A Secret Disgrace Read online

  The main hallway of the castello was formidably impressive. Niches in the walls contained pieces of statuary, an airy flight of stairs curled upwards, and the smell from the floral display on an antique table in the middle of the marble-floored room filled its still silence.

  ‘This way,’ Caesar told her, indicating a double doorway that opened off the hallway into what Louise remembered from her original visit to the castello to be a series of rooms that opened one into the other, each of them decorated and furnished in style, with contents that Louise suspected must be worth several kings’

  ransoms.

  Leading the way through one of them, Caesar pushed open another set of doors onto a covered walkway beyond which lay an enclosed courtyard garden, with a fountain playing and doves cooing from a small dovecote.

  ‘This was my mother’s garden,’ he told Louise as he gestured to her to sit down on one of the chairs drawn up at a pretty wrought-iron table.

  ‘She died when you were very young I remember my grandmother saying,’ Louise felt obliged to offer.

  ‘Yes. I was six. My parents died together in a sailing accident.’

  Out of nowhere, without his seeming to do anything to summon her, a maid silently appeared.

  ‘What would you like? English tea, perhaps?’

  ‘Coffee—espresso,’ Louise told him, thinking inwardly that she needed the boost an espresso would give her to stand up to Caesar. ‘My grandparents taught me to drink it a long time before I developed any taste for English tea. They used to say that it was a taste of home, even though the smell could never be the smell of home.’ She wasn’t going to admit to him that right now she needed its strengthening qualities.

  The maid had gone and come back again with their coffee, only to leave them alone again, before Caesar demanded, ‘Why did you not contact me to tell me that you were carrying my child?’

  ‘Do you really need to ask me that? You wouldn’t have believed me. Not after the hatchet job the headman had done on my reputation and my morals. No one else did—not even my grandparents at first. It was only when Oliver was growing up that my grandfather asked me if he could be yours. He recognised that Oliver looked like you.’

  ‘But you knew right from the start?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How? How could you know?’

  A tiny wire of pain drilled through her, but her pride refused to allow her to dwell on it, commanding her instead to suppress it.

  A tiny wire of pain drilled through her, but her pride refused to allow her to dwell on it, commanding her instead to suppress it.

  ‘That’s none of your business. Just as Oliver himself is none of your business.’

  ‘He’s my son, and in my book that makes him very much my business—as I have already told you.’

  ‘And I have already told you that I am not going to allow you to force my child to grow up as your illegitimate son—even though here in Sicily that is perfectly acceptable for a powerful man like you. I will not have my son forced to grow up as someone who is second best—an outsider to your life, forced onto the sidelines to look on and witness your legitimate and more favoured children …’ Abruptly Louise stopped speaking, knowing that she was allowing her emotions to betray her, and took a deep breath before continuing more calmly. ‘I’ve experienced first-hand the damage that can be caused to a child by its longing for a parent who cannot or will not engage emotionally. I will not allow that to happen to Oliver. Your legitimate children—’

  ‘Oliver is and will be my only child.’

  The quiet words seemed to reverberate around the courtyard before giving way to a shocking silence that Louise was initially unable to find the words to break.

  His only child?

  ‘You can’t say that. He might be your only child now, but—’

  ‘There will be no other children. That is why it is my intention to recognise and legitimise Oliver as my son and my heir. Oliver will be my only child. There can be no others.’

  Louise looked at him, wishing that he wasn’t sitting in the shadows and she could see his expression better. His voice was giving him away, though, telling her quite clearly how hard he had found it to make such an admission. It wasn’t just his pride that would have made it hard either. Any man would feel a blow to his maleness at making such an admission.

  And was she weakening towards him because of that? Did she feel sympathy for him? How could she? She could because she was human and she knew what it was to suffer, Louise told herself. That was all. She would have experienced that same sharp pang of disbelief followed by sympathy for anyone making such an admission in a way that told her how hard it was for them to do so. It did not mean … It did not mean what? That Caesar still meant something to her?

  His admission, she realised, had her own heart slamming into her ribs and her lungs tightening with disbelief.

  ‘You can’t know that,’ she protested.

  ‘I can and do know it.’ Caesar paused, and then told her in carefully spaced, unemotional words, ‘Six years ago, when I was involved in an aid project abroad that my charitable foundation was helping to finance, I was on site when there was an outbreak of mumps. Unfortunately until it was too late I didn’t realise that I’d fallen victim to it. The medical results were incontrovertible. The mumps had rendered it impossible for me to father a child. As there is no other male of our blood to inherit the title that meant I had to reconcile myself to the fact that our line would die out with me.’

  There was nothing in his voice to betray what that must have meant to him other than a slight terseness, but Louise didn’t need to hear it to understand the emotions he must have felt. Knowing his history, knowing the Sicilian way of life, knowing his arrogance, she could easily imagine what a searing, shocking blow such news must have been to him.

  ‘You could adopt,’ she pointed out logically.

  ‘And have countless generations of those with Falconari blood turning in their graves? I think not. Historically Falconari men are more used to fathering children on other men’s wives than accepting another man’s child as their own.’

  ‘Droit du seigneur, I suppose you mean?’ Louise challenged him cynically.

  ‘Not necessarily. My ancestors did not have a reputation for needing to force women into their beds. Far from it.’

  There it was again, that arrogance and disdain, and yet against her will Louise was forced to acknowledge that it would be unbearably painful for a man with Caesar’s family history to accept that he could not father a child—especially a male child.

  As though he had read her mind he told her, ‘Can you imagine how it felt for me to have to accept that I would be the first Falconari in a thousand years not to produce a son and heir? And, if you can imagine that, then I ask you to imagine how I felt when your grandfather’s letter arrived.’

  ‘You didn’t want to believe him?’

  He gave her a look that enabled her to see the bleakness in his gaze.

  ‘On the contrary. I wanted to believe him very much indeed.’

  So much so that the reins to his self-control had slipped from his grasp, and if Louise hadn’t come out to Sicily herself Caesar knew he would have gone to seek her out, even though he had warned himself that doing so could expose him to ridicule and rejection.

  ‘I just didn’t dare allow myself to believe him, in case he was wrong, but the DNA tests are completely conclusive—even if Oliver had not so physically obviously been a Falconari.’

  ‘My grandparents always said that he looked very like your father as a boy,’ Louise admitted reluctantly. ‘They remembered him from when they lived in the village.’

  ‘Now no doubt you will understand why I wish Oliver to grow up as my acknowledged son and heir, and I hope that has put your mind at rest with regard to the supremacy of his position in my life as my acknowledged son. Oliver will never need to fear that he will be supplanted by another child. And as I know what it is to grow up without parents you may also b
e sure that the fathering he receives from me will be true fathering. He will grow up here at the castello and—’

  ‘Here?’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Oliver’s place is with me.’

  ‘Are you sure that is what Oliver himself wants?’

  She had been right to be wary of him.

  ‘Of course I am. I am his mother.’

  ‘And I am his father—as the DNA test confirms. I have a father’s rights to my child.’

  Caesar could feel her rising panic in the air surrounding her. She was like a lioness fighting to protect her cub, he acknowledged with reluctant admiration. She might be having problems with Oliver now, as he grew towards manhood and needed a man’s guiding hand, but Caesar knew from the enquiries he had been making about both Louise and Oliver that she was a very good mother. To have grown from the girl he remembered to the woman she was now must have demanded great strength of character and determination. A child sometimes needed a mother who understood what it meant to be vulnerable. Right now, though, he demanded great strength of character and determination. A child sometimes needed a mother who understood what it meant to be vulnerable. Right now, though, he needed to banish any thought of sympathy he might have towards her. Oliver was his son, and he was determined that he would grow up here on Sicily.

  ‘I won’t have him spending part of his time here and part in London. It wouldn’t be fair on him. He’d be torn between the two of us and two separate lives,’

  Louise announced.

  Silence.

  She tried again.

  ‘I will not have Oliver sacrificed to some … some ancient role you want him to play. He’s a boy. He knows nothing of dukedoms and the history of the Falconaris.’

  ‘Then it’s time for him to begin to learn.’

  ‘It’s too much of a burden to put on him. I don’t want him growing up like you.’

  The gauntlet had been thrown down now, and it lay between them in the swirling silence.

  Why wasn’t Caesar objecting to her comment? Why wasn’t he saying something? Why was she feeling so panicked and anxious? Why did she feel that somehow she had walked into a carefully baited trap and that the walls of the courtyard garden were actually closing in on her?

  ‘Then you will no doubt agree that the best way for you to ensure that Oliver grows up with equal input from both his parents, and that he knows your views, is for you to be here with him.’

  The statement was delivered smoothly, but that smoothness couldn’t conceal the formidable determination Louise could sense emanating from Caesar.

  ‘That’s impossible. I have a career in London.’

  ‘You also have a son who, according to your own grandfather, needs his father. I would have thought that he is more important to you than your career.’

  ‘You’re a fine one to say that when the only reason you want him is because he is your heir.’

  Caesar shook his head.

  ‘Initially when your grandfather wrote to me, yes, that might have been true, but from the minute I saw him, even before I had the results of the DNA test, unbelievable as it may sound to you, I loved him. Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t.’ He had to turn away from her a little because he felt so vulnerable, but he knew that he had to be honest with her if he wanted his plan to succeed. ‘All I can tell you is that in that moment I felt such love, such a need to protect and guide him, that it was all I could do to stop myself from gathering him up to me there and then.’

  His words evoked some of what she had felt after giving birth to Ollie, after looking at the child she hadn’t wanted, a boy so like his father—she had known immediately the surge of fiercely protective love that Caesar had just described.

  ‘Of course Oliver is more important to me than my work,’ she answered truthfully.

  ‘There is no greater gift a parent can give a child than the security of growing up in a family unit that includes both parents,’ Caesar told her, without commenting on her response. ‘For Oliver’s sake it seems to me that the very best thing we can do for our son is to provide him with the stability that comes from knowing that his parents are united, and here on Sicily, in my position, that means married.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘MARRIED!’

  Just speaking the word left her throat feeling as raw as her shocked emotions were beginning to feel.

  ‘It’s the best solution—not just to the situation with Oliver but also to the situation with your grandparents and the effect the past has had on their family reputation.’

  ‘The shame I brought on them, you mean?’ Louise demanded angrily, as she tried to focus on what Caesar was saying and fight down the panic that was threatening to seize her. How could she marry Caesar? She couldn’t. It was impossible, unthinkable.

  But not, apparently, as far as Caesar was concerned, because he was continuing, ‘At the moment the village remembers you as a young woman who shamed her family with her behaviour. That shame is, according to our traditions, carried not just by you but also by your family—and that means your grandparents and Oliver.

  If I were simply to legitimise Oliver and make him my heir that would remove the shame from him, but it would not remove it from you or from your grandparents, and that in turn would be bound to affect Oliver. There would always be those who would seek to remind him of your shame, and in the future that could impact on his ability to be a strong duca to his people. If, on the other hand, I marry you and thus legitimise our relationship that would immediately wipe out all shame.’

  So many different emotions were struggling for supremacy within her that Louise simply could not voice any of them. More than anything else she longed to be in a position to throw Caesar’s arrogant and unwanted offer back at him—just as she longed to tell him that in her opinion the people who ought to be ashamed were him, for publicly shaming her, and those who had welcomed that shaming for the opportunity it had given them to judge a naive eighteen-year-old. However she knew there was little point—not when even her own grandparents had subscribed to the values of their community and stoically borne the stigma of that shame without complaint.

  ‘As my wife you would be raised above the past. So would your grandparents, and so, of course, would Oliver,’ Caesar continued.

  He could imagine the thoughts that would be going through her head—the battle between her love for her son and her own personal pride. Caesar frowned. It kept catching him off guard that he should feel so attuned to her, but he couldn’t deny that he did. Was it because she had borne his son, or because of Louise herself? He could feel the grim ache of an old self-inflicted wound and its shameful scar. He might not be prepared to admit it to her—after all he could barely admit it to himself—but despite that he knew he would never escape from the burden of his own responsibility for the humiliation she and her family had suffered.

  He had allowed her to be punished because the ease with which his desire for her had overwhelmed his self-control had been an almost unbearable blow to his pride. He hoped he had learned since then to recognise that strength came from acknowledging one’s vulnerabilities, not in trying to deny them.

  He had no idea what had caused that lightning spark of furious, fierce connection he had felt with her, that indrawn breath taken out of time when something deep and meaningful passed between them. He had wanted her and he had been ashamed of that wanting, so he had denied both it and her. He could have stayed at the castello. He could have delayed the business meetings he had had in Rome. But he hadn’t. Instead he had walked away from her, and in doing so had destroyed something very special.

  something very special.

  Louise would never know how often over the years he had thought about her and his guilt. He would certainly not burden her with any of that now, knowing that the fact she had never replied to his letter begging her for forgiveness told him exactly what she felt about him and his betrayal.

  Marriage to him now would restore her honour, and that of her family, but it
would not free him from the burden of guilt he would always have to carry. That she wanted to refuse him was obvious to him, but he could not allow her to do so. Oliver was his son, and he must grow up here into his rightful inheritance. He was, he recognized, asking her to make a very big sacrifice, and the only comfort he could find in doing so was to tell himself that since there was no one in her life, nor had there been for many years, she was not looking for a relationship in which she could give her love to the man who partnered her.

  ‘You have told me more than once how important both Oliver and your grandparents are to you,’ he reminded her. ‘Now you have the opportunity to prove that by agreeing to my proposition.’

  He had her tricked and trapped, Louise recognised. If she refused then he would accuse her of putting her own interests before Oliver and her grandparents. She wasn’t eighteen and vulnerable any more, though. He didn’t hold all the cards. Oliver was her son. Once she returned to the hotel she could book them onto the first flight on which she could find seats, and once they were back in London they could come to some arrangement over Oliver that was on her terms, not Caesar’s.

  It seemed, though, that he had guessed what she was thinking, because he announced grimly, ‘If you are thinking of doing something rash, such as leaving the country and taking Oliver with you, I would advise against it. There is no way my son will be able to leave the island without my permission.’

  Louise could feel her heart filling with sick misery as the reality of the situation sent it plunging downwards as though it was weighted with a stone. Caesar had the power to enforce his threat, Louise knew. However, she still had one card left to play.