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.
He could remember very well the afternoon he had first met her, walking on her own along the dusty road that led from the village to the castello, her head bare, her too-tight clothes revealing the sensual shape of her body, her eyes alive with wariness and intelligence. Her whole manner had been one of rebellious defiance against the old order of things and those who imposed it. She had been seen drinking beer from a bottle, laughing and dancing in the village square, encouraging the village’s young men to defy their parents.
She’d looked at him with such a clear-eyed assessing gaze that he had initially been amused by her boldness and then intrigued by Louise herself. No one, least of all a village girl, looked him directly in the eye like that.
He had asked her where she was going, and she had tossed her mane of darkly dyed hair and told him that there was nowhere to go and she couldn’t wait to get back to London. He had asked her how she would have been spending her time had she been in London, and she had surprised him by answering that she would have been visiting the National Portrait Gallery and preparing herself for the art degree she planned to start in the autumn term.
He had known even at that early stage exactly what kind of effect she was having on him. A twenty-two-year-old male’s body didn’t possess any subtlety. It knew what it wanted. And his had certainly let him know that it wanted her. Wanted her, but couldn’t possibly get involved with her. In London she might be a city girl, with all that meant, but here on Sicily she was a member