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With difficulty, she held back her anger. ‘Don’t you think this is something we need to discuss in more depth?’
‘Perché…why?’
‘I think that has to be the stupidest question you have ever asked me,’ Mina protested helplessly.
‘What more is there to say?’ he breathed tautly. ‘The court or the church. The choice is yours.’
For a split-second she glimpsed the rage he was struggling to conceal behind the cold front of detachment. His ferocious tension sprang out at her. Abruptly, he turned from her again and strode towards his car.
She was outraged that she had to run after him again. But he spun back before she could even speak. ‘How could you keep my child from me? How could you do that?’ he demanded rawly.
Mina fell back a step, shattered by the force of his embittered stare. ‘I didn’t think you’d want to know…’ she whispered painfully, savaged by that ringing condemnation.
‘What do you know about me?’ Cesare spread both hands wide in a sudden violent movement that fully expressed all the emotion he had been suppressing. ‘What have you ever known about me?’
‘Probably only what you choose to show,’ Mina conceded grudgingly. ‘And between you and me and the gatepost, Cesare, that is not a lot!’
‘Dio mio…what is that supposed to mean?’ he slashed back at her.
Mina bit into the soft underside of her lower lip, wishing she had kept her mouth shut, but remembered pain stirred when she thought about the night on which Susie had been conceived. Cesare was not verbal about his feelings. So presumably he hadn’t had any particular feelings that night. That had only been sex. She ought to be grateful he hadn’t told her any lies but one of her own most painful memories was telling him that she loved him. And not just once either…she had been so overcome by what had happened between them, she had been floating on cloud nine.
She compressed her lips. ‘It’s not important, but when you talk about marriage,’ she muttered, ‘that is important.’
‘From Susie’s point of view,’ Cesare stressed. ‘I’m putting her needs before my own. For me, it is not a question of personal
choice. It is a very basic instinct that I should take full responsibility for my own child…and what real decision is there for you to make? Am I not offering you the lifestyle you have always wanted?’
Deadly pale, Mina lifted her head high. ‘You don’t know what I want!’
With a rough laugh of disagreement, Cesare swung into his car.
‘If I’m so greedy for money, Cesare, ask yourself why I didn’t tell you about Susie years ago,’ Mina suggested furiously. ‘Legally you would have had to support her and I could have lived very nicely off the proceeds. So tell me, why didn’t I do that?’
A smouldering silence stretched. She could see the frustration currenting through him. He could not explain such an inconsistency and that merely served to infuriate him more. He muttered something vicious in his own language.
‘You can’t answer that one, can you? Or what about why I would be plotting and planning to enrich myself by deception in a boring nine-to-five job when I could have forced you to keep us both?’
‘Give me time and I’ll work it out!’ Cesare swore with vehemence, shooting her a look of derisive brilliance, refusing to back down. But she knew she had made her point and if anything illustrated the intensity of Cesare’s emotional conflict in recent days it was his failure to see that point for himself. She had had no need to struggle for survival or plan to defraud a charity, not while she stood in possession of the child of a very wealthy man. Susie could have been the gravy train she rode for her own selfish benefit.
‘What did he want?’ Winona demanded from behind her.
She was grimly amused by the low profile her twin had kept during Cesare’s visit. Her sister was still recovering from the sensation that she had made a fool of herself forty-eight hours earlier. ‘He…’ Mina hesitated ‘…he suggested that we consider getting married,’ she finally completed.
‘He did what?’ Winona looked stricken, the way you looked when the enemy did something entirely unpredictable.
‘For Susie’s sake.’
‘Considering that he can’t keep his hands off you in a public place, it has to be for his own sake too!’ Winona told her witheringly but with something less than her usual venom.
But Mina genuinely did not think that. Cesare did not want to marry her. He would not even have mentioned marriage had it not been for Susie’s existence. He might lust after Mina but on every other level he despised and distrusted her. And what sort of a marriage could you have on that basis?
‘I didn’t think he would want to marry you,’ Winona confided abstractedly, and Mina knew that Cesare’s stock had suddenly gone up a hundredfold in her sister’s eyes. To give her twin her due, Winona had never once voiced the embarrassment she experienced over her sister’s unmarried motherhood, but the prospect of a wedding-ring tidying up that unfortunate fact of life quite clearly had immense appeal.
Mina didn’t bother to mention Cesare’s references to lawyers, courts and custody battles. In her opinion that had merely been Cesare putting on the pressure and testing the water. As soon as he had established that there was no question of her being prepared to give Susie up voluntarily, he had proffered the marriage solution. Everything else had been an intimidating lead-in to a proposition he fully expected her to accept. Working for Cesare had been an education. In a tight corner he never put his cards on the table.
His methods outraged her. She did not appreciate being approached like a hostile take-over bid. Yet Cesare had reacted to the discovery that he was a father in a far more responsible and positive way than she had expected and she could not think that there was an alternative to marrying him, not when she took her own feelings into consideration and added them to the undoubted benefits for Susie. Her daughter needed a father, a home of her own and security. Mina felt guilty that she hadn’t been able to supply those things.
And she was equally well aware that, no matter how angry Cesare made her, she would rather be with him than without him, but a marriage made only on the basis of a child’s needs was a tall order. In recent days she hadn’t had time to dwell on her own emotions but just as she knew the sun would rise in the morning she knew she loved Cesare, and it was that fact which more than anything else would prompt her to accept his proposition.
