused words had sent such a shock of dismay through her that she felt she needed the glowing warmth of the spirit to banish that shock’s icy coldness.

  ‘You must both be exhausted. I know I am,’ Anna Maria continued, thankfully oblivious to the consternation she had caused.

  As much as Louise desperately wanted to look at Caesar, to see how he was receiving his cousin’s well-meaning interference in his careful arrangements, she couldn’t trust herself to do so.

  ‘The boys dropped off the minute they were in bed, didn’t they, Louise?’ Anna Maria chattered on.

  Numbly, Louise nodded her head.

  When they had discussed their marriage Caesar had mentioned the fact that for form’s sake their marriage must seem ‘normal’, but that they could get round the fact that neither of them wanted any sexual intimacy with the other by occupying the interconnecting state bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, dressing room and private sitting room, which until his parents’ death had traditionally always been occupied by the Duca and his duchess.

  The rooms need some refurbishment, Caesar had told her when he had shown her over them, and he intended to leave the choice of redecoration of her own rooms to her. He would return to his own suite whilst those renovations were taking place, and she had agreed with him that the arrangement would give them both the physical separation from one another they wanted whilst preserving the fiction that their marriage, and with it their sexual relationship, was that of a normal married couple.

  Now, though, it seemed that thanks to Anna Maria their sleeping arrangements had been changed, and Lo
uise knew that she would have to wait until they were finally alone in Caesar’s suite before she could give vent to her feelings about that change.

  Once they were in Caesar’s personal suite of rooms, though, it wasn’t her angry dismay at the changes that had been made that occupied her thoughts so much as the emotions gripping her throat and momentarily silencing her as she looked round the familiar space that was Caesar’s exclusive territory.

  On their first visit to the castello it had been her father’s girlfriend Melinda who had prettily but determinedly insisted on seeing Caesar’s private suite. Her pouting and teasing him about the probability of his bed being covered in decadent black silk sheets had resulted in him admitting them into his private domain.

  Louise admitted that then she had found the simplicity of the decor in his study-cum-office and adjoining bedroom rather dull and unexciting, after Melinda’s deliberate flirtations and sexy verbal build-up. It had only been later, as she’d matured and learned, taught herself to appreciate real style and elegance, that she had come to realise how very smart and understated the colour scheme actually was.

  come to realise how very smart and understated the colour scheme actually was.

  Here in Caesar’s private quarters the wooden panelling was painted a soft blue-grey, with deeper toned beautifully soft modern rugs softening the starkness of the marble floor. Modern leather-covered furniture—heritage pieces for future generations, Louise felt sure—broke up the space of the businesslike and yet comfortable space that was the sitting room for the whole suite. Bookshelves and cupboards filled the space either side of the fireplace, and a very modern computer desk set beneath one of the now shuttered windows.

  Through the off-white painted double doors she could see into the bedroom—and see the enormous double bed, its bedding folded down at both sides, ready for shared occupation.

  Louise couldn’t control her reaction—a physical shudder that ripped through her body.

  Once before she had shared that bed with Caesar. Shared it? Wasn’t it the truth that she had virtually begged him to take her there?

  The sheets—white and very, very expensive—were of the finest quality possible, even if back then she had not known enough about such things to recognise that fact, and it was surely safer to focus on that fact and use it to block out those awful unwanted images that were threatening to crash through the barriers she had erected against them.

  On one side of the bed were double doors that led to a modern marble-and-glass bathroom with a free-standing bath, and on the other a pair of double doors that led to a dressing room.

  She didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t good for her. Not now, when she was feeling so vulnerable, so aware of the past and its consequences not so much for her or for Caesar but for their son. It was there in that room, in that bed, that he had been conceived. There in that bed that she had somehow convinced herself that Caesar wanted and loved her, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary; there that she had willingly allowed herself to be swept away by needs, desires and emotions she had been pitifully incapable of understanding, never mind resisting.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Caesar remove the dinner jacket into which he had changed for their evening meal, throwing it carelessly onto one of the off-white leather sofas. As he did so, the fabric of his dress shirt pulled tautly cross his shoulders. Traitorously, shockingly, dangerously, her stomach muscles clenched and her heart rolled over.

  Quickly Louise closed her eyes—and then wished she hadn’t as immediately her memory replayed for her images of Caesar kneeling over her, his torso naked, tanned, and gleaming with the fine sweat of male desire. She had reached out to touch him, her fingers so sensitised by her emotions and her need that the sensation of his flesh beneath them had seared itself into her memory for ever. How could the flesh covering such a very male body, hard-packed with muscles and sinews and strong bones, feel so incredibly soft? Throbbing with the life pumped through it by his heartbeat—a heartbeat to which her own had responded, thudding in counterpart to it like a rhythm picked out by the most skilled master musician, lifting her, carrying her, driving her.

  Louise could feel her heart remembering that rhythm right now. At her touch Caesar had thrown back his head, the raw sound of his fight to control the need in him she had so deliberately and desperately been trying to arouse breaking the sexual tension of the silence between them, shattering it for ever, before he had made his first, fierce thrust into her body as she offered it up to him. How she had welcomed that act, that possession, that fulfilment of every fevered imagining she had had since she had first looked at him and felt the hot, reckless surge of her own sensuality. How her body had welcomed it too, glorying in the hot explosion of physical pleasure that had rocketed through her.

  It was this room that was having this effect on her and dragging her back to the past. This room. Nothing more.

  ‘Why on earth did Anna Maria have to interfere?’

  Louise’s anguished words had Caesar looking at her.

  ‘She thought she was acting in our interests,’ he told her mildly. ‘She believes we love one another and is sure it is what we both want. It is regrettable that she did what she did, but natural enough, since she believes that we are lovers newly reunited and thus very eager to be together.’

  Why did those words cut so sharply into her emotions? Why did they hurt so much and conjure up such dangerous and painful thoughts and feelings?

  ‘But,’ Caesar continued, ‘once she and her husband and the children have returned to Rome we can revert to our original arrangements.’

  How could he be so relaxed and unconcerned when her stomach muscles and her nerves were screwed up to the point of actual physical discomfort?

  ‘But they’re going to be here for another three weeks!’

  ‘The situation is as unwelcome to me as it is to you,’ Caesar began, but Louise was too wrought up by the fear brought on by her reaction to her own private memories to listen.

  ‘Is it?’ she challenged him wildly.

  Immediately Caesar’s voice hardened as he demanded, ‘You cannot mean to suggest that I asked Anna Maria to say what she did to my housekeeper so that you would be forced to share my bed?’

  ‘No. No, of course not,’ Louise was forced to concede. ‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ she admitted shakily, adding honestly, ‘No one would ever believe that you would need to trick any woman into going to bed with you.’

  ‘Then what did you mean?’

  I said what I did because I’m afraid—because my own memories have made me afraid. She couldn’t tell him that, even if it was the truth, but she had to say something.

  ‘I meant that knowing how important you consider it that people believe we are reunited lovers you might feel that the two of us having to share a bedroom could be a good idea.’

  ‘There’s a certain amount of logic in that,’ Caesar agreed.

  Logic! He was thinking of logic whilst her senses were screaming out in panic and fear.

  ‘You assured me that I would have my own room,’ Louise reminded him, her panic returning.

  ‘And so you will—ultimately. However, for now I’m afraid that we are going to have to share this room.’

  ‘And the bed? Do you expect me to share that with you as well?’ she challenged him, unable to hold back her apprehension.

  Caesar frowned. ‘No. I shall sleep on one of the sofas.’

  ‘For three weeks?’

  ‘For three weeks?’

  ‘For three weeks. However, when the maids come in to make up the room in the morning, they must believe that we have shared the bed.’

  Louise nodded her head. What else could she do?

  ‘It’s been a long day for you, and I have some work I must do,’ Caesar informed her, walking towards his computer desk.

  Surely that feeling invading her as he walked away from her wasn’t really one of disappointment? The last thing she wanted him to do was mak
e any kind of attempt to establish physical intimacy between them, even if they were married and it was their wedding night, wasn’t it? Of course it was.

  Louise walked towards the open double doors into the bedroom.

  She had almost walked through them when she heard Caesar saying casually, ‘You’ve never told me. How was it that you were so sure I was Oliver’s father?

  That you were able to state categorically to your grandfather that I was?’

  She couldn’t move, transfixed on the spot as though physically constrained there, was able only to turn and look at Caesar as he looked at her. He neither knew nor cared how cruel and hurtful he was being, but she cared—she cared a great deal, Louise recognised.

  She knew what he was thinking, and what he was implying. Of course she did. How arrogant he was to stand there, inferring that she had selected him from a number of men who might have fathered Oliver and judging her for it when the reality was …

  Out of nowhere a fierce wave of pride and anger swept through her, overwhelming caution and self-protection, and before she could stop herself she heard herself telling him fiercely, ‘I knew because it could not have been anyone else but you. I knew that you were Oliver’s father because you were the only man who could be.’

  ‘You never had any doubts that Oliver was my child?’

  Caesar didn’t really understand himself why he was questioning her like this, and he understood even less what was driving him to do so. It was as though … As though what? As though he wanted her to tell him that he was the only man she would have wanted to father Oliver? That was an emotional need—an emotional desire—to feel connected with her at the very point, the very heartbeat of time, in which they had created their son. That was folly, and dangerous for him to have.