Read Online The Italian's One-Night Love-Child by Cathy Williams - Free Book Online

that!’
    ‘Events would seem to suggest otherwise. Why didn’t you just come clean when the holiday was finished?’ Cristiano demanded. ‘Why do the vanishing act?’
    Bethany opened and shut her mouth. How could she tell him that she might have confessed everything if he had been the simple fling that she had anticipated? If she had been capable of walking away and relegating him to the role of some amusing escapade which didn’t have the ability to touch her, she might have come clean because his reaction wouldn’t have mattered to her, not really. But she had fallen in love and his reaction would have mattered. Either way, she would have been walking away but she just hadn’t been able to face walking away with the image of his shock and hatred in her head. How on earth would she ever have been able to rid herself of it?
    So instead she had done the midnight flit. Literally. They had returned to Italy and, over their last meal, back to the pizzeria where they had had their first, he had held her hand across the table, playing with her fingers, threatening that he would be looking her up in London and then later, after he had returned to his own place, she had quietly packed up her paltry belongings—she couldn’t really stay as Amy had reluctantly returned to take up her house-sitting duties when Bethany had taken a leaf out of her book and flitted off to Barbados—and she had left. It had been pretty close to midnight, as it happened.
    ‘I should have left a note,’ Bethany now said miserably. ‘I should have explained everything in a note.’
    Cristiano felt a surge of anger. ‘Because, of course, tellingme to my face would have been just a little too much like hard work,’ he said scathingly, and she flinched.
    ‘I knew how you’d react. Like this.’
    ‘Tell me. I’m curious. How much of your personality did you have to edit to accommodate your charade?’
    ‘I didn’t edit any of my personality!’
    ‘You just fine-tuned it to fit in with the deceit.’
    ‘No!’
    ‘So you really are …sweet, genuine, easy to laugh…Hmm, finding it a tad tricky to believe that…’
    ‘Oh, this isn’t getting either of us anywhere.’ She stood up and swept her hands across her forehead wearily. The ingredients for the promised dinner lay forgotten on the counter top. ‘It was all a terrible mistake and I can’t say much more than I’m sorry and I understand why you’re angry with me.’ A tear threatened to squeeze itself out and she pressed her fingers against her eyes, sending it right back from whence it was trying to come.
    This was a nightmare. She had never expected him to descend on her in the one small corner of the planet where she had taken refuge.
    ‘Why do you keep looking at the clock?’ Cristiano said suddenly. ‘This is the fourth time in the past fifteen minutes.’ He wondered if his crack earlier on about her having a hot date had been nearer the mark than he had intended. Never one to indulge in wild flights of imagination, and certainly never in connection with a woman, he now found himself gritting his teeth furiously together at the thought of her with a new plaything. Some local village lad who had doubtless been waiting in the wings for her to return. Someone who, at least, had the luxury of knowing the woman he was dealing with, instead of some fictitious person fabricated from a mixture of lies and play acting.
    ‘Am I? I didn’t think I was.’
    ‘And who is the food for?’ He jerked his head at the unprepossessing pile of vegetables. ‘Entertaining? Is this why you jacked in the university course and hotfooted it back here? Does he know about us?’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ But there was a nervous stutter in her voice that sabotaged any attempt at sounding genuinely innocent of a hidden agenda and his eyes narrowed suspiciously on her face.
    An ugly, insidious thought crept into his head like poison. Never lacking in the confidence stakes when it came to