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He lifted his head and surveyed her smiling face with bafflement.
Erin could see why he might be confused. Tell the average male that he was the best sex you’d ever had and he would be preening himself, say the self-same thing to most women and they would be insulted, though it did kind of depend on the setting. There were some situations where she could imagine not finding such a comment tacky at all.
‘Have I done something wrong?’
‘Not a thing.’
Her gaze swivelled to his; the intense blue hit him just as strongly now as it had done the very first time he had seen her.
Francesco stretched his long legs out in front of him and crossed one foot over the other.
Erin was almost as surprised as Francesco appeared to be to hear herself say, ‘I should have told you about the baby.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that now.’
‘I need to. I knew I ought to have told you straight away, but I was kind of in shock … and …’ she closed her eyes ‘.I know you think I was a quitter to walk away from our marriage. I know you think that I took the easy way out, but it wasn’t …’
‘Wasn’t?’ He studied her downcast features with a frown. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, Erin.’
She shook her head, her luminous eyes starting to feel tired as she looked at him. ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘you don’t see at all. Walking away wasn’t easy, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,’ she told him in a voice that shook with the strength of her feelings. ‘It …’ she swallowed and expelled a long shaky sigh ‘.it was painful,’ she explained with admirable understatement. ‘If I had to do it again I’d … I simply don’t think I could bear it.’
Francesco’s expression was stunned as Erin absently dabbed the back of her hand to her cheek to blot a tear running down her face. ‘You won’t need to. We will make it work,’ he promised thickly.
She expelled a deep gusty sigh. ‘We don’t really have much choice, do we?’ she said, struggling to sound pragmatic.
‘Did you ever consider raising the baby alone?’
The question drew a shaky laugh from her.
‘What,’ he asked, looking considerably taken aback by her response, ‘is so funny?’
‘I suppose the big worry for some women in my situation might have been whether the father would want to know, or if he would question the baby was his. That was never my problem. Don’t you think, Francesco, that I haven’t always known that there was no way you’d allow your child … a Romanelli … to be brought up without his father?’
‘But of course a child should be brought up with two parents within the safety of—’
Shaking her head, Erin cut across him. ‘Any child would be a hell of a lot better brought up in a single-parent situation than in a home where the parents have a relationship based on lies and deceit. Believe me, I know … oh, God.’ She covered her mouth with both hands. ‘My parents’ marriage has really messed me up, hasn’t it?’
‘Was it very bad?’
Erin looked at him, gave a twisted little smile that just about broke his heart, and then with a faraway look in her eyes began to recount a story.
‘I was walking to school one day and I saw my father, which was strange because he had promised me the night before that he would bring me back a nice present from his trip to York. Anyway, there he was standing on the doorstep of a house not half a mile from ours kissing a blonde. Half my class saw him, too—kids are not kind,’ she said with massive understatement.
Francesco growled a violent epithet in his own tongue.
‘How old were you?’
‘About six or seven, I should think.’
He shook his head, his face creased in a grimace of disgust. ‘Dio! Did you tell your mother?’
‘I did. She got hysterical; my father was there. There was a lot of shouting and he packed a bag and walked out. Mum turned to me and screamed, “Look what you’ve done!”
‘I thought it was my fault. I didn’t realise until much later that she already knew. She always had known; she had chosen to turn a blind eye.’
Francesco would have done anything in that moment to assuage the pain he saw in her eyes. He would also have liked to throttle the selfish couple who had used her like a bit-part player in the long-running soap that was their marriage.
He might have to tolerate them because he was married to their daughter, but he was determined that he would let them know his feelings on the subject. And let them know also that he would no longer tolerate the situation.
