One Night: Red-Hot Secrets. Penny Jordan
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. You 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