Secret Love-Child: Kept for Her Baby / The Costanzo Baby Secret / Her Secret, His Love-Child. Catherine SpencerЧитать онлайн книгу.
strong arms folded round her, drawing her close. At first she tensed, trying to resist. But then the sense of loneliness overwhelmed her and she yielded, soft and yearning, against him.
Her head rested on the hard wall of his ribcage, the steady, thudding beat of his heart pounding under her cheek. She could feel his chest rise and fall with every breath he took and she felt, dangerously, as if she had come home.
Ricardo smoothed one hand over the length of her hair, sliding down her back, raising every tiny nerve in response. The warmth of his palm against the skin of her neck made her heart jolt at the feel of it and a moment when those caressing fingers slid briefly in at the scooped neck of her shirt had her breath catching sharply in her throat. The hard strength of his body was against one breast and as the stroking arm brushed against the other with every slow, gentle movement her nipples tightened in stinging response to the sudden waking need low down between her legs.
‘I understand so much better than you could ever believe,’ Ricardo murmured, the deep rumble of his voice drowning out the involuntary sigh of longing she had been unable to hold back. ‘There’s just one thing I want to know.’
Lucy froze against Ricardo’s chest. An edge to his voice made her tense in sudden apprehension. The growing sense of warmth and comfort that had been seeping through her body, driving away the chill that had invaded her blood, suddenly seemed to stop and then, shockingly, started to fade again, allowing the shivering cold to start to creep back again.
‘I want to know his name.’
She hadn’t been wrong about the alteration in his tone, the difference in his mood. It was there too in the sudden change in his position and the way he held her. She was still in his arms, still held close, but it no longer felt like home.
Hard fingers suddenly clamped around her arms, moving her away from him, away from the secure warmth of his lean, hard frame. He held her so that he could look down into her eyes, his dark burning gaze searing her clouded blue one.
‘Who the hell is he, Lucia? What’s the name of the man who did this to you? The man who drove you to a breakdown when he left you.’
WHO the hell is he, Lucia?…The man who drove you to a breakdown when he left you.
For the first few spinning seconds she hadn’t been able to understand what had happened. Ricardo’s sharply snapped questions made no sense. She couldn’t understand where they came from or why he was even asking them. But then, slowly, reluctantly, she looked back over the conversation and realised the train of thought that Ricardo had been following, the conclusions he had jumped to.
He thought that she had had the breakdown after she had left the villa. He really believed—the only way he could possibly see it happening—was that she had run off with another man, leaving him and Marco behind in her determination to start a new life with her lover—his rival.
And then he believed that when that lover had walked out on her, leaving her as she had left him, then and only then had Lucy had the breakdown she had talked about.
‘You think that…’
She had stiffened in his arms, pulling away from the warmth and support of his body. And just the tiny movement seemed to take an inordinate amount of effort, bring with it a wrenching pain that was out of all proportion to the distance she put between the two of them.
‘You really believe that the only reason I could possibly leave Marco was because there was another man!’
Ricardo didn’t need to answer. It was there in his eyes, stamped into the lines of his face. Suddenly, disturbingly, she was seeing her erratic behaviour through his eyes. The excessive spending, the way she had disappeared for most of the day, with no explanation. Had he really thought that she was meeting someone else? That she was having an affair? The thought that she might have put him through that made her shiver inwardly. How could she blame him for thinking so badly of her if that was what he had suspected?
‘I can see now that the way I behaved might have made you think that,’ she admitted shakily. ‘And you don’t know how much I regret it if it did. But you have to believe me—there never was anyone else.’
She saw his frown, the way his dark eyes dropped to lock with her own clouded gaze.
‘Then why…’
‘I wasn’t ill—didn’t break down after I left here.’
Though leaving Marco had been the last straw. The one that had broken this particular camel’s back and driven her in despair and desperation to find a doctor.
‘You’re saying…’
Ricardo’s face changed as realisation dawned. This time his eyes went to the cot where Marco still slept, then came back to her.
‘Are you telling me that it was post-natal depression that caused your breakdown? That was why you left?’
Lucy could only nod, her throat too clogged for speech. It was impossible to read the rush of feelings that flashed in Ricardo’s eyes, but she saw the questions there and straightened her spine, waiting for them to come. And now he was the one to move away, putting more distance between them.
‘That was like no depression I’ve ever seen.’
‘No,’ Lucy admitted.
She couldn’t hold it against him that he hadn’t recognised what even she hadn’t known. She had had the doctor to explain it to her. Ricardo had been looking in from the outside.
When he had been there, which wasn’t often.
‘You were out all the time. Spending money like water.’
‘I know—I was hyper. Manic.’
Post-natal psychosis, the doctor had called it. Not just depression but the more severe form of the illness, which had literally driven her almost out of her mind. So much so that she had been unable to think straight enough to recognise what was happening to her.
It hadn’t helped that her relationship with her own mother had been so difficult. The only time that Janet Mottram had shown any real interest in her daughter had been when she had used the child as a pawn in her personal battle with her exhusband. And, looking back, Lucy knew that what she had feared most was being as distant and unloving a mother to Marco as Janet had been to her.
And, without anyone to confide in, she had been trapped with her own thoughts. Thoughts that had so frightened and appalled her that there was no way she could have admitted them to Ricardo.
So she had put on a front. A cold, distant front that had driven him away from her even more. And she had succeeded so much better than she could have hoped. From the time that Marco had been born, she and Ricardo had barely spoken to each other. It had been what she wanted but at the same time it had added to the aching inside her, creating a spiral of despair from which she had felt that she would never break free.
‘You bought clothes, perfume—clothes you never wore when you were with me.’
And he had thought that she had bought them to make herself look good for someone else.
‘All that spending—it was just an attempt at distraction. I didn’t even want the clothes half the time.’
And the other half she had wanted them to boost her image, to make Ricardo look at her with the desire he had once shown her. But it had seemed that the women she had overheard had been right. She was not the sort of wife who could hold a man like Ricardo. A man who didn’t do commitment. Who was used to having his pick of the most glamorous, most sophisticated women of the world.
If only he would speak—say something. Anything, other than subjecting her to the dark, silent stare that seemed to want to probe right into her eyes, burn its way into her head.
‘Heaven