A Secret Disgrace. PENNY JORDANЧитать онлайн книгу.
what they are. After all, Aldo Barado made them public enough. I came here to Sicily with my family. I went to bed with you. According to the headman of my grandparents’ village I chased after and seduced his son. According to my father and Melinda I disgraced myself and shamed them by hanging around with boys who were quite obviously only after one thing, and then running after you. And they were right. I did humiliate and shame myself by going to bed with you. I wanted my father to sit up and take notice of me and—naively—I thought that being bedded by the most important man in the area was a good way to do that.’
She certainly wasn’t going to tell him of the other reason she had pursued him so relentlessly. She could hardly bear to admit to herself even now the existence of that unfamiliar, shockingly sweet and half-frightening burgeoning of an emotional ache within her that had driven a genuine longing for physical intimacy with him.
For so long all Louise’s emotional drive had been embedded in her quest for her father’s love, so the sudden urgency of her feelings for Caesar had been her first true experience of the dangerous intensity of sexual desire. The strength of her instinctive impulse to reject that feeling had been almost as strong as the feeling itself. Initially she hadn’t wanted anything to come between her and her goal. But over the days and weeks of their time in Sicily something had changed, and she had begun to see in Caesar, very dangerously, her future as the woman Caesar loved.
How naive she had been—and how vulnerable. And how blind to everything else. Brushing off the unwanted attentions of the headman’s son as a mere nuisance, not realising how much her continued rejection of him had damaged his pride, in a way that would demand retribution. That retribution had been the lies he had told about her when he had claimed she had seduced him. Lies that both his father, her family and Caesar himself had been all too ready to believe.
From a professional point of view she could see how much Caesar had been trapped in the demands imposed on him by his culture. She was lucky. She had escaped from its confining strictures. She was her own woman. Although wasn’t it the truth that she was still tied to the past via her son? Like her, Ollie craved his father’s love, and his presence in his life.
Friends and colleagues had urged her to be open to the prospect of a new relationship with a man who would be a good role model for Ollie—a relationship based on love and mutual respect—but no amount of professional self-awareness or knowledge could banish her determination not to love again. For Ollie’s sake as much as her own. The raw truth was that she simply didn’t trust herself not to love yet another man who would hurt her. She had given everything she had to give to Caesar and he had rejected her, allowed her to be humiliated and shamed. Now, for her, the thought of sexual desire and of abandoning herself to that desire was locked into a fear of giving too much. Better not to allow any man into her life and her bed than risk that happening.
‘I used a condom on the night we had sex.’
She could hear Caesar even now denying the son he had fathered, just as all those years ago he had denied her. Well, she didn’t care. Neither she nor Ollie needed him in their lives—even if her grandfather had believed otherwise. Her heart thumped heavily against her ribs. If only her grandfather hadn’t died. If only he was still here to guard and guide Ollie’s growth to adulthood. If only she had never met Caesar. If only she had never gone to bed with him.
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