One Night: Red-Hot Secrets. Penny Jordan
didn’t matter and must be controlled. He must always be a duca before he was a vulnerable human being.
After Aldo Barado’s visit to complain about Louise he had, of course, tried to behave as he knew he should—even going to the extent of seeking out her father to express the headman’s concern. But he knew now, after receiving Louise’s grandfather’s letter, that whilst he had listened to Aldo Barado, and to Louise’s father and his wife-to-be, he had not made any attempt to listen to Louise herself. He had not looked beneath the surface. He had not seen what he should have seen.
Now, knowing how she had been rejected and treated by her father, he had to ask himself how much of that was down to him.
He looked at the photograph again. He had been so caught up in his own fear of the emotions she aroused in him that he had not seen what he could so plainly see now, and that was the unhappiness in the eyes of the girl in the photograph. Because he had not wanted to see it. It was guilt that was fuelling his anger now, he knew.
‘And you expected to get your father’s attention by going to bed with me?’ he demanded caustically.
He was right. Of course he was right. Her behaviour had driven her father away, not brought them closer. Encouraged by the combined denunciations of both Aldo Barado and Melinda, her father, who had never been able to deal well with anything emotional, had turned on her, joining their chorus of criticism.
How naive she had been to expect that somehow Caesar would materialise at her side as her champion, her saviour, and tell them all that he loved her and he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her ever again. Caesar’s very absence had told her all she needed to know about his real feelings for her, or the lack of them, even before the headman had told her father that he was acting on Caesar’s instructions.
Now, when she looked back with the maturity and expertise she had acquired, she could see so clearly that what she had taken for Caesar’s celebration of a shared love and a future for them, when he had abandoned his self-control to take them both to the heights of intimate physical desire, had in reality been a breaching of his defences by an unwanted desire for her that he had bitterly resented. Those precious moments held fast in his arms in the aftermath of their intimacy, which had filled her with such hope for the future and such joy, had filled him with a need to deny that what they had shared had any real meaning for him.
He might want to deceive himself about his own motivations, but she wasn’t going to lie to him about the motives of that girl he had hurt so very badly.
Lifting her head, she gathered herself and let him hear the acid truth. ‘Well, I certainly didn’t go to bed with you so that I could be publicly humiliated by the headman of my grandparents’ village whilst you remained aloof and arrogant in your castello! My father was furious with me for being, as he put it, “stupid enough to think that a man like Caesar could ever have wanted anything from you other than physical release.” He said I’d brought shame on the whole family. My poor grandparents bore the worst of everything. Word spread quickly through the village, and if I wasn’t actually stoned physically then I was certainly subject to critical glares and whispers. All because I’d been stupid enough to think I loved you and that you loved me.’
She paused for breath, savagely enjoying the release after keeping her pain locked away.
‘Not that I’m sorry that you rejected me like that now. In fact I believe that you did me a favour. After all, you’d have dropped me anyway sooner or later, wouldn’t you? A girl like me, with grandparents who were little more than your family’s serfs, could never be good enough for il duca. That’s what Aldo Barado told my grandparents when he did your dirty work for you and demanded that we leave.’
‘Louise …’ His throat felt dry, aching with the weight of the emotions crushing down on him. Only just like before he could not afford to give in to those emotions. Too much was at stake. Right or wrong, he couldn’t turn his back on so many centuries of tradition.
He could apologise and try to explain. But to what purpose? In his letter Louise’s grandfather had warned him of Louise’s antagonism—not just towards him but also towards everything he represented. In her eyes they were already enemies, and Caesar knew that what he was going to tell her would only increase her hostility towards him.
Her grandfather had claimed in his letter that the intimacy he had shared with Louise had led to the birth of a child—a son. That should have been impossible, given that he had taken precautions. But if this child was his …
The heavy slam of his heart was giving away far too much and far more than he could afford to give away—even to himself.
She might not be able to defend her grandfather’s behaviour in telling Caesar Falconari that Oliver was his son, but she could and would defend her own past, the victim she had in reality been, Louise decided grimly.
‘When children grow up in an environment in which bad behaviour is rewarded with attention and good behaviour results in them being ignored, they tend to favour the bad behaviour. All they care about is the result they want,’ she informed him.
And Caesar’s love? Hadn’t she wanted that as well? She had been too young, too immature to know properly what love—real love—meant. She speedily dismissed such a thought.
Louise was very much the educated professional in that statement, Caesar recognized.
‘And you, of course, speak from personal experience?’
‘Yes,’ Louise agreed. She wasn’t going to make excuses for her past—not to anyone. The love and forgiveness her grandparents had shown her had taught her so much, been such priceless gifts. She knew that Oliver’s life would be the poorer for their loss.
‘Is that why you trained as a specialist in family behaviour?’
‘Yes.’ There was no point in her denying it, after all. ‘My own experiences, both bad and good, made me realise that I wanted to work in that field.’
‘But despite that your own grandfather believed you were not dealing properly with your own son?’
It was too late now to regret that she hadn’t been able to deal more positively with her grandfather’s concerns about the way in which Oliver was reacting to his lack of a father. She herself believed that her son had certain distinctive character traits that could only have come down from the Falconaris—chief amongst them perhaps pride, and the hurt it caused to that pride that he did not have a father.
‘Oliver has issues over the identity of his father,’ she felt forced to admit. ‘But, as my grandfather was perfectly well aware, I plan to put him in possession of the facts when I think he is old enough to deal with them.’
‘And those facts are …’
‘You know what they are. After all, Aldo Barado made them public enough. I came here to Sicily with my family. I went to bed with you. According to the headman of my grandparents’ village I chased after and seduced his son. According to my father and Melinda I disgraced myself and shamed them by hanging around with boys who were quite obviously only after one thing, and then running after you. And they were right. I did humiliate and shame myself by going to bed with you. I wanted my father to sit up and take notice of me and—naively—I thought that being bedded by the most important man in the area was a good way to do that.’
She certainly wasn’t going to tell him of the other reason she had pursued him so relentlessly. She could hardly bear to admit to herself even now the existence of that unfamiliar, shockingly sweet and half-frightening burgeoning of an emotional ache within her that had driven a genuine longing for physical intimacy with him.
For so long all Louise’s emotional drive had been embedded in her quest for her father’s love, so the sudden urgency of her feelings for Caesar had been her first true experience of the dangerous intensity of sexual desire. The strength of her instinctive impulse to reject that feeling had been almost as strong as the feeling itself. Initially she hadn’t wanted anything to come between her and her goal. But over the days