‘Here?’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Oliver’s place is with me.’
‘Are you sure that is what Oliver himself wants?’
She had been right to be wary of him.
‘Of course I am. I am his mother.’
‘And I am his father—as the DNA test confirms. I have a father’s rights to my child.’
Caesar could feel her rising panic in the air surrounding her. She was like a lioness fighting to protect her cub, he acknowledged with reluctant admiration. She might be having problems with Oliver now, as he grew towards manhood and needed a man’s guiding hand, but Caesar knew from the enquiries he had been making about both Louise and Oliver that she was a very good mother. To have grown from the girl he remembered to the woman she was now must have demanded great strength of character and determination. A child sometimes needed a mother who understood what it meant to be vulnerable. Right now, though, he needed to banish any thought of sympathy he might have towards her. Oliver was his son, and he was determined that he would grow up here on Sicily.
‘I won’t have him spending part of his time here and part in London. It wouldn’t be fair on him. He’d be torn between the two of us and two separate lives,’ Louise announced.
Silence.
She tried again.
‘I will not have Oliver sacrificed to some … some ancient role you want him to play. He’s a boy. He knows nothing of dukedoms and the history of the Falconaris.’
‘Then it’s time for him to begin to learn.’
‘It’s too much of a burden to put on him. I don’t want him growing up like you.’
The gauntlet had been thrown down now, and it lay between them in the swirling silence.
Why wasn’t Caesar objecting to her comment? Why wasn’t he saying something? Why was she feeling so panicked and anxious? Why did she feel that somehow she had walked into a carefully baited trap and that the walls of the courtyard garden were actually closing in on her?
‘Then you will no doubt agree that the best way for you to ensure that Oliver grows up with equal input from both his parents, and that he knows your views, is for you to be here with him.’
The statement was delivered smoothly, but that smoothness couldn’t conceal the formidable determination Louise could sense emanating from Caesar.
‘That’s impossible. I have a career in London.’
‘You also have a son who, according to your own grandfather, needs his father. I would have thought that he is more important to you than your career.’
‘You’re a fine one to say that when the only reason you want him is because he is your heir.’
Caesar shook his head.
‘Initially when your grandfather wrote to me, yes, that might have been true, but from the minute I saw him, even before I had the results of the DNA test, unbelievable as it may sound to you, I loved him. Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t.’ He had to turn away from her a little because he felt so vulnerable, but he knew that he had to be honest with her if he wanted his plan to succeed. ‘All I can tell you is that in that moment I felt such love, such a need to protect and guide him, that it was all I could do to stop myself from gathering him up to me there and then.’
His words evoked some of what she had felt after giving birth to Ollie, after looking at the child she hadn’t wanted, a boy so like his father—she had known immediately the surge of fiercely protective love that Caesar had just described.
‘Of course Oliver is more important to me than my work,’ she answered truthfully.
‘There is no greater gift a parent can give a child than the security of growing up in a family unit that includes both parents,’ Caesar told her, without commenting on her response. ‘For Oliver’s sake it seems to me that the very best thing we can do for our son is to provide him with the stability that comes from knowing that his parents are united, and here on Sicily, in my position, that means married.’
‘MARRIED!’
Just speaking the word left her throat feeling as raw as her shocked emotions were beginning to feel.
‘It’s the best solution—not just to the situation with Oliver but also to the situation with your grandparents and the effect the past has had on their family reputation.’
‘The shame I brought on them, you mean?’ Louise demanded angrily, as she tried to focus on what Caesar was saying and fight down the panic that was threatening to seize her. How could she marry Caesar? She couldn’t. It was impossible, unthinkable.
But not, apparently, as far as Caesar was concerned, because he was continuing, ‘At the moment the village remembers you as a young woman who shamed her family with her behaviour. That shame is, according to our traditions, carried not just by you but also by your family—and that means your grandparents and Oliver. If I were simply to legitimise Oliver and make him my heir that would remove the shame from him, but it would not remove it from you or from your grandparents, and that in turn would be bound to affect Oliver. There would always be those who would seek to remind him of your shame, and in the future that could impact on his ability to be a strong duca to his people. If, on the other hand, I marry you and thus legitimise our relationship that would immediately wipe out all shame.’
So many different emotions were struggling for supremacy within her that Louise simply could not voice any of them. More than anything else she longed to be in a position to throw Caesar’s arrogant and unwanted offer back at him—just as she longed to tell him that in her opinion the people who ought to be ashamed were him, for publicly shaming her, and those who had welcomed that shaming for the opportunity it had given them to judge a naive eighteen-year-old. However she knew there was little point—not when even her own grandparents had subscribed to the values of their community and stoically borne the stigma of that shame without complaint.
‘As my wife you would be raised above the past. So would your grandparents, and so, of course, would Oliver,’ Caesar continued.
He could imagine the thoughts that would be going through her head—the battle between her love for her son and her own personal pride. Caesar frowned. It kept catching him off guard that he should feel so attuned to her, but he couldn’t deny that he did. Was it because she had borne his son, or because of Louise herself? He could feel the grim ache of an old self-inflicted wound and its shameful scar. He might not be prepared to admit it to her—after all he could barely admit it to himself—but despite that he knew he would never escape from the burden of his own responsibility for the humiliation she and her family had suffered.
He had allowed her to be punished because the ease with which his desire for her had overwhelmed his self-control had been an almost unbearable blow to his pride. He hoped he had learned since then to recognise that strength came from acknowledging one’s vulnerabilities, not in trying to deny them.
He had no idea what had caused that lightning spark of furious, fierce connection he had felt with her, that indrawn breath taken out of time when something deep and meaningful passed between them. He had wanted her and he had been ashamed of that wanting, so he had denied both it and her. He could have stayed at the castello. He could have delayed the business meetings he had had in Rome. But he hadn’t. Instead he had walked away from her, and in doing so had destroyed something very special.
Louise would never know how often over the years he had thought about her and his guilt. He would certainly not burden her with any of that now, knowing that the fact she had never replied to his letter begging her for forgiveness told him exactly what she felt about him