The Costanzo Baby Secret (12 page)

Beside herself, she struck out at his arm with her fist. “Tell me!” she cried. “If it concerns me, I have the right to know.”

“Okay!” He threw up his hands in surrender. “But not until we get to Portofino. You’ve waited this long to hear the whole story. Another hour or two isn’t going to make any difference to the outcome.”

He’d called ahead for a helicopter to transport them to Rappallo, and for one of his sailing crew to open up the yacht and have a car waiting to drive them the short distance from the heliport to Portofino.

Maeve was shivering by the time they’d taken the dinghy out to the big boat and climbed aboard, though whether from the cool night air or sheer misery was hard to determine. Not that it made any difference to Dario. He’d held out long enough and it was time to come clean. Peruzzi could say what he liked about waiting for nature to take its course, but Peruzzi wasn’t the one watching Maeve come unraveled.

Taking her to the aft salon on the promenade deck, he filled two mugs with the hot chocolate he’d ordered prepared, then carried them to where she huddled on the couch and sat down next to her. “Here,” he said. “This will warm you up.”

She brought her hands out from under her cape and wrapped them around the mug. “Thanks,” she said dully. It was the first word she’d uttered since her impassioned plea for the truth, during the drive to Linate.

Her gaze flickered around the salon, and after a while she spoke again. “Is this room where we began?”

“Not quite. We spent that night on deck.”

“Tell me about it.”

So he did, leaving out nothing. No point trying to whitewash the facts at this stage. He’d behaved badly and she might as well know that from the start.

She sipped her hot chocolate and listened without interrupting until he finished, then said, “So we had sex the first night we met?”

“I prefer to say we made love.”

Her face registered her disbelief. “How could I have done that? I’d never been with a man before.”

“I know,” he said.

“Being saddled with a novice couldn’t have been much fun for you.”

“
Fun
isn’t the word that comes to mind, Maeve.” Taking her mug, he set it with his on the low table in front of them and clasped her hands. “Even in your innocence, you were passionate and generous, and I couldn’t resist you. But I admit I was taken aback when I realized I was your first lover. You were twenty-eight at the time and beautiful. How is it you were still a virgin?”

“I didn’t have much time for romance. I was too busy building a career.” She looked at him almost shyly. “I’m glad there’s only ever been you.”

Had there? Or would she remember another lover, before the night ended?

“So what happened next?” she went on. “Did we know right from the start that we were meant to be together?”

Hearing the sudden lilt in her voice, he averted his gaze. “It didn’t happen quite like that. You left for home a few days later and I didn’t expect to see you again. But I found you weren’t easy to forget.”

“Forgetting’s always easy. It’s the remembering that’s hard.”

Thinking back to the day he’d proposed, he had to admit that in a way she was right. He’d give his right arm not to remember what happened next….

Late on a stinking hot afternoon at the end of August, he stopped in Vancouver on his way from Seattle to Whistler. Tracking her down was simple enough. There was only one Maeve Montgomery, Personal Shopper, listed in the Vancouver business pages.

She lived in the city’s west end, on the sixth floor of a west-facing apartment building in English Bay. The beach was littered with sunbathers soaking up the rays when he arrived. Mothers unpacked picnic hampers and spread towels over huge logs washed up by winter tides. Children held their fathers’ hands and splashed in the shallow waves rolling ashore, their shrieks of glee occasionally rising above the muted roar of commuter traffic headed for the suburbs.

A pleasant enough spectacle of domesticity, but not something that held much appeal for him, he decided, searching for Maeve’s name in the list of residents posted next to the intercom outside her front door. There were too many beautiful women in the world for him to tie himself down to just one; women who understood how the game of love was played.

Is that why you’re here, because Maeve Montgomery’s one
of those women?
The question came at him out of nowhere just as he was about to buzz her number.

He stopped with his finger poised. What the devil was he thinking? They had nothing in common, beyond a night they both wanted to forget. Why would she want to see him again? More to the point, why did he want to see her? For a romp between the sheets, when he knew that’s all it would ever amount to for him? To boost his ego at the expense of hers,
again?

Disgusted with himself, he turned away. At the bottom of the steps, a leggy blond in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt had stopped to balance a brown paper sack of groceries on one hip while she fumbled in a leather bag hanging from her other shoulder. The setting sun silhouetted the elegant jut of her hip, the curve of her bosom, the rounded swell of her belly.

Preoccupied with finding whatever she was looking for in the purse, she didn’t notice him. But he had ample time to study her and what he saw filled him with black despair. The woman was Maeve, and she was unmistakably pregnant. About four and a half months along, he reckoned, recalling how his sister had looked at that stage when she was expecting Cristina. And the last time he’d seen Maeve had been in April….

He’d reached a critical point in his revelations. Either he plunged ahead with a truth that the experts had warned could crush her, or he stopped now and continued to pray for a miracle that he knew in his heart was not going to happen. Neither the island, Milan nor seeing his family again had triggered her memory. Portofino had been his last hope that he’d be spared having to tell her bluntly how they’d come to be husband and wife. And it, too, had drawn a blank.

Cool night air notwithstanding, he was sweating. Ripping off his bow tie, he undid the top two buttons of his shirt, strode out to the promenade deck and leaned on the rail, his chest heaving. The moon slid out from the shadow of the
castello
atop the steep hillside rising behind the town, and shed a pearly glow over the bell tower of the Church of San Giorgio. Closer at hand the sea lapped gently against the yacht’s hull. But overriding them all was the scene unfolding in his memory….

Unaware that she was being watched, Maeve had hitched her purse strap more securely over her shoulder, shifted the sack of groceries to the crook of her arm and climbed the steps, a set of keys dangling from her free hand.

He waited until she reached the top before blocking her passage and, removing his sunglasses, said, “
Ciao,
Maeve.”

She stopped dead, shock leaching the color from her face. Her mouth fell open, but no sound came forth. Her eyes grew huge and wary. At last, making a visible effort to collect herself, she asked faintly, “Why are you here?”

“I’d have thought that was self-evident. I’ve come to see you.”

As if “come to see you” conveyed a message vastly different from the usual, she tried unsuccessfully to hide her thickened waist behind the sack of groceries. “I’m afraid this isn’t a good time. I have other plans for tonight.”

“Cancel them,” he said flatly. “We obviously have matters to discuss.”

“I thought I made it clear the last time we were together that I have nothing to say to you, Dario.”

“That was nearly five months ago. Much has changed since then. For a start, you’re pregnant.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Plenty, if, as I have reason to suspect, it’s my baby you’re carrying.”

She tilted her chin proudly. “Just because you happened to be the first man I slept with doesn’t mean you were the last.”

“Quite possibly not,” he agreed, “but nor does it address the question of the child’s paternity.”

A crimson flush chased away her pallor. “Are you suggesting I’m the kind of woman who doesn’t know who her baby’s father is?”

“No,” he said pleasantly. “You came up with that improbable scenario all by yourself. And we both know you’re lying because that same kind of woman doesn’t wait until she’s twenty-eight to part with her virginity.”

“I’m twenty-nine now. Old enough to live my life without your help, so please go back to wherever you came from.”

“I don’t care if you’re a hundred,” he snarled, infuriated by her attitude. “I’m going nowhere until we’ve established if I’m the one who got you pregnant, so hand over your groceries, lead the way to your apartment, and let’s continue this conversation someplace a little less public.”

“Don’t order me around. I’m not your servant.”

“No,” he said wearily. “But we both know you’re the mother of my child, and whether or not you like it, that gives me the right to a lot more than you appear willing to recognize, so quit stalling and open the damned door.”

She complied with a singular lack of grace and rode the elevator to the sixth floor in mutinous silence. Once in her
apartment, she flung open the doors to the balcony to let in what little breeze came off the water, then spun around to face him. “All right, now what?”

“Now we talk like reasonable adults, beginning with your admitting the baby’s mine.”

“I was under the impression you’d already made up your mind you knew the answer to that.”

“Nevertheless, I want to hear
you
acknowledge it.”

“Fine.” She slumped wearily onto a padded ottoman and eased off her sandals. “Congratulations. You’re about to become a daddy, though quite how you managed it is something I’m still trying to figure out.”

“The same way most men do,” he said, her sulky indignation all at once leaving him hard-pressed not to smile. Which would have been inappropriate in more ways than one. She was in no mood to be teased, and there was nothing remotely amusing about the predicament they were facing.

“I didn’t think a woman was likely to get pregnant her first time. In any case, you used a condom.”

“Not quite soon enough, I’m afraid, and for that I have only myself to blame. I knew better than to run such a risk. My only excuse, and a poor one at that, is that I found you irresistible.”

“Oh, please! Once it was over, you couldn’t wait to be rid of me. The fact that you didn’t once bother to contact me afterward is proof enough of that. Which brings me back to my original question. Why are you here?”

“You weren’t as forgettable as you seem to assume. I was passing through the city and decided to look you up. Now that I am here, however, the question uppermost in my mind is, when were you planning to tell me about the pregnancy?”

“I wasn’t. All you were interested in was a one-night stand, not a lifetime of responsibility.”

“I might be every kind of cad you care to name, Maeve, but I’m not completely without conscience. You could have contacted me at any time through the Milan office, and I would have come to you.”

“What makes you think I wanted you? I already have everything necessary to give my baby a nice, normal life.”

“Not quite,” he said. “You don’t have a husband.”

“I won’t be the first single mother in town. Thousands of women take on the job every day and do it very well.”

“Some mothers have no other choice, but you can’t seriously believe a child isn’t better off with two parents to love and care for him.”

“No,” she admitted, after a moment’s deliberation. “If you want to be part of this baby’s life, I won’t try to stop you.”

“How very generous of you,” he said drily. “But explain to me if you will how that’s going to work, with your living here and my being in Italy? A child is not a parcel to be shipped back and forth between us.”

“You have a better solution?”

“Of course. We form a merger.”

“Merger? As in, another company to add to your corporate assets?”

“Marry, then, if you prefer.”

“What I’d prefer,” she said tightly, bright spots of color dotting her cheeks, “is for you to take your
merger
and leave—preferably by way of a flying leap off the balcony!”

“I’m making you an honorable offer, Maeve.”

“And I’m declining. I’m no more interested in acquiring a
reluctant husband than I’m quite sure you are in being saddled with a wife.”

He looked at her. At her long, elegant legs, her shining blond hair, the fine texture of her skin and the brilliant blue of her eyes. She was beautiful, desirable, but so were any number of other women, none of whom had spurred him to relinquish his bachelor state in favor of married life. What made her forever different was the bulge beneath her T-shirt for which he was responsible. And in his book, that left him with only one choice.

“It’s no longer just about us and what we want,” he said. “Like it or not, we are to be a family, and to us Italians, family is everything.”

“Well, I’m not Italian. I’m a liberated North American woman who well understands that even under ideal circumstances, marriage is hard work. And you can hardly expect me to believe you think these are ideal circumstances.”

“They are unexpected,” he conceded, “but not impossible.”

And so it had gone back and forth between them for the next hour or more until, eventually, he had worn her down and she had accepted his proposal.

He took her out for dinner to celebrate. She hadn’t eaten much because a late meal gave her heartburn. He hadn’t eaten much because the enormity of what he now faced sat in his stomach like a lead weight….

The rustle of her gown and faint drift of her perfume brought him back to the present. “Dario?” she said, coming to where he stood at the rail and placing her hand on his arm. “What’s wrong?”

He blew out a tormented breath. How did he begin to tell her?

H
E DIDN’T
answer, but stood as if carved from stone and refused to look at her. Already at the end of her rope, Maeve shook his arm in a burst of near-uncontrollable fury. “Don’t ignore me!” she raged. “I asked you a straightforward question.
What’s wrong?
”

A shudder ran through him. He inhaled sharply, opened his mouth to answer, then snapped it closed again.

Never in her life had she physically assaulted anyone. The very idea sickened her. But at that moment Maeve’s frustration was such that it was all she could do not to kick and bite and scratch and do whatever else it took to jolt him into responding. But no, she thought, her anger subsiding into despair. Not just responding. Telling the whole truth for a change.

“Listen to me,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. “This has to stop now. The searching gazes, the pregnant pauses…I’m tired of them all.”

To her astonishment, he let out a bark of ironic laughter.

“You think this is funny?” she gasped.

“No,” he said, sobering. “Just an unfortunate choice of words on your part, that’s all.”

“How so?”

Pushing himself away from the rail, he squared his shoulders and faced her with the dull resignation of a man confronting a firing squad. “Wait here. I’ll be right back with the answer.”

She watched him go, her insides churning. She wanted to know everything. Wanted it so passionately that it was eating her alive. Yet at the same time, she was afraid, as if, in the deepest recesses of her mind and heart, she knew she wouldn’t be able to live with what she learned.

He was back within minutes. Beckoning her into the salon, he switched on a table lamp and gave her a rather large white envelope. “Here,” he said. “If it’s true that a picture’s worth a thousand words, this should tell you plenty.”

Inside was a photograph, the second she’d come across in the last week, this latest of her and Dario on their wedding day. It was almost as he’d described it. Almost. She recognized the Vancouver courthouse in the background, her blue dress, the little posy of white lilies and roses. But he’d neglected to mention one not-so-tiny detail that leaped out at her and left her light-headed with shock.

Surely, she thought, groping blindly for the couch, it was a mistake? A trick of light, an optical illusion?

She blinked to clear her vision, and looked again. The picture trembled in her hand like a storm-tossed leaf, but the incriminating evidence remained intact. “Dario,” she whimpered in a voice she barely recognized, “are my eyes deceiving me, or was I pregnant?”

“They’re not deceiving you,” he said.

Then that had to mean…

Her entire body froze, trapped in the path of a conclusion
so gravely dark and terrible that to acknowledge it would crush the life out of her. So she attempted to deflect it by seeking escape in the trivial.
No wonder she’d sported such an impressive cleavage in the photograph taken last December. No wonder some of the clothes she’d found in her dressing room at the penthouse appeared so roomy. No wonder…no wonder…

“And that’s why you married me?” she continued, desperate to avoid uttering the word screaming to be heard. “Because you felt you had to?”

“Yes.”

For weeks she’d begged him to answer her questions directly, and for weeks he’d edited the facts to spare her feelings. But now that she needed him to cushion the blow, he blasted her with a truth so painful that she cringed.

Scrutinizing the photo again, she said, “I guess that explains why you look so stony-faced.”

“You weren’t exactly radiant yourself. We had not planned to have a baby.”

Baby, baby, baby…

There it was, out in the open, the word she’d so strenuously tried to ignore. And once spoken, it hovered in the atmosphere, a devastating, debilitating accusation that shot her from limbo straight into hell.

“What happened to it?” she whispered, caught in a web of indescribable horror. “Is that why I feel so empty inside—because I miscarried?”

“You didn’t miscarry.”

This time his stark reply pierced the heavy bank of fog that had been her constant companion for so long and shredded it
to ribbons. They began to shift and part, letting in terrifying fragments of memory.

The salon grew dark and fearful, inhabited by ghosts that threatened to devour her. Moaning, she threaded her fingers through her hair and dug them into her scalp. Touched the scar now so well concealed. But the images and sounds leaked through its healed incision.

She relived the sudden jarring impact of a car leaving the road and careening out of control toward the edge of a cliff. Heard again the hideous shriek of tearing metal, the splintering of glass.

She saw the man beside her slumped over the wheel, and herself scrabbling wildly to release her seat belt so that she could climb into the back of the car, because her baby was there, imprisoned in his infant safety seat. Except it wasn’t safe at all because the car was rocking and spinning, and she had to free him, had to get him out of there and save him, because he was her darling, her precious son, and she would give her life for him.

She saw the thin line of blood oozing down his pale, still face. Felt herself drowning in his terrifying, soul-screaming silence. And then the world was turning upside down, and the sea was rushing up to meet her, and there was nothing but darkness.

Until now, when the light of her failure shone too brightly before her and so many fragmented pieces came together to make a horrifying whole.

The locked room on the island had been his nursery, filled with magical things to entertain him and keep him safe. Mobiles and music boxes; soft blankets and tiny sleeper sets. A quilt
she’d made before he was born. Lullabies she’d sung. Books she’d read to him, even though he was too young to understand the meaning:
Counting Kisses
and
Goodnight Moon.

Oh, sweet heaven! Oh, dear God, please,
please
…!

The floor came up to meet her as she crumpled over, hugging herself to keep the pain from splitting her in half.

“Maeve?”

She was dimly aware of Dario sinking down beside her, his arms trying to draw her upright on the sofa, his voice layered with concern. In a fit of unprecedented agony, she sagged against him. “How can you bear to be near me?” she sobbed. “How can you bear to touch me? Because of me, our beautiful little boy is dead.”

“Not so,” he crooned, stroking her hair.

“He is,” she wept, driven to near madness by her grief. “I remember it all.” Her breath caught at the endless horror movie rolling through her mind. “Dario, I saw him.”

Grasping her by the shoulders, he shook her gently but firmly. “Whatever you think you saw, Sebastiano is not dead,
amore mio
. Do you hear me?
He is not dead
.”

“You’re lying,” she cried, flailing wildly to break free from his hold. “You’ve been lying to me all along.”

“Yes, I have lied,” he admitted. “By omission. To protect you until you were ready to face the truth. But I would never lie about this. I give you my word that our son is alive and well.”

Her adorable baby, with his gummy smiles and big blue eyes, whose skin was softer and sweeter smelling than a rose petal, was
not
alive. He couldn’t be.

“His car seat saved him, Maeve.”

“No,” she said brokenly. “I saw the blood. I saw it, Dario.”

“It was nothing. A minor cut caused by something flying loose in the car from the impact.”

His certainty, the ring of truth in his words, let a crack of light into the darkness inhabiting her soul. “A minor cut? That was all?”

“Not quite. He suffered a bruised spleen, as well, and was hospitalized for a few days, but he’s fine now. More than fine. He’s thriving.”

“Then, where is he?” she cried, her arms aching to hold him. “Why haven’t I seen him since I left the hospital?”

“I sent him to live with my family until you were better.”

“Your family?” She recoiled as if he’d slapped her. “If he’s with your mother—”

“He’s not with my mother. Giuliana has been looking after him on Pantelleria. He’s there now, with her daughter and their nanny.”

She hadn’t thought Dario could shock her more than he already had, but the sheer audacity of his last disclosure took her breath away. “All this time he was practically living next door and you didn’t tell me?” And to think she’d felt guilty about sneaking around behind
his
back! “How dare you!”

“Maeve…” He went to pull her into his arms.

She shook him off. “You kept him from me.”

“From me, too, and if you think it was easy, you’re wrong.” He threw up his hands in surrender. “Stop looking so wounded. I did what I thought was best.”

“Best for whom?”

“For you, Maeve. I thought—”

“I don’t care what you thought. I want my son.” The
wretched tears started again, weakening her when she most needed all her strength. “Damn you, I want my baby!”

“Tomorrow,” he promised. “We’ll go back to the island first thing tomorrow.”

“No. I want to go to him now.”

“Be reasonable, Maeve. It’s after midnight. There’s no way we can get there tonight.”

“Sure there is. You’re Dario Almighty Costanzo. You can charter a jet as easily as other men hail taxis. You can make a child disappear so that no trace of him remains to remind his mother he ever existed. How do I know you haven’t sent him away where I’ll never find him?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dario said sharply. “I’ve done nothing of the sort. On the recommendation of your doctors, I hid all reminders of him until such time as you, of your own accord, were well enough to cope with the events that brought about the accident.”

“You had no right. You’re not God.”

“No,” he said. “I’m merely your husband, as subject to making mistakes as any other mortal. In hindsight, perhaps I did the wrong thing, but at the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, at the time, I thought I was acting in your best interests.”

“When is keeping a mother from her child ever in anyone’s best interests, Dario?” she asked bitterly.

“When the mother has been traumatized to the point that she has no recollection of giving birth,” he suggested, then, regarding her steadily, went on, “Or perhaps if there is reason to believe that said mother intends to desert her husband and abscond with their child.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded.
“Abscond?”

“Run away,” he amended helpfully.

“I understand what the word means,” she snapped. “What I don’t understand and certainly don’t like is that you’d think me capable of such a thing.”

“I don’t like it, either, but the facts appeared to speak for themselves.”

“What facts?” she said scornfully.

He subjected her to another steely gaze. “You had most of Sebastiano’s things with you in that car, Maeve—his clothes, his favorite toys, even his baby swing—as well as a suitcase of your own stuff. You were with Yves Gauthier, a man who’d shown up out of nowhere in June and who’d insinuated himself into your life so thoroughly that everyone on the island was buzzing about it.”

“We were fellow ex-pats. It was natural we should become friends.”

“Was it natural for him to lease a villa for three months, then suddenly be headed for the airport within a few weeks, with a return ticket to Canada, via Rome, tucked inside his passport?”

“Did I have a ticket to Rome tucked in my passport? Come to that, did I even have my or Sebastiano’s passport with me?”

“No. But in view of the fact that, the day before, you and I had had a flaming row at the end of which you told me in no uncertain terms to leave you the hell alone, you can scarcely blame me for entertaining doubts about what you had in mind.”

“I remember our arguing,” she said, the sequence of events falling into place with disturbing accuracy. “We fought because you wanted me to come back to Milan with you, and I said I wouldn’t because that meant putting up with your
mother forever interfering and trying to take over with Sebastiano. You said you hadn’t given up your bachelorhood to live like a monk, and if that’s what I thought marriage was all about, I was mistaken. You told me to grow up and learn to stand on my own two feet. And then you left—went stamping off without so much as a goodbye.”

“That’s more or less it, yes.”

“I walked the floor all night after you’d gone, knowing you were right. If your mother bullied me, it was my fault for letting her get away with it, and up to me to put an end to it. But by running away from you?” She shook her head incredulously. “I was running to you.
To you,
Dario Costanzo, because I decided to be the wife you deserved, instead of sniveling in the corner like a whipped puppy.”

“Then where did Gauthier fit into the picture?”

“He didn’t. His only sin was coming by the next day to tell me he had to return home for health reasons. He had a heart condition that flared up again unexpectedly. I recall thinking he didn’t look well and that it was a good thing he was going back to get treatment, but that’s about the extent of it because my concern was mainly with you and our marriage. He had to drop off his rental car at the airport, and offered to give me a lift. He might have been en route to Canada via Rome, but I was headed straight to you in Milan.”

“And that’s all there was to it?”

“In a nutshell. But since you seem to have so little trust in me or my judgment, why don’t you ask Yves yourself?”

“I can’t. He died in the accident. In fact,” Dario said bluntly, “he caused it, though not through any fault of his own. Apparently, he had a heart attack while he was at the wheel.”

She pressed her fingers to her mouth, assailed by one shock too many. “Oh, no! I’m sorry to hear that. I had no idea he was so seriously ill. He was such a gentle person, so kind, and much too young to die.”

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of more bad news. And I’m sorry that I doubted your loyalty. I’m your husband. I should have trusted you.”

“But you didn’t, and maybe the reason is that you were looking for an excuse to be rid of me.”