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Titus wasn’t used to people turning away from him, especially not when their eyes had just been devouring him. He frowned. ‘My name is Titus Alexander,’ he said, watching her reflection closely to see if there were any signs of recognition, but no. She just carried on calmly wiping that garish lipstick from her mouth. And suddenly he found himself wondering what those lips might taste like beneath his. Whether they’d be able to inflict as much magic on his body as they’d done with the microphone, when she’d started to sing.
‘What can I do for you, Mr Alexander?’ she asked, in a bored tone.
Titus didn’t bother correcting the fundamental mistake she was making about his title. Past experience had taught him that it was best to keep that particular fact hidden for as long as possible. Especially from women. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘So talk.’
‘And I’d prefer it if we were face to face.’
Her eyes met his in the mirror. ‘Why?’
Because your eyes are so incredibly blue that I want to see them up close, he found himself thinking—before ruthlessly quashing the random thought. She was a fallen star, a cuckold and a money-grabber—and he was about to call time on her latest little scam. ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I’d prefer not to have to address your back,’ he drawled.
Her lips now bare of the startling colour she always wore to perform, Roxy slowly turned back to face him. ‘How’s that?’ she questioned sarcastically.
Titus felt that same hard aching at his groin and for a moment he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Because now his attention was once again distracted by her breasts. They were pushing blatantly against the sequin-sprinkled top in a way which seemed to be silently begging him to touch them. With an effort, he tore his gaze away and stared instead into the sapphire brilliance of her eyes. ‘I believe you know Martin Murray?’
Roxy shrugged. ‘I know a lot of people.’
‘You know him rather well, I believe,’ suggested Titus.
She registered his soft insinuation but she didn’t respond to it. She didn’t have to justify herself to privileged men who gatecrashed her dressing room. ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Actually, it is my business.’
Roxy threw the last wodge of cotton wool into the bin and rose to her feet, realising that she was still wearing her too-high stage shoes. ‘Look, it’s late, I’m tired and I want to go home. So why don’t you cut to the chase and tell me what you’re doing, marching in here and asking me all sorts of questions with that...that judgemental air you seem to have?’
‘Maybe because I have the right to be judgmental,’ he retorted. ‘Since you happen to be illegally subletting one of my apartments.’
Roxy screwed her nose up, but something in his expression had made her pulse start to quicken. ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve never seen you before in my life. You’re not my landlord.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I know so. Or rather, I know my landlord.’
‘You live in the top-floor apartment of a large house in Notting Hill Gate, right?’
How the hell did he know that? Another wave of apprehension prickled over her skin, but Roxy hid it with a defiant look. ‘Have you been stalking me?’
At this, Titus gave a low laugh. ‘In your dreams, sweetheart. You think I’m the kind of man who needs to stalk any woman—let alone some second-rate singer who’s fallen on times so hard that she’s reduced to working in a dump like this?’
Something inside her retracted painfully but still Roxy didn’t react. She was damned if she would let him see how much his words hurt. Or how much they had hit home. Instead, she managed another defiant stare. ‘Then how come you know where I live?’
‘I just told you. Because I happen to own the apartment you live in. In fact, I own the entire house,’ he added.
Roxy felt the weight of her long hair brushing against a neck still sheened with sweat after her performance. ‘No, you don’t,’ she croaked. ‘You can’t possibly. Martin owns it.’
‘Is that what he told you?’ enquired Titus idly. ‘Was he pretending to be wealthy when he was trying to get you into bed?’ His voice lowered with exasperation. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that he might be lying? Because that’s what married men do. They lie to their wives and they lie to their mistresses. The wives usually mind because they have their family to think of—but the mistresses know it’s all part of the whole sordid game. And so they overlook it—as they overlook so much else.’ His grey eyes bored into her with undisguised contempt. ‘Because in my experience, women who try to steal another woman’s husband have no morals, nor any scruples either.’
Stuffing her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans so he wouldn’t see they were trembling, Roxy shook her head. ‘I’ve never tried to steal another woman’s husband!’
‘No?’ His dark eyebrows shot up towards the tawny thickness of his hair. ‘You just let him set you up in some kind of tawdry love nest?’
‘It isn’t like that!’
‘I’m not interested in what it’s “like”,’ he snapped. ‘The only thing I’m interested in is that one of my employees has been illegally renting you one of my apartments and I want you out!’
‘Your...employee?’ Roxy echoed, racking her brains for some kind of recognition, but there was none. Titus was a pretty unforgettable name and she’d never heard Martin Murray mention it before. ‘I’ve never heard of you, Mr Alexander. For all I know, you could be a complete fantasist.’
‘You think so? Then maybe this might help convince you that what I’m saying is genuine.’ Titus extracted a business card from the pocket of his cashmere overcoat and held it out towards her.
Removing her hand from the pocket of her jeans, Roxy took it, instantly aware of the expensive quality of the card—as expensive as everything else about him. Embossed black letters stood proud on the costly cream surface and as her eyes focused on it properly she experienced a strange, lurching feeling as the letters formed themselves into words.
Titus Alexander, Duke of Torchester.
The letters blurred again and suddenly her knees felt wobbly. It had been a long time since she’d eaten—she never liked to take food close to a performance—and in any other circumstances she might have slumped down in the chair, in shock. But some instinct told her that would be dangerous. That he would be dangerous if she showed any sign of weakness. She looked up into his cold eyes, her heart still racing. ‘You’re...you’re the Duke of Torchester?’
‘Yes, I’m the Duke of Torchester,’ he drawled. ‘And my late father employed your lover, Martin Murray, as his accountant. Starting to get your memory back are you, Miss Carmichael? Does my name ring a bell?’
Of course it rang a bell! Roxy nodded, willing her face to remain calm. It was imperative that she held onto her poise. To act as if she didn’t care—because she remembered everything she’d ever heard about the aristocratic young Duke.
He’s a ruthless bastard.
He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
Women love him.
Roxy’s eyes were drawn to the unsmiling perfection of his mouth and the grey ice of his eyes and thought that, yes, women probably did love him. She could imagine it would be easy to fall for someone who had the looks and lineage of Titus Alexander. And equally easy to imagine him inflicting pain and heartbreak on any female who was stupid enough to do so.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said flatly.
‘No?’ His tawny-dark eyebrows rose again in arrogant question. ‘What precisely is perplexing you?’
‘It’s Martin’s flat.’
‘Is that what he told you?’
Roxy nodded, but even as he asked the question she began to understand all the things which had never really added up before. Why Martin had always insisted she pay her rent in cash. And why he had instructed her to tell anyone who asked that she was simply ‘house-sitting’. She stared into Titus’s grim face and it came as a shock to realise that she believed the word of this arrogant aristocrat above a man she’d known for years. ‘That’s what he told me.’
‘Well, he was lying,’ he iced out. ‘A lying cheat of an accountant who my father made the mistake of trusting. Only my father is no longer around—and Martin Murray no longer works for my family. I’m in charge now and I intend clearing up the mess which your lover has made of the estate.’ His grey eyes glittered dangerously. ‘An estate which will no longer provide a refuge for wasters and chancers. So I want you out by the end of the week.’
Roxy felt a paralysing fear begin to well up inside her and she fought successfully to dampen it down. Because fear was an emotion she was familiar with and she’d learnt that the only way to conquer it was to face it head-on. She knew that the moment you gave into it, you would be lost and that was not going to happen. Not with this arrogant posh-boy who had just marched into her dressing room with his inbuilt sense of entitlement. Clearing her throat, she tried to make her voice sound as cool as his. ‘I don’t think it works quite like that. I think the law states that you’ll need to give me more notice than one week.’
Titus flattened his lips into an angry line as a slow rage began to flare up inside him. How dared she try to defy him? He thought about how his father had betrayed his mother, with a mistress as ruthless as this foxy-looking singer. He thought about the woeful state of the estate’s finances and the way her crooked accountant of a boyfriend had been creaming off huge amounts for himself. Her married boyfriend, he thought in disgust.
He knew that his rage was disproportionate to her crime of having questionable morals, but Titus didn’t care. Sometimes a person just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and Roxanne Carmichael was that person.
‘The law isn’t on your side,’ he said silkily. ‘Because you’ve been breaking it.’
She lifted her eyes up to his in genuine appeal. ‘But I didn’t know that.’
‘I don’t give a damn what you knew or what you didn’t know,’ he snapped, steeling himself against the brilliance of her gaze. ‘And I’m not sure I’d believe you no matter how much you protest. The word of a woman who can cold-bloodedly sleep with a married man doesn’t count for very much. So I want you—and every one of your tawdry possessions—out of my property by the end of the week. Do you understand that, Miss Carmichael?’
CHAPTER TWO (#uead48278-f3d2-5770-821d-f45a4a24c91f)
ALL the way home on the lurching night-bus, Titus Alexander’s words burned into Roxy’s memory. The wounding vitriol he had just directed against her had been bad enough but, unfortunately, there was an equally disturbing blot on her memory.
Despite the fear which was chewing her up inside, she couldn’t shift the image of his towering presence and the tawny, dark hair, which had made her think of a lion. All she could see was a pair of hard, sensual lips and the brooding gleam of his grey eyes and once again she felt the distracting shiver of desire.
Cursing herself for the shallow nature of her thoughts, she forced herself to concentrate on what really mattered.
That if Titus Alexander was true to his word—she would soon be out on the street with nowhere to go!
Did he really have the power to kick her out of the beautiful apartment which had felt like the first real home she’d ever had? Knotting her fingers tightly together, she stared out of the window as late-night London passed in a blur.
The bus rumbled through Soho, discharging various drunks along the way, and then it skirted Hyde Park and headed towards Holland Park. This was the point of the journey when Roxy usually heaved a huge sigh of relief and revelled in the peace which came from staring out at the wide open space which nestled so unexpectedly in the heart of the city. But not tonight. Tonight her head was full of unwanted thoughts and the memory of those judgmental pewter eyes as they had iced over her. He had looked at her as if he really despised her. As if she were something nasty that he had stepped in. And nobody had ever looked at her quite like that before, even though she had lived a life which had had more than its fair share of drama.
Stepping from the bus onto one of Notting Hill’s premier tree-lined streets, she let herself into the vast, six-storey stuccoed house and climbed the stairs to her top-floor apartment. She tried telling herself that the arrogant Duke had been bluffing—but she couldn’t keep up the pretence of believing that for long. Because deep down she knew he hadn’t been bluffing. Even worse, she recognised now that she had been a fool of the first order. She had believed Martin Murray when he’d come up with his unbelievably generous offer. She had believed him because it had suited her to do so. Because she had been left without a penny of the vast fortune she’d made during her days with The Lollipops.
Yet if she’d stopped to think about it for more than a second, she would have realised that none of this had ever really made sense. As if Martin would own a huge apartment like this and then rent it out to her for such a ridiculously low rent. But she had let him, hadn’t she? She’d closed her mind as to why he’d chosen to be so ‘generous’ and, instead, she had buried her head in the sand and just got on with it, because it had seemed like a lifeline thrown to her in an increasingly turbulent world.
It had been the first decent place she’d lived in since the fortune she’d acquired during her girl-band days had been lost in such spectacular style by her father. She’d gone from a six-bedroomed house in Surrey on glitzy St George’s Hill—with its obligatory swimming pool and the cachet of knowing that John Lennon had once lived two streets away—to a series of ever-more shabby apartments. She’d downsized and downsized until all her worldly goods had been reduced to little more than the contents of a single suitcase. And hadn’t her battered spirit found a blissful kind of refuge here in this glorious tree-lined street? Somewhere where she could just close the door on the rest of the world and lose herself in dreams of a brighter future.
Her last place had been a horrible bedsit above a dry-cleaning shop and she’d been paranoid that the fumes would affect her voice. But she hadn’t had a lot of choice. She needed to be in London because that was where the work was—but living in London was prohibitively expensive. And lonely. Though maybe her other job contributed to the loneliness. Cleaning people’s houses didn’t provide colleagues and it didn’t pay particularly well—but at least it gave her the flexibility to be able to carry on with her singing. And singing was her life. It was all she had left. The only real thing she had to hang onto.
She closed the door behind her and went into the bathroom to start running a bath, telling herself that she had come through things much worse than this. She had to keep positive and keep going—and by morning she would have discovered a solution to this particular problem.
But after a sleepless night the morning presented her with more than the worry of whether Titus Alexander would be as ruthless as he had implied. Her throat was tickly and sore—and felt as if someone had coated it with sandpaper. It was the professional singer’s nightmare and when she tried a practice note, she heard the terrifying sound of her voice cracking. Roxy shivered. There were things she could put up with and things she could not—and losing her voice came in the latter category. In a panic she prepared a concoction of lemon and honey and hot water, which she cradled as she sat by the big window and dialled Martin Murray’s number.
She never called him these days—although sometimes he rang her with that whiny note in his voice as he tried to get her to have dinner with him. But there was no whininess in his voice now—just an oddly furtive tone as he picked it up on the second ring.
Gone was the teasing flirtation which usually edged his words. ‘Roxy,’ he said warily. ‘This is a surprise.’
‘I’ve had a visitor,’ she said flatly.
There was a pause. ‘Go on.’
‘Titus Alexander came to my dressing room.’
An odd, ugly note entered his voice. ‘And?’
Roxy swallowed. ‘And not only did he inform me that I was illegally subletting his apartment—he also told me that I had to be out by the end of the week.’
She waited. And waited. But what had she expected? That Martin Murray would tell her that the Duke was lying through his teeth? That she was safe and nothing was going to change? No, she hadn’t thought that for a minute, though maybe she had hoped—a foolish hope which withered the moment she heard the accountant’s answer.
‘Not my problem, I’m afraid, Roxy. I’m having to deal with my own stuff—like finding myself unemployed for the first time in fifteen years. Made “redundant” by that arrogant young upstart Torchester.’
Roxy didn’t waste words by asking why he had lied to her. She knew exactly why he had lied to her—and exactly why she had turned a blind eye to it. There was only one question she needed to ask and deep down she had known the answer all along.
‘Do you think he means it?’
At this he gave a laugh she’d never heard before. It was the sound of bitter cynicism cloaked with a kind of hollow resignation. ‘You bet your sweet ass he means it. The man is ruthless. I’d start looking round for a new place if I were you.’
Her hand was trembling as she put the phone down, knowing that she had no right to apportion blame. That the only person she could blame was herself. It was nothing to do with Martin Murray that she had no money for a deposit. That was her stuff. Her stuff and her stubbornness in refusing to give up on her dream of making it back to the big time. A dark spectre of fear hovered over her but she batted it away. She could work it out. She’d just have to see if she could find a small room in a house somewhere—maybe with a few light cleaning duties or child-care thrown in, which would guarantee a rock-bottom rent. Surely places like that existed?
But her sore throat became a hacking cough and she felt too weak to look around for somewhere new. She barely had the strength to drag herself off to one of her regular cleaning jobs in one of the big houses on Holland Park. Unfortunately, the Italian footballer’s wife who was normally so sweet took one horrified look at her and said that she couldn’t risk Roxy giving her cold to the children and that she needed to go straight back home.
In truth, Roxy couldn’t blame her because this was beginning to feel like more than a cold—and it was getting worse by the minute. She felt too ill to get out of bed the next morning, and as panic began to mount that people would think her unreliable the week began to slip away.
She got the news that she’d lost her regular singing spot at the Kit-Kat Club on an icy morning when she was at her lowest ebb. They told her that they were sorry, but she wasn’t pulling in the punters in as they’d hoped she would. She’d known that they’d wanted her to dress up as she used to when she was in The Lollipops. To wear those same outrageous clothes and sing all those old, familiar songs. But she couldn’t do it. To try to recreate the past felt like a backward step and a betrayal—because she wasn’t that person. Not any more.
Getting the sack felt like the final blow, yet somehow she managed to keep the tears at bay. It was that old self-preservation thing again, because she suspected that once she started crying she might never stop—and what good would that do her?
Forcing herself to be practical, she managed to make it round to the chemist to buy some paracetamol, but her legs felt so cotton-woolly that it seemed to take forever to get back home again. And all the time she kept wondering how she was going to manage. Whether the disapproving Duke of Torchester had meant what he’d said.
She leaned against the iron railings, so busy trying to catch her breath that for a moment she didn’t notice the huge suitcase sitting outside the front door and when she did, she blinked.
That was...
She blinked again.
That was her suitcase!
Walking slowly up the steps towards it, her gloved fingers trembling as she clicked the bulging case open, she swallowed down the salty taste of tears as she saw what was inside. Her jeans. Her sparkly stage tops. Her toiletries stuffed into that ancient soap-bag she’d had since her days with The Lollipops. And there, peeping out from among the other more functional clothes, were glimpses of her undies—bras and knickers, stuffed haphazardly into wherever there was a space.
Roxy snapped the case closed as dizzy yellow spots began to dance beneath her eyelids. And even though she knew it was completely pointless, she still attempted to wriggle her key into the front-door lock, which was mocking her with its brand-new shininess. It wouldn’t fit, she thought frustratedly. It wouldn’t fit and she knew exactly why.
‘Roxanne?’
Roxy immediately recognised the cultured, feminine voice behind her—her heart sinking as she forced her head to turn to see that it was indeed Annabella Lang, the privileged trust-fund blonde who lived next door.
Unable to muster even a smile, Roxy nodded as she pulled her useless key away from the door. Don’t show your desperation, she urged herself as she sucked in a deep, painful breath. ‘Hello, Bella.’
‘What is going on? Some goon was round here earlier changing all the locks on the door!’
Talk about stating the obvious, thought Roxy wearily. ‘I’m moving,’ she croaked.
But Annabella was clearly much more interested in something other than Roxy’s housing difficulties. ‘And then...’ She paused dramatically, for effect. ‘You’ll never guess who came storming round, looking as if the world was about to end?’
‘Who?’ questioned Roxy, though she could tell from the other woman’s sudden air of adulation just who that might be.
‘Titus Alexander,’ said Annabella, her eyes narrowing. ‘The Duke of Torchester! I didn’t realise you knew him! And I didn’t realise he owned this house,’ she finished accusingly.
Roxy didn’t bother saying ‘and neither did I’. Even if she’d wanted a conversation with Annabella, she didn’t think she’d be coherent enough to make any sense right now, because her head had started pounding and her throat felt as if it were on fire. She needed to get out of here and she needed to lie down before she fell down. ‘I have to go,’ she croaked.
‘But go where?’ asked Annabella, her voice sounding incredulous as she watched Roxy struggle to pick up the heavy case.
Perhaps if she hadn’t been feeling so woozy, then Roxy might have invented a fictitious series of friends who’d be only too glad to let her sofa-surf until she found a place of her own. But she felt so low and defeated that she just blurted out the truth—not caring a jot about her battered pride or Annabella’s horrified face.
