LITMIR.BIZ

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times ahead, but she’d manage, she’d determined. Wouldn’t she? After all, other girls did. It had continued to be impressed upon her, though, how selfish she was being. That she didn’t have her child’s interests at heart. Even her father had tentatively suggested that perhaps she ought to consider the Vincenzos’ offer very carefully. She was young—had her whole life in front of her. Had she considered the enormity of what she was taking on?

      Tortured and afraid, she had clung desperately to Luca’s child. She could never give him up! She couldn’t! Though the pressure to do so had been almost overwhelming, she might not have given in. Not if Marius Vincenzo, determined to wear down her resistance, hadn’t come up with that cruel ultimatum…

      Blindly, she left her car in the reserved parking bay outside the rank of exclusive Georgian apartments and, dodging the rain, raced up the steps, shutting her mind to the bitter choice the man had given her. She couldn’t relive it—couldn’t think about it now.

      She only knew as she rode the lift up to the first floor—let herself into the welcoming haven of her own apartment—that when she had been forced to sign that piece of paper, handing over her son to Luca’s family, she had been too young and too worried about her father to see beyond her naïve hopes in believing that one day she would get her baby back.

      A persistent ringing of the doorbell had Libby reluctantly answering it. Since abandoning all thoughts of going out, she’d bathed and changed and she certainly didn’t feel like seeing anyone tonight.

      ‘Surprise!’ Fran and about a dozen others carolled from the front doorway, before breezing in brandishing bottles of champagne.

      ‘As it was obvious you weren’t coming to the party, we decided to bring the party to you,’ a young woman Libby didn’t even recognise announced, her voice raised above the animated conversation and laughter.

      ‘I can’t. Really, I can’t face this now,’ Libby protested over the sound of corks already being popped, glasses being hauled out of her china cabinet. Someone had switched on her CD player, and a sea of bodies began gyrating to a deafening rhythm.

      She wanted to scream at them to get out. After meeting Romano today there had been no question of attending the end of the assignment party. She had had a lot of decisions to make, appointments to cancel. On top of which her thoughts were in turmoil and her head was thumping.

      ‘Are you all right?’ Fran shouted to make herself heard above the noise.

      ‘No, I’m not!’ Libby yelled back. ‘I just want to be alone!’

      ‘You always do!’ Fran’s more mature features were contorted in friendly chastisement. ‘We thought it would do you good not to let you get away with not turning up for yet another party. We thought…Hey! Are you OK?’ The make-up artist looked genuinely concerned, but trying to compete with the din in her flat was hurting Libby’s throat.

      With a hopeless shrug she swept away from them all, towards the sanctuary of her bedroom.

      ‘Everybody! Everybody! Blaze doesn’t need this!’ From behind the closed door, she heard Fran’s futile attempts to make her protests heard. ‘I really think we ought to go!’

      Someone turned up the music. After a few moments the sound burst intrusively into the bedroom as the door opened and then closed again, admitting a penitent-looking Fran.

      ‘I’m sorry, Blaze. I didn’t realise,’ the woman expressed, as Libby flopped limply down onto the bed. ‘We really were only thinking of you. I tried…. What’s this?’ Fran’s sudden diversion drew Libby’s eyes to the single bed and the little white album lying on the coverlet that she hadn’t had chance to put away. ‘What is this?’ The woman was picking it up, surveying the embossed gold lettering on the leather-bound cover and, despairingly, Libby saw her taking in the first two pages of photographs, then the subsequent blank white pages that told their own story. ‘Am I imagining this…’ the woman’s puzzled gaze lifted from the few appealing baby photos to clash with Libby’s ‘…or does he look like…?’ Fran’s voice tailed off, her mouth an open circle of disbelief. ‘Yours?’ she whispered, dumbfounded.

      Leaping up, Libby grabbed the incriminating album and snapped it shut. ‘He belonged to someone else,’ she said quickly, her voice noncommittal. Well, it was true, wasn’t it? she thought achingly. And if it got out that she had married into the Vincenzo family—one of the richest families in Italy—was the mother of Luca Vincenzo’s son, then because of her celebrity status Giorgio would be hounded by the Press, and his little life would cease to be his own.

      Fran gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Belonged?’ she echoed gingerly and, when Libby said nothing, ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman sighed, guessing that something had gone terribly wrong in her young friend’s life, but clearly didn’t want to probe too deeply. ‘You never said.’

      Libby shrugged. ‘It’s in the past.’ Only it wasn’t. It never would be, she thought, speared with wanting. Giorgio was hers—part of the here and now—and all she wanted was for this rowdy uninvited crowd to leave so that she could ring the boy’s uncle and tell him that she was ready to go with him. That she would throw in her job, her flat, and every commitment she’d made and leave now—this minute—with nothing but the clothes she stood up in just as long as she could see her baby again.

      Hastily she stuffed the album into a drawer. ‘Promise me you won’t say anything to the others?’

      ‘Of course not,’ Fran uttered in compliance, and Libby didn’t doubt that the woman would be as true as her word. ‘Was there some connection with that gorgeous hunk who turned up on the shoot today? Did you have an affair with him or something?’

      ‘No!’ Fran knew that there was no man in her life, and that she didn’t date, so an eye-catching specimen like Romano showing up would naturally arouse her curiosity.

      ‘He seemed pretty possessive. The way he slung that door closed in my face. Only a lover behaves like that.’

      ‘No!’ Libby denied with a vehemence that had one of Fran’s dark brows lifting in patent scepticism. Why would she think that? Libby thought angrily, guessing that while her friend knew when to let the subject of a lost child drop, the possibility of such a ruthlessly attractive male as Romano Vincenzo as a candidate for Libby’s bed was too much even for the discreet Fran to ignore.

      The music was still pounding away in the sitting room. Animated shouts with the rhythmic thud of feet reverberated through the apartment. Suddenly a loud banging was cutting insistently through the pandemonium.

      ‘Your neighbours?’ Fran suggested with a grimace.

      ‘Oh, good grief!’ If it was, then they had every right to complain. ‘Help me get rid of this lot, will you?’ Libby appealed despairingly to her friend.

      ‘I will,’ Fran promised, giving her an affectionate squeeze. ‘After all, it was my fault you got stuck with…’ Her words were drowned beneath a wall of sound as the bedroom door opened and the blond technician who had been on the shoot peered round it.

      ‘Having a tête-à-tête?’ His words were a little slurred, Libby noted, guessing that he had already been drinking heavily before he’d arrived and was clearly the worse for too much champagne. ‘I thought for a moment the lovely Blaze had got herself a man in here, but I should have known better, shouldn’t I?’

      ‘Leave it, Cullum,’ Fran advised, wiser now to what made Libby such a loner.

      Steve Cullum, though, Libby noticed, looked aggressive enough to swing a punch at someone, and hurriedly she made to defuse the situation.

      ‘Let’s go back and join the others,’ she suggested to him in a placatory tone, pushing him gently back into the other room so that she could go and answer the persistent thudding on her front door.

      ‘Only if you’ll dance with me.’

      ‘All right. All right,’ she promised recklessly. ‘After I’ve answered

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