The Italian's Baby of Passion: The Italian's Secret Baby / One-Night Baby / The Italian's Secret Child. Catherine Spencer

evening, as though he might have lost weight. But his greyhound-lean frame had not carried any excess flesh the last time. Perhaps it was the black leather jacket and tailored dark trousers that hugged the muscular contours of his long thighs that made him look longer and leaner and just generally harder.

      If he’d been auditioning for the part of a dangerous but fatally attractive gangster he’d have got the job on the spot! The sprinkling of designer stubble across his jaw and hollow cheeks only intensified the aura of menace that hung around his sinfully gorgeous person.

      The discovery that it was hard to maintain your anger with someone who was blinking innocently up at you did not improve Roman’s mood. His jaw clenched because he knew that under baggy pyjamas and the glowing, baby smooth contours of her make-up-free face there lurked a woman who was living a lie.

      Even if she didn’t know he was the boy’s father, she sure as hell knew she wasn’t the mother! Besides, what was it his mother had said?

      ‘Ignorance is no defence’ Scarlet Smith—if that was her name?—was about to find out it was no defence in his eyes either.

      His son was growing up without a father—that wasn’t something that had happened by accident. Oh, yes, there were a lot of questions he wanted answered.

      Scarlet Smith was going to do the answering.

      For all he knew, everything about her was a lie. The curly knot scrunched casually on the top of her head, which made her look simultaneously vulnerable and sexy, was probably contrived to do just that.

      ‘What the hell kept you?’ he growled. ‘Open the door.’

      ‘I was on the phone.’ Scarlet’s beleaguered brain having finally accepted the fact that it was actually Roman standing out in the hallway and not some hallucination, she began to move on to other stuff, such as what was he doing here? ‘What are you…how…?’ She stopped, the blood draining from her face as a possible explanation presented itself to her.

      ‘The Bradleys sent you.’ Her worst fears were realised when he didn’t deny it.

      The Bradleys were exactly the sort of people he would know.

      Tom was something important in films and Nancy, who wore floaty clothes and cooked like an angel, wrote a foodie newspaper column in a national newspaper; in short the sort of female that left Scarlet feeling sadly inadequate. They lived in a fantastic house, employed an au pair and a gardener, and most likely had dinner guests like Roman.

      Her imagination went into overdrive. Oh, my God, it was so bad they hadn’t been able to break the news over the phone.

      ‘What’s happened to Sam? You can tell me,’ she added, an icy calm settling over her as she prepared herself to hear the worst.

      Roman’s dark eyes scanned her distressed features; the only trace of colour in her face was supplied by her jewel-bright eyes. He appeared about to say something and then changed his mind.

      ‘Just tell me,’ she begged. Imagining was so bad, could the reality be worse?

      ‘Let me in.’

      ‘Of course, of course,’ she cried, fumbling with the door chain, her hands trembling. ‘Have they taken him to the hospital?’ She pushed her fingers into her hair, dislodging one of her hair grips; a section of hair slithered free, falling across her cheek as she flung the door wide and stepped aside for him to enter.

      Think, Scarlet, think…‘Now let me think…’ she said out loud as she tried to organise her thoughts and keep panic at arm’s length. ‘Yes, get dressed.’ She flashed him a whitefaced but encouraging smile. ‘It won’t take me a minute to get dressed,’ she promised, turning to suit her words to action.

      Roman closed the front door. ‘I don’t know who the Bradleys are.’

      Halfway to the bedroom door, Scarlet stopped. ‘What?’

      ‘I don’t know the Bradleys and, as far as I am aware, Sam is not in hospital.’

      Her marble-pale brow creased. ‘But you said…’

      ‘No, actually, I didn’t, you said.’

      She started shaking in reaction as a massive wave of relief hit her. Impetuously she wrapped her arms around him and hugged hard. ‘Thank God!’ she breathed fervently.

      Roman looked at the heart-shaped face complete with misty eyes and trusting sunny smile tilted up to him and felt his focus slipping. He’d come here to uncover some truths, not fantasise about a sexy mouth and what he’d like to do with it.

      It wasn’t until she encountered his broodingly black and icy cold mesmeric eyes that Scarlet recalled with a rush of scalding embarrassment that she wasn’t dealing with someone into spontaneous hugs. Feeling a total idiot, she unpeeled herself from him and stepped away with a self-conscious grimace and a murmur of, ‘Sorry.’

      She tucked her hands behind her back and resisted the self-indulgent impulse to smooth down the non-existent creases in his jacket, recognizing that the impulse to touch his lithe body no longer had anything to do with spontaneity and a hell of a lot to do with sexual curiosity. It was deeply mortifying to have to acknowledge she had enjoyed the contact with a very well-developed male physique.

      She felt she had to offer some sort of explanation for her strange behaviour.

      ‘I know he’s perfectly safe with the Bradleys, but when I saw you I thought the worst…’ She released a small self-derisive chuckle. ‘But I expect you’ve already gathered that much.’

      Her brow wrinkled as an inconsistency she had been too panic stricken to notice earlier struck her.

      ‘Why didn’t you say straight off that you didn’t know the Bradleys?’

      It wasn’t as if he could have missed the fact she had been two steps away from hysteria.

      ‘I wanted to talk to you and I wasn’t sure you’d let me in.’

      Scarlet stared at him. Staggeringly there was no hint of apology in his manner. His behaviour was so extraordinary that it took her a while to get her head around what he had done. ‘You wanted to come in,’ she repeated in a dangerously flat tone as her temper fizzed dramatically into life. ‘You wanted to come in.’

      Only someone totally callous could act with such calculated cruelty.

      ‘I need to talk to you.’

      ‘Oh, that makes it all right, then!’ she said contemptuously.

      His classically pure jawline tautened as a dark line appeared across his cheekbones. ‘Will you calm yourself, woman?’

      ‘I’m not a woman…well, not your woman, anyhow, and for that,’ she added with incoherent fervour, ‘I shall be eternally grateful. Nothing makes it all right for you to scare me half to death that way. It was a totally despicable thing to do!’

      And it also proved her first impressions had been right; he was a man who didn’t care about anything but getting what he wanted! If other people got hurt in the process, so what? It didn’t matter to Roman.

      ‘You disgust me!’ Her voice rose a quivering octave. ‘Get out, get out of my home right now!’

      ‘I think you’re overreacting just a little here.’

      Her eyes flashed pure green fire as she glared up at him. ‘Overreacting? I thought that Sam was—’ She broke off, her voice suspended by tears as the nightmare images crowded into her head. ‘Maybe I am overreacting,’ she conceded huskily. ‘But this is only the second time Sam has spent a night away from home and…’ She shook her head. ‘If you had a child maybe you’d understand.’

      His nostrils flared and something she couldn’t identify flashed in his eyes. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

      From his expression she couldn’t imagine he wanted to