Modern Romance February 2020 Books 5-8. Natalie Anderson

are possibly the most infuriating man in the world,’ Orla snapped when she opened the front door the next morning.

      Tonino looked at his watch and gave an expression of such innocence that she had to bite her cheeks not to laugh out loud. ‘You told me not to come as early as I did yesterday.’

      ‘So you come half an hour later? Seriously? It’s seven o’clock.’

      ‘And you’re up and dressed and looking beautiful.’ She looked as fresh and as beautiful as the clear blue skies covering Dublin that morning. Dressed in a knee-length leaf-green jersey dress, her hair loose around her shoulders, her pretty green eyes enhanced with a touch of mascara, a brush of colour over the high cheekbones. Fresh, beautiful and damned irresistible.

      One day soon, he vowed, Orla would open a door to him with a smile and greet him with a kiss rather than a scolding.

      Late into the night he’d lain in his bed thinking back over their time together. The more he’d remembered, the more he’d come to understand why the few affairs he’d had since she’d disappeared had fizzled out with barely a whimper. Their affair had hung over him. It had shadowed him doggedly. Seducing Orla into marrying him would allow him to put the shadows to bed in more ways than one. He would have her in his bed and his child permanently in his life. The fact he would never be able to trust her was irrelevant. He didn’t need to trust her. He just needed to marry her, the final step that would prevent her ever disappearing from his life with his son again.

      Finn was in his high chair at the dining table. He greeted Tonino with a smile and a wave.

      ‘I was just feeding Finn his breakfast. Why don’t you make yourself a coffee while we finish up?’ Orla strove to keep her tone polite but she could have cheerfully strangled Tonino. She wished she could say it was some sixth sense that he would turn up stupidly early again that had had her awake before Finn but it hadn’t been. It had been the dream of them, in bed together, that she’d wrenched herself out of that had accomplished that feat. She’d sat straight upright, heart pounding, burning and throbbing on the inside, not knowing if the dream had been a replay of something real or just her subconscious imagination, and dived straight into the shower to wash the burning feeling away.

      She’d cleaned her skin, but her insides…

      Mush. Her insides had been a hot, sticky mush the water couldn’t touch. They were still mush.

      Her hands were shaking. She could barely hold the spoon to feed Finn.

      ‘Coffee?’ Tonino’s deep voice reverberated in her ear.

      ‘No. Thank you. Did you want something to eat?’ She ground her toes into the floor in a futile effort to stop her right knee shaking too. ‘There’s bread and cereal in the cupboard.’

      Dark brown eyes met hers. ‘I had something before I left the hotel.’

      ‘Where are you staying?’

      ‘At Bally House.’

      ‘The hotel?’

       ‘Sì.’

      ‘You lucky thing.’

      ‘You have been there?’

      ‘I wish,’ she said reverently. Bally House Hotel was once a medieval village with its own church and flour mill. A huge renovation undertaken a few years ago had transformed it into Ireland’s premier hotel, the destination of choice for A-list stars to marry in. ‘I tried to talk Aislin into getting married there but she wasn’t having any of it—she was set on marrying in Sicily.’

      ‘We can marry there.’

      ‘We’re not getting married.’

      ‘I am confident that one day soon you will come around to my way of thinking, dolcezza.’

      ‘And I am confident that you are full of misplaced ego. I will not marry you, end of subject.’

      Mercifully, the nurse descended the stairs, cutting the conversation short.

      Less mercifully, the look in Tonino’s eyes told her this was a subject he had no intention of dropping.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      ‘ARE YOU OKAY?’

      Ever since they’d left the government offices where they’d officially added Tonino’s name as father on Finn’s birth certificate, Orla had lapsed into silence. Her head was turned from him, her body pressed against the door as if she were preparing to make an escape the moment the car came to a stop.

      ‘I’m fine.’ Her tone suggested she was far from fine.

      ‘You do know this is for the best?’

      She twisted her head to meet his stare and sighed. ‘Yes. I do know that. Whether you believe me or not, I always intended to tell you about Finn. Always.’

      Tonino looked at his son—now his legal son—fast asleep in his car seat.

      He wanted to believe her. For their son’s sake. But he couldn’t escape the one verifiable fact that she’d made the deliberate choice to keep him in the dark about the pregnancy before the accident. Blaming Sophia’s deliberate sabotage was too easy—and he did believe that Sophia had confronted her; it was exactly the kind of thing the poisonous bitch would do—Orla should have told him about the pregnancy whether she believed he was engaged or not. Instead she had chosen to swallow Sophia’s lies and deprive him of the wonder of experiencing the pregnancy with her, which in turn had led to depriving him of over the first three years of his son’s life. Tonino, as his parents would testify, had never been one for forgiving or forgetting.

      ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said after a long period of time had passed when he’d left her assertion unacknowledged.

      He loosened his tense shoulders and inclined his head. ‘Anything.’

      ‘Last night you said our fathers were old friends. Did you know Salvatore well?’

      ‘Well enough. Why do you ask?’

      ‘I know so little about him. I don’t like to ask Dante because I can see it makes him uncomfortable. I think he feels guilty that they had such a great relationship while I was this dirty little secret.’

      He could understand why she felt like that. No one had known of Salvatore Moncada’s secret love child, not even Tonino’s own father, who had been Salvatore’s closest friend.

      He wondered how his father would react when he learned Salvatore’s illegitimate daughter was the mother of his grandchild. Probably with open arms. His mother too. There hadn’t been a single conversation between Tonino and his parents in recent years where the subject of him settling down and having babies hadn’t come up, the implication being he needed to find a suitable replacement for the fiancée he’d so callously thrown away. In his parents’ eyes, Sophia had been perfect. Beautiful and rich and from a good Sicilian family. Their engagement had been celebrated in the same way the British celebrated a royal engagement. Their fury at him ending it had been off the charts. They’d taken it personally. They’d accused him of disrespecting the family name and destroying the decades-long friendship with the Messinas. There had been threats. At one point he’d thought his mother was going to slap his face.

      That marriage to Sophia would have seen Tonino spend his life in misery hadn’t concerned either of them.

      With a sigh, he tried to think positively of his parents. He’d had the security of their unconditional love for the first thirty years of his life whereas Orla had never met her father and as for her mother…where was she? She’d missed Aislin’s wedding. Orla rarely spoke of her. She might as well not exist.

      ‘Your father was a man of many contradictions,’ he told her heavily.