For this was the mouth of a born lover. A beautiful mouth, a seductive mouth, a disturbingly expressive mouth that could grin and mock and snarl and kiss like no other mouth, and lie like no other, and hate like no—
‘Who is there, please?’ his deep voice demanded in terse Italian.
Catherine jumped again, then tensely sat forward, her fingers tightly gripping the telephone receiver as she forced her locked up vocal cords to relax enough to allow her to speak.
‘Hello, Vito,’ she murmured huskily. ‘It’s me—Catherine …’
The bomb went off—in the form of a stunning silence. The kind that ate away at her insides and made nerves twitch all over her. Her mouth was dry, her heart having to force blood through valves that had simply stopped working. She felt light-headed but heavy-limbed, and wanted to start crying suddenly—which was so very pathetic that at least the feeling managed to jolt her into attempting to speak again.
But Vito beat her to it. ‘What is wrong with my son?’ he lashed out, grating English replacing terse Italian. The sheer violence in his tone was enough to warn Catherine that he had instantly jumped to all the wrong conclusions.
‘It’s all right,’ she said quickly. ‘Santo isn’t ill.’
There was another short, tense, pulsing moment while Vito took time to absorb that assurance. ‘Then why do you break your own court order and ring me here?’ he demanded coldly.
Grimacing at his right to ask that question, Catherine still had to bite down on her lip to stop herself from replying with something nasty. The break-up of their marriage had not been pleasant, and the hostility between them still ran strong three years on.
Three years ago Vito had been so incensed when she’d left him, taking Santo with her, that he had made the kind of threatening noises which at the time had made her blood run cold with fear.
She had responded by making Santo a ward of court and serving an order on Vito prohibiting him any contact with her unless it was through a third party. Catherine didn’t think Vito would ever forgive her for putting him through the indignity of having to swear before a judge that he would neither contact Catherine personally nor attempt to take Santo out of the country, before he was allowed access to his own son.
They had not exchanged a single word between them since.
It had taken him a whole year to win the legal right to have Santo visit him in Italy. Before that it had been up to him to come to London if he wanted to spend time with his son. And even to this day Santo was collected from and returned to Catherine by his grandmother, so that his parents would not come into contact with each other.
In fact the only area where they remained staunchly amicable was where their son’s opinion of the other was concerned. Santo had the right to love them both equally, without feeling the pressure of having one parent’s dislike of the other to corrupt his view—a point brought home to them both by a stern grandmother, who had found herself flung into the role of referee between them at a time when their mutual hostility had been running at its highest.
So Catherine had grown used to listening smilingly for hours and hours at a time while Santo extolled all his adored papà’s many virtues, and she presumed that Vito had grown used to hearing the same in reverse.
But that didn’t mean the animosity between them had mellowed any through the ensuing years—only that they both hid it well for Santo’s benefit.
‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to Luisa,’ she explained as coolly and briefly as she could. ‘If you would get her for me, Vito, I would appreciate it.’
‘And I repeat,’ he responded, tight-lipped and incisive. ‘What is so wrong that you dare to ring here?’
In other words, he wasn’t going to play the game and allow Luisa to stand buffer between them, Catherine made wry note.
‘I would prefer to explain to Luisa,’ she insisted stubbornly.
She sensed more than heard his teeth snapping together. ‘Then of course you may do so,’ he smoothly replied. ‘When she arrives to collect my son from you in the morning …’
‘No, Vito—wait!’ she cried out, her long, slender legs launching her to her feet as panic went rampaging through her when she realised he was actually going to put the phone down on her! And suddenly she was trembling all over as she stood there waiting to find out what he would do, while a taut silence began to buzz like static against her eardrum.
The line was not severed.
As Catherine’s stress-muddied brain began to take that fact in, she also realised that Vito was not going to say another word until she said something worth him keeping the line open.
‘I’m having problems with Santo,’ she disclosed on a reluctant rush.
‘What kind of problems?’
‘The kind I prefer to discuss with Luisa,’ she replied. ‘Get her advice on w-what to do be-before she arrives here tomorrow …’
No wonder she was stammering, Catherine acknowledged grimly, because that last bit had been an outright lie. She was hoping to stop Luisa from coming here altogether. But the coward in her didn’t dare to tell that to Vito. Past experience warned her that he would just go totally ballistic.
‘You will hold the line, please,’ his cold voice clipped, ‘while I transfer this call to another telephone.’
Just like that, he was going to accede to her wishes and connect her with Luisa? Catherine could hardly believe her luck, and only just managed to disguise her sigh of relief as she murmured a polite, ‘Thank you.’
Then the line went dead. Some of the tension began seeping out of her muscles and she sank weakly back down onto the sofa, her insides still playing havoc at the shock contact with their worst enemy. But other than that she congratulated herself. The first words they had spoken to each other in years had not been that dreadful.
They hadn’t torn each other to shreds, at least.
Now she had to get her mind into gear and decide what she was going to tell Luisa. The truth seemed the most logical road to take. But the truth had always been such a sensitive issue between them all that she wasn’t sure it was wise to use it now.
So, what do you say? she asked herself once again. Blame Santo’s distress on something at school? Or on the dual life he is forced to lead where one parent lives in London and the other in Naples?
Then there were the two different lifestyles the little boy had to deal with. The first being where average normality was stamped into everything, from the neat suburban London street they lived in, with its rows of neat middle-class houses, to the neat, normal kind of families that resided in each. While several thousand miles away, in a different country and most certainly in a different world, was the other kind of life. One that was about as far away from normal and average as life could get for most people, never mind a confused little boy. For instead of suburban Naples, Vito lived out in the country. His home was a palace compared to this house, his standard of living steeped in the kind of luxury that would fill most ordinary people with awe.
When Santo visited Naples, his papà took time off from his busy job as head of the internationally renowned Giordani Investments to give his son his full attention. And if it wasn’t his papà, his beloved grandmother was more than ready to pour the same amount of love and attention upon him.
Catherine had no other family. And she worked full time all the time, whether Santo was away or not. He had to accept that he was collected from school by a child-minder and taken home with her to wait until Catherine could collect him.
But all of that—or none of that—was what the child found upsetting. Santo was not really old enough yet to understand just what it was that was disturbing him so much. It had taken several skirmishes and a lot of patience for Catherine