His questions were far too intrusive for her liking, but she knew that to antagonise this man—even if she was coming to resent him more with every nerve-shattering dagger-slice he made into the protective shield she had wrapped around her past—would prove to be counterproductive. She was determined not to do so.
All that mattered about this interview was getting this arrogant, hateful overlord’s agreement to the burial of her grandparents’ ashes in accordance with their wishes. Once that was done she could give vent to her own feelings. Only then could she finally put the past behind her and live her own life, in the knowledge that she had discharged the almost sacred trust that had been left to her.
Louise swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her mouth. How she had changed from that turbulent eighteen-year-old who had been so governed by emotion and who had paid such a savage price.
She still hated even thinking about those stormy years, when she’d witnessed the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the resulting fall-out, never mind being forced to talk about it. That fall-out had seen her passed like an unwanted parcel between her parents’ two separate households, welcome in neither and especially unwelcome where her father’s new girlfriend had been concerned. As a result of which, according to both her parents and their new partners, she had brought such shame on them that she had been no longer welcome in the new lives they were building for themselves.
Looking back, it was no wonder that her parents had considered her to be such a difficult child. Was it because her father’s work had made him an absent father that she had tried so desperately to win his love? Or had she known instinctively at some deep atavistic level even then that her conception and with it his marriage to her mother had always been bitterly regretted and resented by him?
A brilliant young academic, with a glowing future ahead of him, the last thing he had wanted was to be forced into marriage with a girl he had got pregnant. But pressure had been brought to bear on him by a Senior Fellow at Cambridge whose family had also been members of London’s Sicilian community. The brilliant young Junior Research Fellow had been obliged to marry the pretty student who had seen him as an escape from the strictures of an old-fashioned society or risk having his career blighted.
Louise didn’t consider herself to be Sicilian, but perhaps there was enough of that blood in her veins for her always to have felt not just the loss of love but also the public humiliation that came from not being loved by her father. Italian men—Sicilian men—were usually protective and proud of the children they fathered. Her father had not wanted her. She had got in the way of his plans for his life. As a crying, clingy child and then a rebellious, demanding teenager she had first irritated and then annoyed him. For her father—a man who had wanted to travel and make the most of his personal freedom—marriage and the birth of a child had always been shackles he did not want. Because of that alone her attempts to command her father’s attention and his love had always been doomed to failure.
Yet she had clung determinedly to the fictional world she had created for herself—a world in which she was her father’s adored daughter. She’d boasted about their relationship at the exclusive girls’ school her mother had insisted on sending her to, with daughters of the titled, the rich and the famous, clinging fiercely to the kudos that went with having such a high-profile and good-looking parent. He’d had a role as the front man of a hugely popular quasi-academic TV series, which had meant that her fellow pupils accepted her only because of him.
Such a shallow and fiercely competitive environment had brought out the worst in her, Louise acknowledged. Having learned as a child that ‘bad’ behaviour was more likely to gain her attention than ‘good’, she had continued with that at school, deliberately cultivating her ‘bad girl’ image.
But at least her father had been there in her life, to be claimed as being her father—until Melinda Lorrimar, his Australian PA, had taken him from her. Melinda had been twenty-seven to Louise’s eighteen when they had gone public with their relationship, and it had perhaps been natural that they should compete for her father’s attention right from the start.
How jealous she had been of Melinda, a glamorous Australian divorcee, who had soon made it clear that she didn’t want her around, and whose two much younger daughters had very quickly taken over the room in her father’s apartment that was supposed to have been hers. She had been so desperate to win her father’s love that she had even gone to the extent of dying her hair black, because Melinda and her girls had black hair. Black hair, too much make-up and short, skimpily cut clothes—all an attempt to find a way to be the daughter she had believed her father wanted, an attempt to fin
d the magic recipe that would turn her into a daughter he could love.
Her father had obviously admired and loved his glamorous PA, so Louise had reasoned that if she were more glamorous, and if men paid her attention, then her father would be bound to be as proud of her as he was of Melinda and as he had surely once been of her mother. When that had failed she’d settled for trying to shock him. Anything was better than indifference.
At eighteen she had been so desperate for her father’s attention that she’d have done anything to get it—anything to stop that empty, hungry feeling inside her that had made it so important that she succeed in becoming her father’s most loved and cherished daughter instead of the unloved failure she had felt she was. Sexually she had been naive, all her emotional intensity invested in securing her father’s love. She’d believed, of course, that one day she would meet someone and fall in love, but when she did so it would be as her father’s much loved daughter, someone who could hold her head up high—not a nuisance who was constantly made to feel that she wasn’t wanted.
That had been the fantasy she’d carried around inside her head, never realising how dangerous and damaging it was, because neither of her parents had cared enough about her to tell her. To them she had simply been a reminder of a mistake they had once made that had forced them into a marriage neither of them had really wanted.
‘But when you started your degree you were living with your grandparents, not your father.’
The sound of Caesar Falconari’s voice brought her back to the present.
An unexpected and dangerous thrill of sensation burned through her—an awareness of him as a man. A man who wore his sexuality as easily and unmistakably as he wore his expensive clothes. No woman in his presence could fail to be aware of him as a man, could fail to wonder…
Disbelief exploded inside her, caused by the shock of her treacherous awareness of him. Where on earth had it come from? It was so unlike her. So… Sweat beaded her forehead and her body was turning hot and sensually tender beneath her clothes. What was happening to her? Panic rubbed her nerve-endings as raw as though they had been touched with acid. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t…wasn’t permissible. It wasn’t…wasn’t fair.
A stillness like the ominous stillness that came just before the breaking of a storm gripped her. This should not be happening. She didn’t know why it was. The only awareness of him she could permit herself to have was an awareness of how dangerous and damaging he could be to her. She must not let him realise the effect he was having on her. He would enjoy humiliating her. She knew that.
But she wasn’t an emotionally immature eighteen-year-old any more, she reminded herself as she struggled to free herself from the web of her own far too vulnerable senses to find safer ground.
‘As I’m sure you know, given that you obviously know so much about my family history, my bad behaviour—especially with regard to my father’s new wife-to-be and the impact she felt it might have on her own daughters—caused my father to ask me to leave.’
‘He threw you out.’
Caesar’s response was a statement, not a question.
There it was again—that twisting, agonising turning of the knife in a new guilt to add to the old one he already carried.
Given that for the last decade he had dedicated himself to improving the lot of his people, what he had learned about Louise and the uncaring and downright cruel behaviour she had been subjected to by those who should have loved and protected her, could never have done anything other than add to his burden of guilt. It had never been his intention to hurt or damage her—far from it—and now, knowing what he did, he could well understand why she had never responded to that letter he had sent, acknowledging his guilt and imploring her to forgive him.
It went against the grain of everything that being a Sicilian father meant to abandon one’s child, yet at the same time for a family to be so publically shamed by the behaviour of one of its members left a stain on that family’s name that would be passed down unforgotten and unforgiven throughout the generations.
Louise could feel her face starting to burn. Was it through guilt or a still-rebellious sense of injustice? Did it matter? It certainly shouldn’t. The counselling she had undergone as part of the training for her career as a much sought after reconciliation expert, working to help bring fractured families back together again, had taught her the importance of allowing oneself errors of judgement, acknowledging them, and then moving on from them.
‘He and Melinda had plans to start a new life together in Australia. It made sense for him to sell the London apartment. Technically I was an adult anyway, as I was eighteen. I was going to university. But, yes, in effect he threw me out.’
So she had been left alone and uncared for whilst he had been on the other side of the world, learning all he could about improving the lot of the poorest people in that world in a bid to expiate his guilt and find a new way of living his life that would benefit his own people.