A Secret Disgrace Read online

  ‘You have talked a lot about me putting Oliver first, but perhaps you should be asking yourself if you should do the same. You want to claim Oliver as your son.

  You want him to live here and be brought up as your son and heir, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you how shocked Oliver is going to be to learn that you are his father. It isn’t something that can just be announced to him out of the blue. It will take time to prepare him for that kind of information. Even when he does know, and even if he is prepared to accept that you are his biological father, he might choose to reject you.’

  ‘Encouraged to do so by you, you mean? That would be a very Sicilian form of revenge, I agree.’

  ‘I would never do that.’ Louise’s shocked anger showed in her voice. ‘I would never use my son’s emotional happiness to score points over you. He means far too much to me for that.’

  ‘If you really mean that then you will allow him to know the truth without any delay. Oliver is desperate to know about his parentage. I was able to work that out for myself just by his manner towards me, even without the contents of your grandfather’s letter. It is my belief that he will welcome the news that I am his father.’

  Louise sucked in her breath, her gaze brilliant with angry contempt at his arrogance.

  ‘I also believe that the sooner he is told the better—especially if at the same time we tell him that we are going to be married, and that in future both he and you will be living here with me,’ Caesar continued.

  ‘And I believe that you are rushing things, and you are doing that for your own sake, not Oliver’s. It’s all very well for you to talk about rescuing my reputation and therefore that of my grandparents by marrying me, but the reality is that what you are doing is blackmailing me into marriage.’

  ‘No. What I am doing is trying to point out to you the benefits for Oliver of a marriage between us. What I am doing is putting the interests of our son first and suggesting that you do the same.’

  ‘But there’s no … no love between us. Marriage should be based on shared love.’ It was all Louise could think of to say.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Caesar contradicted her immediately.

  For a moment her heart leapt, and she wanted to cry out against what that meant. She couldn’t want Caesar to claim that he loved her, could she?

  ‘We both love our son,’ he continued, thankfully oblivious to her own reaction to his words. ‘We owe it to him to give him the loving, stable childhood that comes with having both his parents there for him and united in their love for him. We both missed out on that, Louise. Me because I was orphaned and you because

  …’ He had to turn away from her, so that he didn’t betray how shocked he had been when his enquiries had revealed to him how emotionally barren her own childhood had been.

  ‘Because my father didn’t want me?’ Louise supplied sharply for him.

  ‘Because neither of your parents put you first,’ Caesar told her. ‘I know this isn’t easy for you, Louise,’ he continued. ‘But you aren’t the only one who feels that mutual love and respect is the best basis for an adult relationship as close as marriage. I share that belief.’

  There it was again. Her heart was thudding—slamming, in fact, into her chest wall. As though she was still that vulnerable eighteen-year-old, helplessly in love with Caesar.

  ‘But of course we both know that such a relationship isn’t possible between us.’

  Of course they did. Caesar had never loved her and could never love her. Did she want him to? No … no, of course not.

  ‘I do know how you feel about me,’ Caesar continued, causing her to go hot and cold all over. Did he actually dare to think she still cared about him? ‘How could I not when you never replied to my letter.’

  Now he had thrown and confused her.

  ‘What letter?’ she asked him.

  Caesar hesitated. He had allowed himself to drop his guard too much already, but now that he had gone this far he knew that Louise would insist on an explanation—as she had every right to do.

  ‘The letter I sent you when I got back from Rome, apologising for my behaviour and asking you to forgive me.’

  He had written to her? He had asked for her forgiveness? He had apologised? Her mouth had gone dry. It was inconceivable that he was lying. She knew that instinctively, just as she knew what it must have cost him all those years ago to make such a gesture and now to admit to it.

  ‘There was no letter,’ she told him, her voice low and husky. ‘At least I never received one.’

  ‘I sent it your father’s address.’

  They looked at one another.

  ‘I … I expect he thought he was protecting me.’

  ‘I … I expect he thought he was protecting me.’

  Caesar’s heart ached for her. If she needed him to pretend he believed that then he would do so.

  ‘Yes, I expect so,’ he agreed.

  He had written to her and her father had kept his letter from her. Please don’t let that acid-hot burn behind her eyes be tears. That would be too shaming. It had only been a letter of apology, she reminded herself, nothing more. Exactly the kind of thing a young man of Caesar’s upbringing and position would expect of himself: a neat tying-up of unwanted loose ends so that he could draw a line under what had happened between them.

  Caesar’s crisp, ‘It’s the present we’re living in now, Louise, not the past,’ only confirmed what she had been thinking, and he continued equally crisply, ‘We both have a duty to the child we created together that I believe goes much further than any of our own needs. I appreciate that a loveless marriage is the last thing you want, but I can promise you that for Oliver’s sake I am prepared to do whatever it takes to be in his eyes a good husband as well as a loving father.’

  A loveless marriage. How those words appalled her. But she couldn’t ignore or deny Caesar’s claim that they both needed to put Ollie first. It was ironic that he should be the one to throw that challenge at her when putting her son first had been what she had done from the moment of his birth, for all those years in which Caesar had neither known nor cared about his existence. She didn’t doubt Caesar’s love for their son, but it was also true that he had an ulterior motive for wanting him in his life. As he had said himself, Oliver was his rightful heir.

  Heir to a feudal system and customs that she herself loathed. However, Oliver wasn’t her. Louise didn’t want to think about how he might feel if somehow she managed to keep him away from Caesar and he didn’t learn about his heritage until he was adult. There was a lot of Falconari in Oliver. She knew that. And did she want it fostered so that he could become as arrogant and as steeped in privilege as his father?

  No. All she wanted was for him to be happy and fulfilled. And if she married Caesar and stayed here wouldn’t she have far more opportunity to guard and guide her son so that whilst he grew up aware of his heritage she could see to it that he also grew up aware of how much its feudal systems needed to be changed?

  She was weakening, giving in …

  ‘You speak of being a good husband, but everyone knows that Falconari wives are expected to remain in the background, being dutiful and biddable. I can’t live like that, Caesar. Apart from anything else I want Ollie to grow up respecting my sex and its right to equality.’

  She paused to take a deep breath, but before she could continue Caesar took the wind out to of her sails completely by responding, ‘I totally agree.’

  ‘You … you do? But there’s my career …’ The career she’d worked so very hard for. ‘You can hardly think that I’d give up doing the work I’ve trained and qualified for, which I know benefits others, to be …’

  ‘Oliver’s mother?’

  ‘To be the Duchess of Falconari,’ Louise corrected him.

  ‘No. I can’t and I don’t. It is my hope that within my lifetime I can help my people to step forward into the twenty-first century. You, with your expertise and training, could help me in that work, Louise. Y
ou could have a very important role to play in helping me to change the old order and equip my people for the modern world if you chose to stand at my side and do so.’

  Change the old order? Oh, yes. Only now that Caesar had spoken the words did she know how very much she wanted to be part of that.

  ‘Just as we can raise our son together, so we can lead our people together—the people who will one day be his people. I may have no right to ask for it, Louise, but I need your help to change things for Oliver’s sake—just as you need mine to make sure that our son grows up knowing what it is to have a father who loves him as well as a mother, two parents who are united in their love for him. All you have to do is say yes.’

  ‘Just like that? That’s not possible.’

  ‘Oliver’s conception shouldn’t have been possible, and yet it happened.’

  She was weakening again, and she knew it. Caesar cast a powerful spell around her that robbed her of the ability to think straight. When she was with him …

  When she was with him she wanted to go on being with him. But in a loveless marriage?

  Caesar might not love her, but he did love Ollie. She couldn’t deny that. He had been sincere when he had spoken of his instant fatherly love for their son—a boy who desperately needed his father.

  The point Caesar had made about her reputation and her shame, especially with regard to her grandparents, had touched a nerve. Didn’t she owe it to her grandparents as well as to Oliver to do what Caesar wanted?

  She had always known that at some stage Oliver would have to know not just the identity of his father but the circumstances surrounding his conception. That had always worried her. Which was why she had been so reluctant to tell him what had happened until she had felt he was old enough to be able to deal with that kind of information.

  Even so, she wasn’t going to give in without a fight.

  ‘It’s all very well you claiming that my shame will be wiped out by marriage to you, but there is bound to be gossip about the past. I’ve always protected Oliver from … from what happened. Once he’s acknowledged as your son, even if you legitimise him and marry me, people are bound to talk. Oliver could be hurt by what he might hear. I can’t allow that.’

  ‘You won’t have to allow it. Naturally when I announce that Oliver is my son and that you and I are to marry I shall discreetly let it be known that my own behaviour during that summer was not as it should have been, and that my feelings for you and my jealousy because of the interest being shown in you by other young men led me to fail in my duty to protect you. I shall say that when I asked you to marry me then you refused. You were a modern girl, a young modern girl, who had her own plans for her future. I had to let you go. On your return visit here we both discovered that those old feelings were still very strong, and this time when I proposed you accepted.’

  ‘You would do that?’

  It was a generous offer, and it caught her off guard, undermining her defences. Something inside her couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to have the protection of a man like Caesar who genuinely loved you. She mustn’t even think about asking herself that question, Louise warned herself. It made her far too vulnerable.

  ‘Yes, of course. If you were my wife it would be my duty to protect your reputation.’

  Ah, of course. It wasn’t her he would be protecting, her to whom he would be making amends for old wounds inflicted, it would be her position as his wife.

  ‘If your grandfather was alive he would want you to accept my proposal for both your own and Oliver’s sake.’

  ‘How much emotional pressure are you intending to put on me?’ Louise challenged him.

  ‘As much as it takes,’ he responded, unabashed. ‘There are two ways we can do this, Louise. The first is calmly and matter of factly—with both of us working together in Oliver’s best interests to provide him with the most secure emotional life we can, with both of us here for him as his parents within marriage. The other is for us to battle it out for him and for his loyalty and risk, as we do so, inflicting the most terrible emotional damage on him.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten the third alternative.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘That you forget that Oliver is your son and you allow him and me to return to our lives in London.’

  The words the way you did me hung in the air between them, unspoken, but Caesar proved to her that he knew what she was thinking when he said curtly, ‘I can never forgive myself for being weak enough to allow Aldo Barado to persuade me of the damage it would do to both of us if it got out that you had spent the night with me. He had seen you leaving the castello, you see, and he said …’

  ‘That you must not allow yourself to be associated with me—a girl he himself had denounced as a little tart set on seducing the village boys.’

  ‘It was the act of a weakling—a man who could not face up to his responsibilities, a man who allowed someone else to make his decisions for him.’ And it had also been the act of a man panicked into fleeing as fast as he could from the surging strength and power of an emotion he hadn’t been able to control. But he couldn’t tell her that. After all it had taken him long enough to admit it to himself—all those nights in his early twenties spent lying awake in bed next to a woman he had just possessed only to find himself filled with distaste for what he had done, conscious of an emptiness within him that had become such a permanent ache it had become ground into him.

  From somewhere deep inside her Louise was conscious of her professional voice telling her quietly, It was the act of an orphaned twenty-two-year-old, carrying a heavy weight of huge responsibility and deliberately manipulated by a powerful older man who had his own agenda to protect.

  Was she making allowances for him? Wasn’t that what her training had taught her to do? To look behind the façade and dig deep into what lay behind it?

  ‘I can’t let you deny our son his heritage, Louise. He has a right to grow up knowing what it is—good and bad—just as he has a right to reject it when he has grown up if that is his wish.’

  He was sounding so reasonable that it was hard for her to throw emotional arguments at him. They would sound selfish—as though she wasn’t thinking of Oliver, as though she wasn’t listening to him.

  ‘I know how much I’m asking of you in Oliver’s name, but I also know that you are strong enough to accept the challenges that lie ahead.’

  Oh, how underhand—to praise her like that and so undermine her.

  ‘If I let you walk away would it genuinely be the right thing for Oliver?’ Caesar shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. How is he going to feel about himself and about you, do you think, if you deny him the right to know his real heritage and to know me with it until he is old enough to discover it for himself? Are you really willing to risk inflicting that kind of damage on him just to keep him away from me?’

  Of course she wasn’t. How could she? If she was honest with herself, the thought of a loveless, sexless marriage—with anyone other than Caesar—didn’t bother her. After all, she had already decided a long time ago, in the aftermath of the fall-out from Oliver’s conception, that given her apparent drive to pursue men who would only withhold their love from her it was far better for her not to get emotionally involved. After all, what patterns might he learn about man-to-woman relationships if he had to witness his own mother denigrating herself, constantly seeking the love she was being denied?

  If she acceded to Caesar’s proposition she would be in a position where she would have some power within their relationship from its start, and be in a position to set boundaries for Oliver’s emotional security in all aspects of his growing up.

  And finally she knew that this outcome, a marriage between her and Caesar so that Oliver could grow up with both his parents and legitimacy, would have delighted both her grandparents. They had made so many sacrifices for her—not just in taking her in when she had been so disgraced, but in helping her to learn to be a good mother, in supporting her whe
n she had decided to return to her education, and in giving both her and Oliver the most wonderful and loving home.

  She took a deep breath and stood up, walking several yards away from Caesar and into a patch of sunlight in a deliberate move intended to bring him out of the shadows so that she could see his expression when she spoke to him.

  ‘If I were to agree to your proposition there would be certain terms, certain boundaries with regard to your attitude towards me and how that could impact on Oliver, that I would want guaranteed. However, more important than that, indeed of first importance, is Oliver himself. It is true that he is angry with me because I have refused to discuss the identity of his father with him, and it is true, I agree, that he is missing his great-grandfather’s male influence in his life. As I myself know, however, a bad father can be more damaging than an absent one.

  ‘You have your own reasons for wanting Ollie, and in spite of what you say you aren’t in a position to claim that you love him as your son. You don’t know him. He doesn’t know you. I am concerned that in the first flush of excitement in discovering that you are his father Ollie might be swept into a son-and-father relationship with you before he really knows you, and that he will have expectations of that relationship that are too idealistic and cannot be met. For that reason I think it is better that Ollie gets to know you better before we tell him about the relationship you share.’

  As she had hoped he would, Caesar stepped out of the shadows and came towards her. But any comfort she might have derived from being able to see his expression was more than offset by the rejection of what she had said that she could see so plainly in the hardening of the fiercely strong bone structure of his face.

  Even his eyes, the same unexpected and steely grey as Oliver’s, were darkening as he looked directly at her before saying arrogantly, ‘I don’t agree. Oliver is obviously an intelligent boy. We look far too alike for him not to put two and two together. Any delay in confirming our relationship could lead to his feeling that I am assessing him, perhaps delaying claiming as my son because I do not entirely want him.’