Resisting the maternal impulse to comfort her plainly aggrieved son with a maternal cuddle—Oliver now considered himself far too old for maternal cuddles in public—Louise tried instead not to feel guilty about the small subterfuge she had been forced to practise to take the necessary DNA sample from her son, explaining away the procedure by saying that she thought he sounded slightly husky and she wanted to check his throat and make sure he wasn’t coming down with one of the sore throats to which he was sometimes prone.
The sample, once taken, had been bagged up and handed over to the driver Caesar had sent to collect it. A man of Caesar’s position and wealth would have his own ways of making sure that the test was dealt with speedily, Louise suspected. She, of course, already knew exactly what the test would reveal. Caesar was Oliver’s father. She knew that beyond any kind of doubt. She knew it, but there was no way she had ever wanted Caesar himself to know it.
It was hard for her not to feel let down and even betrayed by the grandfather she had loved and respected so much, but she knew that he would have genuinely believed he was acting in Oliver’s best interests. Her grandfather had been a man of his generation and upbringing—a man who’d believed that a father should take responsibility for his children.
All she had to do once the test confirmed her grandfather’s claim was convince Caesar that she had no interest in claiming anything from him for her son, and thereby relieve him of the necessity to play any kind of role in Caesar’s life. After all, her son was hardly a child he would want to own up to fathering, given what he thought of her—and, as she had already told him, there was no way she was going to allow Oliver ultimately to play second fiddle to Caesar’s legitimate children.
Louise frowned to herself. She was rather surprised that, given his title and the traditions that went with it, Caesar wasn’t already married with children. He was bound to want an heir. His title, like his land and his wealth, had descended in an unbroken line from father to son for over a thousand years. There was no way that an arrogant man like Caesar was going to be the one to break that tradition. Not that she cared about that. Her concern and anxiety were for Oliver.
After she had left Caesar and the coffee shop she had gone to collect Oliver to take him for lunch, arriving just as his match had ended so that she’d been in time to see the way Oliver had been trying to gain the attention and the praise of the father of the boy with whom he had been playing. Witnessing the anger and the frustration on her son’s face had torn at her maternal heart as nothing else could. She could see so much of her own fear and humiliation in Oliver’s behaviour, and she understood only too well what Oliver was going through.
When Billy’s father had walked off with his own son she’d had to fight back her desire to run to Oliver and give him the praise and the attention he so obviously wanted, but she had stopped herself because she knew perfectly well that it was a man’s attention Oliver wanted, not a mother’s.
Tomorrow she was taking Oliver to a water park for the day; she felt guilty about the fact that she’d had to give so much time to trying to sort out the burial of her grandparents’ ashes, even though that was the prime purpose of their visit.
There must be other single parents here in the hotel with their children, but so far she hadn’t seen any. In fact the hotel, which she’d chosen because of its well-recommended children’s facilities, seemed to be filled with happy couples and their equally happy children.
Louise repressed a small sigh as Oliver reached for his games console, warning him with a shake of her head, ‘Not until after we’ve finished dinner, please, Ollie. You know the rules.’
‘Everyone else is using theirs. That Billy and his dad are both playing on his.’
Louise sighed again and looked across to where father and son had their heads close together over the small screen.
In the castello which had first been built by his ancestors to guard the land they had been granted as the spoils of war, and which had been extended and renovated many, many times over the centuries, until it had become the magnificently fronted and redesigned architectural work of art that it was today, Caesar stood looking down the length of the long gallery at its portraits of his ancestors. A portrait of every Duca di Falconari since the first had been commissioned, and then, from the fourteen-hundreds onwards, family groups as well, depicting not just the ducas but also their duchesses and their children—their heirs, in their court finery, the second sons in cardinal’s hats—all of them painted to portray the enduring power of the Falconari name.
No Falconari had ever failed to produce a son—a legitimate heir—to carry on the name after him. His own father had married again late in life to an equally blue-blooded member of a distant branch of the family from Rome to produce Caesar himself. Both his parents had been killed in a sailing accident when he was six but throughout his childhood it had been impressed on Caesar how important it was that he too married and produced the next generation of Falconaris.
‘It is our duty to our people and to our name,’ his father had always told him.
He was thirty-one. He knew that amongst the older generation of elders and village headmen the fact that he had not fulfilled that duty was a matter of increasing concern. None of them would understand his revulsion against himself and his own sexuality which he had felt in the aftermath of his relationship with Louise. His fear of losing his self-control again, as he had done with her, had forced him to remain celibate for many, many months after she had gone. But then, when he had eventually decided that he had to test his own strength of will against his sexuality, he had received another shock.
He had discovered that he was perfectly capable of remaining in control of himself and his responses even with the most beautiful and sensual of women. His ability to control his life had been restored. He had told himself that he was delighted. He had reminded himself that he didn’t want to experience that sense of loss of self, of merging so completely with another person that they were no longer two separate human beings but one indivisible whole, and that had certainly been the truth. Wasn’t it another truth, though, that for him the intimacy of sex had lost its savour and become an empty pleasure that couldn’t satisfy or stem the ache he had locked away deep within himself?
An ache which he had already felt intensifying just because of Louise’s presence …
It was because of Louise that he had held off from marriage. Because he had known …
What? That no woman could ever touch his emotions or arouse his desire as she had done?
He had come to the last portrait—of himself when he had come of age. He had been twenty-one then. For the last six years, thanks to an unexpected and cruel blow of fate, he had had to live with the fact that he was destined to be the last of his line. Until, that was, he had received Louise’s grandfather’s letter, informing him that he was the father of her child and that he had a son.
Caesar could feel the heavy slamming thud of his own heartbeat and the overwhelming tide of fierce emotion it brought with it. His child—flesh of his flesh—linked to him by a bond so strong that the very thought of not loving or wanting him was inconceivable. He would never be able to understand what had motivated Louise’s father to reject and hurt her as he had done. Such behaviour was the antithesis of everything he himself believed fatherhood should be—everything his fathering of Oliver would be if the boy did prove to be his. And he wanted Oliver to be his. Caesar knew that. He wanted him to be his with an intensity that went above and beyond mere practicality and duty. From the minute he had read Louise’s grandfather’s letter he had been filled with a maelstrom of emotions so fiercely intense that now, deep within himself, the inner core of everything that he was was insisting to him that, no matter what precautions he might have taken to deny her, the overwhelming surge of passion they had shared had somehow allowed nature to have its way.
Yet Louise was making it plain that she did not want him to be involved in his son’s life.
Louise.