Mistress Bought and Paid For

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Lydia shook her head in urgent disagreement. ‘The supposed friend is talking nonsense.’

‘I don’t think so…’

‘Of course it’s nonsense. If my mother owned another house, I’d have known about it. There’s been a misunderstanding.’ Of that fact Lydia had no doubt. After all, had there been a second property it would have been sold to ease her parent’s cash-flow problems, and Virginia would never have made the appalling mistake of spending money that did not belong to her.

‘We may not have established the location of that house yet, but we are well on our way to doing so. I think we’ll have more answers when your mother is in a position to assist us with our enquiries.’

Lydia had lost colour. She was dismayed by the fact that the investigation now seemed to be changing course to place new emphasis on her mother’s role. ‘But I’ve told you before that she has nothing to do with this.’

‘I believe that your mother has everything to do with this. You were unable to tell me what you had spent the missing money on.’ The inspector settled a clutch of plastic evidence bags on the table between them. ‘I have a series of cheques that were drawn on the charity account and signed by both you and your mother. One is made out for almost fifty thousand pounds and was used to purchase a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The salesman remembers the buyer well. Where is that vehicle now, Miss Powell?’

Lydia was aghast at the question. Virginia had changed her car before she disappeared? And for a larger, more expensive model? She was disconcerted by the information, but steady in her determination to protect the older woman from the consequences of her crime. ‘I don’t know…’

‘All of the cheques we have retrieved so far relate solely to purchases made by Virginia Carlton, or payments made by her to settle personal debts. When did you sign those cheques?’ the inspector queried, but did not wait for her to respond. ‘It must’ve been difficult for you to deal with the day-to-day expenses of the charity fashion show when you and your mother lived so far apart. I gather the financial arrangements were left in her hands as she was on the spot. Did you pre-sign cheques for her convenience?’

‘No—she did that for me,’ Lydia insisted, a tad desperately.

The older man sighed. ‘If you persist with this stance you will in all likelihood be charged with aiding and abetting your mother to defraud the Happy Holidays charity. All the current evidence, up to and including her careful disappearance, suggests that she was the prime instigator of the theft.’

‘No—no, she wasn’t!’ Lydia exclaimed, her hands twisting together on her lap.

‘And telling silly tales is unlikely to convince me, or any judge, to the contrary,’ he spelt out impatiently. ‘Stop wasting our time, Miss Powell. In due course your mother will be found and prosecuted. There is nothing you can do to alter that. I suggest that you go home now and think over your position very carefully.’

Lydia was on the brink of tears of frustration and fear when she left the police station. How could she have made such a mess of things? She had failed to convince the police that she was the culprit, and her mother was about to be hunted down to her hideaway—wherever that was—and dragged off to court regardless. Of only one thing was Lydia certain, and that was that her frightened parent could not possibly be hiding out in some palace with a pool on the French Riviera!

Although Lydia had been shattered when she’d realised what her mother had done, she had understood how desperate Virgina must have been. In the spring, Lydia had reluctantly agreed to lend her name to the charity fashion show that Virginia had set her heart on staging, and had contacted several other models. It had been around that time too that Dennis had cornered Lydia to ask her for money.

Lydia had been astonished, because her stepfather was well aware that the failure of the nightclub had left her penniless.

‘But you know I don’t have anything left.’

‘Oh, come on. I wasn’t born yesterday.’ His heavy face had been taut with fake joviality. ‘You must have at least one secret account—a cash reserve you keep quiet. Tell me about it—I won’t let on to the tax man!’

Lydia raised a brow at such wishful thinking. ‘If only…’

‘I don’t believe you…you’ve got to be holding out on me. I’ve been offered a terrific opportunity but I’m short of capital.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t help.’

Angry resentment flashed in his pale blue eyes. ‘Not even for your mother’s sake?’

Lydia winced. ‘I can’t give you what I don’t have.’

‘Then isn’t it about time you stopped playing at being a garden labourer and got back to the catwalk, where you belong?’ Dennis demanded accusingly. ‘You could cover the losses we made on the club in a couple of months!’

It had worried her that her stepfather should still be expecting her to provide him with cash when he should have been capable of earning his own healthy crust. It had not occurred to her, though, that anything could be seriously amiss. But, amidst conflicting stories from the Happy Holidays charity director about payments that hadn’t arrived and a cheque that had bounced, and her mother’s differing explanations for those same issues, Lydia had finally travelled to Cheltenham to visit. There she had been amazed to discover that Virginia had already sold the home that her daughter had purchased for her and moved into a hotel.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ Lydia had asked, when her pretty blonde mother had opened the door of her hotel room. ‘Why have you sold the house?’

The older woman treated her to an embittered appraisal. ‘I can’t believe you have the nerve to ask. After all, you’re the one responsible for wrecking my marriage!’

Lydia gasped. ‘How? What have I done?’

‘You put my husband out of work. Now, not surprisingly—because we’ve had dreadful financial worries and I had to sell the house—Dennis has left me for another woman! Do you have any idea how I feel?’

Lydia experienced such a fierce jolt of sympathy for her deserted mother that she attempted to hug her.

‘For goodness’ sake, Lydia…Oh, all right.’ Stiffly, Virginia submitted to being comforted.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ Lydia whispered with pained sincerity.

‘Well, it’s too late for sorry now, isn’t it? If you’d gone back to modelling when we asked you, I’d still have a husband and a house I could afford to live in!’

Lydia felt horribly guilty—because she had put herself first when she’d refused to abandon her garden design course. Her heart ached for her mother, who adored her second husband. Having accepted Virginia’s love and trust, Dennis had hurt and humiliated her. Lydia understood exactly how that felt, because it was barely eighteen months since she’d suffered the agony of a similar rejection at the hands of Cristiano. Fortunately for her, passionate love had turned to energising hate while she tormented herself for her own gullibility.

‘What am I going to do?’ Virginia suddenly sobbed. ‘I’m so scared!’

For an instant Lydia was taken aback by the unfamiliar sight of her mother crying, but she was quick to offer reassurance. ‘It’s going to be all right. Whatever happens, I’m here, and together we can get through this.’

‘But I’m in so much trouble,’ the older woman had confided tremulously, glancing up with a sidewise flicker of her eyes at her daughter. ‘You have no idea how much…’

Her anxious thoughts sinking back to the present, Lydia walked home from the police station through the park. The steady rain would serve to conceal the tears on her cheeks, she thought wretchedly. She felt such a failure. She could not help Virginia if the police refused to believe her story. Why was it that she always ended up letting her mother down? And how many times had she already cost Virginia the man she loved? Had there been some curse put on her at birth?

First there had been Lydia’s father, who would never have gone sailing in that wretched little boat had it not been for the pleas of his more adventurous daughter. It was true that it had been a terrible accident which nobody could have foreseen, but that did not alter the appalling consequences.

Then there had been Rick, Virginia’s boyfriend when Lydia was a teenager. Lydia shuddered when she recalled the ugly ending of that relationship, and the bitter recriminations that had come her way. Whether she liked it or not, she had been the cause of that break-up too, and once again her mother had ended up heartbroken and alone.

With such a history behind them, Lydia had been delighted when Virginia had met Dennis Carlton and found happiness again. Although Lydia had disliked her stepfather, she had been content to pretend otherwise for her mother’s sake. If only her mother had foreseen that in her desperation to keep her husband, and lessen the strain on their marriage, she would feel that her only option was to steal to pay the bills.

When Virginia had tearfully confessed the whole sorry tale, Lydia had immediately promised to protect her. Virginia had been terrified, and so grateful. Recalling the rare warmth that her mother had shown her that day, Lydia felt her eyes overflow afresh. Virginia would never be able to cope with the shame of a legal trial or the rigours of prison life.

Overnight, however, it seemed that the balance of power had changed. Lydia’s readiness to take the blame for the stolen cash was no longer enough to save her mother’s skin. The police were intent on finding Virginia, and there was now only one way that Lydia could keep her pledge to get the older woman off the hook.

Soaked to the skin and numb with cold, Lydia leant back against the worn front door of her home and closed it behind her. She lifted Cristiano’s business card. If he repaid the missing money, the charges would be dropped and her mother would be able to come home again. Virginia would be safe—and wasn’t that all that truly mattered?

She chose to text rather than phone Cristiano, because she could not bear to make a surrender speech.

You’ve got me if you want me.

CHAPTER THREE

WITHIN minutes, Lydia’s phone rang.

‘Lia…’ Cristiano murmured softly, sounding out and savouring every syllable.

‘It’s Lydia. Lia was the name the modelling agency insisted I use, and I never liked it,’ she told him flatly, while her heart beat very fast somewhere in the region of her throat. ‘I need you to pay back the money quickly, so that the charity will withdraw their charges. Can you do that?’

‘It’s not a problem. Are the police behind your sudden change of heart?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘No. Winning is all,’ Cristiano conceded without hesitation. ‘But we can’t reach agreement before we’ve ironed out the finer details.’

Blinking back the hot tears of humiliation washing her eyes, Lydia clutched the phone as though she was hanging off the edge of a cliff. ‘That’s not what you said earlier today!’

‘You should have been more receptive. The necessary formalities can be dealt with tomorrow. You’ll have to come to London.’

‘What formalities? Now you’re making all sorts of conditions!’ she condemned, threading shaking fingers through the hair tumbling over her damp brow. What on earth did he mean by formalities?

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s not necessary. You can trust me,’ she framed between clenched teeth, frightened that if he did not speedily repay the stolen money her mother would be tracked down and arrested.

At the other end of the phone, a sardonic smile of disbelief slowly curved Cristiano’s mouth. She was priceless! This was the woman who, while staying below his roof as his latest squeeze, had eloped with another man. This was also the woman who stood accused of defrauding a charity of almost a quarter of a million pounds. Furthermore, loath as he was to recall the fact—for he was famous for his astute intelligence—when he had first known her he had actually been very impressed by that sweet-little-country-girl act of hers. She had been a natural at pretending to be what she was not. If he’d been a tree-hugging, weepy type of guy he would have got all choked up when she walked barefoot through the grass in his roof garden and confided that every day she was in the city she pined for the countryside. She was a real box of tricks, Cristiano reflected grimly.

‘I’ll arrange for you to be picked up and flown to London early tomorrow. Pack light. I’ll be buying you new clothes. And lock up well and say your goodbyes locally,’ Cristiano advised in the same even tone. ‘If we achieve agreement, you won’t be returning for some time.’

Bright blue eyes wide, Lydia shook her head. ‘Whatever happens, I have to come back here. I rent this place. I’ll need to sort that out, organise storage—’

‘My staff will take care of the boring stuff for you.’

‘But I have relatives here…and if I’m going away, I want to see them before I leave.’

‘I’ll give you one week after tomorrow, and that’s it.’

Lydia sucked in a sustaining breath. The entire dialogue felt unreal to her. If she told him how much she hated him he would naturally want to know why. After all, on the face of it, she had walked out on him for another man. As far as Cristiano was concerned she had no particular reason to dislike him. He, on the other hand, would feel he had ample justification for despising her.

‘I can’t believe that this is what you want…you have to hate me,’ Lydia reasoned tautly.

‘How I feel is my business.’

His cool intonation made Lydia feel as cold as though a chip of ice had lodged in her tummy. She shivered in her damp clothes. He wanted revenge. What else could he want? When she had walked out of his superb country house with Mort Stevens, she had quite deliberately set out to make a fool of him. Now it seemed payback time had arrived.

At seven the next morning she was collected and driven to a private airfield several miles outside town. There she boarded a helicopter ornamented with the blue and gold logo of the Andreotti empire. A couple of hours later, she was being escorted from the helipad located on the roof of a contemporary glass and steel office block in London and ushered straight into a large empty office on its top floor. She smoothed down a ruck in the sleeve of the fitted black jacket she had teamed with a white T-shirt and a braided skirt.

‘Mr Andreotti is in a meeting,’ she was informed by a clean-cut young man in a business suit.

When his PA slipped back in with a shaken nod of confirmation, and rather pink about the ears, Cristiano knew Lydia had arrived and was exercising her usual stunning effect on the male sex. He was very busy. She would have to wait. Of course, she was only on time because he had had charge of her travelling arrangements, he mused, recalling how her unpunctuality had once infuriated him. He did not like to be kept waiting. Even on their first dinner date she had made a late showing. On arrival, however, she had electrified the restaurant with her beauty, approaching him with a wide, engaging smile of apology in a manner that had magically dispelled his exasperation.

In the act of listening to his whiz-kid executives trade facts and figures with a speed and precision which had never before failed to hold the attention of his mathematical mind, Cristiano found himself wondering what Lydia would be wearing. A split second later he sprang upright, called a break, and strode out of the boardroom into the adjoining office.

Sunlight glistening over her silvery fair hair, which she had confined with a clip, Lydia turned from the window that stretched the entire length of one wall. Her face, with its wide cheekbones and ripe pink mouth, was dominated by eyes as bright a blue as a midsummer sky. She focused on Cristiano’s sudden entry, her heart thudding like crazy. Her tension rose as though a pressure gauge had been turned up too high. Beneath the current of apprehension lurked an edge of excitement that shocked her. When she had been seeing him, she had often found her responses to him so strong they scared her, and the reminder of that reality was unwelcome.

Sheathed in a stylish business suit that outlined his broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, lean legs in the finest mohair and silk blend wool, Cristiano looked spectacular. He was fantastically handsome, always superbly dressed and immaculate, always intimidating. His dark eyes glinted gold in the bright light. He really did have the most beautiful eyes, she acknowledged grudgingly, and a tiny pulse began to flicker below her collarbone.

The silence pounded and she couldn’t bear it. Tossing back her head, so that a few silver-gilt strands of hair fell free of the clip, she lifted her chin. ‘So here I am…as ordered.’

‘Yes,’ Cristiano rasped softly. ‘It feels good to have you here.’

She had hoped to discomfit him with her comment, but he betrayed no unease whatsoever. Indeed, something in his rich, dark intonation sent the blood climbing below her fair skin. She had the horrendous suspicion that he was enjoying the situation. Furthermore, he was watching her with the incisive attention of a hunting hawk. When that narrowed golden gaze travelled over her, she was suddenly disturbingly aware of every pulse point in her body. Cupped in a fine cotton bra, her breasts stirred beneath her T-shirt, the tender peaks swelling.

‘I can’t believe you really mean to go through with this!’ she told him breathlessly.

A sinfully attractive smile slashed his well-shaped masculine mouth. ‘Every time I look at you I know I’m going to go through with it.’

‘But it doesn’t make sense—’

‘Makes perfect sense to me, bella mia,’ Cristiano confided. ‘I want you—’

‘But I don’t want you, or this, and I can’t pretend otherwise!’ she blistered back at him.

His shimmering gaze intent, Cristiano strolled closer. ‘If I believed that, you wouldn’t be here.’

‘B-believe it!’ she snapped, infuriated by the way she tripped over the word, standing her ground with difficulty, for her every defence mechanism was trying to drive her into retreat.

‘Since I’m the only rescue option you’ve got, shouldn’t you be trying to persuade me that you’re exactly what I want and need?’

He was so glaringly right on that score that she was seized by a combustible mix of fear and annoyance. He was her only hope. Suppose he took offence? Suppose he changed his mind? Where would her mother be then?

‘Lydia…’

‘What…?’

Cristiano was so close that she could have stretched out an arm and touched him, so close that she was alarmingly conscious of his sheer height and breadth. Her concentration was gone. There was the faintest tang of some exotic masculine cologne in the air and her heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe.

Cristiano caught her to him with strong hands and drew her unresisting body into his arms. ‘This is why you’re being rescued,’ he intoned huskily.

The most delicious tension tautened her every muscle. She knew it was wicked, but when she studied his lean, darkly handsome face, something wild leapt through her and made nonsense of her resistance. He curved long brown fingers to her cheekbone and let his hungry mouth taste hers with a sweet, savouring sensuality that tantalised her. The hand at her hip pressed her into the hard, muscular embrace of his powerful masculine frame, and she gasped beneath the probing exploration of his tongue. A dam of hot dark pleasure overflowed and roared through her in response. Suddenly her legs were like jelly and her breathing was rapid, and she was hanging on to him to stay upright.

Cristiano lifted her off her feet and brought her down on top of his desk. He meshed long fingers into the tumbling hair he had already released to tip her head back and allow him access to her throat. He covered her lowered eyelids, her cheeks, with tiny teasing kisses that made her want to curve round him like a sinuous cat, begging for more. He let his teeth graze her neck and he tasted her smooth white skin with lips and tongue, lingering in sensitive places, forcing a driven moan from her. Bending her back with astonishing ease over his arm, he pushed the T-shirt out of his path and glided his fingers up over her taut and quivering ribcage to curve his hand to a tiny pouting white breast. Her spine arched and she jerked as if she had been electrified. The brush of his thumb over the swollen and sensitive tip was a source of seething pleasure. The sound of her own choked cry of response catapulted her back to renewed awareness of her surroundings.

‘For goodness’ sake…no!’she gasped, pulling away and throwing herself off the desk in such a panic that she overbalanced and went down on her knees on the carpet. He stretched down a hand to help her rise again, but she scrambled up under her own steam and backed away fast. She was in as much shock as if she had been in an accident and her body felt heavy and clumsy and achingly disappointed.

‘Per meraviglia…you could have broken your ankle.’ Cristiano surveyed her with smouldering intensity and a frown of reproof.

Lydia was all the more shaken by the subtle shift in his manner. All of a sudden his tone was more intimate, possessive. He had kissed her and touched her, and she had encouraged him, and now he was telling her off.

Cristiano elevated a dark brow. ‘Why are you so skittish? What’s the deal? If the nervous virgin act is supposed to be sexy, it’s not working, so you can drop it now.’

‘I’m not putting on an act!’ Shame and mortification blazed through her slender length like a burning flame. In her mind it was one thing to submit, but quite another to enjoy being touched by him to such an extent that she had had to knot her fingers into fists by her sides. Desire was in her like a cruel enemy, eager to betray her. And she could not win such a battle, nor even wish in the circumstances that she could. Suddenly she felt as trapped as if she had been put in a dungeon behind a solid steel door.

Pale as milk, she shot him an appalled glance from vivid blue eyes. ‘I can’t do this…I can’t!’