Office Scandals: The Petrelli Heir / Gilded Secrets / An Inconvenient Affair

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 …