Falcon had believed that he had left no stone unturned trying to do this—without any success—but now realised that he had overlooked the fact that his brother had lived his life among the slimy waste of humanity that was expert at scuttling away from the too-bright light of overturned stones.
He knew what he had to do now, of course. The only question was whether or not he told his brothers before or after he found the woman his half-brother had drugged, raped and impregnated with his child—because find her he most certainly would. Even if he had to turn the whole world upside down to do so. His honour and his duty to the Leopardi name would accept nothing less. On balance, telling them first would be easier….
CHAPTER ONE
ANNIE rubbed her eyes. Well shaped and an intense shade of almost violet-blue, with thick long eyelashes, they were eyes any woman could be proud of—if they hadn’t been aching with tiredness and feeling as though they were filled with grit. She lifted her hand, its wrist so slender that it looked dangerously fragile, pushing the heavy weight of her shoulder-length, naturally blonde and softly curling hair off her face. Normally she wore it scraped back in a neat knot, but Ollie had grabbed it earlier when she had been giving him his bath, and in the end it had been easier to leave it down. She loved her baby so much. He meant everything to her, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to protect him and keep him safe. Nothing.
She had been reading all evening. Part-time freelance research work didn’t pay very well—certainly not as well as her previous job, which had been working as a researcher for a novelist turned playwright. Tom had paid her very well indeed, and he and his wife had become good friends. Annie’s face clouded. The lighting in her small one-bedroom flat didn’t really give off enough light for the demanding work she was doing—even if it was energy-efficient.
Next to her work on the cramped space of the small folding table there was a letter from her stepbrother amongst the post forwarded from her old address. She shivered and looked over her shoulder, almost as though she feared that Colin himself might suddenly materialise out of the ether.
Colin was living in the house that had originally belonged to her father, which should have been hers. He had stolen it from her—just as he had stolen… She flinched, not wanting to think about her stepbrother.
But there were times when she had to do so, for Ollie’s safety. Her stepbrother disapproved of the fact that she had kept Ollie, instead of having him put up for adoption as he had wanted her to do. But nothing could make her willingly part with her baby—not even Colin’s attempts to make her feel guilty for keeping him. He had insisted, that someone else—a couple—would give him a better life than she could as a single mother. Colin could be very convincing and persuasive when he wanted to be. She had been desperately afraid that he would win others over to his cause.
Sometimes she felt that she would never be able to stop looking over her shoulder, afraid that Colin had tracked them down and that somehow he would succeed in parting her from her son.
She would never even have told him about her pregnancy, but Susie, the wife of the author she had been working for when ‘it’—her rape by Antonio Leopardi—had happened, had thought she was doing her a favour by writing to him and telling him what had happened. Susie had been thrilled when Colin had offered her a home after Ollie’s birth, and all the support she needed.
Annie had refused his offer, though. She, after all, knew him far better than Susie did. Instead she had stayed in her flat, using the excuse that she wanted Ollie to be born at the local hospital because of its excellent reputation.
Colin had refused to be put off and had insisted on continuing to visit her. Initially he had even pretended that he agreed with her decision to keep her baby once it was born, but that pretence had soon vanished once he’d realised that Antonio Leopardi was not going to respond to Colin’s demand for financial support for his son.
Not that Colin had said anything of this to Susie and Tom, who had been so kind to her.
In the end Annie had begun to feel so desperate and so pressured, afraid that somehow Colin might succeed in forcing her and her baby apart, that a few weeks after Ollie’s birth, whilst Colin had been away in Scotland, sorting out the affairs of an elderly cousin of his father’s who had recently died, she had decided not to renew the lease on her existing flat and to move away instead, to start a new life for herself and Ollie.
Without telling anyone what she was doing—not even Susie and Tom, who had so obviously been taken in by Colin—she had found herself a new flat and new work, and then she had simply disappeared, leaving strict instructions that her forwarding address must remain confidential. It had been easy enough to do in a big city like London.
That had been five months ago now. But she still didn’t feel safe—not one little bit.
She had felt guilty not saying anything to Susie and Tom, but she couldn’t afford to take any risks. They didn’t know Colin as she did, and they didn’t know what he was capable of doing—or how intensely single-minded he could be. She shivered again, remembering how unhappy she had been when their parents had first married, and how she had tried to explain to her mother how apprehensive and ill at ease Colin had made her feel, with his concentrated focus on her, watching everything she did.
He had been away at university then, aged nineteen to her twelve, but after their parents had married—he had decided to change courses, and had ended up living at home and travelling daily to his new university.
Colin had taken a dislike to her best friend Claire, and Annie’s mother had suggested to Annie that it might be better if Claire didn’t come to the house any more after an incident during which Colin had nearly reversed his father’s car into Claire whilst she had been riding her bike.
And now Colin had taken a dislike to Ollie. Annie shivered again.
She had never known her own father. A soldier, from a long line of army men, he had died in an ambush abroad before she had been born. But Annie had been very happy growing up with her mother.
Her father had left them very well provided for—there had been money in his family which had come down to him, and Annie’s mother had always told Annie it would ultimately come down to her. But now it was Colin’s, because her mother had died before her second husband, meaning that the house had passed into his hands and then into Colin’s. The home that should have been hers and Oliver’s was denied to them.
Automatically she looked anxiously towards her son’s cot. Ollie was fast asleep. Unable to resist the temptation, she got up and went to stand looking down at him. He was so beautiful, so perfect, that sometimes just looking at him filled her with so much awe and love that she felt as though her heart would burst with the pressure of it. He was a good baby, healthy and happy, and so gorgeous—with his head of silky dark curls and his startling blue-grey eyes with thick black lashes—that people constantly stopped to admire him. He was bright too, and full of curiosity about the world around him.
They adored him at the council-run nursery where she had to leave him every weekday whilst she went off to her cleaning job—the only other work she had been able to get without too many questions being asked. Most of the others on the team of agency cleaners she worked with were foreign—hard working, but reluctant to talk very much about themselves.
Her present life was a world away from the world in which she had grown up and the future she had expected to have. Ollie’s childhood, unlike hers, would not be spent in a large comfortable house with its own big garden on the edge of a picturesque Dorset village. The area of the city where they lived was run-down, with large blocks of flats—once she would have been horrified at the thought of living here, but now she welcomed its anonymity and its fellow inhabitants, who neither welcomed questions nor asked them.
Ollie opened his eyes and looked up at her, giving her a beaming smile. Annie felt her insides melt. She loved him so much. What an extraordinary thing mother love was—empowering her to love her son despite the horror