Angel Of Darkness
LYNNE GRAHAM
'The days of your innocence are long gone.’Top model Kelda Wyatt is thrilled at the prospect of a photo shoot in Tuscany, until she learns Angelo Rossetti hired her. Caught in a compromising situation with the handsome Italian billionaire years ago, Angelo accused Kelda of setting him up, and vowed to punish her.Now Angelo will take the sweetest revenge possible; make Kelda his mistress, drive her wild with desire, then discard her. But when Kelda becomes pregnant, discarding her is no longer an option. Perhaps a convenient marriage, where he can control her every move, would be a more fitting form of punishment?
is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.
In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!
LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon
reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
Angel of Darkness
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘I KNOW this is a shock for you,’ Daisy Wyatt murmured uncomfortably, absorbing her daughter’s stunned pallor. ‘I would have told you ages ago but I was afraid you might be upset.’
‘Might be?’ Kelda raked her rippling Titian red hair back from her brow, a fiery mix of disbelief and temper leaping through her taut frame. ‘For goodness’ sake, you’ve been divorced from the man for over four years! Why on earth did you start seeing him again?’
Daisy looked uneasy. Small and blonde and barely into her forties, she was a very pretty woman but right now her face was strained. ‘When I heard that Tomaso had had a heart attack, I...I—well...’ She stumbled under fire from an outraged emerald-green stare of enquiry. ‘I thought it was only decent to write with my good wishes for his recovery and Tomaso wrote me such a kind letter back asking me to visit...I didn’t see how I could refuse—’
‘But that was three months ago,’ Kelda condemned in a shaken tone. ‘You’ve been seeing him all this time and you never even dropped a hint!’
Daisy turned a guilty pink. ‘At the start, it didn’t seem worth mentioning. Just a few friendly visits to the hospital. Tomaso seemed so lonely. He didn’t seem to have many visitors, apart...’ She hesitated, assessing her daughter’s vibrating tension and hurriedly averting her gaze before reluctantly continuing, ‘Apart from Angelo, of course.’
That name struck Kelda like a stinging slap on the face. The fact that her sensitive mother wouldn’t meet her eyes when she said it didn’t help. Indeed, Daisy’s visible embarrassment on Kelda’s behalf merely piled on the agony. A moment out of time when she was eighteen. Inexplicable...inexcusable. Kelda blocked out the memories threatening her, refusing to recall that dreadful night and its appalling repercussions.
‘And I suppose Angelo was as chillingly contemptuous as he was when Tomaso married you and polluted the Rossetti family with a lowly hairdresser!’ Kelda snapped with ferocious bite. ‘I wish I could believe you cut him dead but I bet you didn’t!’
Daisy was studying her tightly linked hands. ‘Tomaso and I should never have got married in such a hurry the first time. Angelo hadn’t even met me... naturally, he was shocked.’
‘Look, I’ll make us a cup of tea.’ Kelda was so furious, she had to get out of the room before she burst a blood-vessel and said what she really thought. How could her mother make excuses for Angelo? How could she possibly do that? When Tomaso Rossetti had married Daisy eleven years ago, his son Angelo had scorned her, snubbed her and treated her as though she was a scheming, common little gold-digger with a greedy eye to the main chance. Kelda’s gentle, quiet mother had suffered agonies of discomfiture at Angelo’s merciless hands!
Safe in her pine galley kitchen, Kelda snatched in air in heated gasps. Her memories of Daisy’s short-lived second marriage were extremely painful. The discovery that Tomaso, for all his apparent devotion to her mother, was having an affair with another woman had shattered Kelda. The divorce had come as an incredible relief. It had freed her from the burden of a secret she had not dared to share with her vulnerable mother, and how could she tell Daisy the truth now? It wasn’t even as if she had any concrete proof to offer...nothing more than the dismayed and embarrassed confirmation of a classmate.
There had been a piece about Tomaso in a newspaper. ‘Looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, doesn’t he?’ Helena had giggled. ‘He’s had a mistress on the go for years, some blonde he takes to hideaway country pubs for dirty weekends. And even though he only got married recently, he’s still seeing her...my father saw them all cosied up together in a dark corner only last week! Holding hands and kissing. Everybody’s dying to meet his new wife and see what she’s like—’
‘She’s my mother,’ Kelda had said flatly.
Helena had looked aghast. ‘Oh lord, I am sorry. I had no idea.’
Hell, why hadn’t she told Daisy straight after the divorce? Well quite naturally she had believed the divorce was final. Most divorces were. ‘We just weren’t compatible,’ Daisy had said sadly then, seemingly having no suspicion of Tomaso’s infidelity. And now Tomaso had actually had the neck to pop the question a second time! How the heck could Kelda have foreseen that eventuality? And heaven knew, right at this minute, it was a problem she could have done without. She had quite enough problems of her own!
Determinedly, however, Kelda suppressed the bitter awareness that, thanks to all the bad publicity she had received of late, her career as a top model was over. There was no point in crying over spilt milk, she told herself and her poor mother’s predicament was far more important.
Kelda had adored her own father, although her recollection of him was unhappily vague, built up on blurred impressions of a jovial, boisterous man, quick to temper, equally quick to laughter. She had only been five when her father began to spend long periods working abroad. She had only a couple of faded photographs of him when he was young and her mother had invariably resorted to tears whenever she tried to talk about him. But she still had every letter her father had ever written to her. The heart attack which had claimed his life in her twelfth year had seemed to devastate her mother at the time...
Yet four short months later Daisy had upped and married Tomaso Rossetti.
Her mother had been the manageress of a small hair salon, Tomaso, an extremely wealthy director in the Rossetti Industrial Bank. According to Daisy, she had been cutting Tomaso’s hair for years but she had never once mentioned him to Kelda! Indeed, Kelda had not even had a chance to meet Tomaso before the wedding took place.
The first news she had had of the marriage had been in the headmistress’s office at school. Called from class without any prior warning of what was coming, Kelda had been absolutely shattered when she was faced with a strange man with a proprietorial hand at her beaming mother’s waist and told he was her stepfather. And she hadn’t reacted exactly politely either. She had been appalled, resentful and alienated by the startling fact that the mother she loved could have kept so much from her. It had not been a promising start.
At the time, Kelda and her brother, Tim had been living with an elderly great-aunt in a quiet suburb of Liverpool, seeing their mother on only occasional weekends. Daisy had been unable to find a decent job outside London and her salary had not been enough to run to childcare outside school hours. She had refused to listen to Kelda when she argued that she was old enough to look after herself. Living as she then did in a far from salubrious inner city area, Daisy had been convinced that her children were far better off with their great-aunt.
‘We’ll all be together now!’ Daisy had enthused. ‘Tomaso wants us all to be one big happy family. He’s bought us a beautiful house in Surrey.’
She could have coped with Tomaso with her hands tied behind her back. It had been Angelo she hadn’t been able to handle. Angelo Cesare Rossetti. In the City, they called him the Angel of Darkness. It fitted him like a black velvet glove. Like an avenging dark angel, he destroyed anything and anybody foolish enough to get in his way. In comparison, his father was a positive pussycat, a gentleman of the old school, who treated women like creatures of spun-glass fragility in need of cherishing protection.
While Tomaso and Daisy had regularly scarpered abroad on what seemed to be one long impossibly extended honeymoon during the first years of their marriage, no doubt avoiding as best they could the poisonous atmosphere in their English home, Kelda had been left to Angelo’s tender mercies. Angelo, the stepbrother from hell, who had loathed her on sight. Mind you, it had been mutual, she conceded grimly. Even now when she saw Angelo’s name in a gossip column she still burned with an unholy, burning hatred that threatened to lick out of control.
As she slammed cups out on a tray, intelligence told her that she should be concentrating on Tomaso’s sins, not those of his son. Tomaso, who had probably ordered all his business acquaintances to stay away from the hospital while he plucked violin strings and talked about the misery of his lonely life at the top. Daisy was an easy mark for a sob-story.
Well, never let it be said that Kelda didn’t see her duty before her, even when it was unpleasant. The Rossettis had given her poor mother a very rough ride the first time around. Kelda intended to make sure that her mother thought twice, thrice and even more before she took the risk of marrying Tomaso again.
‘So when did Tomaso pop the question?’ she prompted with a brittle smile as she poured the tea.
‘Last night over dinner.’
‘He’s out of hospital, then.’ Kelda had had vague hopes that Tomaso had proposed from his sickbed. Her mother’s dreamy expression might then have been excused as compassion.
‘For ages. It wasn’t a bad attack, more of a warning really,’ Daisy shared. ‘And Angelo has persuaded him to retire. He knows just how to talk to his father and he’s been so kind—’
‘Angelo? Kind?’ Kelda echoed incredulously.
Her mother tensed. ‘He sent a car to pick me up and take me home again every time I visited the hospital.’
‘How many near-fatal collisions did it have?’
‘Angelo really has been wonderful, Kelda,’ Daisy murmured tautly. ‘He...he even took me out to lunch. I find him rather overwhelming but he is trying to be friendly and considerate...’
Kelda wanted to laugh like a hyena. Angelo...kind, wonderful, considerate? Only her trusting mother could be so easily taken in. But on another level she was deeply hurt that so much had been happening behind her back. ‘Does he know that his father’s proposed again?’
Daisy nodded and smiled. Kelda ground her teeth together.
‘Angelo even asked about you,’ her mother advanced in a clear effort to impress. ‘He was very sympathetic and understanding about...well, about that awful business in the papers.’
Kelda went white with rage and mortification and turned her head away. Of course, it had clearly been too much to hope that Angelo hadn’t been laughing heartily over her recent sufferings. He never read the tabloids but she just bet that he had made an exception when the gutter Press were tearing her apart. Kelda still felt soiled and besmirched by the lies that had been written about her and the vicious quotes from ex-boyfriends who had jumped on the bandwagon in revenge.
‘It’s such a shame that you didn’t let Danny Philips down more gently.’ Daisy sighed regretfully.
‘He was a married man!’ Kelda reminded her acidly. ‘Naturally, I got rid of him as soon as I found that out.’
‘I expect he didn’t mean to fall in love with you,’ Daisy murmured sadly.
‘He wasn’t in love with me...he just wanted to get me into bed like all the rest!’ Kelda fielded.
‘But he must have been terribly hurt to take an overdose like that, and maybe if you’d gone to see him in hospital—’
‘I’d have finished him off!’ Kelda broke in rawly. ‘He took an overdose because his wife found out he’d been seeing me. He took it to get back in with her and then he spilt his guts in that filthy newspaper to get his own back on me!’
‘It was wicked of him to tell all those lies about you.’ Daisy’s large blue eyes were swimming with tears. ‘I told Angelo that you’d never had an affair with anyone...’
‘P-Pardon?’
Her mother reddened. ‘I wanted Angelo to know that there wasn’t a word of truth in any of it. You’re not that sort of girl.’
Kelda was in agony. She adored her mother but she had never come closer to killing her! ‘Kelda’s saving herself for marriage.’ She could just hear her mother saying it! And she could see Angelo, struggling not to choke on his wine, sardonically amused by her mother’s blind faith in her daughter’s virtue. Hellfire embarrassment scorched Kelda.
‘Well...what do you think?’ Daisy asked hesitantly.
‘About what?’
‘About me marrying Tomaso again?’
Kelda steeled herself. ‘I think you’d be making the biggest mistake of your life. But of course...it’s your decision.’
‘I suppose the idea of us all being a f-family together is a little fanciful.’ Looking stricken, Daisy was visibly swallowing back tears of disappointment.
Kelda felt torn apart by guilt but she reminded herself that it was for her mother’s own good. ‘Have you given him an answer yet?’
‘No,’ Daisy conceded tightly.
‘If you do marry him, I’ll hardly cut you off...I expect we can still meet for lunch occasionally...’
‘Y-yes,’ Daisy gulped, bending her head. ‘But you and I are so close...what about weekends?’
‘I will never cross the threshold of any house that harbours Angelo as a regular visitor,’ Kelda stated without apology.
* * *
‘You mean she just dropped it on you?’ Her brother Tim burst out laughing. ‘Isn’t that just Daisy?’
It was the following day. They were lunching in a wine-bar round the corner from the insurance company where Tim worked.
‘It wasn’t funny! Why didn’t you warn me?’ Kelda snapped, throwing an icy glance of hauteur at the man at the next table, who had sat fixedly trying to catch her eye ever since she sat down.
Tim followed her gaze ruefully. ‘The Iceberg buries another victim...’
‘I loathe that stupid nickname!’ She set her perfect white teeth into a celery stick and crunched. As she chewed, she flung her head back, her mane of entirely natural pre-Raphaelite curls rippling back over her slim shoulders in tongues of fire. ‘Don’t use it!’
‘OK...OK!’ Tim held up both hands in mock surrender.
‘Why didn’t you tell me she was seeing Tomaso again?’
His mobile features tensed. ‘I guessed how you’d react.’
‘I bet you said nothing, you lily-livered swine!’ Kelda hissed across the table at him. ‘You don’t care if Tomaso runs around with other women behind her back!’
Tim had gone red. ‘I don’t think it’s any of my business.’
‘Oh, I’m all right, Jack!’
Tim grimaced. ‘How much of the way you feel has to do with Angelo?’
Kelda froze. ‘It’s got nothing to do with him!’
Tim gave her an unimpressed glance.
‘I can’t stand him...that’s true.’ Her restive hands snapped a carrot stick in two but she held his gaze fiercely. ‘But it’s Mum’s best interests that concern me.’
‘You’re terrified of Angelo.’ Tim looked almost amused.
‘Don’t be ridiculous...I loathe and despise him... I’m certainly not afraid of him!’
Tim sipped his wine. ‘Exactly what did happen the night of your eighteenth birthday bash? You know, I never did find out why Angelo had disappeared, Tomaso looked like thunder and Mum was on the brink of hysterics over breakfast the next morning...’
Every scrap of natural colour had drained from her complexion. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said tightly.
Her stomach was churning sickly. She broke out in a cold sweat. If she lived to be a hundred, she would still relive that evening in her nightmares. Angelo had humiliated her. Angelo had destroyed her. At a most sensitive age, he had instilled in her an aversion to sexual intimacy that she had still to overcome. The Iceberg was dead from the neck down, she reflected with raw shame and bitterness. She couldn’t bear a man to come too close. Her skin crawled when men got seductive and expectant. It made her feel soiled, cheap. Angelo had done that to her...with his scorn and revulsion.
‘You’re a promiscuous little tramp. It doesn’t matter how much money my father spends on you...you will never climb out of the gutter!’
Kelda swallowed back nausea with difficulty. She was lost in the past, savaged by an indictment that had merely heightened the intense vulnerability she concealed from the world.
‘Angelo seems to be encouraging Mum and Tomaso,’ Tim remarked. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t stick a spoke in his wheels.’
‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’ Kelda demanded.
Tim didn’t meet her eyes. ‘He called into the office one day last week.’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Actually, he’s offered to fix me up with a better job...’
‘I can see I’m on my own,’ Kelda breathed flatly.
Tim searched her vibrantly beautiful face anxiously. ‘He’s a vicious bastard when he’s crossed, Kelda. Stay out of it. Mum’s a big girl now. Let her make her own mistakes. And if Angelo’s prepared to bury the hatchet—’
‘I’ll lift it out of the ground and bury it in his back,’ Kelda slotted in with grim emphasis. ‘I have no intention of interfering between Mum and Tomaso but neither have I any intention of being roped in to play happy families. I’m not eighteen any more. I have a life of my own.’
Tim groaned. ‘You’re not half as tough as you like to act. If you annoy him, Angelo won’t just rock your boat, Kelda. He’ll blow you out of the water.’
Her hand shook slightly as she raised her glass. Tim’s imagery sent a chill snaking down her backbone.
‘Any recovery on the career front?’ Tim prompted abruptly.
She pulled a face. ‘I’m trying to sell my apartment.’
‘As bad as that?’ Tim looked shaken.
‘When the Fantasy campaign dropped me, I lost half my income...and other cancellations followed,’ she spelt out tautly.
‘But you’ll make it up again...you’re famous!’
‘Notorious,’ Kelda corrected with unconcealed bitterness. ‘And that’s not the sort of image that sells exclusive cosmetics and perfume. My contract with the agency is up in two months’ time. I don’t think it’ll be renewed.’
Tim said something unrepeatable about Danny Philips. Then he smiled. ‘You should marry Jeff. He’s stood by you and he’s got all his Daddy’s hotels coming to him—’
Kelda concealed her distaste. She knew she would miss the luxuries her high earnings had brought her but she had no intention of marrying to maintain that lifestyle.
‘I should have stopped seeing Jeff weeks ago,’ she confided wryly,.
‘I liked Jeff.’ Tim frowned at her. ‘Let him down gently.’
As she dressed for her dinner date that evening, she grimaced. She had already tried and failed twice to let Jeff down lightly. So much for her heartless bitch image! She liked Jeff but he was getting serious. He wasn’t the Mr Right her daft mother liked to talk about. Kelda had decided a long time ago that Mr Right didn’t exist. Not for her, anyway. She attracted all the wrong types.
The poseurs, the predators. To most men, she was a trophy to show off, a glorified sex object, whose greatest gift was the envious reactions she stirred up among their friends. Five feet nine in her bare feet, Kelda had the sleek slender lines of an elegant thoroughbred and a face that every camera loved. She had flawless skin, gorgeous hair and beautiful eyes. At sixteen she had suddenly blossomed from a gawky, flat-chested late developer into an eye-catching young woman, who turned heads wherever she went. The attention had been balm to a self-esteem continuously battered by Angelo’s cruel tongue.
He had so very nearly prevented her from becoming a model. If it hadn’t been for the divorce, she would have ended up resitting the final exams she had failed.
‘You let her go to London, she’ll go wild,’ Angelo had forecast. ‘She’s too immature, too undisciplined and too volatile.’
Angelo had always taken great pleasure in ensuring that whatever she most wanted she didn’t get and whatever she least wanted, she got in spades. But she hadn’t gone wild, had she? She had clawed her way up the ladder to success and exulted in her first Vogue cover. Rather childishly, she recalled reluctantly, she had sent a copy of that edition to Angelo, desperately afraid that he mightn’t have seen it. Very childish, she acknowledged. Then, Angelo had always brought out the worst in her character.
Jeff arrived with a massive bunch of red roses and her heart sank. Dinner at a candlelit restaurant followed. No matter how often she tried to tactfully change the subject, Jeff brought it back to marriage. He was like a terrier chasing a bone.
Her conscience smote her. Jeff had staunchly stood by her throughout the tabloid attacks. Other friends had deserted her like rats escaping a sinking ship. Jeff had had touching faith in her innocence. What a shame it was that you couldn’t love to order, she thought ruefully. She valued Jeff’s friendship but she was beginning to realise that no matter what she did, she was going to lose that as well.
‘I’m really very fond of you,’ Kelda stressed carefully.
‘I don’t want you to be bloody fond of me!’ he muttered with unexpected heat. ‘I want you to marry me.’
‘I can’t.’
For the remainder of the meal, he swung between arguing and a monolithic attack of the sulks. Kelda managed to charm him out of the worst of his mood but he was drinking too much. Unfortunately she had already agreed to join friends of his at a nightclub. Her attempt to pull out of the arrangement was badly received. Fearful of a public scene, she steeled herself to face what remained of a difficult evening. If it was at all possible, she didn’t want to hurt Jeff’s feelings.
Belatedly she realised that she had made the wrong decision. In the foyer of the club, Jeff suddenly attempted to drag her into his arms and Kelda slapped his hands away with the fury of a bristling tigress. Of all things, she hated being mauled in public.
‘I’m absolutely crazy about you!’ Jeff announced stridently. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’
‘If you don’t behave yourself, I’m going home!’ she hissed at him in an undertone and turned on her heel, praying that he would cool off.
A split-second later, she stopped dead in her tracks, slaughtered by the sheer shock of finding Angelo less than six feet from her. He had the advantage, she registered. He had seen her first. At six feet four, he was one of the very few men capable of looking down on her even when she was wearing her highest heels.
She was paralysed, her heartbeat quickening, colour flooding her translucent skin and then slowly, painfully draining away again to leave her paper-white. Chillingly dark eyes cut into her like grappling hooks in search of choice and tender flesh. Every tiny muscle in her tensed body jerked tight as she braced herself for attack.
‘I presume you do intend to speak, Kelda.’ The smooth, cultured drawl sliced through the thickening atmosphere and clawed nasty vibrations of threat down her sensitive spine. He was like a sleek, terrifyingly dangerous black panther about to strike.
‘Did you hear someone speak?’ she asked Jeff, planting a trembling hand on his arm. ‘I didn’t.’
She swept past Angelo and his dainty little blonde sidekick with inches to spare and her classic nose as high in the air as she could hold it.
‘Do you realise who that was?’ Jeff bleated in her ear.
‘Once upon a time, my mother was married to his father. That creep was my stepbrother. And we didn’t part on such terms that I feel I have to notice him in public.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that your mother had been married to Tomaso Rossetti?’
Jeff was so helplessly impressed by anyone whose bank balance was greater than his father’s. ‘It wasn’t important.’
‘You just cut Angelo Rossetti dead,’ Jeff groaned. ‘Are you out of your mind?’
Sitting down, Kelda fought to still the nervous tremors still rippling through her. ‘He told me once that I had the manners of a slum child. He ought to be pleased to see how well I’ve turned out.’
Shock seemed to have sobered Jeff up. ‘My father’s into the Rossetti Bank to the tune of a million and we’re looking for an extension on the loan. I was so shattered by what you did out there, I didn’t speak either.’ Abruptly, he bolted upright again. ‘I’d better go and apologise.’
Her temples were throbbing. ‘I’m sorry...I didn’t intend to involve you—’
‘My God, you must have a death wish!’ Jeff muttered. ‘Nobody treats Angelo Rossetti like that and gets away with it.’
‘I think you’ll find that I have,’ Kelda asserted with more confidence than she actually felt.
She had gone too far. Temper and other emotions that she had no desire to examine had taken over. Did she never learn? Angelo taunted her and she still went for the bait. The teenage years might be behind her but evidently the responses weren’t. Only she could know the depth of the bitter mortification which overwhelmed her in Angelo’s radius. Nothing had changed.
Absolutely nothing had changed. In one glance she had learnt that. Angelo had stared her down with freezing hauteur and distaste. The dust beneath his feet would have inspired less repugnance. Of course he hadn’t seen her since that night...not once, not even briefly. He had gone abroad and shortly after that their parents had parted. She shuddered under the onslaught of a mess of confused emotions, none of which was pleasant.
Tonight she had reacted in self-defence as she had so often in the past. ‘Hit and run’ best summed it up, she conceded shamefacedly. If she hadn’t got away immediately, her control would have splintered and he would have seen that, caught unprepared, she was vulnerable. Naturally his hostility would be on a high again at the prospect of her re-entering the family circle with her slum-child manners and her legendary promiscuity.
But this time Angelo had been ahead of her. This time he was isolating her. She recognised the subtle brilliance of Angelo’s manipulation of her mother and her brother. How come they didn’t see it? Frankly, Tim was pleased at the idea of being part of the Rossetti clan again. Tim was always broke, always in debt. Tomaso was open-handed with money.
And Tim, like her mother, had always walked in awe of Angelo. Angelo was so clever that he had finished university in his teens. Angelo spoke half a dozen languages with the sort of fluency that made lesser mortals cringe. Angelo was so dazzlingly successful in the field of international finance that he was currently being tipped to become the youngest ever chief executive of Rossetti Industrial. Tongues that had dared to talk of nepotism had long since been silenced. Everything Angelo touched turned to gold. His opinions were quoted in the serious newspapers. Tomaso thought his son literally walked on water.
‘I must say that he was very gracious about it.’ Jeff reappeared, exuding an air of strong relief. ‘He’s asked us to join their table.’
Kelda went rigid. ‘But what about your friends?’
Jeff grimaced. ‘Don’t be so naïve, Kelda. You get an invite like that from Angelo Rossetti and you grab it. He’s got influence like you wouldn’t believe in all sorts of powerful corners—’
‘I’m sorry. I have a dreadful headache.’ Kelda stood up, her face a mask of disdain. ‘You can call a cab for me if you like—’
Slowly he shook his head. ‘Kelda...’
She was immovable. Catch her falling for a trick like that? No way would she give Angelo the opportunity to put her down in front of an audience. He excelled in that direction. Time was when she wouldn’t have had the wit to forestall him...time was when she would have waded in with both fists metaphorically flying, unconcerned by the presence of others. Suddenly she was unbelievably grateful to be a mature twenty-four, rather than an insecure, dreadfully unhappy teenager, trying to act older than she was.
Jeff was furious. She was wryly amused at the way the prospect of making an influential contact had cleared his wits and turned him off his previous insistence that he loved her and wanted to marry her. Insisting that he go and find his friends, she went home alone.
Switching on the lights in the lounge, she kicked off her shoes and switched on her answering machine. Nothing. Once there would have been at least a couple of messages. Not now...she was yesterday’s news. The Iceberg, who drove innocent married men to suicide. Her apartment would sell for far less than she had paid for it. Her bank balance was at an all-time low. She had had insurance for accident or injury but nothing to cover what amounted to being virtually unemployable. The media had turned her into a figure of hate. There had been plenty of pictures of Danny’s tear-stained, plain little wife. The wife that Kelda had not even known existed, living in the country as she did with their two young children while Danny had lived the life of a free and easy single man in the city during the week.
He had actually told Kelda that he went home most weekends to his elderly parents! With a sudden choked sound between a laugh and a sob, Kelda covered her working face with two unsteady hands. How could she have been so stupid? And how could Danny have told so many lies? For the money, she thought cynically. The true story would have made surpassingly unexciting reading. Danny had made her look like a vicious bitch, who used men up like tissues and threw them away when she got bored. And the truth...really the truth was far more pathetic, she reflected.
Here she was all dressed up in the proverbial sexy little black dress which showed off her perfect curves and endless legs and what was she, she asked herself painfully as she stared at her reflection in one of the mirrored wardrobes in her bedroom. A complete fraud! Less of a woman certainly than Danny’s poor little wife, who loved him and had borne his children and who had apparently been willing to forgive and forget from the instant he landed in that hospital bed!
What did it feel like to love like that? She couldn’t imagine it...she had never loved, only once experienced the devastation of desire...and that she never ever allowed herself to remember. It had hurt so much and so badly; she had been savaged by her own vulnerability. Deep down inside the pain was still there like an indoor alarm system. A man put his arms around her and if she felt anything at all, the alarm went off. If he makes me want him...what then? And she would go cold, inside and out.
The intercom buzzed beside the front door. It was two in the morning. With a crease between her brows, she pressed the button.
‘Angelo here...’
Kelda’s stomach clenched fearfully. She leapt back a step.
‘Go away!’ she shouted.
She heard muffled speech as if he had turned to speak to someone else.
‘Calm down, cara,’ Angelo purred.
Her lashes blinking in bemusement at the smooth endearment, Kelda let rip again, something terrifyingly akin to hysteria audible even to herself in her shrieked response. ‘Leave me alone!’
She walked away from the front door, breathing fast, and backed into the lounge where she sat down on the sofa and wrapped both arms round herself tightly. She had had a lousy evening, a lousy week, a lousy month come to that. She was not in the mood for a fight with Angelo. Dimly she had known that it would come, but she hadn’t been prepared for it to happen so soon.
It was with utter disbelief that she heard her front door open. She lurched bolt upright in genuine fear, cursing herself for not using the chain.
‘Do you think I should call a doctor, Mr Rossetti?’ a vaguely familiar male voice enquired. It was the night security guard.
‘No...I don’t think that will be necessary now that I am here. Thank you again.’
‘It’s a pleasure to be of service, Mr Rossetti.’
She heard the crackle of money changing hands and she still couldn’t move or react. She couldn’t believe that Angelo had somehow contrived to break into her very secure apartment with the assistance of the guard.
Angelo appeared in the doorway.
‘If you don’t g-get out, I’ll call the police!’ Kelda screeched at him.
CHAPTER TWO
KELDA had blocked Angelo out in the foyer of the nightclub. She had seen him and yet she hadn’t seen him. Her eyes had skipped off him again double quick, discarding the imagery as if it burned. And it did...it did. Angelo was drop-dead gorgeous.
‘My, but you’re pretty,’ she had trilled the very first time she met him at the age of thirteen, derisively scanning the near-classic perfection of his golden features and the lean, lithe perfectly balanced body that went with it. Amazingly, Tomaso had laughed. Angelo hadn’t.
And then as now, Kelda had somehow found herself still staring, after the laughter had died away. He had the slashing cheekbones of a Tartar prince, long-lashed, brilliant dark eyes and a strong aristocratic nose. The whole effect was sexually devastating. She hadn’t known what made him so disturbing when she was thirteen...but she did now.
Angelo was sinfully, scorchingly sexy. It hit the unwary like a forcefield of raw energy. The very air seemed to sizzle round Angelo and when you reached a certain age, she acknowledged, that certain age when you often embarrassed yourself with your own thoughts, you would look at a male like Angelo and find yourself quite unable to avoid wondering what he was like in bed...
A little voice inside Kelda’s head cruelly reminded her that she was not entirely unaware of what Angelo was like in bed...and instantaneously a wave of mortified heat engulfed her translucent skin. It was hardly surprising that such painful imagery should visit her now. This was the first time they had stood face to face since that ghastly, unforgettable night over six years ago.
‘The police,’ Angelo reminded her with satire. ‘Weren’t you about to call them? Or have you decided that you really can’t afford the publicity?’
As Kelda’s teeth gritted, she made a swift recovery from her unfortunate loss of concentration. ‘How did you persuade the guard to let you in here?
‘I told him you were suicidal,’ Angelo drawled softly. ‘And you probably will be by the time I’m finished with you.’
‘Get out!’ Kelda gasped. ‘Get out of my apartment!’
‘It’s not going to be your apartment for much longer.’ Angelo cast her a veiled glance of cruel amusement. ‘In the current market, I suspect you are about to suffer from a severe negative equity problem...the sale price is not going to wipe out the mortgage debt—’
‘Damn, you to hell!’ Kelda interrupted tremulously. ‘I know what negative equity is. I’m not stupid—’
‘You just didn’t manage to pass a single exam in all those years of expensive education,’ he inserted.
‘I’m thick,’ Kelda responded through clenched teeth, refusing to rise to the bait.
‘Surpassingly so,’ Angelo agreed. ‘If you had listened to me, you could have had the modelling career and the education to fall back on. As it is, you have neither—’
‘I can’t believe you actually came here just to crow!’ Kelda blistered back.
‘I want you to understand your present position,’ Angelo breathed almost conversationally. ‘If you think that your future is on the skids now, you’re wrong. Life could become so much more painful... with a little help from me.’
The assurance hung there in the pulsing air between them and her blood ran cold in her veins. She cleared her throat. ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Surprised?’ Angelo sank down with innate grace into a wing-backed armchair and surveyed her with total cool. ‘I have no intention of allowing you to come between my father and your mother a second time...’
Her tongue snaked out to wet her dry lips. ‘A second time?’
‘You put considerable stress on their relationship six years ago—’
Rigid with incredulity, Kelda spat, ‘That’s a filthy thing to say!’
‘But true, and this time matters were proceeding smoothly until once again you intervened—’
Kelda was shaking. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
A satiric brow climbed. ‘Last night, Daisy asked my father to give her more time to consider his proposal, and we both know why, don’t we?’
Kelda thrust up her chin. ‘Naturally she wants to think it over very carefully. You can’t blame me for that. For goodness’ sake, she divorced him five years ago!’
‘You selfish little bitch,’ Angelo murmured with a softness that was all the more chilling than a rise in volume. ‘Daisy didn’t have any reservations until after she saw you yesterday!’
Kelda stiffened, colour flying into her cheeks. Derisive dark eyes raked over her, absorbing her sudden tension.
‘She’s afraid of losing her daughter, would you believe?’ Angelo drawled. ‘Family ties are very important to Daisy. What the hell did you say to her?’
‘Nothing that I wouldn’t say again!’ Kelda slung defiantly, although the ache of tears threatened behind her eyelids. ‘And if she is having second thoughts, don’t lay them all at my door. Your father wasn’t exactly Mr Fidelity the first time around and maybe she suspects that!’
Angelo’s striking bone-structure clenched hard. ‘I told you that there was absolutely no truth in those allegations years ago,’ he grated with savage emphasis. ‘And if you have repeated those same lies to Daisy, I’ll break every bone in your poisonously vindictive little body!’
Shocked by the depth of his anger, Kelda paled and drew back a step, but she was outraged by his treatment. No, she had no concrete proof to offer her mother on the subject of Tomaso’s adulterous affair but, the year before their parents had separated, Kelda had flung that allegation at Angelo.
And for a fraction of a second Angelo’s expression had one hundred percent convinced her that he knew exactly what she was talking about and that he was well aware of his father’s extra-marital relationship with another woman. Kelda had taken him by surprise and his complete denial of that relationship had come just that little bit too late to be plausible.
Angelo had known all right. And no doubt, Angelo hadn’t seen anything the slightest bit immoral in Tomaso’s behaviour. In his world, married men with mistresses were far from unusual. But that same knowledge would have destroyed her mother. Now, Kelda found herself wondering if indeed her mother had at least suspected Tomaso of having another woman. It was quite possible that Daisy would have kept that information to herself, rather than share it with her teenage daughter.
‘What did you tell her?’ Angelo demanded ferociously.
‘I told her nothing...not that that is any of your business,’ Kelda stressed.
‘When my father’s happiness is at stake, it is my business.’
‘I doubt if he’d thank you for your interference...and if my mother knew that you were here threatening me like this—’
‘Are you planning to tell her?’ Angelo had the stillness of a jungle cat about to spring.
Kelda wouldn’t have dreamt of telling Daisy, but she was furiously angry and she lifted a bare pale shoulder in a deliberately provocative gesture. ‘I might...on the other hand I might not,’ she said sweetly, incandescent green eyes flaming at him. ‘You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you, Angelo?’
He had gone satisfyingly white beneath his bronzed skin, his facial bones harshly set. Kelda smiled, widely, brilliantly, smugly. It really had been very foolish of Angelo to come here and threaten her. Astoundingly foolish...astoundingly out of character for so noted a tactician. One lean brown hand was curled into his fist and without warning he stood up again.
‘I came here tonight to appeal to your better nature—’
‘I haven’t got one, Angelo...not where you’re concerned,’ she said shakily but truthfully.
‘I could break you with one hand,’ Angelo savoured, eyes as treacherous as black ice on a wintry night, fixed to her with savage intensity. ‘And I will...I don’t mind waiting a little while...a very little while. And while I’m waiting, you’ll be waiting too...’
Icy fingers were walking up her unbelievably taut backbone. Angelo hated her, he really did hate her. And she knew why. It lay unspoken between them, untouched but raw. She shivered, no longer able to meet that hard, dark scrutiny. Had she gone overboard? Should she for once have kept her mouth shut? But why should she stand and take abuse from Angelo?
Her front door shut with a soft click. Shaking all over now, released from the spell he always cast, Kelda collapsed down into the nearest seat. She felt sick. He had called her poisonous, vindictive, and yet all she wanted was her mother’s happiness. Had it been selfish to make it clear that if Daisy married Tomaso again she was unlikely to see so much of her adored daughter?
But hadn’t that only been the truth? She couldn’t stand Angelo, and the savage hostility between them would be painfully obvious to both their parents. It would hardly add to connubial bliss, so naturally her contact with her mother would have to take place only when Angelo was elsewhere. Was that her fault? Was that so horribly selfish of her? Tears lashed her eyelids in a scorching surge. The memories were coming back...
Yes, she had bitterly resented her mother’s remarriage all those years ago. Had she had a chance to get to know Tomaso in advance, had she even known of his existence, maybe she would have reacted differently.
The sudden material change in their lifestyle hadn’t helped. Kelda had been parcelled off to an exclusive boarding school where her accent had provoked her classmates to pitying laughter. Her friends, her great-aunt, everything that had given her security had been wrenched away all at once. Instead of seeing more of her mother, she had actually seen less of her. Was it really any wonder that she had found it so hard to adapt?
The worst shock had been the discovery that, when their parents were abroad, Angelo was expected to take responsibility for her. Angelo ruled with an iron rod. When she was expelled from that first school for going ‘over the wall’ one night on a dare, it had been Angelo who took charge and reinstalled her in a convent day school with more rules and regulations than Holloway. It had been Angelo who took her apart when she failed her exams, Angelo who forced her to spend several fruitless vacations swotting with private tutors as bored and fed up as she was.
Tomaso had seemed to find his son’s assumption of authority amusing. When he was around, which had been rarely, he hadn’t interfered. Her mother had had a tendency to slip out of the room when Kelda appealed to her for back-up. Defying Angelo to her last gasp, Kelda had refused to work. She had frequently been in trouble at school but she hadn’t cared because for the first time in her life she had been really popular.
At sixteen, Angelo had trailed her screeching out of her first boyfriend’s car. She had sneaked out on the date, conscious that her mother would think that Josh at twenty-two was too old for her. The evening had been spent at a ten-pin bowling alley...nothing could have been more innocuous. Josh had parked his car a hundred yards before the entrance of the house on the way back. He had been on the brink of giving her a kiss...only on the brink, mind you, when all of a sudden the door was wrenched open and she was forcibly hauled out of Josh’s reach by Angelo.
‘Approach her again and I’ll break every one of your fingers,’ he had told Josh with a chilling smile. That had been the end of that, and the word had gone out on her locally. Josh had talked. Date Kelda and you tangled with Angelo Rossetti. Not surprisingly, it had destroyed her social life. Even her girlfriends had laughed and, not content with humiliating her, Angelo had told Tomaso and Daisy, ensuring that what little freedom she had had was even more severely curtailed. He had made Josh sound like a potential rapist.
Was it any wonder that she had hated Angelo? Even now, it still stuck in her throat that she had had to endure all those years of Angelo’s moralising lectures. What about his own reputation?
From birth, he had made headlines. When Tomaso and his far richer Brazilian wife had split up, Angelo had been the most fought-over little boy in the Western world. Tomaso had lost, but when his ex-wife died he had fought for custody again, this time against Angelo’s grandmother. Tomaso had won the final battle, but he hadn’t managed to subdue the explosive temperament that powered his son.
Angelo’s teenage exploits had shocked Europe. At the age of eighteen, he had inherited his late mother’s millions, and for several years afterwards he had run wild. He had lived the self-indulgent life of the super-rich playboy. His insatiable appetite for beautiful women had been notorious. His sex-life might have become considerably more discreet over the last decade but husbands still paled in Angelo’s vicinity.
As her mind threatened to leap forward to her eighteenth birthday, Kelda tensed and stopped her recollections stone dead in their tracks. She went to bed, suppressing all thoughts on the subject of Angelo’s threats...after all, what could he possibly do to her?
Dawn was lightening the sky beyond the curtains when she woke up, shivering and perspiring, an hour later. She had been wrestling with the duvet, probably crying out. The fear was still with her even in the light of day. The nightmare had been so real.
Getting up, she poured herself a glass of mineral water in the kitchen. On wobbly legs, she sank down at the breakfast-bar and stared into space. She had been allowed to throw a party to celebrate her eighteenth birthday. Owing to her exams, the party had been held several months after her actual birthday. There had been two events to celebrate. Her birthday and the end of her schooldays. Daisy and Tomaso had gone out for the evening but naturally Angelo had had no such tact. Strange to think that some hours after that wretched party had started she had been desperately, pathetically grateful that Angelo had stayed home.
Before the party had started, Angelo had staggered her by complimenting her on her appearance. Ignoring her dropped jaw and looking oddly self-conscious, he had then taken himself off to his suite of rooms on the far side of the house. He had just come home after a long period working abroad and it must have been almost a year since she had seen him. After that astonishing compliment, she had actually wondered if her stormy relationship with Angelo was miraculously about to improve with his acceptance that she was now an adult.
She had promised that there would be no alcohol at the party but most of her guests had brought wine. Reluctant to be the odd one out, Kelda had had a couple of glasses. Half a dozen boys had shown up on the doorstep midway through the evening. One of them had been the brother of one of her best friends, so she had let them in.
It had happened in the library. Some people had drifted in there and she had had to shoo them frantically out again because the party had been getting rowdy and there were far too many valuable objects in that room. She should have called for Angelo’s help then, because she had known that some people had had far too much to drink. But most of those people had been her friends.
She had been switching out a lamp when she was grabbed from behind. Having believed that she was alone in the room, she had screamed with fright. For a moment, she had assumed it was one of the boys she knew fooling around, but when she was dragged down on the carpet by bruising hands and a crude voice started telling her in the kind of language she had never heard before exactly what he was going to do to a ‘snobby little cow’ like her, she had been terrified out of her wits.
He had been so strong. Until that night she had never properly appreciated just how much stronger the average male was in comparison to a woman. She had gone wild, trying to kick, trying to claw with her nails while he yanked her dress up round her waist and bit horribly at the exposed slope of her breasts. He had hit her a stunning blow across the side of her head and then he had put his hand over her mouth, depriving her of the ability to scream. She’d been involved in a desperate struggle when the light went on and all of a sudden she was freed.
She had thrown up on the priceless Persian rug at Angelo’s feet. Her assailant had taken immediate flight. She had not seen his face and, strangely, Angelo had made no attempt to stop him. He had simply swung on his heel and walked back out of the room to tell everyone that the party was over. At that point, she had been too hysterical to realise that Angelo had not understood what he had interrupted.
Stumbling and crying, she had fled upstairs to her bedroom. She had stripped and got into the shower, needing to wash away the taint of the hands that had touched her. There had been bruises on her breasts and a lump the size of a small egg on the side of her head where she had been struck. The attack had terrified her and she had been sitting still shaking on the side of her bed when Angelo knocked and entered.
‘A promiscuous little tramp’, he had called her and, still suffering from the effects of shock, Kelda had looked back at him numbly, unable even to credit that he could think she had been writhing about on the library floor in the dark out of choice.
‘He attacked m-me!’ she had gasped. ‘He was trying to rape me...’
And she still remembered the way Angelo had looked at her. He had been so pale, so rigid with tension. She had recognised the seething anger he was struggling to restrain. It had glittered dangerously in his piercing dark eyes like a violent storm warning. For a foolish moment she had actually thought that he believed her and that he was angry with himself, angry that he had allowed her assailant to get away instead of calling the police to report an assault. But his next words had demolished that hope.
‘You disgust me,’ he had breathed in a savage undertone. ‘I will never forget what I saw tonight.’
He had not even given her a fair hearing, had not hesitated in choosing to believe the very worst of her. His response, following so closely upon the attack she had endured had reduced her to stricken sobs. It had been some time before she pulled herself together again, and then the anger and the fear of what he would tell her mother and Tomaso had assailed her.
She hadn’t thought about what she did next. Had she known what would happen, she would have stayed where she was, safe in her own room...but she had been distressed and frightened and helplessly determined that Angelo should hear her side of the story and believe her. She hadn’t stopped even to put her dressing-gown on.
She had knocked on Angelo’s door. Although she had been able to see faint light beneath the door, there had been no answer. She had crept in. The bedside lamp had cast a soft pool of light over Angelo. He had been asleep and about that point, her memory became confused between what she did recall and what, for a long time afterwards, she had refused to admit even to herself.
A white sheet had been riding dangerously low on one lean golden hip. He had been naked and she had been strangely hesitant about waking him. Indeed now, when she was of an age when she had learnt to be truthful at least with herself, she could admit that she had been mesmerised by his sheer masculine beauty. For the very first time, she had reacted to Angelo’s physical allure. He had not been Tomaso’s son, her hatefully arrogant stepbrother, who just so happened to be very good-looking. No, it had been much more personal, much more intimate than that, and the sensations Angelo had aroused in her had been painfully new to her experience.
He had opened his eyes, pools of passionate gold. He had not appeared to be still half asleep. But perhaps he had been. Something had flamed in that golden gaze that raked over her while she had hovered there in stupid paralysis and he had reached up with two very determined hands and pulled her down on to that bed with him.
‘Carissima...bella mia,’ he had breathed passionately against her lips in welcome, suggesting that he had inexplicably mistaken her for someone else. He could not possibly have been addressing those endearments to Kelda.
‘Angelo!’ she had gasped incredulously before he silenced her with the heat of his mouth.
It had not been to her credit that she had neither screamed nor raised a finger to fight him off. But the terrible truth was that she had had no thought of denying him. In fact she could not recall a single thought of anything passing through her blitzed mind during those fevered few minutes.
The explosion of desire, of need, of want had been instantaneous. The stab of his tongue into the moist interior of her mouth had drowned her in waves of intense physical pleasure. She had been reduced to mindless compliance within seconds. Angelo kissed with electrifying eroticism. She had wrapped her arms round him with shameless abandonment and the spell had only been broken when a thunderous male voice rudely interrupted them.
‘You set me up!’ Angelo had hissed incomprehensibly, staring down at her with cold, embittered fury.
Even six years after the event, Kelda still got hot and cold reliving that hideous moment when Angelo had released her and she had dazedly focused on Tomaso standing at the foot of the bed. Ignoring her, Tomaso had been ranting at his son in staccato Italian. Normally a mild-mannered man, Angelo’s father had been shocked and completely enraged by the scene he had interrupted.
But then, oddly enough, Tomaso had briefly appeared to calm down. He had even managed a rather grim smile as he said something very clipped. Whatever Angelo had said in response had wiped that smile right back off his face again and two seconds later Tomaso had been ripping off his own jacket, draping it round Kelda’s cowering shoulders and practically trailing her out of the room while throwing words that had sounded positively violent over his shoulder at his son. His precious, much beloved son...
Daisy had come to her bedroom. Kelda had striven to explain the inexplicable but tears had overwhelmed her. ‘Just put it behind you, darling,’ her mother had whispered, in sympathetic tears herself. ‘I know you must feel very foolish but at your age one does do foolish things...that’s a fact of life...and it’s so hard to control your feelings but you’ll get over him...’
Her mother had assumed that she had thrown herself at Angelo’s head because she was infatuated with him, and Kelda had been too deeply ashamed of her behaviour and too desperately confused to protest. She hated Angelo and yet when he had touched her she had gone up in flames. It had not been the sort of self-discovery she could have shared with her mother.
Angelo had read her appearance by the side of his bed as a sexual invitation. Why he should have done so and why he should have acted on such an invitation, she had never understood. Angelo had never given her the remotest hint that he considered her even passably attractive. Could he really have mistaken her for another woman? She found that explanation unlikely. So why had he touched her? To humiliate...to hurt...and when had he planned to stop?
The next morning, Angelo had been gone. He had had an apartment in London. Her stepfather had heavily assured her that he attached absolutely no blame to her. She was innocent of all fault, he had stressed, making her feel guiltier than ever. She had felt so dreadful for causing a rift between father and son. When she had fought her embarrassment enough to mumble, ‘Angelo didn’t mean to—’ Tomaso had grimly silenced her with the reminder that Angelo was eight years older.
Her mother had said later, ‘I can’t reason with Tomaso. He’s very strict about some things and even though I assured him that it was only a few kisses, he won’t listen to me. He said that he can no longer trust Angelo with you and he’s very angry with him. I think he told Angelo to get out and that must have been devastating for both of them. Until now, they were so close...’
Angelo had accused her of setting him up. How, she had no idea, had never wanted to know, because frankly the way things had turned out afterwards she might as well have set him up. His father had told him to leave and she had been relieved of all responsibility for the episode. A couple of days later, she had travelled over to France with a girlfriend and her family for a month’s holiday and while she had been away she had received a letter from her mother, telling her that she was separating from Tomaso.
Had that been her fault? She was much inclined to say no. In the months coming up to that fatal night, she had noticed that Daisy was far from her sunny self. There had been something wrong in that relationship then, some tension that had had nothing to do with what had later happened between Angelo and her.
Dear lord, she suddenly reflected, why had her mother had to get involved with Tomaso Rossetti again? And the second she thought that, she despised herself. How could she be so selfish? Had Tim been right to suggest that her hostility towards the idea of Tomaso and Daisy remarrying related more to her own hatred of Angelo than to any genuine concern for her mother’s future happiness?
Mid-morning the next day, she received a call from Ella Donaldson, who ran the modelling agency she had been with since she was eighteen. ‘I’ve got a last-minute booking for you...if you’re not too proud to take it,’ she announced.
Kelda bit at her lower lip, gathering that the assignment was downmarket and less lucrative than what had once been offered to her.
Ella didn’t wait for her reply. ‘A holiday brochure. A very upmarket company, mind you...St Saviour Villas. Mr St Saviour himself strolled in here not half an hour ago and made a personal request for you, and let me remind you,’ Ella said drily, ‘right now, personal requests for you are like snow in high summer.’
‘I do appreciate that,’ Kelda put in tightly. Her interview with Ella Donaldson a month ago had been very unpleasant. A tough, astute businesswoman, Ella didn’t give two hoots about whether or not Danny Philips had been lying. Her sole angle had been Kelda’s stupidity in leaving herself open to such damaging publicity. The agency had lost a big commission when Kelda was dropped from the Fantasy campaign.
‘Good. Mr St Saviour thinks you’re a very classy looking lady...’ Ella told her. ‘But he did beat me down on your usual fee—’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone else must have dropped out last minute,’ Ella asserted. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t be wanting you airborne by tomorrow afternoon—’
Kelda frowned. ‘That soon?’
‘You’re free until Monday,’ Ella reminded her. ‘The shoot is in Italy...you should be home by Saturday. They’re using a photographer I’ve never heard of but you can’t afford to quibble. The other models are Italian.’
Kelda replaced the phone after Ella had finished advancing flight details. Italy...tomorrow. She’d have gone for the cost of the flight, she acknowledged inwardly, just to get away for a while. The next morning, she tried to phone her mother but Daisy was out. She called Tim at work instead and told him where she would be.
* * *
It was late when her flight landed at Pisa. Her name was called out over the public address system and she was greeted at the desk by a morose little man, who merely verified her identity and his own before sweeping up her case and leaving her to follow him out to the taxi.
Their destination was a villa complex in the La Magra Valley, somewhat off the tourist track as befitted an exclusive development. Kelda had never been to Tuscany before in the past, she had had assignments in both Rome and Milan but, tightly scheduled as her timetable had been then, she had never had the opportunity to explore. Her expressive mouth tightened ruefully. It was a little late to wish that she had taken more time off at the height of her popularity. Now she no longer had the luxury of choice. She would have to take any work that came her way just to survive.
It was too dark for her to appreciate the scenery and she rested back her head and dozed, waking up with a start when the door beside her opened and cooler air brushed her face.
Her driver, surely the most unusually silent Italian male she had ever met, already had her case unloaded. Climbing out, Kelda stared up at the dim outline of what looked like a medieval wall towering above them. A huge studded oak door was set into the wall. Kelda frowned. The door looked more like it belonged to a convent than a hotel. Her driver tugged the old-fashioned bell and headed back to his car.
An old woman appeared in the dark doorway.
‘Signorina Wyatt,’ Kelda introduced herself.
‘Sorda.’ The woman smiled and touched one ear and shrugged. Then she pointed to herself and said, ‘Stella.’
Did she mean that she was deaf? Grabbing her case up, Kelda followed her across a vast unlit courtyard. A huge building loomed on three sides. Her companion ushered her into a big tiled hall that looked mercifully more welcoming than what she had so far seen. No reception desk though...and it was so silent.
As she climbed a winding stone stair in the older woman’s wake, she smiled to herself. For sheer character, this place beat all the luxury hotels she had ever stayed in! As for the silence, this was not high season and they were off the beaten track. It was also pretty late and the other models were undoubtedly in bed, preparing themselves for the shoot at some ungodly hour of the morning.
Stella showed her into a panelled room of such impressive antiquity and grandeur that Kelda hesitated on the threshold. A giant four-poster bed, festooned with fringed damask hangings, dominated the room. A door in the panelling was spread wide to display a bathroom of reassuringly modern fixtures. French-style windows opened out on to a stone balcony, furnished with a lounger and several urns of blossoming flowers.
The bathroom was hung with fresh fleecy towels, furnished with soap and an array of toiletries such as were the norm in any top-flight hotel. The sight was indefinably reassuring. Kelda found herself looking for the list of rules that every hotel had somewhere and, while she was glancing behind the bathroom door, Stella disappeared.
With a rueful laugh, Kelda frowned at the closed bedroom door through which Stella had wafted herself at supersonic, silent speed, and then her attention fell on the tray of hot coffee and sandwiches sitting on a cabinet beside the bed.
She didn’t like to drink coffee last thing at night and she looked for a phone. There wasn’t one. She went to the door and then hung back. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go demanding mineral water to drink at this hour if Stella was the only member of staff on duty.
Undressing, she treated herself to a quick shower to freshen up. With a sigh, she allowed herself one sandwich and two sips of coffee before climbing into the gloriously comfortable bed. She thought it funny that nobody from the crew had come to greet her, not even the photographer, keen to issue instructions for the shoot in the morning. Maybe a taste of fame had made her too self-important, she scolded herself. And she certainly couldn’t complain about the standard of accommodation allotted to her. Within minutes of switching out the light, she was fast asleep.
* * *
‘Buon giorno, signorina...’
‘Buon whatever,’ Kelda mumbled, stretching sleepily and opening her eyes as the curtains were pulled back, flooding the dark room with brilliant sunshine. As she sat up, she registered that the voice had been male and hurriedly hauled the sheet higher, thinking that if someone had to come into her room when she was asleep, she would have infinitely preferred a maid to a waiter.
‘Giorno,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness.
And a blasted irritating waiter come to that, set on educating her, she thought grumpily or maybe what was really irritating her was the fact that the unfortunate man sounded horrendously like Angelo. One of those growlingly sexy accents all Italian males were probably born with. Like a cut-throat razor wrapped up in smooth black velvet, contriving to be both riveting and unnerving simultaneously.
She shaded her eyes to focus on the offender and nearly dropped the sheet. Her emerald-green eyes incandescent with disbelief, she gasped, ‘A-Angelo?’
CHAPTER THREE
‘WELCOME to my lair in Tuscany.’ Angelo uncoiled himself from his inexpressibly relaxed lounging stance against the French windows he had thrown wide and strolled to the foot of the bed.
Thinking she was in some impossibly realistic nightmare, Kelda didn’t bother about proudly holding her ground. She jack-knifed back against the carved wooden headboard and simply gaped at the virile vision of masculinity her crazy mind had conjured up out of thin air. He looked good even in a nightmare, but for some reason he was dressed for riding. Long black boots, thigh-hugging breeches of positively indecently faithful fit and a black cotton sweater that lent him a devilish aspect. He wasn’t real...he absolutely wasn’t real, and if she shut her eyes again he would go away. She did so.
‘Clearly you don’t quite function at the speed of light when you wake up alone,’ Angelo drawled in a tone that sent hideously responsive tremors down her rigid spine. ‘I can change that. And from where I’m standing I’m very well satisfied. You look really hot mistress material. I thought you might look a little worn at this hour without the cosmetic tricks of the trade, cara...’
Kelda’s long lashes swept up like fans. She swallowed hard.
Angelo was leaning in a very familiar way on the footboard, lustrous golden eyes wandering intently over every exposed inch of flesh above the sheet. ‘All those lovers...all those different beds,’ he extended. ‘I was expecting to be just a tiny bit disappointed... but I’m not. You look all dewy and untouched...Madre di Dio, how do you do it? Not, you’ll understand, that I am about to complain.’
Angelo...hot mistress material. Neither subject dovetailed. ‘What are you d-doing in my hotel room?’ she suddenly found the voice to demand explosively. ‘How did you know that I would be here?’
‘Ah, she speaks...shame,’ Angelo sighed with mock regret. ‘Now where do I start? This is not a hotel. It’s a private house. It belongs to me. I came upon it three years ago when I was investing in Max’s villa development. It was going to rack and ruin then but it was so totally private, I had to have it—’
‘Your house?’ Kelda repeated incredulously. ‘This is your house? What the hell am I staying here for?’
‘I brought you here,’ Angelo said softly. ‘It was astonishingly easy. Max St Saviour is a business acquaintance. He’s very happily married and prone to romantic delusions. I had no problem persuading him to approach the Donaldson Agency on my behalf. He thought he was playing Cupid. Did you like the touch about the reduced fee? Now Max didn’t like that bit but I felt it added a dash of authenticity...’
A slow, deep flush of almost uncontrollable rage was reddening Kelda’s complexion. She couldn’t even begin to believe what she was hearing, but there was something frighteningly sincere about the hard dark onslaught of Angelo’s gaze. ‘Are you telling me that there is no assignment...I don’t believe you!’ she snapped.
‘Max couldn’t afford you,’ Angelo said with dulcet emphasis. ‘But I can, and I don’t need to know one end of a camera from another to know exactly what to do with you.’
Kelda’s head was swimming with a mess of utterly bewildered thoughts. There was no assignment? Then why bring her here? Why would Angelo lure her to Tuscany? Why was Angelo surveying her as if she was a cream cake and he was starving for a bite to eat? Angelo had never looked at her like that before...and all the double entendres...what on earth was going on? Had Angelo gone insane? This was not Angelo as she knew him. This was another Angelo entirely.
‘You really are the most spectacularly beautiful creature,’ Angelo murmured in a thickened undertone. ‘And if you stay in that bed much longer, I’m likely to join you.’
Kelda wrenched the sheet so high it came adrift from the foot of the mattress and exposed her bare feet, but she didn’t notice. She couldn’t take her eyes off Angelo’s darkly handsome features. ‘W-what are you talking about?’ she demanded in a near shriek. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
Angelo winced at the ear-splitting decibels. ‘I wish I had volume control on your voice.’
‘Y-you brought me here...all the way to Italy for an assignment that doesn’t exist,’ she recounted, spitting out each work with clarity. ‘What I want to know is why?’
‘I have this feeling that our mutual parents will get on much more happily with you out of the way,’ Angelo drawled. ‘I could quite happily have knocked you on the head and dragged you out of your apartment by the hair forty-eight hours ago. But that would have been foolish. And, cara, I am very rarely foolish—’
‘You are right out of your tiny mind!’ she launched at him in seething bewilderment.
‘No. If you had simply disappeared, questions would have been asked,’ he pointed out speciously. ‘This way you’re here on a perfectly respectable alibi—’
‘But I won’t be here for long! And you’re going to pay for this!’ Kelda spat.
‘I have your passport, your money and your credit cards...not much use, those, are they?’ Angelo remarked silkily. ‘You’re right up to your limit on all of them.’
‘You have my passport...how do you know I’m up to my limit?’ she suddenly heard herself demanding.
‘I am completely conversant with your financial status,’ Angelo admitted unashamedly. ‘And I have to say, in my capacity as a banker, how did you get yourself in such a mess? You are in debt to the tune of thousands!’
Abruptly she turned her head away, utterly humiliated that Angelo of all people should know such things. She had been foolish with her money when she’d first started earning. But when Daisy had divorced Tomaso and had, inconceivably, refused to accept any alimony from him, Kelda had been determined to buy her mother a decent home to live in again.
She had bought Daisy a lovely little cottage not too far from London. It had not come cheap. She had sent her mother off on holiday several times. She had settled her brother’s debts times without number, bought expensive presents for her family and friends. Her apartment had been the only major item she had ever bought for herself. It had never occurred to her that the gravy-train of her high income could come to a sudden frightening halt. But it had and she just hadn’t been prepared for it.
‘You really do need a rich patron, who can settle your debts and pick up the tab for your expensive tastes...someone who would never question the bills,’ Angelo murmured with the soft, smooth delivery of a devil’s advocate. ‘I’m very generous with my lovers...I’ve never had a mistress before...you see, strange as it may seem to you cara...I’ve never had to buy a woman before. But the more I look at you in that bed and contemplate total possession and title, the more I see your investment potential...’
A steel band of tension was throbbing unbearably round her temples and it tightened another painful notch every time Angelo spoke. Perhaps she was very, very stupid but she just couldn’t grasp why Angelo was behaving the way he was. ‘I don’t kn-know you like this,’ she confided without meaning to.
Angelo vented a grim laugh that ironically made her feel much more at home with him. ‘How could you? Much has changed over the past six years. Does it surprise you to learn that I deeply resented being forced to take responsibility for you when you became my stepsister?’
‘Nobody asked you to take responsibility for me!’ Kelda slung at him.
Angelo dealt her an assessing glance. ‘But there was nobody else to do it. Our parents were abroad so much. And I know for a fact that my father was more than happy to leave you to me,’ he continued drily. ‘Daisy was such an adoring mother that he didn’t want to get into trouble with her for disciplining you. And he would have done, make no mistake. Daisy’s very protective of you. So I got landed with the job nobody else would touch!’
‘How dare you say that?’ Kelda threw at him fierily. ‘How dare you?’
‘And you were the most totally obnoxious teenager,’ Angelo volunteered. ‘You put me off having children for life.’
‘If that means that there’ll never be a junior edition of you running about making someone’s life hell, I’m delighted to hear it!’ But although the ready words flowed from her tongue, Kelda was dismayed to realise that she was deeply and genuinely hurt by what he had thrown at her. And she couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t she always known that Angelo hated her?
The difference was, she appreciated, that it had never once crossed her mind to wonder how Angelo felt about having the burden of a teenager thrust on him. She had not considered that aspect of those years before, had dimly imagined that Angelo had taken over simply to be officious and unpleasant. And why hadn’t she thought more deeply...because to have reflected more deeply would have forced her to acknowledge the truth of what Angelo had said. Daisy and Tomaso had been abroad a great deal and Tim had been a quiet, self-contained boy, quite content to be sent off to boarding school and given plenty of pocket money in return for a lack of personal attention.
‘I was only twenty-one,’ Angelo pointed out, having ignored her childish response. ‘And you were out of control. Between them your mother and your sweet old great-aunt had spoilt you rotten. Daisy, quite frankly, couldn’t cope with you. You are very different from her in temperament.’
Kelda could feel tears burning behind her lowered eyelids. She had never hated Angelo so much and yet simultaneously, she had never felt so savaged. She found herself remembering the loneliness of those years and discovered that inexplicably, deep down inside, she must once have had the vague conviction that to take charge of her in the first place, Angelo must have had some slight affection for her. How she could have thought that and yet believed that he hated her at the same time was no more clear to her than anything else since she had arrived in Tuscany.
‘I was more like your father than your stepbrother,’ Angelo mused with an oddly chilling quality. ‘You don’t know me like this because in the past six years you have become an adult and I can now treat you as one. You wouldn’t believe the pleasure that that freedom gives me.’
Kelda pressed both hands against her pale cheeks and forced herself to look at him over her straining fingers. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she demanded in a shaken tone.
‘Why?’ Glittering dark eyes slid over the wild tangle of red-gold hair veiling her shoulders in a torrent of curls and lingered on the exquisite perfection of the triangular face pointed at him. ‘Are you really that dumb? Six years ago you virtually destroyed my relationship with my father—’
‘I...I didn’t mean to—’ Kelda was shocked and unprepared for the directness of that attack.
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