Second-Time Bride by Lynne Graham

had reached an agreement, Daisy. The past is off limits. Let’s strive to keep the temperature down. Perhaps I should speed up matters by admitting that because we were once married I do still feel some sense of responsibility towards you.’
    Daisy stiffened and bridled. ‘I don’t want you feeling responsible for me and I am not here to ask you for a loan. But, while we’re on the subject, let me assure you that I would die of starvation before I would ask you for help!’
    â€˜Then exactly what are you doing here?’ Alessio enquired.
    Daisy breathed in deep and dug into her slim handbag to extract a copy of Tara’s birth certificate and a small photograph. Her slender hands were trembling, her stomach knotting up. She gripped the certificate. ‘This is going to come as a big shock to you, Alessio...but I’m afraid that there isn’t any easy way to do this—’
    â€˜Do what?’ he broke in impatiently.
    Daisy stood up on wobbly legs, her heart thumping as if she were tied to the rails in front of an express train. ‘I think I’ll just leave these with you and then maybe I could ring you tomorrow and see how you feel.’
    Alessio had already vaulted upright. His dark features were taut. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
    â€˜After we split up, I discovered that I had been expecting twins... and although I had lost o-one of them,’ Daisy stammered, a trickle of nervous perspiration running down between her breasts below her blouse, ‘I didn’t lose the other.’
    Alessio stared down at her with fiercely narrowed eyes, a stark frown of bewilderment drawing his level black brows together. ‘What are you trying to say?’
    â€˜I have a daughter of thirteen... your daughter,’ she delivered with unconscious stress as she took an automatic step back from him.
    â€˜That’s impossible.’ The faintest tremor lent an uneven quality to Alessio’s usually level diction and his accent had thickened. ‘You had a miscarriage.’
    â€˜She was born three months after I left Italy. I was kept in hospital right up until her birth...in case I lost her too. She was a couple of weeks premature. You see, I wasn’t quite as pregnant as everyone assumed I was,’ Daisy muttered awkwardly in the thundering silence of Alessio’s total disbelief. ‘The doctor in Rome got the delivery date wrong because when he first saw me I was bigger than he thought I should be, but that was because I was carrying twins.’
    â€˜You had a miscarriage,’ Alessio delivered in stubborn repetition. ‘And if at some subsequent stage you did give birth to a baby which was premature it could not possibly have been mine—’
    â€˜Tara was born in April.’ Daisy’s lips compressed tremulously.
    If Alessio had been capable of rational thought, his intelligence would have told him that given the time period concerned there was no way on earth that the child could be anything other than his. But then Alessio was not reasoning out anything right now. Alessio was at a standstill, blocked from moving on by the barrier of what he had believed to be concrete fact for thirteen years.
    â€˜You lost the baby,’ he said, his rich drawl oddly attentuated and unevenly pitched.
    Daisy couldn’t stop staring at him. His strong bone structure was fiercely prominent below his golden skin. He was alarmingly pale. His astute eyes were curiously dark and unfocused.
    â€˜I didn’t lose Tara...I lost her twin,’ Daisy whispered shakily, her eyes aching. ‘But when I left Rome I didn’t know that. What I did know was that you didn’t want me or the baby, and once the baby was no longer on the way there was no reason for us to stay married. You couldn’t wait to get rid of me. You couldn’t even bring yourself to come and commiserate at the hospital because naturally you couldn’t