Free A Clash With Cannavaro by Elizabeth Power Page A

together. No maintenance for Daniele. A recent scour through the mess of Angelo’s financial records had shown that no payments at all had been made or even claimed for the little boy. Not even a gift passed on from his only uncle. He couldn’t comprehend what his brother had been thinking of.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell me Angelo was not providing you with any money for Danny?’ he asked, appalled. ‘Why did you not try to claim?’
    ‘Because he didn’t want anything to do with his son,’ she said, putting her glass back down. ‘I did invite him to see him sometimes, but he never came. So I decided that if he didn’t want anything to do with us, then we wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Or any of you,’ she tagged on after a moment, as though it had taken a little extra courage to say it.
    In other words, she was too grossly independent to ask anyone for anything. He was beginning to see that now. He was also being forced to accept that he had judged her far too readily two years ago when he had bracketed her as the same type of opportunist female as her sister. She was nothing like Vikki Westwood, whose character he had sussed right from the moment Angelo had introduced her to him outside that Rome restaurant where they had met for dinner.
    He remembered welcoming her to the family when his brother had said that they were getting engaged; remembered how she had laughed flirtatiously, turning her head so that the brotherly kiss he’d intended for her cheek had landed on her full red lips. He’d known then that Vikki Westwood was going to be trouble.
    ‘Does this mean you believe me now?’
    ‘What it means, Lauren, is that I don’t understand how you could have let my brother get away with it. And I repeat...Why didn’t you come to me?’
    Above the sighing of the warm wind through the oleander bush he heard an incredulous little sound leave her throat, and knew the answer even before she replied.
    ‘After you’d accused me of sleeping with you because you thought I was after your money? I’m not a glutton for humiliation, Emiliano. And your wonderful brother would have denied it anyway.’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ he countered. And when she looked at him as though he were suddenly challenging the truthfulness of all she had been saying, ‘He would have told me simply to mind my own business,’ he clarified. Wasn’t that what Angelo had always said to him when he had quizzed his brother about anything that he wasn’t comfortable with? Not pulling his weight in the company. His drinking habits. The way he treated women. Daniele.
    * * *
    Wondering at the emotion that seemed to darken those heart-stopping features, Lauren had to force back a sudden dangerous surge of warm feeling towards him.
    Instead, in response to that remark he had made about his brother telling him to mind his own business, she suggested a little shakily, ‘Perhaps I should take that stance with you myself.’
    ‘Oh?’ He looked at her obliquely, the sunlight creeping under the canopy glinting on the rich, healthy sheen of his hair.
    ‘Just because I’ve agreed to come here with you doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to let anyone else take over looking after Danny,’ she told him, with her gaze automatically straying to where the other woman had taken her nephew.
    ‘And you think that anything to do with Daniele isn’t my business too?’
    He had a point, but right at that moment Lauren had been left feeling too dispensable over not being consulted.
    ‘He’s still in my care and OK...I’ll let Constance do it this once as she was kind enough to agree to. But in future I intend to bathe and feed him and tuck him up in bed as I’ve always done.’
    ‘And so you shall, if that is what you want,’ he acceded, surprising her. ‘I merely thought that, for the time being, you might appreciate a break.’
    She did, now that he mentioned it. It was just that she felt so protective and possessive of her nephew where Angelo’s