A Secret Disgrace Read online

  He wasn’t saying any more, but Louise knew exactly what he was getting at.

  ‘That’s blackmail,’ she accused him. ‘Do you think I would want as a father for my son a man who would threaten blackmail to get his own way?’

  ‘I have every right to know if the boy is mine. Your grandfather obviously thought so, and he also obviously thought that the boy has a need for me in his life. He says as much in his letter. I do him the respect of believing that his claim on me on Oliver’s behalf is not about money or status, but about a child’s need to know its parentage. Can you sit there and honestly tell me, with your training, that you are prepared to deny your son that?’

  ‘To deny him what? Being recognised as the bastard son of a man who allowed his mother to be publicly denounced and shamed? A man who is no doubt hoping right now that the test proves negative? A man who can never be anything to him other than someone who at best deigns to recognise him as his child without giving him anything that he really needs? Even if you were to recognise Oliver as your son, what can that bring him other than an even greater feeling of awareness than he already has that he is “less” than other children? There will always be those in a community, both here and at home in London, who look down on him because of his illegitimate status, just as there will be those who will never allow him to forget how he came to be conceived. I will not have my son pay for my sins.’

  ‘You are making judgements that have no validity. If it turns out that Oliver is my son, then we shall discuss this matter again—and rationally—but for now I have to tell you that I intend to find out the truth about his parentage.’

  He meant what he said, and he would somehow find a way to acquire the sample he would need, Louise suspected, true fear striking at her maternal emotions.

  Wouldn’t it be far better for her to agree to provide the sample he was so obviously determined to have rather than run the risk of him trying to acquire it in a way that might upset Oliver?

  Her voice heavy with reluctance and resistance, she said, ‘If I agree to provide a DNA sample then in return I want your word that you will never approach my son with the results of the test—or indeed in any way at all without my permission and my presence.’

  She was a very protective mother, Caesar recognised.

  ‘I agree,’ he confirmed. After all, the last thing he wanted to do was upset or damage the boy in any way. Before she could continue to raise further objections he added smoothly, ‘I shall arrange to have the necessary test kit delivered to you for return to me. Once I have the results …’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler and easier for you to simply forget my grandfather’s letter?’ Louise suggested, in a last-ditch attempt to change his mind.

  She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t plead with him, but now she wasn’t able to stop herself, she recognised helplessly, torn between anger against him and contempt for herself as she heard the slight tremor in her own voice.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Caesar told her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘AND the only reason Billy won was because his father was there, watching us play and telling him what to do.’

  Oliver had been complaining about losing his match with a fellow holidaymaker ever since Louise had picked him up from the children’s club earlier in the day, and was still complaining about it now, as they had an early evening meal together.

  Resisting the maternal impulse to comfort her plainly aggrieved son with a maternal cuddle—Oliver now considered himself far too old for maternal cuddles in public—Louise tried instead not to feel guilty about the small subterfuge she had been forced to practise to take the necessary DNA sample from her son, explaining away the procedure by saying that she thought he sounded slightly husky and she wanted to check his throat and make sure he wasn’t coming down with one of the sore throats to which he was sometimes prone.

  The sample, once taken, had been bagged up and handed over to the driver Caesar had sent to collect it. A man of Caesar’s position and wealth would have his own ways of making sure that the test was dealt with speedily, Louise suspected. She, of course, already knew exactly what the test would reveal. Caesar was Oliver’s father. She knew that beyond any kind of doubt. She knew it, but there was no way she had ever wanted Caesar himself to know it.

  It was hard for her not to feel let down and even betrayed by the grandfather she had loved and respected so much, but she knew that he would have genuinely believed he was acting in Oliver’s best interests. Her grandfather had been a man of his generation and upbringing—a man who’d believed that a father should take responsibility for his children.

  responsibility for his children.

  All she had to do once the test confirmed her grandfather’s claim was convince Caesar that she had no interest in claiming anything from him for her son, and thereby relieve him of the necessity to play any kind of role in Caesar’s life. After all, her son was hardly a child he would want to own up to fathering, given what he thought of her—and, as she had already told him, there was no way she was going to allow Oliver ultimately to play second fiddle to Caesar’s legitimate children.

  Louise frowned to herself. She was rather surprised that, given his title and the traditions that went with it, Caesar wasn’t already married with children. He was bound to want an heir. His title, like his land and his wealth, had descended in an unbroken line from father to son for over a thousand years. There was no way that an arrogant man like Caesar was going to be the one to break that tradition. Not that she cared about that. Her concern and anxiety were for Oliver.

  After she had left Caesar and the coffee shop she had gone to collect Oliver to take him for lunch, arriving just as his match had ended so that she’d been in time to see the way Oliver had been trying to gain the attention and the praise of the father of the boy with whom he had been playing. Witnessing the anger and the frustration on her son’s face had torn at her maternal heart as nothing else could. She could see so much of her own fear and humiliation in Oliver’s behaviour, and she understood only too well what Oliver was going through.

  When Billy’s father had walked off with his own son she’d had to fight back her desire to run to Oliver and give him the praise and the attention he so obviously wanted, but she had stopped herself because she knew perfectly well that it was a man’s attention Oliver wanted, not a mother’s.

  Tomorrow she was taking Oliver to a water park for the day; she felt guilty about the fact that she’d had to give so much time to trying to sort out the burial of her grandparents’ ashes, even though that was the prime purpose of their visit.

  There must be other single parents here in the hotel with their children, but so far she hadn’t seen any. In fact the hotel, which she’d chosen because of its well-recommended children’s facilities, seemed to be filled with happy couples and their equally happy children.

  Louise repressed a small sigh as Oliver reached for his games console, warning him with a shake of her head, ‘Not until after we’ve finished dinner, please, Ollie.

  You know the rules.’

  ‘Everyone else is using theirs. That Billy and his dad are both playing on his.’

  Louise sighed again and looked across to where father and son had their heads close together over the small screen.

  In the castello which had first been built by his ancestors to guard the land they had been granted as the spoils of war, and which had been extended and renovated many, many times over the centuries, until it had become the magnificently fronted and redesigned architectural work of art that it was today, Caesar stood looking down the length of the long gallery at its portraits of his ancestors. A portrait of every Duca di Falconari since the first had been commissioned, and then, from the fourteen-hundreds onwards, family groups as well, depicting not just the ducas but also their duchesses and their children—their heirs, in their court finery, the second sons in cardinal’s hats—all of them painted to portray the enduring power of the Falconari name. />
  No Falconari had ever failed to produce a son—a legitimate heir—to carry on the name after him. His own father had married again late in life to an equally blue-blooded member of a distant branch of the family from Rome to produce Caesar himself. Both his parents had been killed in a sailing accident when he was six but throughout his childhood it had been impressed on Caesar how important it was that he too married and produced the next generation of Falconaris.

  ‘It is our duty to our people and to our name,’ his father had always told him.

  He was thirty-one. He knew that amongst the older generation of elders and village headmen the fact that he had not fulfilled that duty was a matter of increasing concern. None of them would understand his revulsion against himself and his own sexuality which he had felt in the aftermath of his relationship with Louise. His fear of losing his self-control again, as he had done with her, had forced him to remain celibate for many, many months after she had gone. But then, when he had eventually decided that he had to test his own strength of will against his sexuality, he had received another shock.

  He had discovered that he was perfectly capable of remaining in control of himself and his responses even with the most beautiful and sensual of women. His ability to control his life had been restored. He had told himself that he was delighted. He had reminded himself that he didn’t want to experience that sense of loss of self, of merging so completely with another person that they were no longer two separate human beings but one indivisible whole, and that had certainly been the truth. Wasn’t it another truth, though, that for him the intimacy of sex had lost its savour and become an empty pleasure that couldn’t satisfy or stem the ache he had locked away deep within himself?

  An ache which he had already felt intensifying just because of Louise’s presence …

  It was because of Louise that he had held off from marriage. Because he had known …

  What? That no woman could ever touch his emotions or arouse his desire as she had done?

  He had come to the last portrait—of himself when he had come of age. He had been twenty-one then. For the last six years, thanks to an unexpected and cruel blow of fate, he had had to live with the fact that he was destined to be the last of his line. Until, that was, he had received Louise’s grandfather’s letter, informing him that he was the father of her child and that he had a son.

  Caesar could feel the heavy slamming thud of his own heartbeat and the overwhelming tide of fierce emotion it brought with it. His child—flesh of his flesh—

  linked to him by a bond so strong that the very thought of not loving or wanting him was inconceivable. He would never be able to understand what had motivated Louise’s father to reject and hurt her as he had done. Such behaviour was the antithesis of everything he himself believed fatherhood should be—everything his fathering of Oliver would be if the boy did prove to be his. And he wanted Oliver to be his. Caesar knew that. He wanted him to be his with an intensity that went above and beyond mere practicality and duty. From the minute he had read Louise’s grandfather’s letter he had been filled with a maelstrom of emotions so fiercely intense that now, deep within himself, the inner core of everything that he was was insisting to him that, no matter what precautions he might have taken to deny her, the overwhelming surge of passion they had shared had somehow allowed nature to have its way.

  Yet Louise was making it plain that she did not want him to be involved in his son’s life.

  Louise.

  He could remember very well the afternoon he had first met her, walking on her own along the dusty road that led from the village to the castello, her head bare, her too-tight clothes revealing the sensual shape of her body, her eyes alive with wariness and intelligence. Her whole manner had been one of rebellious defiance against the old order of things and those who imposed it. She had been seen drinking beer from a bottle, laughing and dancing in the village square, encouraging the village’s young men to defy their parents.

  She’d looked at him with such a clear-eyed assessing gaze that he had initially been amused by her boldness and then intrigued by Louise herself. No one, least of all a village girl, looked him directly in the eye like that.

  He had asked her where she was going, and she had tossed her mane of darkly dyed hair and told him that there was nowhere to go and she couldn’t wait to get back to London. He had asked her how she would have been spending her time had she been in London, and she had surprised him by answering that she would have been visiting the National Portrait Gallery and preparing herself for the art degree she planned to start in the autumn term.

  He had known even at that early stage exactly what kind of effect she was having on him. A twenty-two-year-old male’s body didn’t possess any subtlety. It knew what it wanted. And his had certainly let him know that it wanted her. Wanted her, but couldn’t possibly get involved with her. In London she might be a city girl, with all that meant, but here on Sicily she was a member of the community for which he was responsible. And yet even knowing that he had still invited her to go back to the castello with him, so that she could view his own portrait gallery.

  She had blushed then, he remembered, suddenly looking so sweetly feminine and uncertain that he had immediately wanted to protect her.

  ‘You will come to no harm,’ he had assured her. ‘You have my word on that.’

  ‘The word of a duca and therefore of far more value than the word of a mere mortal?’ she had mocked him, with one of those lightning changes of response that had always managed to catch him off guard.

  To have her taunting him like that, as though she was the one who was in control, had piqued him enough to have him exchanging the kind of sensually charged banter with her that, whilst perfectly acceptable, still held an erotic edge to it. And she had responded in kind, so that they had occupied their walk back to the castello like two expert duellists engaged in a verbal swordfight.

  He had shown her the portrait gallery, and she had swiftly picked out those portraits painted by the great masters, surprising him by admiring his own Lucian Freud portrait and commenting that she was surprised that he had chosen such a modern and often controversial painter.

  ‘I bet Aldo Barado doesn’t like it,’ she had challenged him, and of course he had been forced to agree that she was right.

  ‘He is a good man,’ he had said in defence of the headman. ‘I value his advice and his knowledge.’

  ‘And his desire to keep his people locked into out-of-date customs—especially when those people are female? Do you value that as well?’ she had demanded.

  ‘He has his pride, and I would never want to damage that, but I can see that there are changes that need to be made—changes that I want and plan to make.’

  Even now it still gave him a sharp shock of disbelief that he should have been able to confide in her so easily and so quickly. Even then there had been something about her that said she had an understanding of and a compassion for human nature that outweighed her years. Her choice of career had proved that.

  It had been inevitable right from the start that he would take her to bed. Was it equally inevitable that she should have conceived his child?

  His heart thudded into his ribs with truly ferocious blows.

  It was simply because she had come to bed early that she couldn’t sleep, Louise assured herself as she stood on the balcony of the twin room she was sharing with Oliver, who was fast asleep in his own bed.

  The gardens beyond the hotel sparkled with lights, in the trees and around the pools. Somewhere on the complex music was playing. From her balcony she could see couples strolling arm in arm. Couples. That was something that could never happen for her—being part of a couple. She’d always be far too afraid of somehow regressing to the needy, self-damaging girl she had been, and repeating her old mistakes. More important than that, though, was Oliver. She would never take the risk of introducing into their lives a man who might damage her son by letting either of them down.

 
Down on the ground below her a small group of teenagers passed by, reminding her of how she had been the last time she had come to Sicily. A teenager who had been punished so cruelly and so publicly. Louise could feel herself compressing her muscles against the savage bite of memories she didn’t want resurrected.

  Some things never stopped inflicting pain, no matter how much thick skin one tried to grow over the wound.

  It had been midway through their holiday. Her father hadn’t spoken to her for three days because he was ashamed of her—both of how she looked and how she behaved.

  Melinda, of course, had been looking like the cat who had got the cream, constantly drawing attention to Louise’s failings whilst making sure that her father saw how enchantingly pretty and well behaved her own daughters were in contrast. Pretty, self-confident little girls, who weren’t at all hesitant about begging sweetly for ice cream.

  Since Melinda had come into her father’s life there had been a constant and—on Louise’s part—increasingly desperate war between them to win his loyalty. A war which Louise had felt deep down inside herself she was destined to lose—until she had met Caesar on the fateful solitary walk she had taken to escape from Aldo Barado’s son Pietro’s increasingly unpleasant attentions. She’d done nothing to encourage him. At least not in her own book. Yes, she’d initially enjoyed the fuss the local boys had made of her, feeling very grown up and streetwise compared with the village girls who had such cloistered lives. Yes, she’d broken an unwritten local rule by drinking beer in the village bar in the company of those boys, but she had never, ever given Pietro the kind of encouragement he claimed she had given him.

  It was no exaggeration to say that meeting Caesar, realising who he was and accepting his invitation to the castello, had changed the whole course of her life. Not that she had guessed how radical that change would be on that first day. She had heard her grandparents talking about him, and knew the high regard, almost awe, with which he was revered, and had seized on what she had seen as an opportunity to outmanoeuvre Melinda via a relationship with Caesar. At eighteen she had been too naive to reason any further than that. It had been enough that Caesar had shown an interest in her.