Page 45 of In Bed with Her Billionaire Bodyguard

‘You look well,’ he said, facing away from her.

That was how they did this. Two strangers talking out at the world, rather than to each other. In a paparazzo’s photograph he would just be a hazy background figure; in a fan’s memory he wouldn’t even appear.

‘So do you,’ his mother observed, even though she had yet to actually look his way. ‘Is everything okay? I was surprised to get your request to meet,’ she said, and he wondered whether she was really worried about him or herself.

‘Do you regret it?’ It wasn’t what he’d planned to ask, but the words came unbidden to his lips.

Anna froze, the moment so quick it was almost imperceptible, but he’d been watching, waiting to see it and, now that he had, he wasn’t sure how it made him feel. She exhaled slowly, as if through pain, and he hated that he couldn’t trust that she was being truthful.

‘Every day,’ she replied.

‘Would you have made a different choice?’

‘No.’ The word was a bullet that hit its mark. ‘We are who we are because of our choices, Luca.’ That he believed. ‘And you were a child. I was trying to protect you.’ The words were right, but Luca honestly thought in that moment that his mother was talking about herself.

He bit down on a chunk of ice, watering down the whisky in his empty stomach.

‘The press intensity would have been truly awful for you.’

‘Then.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Then. As a child, it would have been awful then. I’m a man now and I can take whatever you think they might throw at me.’

‘Even your agreement to sign an NDA?’

Bile twisted his stomach.

‘They’d eat us alive. The mother who hid her son and the son who sold his silence?’

Rage tore through him at the thought that his mother would even try to use that against him. He’d agonised over that decision—between money he desperately needed, and what...? Because there hadn’t been an alternative offer that was anything other than what he already had. There hadn’t been promises to recognise him in her life. There had been no exchange. It had been a payment, pure and simple. Any last hope of a familial bond frayed beneath the weight of that recognition and a line appeared in the sand, between him and her. Anna shifted in her chair as if sensing it.

‘Is this because of the girl?’

This time,hefroze.

‘Hope Harcourt?’

‘How do you—?’

‘I saw you in the background on the front page. Even when you try not to, you stand out, you know,’ his mother said with an edge to her tone that sounded a little too much like jealousy. ‘Even in the shadows.’

Luca shook his head at her choice of words as they struck a chord with similar ones Hope had said over lunch in Austria. Hope had lashed out, had been angry that his mother had wanted him to stay in the shadows. She’d said as much. And Hope would also have known that being with her would do exactly the same—force him to remain there, in the darkness, to keep his promise to his mother.

Like a fist to the gut, Luca realised that Hope had been lying to him that last day in Austria. That there had been something else instigating their separation. Something that must have been tied to the phone call she’d taken that last night.

And he’d allowed himself to believe her lies because he was scared. Scared by the power of his feelings for her, by his need—yes—but by the all-consuming love he felt for her too. Scared because he feared, even now, that Hope might not think him worth the risk.

I’m done with hiding.

He could have laughed at himself right then, and not with humour. Hope Harcourt had more strength and determination than anyone he knew. Now it was time for him to prove that he was worthy of such an incredible woman.

‘Luca?’

‘I didn’t mind it, you know,’ he said, even as his mind raced towards what he needed to do next. ‘Being in the shadows for you. It was safe, for us both really. You got to keep your greatest acting role, that of the eternal ingenue, and I never had to ask you to prove your love.’

Anna Bertoli might have paled, or it could have been a trick of the airport lounge lighting.

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