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Jack nodded. “Fiero got a pool.”
“Fiero has a pool.” Elodie’s smile was tight as she made the gentle correction. “Does he?” She could imagine what else Fiero had. When she’d woken up that morning three years earlier to find him gone – disappeared completely into thin air – she’d googled him, and seen exactly who she’d invited back to her tiny little flat, who she’d welcomed to her bed.
One of the richest men in the world, a man with yachts and planes and hotels and mansions all over the world. Most importantly though, a man with a wife.
Her anger surged like a blade, but she didn’t know how to wield it. She couldn’t object. Who else was there to look after Jack?
“Do you even know how to care for a child?” She asked, the words clearly dubious.
“Does it look like it?”
She wasn’t up to this kind of mental sparing. “He’s well-dressed, but is he eating? Bathing? Being read to?”
“Relax, Elodie.”
She startled to hear her name on his lips. It brought back far too many memories of the musical way he’d whispered it against her flesh, bringing her to climax with his lips alone.
“I have hired a nanny to help. Jack will be fine.”
The reassurance did nothing to ease her concerns. “I don’t want to stay here.” She looked around. The movement hurt. “Not for longer than is absolutely necessary.” Fear wrapped around her. “I want to go home.”
A muscle throbbed in his jaw, as though he were gritting his teeth. He didn’t answer her plaintive demand. “Come on, Jack. We should allow your mother to rest.”
But she didn’t want to rest. It felt like all she’d been doing for days. And yet, she was unbelievably exhausted, struggling to keep her eyes open.
“Will you bring him back later?”
“Tomorrow.” Fiero reached for the little boy who didn’t object in the slightest. Her heart stammered, mostly because she realised she was completely at Fiero’s whim. Despair filled her lungs.
“Please do.” The words were quivery with the threat of tears. She didn’t care.
“You have my word.” His eyes though were ice, and she felt the full force of all the things he wasn’t saying, the strength of his fury was emanating from him like an ice-cold tsunami. An answering tremble ran the length of her spine.
* * *
Four sets of eyes followed Jack’s progress around the swimming pool, under the watchful care of his nanny Emilia. The little boy splashed his hands, so droplets of water lifted in the sky, catching flashes of sunlight and shining them around the terrace.
One face in particular watched intently. Yaya, in the shade of a huge olive tree sat in a recliner. Despite the heat of the day, a blanket covered her slim legs. Her face was lined by every one of her ninety two years, but there was a smile on her lips none of them had seen before.
Fiero saw it, and guilt throbbed inside of him – guilt at what he hadn’t been able to give her sooner, guilt at the baby he’d lost who had meant so much to her, to all of them – the next generation of Montebellos. And now there was Jack, but Jack was two years old and Yaya had missed as much of his life as the rest of them. But it was worse for her, worse because her time was so valuable, so precious.
“You are a better man than I,” Massimo – Max – the oldest of the three brothers growled. “I would have left her in England and had that be the end of it.”
Fiero dragged his eyes from Yaya, watching as his son began to kick his legs, propelling his body forward. Emilia was ever-watchful and cautious by nature, so that behind her smile he saw her intense concentration and was gratified by it.
“You don’t think perhaps she deserves to lose him?” Luca, the middle brother of three, chimed in.
“She is his mother,” Fiero spoke simply.
“So? She saw fit to keep him from you. From us.” The words were hard, loaded with an anger Fiero understood.
“I know that.” Fiero compressed his lips. “There can be no forgiveness. No forgetting. But until she has recovered, she is here in Italy. I owe that much to Jack.”
“And you take him to see her every day?” Luca stubbed his toe on the marble tiles with obvious disbelief.
“No.” Fiero rejected the idea instantly. “Emilia does, most of the time. I don’t wish to see her more than I need to.” His gut tightened forcibly at the very idea.
“I can’t say I blame you. I hope I never have to meet the woman.”
