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Colour slashed his cheekbones as he jerked his head in a brief nod. ‘It would have happened eventually, but I admit, our…liaison precipitated it. I thought working together would be a distraction. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so…abrupt.’
‘So that was you making a unilateral decision,’ Mia returned, her voice shaking, ‘while calling me to account for doing the same.’
‘They’re entirely different situations, Mia. A job versus a baby. You cannot compare,’ Alessandro fired back, taking another step towards her so they were nearly standing toe to toe. Mia felt exhausted by his anger; her daughter was three months old, she’d been going it alone the entire time, and she was hormonal and sleep deprived and very near tears. Still, she took a steadying breath and met his furious, narrowed gaze with a challenging one of her own.
‘I’m not comparing, I’m only asking you to understand where I was coming from.’
‘I can’t understand at all where you’re coming from,’ he snapped. ‘What you did was inexcusable—’
‘Did you come here to blame me, Alessandro, for everything? Because I get it. This is all my fault. Message received. Now you can go home.’ Her voice trembled and tears she was desperate for him not to see stung her eyes. She turned away from him, too tired to keep battling.
She flopped onto the sofa, tucking her knees up to her chest. She’d just put Ella down for a nap and she’d been hoping for a little sleep herself. Clearly that was now an impossibility, which alone was enough to make her cry.
‘I’m not going home.’ Alessandro came to sit on the sofa opposite her, his hands resting on his knees. He gave her a level look that Mia could barely summon the energy to return.
‘What do you want, then?’ she asked tiredly, only to realise how open and dangerous that question was.
Now that she could think about it all properly, the shock of seeing him finally starting to fade, she realised he’d flown a long way for nothing more than a confrontation. He couldn’t have come simply for that. He had to want more. A lot more. But what?
‘I want my daughter,’ Alessandro stated simply, the words icing the blood in her veins and freezing her soul. She stared at him, as trapped as an animal in a snare, as his iron-hard gaze slammed into hers. ‘And I’m not leaving without her.’
Alessandro hadn’t meant the words as a threat, but he recognised that they sounded like one. He saw it in the flare of Mia’s eyes, the pulse that beat in her throat, as her hand crept up to press against her chest as if to still her fast-thudding heart. No, it wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.
‘Alessandro, be reasonable…’
‘Reasonable? What is reasonable about having my child hidden from me for three months—?’
‘I didn’t hide.’ Her voice trembled but he still heard a note of quiet dignity in it that struck an emotional chord within him. ‘Please, Alessandro, for…for our daughter’s sake, can we not play the blame game? Surely we can reach some kind of…of arrangement…’
An arrangement?
Was she hoping to fob him off with some half-baked idea of shared custody, parental visitations? ‘The only arrangement I’m interested in,’ Alessandro told her curtly, ‘is to take my daughter back to where she belongs.’
Mia’s eyes looked huge and dark in her face. ‘Which is where?’
‘Home. My villa in Tuscany. It is the perfect place to raise a child.’ As he said the words, he knew how much he meant them. His daughter would not have the kind of chaotic, unstable childhood he’d had, filled with strangers and strange places. She would have every need provided for, emotional and physical. And that required a home, with two parents fully involved in her life. He would not negotiate on any of those points, as a matter of principle and honour.
Mia pressed her lips together; Alessandro saw the sheen of tears in her eyes, giving them a luminous quality. ‘And what are you expecting me to do? Just…just hand her over?’
It took Alessandro a moment to realise what she thought, what she’d assumed—that he would take their daughter, and leave her here. Did she really think him such a monster? Had she thought he’d been threatening that? He felt both hurt and shamed by the idea.
‘No, of course not. I would never ask or expect such a thing. A child belongs with her mother as well as her father, especially one as young as ours.’ Ours. A ripple of shock went through him at the thought; he had a child. They did. He still couldn’t grasp it fully, the implications crashing over him in endless waves.
‘Then…’ Mia’s worried gaze scanned his face. ‘You want me to go with you?’ She sounded as if she could scarcely credit such a possibility.
‘Yes, of course I do.’ It had been obvious to Alessandro from the beginning, considering his own unfortunate background, and one he would never, ever wish on a child of his own. A child belonged with his or her parents. Always.
He could see now from Mia’s stunned expression that she had not considered that. No wonder she’d been so hostile; she thought he’d been going to steal their child, as if he’d ever do such a despicable thing.
Mia shook her head slowly. ‘Go with you…to Tuscany?
’ she clarified, as if she still couldn’t believe it.
‘Yes.’
‘But…’ Mia continued to shake her head, as if she could not imagine such a thing coming to pass.
‘There is surely nothing keeping you here,’ Alessandro observed. ‘You’ve only lived here a year.’
