LITMIR.BIZ

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want to be late for his appointment with Louise. As always when he thought about her he could feel his long-standing burden of guilt and regret.

      Louise checked her watch. Eleven o’clock. Her son had been surprised and pleased when she had suggested that he have another tennis lesson. Such lessons were ‘extras’ on top of their holiday budget, and she’d warned him before they came that there wouldn’t be much money for such things. A stab of guilt stung her conscience. Right now she needed to be spending time with Ollie and trying to find a way to put things right between them. Wasn’t that exactly the kind of advice she would be giving another parent in her circumstances? The trouble was that child-rearing was easier when it was shared not just between two parents but with an extended family. And she and Ollie only had one another.

      Louise closed her eyes briefly as she sat on one of the banquettes in the hotel coffee shop. She missed both her grandparents dreadfully, but especially her grandfather. And if she missed his wise, loving kindness and guidance then how much more must Ollie miss him?

      They had been close, the two of them, and now Ollie had no male influence on his life to guide and love him.

      When she opened her eyes again she saw that Caesar Falconari was striding towards her. More casually dressed today, he was still looking very Italian in his buff-coloured linen jacket, black tee shirt and light-coloured chinos. No other man but an Italian could carry off such an outfit with so much cool sexuality. It was no wonder that every female head within looking distance swivelled in his direction, Louise acknowledged. Not that she would ever find him attractive. Far from it.

      Liar, liar … a wickedly rebellious voice inside her head taunted. She must not think about that moment yesterday when, out of nowhere, she had suffered the awful, shaming indignity of a feeling as though she had been stripped of her defences, her body left nakedly vulnerable to an attack from its own sensuality. Logically it should have been impossible for her to have felt that searing, possessing jolt of female awareness, and all she could do now to comfort herself was to pretend to ignore it. It meant nothing, after all. But what if somehow her body …? No. She was not going to go down that route or start asking those questions. She needed to focus on the here and the now.

      Of course the moment Caesar sat down next to her a waitress miraculously appeared, even though she had been sitting there without anyone coming anywhere near her for close on ten minutes prior to his arrival, and of course he ordered an espresso in contrast to her own caffè latte.

      ‘I see that your son is having another tennis lesson this morning.’

      ‘How do you know that?’ There was no real reason for her to feel alarmed—no reason at all—but somehow she did.

      ‘I happened to walk past the tennis courts as the children’s club leaders arrived with their charges.’

      ‘Well, hopefully I’ll be able to go and watch him play myself if our meeting can be kept short.’

      There was nothing wrong in her letting him know that she wanted this matter concluded. He might be lord of all he surveyed here on Sicily, but she wasn’t going to bow and scrape to him even if she couldn’t afford to actually offend him, she thought mutinously.

      The waitress brought their coffee and handed Caesar Falconari his with so much deference that Louise half expected her to back away from him, bowing.

      ‘As to that … there is a second matter I need to discuss with you in addition to your request for the burial of your grandparents’ ashes.’

      Another matter? She had been about to pick up her latte but now she left it where it was. Her heart-rate had picked up and was thumping heavily as alarm bells started ringing throughout her body.

      ‘You see, just prior to your arrival here, and following on from your late grandfather’s demise, I received a letter from his solicitors which he had written and given instructions to be posted to me following his death.’

      ‘My grandfather wrote to you?’

      Her throat had gone dry and her breath caught.

      ‘Yes. It seems he had certain concerns for his great-grandson’s welfare and his future. He felt he could not entrust you to deal with them, so he felt it necessary to write to me.’

      Louise struggled to prevent her pent-up breath leaking away in an unsteady jerky movement that might betray her to him. It was true that her grandfather had had concerns about the growing anger and resentment Ollie was demonstrating towards her. He had even warned her that with so many families in their community knowing what they believed to be the story of her disgrace it wouldn’t be long before Ollie was given that version of events at school. Children could be cruel to one another, both deliberately and accidentally, and Louise knew that Ollie already felt alienated enough from his peers because of his inability to name and claim a father, or even the family of his father, without the situation being made worse. However, as her grandfather had known, her hands had been tied.

      It came as a dreadful shock to know that despite everything they had discussed, and despite the fact that she had believed her grandfather understood and accepted her decision, he had fallen victim to centuries of tradition and in his last weeks of life reverted to the Sicilian way of life she herself so much resented. Despite her love for him, and all that she owed him, after listening to Caesar Falconari’s revelation it was impossible for her to stop her anger spilling over.

      ‘He had no right to do that even if he did think he was acting in Ollie’s best interests,’ she said sharply. ‘He knew how I felt about this whole Sicilian community thing of referring everything that is seen as some kind of problem to the community’s patronne for judgement. It’s totally archaic.’

      ‘Basta! Enough! Your grandfather did not write to me as his patronne. He wrote to me because he claims that I am Oliver’s father.’

      The pain was immediate and intense, as though someone had ripped away the top layer of her skin, flooding her emotions, opening the locked gates to the past with all its shame and humiliation. She was eighteen again, shamed and disgraced, filled with confusing and only half-understood emotions that had come out of nowhere to change the path of her life for ever and marked her out in public as a fallen woman.

      She could still see her father’s face, with its expression of anger mixed with rejection as he’d looked at her, whilst Melinda had given her a gloating smile of triumph as she’d drawn her own daughters close to her and taken hold of her father’s hand so that they formed a small close group that excluded her. Her grandfather’s face had lost its colour, and her grandmother’s hands had been trembling as she’d folded them together in her lap. No one seated in the popular café-bar in the small village square could have failed to hear the awful denunciation the headman of her grandparents’ home village had made, labelling her as a young woman who had shamed her family by what she had done.

      Automatically she’d turned to Caesar Falconari for support, but he had turned away from her, getting up from his seat to walk away, leaving her undefended and unloved—just as her father had done.

      Hadn’t she already been punished enough for her vulnerability and foolishness, without the added horror of this?

      Louise winced, unable to stop that small betraying reaction to her memories of the past. She was still sensitive to his rejection. That should have been impossible. It was impossible, she assured herself. Her body was merely reacting to the memory of the pain he had once caused her, that was all. She needed to be here, in the present, not retreating to the past.

      The very fact that he had spoken to her in Italian, with a harshly critical edge to his voice, was enough to warn Louise that Caesar was losing his patience with her—but why should she care about that when she had so much more to worry about? Oliver was her son—hers. He had nothing to do with Caesar, and if she had her way he never ever would. Even if Caesar had fathered him.

      Caesar watched and saw the emotion she was struggling to suppress. The muscles in his own body tightened as he recognised that he would have preferred it had she immediately

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