LITMIR.BIZ

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I’m sorry,’ her mother said. ‘I’m volunteering at the day centre today. I would otherwise...’

      ‘Of course.’ Her mother volunteered several times a week with a centre for elderly people and Hannah knew she enjoyed the work. It wasn’t fair of her to call her mother away from her own life. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal,’ she said as brightly as she could. And then spent half an hour on the Tube battling a crushing sense of guilt.

      She supposed she could blame Luca for this, for questioning her choices, but Hannah was honest enough to admit, at least to herself, that she’d always struggled with working mother’s remorse. It might not have been fair or reasonable, but she felt it all the same.

      Luca was shut away in his office when Hannah arrived, and so she got right down to work, trying to push away all the distracting thoughts and worries that circled her mind.

      Luca came to discuss some travel arrangements about an hour later, and she instinctively tensed as he approached her desk. She felt both weary and wired, but at least it kept her from shaming herself with an obvious physical response to his presence.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked after she’d taken down some dates for a trip he was planning to Asia next month.

      ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, startled. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

      ‘You look worried.’ His whisky-brown gaze swept over her as he cocked his head. ‘Is it Jamie?’

      Hannah stared at him, dumbfounded. ‘You’ve never asked me that before.’

      ‘I never knew you had a child before.’

      ‘Yes, but...’ She shook her head, more confused than ever. ‘If you had known, you would have been annoyed that I seemed worried and distracted while at work. Not...’

      ‘Not what?’ Luca prompted, his gaze locked on hers.

      ‘Not concerned.’

      ‘Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you thought you did.’

      ‘Perhaps I don’t.’ She had thought she knew what kind of man he was. But that had been a week ago, and everything had changed since then.

      ‘So is it your son?’ Luca asked. ‘That’s worrying you?’

      Still surprised by his perception as well as his interest, Hannah relented. ‘Yes, but it’s only a small thing.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I forgot his class had a bake sale today. Everyone brought in biscuits and cakes, lovely home-made ones, except for me.’ She shook her head, almost wanting to laugh at the bemused look on Luca’s face. This was so outside his zones of both familiarity and comfort. ‘I told you it was a small thing.’

      Luca didn’t answer for a moment. Hannah sighed and turned back to the notes she’d been making. Clearly she hadn’t advanced the cause of working mothers through this exchange.

      ‘So,’ Luca said slowly, ‘Jamie is the only child in the class without cakes or biscuits?’

      ‘Yes, but it doesn’t really matter—’

      ‘It does matter,’ Luca stated definitively. ‘Let me make a few calls.’

      Hannah stared at him in stunned disbelief as he went back into his office. Not knowing what else to do, she got on with making his travel arrangements. Fifteen minutes later, Luca reappeared.

      ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘My limo is waiting downstairs.’

      ‘Your limo—where are we going?’

      ‘To your son’s school.’

      ‘What—?’

      ‘He can’t be the only one without cakes,’ Luca stated, and stabbed the button for the lift.

      Hannah had no choice but to grab her handbag and coat and follow him into the lift. ‘Luca, what are you doing? He can manage—’

      ‘But why should he, when I can do something about it?’

      ‘I could have done something,’ Hannah muttered. ‘Couriered a cake to the school—’ Now she felt even more guilt.

      ‘We’ll do better than that,’ Luca announced. ‘We’ll deliver them in person.’

      The cakes turned out to be forty-eight of the most glorious creations from a nearby exclusive patisserie. Hannah peeked into the white cake box and her jaw dropped at the berries glistening like jewels in folds of perfectly whipped cream.

      ‘These are amazing,’ she told Luca. ‘And they must have cost—’

      ‘It was no trouble.’

      Hannah closed the cake box. ‘I’ll pay.’

      ‘You will not,’ Luca returned swiftly. ‘This is my gift. Do not presume to take it from me, Hannah.’

      She shook her head slowly, overwhelmed but also befuddled by his generosity. ‘I really don’t understand you. Last night you seemed angry...’

      ‘I was surprised,’ he corrected. ‘And I don’t deal well with surprises.’

      ‘And now?’

      ‘Now I want to help.’

      ‘But you don’t even like children,’ Hannah burst out.

      Luca glanced at her, affronted. ‘Why would you think that?’

      ‘Maybe because you had to make me masquerade as your fiancée to impress a self-proclaimed family man?’ Hannah returned dryly. ‘Just a thought.’

      ‘Just because I don’t want children myself it doesn’t mean I don’t like them.’

      ‘But why don’t you want them, if you like them? Most people do.’

      Luca was silent for a long moment, his gaze hooded, his jaw bunched tight. Hannah held her breath as she waited; she realised she really wanted to know the answer.

      ‘I told you it wasn’t worth it,’ he finally said.

      ‘But what does that even mean—?’

      ‘Since you partially agreed with me, what do you think it meant?’ he shot back, his eyes glittering.

      Hannah considered the question for a moment. ‘It means that you’re scared of getting hurt,’ she said quietly. ‘Afraid of someone leaving you, or stopping to love you. Of loving someone causing you pain rather than joy.’

      She held Luca’s gaze, willing him to answer, to admit the truth. ‘Well, then,’ he said, breaking their locked gazes as he looked out of the window. ‘Then you know why.’

      Hannah was silent, struggling with her own emotions as well as Luca’s. ‘It sounds very lonely,’ she said finally.

      Luca shrugged, his gaze still averted. ‘I’m used to being alone.’

      She remembered what he’d said on the beach, how he’d felt alone all the time. ‘You don’t even want to try?’ she asked, her voice squeezed from her throat. She didn’t know when the conversation had gone from the abstract to the personal, but she knew she was asking him more—and revealing more herself—than just what he thought about relationships in general. She was asking him what he thought about her.

      ‘I don’t know if I can,’ Luca said in a voice so low Hannah had to strain to hear it.

      ‘You’ll never find out if you don’t,’ Hannah answered and he turned to look at her, his eyes like burning black holes in his tense face.

      ‘That’s a very pat answer, and the reality is more complex when there are people involved,’ he said. ‘Children involved.’

      Hannah’s breath hitched. She wasn’t the only one who had made this conversation intensely personal.

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