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‘Of course not!’
‘Of course?’ Cesare loosed a sardonic laugh. ‘Where you’re concerned, cara, nothing would surprise me!’
Thinking about Susie, she hoped he kept that in mind. If she had been a cat she would have used up eight of her nine lives over the past hour. Now she was hanging on to her last life by the skin of her teeth.
‘May we enter the house?’ Cesare enquired gently.
‘I would much rather you left.’
‘And miss this wonderful opportunity to meet your family?’ Cesare drawled satirically.
The front door was wide open. From the breakfastroom Winona could be heard shrieking at somebody. Cesare winced. ‘Somebody needs to throw a bucket of cold water over her.’
‘She hates you. What do you expect? My family know what you’ve accused me of! They know why I’m out of work again as well!’ Mina threw at him.
‘The injured innocent act,’ Cesare murmured, unimpressed, flicking her a grim glance. ‘I assume you play the martyr for their benefit. Don’t get carried away with your role.’
‘Why don’t you just get out of here?’ she suddenly demanded a whole octave higher.
‘Not you as well,’ another voice groaned.
Mina spun round. Roger had appeared in a doorway, his working clothes making it clear that he had come in from the haymaking out on the estate. ‘What the blazes is going on? Steve damned near hit the tractor on the back lane and I come back here and find Winona trying to get a gun out of Baxter’s cupboard…She’s hysterical!’
‘I suggest you don’t mention that fatal word,’ Cesare drawled.
Roger stared at him, frowned, and drove a hand through his sweat-streaked blonde hair. He looked at Cesare, then back at Mina, and sighed. ‘All of a sudden I see the light. I’m Roger Keating, Mina’s brother-in-law, Mr Falcone.’
‘Don’t you dare be polite to him, Roger!’ Winona snapped, stalking out into the hall. ‘Tell him to get out!’
‘Winona,’ Roger muttered, tight-mouthed with embarrassment. ‘Let’s at least try to be civilised about this——’
‘Civilised? This is the bastard who ruined my sister’s life!’ Winona railed in a shaking voice. ‘He’s caused this family nothing but misery——’
‘Don’t say any more…please,’ Mina broke in tautly.
‘If it weren’t for you, Steve and Mina would be married by now!’ Winona condemned as she glared at Cesare with loathing. ‘Steve was even willing to take on your child but Mina was too bloody proud to let him do it, and now, just when everything is finally beginning to go right for them, you show up again!’
Without looking at anyone, Mina swung round and walked back out of the house, rigid-backed and sick inside. The dreadful silence followed her. And then she heard Cesare rake back with, ‘My child?’ His tone was raw with disbelief.
Winona burst into tears, belatedly realising what she had done.
Mina sank down on the bench on the south wall of the house. The heat of late afternoon did nothing to lift the deep inner chill sinking into her very bones. She folded her hands together tightly. She could have told him herself but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it from her. After what Cesare had put her through four years ago she would have cut out her tongue sooner than let him know that she had given birth to his child nine months later.
That birth had been the last in a long series of humiliations inflicted by him and when she had realised that she did not have the strength to surrender her daughter to adoption and the more secure background that would then have been hers her sole consolation had been the belief that Cesare would never, ever know that Susie existed.
A long dark shadow blocked out the sunlight.
‘Tell me it’s not true,’ Cesare urged her fiercely.
Mina fixed her attention on the gravel, her eyes burning. ‘I told you to stay away from me——’
‘Knowing I would keep on coming! I don’t believe you had my child…’
‘No problem. Get back in your car and drive away,’ Mina advised in a wooden undertone that masked her increasing turmoil. ‘That’s what I wanted right from the first moment I laid eyes on you again.’
‘It’s impossible!’ he asserted roughly.
‘I wish it had been.’ But that wasn’t quite true. She did wish it and she didn’t wish it. She adored Susie and had made considerable sacrifices to keep her but she had also discovered the hard way that single parenting ineluded a lot of guilt and inadequacy. In addition, she had had to rely on her family to enable her to give Susie a decent home and for someone as independent and proud as Mina that had been a constant source of self-reproach.
