Free The Italian's One-Night Love-Child by Cathy Williams

anything nicer than a simple meal. Your daughter must have told you that I’m a man of uncomplicated tastes.’
    That earned him a friendly pat on the shoulder from the older man who said, to Bethany’s horror, although how much more horrible could the situation get? ‘Guess that’s the way it plays with the kind of risks you take on with what you do, eh?’
    Cristiano greeted this bewildering statement with a noncommittal smile and said nothing. His life, until he had met the woman hovering slightly behind him, had been an ordered affair. Work. Women. Everything in its place. He was a man who had always believed that by wielding firm control he could successfully limit unpleasant surprises and thus far he had never had occasion to doubt the philosophy. So he was ill prepared for the sensation of walking on quicksand, which was what he felt he was doing now. Risks? Sure, he took risks in his line of work, but somehow he had got the impression that the risks to which Bethany’s father had referred did not apply to those associated with high finance,mergers and acquisitions. So what the hell had the man been talking about? And how, for that matter, had they known his identity before the usual round of introductions?
    Behind him, Bethany cleared her throat and he spun around to face her as her parents disappeared up the stairs, talking in low, excited voices.
    It grated on his nerves, but even in her own territory, a modest thatched cottage a million miles away from glamorous designer shops and sexy wine bars, she still had the look of a woman who could reel in any unsuspecting man with the pretence of being born to privilege. She didn’t have the air of someone who looked down on anyone they considered their inferior, which was just one of the things he found so insanely irritating about many of the women he had dated in the past. Bethany, instead, just looked refined. Something about the way she was put together. Maybe the vibrant, rich colour of her hair tumbling down past her shoulders. Or the perfect clarity of her eyes. Or maybe it was the silky smoothness of her skin with its dusting of freckles, untouched by the make-up mask so many women used to camouflage less than flawless complexions. Or perhaps the manner in which she held herself. Poised, proud and assertive but in a very muted way.
    Angry with himself for even bothering to register her as anything more than a woman who had had the temerity to play games with him, Cristiano looked at her with grim, unsmiling menace. As always, silence proved to be his ally and Bethany stumbled into speech, her eyes shifting away from his as she led him towards the sitting room. He listened without saying a word as she rambled on about her parents, apparently pillars of the community, involved in all sorts of charitable causes, virtual saints if her eulogy was anything to go by.
    As he listened, he took in everything around him, from the profusion of family photos to the gleaming ornaments collected over a lifetime and obviously cherished. Although just a cottage, it was an extremely spacious one and the downstairs was comprised of a honeycomb of little rooms which quaintly interconnected with one another. On one of the chairs in a room which had been kitted out as a study, a fat, contented tabby cat was snoozing. This couldn’t be further removed from the ancestral manor she had given him to believe was her family home and Cristiano hung on to the thought, which provided just the right spur for the aggression with which he had earlier confronted her.
    ‘So,’ he said conversationally, once they were in the sitting room and he was installed on one of the sprawling comfy chairs, ‘what a charming place your parents have. So different from the turreted mansion you described…’
    Bethany blushed. She hadn’t been treated to Cristiano’s brutally cold side, although she had known it was there because men of power were invariably ruthless, and she was finding it hard to