Boss Meets Baby(29)

They slept together—the third night in his bed, and this time they truly slept together, coiled around each other in a fierce embrace that didn’t abate with sleep.

Never did he just glance at his mother in the morning.

Never could he just accept that greeting and coffee without thought.

Always he checked.

And all these years later, still it happened—an instant check that, for Luca, was as natural as breathing.

A cardigan on a hot summer’s morning.

Or the unusual sight of her in full make-up at seven a.m.

Or worse, an empty kitchen and the explanation of a migraine as to why she couldn’t get up.

His dark eyes automatically scanned for clues or confirmation, yearning for that same rush of momentary relief he had sometimes felt as a child, that all was well—for today at least. That surely his father was too old, too sick, too frail to hurt her…Ah, but he had a savage tongue too—and words, if they were savage enough, could sometimes hurt as much as a blow.

‘How was he last night?’ Luca asked in his native language, watching his mother stiffen.

‘It went wonderfully,’ she replied evasively.

‘I meant how were things when you got home? How was Pa?’

‘Tired,’ Mia said briefly. ‘Where is Emma?’

‘Still asleep.’ Climbing out of that bed, feeling her stir, he had hushed her and kissed her back to sleep and then stood and watched her sleeping. Young, innocent, trusting—how— could he do it to her? How could he take her by the hand and lead her to hell? He felt as if his home was built on a sewer—he could almost smell the filth beneath the very foundations as he sat at the table and his mother embroidered the lies.

‘He did so well to dance with Daniela…Leo is coming this morning and his nurse Rosa. I am a bit worried, because he coughed all night—it was a very long day for him.’

‘For you too,’ Luca pointed out, and then added, ‘I heard him shout in the night.’

‘He just shouts, Luca, nothing else…’ Mia closed her eyes. ‘He is old and weak and tired…’

‘Yet still he treats you poorly.’

‘Words don’t hurt me, Luca,’ Mia said. ‘Please just leave things alone—it is good that you came.’

The coffee tasted like acid in his mouth—her words rendering him hopeless.

Again.

For everything he had a solution, an answer. His logical, analytical brain could take the most complex problem and unravel it to the base solution. Yet nothing—not logic, not reason, not power, not brawn, not wealth—could solve this.

Nothing!

‘Leave him.’ He stood up, stared into her eyes and even as he pleaded again, he knew it was futile, as futile now as it always had been.

‘You know I cannot!’

‘You can…’ His usually strong voice cracked, and he saw his mother flinch—both of them realising that he was near to tears. It had been so long since he had even been close to crying that the sting in his eyes, the swell in his throat caught even Luca by surprise. The pain, the fear, the helplessness, the never-ending grief he had lived with as a child was still there—right there and ready to return at any given moment—the anguish waiting to floor him. ‘Leave, Ma.’

‘He is dying, Luca. How can I leave a dying man? What would people think?’

‘What does it matter?’ Luca burst out.

‘It matters!’ Mia sobbed. ‘And he matters too. He is sick, he is scared…’

‘He wasn’t always sick! He can be moved to hospital.’

‘Luca. Please. I beg you to stop this.’

She didn’t want his help—she simply didn’t want it, yet— he could not accept that.

‘He is a bastard, and he has always been a bastard,’ Luca tried again. ‘That he is dying does not change that fact.’

‘He’s my husband.’

Those three little words that had condemned her to a lifetime of pain and suffering.

The shame of leaving, the scandal attached to such an action had silenced her and in turn had silenced Luca too.

It hadn’t always silenced him.

He had spat in his father’s face many times as a child—and he still bore the scars to prove it.

He had tried to intervene when he was twelve years old, and had been beaten to within an inch of his life for his trouble.

And always Mia had sobbed—always she had pleaded that he ignore what his father was doing, that he was making things worse.

So he had waited.

Waited for his moment, waited till he was taller, fitter, stronger—and then one night, when the inevitable had happened, an eighteen-year-old boy in the body of a man had intervened.

Eighteen years of tension and frustration, combined with a generous dash of testosterone, had exploded, and he had beaten and bullied his father that night as mercilessly as his father had beaten and bullied his mother over the years—sure this would end it, sure that finally it was over.

Yet the next morning, his knuckles bruised and bleeding, his top lip swollen, his left eye closed, his cheek a savage mess, something inside Luca had crumbled and died when his mother had walked into the kitchen—bruises that hadn’t been there last night on her face, her arms a pitiful mass of red and blue. But worse than that had been the accusing look in her eyes as she’d faced her son, telling him that he had made things even worse, that his interference hadn’t helped. And then she had said the words that would stay with Luca for ever.