Modern Romance - The Best of the Year. Miranda Lee

      * * *

      On Monday morning Sam filed into the conference room at the university and took a seat at the long table for the weekly budget meeting. Her eyes were gritty with tiredness. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t slept all weekend, on tenterhooks waiting for Rafaele to appear again like a spectre. In her more fanciful moments she’d imagined that she’d dreamt it all up: the phone call; his appearance at the house. Coming face to face with his son. A small, snide voice pointed out that it was no less than she deserved but she pushed it down.

      Robustly she told herself that if she’d had to go back in time she would have done the same again, because if she hadn’t surely the stress of Rafaele being reluctantly bound to her and a baby would have resulted in a miscarriage for real?

      Gertie, the secretary, arrived then and sat down breathlessly next to Sam. She said urgently, ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened over the weekend...’

      Sam looked at her, used to Gertie’s penchant for gossip. She didn’t want to hear some salacious story involving students and professors behaving badly, but the older woman’s face suddenly composed itself and Sam looked to see that the head of their department had walked into the room.

      And then her heart stopped. Because right on his heels was another man. Rafaele.

      For a second Sam thought she might faint. She was instantly light-headed. She had to put her hands on the edge of the table and grip it as she watched in mounting horror and shock as Rafaele coolly and calmly strode into the room, looking as out of place in this unadorned academic environment as an exotic peacock on a grubby high street.

      He didn’t even glance her way. He took a seat at the head of the table alongside their boss, looking stupendously handsome and sexy. He sat back, casually undoing a button on his pristine suit jacket with a big hand, long fingers...

      Sam was mesmerised.

      This had to be a dream, she thought to herself frantically. She’d wake up any moment. But Gertie was elbowing her none too discreetly and saying sotto voce, ‘This is what I was about to tell you.’

      The stern glare of their boss quelled any chat and then, with devastating inevitability, Sam’s stricken gaze met Rafaele’s and she knew it wasn’t a dream. There was a distinct gleam of triumph in those green depths, and a more than smug smile was playing around that firmly sculpted mouth.

      Her boss was standing up and clearing his throat. Sam couldn’t look away from Rafaele, and he didn’t remove his gaze from hers, as if forcing her to take in every word now being spoken, but she only heard snippets.

      ‘Falcone Industries...most successful...honoured that Mr Falcone has decided to fund this research out of his own pocket...delighted at this announcement...funding guaranteed for as long as it takes.’

      Then Rafaele got up to address the room. There were about thirteen people and, predictably, you could have heard a pin drop as his charismatic effect held everyone in thrall. He’d finally moved his gaze from Sam and she felt as if she could breathe again, albeit painfully. Her heart was racing and she took in nothing of what he said, trying to wrap her sluggish brain around the ramifications of this shocking development.

      ‘Samantha...’

      Sam looked up, dazed, to see her boss was now addressing her, and that Rafaele had sat down. She hadn’t noticed, nor heard a word.

      ‘I’m sorry, Bill, what did you say?’ She was amazed she’d managed to speak.

      ‘I said,’ he repeated with exaggerated patience, clearly disgruntled that she appeared to be on another planet while in such illustrious company, ‘that as of next week you will be working from the Falcone factory. You’re to oversee setting up a research facility there which will work in tandem with the one here in the university.’

      He directed himself to the others again while this bomb detonated within Sam’s solar plexus.

      ‘I don’t think I need to point out the significance of being allowed to conduct this research within a functioning factory, and especially one as prestigious as Falcone Motors. It’ll put us streets ahead of other research in this area and, being assured of Falcone funding for at least five years, we’re practically guaranteed success.’

      Sam couldn’t take any more. She rose up in a blind panic, managed to mumble something vague about needing air and fled the room.

      * * *

      Rafaele watched Sam leave dispassionately. Since the other evening he’d been in shock. Functioning, but in shock. His anger and rage was too volcanic to release, fearsome in its intensity. And fearsome for Rafaele if he contemplated for a second why his emotions were so deep and hot.

      Sam’s boss beside him emitted a grunt of displeasure at her hasty departure, but Rafaele felt nothing but satisfaction to be causing her a modicum of the turbulence in his own gut. Through his shock Rafaele had felt a visceral need to push Sam off her axis as much as she’d pushed him off his.

      He recalled bitterly how reluctant she’d been to talk to him in the first place about the job he was offering, all the while knowing her secret. Harbouring his son. With one phone call to his team Rafaele had put in motion this audacious plan to take over the research programme at her university and had relished this meeting.

      While Sam’s boss continued his speech Rafaele retreated inwardly, but anyone looking at him would have seen only fierce concentration.

      He breathed in and realised that he hadn’t taken a proper breath since he’d seen Sam looking at him with that stricken expression on her face in the doorway of her house the other evening. The initial punch to his gut he’d received when he’d first thought that Sam was married, with someone else’s child, was galling to remember—and more exposing than he liked to admit.

      Nothing excused her from withholding his son from him for more than three years. Rafaele had been about Milo’s age when his world had imploded. When he’d witnessed his father, on his knees, sobbing, prostrating himself at Rafaele’s mother’s feet, begging her not to leave him.

      ‘I love you. What am I if you leave? I am nothing. I have nothing...’

      ‘Get up, Umberto,’ she’d said. ‘You shame yourself in front of our son. What kind of a man will he be with a crying, snivelling wretch for a father?’

      What kind of a man would he be?

      Rafaele felt tight inside. The kind of man who knew that the most important things in life were building a solid foundation. Security. Success. He’d vowed never to allow anything to reduce him to nothing, as his father had been reduced, with not even his pride to keep him standing. Emotions were dangerous. They had the power to derail you completely. He knew how fickle women were, how easily they could walk away. Or keep you from your child.

      Rafaele had driven back to Sam’s house on Sunday, fired up, ready to confront her again, but just as he’d pulled up he’d seen them leaving the house. Milo had been pushing a scooter. He’d followed them to a small local park and watched like a fugitive as they played. Dark emotions had twisted inside him as he’d watched Sam’s effortless long-legged grace and ease. He’d known that if he hadn’t reappeared in their lives this would have just been another banal Sunday morning routine trip to the park.

      Seeing his son’s small sturdy body, watching him running around, laughing gleefully, something alien inside him had swelled. It was...pride. And something else that he couldn’t name. But it had reminded him of that day again—the darkest in his memory—when his mother had gripped his hand painfully tight and pulled him in her wake out of their family palazzo outside Milan, leaving his father sobbing uncontrollably on the ground. A pathetic, broken man.

      That was one of the reasons Rafaele had never wanted to have children. Knowing how vulnerable they were had always felt like too huge a responsibility to bear. No one knew better than he how events even at that young age could shape your life. And so he’d never expected that, when faced with his son, there would be such a torrent of feelings within him,