Free Coercion to Love by Michelle Reid Page A

end of my patience with you,and the file was designed for the exact purpose I used it for—to pull you into line the moment I got close to you. In the end it was my ruin,' he then ruefully conceded. 'You make your point, Miss Marlow, with the lethal thrust of a rapier!
     He continued briskly. 'I want to get to know my daughter, and I want her to have a chance to get to know us. And I also think that, in your heart, you believe we both deserve that chance.'
    He was right of course. In all conscience she had no right to keep father from daughter or vice versa. And, selfish or not, the  idea of losing Teresa frightened Cass enough to force her restlessly from the chair, her face pale as she turned from him.
    The room was long and wide, with windows at either side found herself pacing the thick red carpet the floor to the opposite end of the room. In contrast to the view behind where he sat, this looked out on the central courtyard where the dying sun could barely penetrate. She could just make out the Venetian pots spilling with bright summer blooms, and the fountain sprinkling out fresh, clean water into the dry summer air.
    As she stood there staring bleakly out, she saw her niece appear, skipping backwards as she chatted ten to the dozen to the old lady who appeared with her, leaning heavily on her walking-sticks as she moved.
    'They feel something for one another already,' Carlo's voice said quietly just behind her, and Cass sighed shakily, ready to burst into tears.
    As they watched, his mother stopped walking, her silvered head bending to catch something Terri was saying to her, then the old woman's head went back and she laughed out merrily, the sound ringing off the heavily perfumed walls.
    Carlo's hands jerked up to grasp Cass's shoulders, and his voice pulsed with some deeply felt emotion as he murmured thickly, 'She has not laughed like that for years—not since the car accident she was involved in took the lives of my wife and my son, and left her as you see her now.'
    'Y-your son?' Cass turned in his grasp to stare at him in horror. Of the several sharp shocks she received from that roughly voiced statement, the fact that he'd once had a son shocked her the most. 'I'm so sorry...'
    'He was just four years old when I—lost him,' he said, 'and as blonde as Teresa is dark...' The words died, lost inside his thickened throat. Cass looked at him in mute sympathy, the only feature she could distinguish in the glowing gloom his eyes, shot raw with a deep and personal pain.
    'You still miss him.' Not a question, but a husky statement of fact. It was written all over the tensely held face.
    The hands absently curving the rounded cups of her shoulders gripped tensely. 'We all miss him,' he said. "He was a beautiful child.'
    And—your wife?' Almost against her will Cass found herself asking the question. They were standing very close together, the emotion of the moment linking them by a mutual experience of loss.
    'As Teresa would no doubt say...' a smile softened the tense lines around his mouth '... she was a princess. A beautiful golden princess...'
    Cass stood, as stifled by his sadness as if it were her own, imagining that close and happy family who must have once lived in this valley in contentment. This man with his beautiful wife and son. That poor old lady out there who must have believed nothing could ruin their happiness. Then she thought of Liz and her disastrous relationship with Carlo, and suddenly she could not be see him capable of being as heartless as she had made aim out to be. It-just didn't fit with what she now knew of him. A man who had loved and lost one child did not casually discard the chance of loving another.
    His gaze flickered down to collide with hers. They didn't speak, and, as they stood there gazing sombrely at each other, the dimness began to close them in, until it felt as if they stood alone in a dark, dark chasm of mutual sorrow, their bodies close, linked together by the sad mood of