LITMIR.BIZ

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friend’s been looking after my b-baby in the bus shelter while I came to see you.’

      For a moment, he’d felt fury and pity in equal measures—but something else, too. He would help her, yes—but only if she proved she was worth helping. And, unless this mystery woman dried her eyes and pulled herself together, he would kick her back out on the street, where she belonged.

      ‘Hysterics won’t work in this case,’ he’d said coldly. ‘Not with me.’

      Just in time, Natasha had recognised that he’d meant it and, sucking in a shuddering breath, she’d looked down at Sam. How did he manage to still be asleep? she’d asked herself with something close to wonder.

      ‘How old is he?’ Raffaele’d asked.

      She’d lifted her face to his. It glowed in the firelight and had been wet with rain and tears, and he’d suddenly found himself thinking that her eyes were exceptionally fine—pale, like a summer sky.

      ‘How on earth d-did you know he was a boy?’ she’d questioned shakily.

      He’d heard the strong and fierce note of maternal pride and, unexpectedly, he’d smiled. ‘He’s dressed entirely in blue,’ he’d said, almost gently.

      Natasha had looked down and, sure enough, the hooded all-in-one and baby mitts had all been in variations on that shade. ‘Oh, yes!’ And, for the first time in a long, long time, she’d quivered him a smile. ‘He’s nearly eighteen months,’ she’d added.

      Raffaele had hid the sinking feeling in his heart. Porca miseria! What he knew about children and babies could be written on his fingernail, but even he knew that children around that age were nothing but trouble.

      ‘But he’s really good,’ Natasha’d said.

      It was perhaps unfortunate that Sam had chosen that precise moment to wake up. He’d taken one look at Raffaele and burst into an ear-splitting howl of rage.

      There’d been a pause.

      ‘So I see,’ Raffaele’d said wryly.

      ‘Oh, he’s just tired,’ Natasha’d babbled, clamping him tightly to her chest and rocking him like a little boat. ‘And hungry. He’ll be fine tomorrow.’

      He’d noticed her assumption that they would still be around the next day, but didn’t remark on it. ‘Why are you in this situation? Where have you been living?’

      ‘I’ve been working in a house—only, they keep asking me to do more and more, so that I hardly get a minute with Sam. And the house is damp, too—he’s only just finished a cold, and I’m terrified he’s going to get another. It’s not somewhere I want to bring a child up.’

      His eyes had narrowed. ‘And what about his father? Is he going to turn up and want to stay the night with you here?’

      ‘We don’t see him,’ Natasha’d said, with an air of finality.

      ‘There isn’t going to be a scene? Angry doorstep rows at midnight?’

      She shook her head. ‘No way.’

      Raffaele’d looked curiously at the boy, who had been attempting to burrow into her shoulder, his thumb wobbling towards his mouth. He’d frowned. ‘Where’s he going to sleep?’

      And with those words she’d known that she was in with a chance. That she’d had one foot in Mr—or rather—Signor de Feretti’s expensive door and she had to prove to this rugged, but rather cold-eyed, foreigner that she deserved to stay. They deserved to stay.

      The child had spent his first night under the Italian’s roof in the same bed as his mother and when, the next morning, Raffaele’d caught Natasha trawling through the second-hand column of the local paper he’d overrode all her objections—which admittedly weren’t very strong when it came to her beloved boy—to order a top-of-the-range bed which was fashioned out of wood to look like a pirate ship.

      And there mother and son had been ever since.

      It suited all parties very well. Raffaele knew that it was far better his big house be lived in—especially as he was away a lot, not just in the States, but Europe, too, for the de Feretti empire spread far and wide. Once, Natasha had plucked up the courage to ask him why he bothered keeping on a house in England when presumably a hotel might have been more convenient.

      But he had shaken his jet-dark head. ‘Because I hate them,’ he’d told her, with a surprising vehemence. Hadn’t he been in enough of them as a boy, following the death of his father, when he had been trailed from pillar to post by a mother determined to find herself a new rich husband? ‘Hotels have no soul. All the furniture is used by faceless hundreds. The pillows slept on by others and the mattresses made love on by countless couples. Yet, when you buy stuff of your own and put it down somewhere at least you can make any house a home.’

      If she hadn’t been so busy trying not to bite her lip with embarrassment when he’d said that bit about making love then she might have disagreed with him—telling him that a home consisted of more than just furniture and belongings. It had to do with making it the place you most wanted to be at the end of the day. And, anyway, who was Natasha to disagree with him, when he had provided the only real home she and Sam had ever known?

      When Sam had been old enough Raffaele had insisted on enrolling him to attend the nursery section of the highly acclaimed international school which was situated nearby.

      ‘Why not?’ he had queried, rather arrogantly, when she’d shaken her head.

      ‘It’s much too expensive,’ Natasha’d said defensively. ‘I can’t afford it.’

      His voice had gentled in a the way it rarely did, but which was impossible to resist when he turned it on. ‘I know that. I wasn’t expecting you to pay. I will.’

      ‘I couldn’t possibly accept that,’ Natasha’d said, feeling as if she ought to refuse his generous offer even though her maternal heart leapt at the thought of Sam being given such a head start in life.

      ‘You can, and you will. It makes perfect sense,’ he’d drawled. ‘All the other schools are far enough away to eat into your time when you take him there, and ultimately my time. Listen, Natasha, why don’t you look at it as one of the perks of the job—rather than me giving you the use of a car, which so far you have refused to drive in London?’

      Put like that, she’d found she could accept his offer gratefully, and she would never forget her joy, when Sam spoke his first few words in French and then Italian. After that Raffaele had taken to always speaking to the boy in his native tongue, and while Natasha had revelled with dazed pleasure at this evidence of her son the linguist, there had been a tiny part of her which had felt shut out. It had been enough to make her start taking Italian lessons, herself, though she kept quiet about it—in case it looked as if she was expecting something.

      It hadn’t all been plain sailing, of course. There had been the time when Sam had fallen over the step into the back garden and sustained a nasty bump to his forehead. Natasha had rushed him to the emergency room and though Raffaele had been out of the country at the time, he had listened grimly on the other end of the line as she recounted how a social worker had been round the next day to check everything out.

      ‘Well, you should have damned well been watching him!’ he had flared.

      It had been unjust and unfair, but Natasha had been too eaten up with guilt to tell him that her back had been turned for just a few seconds.

      And the time when Sam had found a handbag belonging to one of Raffaele’s girlfriends and had decided to reinvent himself as his favourite character, Corky the Clown.

      ‘But that’s my best lipstick!’ the girlfriend had screeched, as she’d dodged Sam’s pink-glossed and podgy hand as he attempted to hand the decimated piece of make-up back to her.

      Raffaele had laughed. ‘I’ll buy you another.’

      The

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