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So was it the mystery of her that made her different? He didn’t know. He only knew that he had never felt like this before. Emptied of his normal assurance, his self-sufficiency, filled instead with a yearning pain.
Denying the temptation to reach out and touch her, evoke the magic that would keep her with him just one more time, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his narrow-fitting black trousers and said with an impulsiveness that rocked him back on his heels, ‘Marry me, Bianca.’
CHAPTER TWO
MARRY him!
The shock of Cesare’s proposal had turned Bianca to stone, the only movement detectable being the frantic beating of her heart as it hammered against her ribs. Only the arrival of Denton, Cesare’s manservant, a few seconds later, snatched her out of the fantasy land where she and Cesare were bound together by love until death did them part and plunged her back into stark reality.
‘Your cab’s arrived, Miss Jay.’
Just five cockney-accented words were all it took to clear her head, strengthen her resolve, move her out of the paralysing shock that had held her immobile, allow her to focus on Denton’s impassive, homely features, force out a pallid smile, a word of thanks, turn again to Cesare, not meeting his eyes, and push the single word ‘goodbye’ through her lips.
And walk from the room, anguish a tight band around her heart, leaving behind the man she was growing to love with more passion than reason, pointedly ignoring his offer of marriage as if it were beneath her consideration, that insult the final and firmest nail in the coffin of their relationship.
As the cab made uneven progress towards Hampstead through the late-evening traffic Bianca pressed her fingertips against the burning pressure of her eyelids. She would not cry. She couldn’t allow herself that luxury. And even thinking about that shock proposal of marriage was counter-productive. If anything, it made everything worse. Far worse.
A permanent relationship was the last thing Cesare wanted; hadn’t he told her that much?
So why that shock proposal of marriage?
Shuddering as her stomach tied itself in nauseating knots, she forced herself to face facts, to find an answer to that question. He obviously hadn’t yet tired of their nights of blazing, unforgettable passion, she ticked off mentally. Cesare still wanted her physically, perhaps because the time they’d spent together had been governed by the foreign travel made necessary by his business commitments, her refusal to move in with him, her insistence that when she stayed with him she left at dawn, alone, taking a cab back to the home she shared with her mother.
So their time together had been snatched—and inevitably all the more precious for that. There had been nothing routine or predictable about their affair. Therefore, it followed, Cesare hadn’t yet grown bored.
Hence the surprise proposal. Bind her legally until he tired of her. It was the sort of thing that was taken for granted in the ultra-sophisticated circles he moved in. The sort of thing that brought devastation in its wake, as she knew only too well.
It was over, she lectured herself staunchly as the cab drew into the street where she lived. She had done the right, the sensible thing and now she had to forget Cesare Andriotti, forget the brief dead-end affair that had started to mean far too much to her, and concentrate on the immediate and problematic future.
Giving mental thanks for Aunt Jeanne’s willingness to be co-opted, Bianca paid off the driver and stood for a moment in the warm late-May evening, readying herself to enter the house.
She had to put her own anguish aside and get to grips with the love and duty she owed to her mother. Without Aunt Jeanne’s presence, she reminded herself, she would have been unable to attend Claudia’s birthday dinner party this evening, an event which had helped her to finally make up her mind about ending her affair with Cesare.
And without her aunt’s promise to keep an eye on her sister, Bianca’s mother, she would have had to have asked her boss, Stazia, for an extended period of leave, at least until her mother’s problems had been resolved.
Expelling a short sigh, she turned to face the house that wouldn’t be theirs for much longer.
The steps up to the white-painted door sheltered by a stone pediment, the empty window-boxes on either side that she really should have planted up weeks ago, the elegantly curtained windows. The desirable façade proclaimed respectability but hid anything but.
As if to reinforce her wry observation the door in front of her was flung open and a golden-skinned youth wearing a singlet and boxer shorts half fell, half hurtled down the steps followed by sundry articles of clothing accompanied by her mother’s cut-glass tones, now raised in ringing, withering scorn, ‘Damned sprog! What do you think I am? Desperate?’ Her tone lowered scathingly. ‘And a word of advice—polish up your wares before you attempt to sell them.’
Backlit by the hall illumination Helene Jay’s tall, bone-thin figure, wrapped in a filmy, ruffled robe, was bristling with outrage, her carefully tinted copper hair writhing about the ageing beauty of her far too heavily made-up face.
Ignoring the youth who was scrabbling around for his scattered belongings, Bianca mounted the steps. Her heart was somewhere near the soles of her feet and she wanted to collapse into floods of tears. To weep for what she had thrown away tonight and what she faced in the immediate future.
But letting go was out of the question. For the larger part of her twenty-five years she had had to be the stronger part of the mother-daughter relationship and now her mother needed every bit of support she could give her.
Two weeks ago her mother had been having the contents of her stomach unceremoniously pumped out. An overdose of sleeping pills and vast quantities of alcohol. ‘One teeny drink too many and I forgot I’d already taken my pills—too silly of me, darling,’ had been the excuse she’d feebly proffered.
But Bianca wasn’t so sure. Approaching her fiftieth birthday, no regular man in her life, her once fantastic looks fading rapidly, Helene Jay was pitifully vulnerable. Her always volatile temperament was daily growing more brittle. Anything could happen.
Reaching her mother’s side, Bianca took her arm, inwardly flinching at the extreme thinness of the flesh beneath her fingers, and turned her gently back into the hall, closing the door behind them.
‘Helene—don’t—’ she exhorted, her voice riven with compassion as a sudden storm of sobs shook the older woman’s frame. She couldn’t bear to see her mother like this, her thick black mascara smudged into panda-like circles, her scarlet lipstick gravitating into the fine lines around her mouth.
‘That little creep was a gigolo! I had no idea! How could I have?’ she wailed brokenly. ‘He assumed I had to pay for male company!’
‘Then he’s obviously either completely stupid, or blind.’ Bianca did her utmost to soothe the already battered ego, her shaking fingers reaching a tissue from her bag to mop the mascara-streaked tears from her mother’s face, murmuring with what she hoped was the right balance of humour and concern, ‘I thought you and Jeanne were settled for the night, watching television.’
Helene jerked her head away, her recent humiliation momentarily forgotten. ‘That programme you said was unmissable was deadly boring and Jeanne’s got no conversation to speak of—discussing knitting patterns and recipes is her idea of sparkling repartee—and do stop treating me like a child, darling. I know you mean well, but it can be stultifying! I needed a drink and as this house has become a positive temperance hall I went out to get one.’
And unknowingly picked up a gigolo, Bianca thought despairingly. Years ago her mother had never lacked attentive male company but as time had crept inexorably onwards adoring lovers had become demeaning one-night stands, her spending on the latest fashions more incautious, her drinking habits more injurious.
This latest incident with the golden youth who had wanted payment for services about to be rendered could be the final nudge that could tip the fading, once fabulously beautiful woman clear over the edge.
And where the heck was Jeanne?
As if in answer to Bianca’s unspoken question a stout, elderly woman descended the stairs, tying the belt of a serviceable fawn dressing gown around what passed for her waist.
‘I heard shouting—such a commotion! I came as soon as I could.’
As soon as she’d located her false teeth and removed her curlers, Bianca translated wearily. To Aunt Jeanne respectability was all.
‘I heard a man’s voice, calling you names—and you screeching.’ Her mild blue eyes hardened as she took in the ravaged state of her younger sister’s face. ‘You told me, Helene, that you were tired and fancied an early night. So I went up early, too.’ She vented a long sigh. ‘You tricked me. I didn’t come all this way to look after you to be made a fool of.’
Cesare bade his sister and brother-in-law goodnight, impatient to end the evening that had dragged so slowly since Bianca’s departure carefully concealed behind a bland smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
The caterers had left half an hour ago and Denton was doing some unnecessary clearing up in the kitchen. Curtly dismissing him for the night, Cesare turned off the lights and headed for his study.
Normally, the quiet, book-lined room was a peaceful oasis in his hectic working life. No fax machines, computer screens or telephones to spoil the relaxing atmosphere. Whatever the pressures, he made it a rule never to bring his work back to whichever home he happened to be using at the moment.
But tonight, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to relax anywhere on earth until he could get his head round what had happened.
Dumping an inch of malt whisky in a squat crystal tumbler, he paced the room, his stride rapid and edgy, anger holding his shoulders rigid.
She had said it was over. Just like that.
In his experience it didn’t happen that way. His occasional affairs had been ended by him, the demise carefully signalled weeks in advance. The parting was amicable with gentle words of regret, a lavish gift—a car, jewellery, an exotic holiday—according to the lady in question’s preferences.
But never like this. Never!
And never before he was ready to end it!
Slamming his empty glass down on the leather-topped desk, he scowled at the spines of the books on the shelves, not seeing them. The anger that raged through him in a roaring torrent demanded release.
And where in the name of all that was sacred had that proposal of marriage come from? Porca miseria—his mind must have gone walkabout! The words had slipped out without any direction from his brain, shocking him.
His hands balled into fists and his jaw clenched until his teeth ached. She had simply ignored what he’d said. Not by a flicker of those fabulous lashes had she revealed that his monumentally crazy offer of marriage had made the slightest impact,
Many women would have killed their own grandmothers to hear those words from his lips!
Bianca Jay had simply looked through him and walked away!
No one, but no one, humiliated Cesare Andriotti and got away with it!
His ebony brows flared as he bit out an expletive in rawly vented Italian. Then, collecting himself, he dragged in a deep breath, meant to be calming but not quite hitting the mark.
He had wanted Bianca Jay from the very first moment of seeing her. She hadn’t been a pushover but he’d got what he’d wanted from her in the end. But somehow, on a level he’d never encountered before, it had been far more complicated than the slaking of physical lust within the confines of a sophisticated affair.
The beautiful, elusive Bianca had begun to intrigue him. In bed they shared a mind-blowing ecstasy but out of it she kept him at a distance, never letting him get to really know her.
She’d flatly refused to move in with him and put their relationship on a semi-permanent basis, and had made it abundantly plain that she would accept none of the gifts he had instinctively wanted to shower on her, had refused to speak of her background, her family, easily and prettily changing the subject whenever he’d brought it up.
And although he’d increasingly wanted to know what made her the woman she was he’d respected her need for privacy, battening down his ever-growing desire to solve the mystery of her, pin down the elusiveness that was part of her tantalising contribution to their relationship.
Impatiently sloshing another inch of whisky into his glass, he took it to his desk and extracted a slim notebook from one of the drawers. Riffling through it, he found the number he wanted.
What had happened this evening had changed all the rules. Respecting her privacy was now completely out of the frame.
Sitting on the comfortably upholstered swivel chair, he reached for the phone, his shoulders relaxing, his eyes darkening and narrowing as his anger hardened into something darker, needier.
Don’t get mad, get even!
‘It’s not going to work, is it?’ Jeanne said decisively as she stirred the third spoonful of sugar into her breakfast coffee.
Dressed this morning in a light tweed skirt and cotton blouse, every iron-grey curl in its designated place, she looked what she was: sensible, stolid and utterly reliable. Sighing, Bianca had to agree with her aunt’s blunt statement. In the past she had coped alone with her mother’s growing excesses, her startling mood changes, but after the overdose episode she had been really frightened.
For the first time ever she’d sought outside help in the shape of her widowed Aunt Jeanne. Her amber eyes misted with tears as she recalled her aunt’s immediate offer. ‘She can stay with me in Bristol while you wind things up that end and find somewhere else to live. And I’ll spend the next week or two with you until she’s feeling more herself, keep an eye on her while you’re out at work. From the sound of it she shouldn’t be left too much on her own.’
Bianca had grasped the offer with both grateful hands. The lease on this house expired in a couple of months. Hunting for a flat she could afford, holding down her demanding job, deciding what to do about the furnishings—all while coping with her mother’s problems—would have been a nightmare.
Newly discharged from hospital, feeling frail and needy, Helene had listlessly agreed. But on the evidence of last night’s return to her former addictions, alcohol and men, it was obvious that she wouldn’t settle for five minutes in her sister’s tidy little semi in a quiet road on the outskirts of Bristol.
‘I love my sister but I can’t take the responsibility; it wouldn’t be fair on either of us,’ Jeanne admitted. ‘What she needs is professional help—one of those fancy clinics you read about, where film stars and footballers go to get themselves sorted out.’
‘If only!’ Bianca gave a wry smile as she passed her aunt a rack of fresh toast and sat to pour herself some desperately needed strong hot coffee. ‘She refuses to see her GP about her problems, mainly because she won’t admit she has any. But she’d probably go for a fancy, up-market clinic. It would suit her image!’ She took a grateful sip of the aromatic brew in her cup and added prosaically, ‘Unfortunately, there’s no way we could afford that sort of treatment.’
‘Nothing left of the settlement?’
‘That went years ago.’ Bianca lifted her shoulders in a weary shrug. Her mother’s divorce settlement had been recklessly spent on the latest designer clothes, lavish parties, an endless supply of drink.
‘Then ask your father to pay for treatment. He’s extremely wealthy, by all accounts. And it’s mostly his fault she’s the way she is.’ Jeanne spread butter lavishly on her toast. ‘You know, I always used to envy my little sister. When she married Conrad Jay I thought she had everything. Wealth beyond her wildest dreams—a bit “new money”, but you can’t have everything. At least his financial clout bought their way into the most glittering social circles. She was so beautiful and I was plain. But now I’m glad—about being plain.’ She took a healthy bite. ‘If you’ve never had any looks you can’t lose them and get all bitter and twisted about it. That said, you should approach your father for help.’
‘No.’ The refusal was instinctive. Seeing Jeanne’s quick frown, Bianca knew she had to elaborate and excuse her apparent stubbornness.
Although the sisters had kept in touch through the years, via the occasional phone call or letter, their lives had barely touched. There was so much her aunt didn’t know. And because Helene was sleeping off the effects of last night’s binge and the resulting aftermath, when she’d thrown her sister’s offering of a mug of sweet cocoa—‘To help you settle, dear’—at the sitting-room wall then had hysterics, Bianca and Jeanne could at least have a frank and full discussion.
‘I only met my father once. I was twelve,’ Bianca explained. ‘It was New Year’s Eve and he was visiting London—he was living in the States at that time. He wanted to see me—he’d never shown an atom of interest before. I went to his hotel hating him, not because he’d never so much as acknowledged my existence, but because of what he’d done to my mother.’
She leaned back in her chair, remembering that dreadful day. ‘A week before, something had gone wrong for Helene—don’t ask me what, I can’t remember—but she’d started drinking and getting maudlin and told me I was old enough to be told what a louse my father was.
‘She was twenty-one when she met and married him. For two years she was blissfully happy, living the high life, and then she suspected he was seeing someone else. So she deliberately got pregnant with me, thinking that would stop him straying. But it didn’t work. He left her for the latest sex symbol on the social scene. As part of the divorce settlement he bought a twenty-five-year lease on this house. And that was that; she never saw him again. I think she had loved him desperately, and never really got over it.’
Bianca shrugged, knowing she was probably about to shock her ultra-respectable aunt. ‘I grew up in the changing company of a variety of “uncles”. She could have married any one of them—they always seemed to be besotted. But there was always something wrong with them—in a nutshell they weren’t Conrad Jay. She never stopped loving him but she needed these men in her life to convince herself that she was still desirable, worth something.’
She pulled a wry face. ‘So there was I, twelve years old and hating my father, when that surprise phone call came through. Helene put me in a taxi to the hotel and my father put me in another to take me home.
‘In between I told him exactly what I thought of him for the way he’d hurt my mother and said that under no circumstances would I ever agree to see him again. All this in front of his latest new wife. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years older than me. So perhaps you understand why he is the last person I would ever appeal to for help. I have no idea how to contact him, even if I wanted to. And the moral of this story is something Helene once said to me—never marry a rich man. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’
Advice which had stuck more firmly than she’d realised, cemented in place by the damage such a marriage had done to her mother, the years of coping with the after-effects. Advice which had stood her in good stead when Cesare had made that shock offer of marriage.
Pushing him and what he had come to mean to her roughly out of her head, Bianca rose from the table and forced herself to think instead of how to handle the problem of helping Helene and holding down the job that was essential if she were to provide for them both.
Right at this moment it seemed completely impossible.
CHAPTER THREE
HE HAD her!
Had her exactly where he wanted her!
Cesare slid the sleek black Ferrari into a fortuitously vacant kerbside slot in front of the Hampstead house and switched off the ignition, the iron fist of inner harshness crushing that gut-punch of triumph, hardening his icy resolve.
His mouth flattened into a line of grim determination. Whatever the beautiful minx thought, he hadn’t finished with Bianca Jay yet, not by a mile. The information he had at his fingertips would ensure that, until he said it was over, their affair would continue. On his terms this time, not hers. His Italian pride demanded it.
She would be taught that no woman brushed an Andriotti male aside as if he were of no more importance than a fly! It was a salutary lesson he would take great pleasure in giving.
Flicking a glance at the façade of her home, he battened down the recurring upsurge of anger with steely control. Don’t get mad, get even, he reminded himself. Her carefully hoarded secrets were his now and he would use every last one of them to his own advantage.
Exiting the car, he activated the top-of-the-range security system, his mouth hard and flat as he mounted the steps and pressed the doorbell.
Yesterday’s phone call to her boss, Stazia Lynley, had elicited the information that she had just received a surprise call from Bianca herself, requesting an indefinite period of unpaid leave, so unless she was in the habit of going shopping at eight in the morning she would answer the summons.
His loins kicked and hardened at the mere thought of seeing her again, of drowning in the witchery of her beautiful amber eyes, in the special just-for-him look of steamy sultriness that swamped the glorious, glowing depths when they lay together in tangled sheets. Two eager bodies, hours of mind-melting passion, melding her physically to him. Yet keeping her just out of reach, he reminded himself. Because he’d never known the truth of her; the real Bianca Jay had been carefully kept from him.
Until now.
Switching off lust was far harder than blocking out anger, he conceded edgily as he pressed his thumb against the bell-push again and kept it there. But by the time he heard the rasp of the bolts being drawn back his face was as bland as a slashing bone structure, a blade of a nose and a passionate mouth could ever hope to be.
‘Cesare—’ His name on the lushness of her lips was a falling sigh, as if seeing him here was more than she could hope to cope with, and as the quick flush of telltale and immediate colour receded he noted that her skin was ashy pale, her eyes dark-circled as if she’s spent the past night in wakeful worry.
He hated to see that, although he knew he shouldn’t. Compassion shouldn’t come into the equation in his dealings with the witch who had taken his ego and stamped on it. Why should she sleep easily when he’d lain awake all night, alternately plotting revenge or consumed with anger and damaged pride?
Impatiently consoling the stubborn part of himself that felt pain at her distress with the knowledge that her anxiety over her mother would soon be ended, and quelling the stab of guilt over having brought her from her bed—as evidenced by the rumpled state of her long, silky black hair, the robe hastily flung on and belted over her naked body—he responded coolly, ‘We need to talk.’
‘There’s nothing to say.’ Her voice was wary and the hand that gripped the edge of the partly open door was white-knuckled. Her heart had leapt into her throat and was staying there, beating fast enough to choke her.
She had never thought to see him again, truly believing that having been told their affair was over he would watch her walk away with little or no regret, shrug his impressive shoulders and begin the process of finding the next willing candidate to share his night-time activities. It was the sort of thing men like him did.
