Chapter Twelve
ROCCO SAT IN the chair in his home office, Lily straddling his lap.
The heat of her body pressed against him, their hands entwined in each other’s hair as they kissed.
He should have been working—finding an alternative fabric supplier—but he had no interest. The board had been calling him and he’d ignored their messages.
Let them wait. He couldn’t escape the recurring thoughts that their designs had been stolen from Leo’s mother.
That their success was built on lies. That Leo deserved recognition and compensation.
Lily had come in to tell him she was thinking of joining Carmella at a farmer’s market.
It hadn’t taken them long to end up here, wrapped in each other.
The perfect distraction. With her, he could forget about his problems and focus on the new life he was creating for himself.
A sense of peace settled over him, as it always did around her.
In the hierarchy of what really mattered, she was it: the release, the distraction.
He held the future here under his hands.
She fed his desire and his creativity. With her, he was alive once more. It was perfect. They were aligned.
A relationship of passion. A marriage to care for their child. No unnecessary emotion. Their expectations of each other were simple: Feed the body, entice the mind. The rest was meaningless.
He groaned as she squirmed. What he wouldn’t give to simply lay her on this desk and make love to her here, thrust hard into her hot, lush body and gaze down at her small belly as he did, the evidence of the life they’d created together.
Yet even though he could lose himself in her eternally, there were things he needed to do.
Debts he should try to repay. Wrongs to be righted.
He pulled away from her. Lily’s face flushed, her lips a delicious pink.
She looked aroused, desired, desirable. Her hair a cascade of auburn silk down her back, her eyes a tropical blue piercing him.
‘I’ll admit that this is the finest use for my office I’ve ever found,’ he murmured against her smiling lips. ‘However there are things I need to do and Carmella doesn’t like being late to the market. She says she misses all the good produce.’
Lily pouted, but he knew it was all for show. ‘I want you. I’m enjoying these second trimester hormones.’
So was he.
‘Later. After lunch. Once I’ve finished this work, then I’ll be free.’
She hopped up from his lap into a single shaft of sunlight.
Lily held out her hand, the magnificent, glowing engagement ring sparkling.
He would often catch her turning her hand in the light as it glittered, a faint smile on her face that lit up something inside him at the realisation that somehow, despite everything, he’d made her happy.
‘You’d better keep your promises.’ Lily turned and walked away from him with an exaggerated sway to her hips. She reached the door, opened it, then over her shoulder blew him a sultry kiss. Temptation and invitation all rolled into one.
With nothing left to occupy him he tried to get absorbed in his emails.
A task he used to ruthlessly keep up with.
Right now, though, he couldn’t concentrate.
Anger still roiling in his gut that his father hadn’t been clearer about the extent of the risk of Zanetti purchasing Tessitore fabrics.
That the whole mess was in essence, a revenge plot.
If his father hadn’t left Leo and his mother in poverty, if he’d given them any recognition at all, this whole debacle might have been prevented.
Instead, repairing the damage had been left to him.
Rocco wasn’t naive enough not to realise the cachet of having the heir to the Silvestri fortune contacting you to ask if you wanted to provide fabric for their famed designs.
Which was why this was a task he needed to complete.
And as much as he hated it, he recognised that the company was his child’s legacy now.
A complicated and conflicted realisation.
He tried to get back to work, wrote a response to the Silvestri company secretary who’d been trying to reach out.
Deleted it. Slammed his computer shut. A restlessness overtook him now Lily had left.
Rocco pinched the bridge of his nose, his palms itching.
There were two things that caused that sensation: his desire to touch the mother of his child, or his desire to carve.
He left his office and strode through the house, into the backyard and to the place he saw as one oasis from the chaos that surrounded him. Lily was the other. As he unlocked the door, the scent of wood assailed him, the calm settling over him like a warm blanket on a winter’s night.
Rocco glanced over at the sectional where he and Lily had made love after she’d agreed to marry him.
Recollecting that moment had him half hard.
More like a teenager than a grown man of thirty-two.
Every time he came in here now, that couch was a reminder of the passion they had shared.
Feeding his own. He pulled a sheet from the sculpture he’d begun on his return from Venice.
It would have looked rough and almost unfathomable to the naked eye, but to him, he saw the shape of how it was going to be.
A life-sized sculpture of a winged woman, escaping the wood.
One woman, the thoughts of whom had plagued his mind until she’d turned up on his doorstep, pregnant.
Muse.
He’d made peace with the word.
Now, instead of a flat stomach, the sculpture would have a slight belly.
The shape of her was etched into his brain and his hands; he couldn’t help but re-create her.
He touched the piece, smoothing his palms over a surface that whispered to him what he had to release next.
He picked up his mallet, a chisel, ready to lose himself till Lily returned.
There was some kind of commotion outside. Raised voices coming closer. He tried ignoring them except the door of his studio flung open. Lily?
But it wasn’t the mother of his child. It was his gardener, with a shadow looming behind that pushed forwards and entered his sacred place.
‘You should not be ignoring the board’s calls.’
The last person he’d ever expected to see was his father. The man strode in like he owned the space, a deep frown etched into his forehead. They looked alike. His mother had been petite. Blonde. His father was an imposing man, even now into his sixties.
Like father, like son.
Right now? Rocco hated it.
Rocco motioned to his gardener that it was okay and the man left.
He wanted no witnesses to the inevitable confrontation.
His father’s gaze fixed on the sculpture he’d been about to work on.
Rocco stalked to the corner and tossed a sheet over it.
Even though it was only a representation, this man was not entitled to see any part of Lily.
A volcanic heat rose in his gut, threatened to strangle him.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I’m your father. You’re ignoring the board—and your responsibilities—for that—’ He pointed with disdain at the now covered torso.
‘I’m not interested in talking to your sycophants and I’m not interested in talking to you.’
‘You’re not interested in anything apart from this foolishness. I never thought I’d see a son of mine allow the business we’d worked to build fail.’
Rocco snorted. ‘I never thought my parents would lie to me. Yet here we are. My question for you, father, is how did we get here at all? If you hadn’t ignored a child who was yours, then he wouldn’t have been driven to take Tessitore out from underneath us.
If you hadn’t stolen his mother’s designs—’
‘Enough!’ his father shouted. ‘She was a woman with her head in the clouds who wouldn’t have been anything without me. There was nothing—’
Rocco raised his hand. ‘I don’t want to hear it. For years you fomented the discord between our family and Zanetti. You created your own poisoned chalice. Now you’re complaining that you’ve been forced to drink from it, whilst I try to find the antidote.’
‘It’s what you should do. You are my only son.’
‘No. You have another. You know what has to happen to repair the damage.’
Rocco’s heart punched against his ribs. In their last great argument he’d demanded his father acknowledge Leo. His father had refused. That was their impasse. The bile rose in Rocco’s throat. He didn’t want this man here, not in his home infecting it.
‘I suggest you leave and go back to Milan.’
His father’s gaze was hard and angry. ‘Say what you like about me. Are you turning your back on your mother too?’
The pain of that accusation knifed deep.
He’d been close with his mother. But the whole idea of his parents’ relationship, the lies that had been told about how they’d met when his father was making furniture for his mother’s parents and they’d fallen in love at first sight, all seemed so tawdry now.
He knew Leo’s date of birth. Had compared it to his own.
Leo had come first, Rocco a few years younger.
Perhaps Leo had been mistaken about an affair.
Maybe the relationship with Leo’s mother was over at the time his father and mother conceived Rocco.
But he didn’t think so. Certain things added up about the delays in their nuptials.
How his mother had come into money from a trust and sought her freedom to marry the man she loved.
He’d always observed a cooler relationship with his mother’s parents than with his paternal grandfather.
Whilst it might be circumstantial, Rocco believed the evidence would be enough to prove his father was with Leo’s mother when his parents began their own relationship.
‘There’s nothing more we need to say. I’ll let you know when a new fabric agreement is inked. For now, you can leave.’
His father scowled. ‘I don’t believe you. I see you wasting time here with your whittling. This is not what made us rich.’