Office Scandals

CHAPTER THREE

IZZY walked into the hotel foyer, aware that Roman was following a few steps behind her. She stopped and turned. ‘Will you go away? Or I’ll call Security.’

‘I was invited, remember!’

‘You …’

‘All right, I’m going, but if you change your mind I have a room …’

She ground her teeth at his deliberate provocation. ‘I’m never going to be that drunk.’

‘Izzy, dear, did you find it?’

Flustered, Izzy turned to find Michelle with Lily in her arms, walking across the lobby towards her. ‘Find …? Oh, yes, my bag, thanks, Michelle. None the worse for—’ She stopped and dropped her hand, realising that she had found her bag, but she didn’t have a clue where it was now. Although she wasn’t much concerned compared with the presence of Roman Petrelli, who was now standing just a few feet away from his daughter. ‘Sorry, it took me longer than I thought.’ She knew he hadn’t moved; even with her back to him she could feel the waves of raw male magnetism he radiated.

‘Oh, don’t worry about that, the reception isn’t for another hour.’ Michelle’s expression showed her opinion of this break with tradition. ‘All at the behest of that ridiculously expensive photographer Rachel insisted on.’

‘Well, thanks. I didn’t mean to dump her on you.’

‘You know I love having her, the little angel. Actually she fell asleep in the car and she’s only just woken up. Have you got her … yes?’ Michelle relinquished her hold on the baby and took a step back to grab a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter.

‘Have you seen Emma?’ Izzy asked casually.

‘No, she must be around somewhere. Are you feeling all right, Izzy? You look rather pale. You haven’t got another migraine—’ She broke off, her quizzical gaze shifting to a point behind Izzy. Even without the eyes-widening moment that Izzy presumed was the normal response for any female with a pulse when they saw Roman, she knew what was coming next, but even so she still flinched when she heard his voice.

‘Excuse me, ladies.’ Moving into view he divided his smile between Izzy and Michelle, giving the older woman the lion’s share and conscious in his peripheral vision of Izzy’s expression of panic. What the hell was her problem? Did she really think he was about to tell the world they had shared a night of passion? Being associated with him had never done any woman’s social standing any harm. ‘But I think this might be yours …?’

If her back hadn’t been literally to the wall Izzy had no doubt she would have run, but as the tall, elegant and devastatingly handsome figure approached, with a smile that could have charmed a steel bar into malleable submission, there was nowhere for her to go.

Izzy took a deep breath and lifted her chin. This was face-the-music time. She stared at the handbag dangling by its decorative metal chain strap from the long brown forefinger of his right hand, but before she could respond Michelle exclaimed, ‘Oh, look, Izzy—it’s your bag!’

Izzy, who had never seen Roman turn on the charm before, was not surprised to hear the older woman give a girlish giggle.

‘Oh, yes, so it is. I must have dropped it again or something, thank you.’ She waited, her eyes conveying cold disdain as she shifted Lily’s weight to her left hip and in the process partially shielded her from view before she extended a hand to receive it.

Roman held the bag just a little away, prolonging the moment before he threaded it over her wrist. His lips twitched appreciatively; managing to make ‘thank you’ sound like ‘go to hell’ was quite an achievement.

He dipped his dark glossy head. ‘You’re welcome.’

‘Well, isn’t that lucky you found it, and realised it was Izzy’s?’ From Michelle’s expression it was clear that she was not immune to his high-voltage charm.

‘Very lucky.’ He extended his hand towards Michelle. ‘Roman Petrelli. We have met at Gianni’s wedding.’

For once Izzy was able to place Emma and Rory’s handsome older cousin as the son of her father’s eldest brother. He was here today with his gorgeous, redheaded, very pregnant wife.

‘Of course, you were his best man, but no.’ Michelle tilted her head a little to one side as she studied Roman’s handsome features with a frown. ‘That’s not it. You remind me of someone …?’

Izzy knew exactly who he reminded her of and stared at the floor. This was probably what it felt like to act normally in the middle of an earthquake when you knew, you just knew, that any moment the earth was going to open at your feet.

‘Your son Rory worked for me last summer … we were impressed. He’s a young man with promise.’

The perfect way to a mother’s heart—say something good about her son, Izzy thought, a cynical smile twisting her lips.

‘Thank you. I’m prejudiced, of course, but I know he really enjoyed working for your firm. He was so enthusiastic when he got home. He’s waiting for his results at the moment. It’s such a tough job market out there.’

‘Has he put in many applications?’ Roman asked, not thinking about applications but the slim figure standing a few feet away. He could feel the inexplicable anxiety rolling off her in waves.

‘He’s waiting for the results of his finals.’ Michelle gave a rueful smile and admitted, ‘He was aiming for a first, but he thinks he messed up a paper.’

‘Well, exams are useful but I think enthusiasm and ambition are equally important.’ Struggling to maintain a level of appropriate interest, Roman fished a card out of his pocket. ‘My PA will be expecting his call.’

Izzy was amazed that Michelle, normally a very moral person, saw nothing wrong in this piece of blatant bribery thinly disguised as generosity.

The man clearly thought he could buy his way in or out of any situation. He probably heard no as a response once every ten years or so and then it was probably incorporated into, No, I don’t mind if you wipe your shiny handmade Italian shoes on me, Mr Petrelli. It would be an honour.

Izzy endured this conversation with gritted teeth. Without asking someone to move out of her way she could not drift unobtrusively away without drawing unwanted attention to herself and, more importantly, Lily.

She was cornered and couldn’t even access the glasses of champagne, she mused as another waiter drifted by, and she could really do with a drink. She had always known Lily looked like her father but until seeing them virtually side by side she had not realised how much. She couldn’t see how anyone would not be struck by the uncanny likeness.

He had to notice … It was inevitable. She was amazed they weren’t already the focus of finger pointing.

This was the last place in the world she wanted the big reveal, right here with a captive audience. It was going to happen; it was just a matter of when.

It was Lily herself who eventually kick-started the event. Tired of being carried and ignored, she let out a yell, shouting loudly, ‘Want go down, play … now!’

Roman winced in response to the sudden high-pitched ear-piercing squeal.

Michelle saw his expression and said, ‘She does have a temper!’ as she gazed with a fondness he struggled to understand at the red-faced bundle who was struggling like a demented demon to escape her mother’s arms.

His glance moved on to the small demon’s mother, who looked self-conscious, pink-cheeked and actually far too young to be a mother as she struggled to soothe the child, whose tantrum was causing a good deal of attention.

Roman might have expected to feel a certain amount of satisfaction witnessing her discomfiture. He did not consider himself a vindictive man, but he was a man who believed strongly in the old adage of ‘what goes around comes around’, and she had left him feeling a different and extremely painful type of discomfort. Her hypocrisy was staggering. First she had responded to him in a way that had fanned his smouldering desire into a full-scale conflagration, but had then acted as if he had somehow insulted her by suggesting they get reacquainted in bed! She had somehow managed to offend his masculinity and his intelligence in the process!

Double whammy!

Roman knew the signs when a woman was interested in him, and she was, so why was she acting as though there was some sort of stigma attached? It was as if she had undergone some weird personality transplant. Maybe taking her out of this environment, where relatives lurked around every corner, would bring back the erotic, uninhibited, adventurous lover of that night? He had a private jet on standby … and the villa on Lake Como … He smiled, seeing the plan formulating in his head coming together.

The opportune timing of the child’s sob meant he did not have time to consider why he felt such a strong need to construct an elaborate plan to get this woman into his bed, when he could achieve the same result without any effort on his part at all and with a woman who did not act as though he were a social liability!

As he watched Izzy cope with the distressed child and display a level of patience that was staggering, Roman found himself experiencing a sudden and inexplicable desire to help her.

He didn’t, of course. He didn’t have a clue about children, especially loud, screaming ones. His critical glance slid back to the child, who appeared to have been pacified slightly and was not so red in the face any more. He could see that she was not so … He stopped and looked closer. The child had dark hair, with blue-black curls, huge chocolate-brown eyes and skin the colour of rich honey. His eyes followed the suddenly very familiar shape of a jaw and eye … the mouth.

‘Dio!’

Izzy was alerted to the impending scene by his raw gasp. Her glance flew to his face in time to witness the stunned recognition. Both shock and denial were written in the strong sculpted lines of his patrician face.

‘How is this possible?’

Unaware that he had voiced the question out loud, Roman half expected to hear an answer in his head, but no reply was forthcoming. His brain, unable to cope with the shock, had closed down.

‘Were you off school the day they did the birds and bees?’ She regretted the comment the moment she said it, but flippancy was one of her coping mechanisms.

Jolted back to reality by Izzy’s comment, Roman glared at her. What was she now … the mother of his child? It didn’t seem possible, but instantly he knew it was. He looked at her and then at the baby, then back at the mother, who looked away guiltily.

‘Isabel?’

His voice made the fine downy hairs on her body tingle … ‘Izzy,’ she corrected, staring at his chest. Almost without thought she saw herself unbuttoning his shirt and peeling back the fabric to expose the smooth, golden tautly muscled flesh beneath. Taking a deep breath, she closed the door on the memory.

His dark, heavy-lidded stare zeroed back in on her face. ‘I think we need to talk.’

She gave a grudging nod, but was saved the need to respond by the appearance of a suited usher who had been sent to corral the stragglers and drive them into the wedding breakfast.

He consulted a seating plan in his hand and said, ‘Come on, ladies, we need to get you in first. It’s a tight squeeze and once you’re at your table it’s kind of hard to get out without a lot of hassle.’

The last sight Izzy had of Roman Petrelli’s dark head was in the distance as she joined the file of guests who were waiting to be greeted by the happy couple.

He looked like the living, breathing incarnation of retribution.

The wedding breakfast seemed to go on for ever, but when the opportunity arose during a gap in the speeches Izzy made her move for the fire door and escaped into the hallway.

There was no one in sight.

Then she spotted his tall distinctive dark head at the same time a waiter extended a tray of champagne her way.

With a groan of, ‘Oh, God, no!’ that made the waiter withdraw his tray, she began to weave her way through the crowd, her aim nothing more complicated than to put as much space between herself and the tall Italian as was humanly possible. She walked through the first door she came to and found herself in an orangery that was for the moment blissfully empty except for an elderly man with a red nose and large moustache who was dozing in one sunny corner, and the pianist playing the baby grand in one corner of the room.

The pianist smiled at Izzy and glanced towards the sleeping figure before miming an ironic hushing motion with his finger.

Izzy smiled back and set her struggling daughter on the floor, rotating her neck muscles, which ached from a combination of extreme tension plus the extra pounds her growing daughter had gained.

‘Careful,’ she cautioned absently as Lily grabbed a chair leg and pulled herself to her feet.

Izzy leaned back in the wrought-iron chair and sighed as her daughter eyed a plant several feet away and launched herself towards it, managing half a dozen steps before falling on her well-padded bottom. The startled expression on her face drew a laugh from Izzy.

‘Oops!’

Her daughter’s lower lip stopped quivering and the tragedy vanished and a moment later she sent her mother a sunny grin and continued across the room on all fours this time. As she watched her progress Izzy’s smile faded; she knew she was hiding and that she couldn’t continue in this way.

What was she avoiding? She couldn’t run away; she had to face him—he was Lily’s father. The image of his expression when he had looked at Lily surfaced, the shock and disbelief etched in his strong-boned features still fresh in her mind. She doubted many things in this supremely confident man’s life had shaken him, but seeing Lily had.

Izzy suddenly felt an unexpected stab of sympathy for Roman. She had been shocked too, but she had had nine months to get used to the idea of having a child. He’d just had the facts thrust live and kicking under his nose.

God only knew what was going through his mind.

She took a deep calming breath. It felt like the first time she’d really thought clearly since she’d felt herself sinking into those deep dark eyes on that night two years ago.

That one night when she had been someone else, but a night she was reminded of every time she looked at her daughter. Sure, this had been a shock—massive understatement—but might it not also be a positive thing … a good thing? It was a massive disruption of the comfortable status quo she had been enjoying, but surely her daughter having a chance of something she had never had the opportunity to experience was worth some disruption?

‘Lily, no!’ Izzy raised her voice in warning above the soft piano music in the background.

Her daughter’s head turned at the sound of her raised voice, but she did not halt her shuffling progress towards the tall cactus sporting scarlet blooms along its spiky stem that had caught her eye.

Before Izzy or her daughter could reach the spiky cactus the pot was blocked by a tall figure. A frustrated Lily treated the tall figure to a glare and, thrusting out her lower lip, yelled, ‘No!’

Izzy took a deep calming breath and scooped up her daughter, sweeping her wriggling and kicking off the floor. ‘Her favourite word.’

‘She’s determined, isn’t she?’ Roman observed, staring at the red-faced baby who was his daughter—how was it possible? He pushed away the question that had been running on a continual loop since the baby had looked at him.

He had always acknowledged a comment that a baby looked like one parent or the other with a certain degree of polite scepticism. In his, admittedly limited, experience all babies looked much the same with their indistinct unformed features.

He had never had reason to change his mind about this until half an hour ago, but he could have been wrong—he had to be wrong.

Was it coincidental that the subject had been much on his mind since he had updated his will? He had no child to pass his wealth on to but there were good causes and not all of them were females with a taste for designer shoes.

As he had left the lawyer’s office the older man had shaken his hand warmly and said with a smile, ‘No doubt the next time we see you will be when you marry or have your first child?’

Roman prided himself on focusing his energy on things he could change, not lost causes. Anyone who got to be thirty and didn’t realise that life was not fair was either very stupid or very lucky. He was neither, so he had not wasted time bewailing the hand fate had dealt him. He got on with life—a life that would not contain a family. He’d thought he had come to terms with it, but now …?

Had he only been seeing in Lily what he wanted to see? he wondered. Did he imagine the resemblance the child had to his family line? No, he dismissed the possibility almost immediately.

After his parents’ deaths he had discovered a box of photographs and one among the dozens of images had been of him on his first birthday. The likeness between that image and Lily was not just striking, it was almost identical.

He’d had sex with her mother and now two years later his mystery woman turned up with a baby who looked impossibly like him. It did not take a genius to do the maths …

‘Michelle said that Lily was fourteen months old, but she must be nearly fifteen months …?’

‘Fourteen, she was premature.’ The long labour had ended in an emergency Caesarean when the baby had become distressed.

The silence stretched between them, broken finally by Roman’s hoarse voice. ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ He could feel the vibration of a dull roar in his ears as his stunned gaze narrowed and swung her way. She’d had ample opportunity to come clean and she hadn’t.

Izzy registered the accusation in his glare and let out a grunt of sheer disbelief. How dared he act like some innocent victim? Presumably he had conveniently absolved himself of all responsibility!

‘Telling you was never an option—I didn’t know your name.’ Hard not to say it out loud without feeling shame.

‘You were the one who insisted on anonymity,’ he reminded her grimly. She was not the one who had encouraged him to have unprotected sex, though, reminded the voice in his head. In his defence, in a brief moment of sanity he had made an attempt to ask her if she was protected, but it had been an attempt he’d abandoned when she had touched a finger to his lips, encouraging him to be silent. ‘And I meant today, or didn’t you recognise the father of your child?’

Oh, yeah, because there was more than one man out there that looked like him.

‘Oh, so now it’s my child …’ She smiled and had the satisfaction of seeing his jaw clench. ‘Make your mind up, Roman.’ His flush suggested she had made her point.

‘And when was I meant to tell you about her? In the middle of the marriage service perhaps? Or during our delightful walk back here?’ she snapped. ‘It was kind of hard to get a word in edgewise while you were so charmingly propositioning me. Tell me, does the I need you line normally work for you? I want you, really?’

‘It worked with you. No, I take that back, you were the one that said that, weren’t you?’

The seamless comeback sent a flush of shame to Izzy’s pale face. ‘Look, I know this was a shock for you and I’m trying to make allowances—’

‘That’s really good of you,’ he said in a voice like dry ice.

‘Well, one of us has to act like an adult!’ she snapped back.

‘I’m struggling here, but what exactly is adult about hiding from me?’ he drawled sarcastically.

She cast a quick furtive glance over her shoulder. They were alone but for the pianist and the dozing guest, but that situation could not last. ‘Yes, I was avoiding you, because I didn’t want this sort of public scene. I just knew you’d react like this …’ She stopped, the anger fading from her face as she finished. ‘Actually I didn’t have a clue how you’d react. For all I knew you’d prefer to ignore Lily’s existence.’

‘And that would have suited you?’ He watched the way her expression changed as she glanced towards the happily playing tot, the slow smile that transformed her face.

Izzy hesitated. This was a subject where her opinions were still lurching dramatically from one side of the argument to the other. She voiced the one thing she was sure of, though he might not agree. ‘It would have been your loss.’

Roman could not argue with this assessment and quite suddenly he felt his anger towards her dissipate. He was blaming her for something that was not a curse, but a blessing.

‘I’m a father … Madre di Dio …!’ It shouldn’t be possible but it was. Roman felt a fresh explosion of wonder but it still didn’t fully sink in. ‘Did you try and find me?’

‘How could I? Where would I have started?’ He took a step closer, a tall and overpoweringly male presence that made her feel trapped. She lifted a hand to her throat to cover the pulse she could feel beating there.

‘Do I make you nervous, Isabel?’ He stepped closer again, his nostrils flaring as the scent of her perfume brought back memories his body responded to hungrily, making him uncomfortably aware of the heaviness in his groin. ‘Isabel. I like that name, it suits you …’