He hadn’t realised he was shouting.
But, Dio, it was taking all his strength not to grab her by the shoulders and shake all the lies out of her until only the truth remained. What kind of a fool did she take him for? Did she seriously think she could play the amnesia line and that he would fall for it? What did she think? That they were players in one of those over-acted soap operas his grandmother watched?
Green eyes, wide and wary but unflinching, stayed on him. ‘Aislin registered Finn’s birth. I’d never told her who the father was so she couldn’t name you—’
‘You denied my existence?’ he roared.
‘Keep your voice down,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to be sympathetic but you’re not making it easy when you keep interrupting me with all your stupid assumptions. Everything I am telling you is provable—you do not have to take my word for it.’
‘Good because I will never take you at your word for anything.’
‘Good because now you know how I feel about you.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘That you are in no position to act all holier than thou when you consider all the lies you told me.’
Her assertion was almost as outrageous as her lies about having amnesia. ‘You dare try to deflect?’
‘Deflection? Okay, then, explain this to me, buster. Why did you tell me you were the hotel manager and not the owner?’
‘I never told you anything. You assumed it.’ He would not feel guilty about this. He’d intended to tell her the truth about who he was the day she’d run away from Sicily.
Tired eyes blazed with the same anger as coursed through his veins. ‘You let me assume. I only found out who you really were the day I left Sicily when your fiancée paid me a little visit.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sophia,’ she spat. ‘The fiancée you forgot to tell me about. She tracked me down when you were in Tuscany.’
Tonino swirled the wine in his glass and stared hard at her, a rancid feeling forming in his guts. Sophia had taken the ending of their engagement as badly as his parents had taken it. He’d shielded Orla from the fallout. Shielding her had been bliss; the pair of them cocooned in his smallest and plainest apartment, just the two of them, the rest of the world locked out. ‘What did she want?’
Orla’s skin chilled and a throb pounded in her head to remember the encounter that had broken her heart. ‘To tell me you belonged to her and warn me off you. What else?’
He nodded in a thoughtful way, but the blackness of his eyes revealed something very different. ‘Let me be clear on this—you are telling me that Sophia Messina, the daughter of one of Sicily’s oldest families, tracked you down and warned you off me?’
‘That’s exactly what happened.’
‘She threatened you?’
‘Not in words but her meaning was very clear. She knew you’d been cheating on her with me. I can’t say I liked the threats she made but I understood where her anger came from. No one likes to be made a fool of.’
He’d made a fool of her and Sophia both. The other woman’s threats had been almost as sickening as the proof she’d put before her. So sickening had Orla found it that the minute Sophia had left her room, she’d vomited.
She half feared she could vomit now, from both the memories and the growing ache in her head.
‘I ended my engagement with Sophia the day I met you,’ he stated flatly. ‘If you had stuck around and asked, I would have set you straight. Sophia was playing games with you.’
‘You expect me to believe that when all the evidence points otherwise and when we both know you’re loose with what truth means?’
He let out a Sicilian word she instinctively knew was a curse but, on a roll, she ignored it.
‘You let me believe you were a hotel manager. That was a lie. Everything you told me about yourself was a stinking fat lie. Can you blame me for being scared when I learned I was pregnant? All I knew for sure was that you were a liar and a powerful one at that. I refused to tell anyone about you because I was frightened and ashamed and an emotional wreck, and all I could focus on was delivering my baby safely into the world. I was going to tell you about him after he was born but then I had the accident and it changed everything. I couldn’t amend Finn’s birth certificate after I left hospital because I couldn’t remember your name.’
When Orla had finished her venomously delivered rebuke, the only sounds in the suite were their ragged breaths. The poison swirling between them was thick enough to taste.
Something else swirled between them too in that small stretch of silence, something that glittered behind Tonino’s dark, furious eyes. His jaw was clenched so tightly she could see the angry pulse throbbing on it.
When he finally spoke, every word was elucidated with deliberate slowness. ‘Do you know what I think? I think you have backed yourself into a corner and that every word coming from your pretty little mouth is an excuse to justify what you know is inexcusable. You hoped to get through the day without me noticing or recognising you and hoped you could get through it without me seeing Finn and recognising my own son. You have cruelly and maliciously kept him from me and, for that, you will pay, and pay by having him cruelly and maliciously kept from you.’
TONINO’S THREAT RANG loudly in Orla’s ears then became a siren when he slammed his glass on the bar and strolled towards the bedroom door.
‘What are you doing?’ she beseeched, trying her hardest not to panic.
‘I’m going to see my son.’
He can’t take him from you, she reminded herself. At this moment, he has no legal rights. Don’t panic. Keep calm.
She took a long breath. ‘You’re going to storm into a three-year-old boy’s room and wake him from his sleep?’
The hateful expression he threw at her wounded as deeply as his threats. He placed his hand on the door knob. ‘Do not make me out to be the bad guy in this. I want to see my son.’
‘If you go in there you will wake him and you will frighten him.’
His jaw clenched. Seizing this brief moment of indecision, Orla pointed at her phone, which she’d placed on the coffee table. ‘You can see him through my phone—look, I’m monitoring him as we speak.’
Now his expression became cynical. ‘You watch him sleep?’
‘I am tonight. He has epilepsy.’
Lines creased his forehead. A beat passed before he said, ‘Epilessia…? Fits?’
She nodded. She must keep calm. Placing a hand to her chest in an attempt to temper her clattering heartbeat, she fought to keep her tone even. ‘He has seizures—fits. He’s on medication for it, which has helped a lot, but he’s had an exciting day and I don’t want to risk leaving him unmonitored. Normally the nurse would monitor him but I told her to join the party so we could have some privacy.’
She did not drop her gaze from his cynical, suspicious one and allowed herself only a small breath of relief when he abandoned the door. Then she found she had no breath left to exhale for Tonino had walked over and sat his powerful body beside her.
Her poor clattering heart accelerated into overdrive.
He picked the phone up and studied the live feed on it. After