LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      WAS this how it felt when the sky fell in on you? And yet she should have been prepared for such a question.

      ‘Yes.’ Her answer was terse, because that one word was all she could manage with the angry fear that was crawling with sickening intensity through her veins. Not that she had anything to fear. It was no secret, after all, that she was a single mother with a nine-year-old son.

      ‘But you didn’t choose to bring him here with you? Was that wise? He is only nine years old. A responsible mother—’

      ‘As a “responsible mother” I decided that my son would be safer and happier, whilst we conducted our interview, keeping his appointment for a tennis lesson as part of the children’s club activities provided by our hotel. Oliver, my son, was very close to his great-grandfather. He misses him. Bringing him here today wouldn’t have helped Ollie.’

      Even if he could have been persuaded to come.

      She was shaking inside with mortified anger, but she wasn’t going to let him see it. She couldn’t let him see it. The truth was that for the last eighteen months her relationship with Ollie had been going through an increasingly difficult time, with Oliver making it very plain to her that he blamed her for the fact that he didn’t have a father. This had led to problems at school, with Ollie getting into trouble because of arguments and scraps with other boys who did have fathers in their lives, and a painful gulf was growing between her and the son she loved so very much.

      She would have done anything to protect Ollie from the pain he was going through—anything. She loved her work, and was proud of what she had achieved—of course she was—but she knew that without Ollie to be responsible for she would probably never have pushed herself to go back into education, get her qualifications and then start to climb the career ladder. It was for Ollie that she had worked long into the night, studying and working, so that she would always be able to provide him with a secure financial future. But what Ollie was now insisting he wanted more than anything else was the one thing she could not give him. A father.

      Whilst her grandfather had been alive he had been able to provide a stabilising and loving male influence in Ollie’s life, but even then Ollie had started to become withdrawn and angry with her because she would not give him any information about his father.

      Oliver was a clever boy at a good school. The private fees soaked up a large part of her income. But even though there were plenty of other boys there whose fathers were absent from their lives for one reason or another, unlike Oliver they at least seemed to have some contact with those fathers. Her grandfather had been very concerned about the effect the lack of any information about his father was having on Oliver, but he had known as well as she did how impossible it was for her to tell Ollie the truth—and she certainly wasn’t prepared to lie to him by concocting a comforting, sanitised version.

      Louise loved her son. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him to make him happy. But she couldn’t tell him about his father. At least not yet—not until he was old enough to understand something of the demons that had driven her. And old enough to forgive her for them. Her transgressions might not have given him a father, but they—and the loving care of his great-grandparents, who had stood by her when she had totally refused to have the termination her parents had tried to insist on—had given him life. Surely that was a gift worth having?

      ‘We still have things to discuss. I shall call on you at your hotel tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock in the coffee shop.’

      Not a single word as to whether or not it might be convenient for her to see him at eleven o’clock, or indeed if she would have preferred to meet him somewhere else. But what else had she expected? Arrogance was this man’s middle name—along with cruelty and over-weaning pride. It was a great pity that someone didn’t cut the all-powerful, judgemental Duca di Falconari down to size and make him as mortal and vulnerable as those he obviously thought so far beneath him.

      From the churchyard Louise could just see the polished shine of the black metal bonnet of the waiting limousine as it drew away, the dark-tinted windows obscuring any view she might have had of its passenger. Not that she wanted to look at him, or indeed have anything to do with him, but she had no choice.

      From the path that wound through the hotel’s gardens and ran past the tennis courts Caesar had a good view of the young boy who had just arrived as part of a group under the care of the hotel’s children’s club team, to begin a lesson with one of the hotel’s tennis coaches.

      Louise Anderson’s son. He was tall and strongly muscled for his age, and he hadn’t inherited his mother’s colouring Caesar recognised. The boy was olive-skinned and dark-haired—but then that was hardly surprising given his Sicilian blood. He was a good player, focused and with a strong backhand.

      Caesar looked at his watch and quickened his pace.

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