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No, he hadn’t. Many had hinted, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing any such thing.
Riccardo pushed himself away from the kitchen counter against which he had been leaning and strode towards the door. ‘A little childish all this, isn’t it, Charlie?’ He paused and looked down at her coldly. ‘Hurling insults. When we should be discussing the next step forward like civilised adults. I’m going into the sitting room where we can talk in comfort. Follow me, but if you don’t I feel I should warn you that I’ll have no alternative but to get lawyers involved. I want firm visiting rights, and if you can’t control yourself when you’re with me then it’s a pretty good indicator that you’ll be impetuous and unreliable when it comes to any situation we agree informally.’
Charlotte flushed, stood up and followed him, feeling ashamed of her outburst. ‘I’m sorry,’ was the first thing she said as soon as they had sat down, facing one another. ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t have commented on your personal life. I was out of order.’
‘I can be out of here by tomorrow evening,’ Riccardo told her bluntly, ignoring the apology. ‘I’ll want to spend it with Gina, as you might understand.’
‘’Course.’ Winter would roll into spring, then into summer, and on and on and on. She wondered how she would feel as time went by and she saw him every week, twice a week, how ever many times, there at her house, collecting their daughter. She wondered how she would feel when there was a woman’s face looking out from the passenger seat of his car. ‘But when it comes to these arrangements there are a few conditions.’
‘Yes?’
‘Gina can’t be out too late during the week because of her homework. So on the agreed days you’ll have to arrange to be here fairly early so that she can be brought back home by, let’s say, eight-thirty. That would give her time to do some homework and have a bath before you come so that she can just hop into bed when you drop her off.’
‘Fine. But you’ll have to understand that I work, and I can’t always plan meetings down to a certain hour. Sometimes I’ll have to give you very short notice of when I can see her, but I guarantee it’ll be no less than twice a week, and I want her every other weekend.’
‘She’s going to be pulled from pillar to post,’ Charlotte whispered, on the verge of tears.
‘I gave you the option of making our arrangement permanent. You rejected it.’
‘For all the right reasons!’
‘Then there’s the question of holidays.’
‘I can’t think about that right now.’
‘Try,’ Riccardo rasped harshly. He watched as she curled herself into a tighter ball on the chair.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I will want her to spend some time in Italy. She has relatives over there, people she’s never met.’
‘I hadn’t thought…How are they going to react?’
‘With great joy,’ Riccardo said dryly. ‘My mother’s been after this result for years. ’Course, she would have preferred to have seen her grandchild through the more conventional route of marriage, but there you go.’
‘Marriage to a girl with the right connections,’ Charlotte said bitterly.
‘She gave up on that ambition a long time ago,’ Riccardo told her shortly. She had resigned herself to a son who went out with ‘babes’, none of whom she had ever met anyway because they weren’t of the variety that he took on holiday. Like Charlie had said, with bullseye accuracy.
