PENNY JORDAN - One Night - Red-Hot Secrets - A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets

‘We both love our son,’ he continued, thankfully oblivious to her own reaction to his words. ‘We owe it to him to give him the loving, stable childhood that comes with having both his parents there for him and united in their love for him. We both missed out on that, Louise. Me because I was orphaned and you because …’ He had to turn away from her, so that he didn’t betray how shocked he had been when his enquiries had revealed to him how emotionally barren her own childhood had been.

‘Because my father didn’t want me?’ Louise supplied sharply for him.

‘Because neither of your parents put you first,’ Caesar told her. ‘I know this isn’t easy for you, Louise,’ he continued. ‘But you aren’t the only one who feels that mutual love and respect is the best basis for an adult relationship as close as marriage. I share that belief.’

There it was again. Her heart was thudding—slamming, in fact, into her chest wall. As though she was still that vulnerable eighteen-year-old, helplessly in love with Caesar.

‘But of course we both know that such a relationship isn’t possible between us .’

Of course they did. Caesar had never loved her and could never love her. Did she want him to? No … no, of course not.

‘I do know how you feel about me,’ Caesar continued, causing her to go hot and cold all over. Did he actually dare to think she still cared about him? ‘How could I not when you never replied to my letter.’

Now he had thrown and confused her.

‘What letter?’ she asked him.

Caesar hesitated. He had allowed himself to drop his guard too much already, but now that he had gone this far he knew that Louise would insist on an explanation—as she had every right to do.

‘The letter I sent you when I got back from Rome, apologising for my behaviour and asking you to forgive me.’

He had written to her? He had asked for her forgiveness? He had apologised? Her mouth had gone dry. It was inconceivable that he was lying. She knew that instinctively, just as she knew what it must have cost him all those years ago to make such a gesture and now to admit to it.

‘There was no letter,’ she told him, her voice low and husky. ‘At least I never received one.’

‘I sent it your father’s address.’

They looked at one another.

‘I … I expect he thought he was protecting me.’

Caesar’s heart ached for her. If she needed him to pretend he believed that then he would do so.

‘Yes, I expect so,’ he agreed.

He had written to her and her father had kept his letter from her. Please don’t let that acid-hot burn behind her eyes be tears. That would be too shaming. It had only been a letter of apology, she reminded herself, nothing more. Exactly the kind of thing a young man of Caesar’s upbringing and position would expect of himself: a neat tying-up of unwanted loose ends so that he could draw a line under what had happened between them.

Caesar’s crisp, ‘It’s the present we’re living in now, Louise, not the past,’ only confirmed what she had been thinking, and he continued equally crisply, ‘We both have a duty to the child we created together that I believe goes much further than any of our own needs. I appreciate that a loveless marriage is the last thing you want, but I can promise you that for Oliver’s sake I am prepared to do whatever it takes to be in his eyes a good husband as well as a loving father.’

A loveless marriage. How those words appalled her. But she couldn’t ignore or deny Caesar’s claim that they both needed to put Ollie first. It was ironic that he should be the one to throw that challenge at her when putting her son first had been what she had done from the moment of his birth, for all those years in which Caesar had neither known nor cared about his existence. She didn’t doubt Caesar’s love for their son, but it was also true that he had an ulterior motive for wanting him in his life. As he had said himself, Oliver was his rightful heir.

Heir to a feudal system and customs that she herself loathed. However, Oliver wasn’t her. Louise didn’t want to think about how he might feel if somehow she managed to keep him away from Caesar and he didn’t learn about his heritage until he was adult. There was a lot of Falconari in Oliver. She knew that. And did she want it fostered so that he could become as arrogant and as steeped in privilege as his father?

No. All she wanted was for him to be happy and fulfilled. And if she married Caesar and stayed here wouldn’t she have far more opportunity to guard and guide her son so that whilst he grew up aware of his heritage she could see to it that he also grew up aware of how much its feudal systems needed to be changed?

She was weakening, giving in …

‘You speak of being a good husband, but everyone knows that Falconari wives are expected to remain in the background, being dutiful and biddable. I can’t live like that, Caesar. Apart from anything else I want Ollie to grow up respecting my sex and its right to equality.’

She paused to take a deep breath, but before she could continue Caesar took the wind out to of her sails completely by responding, ‘I totally agree.’

‘You … you do? But there’s my career …’ The career she’d worked so very hard for. ‘You can hardly think that I’d give up doing the work I’ve trained and qualified for, which I know benefits others, to be …’

‘Oliver’s mother?’

‘To be the Duchess of Falconari,’ Louise corrected him.

‘No. I can’t and I don’t. It is my hope that within my lifetime I can help my people to step forward into the twenty-first century. You, with your expertise and training, could help me in that work, Louise. You could have a very important role to play in helping me to change the old order and equip my people for the modern world if you chose to stand at my side and do so.’

Change the old order? Oh, yes. Only now that Caesar had spoken the words did she know how very much she wanted to be part of that.

‘Just as we can raise our son together, so we can lead our people together—the people who will one day be his people. I may have no right to ask for it, Louise, but I need your help to change things for Oliver’s sake—just as you need mine to make sure that our son grows up knowing what it is to have a father who loves him as well as a mother, two parents who are united in their love for him. All you have to do is say yes.’

‘Just like that? That’s not possible.’

‘Oliver’s conception shouldn’t have been possible, and yet it happened.’

She was weakening again, and she knew it. Caesar cast a powerful spell around her that robbed her of the ability to think straight. When she was with him … When she was with him she wanted to go on being with him. But in a loveless marriage?

Caesar might not love her, but he did love Ollie. She couldn’t deny that. He had been sincere when he had spoken of his instant fatherly love for their son—a boy who desperately needed his father.

The point Caesar had made about her reputation and her shame, especially with regard to her grandparents, had touched a nerve. Didn’t she owe it to her grandparents as well as to Oliver to do what Caesar wanted?

She had always known that at some stage Oliver would have to know not just the identity of his father but the circumstances surrounding his conception. That had always worried her. Which was why she had been so reluctant to tell him what had happened until she had felt he was old enough to be able to deal with that kind of information.

Even so, she wasn’t going to give in without a fight.

‘It’s all very well you claiming that my shame will be wiped out by marriage to you, but there is bound to be gossip about the past. I’ve always protected Oliver from … from what happened. Once he’s acknowledged as your son, even if you legitimise him and marry me, people are bound to talk. Oliver could be hurt by what he might hear. I can’t allow that.’