Kate Walker - Secret Love-Child

‘Marco…’

It was all that she could manage and she swayed towards him where she stood but didn’t dare to try to make a move towards the cot. It was what she wanted most in all the world and yet what she feared in the same moment as she longed for it. Tears blurred her eyes but they were too hot and too bitter to give release to them. She almost felt as if they would burn down her cheeks like acid if she actually let them fall and flow.

And all the time she was so desperately aware of Ricardo standing next to her, still and silent, just watching her, his dark eyes observing and noting everything.

She didn’t know what he was thinking and, quite frankly, she didn’t care. All she knew was that her son—her baby—was just across the room from her and she didn’t know how she could get to him, or even if she dared to try.

‘Marco…’ she said yet again. Then, as Ricardo’s stillness and silence got through to her once more, she cleared her throat and forced the words out.

‘“Something we have to see”, you said,’ she croaked in reproach.

‘This is what you came for, isn’t it? You wanted to see Marco.’

Lucy could only nod silently, the one accusing outburst she’d managed seemed to have drained all her strength so that she couldn’t find any words to answer him.

What was happening here? What was in Ricardo’s mind? Why had he brought her here like this—to see her baby—and yet once again be so near and yet so far? How had he come from Not while I live to actually leading her to the nursery, dismissing the nanny?

He couldn’t be so cruel as to let her see Marco, come within touching distance of the baby and…

‘Then go and see him,’ Ricardo said, stunning her.

He wasn’t touching her, wasn’t doing anything to push her forward or to hold her back either. The hand that had been on her arm had dropped to his side and he was standing back, waiting—and watching. She could feel the burn of his gaze on her face so fiercely that she didn’t dare to turn to meet the darkness of his eyes.

‘I can’t…’

This couldn’t be happening. Not after she had dreamed of it for so many weeks, ever since the doctors had told her that she was fine now. That they were sure she could handle things, and that she was no longer a danger to her baby or to herself. Without that assurance she would never have dared even to try to make contact. But she had wanted this moment so much that now she could not believe it was actually real.

‘Yes, you can.’ Ricardo’s voice was surprisingly soft, though still without any trace of emotion in it. ‘He’s real, Lucia. Our baby—our son. You can…’

‘No, I can’t!’ It was a cry of raw pain, dragged from her as if it was tearing her soul out by the roots, leaving her bruised and bleeding deep inside. ‘I can’t—’

‘Have you come all this way to give up now? Whatever else I thought of you, Lucia, I never considered you a coward.’

Coward! If he had meant to sting her into action—and Lucy strongly suspected that he had—then it worked. Before she had time to think, rejection of that accusation had pushed her forward, the impetus driving her to the side of the cot before she had time to think.

And from the moment that she looked into her baby’s face there was nowhere else she could look at all. Nothing else that mattered.

‘Oh, Marco…’

Sinking down onto the floor beside the cot, she curled her fingers around the white-painted bars and just stared, seeing the way that the baby’s chest rose and fell, the curl of his lashes onto the soft cheeks, the faint bubble that formed at his lips as he breathed.

‘Darling…sweetheart…’

And looking was just not enough. Slowly one hand uncurled itself from the bars, then slid between them, reaching out towards where Marco lay. With soft fingers she touched his cheek, then curved her palm around the top of his small head, resting gently on the fuzz of jet-black hair. It seemed to fit so perfectly, and yet it was so different from the times that she had held him before that it made a terrible sorrow at all that she had missed clog up her throat.

‘He’s so big…’ she choked out, fighting the tears.

The silence that greeted her words tugged hard on her nerves, making her tense suddenly where she sat. Ricardo still stood in the doorway; he didn’t seem to have moved a muscle. And it was the fact that he was so very still, so totally, dangerously still that tightened every muscle in her body, made the tiny hairs at the back of her neck lift in a shivering, fearful moment.

He was as still as some fierce hunting predator might be while watching his prey wander innocently on the plains before him. He was just waiting, poised ready to move—ready to pounce.

‘Strange…’ he said now, and for all it was so quiet, so apparently calm, his tone did nothing to ease the sensation of being hunted down. If anything, it made it so much worse, twisting her nerves in a sense of intuitive terror, though of what she had no idea. ‘He still seems so small to me. But then I see him every day—so I expect that the difference between when you saw him last and now is so much more pronounced.’

Could what he said be any more pointed? Could he do anything more to drive home the point that he had been here with Marco all the time, while she had abandoned their baby when she had walked out?

Slowly she raised her head, lifted her eyes to meet his, and when she saw the dark opaqueness of his gaze she knew what was happening.

He was testing her. She was under total scrutiny, like some small defenceless creature dissected on a laboratory table and then placed under the microscope. He was testing her, and she had no idea whether what she was doing was the right thing in his eyes or exactly the opposite.

As she fought to control the fearful shudder that took her body by storm, she saw the sudden change in his face and knew that the predator had finally grown tired of watching and waiting. He had decided to pounce.

‘ALL right…’

Ricardo had thought that he would have to force himself to keep his voice calm, his body still. He had anticipated that at this point he would have to struggle with himself not to lose the tight grip he had on his emotions and to control the rising rage that was welling up inside him. But instead it all seemed suddenly so much easier than he had ever anticipated.

It was as if the time he had spent standing unmoving, just waiting and watching, had fixed his limbs in place so that he couldn’t move them even if he wanted to. And at the same time a storm of ice had entered his mind, his veins—his heart—freezing them so that there was no feeling, no response in any of them.

He didn’t even feel anger any more. Only the icy certainty that there was something he really needed to know here. The suspicion had been planted in his thoughts yesterday and it had taken root there, growing stronger overnight, with each moment of today. On some deep, instinctive gut level he had known that there was something missing in the story Lucy had told him. And what he had just seen had confirmed it.

He had had to see Lucy with Marco. Had to see if the callous indifference she had displayed in her leaving note had been true. And so he had brought her here to see how she reacted.

And she hadn’t behaved at all as he had expected.

‘I think it’s time we got to the truth. The real truth—nothing else. You said you were ill—but there’s more to it than that.’

Her behaviour had not been that of the monster mother he had created in his mind. There had been real pain, real fear in that I can’t …And the way that she had cradled the baby’s head had been so needy and yet so desperately gentle, making it plain that she was anxious not to disturb the little boy’s sleep.