A Secret Disgrace Read online

  Why had he said that? Did he really want her to know of his weakness? That his decision to have the Falconari crypt opened and her grandparents’ ashes interred there had been something he’d done for her? Why? To make amends for the past or because he wanted to please her? Because he wanted … Because he wanted her?

  Had she really been foolish enough to think that it had been consideration for her grandparents that had motivated him? If so, she should have known better, Louise recognized.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ she said, every bit as clipped as his own declaration had been. ‘It’s the Falconari name, the Falconari status that matters to you, after all—not my grandparents.’

  ‘I have to think of Oliver,’ was all Caesar could allow himself to say.

  ‘I have to think of Oliver,’ was all Caesar could allow himself to say.

  ‘He is so very much your son.’ The words were dragged from her. ‘I lost count of the number of people who said as much to me today.’

  ‘He has you to thank for the loving upbringing he has had.’

  A compliment? From Caesar?

  The shock of recognising that it was had her admitting truthfully, ‘I didn’t want him to suffer as I did during my own childhood. I wanted him to feel secure in my love and not to ever have to worry about losing it.’

  ‘Is that why there hasn’t been a man—a lover—in your life?’

  Louise took a quick drink of her tea in an attempt to conceal the shock she felt. How could he possibly know that?

  ‘I don’t have to answer that question,’ she told him, continuing to head for the bedroom.

  ‘But it is the truth. There hasn’t been any other man for you, either before me or after me.’

  It was a statement, not a question, and one that was making her feel very vulnerable indeed, desperate to escape from him. But why? Her decision to live a sexless, partnerless life hadn’t been made because of him but because of Oliver.

  When Louise didn’t say anything, Caesar told her, ‘After I learned about Oliver I instigated certain enquiries …’

  ‘You paid someone to investigate me? To rifle through my private life like … as though they were going through my dirty washing?’

  Louise’s angry revulsion filled her voice. He had wanted to please, but instead she was reacting as though he had insulted her.

  ‘I had no choice,’ Caesar defended himself. ‘A man in my position …’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course—your position … Of course that must take precedence over everything and everyone else.’

  ‘Not for my sake,’ Caesar insisted, ‘but for the sake of my people. Oliver will be their Duca after my death.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’ Louise stopped him, putting down her teacup as she turned to confront him. ‘But I want more for my son than a hereditary title. The only reason I have agreed to this sham marriage and this whole charade is because I want Oliver to have the parenting, the bond with his father that—’

  ‘That you never had. I understand that. And I promise you that Oliver will never, ever have to question either my love for him or my responsibility towards him. I think you know and believe that yourself, without me having to state it, because I know enough about you to know that you would never have agreed to allowing me into your lives if you did not.’

  ‘I don’t recall there being much choice for me! You threatened to take Oliver from me if I didn’t agree.’

  ‘He is my son.’

  ‘Our son,’ she corrected him, but even as she did so Louise knew that Caesar was right.

  Oliver was his son, and that fact had already been brought home to her in the short time that father and son had already been together. Oliver had gravitated quickly to Caesar; he looked up to him, laughed and joked with him, shared a male intimacy with him that showed her over and over again just how close the bond between them already was. She could never take Oliver from Caesar now. She knew that. But she was still angry. Very angry.

  ‘And what else did you learn from these enquiries you instigated?’ she challenged him. ‘Enquiries which I presume you made to prove that I wasn’t a fit mother for Oliver.’

  If that had originally been what he had hoped that hope had been sent packing for ever by the rush of compassion and guilt he had felt when he had read in the reports the truth about her.

  ‘What I learned,’ he told her truthfully, ‘was that I was guilty of an unforgivable error of judgement. I learned that your father had treated you very badly, and that his treatment of you was responsible for your own reaction to it and to me.’

  Simple words, but oh, how they still had the power to hurt as they resurrected the fear that had dominated her childhood: that somehow it was her fault that her parents didn’t love her, that it was a flaw in her that was to blame. You could teach yourself via counselling and education to untangle the knotted misery of a painful past, but somehow those knots, even when undone, left a discernible kink that could always be seen and felt by those who knew where to look for it.

  ‘I don’t want your pity,’ she told him fiercely. ‘There is never merely one person to blame in a family which is dysfunctional. As you no doubt know, my father resented being forced into marriage and parenthood. No wonder he rejected me.’

  The look in her eyes defied him to argue with her. She had so much pride, so much strength, and yet at the same time she was so vulnerable. Caesar could feel within himself the intensity of his desire to reach out to her, to tell her …

  What? That he wanted them to give their marriage a proper chance? That he wanted her? That he had never forgotten her? That a part of him had been left raw with its longing for her even though he had fought fiercely to deny that reality?

  Oblivious to Caesar’s private thoughts, and wrapping her pride around herself as protection—after all it wasn’t just her father who had rejected her, was it?—

  Louise carried on.

  ‘Perhaps if I’d behaved better, been a different and more appealing child instead of being so difficult and making him ashamed of me, things might have been different.’

  Old habits died hard, and despite her training Louise knew that she had automatically fallen into her old familiar role of protecting her father at her own expense.

  Caesar would agree with her definition, of course. She could remember the look of male anger and embarrassment he had exchanged with her father that fateful morning: two men sharing their wish not to be involved with her.

  ‘Your father’s shame should be for himself. Where you are concerned he has a great deal to be ashamed of. And so do I.’

  The terse, harsh words of condemnation had Louise turning to look directly at Caesar. Such a declaration was the last thing she had expected to hear from him, and it confused her, making her feel both defensive and at the same time filling her with a dangerous, aching longing to believe that he genuinely cared about what had happened to her—even though she knew he did not.

  ‘I … I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  The truth was that she couldn’t trust herself to speak about it any more in case she gave herself away. Turning away from Caesar, she headed for the open doors to the bedroom, but Caesar stopped her, moving to stand in front of her and blocking her exit.

  ‘Louise.’

  She could feel his heart beating. This close to him she was so conscious of everything about him—especially all those things she didn’t want to be conscious of: his maleness and her own vulnerability to it, the scent of his skin, the ache deep down in her own body caused by his proximity.

  She tried to push past him but he stopped her, taking hold of her, and then she was in his arms and he was kissing her fiercely, determinedly—almost as though he was laying claim to her. And she was kissing him back, letting him draw her so close to him that she could feel the hard muscles of his thighs and his arousal, letting him slide his hands beneath her robe to caress her naked back where her satin nightgown dipped down low.

  Such a hunger
possessed her—such a need, such an aching, tearing, irresistible yearning that she couldn’t withstand its call. Beneath the hot, hard pressure of his kiss her lips parted, her tongue eagerly seeking the remembered sensuality of his, her whole body shuddering with remembered pleasure when his tongue probed deeply into the soft cavern of her mouth. The dull ache low down in her body flared into the same pulsing urgency she could feel throbbing through Caesar’s erection. She wanted to hold him, to touch him, to own him as she had done all those years ago. She wanted to caress his flesh with her fingertips and her lips, and she wanted him to caress her in the same way.

  A need it was impossible for her to control had come out of nowhere to crush all the opposition in its way. Everything she had believed she had learned was forgotten as the desire only he could arouse within her took control.

  ‘Louise.’

  How sweetly savage and filled with longing her name sounded on his lips—as though she were the only woman he wanted, the only woman he could ever want.

  It was a sound that fed the out-of-control flames of her own longing.

  He was pushing her robe off her shoulders, sliding down one of the straps of her nightgown, kissing his way along the slope of her shoulder whilst his fingertips teased the erect crest of her exposed breast. It had been nearly ten years since he had last touched her, and yet her body remembered every single sensation he had aroused in it then as faithfully as if he had imprinted that memory upon her.

  The sensation of his mouth covering her nipple drew a sharp cry of driven pleasure from her. This was what she had both feared and longed for so much—these feelings and Caesar. Only Caesar. And now it was too late to stop what was happening, what she wanted to happen so much, Louise acknowledged.

  When Caesar released her nipple to look deeply into her eyes, she reached for him, unfastening the buttons on his shirt, making small mewling sounds of pleasure at the feel of his hot male flesh beneath her touch—a tentative touch at first, but one that quickly grew bolder when she saw the tension in his jaw and heard the groan of arousal he was fighting to suppress. It was only fair that he should experience what she was experiencing, that he should ache for her and long for her as she was doing for him. It was only fair that she should ramp up the sensual tension between him, pleasuring herself with her avid hunger for the sight and the feel of him.

  A hot, immediate surge of responsiveness to him took her senses right down to the depths of her own desire for him, urging her to hurry, to enjoy what she could of him before he rejected her all over again. The voice inside her was urging her towards caution, warning her that she could only be hurt. She ignored it. Her body ruthlessly crushed anything that threatened to stand in the way of satisfaction of the need it had suppressed for so very long.

  It was instinct and not experience that had her leaning forward to trace the line of his collarbone with her lips, her whole body trembling as she breathed the aphrodisiacal scent of his naked flesh. Boldly she let her hands skim his torso and then rest on his belt, her heartbeat skyrocketing as slowly, centimetre by centimetre, she gave in to the urge possessing her to know him more intimately. After all he could choose to stop her if he wished—but he wasn’t doing so.

  And then she forgot all about him stopping her, forgot about everything apart from the agonising tug on her own deep inner sexuality caused by what she was doing. Beneath her fingertips the dark arrowing of his intimate body hair felt unexpectedly silky soft, and the erection she could see was thick and hard, its pulse mirroring the pulse dominating her own body.

  ‘Caesar …’

  It was no more than a whispered breath but it was enough, because he was reaching for her, carrying her to the bed, tugging off his own clothes and hers to leave them both naked, clothed only in the sensual heat of their mutual need.

  His kiss took her mouth, possessing it, drawing from her the sweetness of a response she couldn’t withhold. His hand cupped her breasts, shaping them and tormenting her, until she made a sound of fierce female longing deep in her throat.

  In response Caesar lifted his mouth from hers to tease tiny kisses along the line of her throat and behind her ear, where his touch made her shudder and call out to him. Then he moved down along her shoulder and her breast, his tongue tormenting the already almost too sensitised flesh of her nipple with its sensually rough pleasuring.

  When she protested, ‘No! I can’t bear it any more!’ Caesar looked up at her.

  ‘Now you know how I felt when you touched me earlier,’ he told her in a voice thick with male arousal. ‘Now you know how much you aroused me and how much I want you.’

  He was kissing his way down along her body. Already her sex was swollen and wet, but now it pulsed urgently and wantonly, causing her to place her hand over it in an instinctive attempt to calm and silence it.

  There was no point, though. Caesar was already kissing her there through her spread fingers, nibbling erotically at the sensually vulnerable flesh of her thighs.

  The increase in her own hot, wet heat made her cry out, unable either to protest or resist when Caesar removed her hand and then spread open the outer lips of her sex.

  How could such a light, delicate touch from his fingertips evoke such an intense, out-of-control response that had her crying out to him, her body writhing in his hold beneath the onslaught of pleasure he was giving her? How could he take that pleasure even higher—so much higher that she cried out again helplessly and begged him not to make her endure any more of it without relief and release? She felt the stroke of his tongue-tip between the open wet lips of her sex to her clitoris, and he ignored her cries to draw from her a climax so intense that it claimed every last bit of her. Just as he had claimed her, and her love.

  Her love. She loved Caesar.

  She loved him so much.

  Instantly Louise froze, and then frantically pushed Caesar away, her hand trembling as she reached for her clothes, ignoring him as she fled to the privacy of her bathroom, locking the door behind her and then leaning on that door, her heart pounding so painfully fast that she thought it might burst out of her chest wall.

  Now, when it was too late, a terrible sick awareness of her own danger was filling her. She must not love him. She should never have allowed him to so much as Now, when it was too late, a terrible sick awareness of her own danger was filling her. She must not love him. She should never have allowed him to so much as touch her, let alone take her to bed. If she hadn’t fled from him now she would have ended up humiliating herself again by telling him that she loved him, she knew.

  From the other side of the locked door she could hear Caesar calling her name, insisting that she come out of the bathroom.

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘You shouldn’t have touched me. That wasn’t part of our bargain.’

  She was right, Caesar knew, but right now he was aching so damn much for her that the intensity of his need shocked him. And he hadn’t been the only one to experience it.

  ‘You wanted me as much as I wanted you,’ he insisted.

  ‘No,’ Louise denied, even though she knew that she was lying.

  It was true. She still loved Caesar. Or rather she had fallen in love with the man he had become. But loving Caesar made her vulnerable, because he did not love her.

  In the bedroom Caesar picked up the robe Louise had left behind, the scent of her body filling his nostrils as he did so. His body was a raw, raging storm of need for her—and she had wanted him too, even if she now denied it.

  Wanted him, but nothing more than that. Caesar was desperately afraid that it was something much more than sexual desire that he felt for Louise and wanted from her. And that something was love. The love he had denied for years that he could feel for her. The love he could no longer deny.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘ARE you sure you won’t change your mind and come with us all to Rome, Louise? It isn’t too late. We can delay our departure whilst you pack.’

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon a
nd they were all gathered in the hallway, the boys, Anna Maria, her husband and Caesar, on the point of leaving for the airport where a private jet was waiting to transport them to Rome for a for brief three-day trip.

  ‘No, I really can’t,’ Louise answered Anna Maria. ‘I’ve got some files to prepare and send to London.’

  It wasn’t a total lie, but Louise knew that her late employers were in reality happy to give her as much time as she needed to write her final reports. The reality was that she didn’t want to join the trip to Rome because of Caesar. It would mean her being in close proximity to him, both during the journey to Rome and during the visit itself, even if Caesar had booked hotel accommodation for the three of them.

  Whilst Caesar might be able to play the part of a loving and happy new husband in public, without the small intimacies that would involve having any discernible effect on him, the same certainly wasn’t true for her. Every time he was merely within arm’s length of her, her body started reacting as though it was possessed by a force neither she nor it could control. In a sense it was. And that force was love. Had she really only agreed to marry Caesar for Ollie’s sake? What if the emotions that had kept themselves hidden had had a secret agenda all along? Like going wild in Caesar’s arms when he had kissed her and touched her. What a clever idea that had been, destroying her peace of mind and putting her in a position where she was now mortally afraid that Caesar’s merest touch might re-ignite the smouldering embers of the need that she had tried and was still trying to quell.

  How shameful it was that she should feel like this about him—every bit as shameful as it had been to be misjudged and then rejected by him. Never again did she want to be that girl she had once been, pleading with him to want her and to love her. She had Ollie to think of now.

  Oh, Caesar might take her to bed—when he didn’t have anything better to do—but she wanted more than that. She wanted his love.