The Mills & Boon Christmas Wishes Collection. Maisey Yates

important?’ Vito prompted, his irritation barely hidden.

      Defiance and umbrage combined inside Holly. She had held on to her temper but it was a close-run battle. His assumption that she was approaching him for another sexual encounter had shocked her, possibly because she had persuaded herself that they had shared something more than sex. Now she saw her illusions for the pitiful lies that they were, lies she had told herself to bolster her sagging self-esteem while she was waddling round with a massive tummy.

      ‘Yes, much more important,’ she confirmed, lifting her chin and simply spilling out her announcement. ‘I got pregnant that night we were together.’

      Vito froze as if she had threatened to fling a grenade at him. He turned noticeably pale, his strong bone structure suddenly clearly etched below his skin by raw tension. ‘You said you were on the pill—’

      Holly wasn’t in the mood to go into the intricacies of missed pills and antibiotic treatment. ‘You must know that every form of contraception has a failure rate and I’m afraid there was a failure. I got pregnant but I had no way of contacting you, particularly not when you had given me a fake name.’

      Vito was in shock. Indeed Vito could never recall being plunged into such a state of shock before. Everything he had assumed had been turned upside down and inside out with those simple words... I got pregnant.

      ‘And do you usually reintroduce yourself with a very evocative Santa hat and a sprig of holly when this happens?’ he heard himself snap without even mentally forming the words. ‘Is this some sort of a scam?’

      Holly’s small shoulders pushed up, along with her chin. ‘No, Angelo is not a scam, Vito. He was born eight months after that night.’

      ‘You come here without a word of warning and throw this announcement at me like a challenge,’ Vito ground out in condemnation, no fan of major surprises in his life, as yet not even capable of thinking of what she was telling him. The prospect of having a child had long struck him as a possibility as remote as the moon. He had known fatherhood was on the cards somewhere down the line if he married Marzia but he had also known that neither of them were in any hurry to start a family.

      ‘No, I did not. If I challenged you it would be an awful lot tougher!’ Holly shot back at him furiously. ‘Tough was waitressing until I was eight months pregnant and being in labour for two days before I got a C-section. Tough is working as a childminder and a shelf-stacker and never getting enough sleep. You wouldn’t know tough if it leapt on you and bit you...because in your whole blasted spoilt-rotten life you have had everything handed to you on a plate!’

      A dark line of colour had delineated Vito’s high cheekbones as he viewed her in growing disbelief. ‘That is enough.’

      ‘No, it’s not enough, and you do not tell me when enough is enough!’ Holly fired back at him, while pointing at him with an angry finger.

      ‘Ranting at me is not getting us anywhere.’

      ‘I’m entitled to rant if I want to rant!’ Holly launched back at him an octave higher, shaking with rage and the distress she was fighting off while wondering if Vito ever lost his temper, because he was still so very controlled. ‘And I don’t want to get anywhere with you. I’m done here. I’ve told you that you’re a father and that’s why I came to see you. I saw your photo in a newspaper, incidentally...a lovely way to identify the father of your child! But if you want to think Angelo’s a scam, you’re welcome.’

      ‘Holly...’

      Holly yanked open the door and marched down the corridor very fast because she could not wait to get out of the building. She could feel the tears building up and she didn’t want them to fall in front of an audience. She ignored Vito’s voice when he repeated her name and stabbed the lift button with frantic force.

      ‘Holly...come back here!’ Vito shouted without warning.

      So taken aback was she by that sudden rise in volume from him that she spun round and looked at him. He was only halfway down the corridor, evidently having expected her to return at his urging, and if looks could kill she would have been lying dead at his feet. He did have a temper, though, she registered belatedly, and it made his dark eyes glitter like gold ingots and gave his lean, darkly beautiful features a hard, forbidding edge.

      Horribly aware of the number of people openly staring, Holly turned back to the lift just as the doors opened. She dived in as fast as she could but not fast enough to prevent Vito from joining her.

      ‘You should’ve come back to my office.’

      In silence, Holly contemplated his polished shoes because the tears were even closer now and stinging her eyes like angry wasps.

      ‘I have to look into this situation. I need your phone number and your address,’ Vito breathed in a raw undertone.

      ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so offensive—funny, how you get the wrong idea about people. I really didn’t want to get pregnant, Vito, but I love my son and he is never ever going to hear me admit that because now that he’s here he’s the best thing that ever happened to me,’ she bit out shakily, hurriedly stepping out of the lift.

      ‘Phone number. Address,’ Vito said again, closing a hand to a slight shoulder to prevent her from walking away through the crowded concourse.

      With a heavy sigh, Holly dug into her bag and produced a notebook. He handed her a gold pen. She squinted down at the pen, dimly wondering if it was real gold, and then scolded herself for that stupid thought. She printed out the requested details and ripped out the sheet to hand it back to him. ‘Look,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘There’s no pressure on you here. If I’m honest I don’t really want you in our lives. You’re not the sort of man I want around my son.’

      And having deprived Vito of breath and speech with that damning final indictment of his character, Holly disappeared into the crowds.

       CHAPTER SIX

      WELL, YOU MADE a real screw-up of that, Vito reflected for the first time in his life. But Holly hadn’t given him the smallest preparation for what was to come, so it was scarcely surprising that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. He didn’t react well to surprises and the delivery of the Santa hat and the holly had seemed suggestively sexual. Was it any wonder he had got the wrong idea? His hard mouth compressed while he wondered about that note she had mentioned. Had she left a note? He had looked in all the obvious places. There had been nothing on the table or the door, and what did it matter now anyway?

      What really mattered was that without the smallest warning he was apparently a father...

      That was a mind-blowing concept but Vito was primarily ruled by his very shrewd brain and his first call was to his lawyer, who within the hour put him into contact with a London-based specialist in family law. Once all his questions had been answered, Vito was frowning at the realisation that he didn’t really have any rights over his own son. Only marriage granted such legal rights. He didn’t consult Apollo because he knew that his friend would start talking about demanding DNA tests but he and Apollo lived very different lives and Vito was confident that if Holly had given birth to a baby eight months after that night, it could only be his baby.

      He didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, and after he had organised travel to Holly’s home town for the following day and informed her by text of his planned visit, he phoned his mother to break the news.

      Concetta Zaffari’s delight at learning that she was a grandmother tumbled through her every word and then there were questions about Holly that Vito found hard to answer, and some he skipped altogether.

      ‘Obviously you’ll be getting married,’ Concetta trilled cheerfully, and Vito laughed that his mother should even feel the need to say that. Of course they would be getting married. No Zaffari in history had had an illegitimate child and Vito had every intention of being a better parent than his own