‘Cleaning up a cut finger,’ Riccardo answered. He shoved his hands inside his pockets and perched against the kitchen counter, his long legs casually crossed at the ankles.
‘Nicola isn’t awake, is she?’ Julia asked suddenly and her mother shook her head with a smile.
‘Sleeping like a log. I only woke up to use the bathroom and then I thought I’d come down here and fetch myself a glass of water. You know how difficult it is for me to sleep these days, my love.’ She turned to Riccardo and said, with forthright honesty, ‘This must be a very difficult situation for you. I’m so very sorry but, well, I’m glad that you’re here now.’
Riccardo found that he couldn’t resist the genuine sincerity in the faded blue eyes and he offered a half-smile, the first Julia had witnessed since she had first clapped eyes on him.
‘I’ll leave you two alone. I’m sure there’s a lot that you need to sort out between yourselves.’ She bustled over to a cupboard and poured herself a glass of water. ‘I shall see you again very soon, Mr Fabbrini.’
‘Riccardo. You can call me Riccardo.’ His mouth twisted. ‘After all, I am a member of the family now.
‘Several years too late,’ he said softly as her mother left the kitchen. ‘But here now, Miss Nash. Are you not thrilled to have accomplished what you set out to do?’ He flashed her a bitterly mirthless smile and pushed himself away from the counter.
How many more members of this cosy little unit from which he had been ruthlessly excluded? he wondered. Aunts and uncles in the background? Cousins maybe? A full life just lacking the ingredient of father?
Except, he thought with hard-edged cynicism, Nicola had had a father. This woman’s brother. The only father she had ever known. She’d called him Daddy and sat on his shoulders when they went to the park.
Riccardo’s shuttered gaze concealed his white-hot fury. For a few seconds back there, as he had dealt with her finger, he had felt a certain uninvited empathy with her. It hadn’t lasted. Nor would it return.
‘You said you wanted something stronger than coffee,’ Julia said, avoiding his rhetorical question. ‘I have some wine in the fridge, but that’s about it.’
‘As frugal in matters of alcohol as your sister-in-law was?’
‘I prefer to keep my head.’ Especially now, she thought as she opened the fridge and extracted a bottle of Sauvignon. She could feel his heavy-lidded dark eyes raking over her as she poured them both a glass of wine, his a large glass, which might do something to take the edge off that ferocious fury which she could feel him tightly keeping in check, hers a smaller glass, just enough to cope.
So in control, Riccardo thought, or at least determined to be. Which made her little slip-ups all the more intriguing. She hadn’t been in control when he had taken her finger into his mouth. Her body had become rigidly still and he had breathed in her unwilling response to him, to the warmth of his tongue rubbing against the soft flesh of her finger. And then when her mother had surprised them she had been startled. The obvious answer was that she felt guilty to have gone behind her mother’s back and contacted him, but there was something else.
He imagined what it would be like for her to see her carefully planned life brought to a standstill, just as his had been.
‘Why did you decide to contact me?’ he asked, sitting down at the table and pushing back the chair so that he could extend his long legs in front of him. His fingers caressed the rounded contours of the wine glass before he brought it to his lips, sipping some of the wine while he continued to direct his unsettling gaze on Julia’s face. ‘Would it not have been easier to have maintained the secret rather than risk kick-starting a situation you might end up having no control over?’ Here’s where the money angle comes in, he thought cynically.
Julia, sitting opposite him, elbows on the table like a child being interviewed, lowered her eyes. ‘I did what I thought I had to do,’ she said. ‘When Caroline was alive I respected her wishes…’
‘Because you agreed with her, because you saw nothing wrong in writing off my existence…’
‘Because it was what she wanted. Because I loved my brother and wanted what I thought was best for them both.’ Her jaw hardened and she challenged him to try and prolong the probing. ‘What we have to deal with is reality. What’s happening now.’
Riccardo forced himself to let it go. He was so unused to having to let anything go when his instinct told him to pursue that the withdrawal felt like bile in his mouth. ‘For which you no doubt have a plan.’
‘I don’t think you should tell Nicola who you are to start with…’ When his mouth opened in outrage she firmly stood her ground, refusing to back away. ‘I know this is hard for you to accept, but I don’t think she can cope with too much now. Get to know her and when she trusts you then perhaps you can tell her who you are, tell her that you are her blood father.’
‘As opposed to what your brother was, you mean?’ His lips curled and she met his eyes evenly.
‘That’s right. She’s always known that Martin wasn’t her real father. Neither he nor Caroline pretended to her otherwise.’
‘I will come and see her tomorrow. When she finishes school. What time does she get home? Do you bring her home with you? Does she attend the same school where you teach?’
More at home with being the one who answered the questions as opposed to posing them, Riccardo grudgingly acknowledged the shift in emphasis.
‘Yes, I teach at her school, but not in the junior section. I teach the older pupils, and I’ve been leaving school early so that she can come home with me. I do a lot of my work from home now, after school hours.’
Riccardo had a glimpse of her view of things and it irked him to realise that she was due some sympathy as well. Her life had been changed too, though, he reminded himself grimly, not quite to the same extent as his. He finished his wine and refused the offer of a refill. She, he noted, had toyed with hers, barely drinking any.
‘We’re normally back home by around four-thirty. If you like, you can drop by around five. She should have had her bath by then.’
Riccardo stood up. It had, he conceded, been the longest day of his life. He slung on his jacket while Julia hovered by the table, keeping herself at a distance, he noticed. He wanted to have another look at his daughter, drink in her sleeping face before he left, but no, there would be time enough tomorrow.
‘Does your mother live here with you both?’ he asked, as they walked towards the front door, Julia virtually sprinting to keep pace with his long strides.
‘She has her own place. She was here to babysit.’
‘And you? Where did you live?’ He paused by the door, frowning at her as he tried to complete the pieces to this jigsaw that had now become a part of his well-ordered life.
‘I rented a flat,’ Julia told him vaguely.
‘This arrangement must have dented your freedom,’ he said without the slightest indication of sympathy in his voice, and when she returned his look with a puzzled one of her own he shrugged. ‘Men. A five-year-old chaperon can’t have been welcome.’
‘It hasn’t been a problem,’ Julia told him stiffly. She yanked open the front door to find that the rain had softened to a steady, bone-chilling drizzle.
‘Because there’s no man.’ Riccardo watched as her face reddened and the defiant shake of her head couldn’t quite hide the fact that his offhand assumption had struck home. ‘Is that why your mama sounded so pleased when she thought you had brought home a date?’ He felt a curl of satisfaction as he watched her flounder. He had spent the past few hours floundering. Now it felt good to have the shoe on the other foot, even though the situations