The Italian in Need of an Heir by Lynne Graham

Author:Lynne Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2020-04-09T18:44:07+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

REELING WITH SHOCK at that revelation as they sank down, Maya looked up into haunted dark golden eyes and her heart clenched as though someone had squeezed it. ‘Why on earth would your mother have done something so dreadful?’

And he told her about Julieta then, and the day she had pulled out a gun over breakfast while he was playing with his childhood pets, how she had accused him of loving the dogs more than he loved her. In her adolescence, his mother had suffered a serious head injury and brain damage in a car accident, and it was after the crash that her mental health issues had developed. Although she had received many different diagnoses and had endured an ever-changing regime of medication, no treatment and no therapy had ever given her peace or normality.

‘She can’t be held responsible for anything wrong that she did. She was rarely in rational control of herself,’ Raffaele pointed out with creditable loyalty. ‘Unfortunately for me, her wealth and her lawyers protected her from outside interference.’

‘You were eight years old, Raffaele. Who was looking after you?’

‘The domestic staff generally took care of my physical needs, but they couldn’t protect me from her because she sacked them immediately if they tried to intervene,’ Raffaele admitted curtly.

‘And your father?’

‘Julieta shut Tommaso out of our lives while I was still a baby,’ he explained. ‘They were only married for a couple of years. He offended my mother by trying to compensate some waitress she had had fired in a restaurant and she threw him out. He had been cast off by the Manzinis when he married her and, in the divorce, he didn’t get anything because their marriage hadn’t lasted long enough. He didn’t have the money to fight her through the courts for access to his son. He didn’t have any choice in what followed.’

‘So, tell me about the dogs,’ she encouraged softly, reaching out to link her fingers carefully with his taut ones, noticing how he glanced down at their entangled hands with bemused discomfiture as they sat side by side on the sofa. ‘And stop beating yourself up for being human, Raffaele. You went through an appalling experience as a child. It’s still totally masculine and normal to be upset by the memory of it.’

Faint colour flared over his exotic cheekbones at that assurance but he let it go past. ‘Bella and Lupo were puppies when they arrived that summer. I adored them,’ he declared simply. ‘They were the closest thing to a family that I ever had. They loved me back.’

‘Didn’t your mother love you?’

‘If she did, she wasn’t capable of showing it. She was very possessive of me, though. Nannies weren’t allowed to show me physical affection, even if I was hurt or ill. With Julieta,’ Raffaele revealed absently with a lack of emotion that cut Maya deep, ‘it was half beating me to death one week and then a trip to Disneyland with every conceivable extra the next, all extremes, while she flailed from one mood into another.

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