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

mother’s and it was only when her mother clapped her hands that it dawned on her exactly what he was saying.
    ‘Yippee!’ She tried to insert some enthusiasm into her voice as she watched the last glimmers of any excuse for his disappearance from her life take wing and fly through the window.
    ‘That’s right,’ Cristiano expanded, just so that she was in no doubt as to what he was saying. ‘My priorities are here now. Aren’t they, sweetheart? Right here with you and…our baby.’
    Suddenly the world was full of rainbows and angels. At least, as far as her parents were concerned. Her mother could barely contain her excitement and while the babble of voices resounded around her Bethany felt nothing but a dull awareness of a situation that was now no longer in her control. Had she thought that she might persuade him to disappear out of her life? He didn’t love her. He never had. Yet he had found himself landed with the prospect of fatherhood in a little under four months, welded against his will to a woman he now loathed, a woman he considered an inveterate liar and heaven only knew what else. When had it ever been her dream to find herself expecting a baby by a man she loved who felt nothing but scorn towards her? Since when was that any woman’s dream?
    ‘I wasn’t sure if Beth had mentioned it to you…’
    ‘We were shocked when she broke the news to us…’
    ‘But now that we’ve met you, we couldn’t hope for a better son-in-law…’
    ‘Dad!’
    ‘Of course, we wouldn’t dream of rushing you into anything,’ Eileen hastened to add. ‘You just have to excuse us because we’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to things like that…’
    ‘So, as it happens, is my own mother.’ Had he really thought that she had been lying about the pregnancy? She had lied about pretty much everything else but, in that one area, she had been telling the truth. Her father had tactfully asked him whether he knew or whether he had already disappeared to Africa by the time Bethany had found out, and at that split moment in time Cristiano had kissed sweet goodbye to his freedom. Two weeks of fun in the sun and he would be paying the price for the rest of his life. What choice did he have? It was a mess but it was a mess from which he could not walk away. He tried to imagine how his mother and his grandfather would react and for a fleeting few seconds he could understand why she had fabricated this particular lie. His mother would have been devastated if he had shown up with a child in tow and no mother in sight.
    ‘You’ll have to tell us all about her…about your family…I’m afraid Bethany has been a bit economical on information…’
    Your daughter, it was on the tip of his tongue to tell them, has been economical on a number of things.
    ‘But right now—’ John put his arm around his wife with affection ‘—Eileen and I are going to hit the sack.’
    ‘And we may be old-fashioned—’ Eileen gave Cristiano a warm smile ‘—but we’re not so old-fashioned that we expect you two love birds to sleep in different rooms…’
    ‘But Mum !’ Bethany’s voice bordered on a screech. ‘You’ve never let Shania or Melanie bring their boyfriends home and share a bedroom!’
    ‘Slightly different situation here, don’t you think, pet?’
    ‘Well, yes,’ Bethany huffed, ‘but that’s no reason…I mean, I wouldn’t want to disrespect…’
    ‘Thank goodness we got rid of that single bed of yours a few years ago! Remember how upset you were at losing the headboard?’ This to Cristiano. ‘She had collected a range of stickers on it from when she was just knee high to a grasshopper! Can you believe it? Detached all of them and stuck them in a scrapbook!’
    Bethany felt herself go crimson. Did her mother imagine that that somehow made her sound sweet ? Couldn’t she see that the flip side of sweet was fruit loop , which was what Cristiano was already thinking? No, she thought unhappily, why on