Page 58 of A Son Hidden from the Sicilian

‘Certainly. The nanny...?’

‘Get in touch with the agency...no, I’ll do it.’ It would be some compensation to let them know how low his level of satisfaction with them was.

In the underground garage, Zac had just got behind the wheel of his sleek designer car when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen ID and switched the engine back off before putting the phone on speaker.

‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’

‘No, it’s fine, Marco.’ Liam had been his first employee and Marco had been his first well...verywell-heeled tenant back in their uni days, the only two friendships forged back then to survive the transition from student life to the real world.

‘Sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral. Kate—’

‘Liam would have understood,’ Zac cut in immediately.

Crown Prince Marco Zanetti got straight to the point, a characteristic that Zac had always approved of in the other man.

‘I need your help, Zac. I know you have a lot on your plate at the moment with the baby... How is it going?’

‘Work in progress.’

‘If you can’t or don’t feel able, just say.’

‘Don’t worry, I will,’ Zac promised drily, knowing full well that, had the situation been reversed, the Crown Prince of the island kingdom of Renzoi would do anything for him, no questions asked. Zac had few close friends, and now one less.

‘So how can I help?’

Marco told him and Zac heard him out before responding.

‘So Kate was adopted?’ An image of his friend’s beautiful new red-headed bride flashed into his head. ‘She never knew she had a twin?’ That must have been quite a discovery to make, he mused.

‘Identicaltwin. When the marriage broke up she stayed with the father and Kate went with her mother.’

‘What did they do, pull straws?’ He was no father, not in the real sense, but for Zac the idea of parents dividing up a family as though they were a record collection was incomprehensible.

‘I asked myself the same thing,’ Marco admitted, his voice hard as he added, ‘The records I have seen suggest the mother was desperate to keep both girls, but the father threatened a custody battle. The bastard admitted, boasted during our last conversation that he split them to punish their mother, told her he’d get both, prove her unfit.’

Zac swore, adding. ‘But surely he wouldn’t have stood a chance!’

‘Probably not but she knew how convincing he can be and could she risk losing both babies? Awful choice to make.’

‘She died?’

‘And he refused to take Kate back—seems she was always sniffing and crying—his words.’

Though ironically that rejection turned out to be lucky for Kate—her adoptive family are the real deal. She had a good childhood.’

‘He sounds a charmer,’ Zac observed sardonically, thinking there were a lot out there, including his own father.

‘The guy is...’ The expletive down the line drew a nod of agreement from Zac. ‘He is no longer in the picture.’

Zac approved of the cold implacability in his friend’s voice. Maybe Marco had not changed that much.

‘So you’re saying Kate wants to find her sister and you want me to locate her.’ Zac’s dark brows drew into a puzzled line above his deep-set dark eyes. Marco had resources at his command that few could match. He could only assume that the prince was outsourcing the search to avoid information leaks within the palace.

‘Contacting her or not is Kate’s call and we—or at least I—know where she is...and on paper there is nothing to suggest that she is...that she...’ He hesitated.

Zak helped the other man out. ‘Is like the father?’ The subject of tainted genes, and the circuitous nurture versus nature debate, was one he was no stranger to, having spent his formative years watching for signs of inherited weakness, for his own tainted genes surfacing, until he’d latterly found some sort of closure.

If he was a monster in waiting, the chances were he would not notice the signs and, even if he did, what would he do about it? He was what he was, his philosophical attitude stopped short of risking passing his flawed genes on to his own children.

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