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

cold-eyed stranger staring at her with biting antagonism was as far away from the sexy, amusing, highly intelligent charmer who had swept her off her feet sufficiently for her to extend her one night of fun into a two week, mind-blowingly idyllic trip to paradise as chalk was from cheese.
    Playing at the back of her mind was his casual insinuation that she could be prosecuted for impersonation. Was that true? Could that really happen? She couldn’t even begin thinking about that, so she shut the horror of it away and focused instead on the humiliation awaiting her at his hands.
    Of course she deserved it. She had meant so many times to confess the truth to him, but every time she’d got to within striking distance of doing so she had pulled back because she hadn’t wanted their affair to end. Instead, she had laughingly sidestepped awkward questions, glazed over the truth and generally done such a good job of dancing round anything remotely incriminating that she could have had a career as an escape artiste. Houdini would have been proud of her.
    In the process, he had stolen her heart and if he had asked her to stay on in sunny Barbados for another fortnight she knew she would have jumped at the chance and postponed the inevitable again.
    Her punishment was as deadly as it was conclusive. He had taken up residence inside her and not a single day hadgone by when she hadn’t thought about him and about the fact that she would never be entitled to have him in her life again. Ever.
    ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she muttered mutinously.
    ‘Like what? How do you expect me to look at a liar, a cheat and a thief?’
    ‘I told you I didn’t steal anything from Amelia Doni! ’
    ‘But you certainly managed to rip me off for quite a bit when you count the dinners, the wardrobe, the first class ticket to the other side of the world…’
    ‘You don’t understand…’
    ‘Enlighten me.’ He sat forward and Bethany instinctively cringed back, licking her lips nervously, with one eye on the clock behind him over the kitchen door.
    ‘I meant to tell you the truth…’
    ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ He intoned the age-old motto with icy grimness. ‘When did the good intentions disappear? When you realised that it would be a hell of a lot more rewarding to hop on the gravy train and take advantage of my generosity? Sex with all expenses paid?’
    ‘Don’t be crude!’
    ‘When did you decide to leave London?’
    ‘Wha…?’ Confused by the abrupt change of subject, Bethany looked at him in bewilderment before her brain clanked back into gear and she caught on to what he was doing. Instead of going for the kill, he was nipping away at her, pulling back before he could draw blood, only to home back in again just when she had managed to recover. He was getting under her defences and making sure that she had no time to rebuild them.
    ‘London. When did you decide to leave? Ditch the university course? Fly back over here, to the middle ofnowhere? Did you think that London was too small for the both of us? Was your conscience acting up too much for you to stay put and risk running into me at some unspecified point in time?’
    Bethany paled as his carelessly tossed question found its unintentional target.
    ‘How…how did you find me, Cristiano?’ She fell back on her original query. ‘And why did you bother?’
    Cristiano shrugged elegantly. Even at the height of his anger, when his face was a cold mask of freezing disdain, she couldn’t help but register his magnetic pull. Everything about him was unbearably graceful, unbearably and unfairly masculine, and her memory had not begun to do justice to his shamefully abundant sex appeal. She was ashamed to find that she was lapping it up, shoving it into some storage compartment in her brain from whence she knew she would retrieve it over and over again in the future. The man who had once told her that he had never felt what she made him feel with