Page 37 of In Bed with Her Billionaire Bodyguard

‘Sixteen.’

Hope cursed, the word almost funny in her crisp English accent. But there really was nothing funny about a pregnant single sixteen-year-old girl.

‘He was a co-star, apparently.’

‘Apparently?’ Hope asked, her eyes getting darker and darker with an empathy that was new and unfamiliar to him.

‘She never told me his name,’ Luca said. Anna had, instead, told him that it had been a terrible mistake, that she wished it had never happened and that he had told her to just ‘get rid of it’. If she had even realised the impact of what she was saying to her child, he’d never seen a sign of it. In Anna’s world, she had simply been telling him how terrible it had been forher. He’d wondered once if it was a defence mechanism. If she’dhadto see the world that way, to live with the decisions she’d made, but he didn’t like to think that hard about it. Instead, what he’d clung to as a child was that she had stayed. His mother had stayed when she could so easily have not. How could a child not be thankful for that?

‘At the time, her father was her agent, her mother had died a few years before. It wasn’t too difficult to explain her absence by an eight-month stint on an independent film that didn’t get off the ground. And after she had me, she returned to makeIl Cuore Vuole, the film that made her an international star.

‘But from that moment on, I was a threat to her,’ he confessed. ‘Neither Hollywood nor Italian cinema would have touched an unwed sixteen-year-old mother of one.’

Hope reached out her hand across the table and, as much as he wanted to take the comfort she offered—more than he’d ever wanted anything—he couldn’t forget that they weren’t in private. Just like with his mother, there were too many witnesses and something buried deep ached all over again.

She withdrew her hand, apologies in her eyes for the gesture of comfort she couldn’t give.

It was strange speaking of it after all this time. For so long everything he’d thought about it, he’d felt about it, had been unspoken. Seeing the sadness for him in Hope’s gaze legitimised his feelings in a way that was new for him.

He wished that didn’t make him angry. He wished that he still wanted to protect his mother, the way he had been so desperate to as a child. But he wasn’t a child any more. He had seen the way the world worked, and what Anna had told him then didn’t make as much sense now.

‘Who raised you?’ she asked.

‘Anna’s older sister and her husband. Alma and Pietro. They’d never had children of their own and after their mother passed, they loved Anna like their own.’

But not you?

Her question might not have been spoken but he read it easily in her eyes.

He was saved from having to answer by the arrival of the food he’d ordered before he’d lost all appetite following their conversation.

Hope seemingly felt the same way as the food went untouched long after the waitress left.

‘So, you have protected her secret?’ Hope asked, reaching for the water rather than the wine.

‘Yes,’ he said with a conviction that went deeper than any vow. No matter what their relationship was like, Anna was his mother.

‘Why?’ she asked tentatively, as if afraid that the question would seem rude or thoughtless, even though he knew that Hope was neither of those things.

Why?It was a question he’d been asking himself a lot in the last few years. It had made sense when he’d been a child. He’d seen himself as her knight, as Anna’s protector. But was he really that same little boy, still hoping that she’d love him? That she’d finally recognise him and claim him? Something he realised in that moment, with a start, that Anna Bertoli would never do.

‘But she supported you?’ Hope asked in the absence of an answer, her concern that his mother had fulfilled at least some part of her maternal duties clear in her tone.

‘She gave Alma and Pietro whatever they needed to raise me and, although it wasn’t too much to raise suspicions, it was definitely enough. And then at eighteen there was an inheritance of sorts.’

‘Of sorts?’

‘Anna wanted me to have some money, but said that her lawyers were worried about it so they tied it into a non-disclosure agreement.’

‘An NDA for what?’ Hope demanded, already halfway to furious on his behalf.

‘That I never revealed myself as her child.’

Shock punched the breath from her lungs. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘She...’ Hope couldn’t find the words. In all her years at an all-girls boarding school, throughout which she genuinely thought she’d experienced some of the cruellest behaviour, and even beyond that—seeing what Simon was willing to do for power and control—none of it compared to a mother not just disowning her son, but silencing him too.

‘You can do a lot with half a million,’ he said, as if he felt the need to justify his choice. She realised that he was worried what she thought of him.

She desperately wanted to reach for him then. She wanted to curl up in his lap and hold him and tell him words she had no place offering him. Because he couldn’t even take her hand. And she hated that she couldn’t offer it to him. It made her feel unworthy of him.

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