Not something but someone, he’d realised, staring down at the young woman he’d accidentally bowled off her feet.
She should have yelled at him. Told him to look where he was going. Instead she pushed off her hood, revealing a head of golden hair and a pair of striking blue eyes, and grinned up at him.
Luca had stood dumbstruck for long seconds before he’d finally roused himself, helped her up and found his voice to apologise. And then he’d whisked her into the hotel’s swanky lounge bar and ordered her an enormous hot chocolate.
Which was where their random encounter should have ended.
But her natural beauty, her easy smile, her infectious laughter...everything about her captivated him, and the temptation to touch, to hold her close and lose himself in her sweetness—to pretend for one night his world was not tainted with ugliness—was too strong to resist.
Breathing hard, Luca riffled through the photos, searching for something more, some clue, anything to help him understand how the woman he’d spent one unforgettable night with five years ago had become not only his father’s mistress but the mother of Franco’s illegitimate child.
Hatred flared. How typical of his father to corrupt the one pure thing Luca had ever had.
He upended the envelope and a piece of paper, folded in half, fell out. He flipped it open. It was a photocopy of a birth certificate for an Ethan Sinclair, the boy in the photos presumably.
He skipped down to the mother’s name.
Annah Sinclair.
And just like that, the memory of her sweet, melodic voice filled his head.
‘Annah with an “h”,’ she’d said, smiling at him over the frothy rim of her hot chocolate.
He’d misunderstood. ‘Hannah?’
She’d laughed, shaking her head, then spelt it for him.
Luca thrust aside the memory and focused on the certificate. The father was listed as unknown. The kid’s birth date was October the thirty-first in the year—
He froze.
‘Signor Cavallari?’
He looked at Victor but didn’t see him. In his head, he swiftly calculated the number of months and weeks between February the seventeenth and October the thirty-first.
Victor spoke again, but the sudden rush of blood in Luca’s ears and the loud rasp of his breathing drowned out the older man’s words.
Wrong.
He had it all wrong.
The boy wasn’t Luca’s half-brother; he was his son.
* * *
‘Oh, don’t you dare,’ Annah muttered, throwing down her shears and lunging for the spool of silver ribbon rolling across her worktop.
She was fast, but the renegade ribbon was faster. Before her outstretched fingers could reach it, the reel had gathered momentum and shot off the counter.
Annah groaned, listened to the clatter of the cylinder hitting the floor, and imagined the hideously expensive organza ribbon unravelling beneath her workbench.
Excellent.
She pulled a face at the bunch of purple tulips in her hand. ‘Sorry, you lot. I’m afraid you’ll have to hang tight.’ She set the flowers on the bench and crouched down to search the floor.
No trail of ribbon.
No reel in sight, either.
Puffing a strand of hair out of her face, she got to her hands and knees and crawled beneath her work space.
Please don’t let a customer walk in right now.
She loved customers. Who didn’t when you ran your own business? But with Chloe—her friend and co-owner of their floral studio—in London visiting a sick friend, Annah was operating alone and stretched to capacity.
She stuck her hand in a gap between some boxes of coloured binding wires stacked against the wall. ‘There you are,’ she said, closing her fingers around the spool—just as the vintage shopkeeper’s bell over the front door of the studio jangled.
Blast.
Hoping to see the scrawny bare legs of her delivery man, she peeped under the front of the counter.
Nope. Not Brian’s legs. He didn’t wear dark tailored trousers and expensive-looking leather shoes. Handmade shoes, by the look of them.
Her walk-in wasn’t a local, then. The men who lived in and around the small rural village of Hollyfield in South Devon typically wore wellies or work boots, not the kind of shoes that wouldn’t survive a muddy field or a half-decent snowfall.
‘I’ll be right with you,’ she called, backing out of the crawl space.
‘Please, do not rush on my account,’ replied a deep masculine voice.
An accented voice.
Annah stiffened for a second and then, in her haste to stand, misjudged her clearance of the bench. With a loud crack, the top of her skull connected with solid wood. Pain knifed across her scalp. Clutching her head, she dropped back to her knees. ‘Ow!’
The man walked around the counter. ‘Are you all right?’
His deep voice floated somewhere above her in the flower-scented air.
‘Yes,’ she lied, not moving, her heart racing in her chest. ‘I’m fine.’
You’re not fine. You’re about to have one of those silly paranoia attacks. After all these years!
Lowering her hands to the floor, she took a deep breath and steadied herself. She mustn’t overreact. A man had walked into her shop. He had a sexy Italian accent. Those facts could mean nothing.
Or they could mean—
No.
She shut down the thought and clenched her teeth against the swell of panic. She would not become that woman again. The one who looked over her shoulder and flinched at shadows, seeing threats where none existed. It wasn’t fair to Ethan. Her son was an intuitive little boy who deserved better than a nervous wreck for a mother.
‘Are you sure?’ the man said.
She pushed to her feet. She would look at him and prove she was being ridiculous. With any luck he’d be short and rotund, nothing at all like the tall, dark-haired devil who’d seduced her with hot chocolate and a hint of torment in his deep brown eyes on a cold night in London five years before.
More importantly, he’d be nothing like Ethan’s paternal grandfather—a man she hoped never to have the misfortune of meeting again.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, placing the reel of ribbon on the counter. The top of her head throbbed, but she turned towards the man with a professional smile. He was probably passing through and had stopped to buy flowers for his girlfriend or wife. ‘How can I help?’
The lapels of a sleek, single-breasted camel coat worn over a black polo-neck jumper confronted her at eye level, along with a set of extremely broad shoulders. Although Annah couldn’t see the body beneath the coat, her immediate impression was of solidity and power.
Her smile faltered, and, in the same way people peek through their fingers at a scary movie, afraid to look yet helplessly compelled to do so, she lifted her gaze.
A pair of dark brown eyes, deep-set in a brutally handsome face, connected with hers.
‘Hello, Annah.’
She gasped, her heart lunging into her throat, and stumbled backwards,