‘I didn’t show you that picture because I thought you might be interested or curious,’ Julia told him. She walked towards the kitchen table and rested his cup of coffee on the surface. She had no idea how he took his coffee but somehow she assumed that it would be black, sugarless and very strong. And she was right. He took the cup, sipped and placed it back on the table, his eyes never leaving her face.
‘I showed you the picture so that you could see for yourself how fair Martin was. Almost as fair as Caroline. Of course, he was not nearly as striking as she was, but from a distance they could almost have passed for brother and sister, their colouring was so similar.’
‘Where is all this going?’
‘I want you to follow me. Very quietly.’ She didn’t give him time to question her. The more she tried to explain, the more obstinately dismissive he became, the more convinced that she wanted something from him. Money. She would reveal her trump card now and hope that proof of her words would make him see reason.
She put her cup on the counter and began walking back through the house but this time up the dark staircase, pausing only to turn on the light so that she could see where she was putting her feet. For a large man he moved with surprising stealth. She could barely hear his footsteps behind her and, once at the top of the stairs, she turned round just to check and make sure that he was still there. He was. His face grim and set. Julia placed one finger over her lips in a sign for silence and began walking towards Nicola’s bedroom.
Her mother, who was already asleep in the guest room, would have switched on the small bedside light on Nicola’s dressing table. Nicola had always been afraid of complete dark. Monsters in cupboards and bogey men lurking under the beds. The stuff of childhood nightmares which no amount of calm reasoning could assuage.
Julia pushed open the door to the room very quietly and went across to the bed and stared down at the child.
Nicola was a living, breathing replica of her father. Her hair, which had never been cut, was thick and long and very black and her skin was satiny olive, the colour of someone accustomed to the hot Italian sun, even though it was a place she had never visited. Her eyes were closed now, but they, too, were dark, dark like her father’s, who had joined Julia in contemplation of the sleeping figure.
‘You could take a paternity test, but look at her. She’s the spitting image of you.’
There was complete, deathly silence at her side, then Riccardo abruptly turned around and began walking out of the room. The sleeping child had aroused sudden, overwhelming confusion in him such as he had never felt before. It had instantly been replaced by rage.
Was it possible to feel such rage? He would have thought not, but he felt it now. Five years! Five years of being kept in ignorance of his own child’s existence! His own flesh and blood. Because the minute he had laid eyes on her he had known that the child was his. There could be no doubt.
He thought of his ex-wife and her husband, bringing up his child, laughing with his daughter, relishing the precious moments of watching those milestones, and his fingers itched with the desire to avenge himself for what he had missed. What had been his by right.
He heard Julia running down the stairs behind him and, in the absence of Caroline and her cursed lover, he could feel his body pulsating to unleash his terrible wrath on the slightly built woman following him.
She would have been party to the decision to keep him in the dark about the birth of his child. Whatever her motives for contacting him now, and those motives would surely have something to do with money, she had agreed with the plan to say nothing to him.
He reached the bottom of the staircase and strode into the kitchen. He had to stop himself from smashing things on the way, destroying the contented little nest around him, a contented little nest in which his daughter had been raised. By another man.
Once in the kitchen, he paused and tried to control himself, to regain some of his natural self-composure, which had been blown to smithereens in the space of three short hours.
Somehow he would deal with this. And somehow Julia Nash would be made to pay for the torture she had subjected him to. It mattered not that Caroline and her lover were now no longer around to be held accountable for their vile actions.
Julia Nash was here, accessory to the crime as far as he was concerned, and she would pay the price.
She ran into the kitchen, her face distressed, and he looked at her in stony silence.
‘Don’t even dare think that you can make excuses for Caroline and what she did! Don’t even imagine for one minute that you can justify the immorality of her decision!’
Their eyes locked, Julia helpless to break free from the ice-cold blackness of his stare.
‘How dared she think that she could play God and make decisions that would affect my life and the life of my own flesh and blood? And you…’ he added in a voice thick with contempt, ‘how did you feel watching your brother do the job that should rightfully have been mine?’
‘That’s not fair!’ Julia protested, even though she knew that she was doing little more than shouting in a wind because he was not going to listen to a word she said. But still, she had to defend them both. She might not have agreed with what they had decided to do, but she had been able to see their point. Caroline was terrified that Riccardo, had he known of the existence of his daughter, would do his best to gain custody. The thought of having the fruit of his loins raised by another man would have been anathema to him. So she had silenced Julia’s objections. She had reasoned that, however much the courts decided in favour of the mother, Riccardo Fabbrini had the power and the wealth to get exactly what he wanted.
‘How dare you talk to me about fair?’ he gritted. He slammed his fist on the counter, tipping the edge of the saucer resting beneath her cup, and sent both shattering to the ground. She doubted that he was even aware of it.
‘You wouldn’t have been married to her!’ she persisted, mutinously defying the warning in his eyes. ‘You’re not comparing like with like. You might have seen Nicola on weekends, but you still wouldn’t have shared the completeness of a family home. The marriage was over well before she was born. Before she was conceived, even!’
Riccardo refused to hear the sense behind what she was saying. He felt like a man who had suddenly and inexplicably had the rug pulled from under his feet and in the process found himself freefalling through thin air off the edge of a precipice. No, reason was the last thing that appealed.
The small brown sparrow in front of him might be pleading for his understanding, but understanding was the least emotion accessible to him right now.
‘Now that you know, we need to talk about Nicola, decide how often you want to see her.’ Julia spoke even though her mouth felt dry, and she had to move to the kitchen table and sit down, because her legs were beginning to feel very uncooperative.
She sat down and ran her fingers through her thick shoulder-length hair, tucking it nervously behind her ears. This meeting had all gone so very wrong that she had no idea where anything was heading any more. She had expected a more civilised reaction, a more accommodating approach. She knew that he was a force to be reckoned with in the world of business. She had reasonably deduced that, that being the case, he would respond with the efficient detachment which would have been part and parcel of his working persona. She had not banked on his natural passion, which now flowed around him in invisible waves, putting paid to any thoughts of a reasonable approach.
‘A calm, phlegmatic British approach to a problem, is that it? I am supposed to quietly accept years of premeditated deceit with a smile on my face and then get down to visiting rights. Is that it?’
‘Something like that,’ Julia admitted hopefully.
‘I might have been educated in your fine British system, but I am not a phlegmatic British