Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,55

been planning to tell him that she thought things needed to change, but now it looked as if Gianluca had come to a similar sort of conclusion himself and suddenly she was scared.

‘Can I put him to bed? I haven’t seen him all day.’

‘Of course.’ He kissed Claudio’s head and handed him over—barely meeting her eyes.

‘I’d better feed him, too.’

He was going to say that Claudio had taken most of the bottle she’d left behind, but by then she was already lifting her shirt with trembling fingers and latching the baby to her. Was she doing that to emphasise the fact that the baby needed a mother in the way that it never could need its father? He heard Claudio’s little sound of contentment and then the glugging of him feeding and saw Aisling briefly close her eyes with relief.

And, God forgive him, but at that moment he felt excluded. An outsider. Hadn’t he seen articles about fathers sometimes feeling jealous of their babies and hadn’t he despised them? Yet now here he was, feeling something very close to envy. He turned his back on her with a gesture of finality. ‘I’ll be waiting for you downstairs,’ he said.

Had he meant that to sound like a threat? Aisling forced herself to relax while Claudio fed, but it felt as if a soft dark cloud of dread were waiting to descend on her shoulders. It should have been a glorious homecoming—her baby safe and happy—with a sense of achievement that she’d managed to do a day’s work. Except that she hadn’t, had she—not really?

The whole day had been a disaster from start to finish. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on her work properly and yet she hadn’t been there for Claudio either, and now Gianluca was waiting for her downstairs with a strange and sombre look on his face and she was terrified of what that might mean.

That life was better when she wasn’t around—and now that Claudio was entrenched in this rural paradise she would have the devil’s job ever prising him away from it.

She spent longer than she needed to cuddling her little boy and then putting him down in the cot. As if she was trying to hold onto these last few moments of innocence before her world was shattered in a way which instinct told her it was about to be.

Flicking the mobile which hung over the crib with her fingertip, Aisling watched the tiger spinning round and round, its distinctive gold and black colouring blurring into something unrecognisable and indistinct—just as her life seemed to have done since meeting Gianluca.

Was it over? she wondered as she switched on the nightlight and slowly made her way downstairs.

Probably. And maybe it would be better like that—with all this need for pretence gone. She used to think she had everything mapped out, rigidly put in its place. She had thought that if you hid how you were really feeling, then you wouldn’t get hurt. But she had been wrong—because she had opened up the way for the kind of hurt which was a million times worse than anything else she’d ever experienced before.

She had grown up under a canopy of fear—and that had carried on into her adult life. But fear didn’t make a situation better—it made it worse. Fear that Gianluca might one day leave her or slowly edge her from his life was spoiling what time they had together now.

He was waiting for her in the smallest of the reception rooms with only a couple of low-lamps on and a fire which had been lit against the newly chilly evenings. Flames danced shadows over the walls and ceiling, and she could hear the crackle and spit of the logs.

He’d opened wine, too—she could see that it was a bottle from his own estate with its distinctive Palladio label—and he had poured two glasses. Viewed from here, it looked like a picture-perfect family scene. The husband and the wife who had just put their adorable baby to bed. The glow of the room and the pleasurable anticipation of the evening ahead. Suddenly, Aisling felt weak. She wanted to freeze-frame it and keep it, but it wasn’t real, and yet the pain in her heart had become so very real.

Gianluca saw her face whiten and his eyes narrowed. ‘What’s happened?’ he demanded. ‘Is something wrong?’

She hesitated. What would she usually say? No, I’m fine—just a little tired, that’s all. She wouldn’t want him to think she was less