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Had she really imagined that he would pay the slightest consideration to what she demanded? Could she really be that insane? Walking in, out of the blue, three years after he’d finally torn Arlene Graham’s grasping claws from the Farneste coffers, and thinking that he might actually consider, let alone accept paying such a price for the purloined Farneste emeralds?
Out of what sordid hole had she crawled, anyway? And why now? Were times hard for the pair of them these days? He’d made sure Arlene Graham had taken the minimum of booty with her when he’d despatched her after his father had died, but a woman like her would have squirrelled away funds for years. Other than sending his useless pack of lawyers to try and extract the one trophy she had managed to carry off, he’d let Arlene Graham rot, glad that he’d finally got her out of Italy. Where she’d gone he neither knew nor cared. If she’d taken another protector he’d have been surprised—her youth had gone and her market rate was all but zero.
Another thought seared across his mind.
Had she turned her daughter to the same trade? Leeching off rich men in exchange for sleeping with them? She was certainly dressed as if a rich man had paid for her appearance…
Even at the thought something stabbed at him. So brief that he dismissed it. Instead he found himself jabbing at the intercom to his PA.
‘The woman who left my office just now. Have her followed.’
CHAPTER THREE
RACHEL turned the key in the lock and let herself into her flat. She felt overwhelmed with emotion, shaking in the aftermath of her encounter with Vito Farneste.
It had been worse, far worse than she had imagined it could be—even though she had been dreading it ever since the realisation that she would have to go and confront him had gelled inside her all those weeks ago.
She collapsed down on the bed. It sagged ominously under her weight. But she took no notice. The grim condition of the rented bedsit she lived in was of no concern to her—she had ceased to notice its noisome condition some time ago, and if she missed her small but beautifully decorated one-bedroom flat in the old Victorian house in a leafy inner London suburb, she did not regret its sale by an iota. It had had to go, and go it had. And that was that.
Only one thing concerned her now—had concerned her for the last five gut-churning weeks.
Getting Vito Farneste to marry her.
Had she really thought she had a chance of succeeding? She might as well have tried to scale Everest on her hands and knees! She stared bleakly ahead of her, every excruciating moment of that ghastly scene playing itself inside her head like an unstoppable CD.
Her stomach writhed as if it were full of sea snakes, and her hands, she realised, were still clenched tightly around her handbag. Forcibly she made herself unclench them, and tossed the bag on the bed’s shabby coverlet. She glanced down at the threadbare carpet.
It had all been pointless. The whole sorry, stupid expedition! The idiotic, no-hope, ludicrous plan! How could she possibly have thought it would succeed? That Vito Farneste would actually consider going along with her proposal to get his precious emeralds back? Agree to anything so absurd, so insane as going through any kind of marriage ceremony with her? However temporary, however limited.
Not even getting back the Farneste emeralds was worth such a sacrifice on his part.
I must have been mad even to consider it…
No, not mad, she thought, her eyes screwing shut in anguish. Just desperate.
Desperate enough to do anything, anything to make Arlene happy…
Pain ate at her. Like a huge, engulfing pool it flooded over her. Washing through every pore of her body. She could not stop it—did not even try to these days. Because if she did, it didn’t work, simply hit her again, over and over.
Getting to her feet again, she reached to pick up her handbag and extract her mobile phone. The number she knew off by heart, and dialled it automatically. When it answered, her words were automatic as well.
‘Hello. This is Arlene Graham’s daughter. How is she?’
She waited while the appropriate records were checked, and the same carefully neutral phrase came back to her. Rachel nodded, murmuring her thanks, and disconnected.
Stable. No change. As well as can be expected. Comfortable.
The familiar litany drilled through her head. None of it sufficient to hide the one word that was the truth about her mother.
Dying.
Depression sank over her like a heavy weight, pressing down on her so that she felt slow and cumbersome as she moved around the cramped bedsit, carefully proceeding to take off her expensive, extravagant outfit and smooth it carefully inside the curtained-off hanging space which was the closest the accommodation got to providing a wardrobe.
As she eased the beautiful fabric off another emotion penetrated her cawl of depression. Bitterness that she had wasted so much scarce money on such a pointless expenditure. She might as well have saved it for all the good it had done! Had she really thought that looking the part would help persuade Vito Farneste to accept her ludicrous conditions?
How could it have? Making her his wife—on whatever terms imaginable—was anathema to him, whatever clothes she was wearing!
Get real, he had sneered at her, and he was right. She’d been indulging in a pathetic fantasy, thinking the Farneste emeralds might be a sufficient inducement to go along with her absurd plan.
Again in her mind she heard his contemptuous, angry words cutting her idiotic fantasy into tiny shreds!
Well, it was an idiotic fantasy…the whole thing—emeralds or not!
Just how many times does Vito Farneste have to say vile things to you before you learn your lesson about him?
If she’d been smart, the first insult he’d thrown at her when she was fourteen would have been the last! If she’d been more worldly-wise she’d never have given him the benefit of the doubt again.
But she hadn’t been smart, she thought savagely. She’d been stupid—criminally, culpably stupid. Indulging herself in an idiotic, ridiculous fairytale.
She tried to stop herself, but it was no good. Like a sweeping, drowning tide memory rushed through her, taking her shakingly, shudderingly back into the past that was like a curse over her life still, all these years later.
Eighteen.
She’d been eighteen.
Such a dangerous age. An age for dreams.
For fairytales.
Her school exams had been over, and the senior class had been allowed two weeks away from school in the summer term as a reward. Her friends Jenny and Zara had whisked her away with them, gleefully informing her that they were going to spend the fortnight in Rome, at Jenny’s father’s company flat. Rachel had been apprehensive—although she’d been one of the oldest girls in her year she’d known that she was the least worldly-wise—but excited as well.
She hadn’t told her mother—anyway, Arlene was cruising with Enrico in his yacht off the French Riviera, so her last postcard had said.
After years of being an exemplary pupil at the strict boarding-school restlessness had swept through her, a yearning for something more than studying and sport and music lessons. A longing for excitement. Adventure.
Romance.
Cold broke down her spine as memory washed over her.
Romance?
She’d been yearning for romance—but what she had found was something quite, quite different…
She felt her fingers clench.
If I just hadn’t gone to Rome. If I hadn’t gone to that party the night we arrived. If Vito Farneste hadn’t gone. If, if, if…
But she had gone. Dressed up in one of Jenny’s evening outfits that showed off so much bare flesh she’d been shocked by it, her face and hair done by Zara so that a golden waterfall had cascaded down her bare back, her eyes huge, her mouth lush.
A totally different Rachel Vaile from the boring schoolgirl she had always been.
She’d thought she was so sophisticated, so mature, so grown-up…
But she’d been like a kid playing games. Games she hadn’t even known she was playing.
If I just hadn’t gone to that party…
But she had gone, and so, by malign chance, had Vito Farneste. And he had taken his opportunity, handed to him on a plate by a stupid, gullible eighteen-year-old.
Such a vulnerable age.
Against Vito Farneste, at eighteen, she’d had no defences whatsoever.
Most pitiable of all, she hadn’t even wanted any.
Her mouth twisted and tightened.
It had been like taking candy from a baby.
All he’d had to do was look at her, that beautiful, sinful mouth smiling at her, his dark eyes washing over her, telling her with his sweeping, long-lashed gaze that she was pleasing to him.
He’d spent that whole party by her side, and he had been the only person in the room for her. Her whole being had focused on him.
She’d recognised him immediately, and frozen, but miraculously he hadn’t seemed to recognise her. She’d known that four years on she must look very different from that briefly glimpsed, scathingly dismissed gawky fourteen-year-old in a swimsuit. Moreover, she’d still borne her father’s name, not her mother’s—and had he ever even known her first name? She’d wondered whether she should tell him who she was, but as the evening had worn on she’d known she could not. Could not bear to risk him dismissing her as cruelly as he had done four years earlier.
He had been like a dream come true. A secret fantasy made real.
He’d whisked her away from the party as it had got rowdier, and driven her around Rome by night in a powerful, open-topped Italian thoroughbred of a car. And she’d sat, gazing round at the beauty and excitement of the Eternal City, entranced by the Spanish Steps—so crowded with tourists, whatever the hour—then the Via Corso and the Pantheon. They’d driven along to the glistening white wedding cake of the Victor Emanuel monument, and then through the ancient Roman Forum to sweep past the sinister mass of the dreaded Coliseum.
But it hadn’t just been Rome that had captivated her.
Her hungry gaze had been as much for Vito Farneste, disbelieving that he was fantasy made flesh—here, now, beside her.
She’d assumed, when he’d finally dropped her off at Jenny’s apartment after midnight, that she would never see him again, but he’d turned up the next day, after breakfast, and whisked her off again to see Rome by day.
Jenny and Zara, as thrilled for her as she was herself, had done her up to the nines again, and once more she had had the bliss of seeing Vito Farneste smiling down at her, knowing she was pleasing to his eye despite her youth, her Englishness and her obvious lack of worldly-wise sophistication.
It had been like a fairytale. Two, beautiful, exquisite, wonderful, gorgeous weeks of having Vito all to herself, during which she had basked like a flower beneath the sun. She’d floated three feet off the ground, it seemed, as Vito had showed her Rome and the lovely, rolling summer countryside of Lazio, with its pine forests and cooling lakes, and the coast and the seaside. Everything had been touched with magic—gazing awestruck, neck cricked, at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, wandering around the shady avenues of the Borghese Gardens, watching the children at play and avoiding their madly pedalled go-karts, and the mandatory tourist ritual of throwing a coin, backwards over her shoulder, as tradition demanded, into the majestic Trevi Fountain. As she had turned, her return to Rome guaranteed, Vito’s arm had come around her shoulder, guiding her through the press of jostling tourists who’d flocked around the edge of the Fountain, cameras flashing, guides expounding, a polyglot of different languages.
The feel of his arm around her had made her almost faint with joy. He’d paused at a nearby gelataria, and she’d hovered, delicious with indecision, over the myriad flavours to choose from. Then they’d strolled along, cornet in hand, back towards the Via Corso, across the busy shopping street into the Centro Storico to seek out the glory of the Pantheon.
He’d told her about Rome—all the tourist things, the history things, the modern, gossipy things—smiling at her, laughing with her, and she’d been enthralled, enchanted.
Blinded. Completely blinded.
Completely unable to see what he’d been doing.
There had been a clue she should have seen—a massive clue, totally obvious with hindsight. But not at the time. Not to her—not poor, stupid, little inexperienced eighteen-year-old her.
In all their time together he had barely touched her. Nothing beyond that arm around her shoulder at the Trevi Fountain, or an accidental brushing of fingers when he’d handed her an ice-cream, or the touching of her arm as he’d pointed something out in the Roman Forum.
But nothing else. Nothing else at all.
Until that last fatal night.
Anguish pierced her. Roughly she drew the shabby curtain across the wardrobe alcove and went into the tiny kitchenette, hardly more than a cupboard, to run water for the kettle.
She didn’t want to remember! She didn’t want to remember that night. That night—the last one she was to spend in Rome—when, instead of taking her back to Jenny’s father’s apartment, as he always had done every night, after a last coffee in one of the old piazzas, he’d taken her instead to an elegant eighteenth-century building which housed the baroque splendour of the Farneste apartment.
Where, with all the skill and experience of the consummate Italian playboy lover, Vito Farneste had seduced her.
She could feel her eyes sting, pain buckle through her.
It had been an effortless seduction. She had gone into his arms—his bed—rapturously, breathlessly, adoringly. So, so willingly. Her mouth melting under the kisses with which he had dissolved her frail, hopeless resistance to him.
But what eighteen-year-old girl could have resisted Vito Farneste? Could have resisted that lean, svelte body, that beautiful, sculpted face, that sable hair, those dark, long-lashed eyes and that skilled, sinful mouth…?
In two blissful, dreamlike weeks she had fallen so helplessly, so hopelessly in love that giving herself to Vito had been an act of homage, of adoration. She had clung to him, clasped his body to her, as his honeyed stroke had opened to her a heaven she had not even known existed, could ever exist.
And in the morning he had thrust her into hell.
A hell so agonising she had never known she could feel such pain.
She had awoken, naked in his arms, after he’d taken her through the gates of paradise itself, and lain dazed with bliss and happiness in the huge, ornate bed. Then, horror-struck, had heard the sound of the front door opening, and voices, felt Vito tensing suddenly, every muscle rigid, and then, like some slow, endless nightmare, the bedroom door had opened and her mother had walked in.
She could see, as if in slow motion, her mother’s face frowning at the closed heavy drapes, her head turning to see the naked figures in the bed.
And recognition dawning on her horror-struck face.
Even now, seven years later, she could still feel the horror of it all. Still feel cold sweat break out down her spine.
Her mother screaming. Screaming with fury, with outrage. Enrico charging in, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Herself cowering, mortified, beneath the sheets covering her nakedness, wanting only to die.
And Vito.
Shameless. Unashamed.
Callous, uncaring.
So cruel.
She could hear him now. She would always hear him.
Her mother yelling at him in Italian, her face distorted. Enrico angry, his hand slashing through the air.
And Vito. Vito coolly climbing out of bed. Uncaring that he had not a stitch on. Pulling on his trousers and drawing up the zip with insolent unconcern.
Turning to Arlene.
