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She led the way forward along a wide expanse of space, carpeted in cream and interspersed with pieces of large, abstract statuary. It was imposing, impressive. Designed to be intimidating. Intimidating to impudent interlopers such as herself, who had no business being here.
But Rachel was here to do business.
Nothing more.
And nothing less.
As they gained the far side of the atrial space she could see another reception desk, with two young women working there, both exceptionally beautiful. Rachel’s mouth tightened, but her expression did not alter. She was led past the two receptionists, aware of them looking at her as she walked by, and then past the office that was clearly Mrs Walters’s own. She was taken straight up to a large pair of chestnut wood double doors.
Mrs Walters knocked discreetly, and opened one of them.
‘Ms Vaile, Mr Farneste,’ she announced.
Rachel walked in.
Not a trace of emotion was in her face.
He was exactly the same. Seven years had not altered him. He was, as he would remain all his days, the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
Beauty, she thought absently. Such a strange word to apply to a man. Yet it was the only one that fitted Vito Farneste.
The sable hair, the superbly chiselled face, the high, sculpted cheekbones, the fine line of his nose, the edged plane of his jaw.
And his mouth. Perfect, like an angel’s. But not an angel of light.
An angel of sin.
Temptation made visible.
He leant back in his black leather chair, perfectly still. One hand rested on the surface of the ebony desk. Against that blackness it seemed pale, yet its olive hue was dark against the pristine white of his cuff, the golden gleam of his watch.
The other hand rested on the leather arm of his chair, elbow crooked slightly, long fingers splayed, motionless.
He did not get to his feet.
Rachel heard the soft click of the door and realised that Mrs Walters had performed her duty to a T.
Eyes surveyed her, dark and expressionless, with lashes so long that they lay on his cheek. Impassive. Dispassionate.
He did not speak.
But in that silence she heard in her head, as if time had dissolved, the very first words he had ever spoken to her.
Eleven years ago. She had been fourteen. Just fourteen.
Tall. Gawky. Plain.
Like a half-grown colt.
It had been the school summer holidays. The first week. She had been supposed to go and stay for a fortnight with a schoolfriend, but on the last day of term Jenny had come down with a belated childhood infection and her parents had rescinded the invitation. The school had informed Rachel’s mother, and at the last moment a ticket had been sent, flying her out to Italy.
Rachel hadn’t wanted to go. She’d known her mother didn’t want her around. Hadn’t wanted her around ever since she’d been taken up by Enrico Farneste and had moved to Italy to be as close to him as she could. Now her mother only ever saw her for a week or so every school holiday, in a London hotel paid for by Enrico. Rachel knew Arlene was always glad when the visit was over and she could get back to Enrico.
But this holiday, with nowhere else to go, Rachel had ended up in Italy all the same.
The villa Enrico had installed her mother in was beautiful, nestled into the cliffside above a fashionable seaside village on the Ligurian coast, within easy reach of Turin, where the Farneste factories were. Never having seen the Mediterranean before, Rachel had found herself enchanted despite her reluctance to be there, and on that first afternoon, upon being deposited at the villa by the chauffeured car that had met her at the airport, she had wasted no time in running down to the azure-tinted swimming pool on the lower terrace.
Apart from a housekeeper who spoke only Italian the villa had seemed deserted, despite the presence of a sleek red monster of a car in the driveway. Her mother and Enrico, Rachel had assumed, as she glided blissfully through the warm clear water beneath the Mediterranean summer sun, must be out.
But as she’d reached the shallow end of the pool, after a dozen lengths or so, and halted momentarily, one arm hooked over the stone edge of the pool, hair slicked back in a soggy pony-tail over one shoulder, to catch her breath before preparing to turn and head for the deep end again, she had realised the villa was not deserted after all.
Someone had been standing at the top of a short flight of stone steps that led from the upper terrace down to the pool area. Male, late teenage, maybe even twenty, obviously Italian. Very slim. Tall.
For a moment he had gone on standing where he was, unmoving.
Then, slowly, he had begun to walk down the steps.
He’d been wearing cream-coloured chinos, immaculately cut and styled. One hand had been thrust into a pocket, tautening the material across a washboard stomach. A tan leather belt had snaked around his lean hips. An open-necked, cream-coloured shirt had been rolled back slightly at the cuffs, and around his shoulders an oatmeal jumper.
He had descended the steps with an indolent, lethal grace that had stopped the breath in Rachel’s lungs.
Her eyes had been dragged from the column of his throat, revealed by the open-necked shirt, and as they’d reached his face she had felt every muscle in her body tense unbearably.
It was the most beautiful face she had ever seen.
Sable hair, feathering slightly over a tanned brow, sculpted cheekbones, planed jaw and nose, and a mouth…a mouth that made jellyfish squirm inside her stomach.
He’d worn dark glasses, and he’d looked just so cool, so glamorous, as if he’d just stepped out of a scene from a film, or off a poster.
Her stomach had tensed with nervous awareness, making her feel stupid and dazed.
He had stopped at the bottom of the stone steps, about two metres from the edge of the pool. He had looked at her. His dark glasses had veiled his eyes, but she’d suddenly—despite the sporty cut of her swimsuit—felt incredibly exposed.
Had he known she was supposed to be here?
She hadn’t had the faintest idea who he was, but she had known instinctively that he was the sort of person who knew who he was—and that was someone who could go anywhere he pleased. It wasn’t just his breathtaking looks, there’d been a natural, arrogant grace about him that would have elicited instant accommodation to any wish he might have.
Especially by females. He was the sort of male girls would just drool over, fight over, play totally, bitchily dirty to get his attention.
With a horrible sort of dawning embarrassment Rachel had realised that, right then, it was she who was getting his attention.
And she hadn’t liked it.
It hadn’t been just that her housemistress’s parting warning about the predilections of Italian males towards young females was ringing in her ears. She’d felt self-conscious, horribly so. Because, whoever he was, he’d obviously known he had every right to be there, but, given the unexpectedness of her arrival, he might not have known that she had too. It had also been due to the way he’d looked down at her, his face, what she’d been able to see of it, given that his eyes were veiled, expressionless.
Her costume might have been the world’s least glamorous swimwear, but for all that it had moulded her body and exposed her legs and arms, shaping her figure.
She didn’t have a very good one; she had known that. Compared with some of her age group she’d been pretty underdeveloped, especially in the bust department, and all the sport she’d played had made her arms muscular. As for her face—well, it was OK-ish, she supposed, but it was pretty ordinary.
For a male like the one who had been staring down at her, ‘ordinary’ might as well not exist.
She had known exactly what kind of girls he would date. The A-list girls, the ones oozing sex appeal, who looked fabulous every moment of the day. The ones who totally outclassed all the other girls and who knew exactly just how hot they were.
Any other girls could just forget it. Give in. They wouldn’t even register on his radar.
All this had gone through her mind in a few scant moments, and she had realised that, since she was not an A-list female—even one far too young for him—she wouldn’t even exist for him as a member of the female species. So what would it matter if he thought her swimsuit unalluring and her face and figure likewise?
What had mattered, though, was that he might think she was trespassing—or gatecrashing, or something—some tourist chancing it at a deserted posh villa.
He had continued looking down at her, one hand still thrust into his trouser pocket, the other hanging loose, his expression blank and unreadable. Had he been waiting for her to say something? Explain her presence?
Embarrassment had flushed through her. She’d raised a hesitant hand in a sort of wave, or some sign of visual communication. The moment she’d done it she felt a fool. But it had been too late to back off.
‘Hi,’ she said awkwardly. ‘You’re probably wondering who I am, but—’
The moment she started speaking she realised she was an even bigger fool. She was speaking English, and it was totally obvious that he was Italian. No English male could ever look that svelte, that beautiful…
He cut her short.
‘I know exactly who you are,’ he said. He spoke in English, completely fluent, his Italian accent doing nothing to soften the flat harshness of his words. ‘You’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore.’
CHAPTER TWO
ELEVEN years later his voice was just as harsh, just as flat, the Italian accent just as unsoftened.
‘So, you’ve finally decided to cash in your last asset.’
His eyes went on surveying her, completely without expression.
Yet as his unblinking, impassive gaze rested on her she could see, very deep at the back of his eyes, a flash of gold.
Emotion pinpointed her, like a sniper’s bullet. And just as deadly.
That flash of gold came only at two moments.
The first was when, as she knew he must be now, he was keeping a leash on that tight, white rage that could lash out with such lethal devastation.
He had done that with the very first words he had ever said to her.
If she’d had any instinct whatsoever for survival then, she knew, with bitter accusation, she would have made sure they were the last words he’d ever spoken to her.
But that stupid, gormless fourteen-year-old had had no such instinct. Only one for encompassing with sure, deadly accuracy her own total ruin.
She felt her nails curve with a minute jerk into the soft leather of her handbag. And that was why she knew about the other moment when that flash of gold in his eyes came.
Out of nowhere, after the last seven years of ruthless, relentless suppression of any feeling to do with the man who was now sitting there, not three metres away from her, came a bolt of memory that she would have given her right hand not to be remembering now, here.
No! No!
She forced the memory aside.
You are here for one thing only. One purpose. One aim.
A single business transaction.
She sharpened the focus of her gaze on him.
Feel nothing. Remember nothing.
He sat there, waiting for her to pitch. He knew she would pitch. It was what he had let her in to do. It was the sole justification for her continued existence as a data field in his mind. She didn’t exist otherwise.
Did I ever exist?
The question came, treacherous, pointless.
No, she had never existed for him. Not her, not Rachel Vaile.
Not the person she was—her soul, her mind, her personality, her likes and dislikes—nothing, about the person she was existed for him.
Not even my body existed for him.
I thought it did, in my naïve stupidity. I thought that at least my body existed.
But it hadn’t. Only one thing had mattered to him about her.
Over the wastes of eleven long years his words echoed in her mind.
‘I know exactly who you are—you’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore…’
That was who she was to Vito Farneste. It was all she ever had been. All she ever would be.
And then, into the welling seepage of old, old bitterness, a new thought came. One that made her vicious with sudden satisfaction.
She would be more to Vito Farneste.
If he wanted to do business with her.
Her shoulders pulled back with a minute, almost invisible straightening. Her gaze rested on his blank, impassive face, no trace of emotion, none whatsoever, in her eyes.
And she pitched.
‘There are conditions,’ she began.
Vito held himself still. Every fibre, every muscle in his body was under total control.
It was essential.
If he had not imposed such ruthless control over his body it would have hurled itself from his chair, thrust past his desk and his hands would have curved around the shoulders of the woman who dared, dared to stand there offering him conditions, and he would have shaken her, and shaken her and shaken—
