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‘Does it seem ironic to you that the man you turned down all those years ago is now richer and more powerful than both your father and your ex-fiancé combined?’ Alessandro asked.
‘How did you do it?’ she asked, but then bit down on her lip as if she had regretted the words as soon as she had said them.
‘I was prepared for success and jumped at it when the first opportunity presented itself,’ he said. ‘Leaving Australia and coming over here opened up new avenues for me that would not have occurred otherwise.’
‘It’s a shame you don’t have any family to be proud of you,’ she said.
Alessandro clenched his jaw at her little jibe. He was used to her throwing her blue-blood lines in his face in the past. She was the rich girl with the pedigree; he was the abandoned mongrel who trawled the streets for the scraps thrown to him. He hated her for tricking him into thinking he’d had a chance with her. She had lured him into her sweet honey trap before flicking him away like an annoying insect. He was not going to make that mistake again, not with her or any woman. ‘Yes, but I have many friends who more than make up for the lack of close family,’ he said. ‘Now if you will excuse me I have work to do.’
‘Aren’t you going to accompany me to the door of your fortress to make sure I don’t pinch the silver on the way out?’ she asked.
‘I will leave Lucia to escort you off the property,’ Alessandro said. ‘I have better things to do with my time.’
‘She seems very nice,’ Rachel said, deliberately stalling. ‘Your housekeeper, I mean.’
‘Lucia is a kind soul,’ he said. ‘She has worked for me ever since I came to Italy. She is like a mother to me.’
Rachel thought of her own mother, an increasingly vague, amorphous image that drifted in and out of her consciousness from time to time. She had died when Rachel was three and a half but she still missed her. There was a mother-shaped hole inside her that nothing and no one had filled since in spite of her father’s many and varied partners over the years. She wondered if Alessandro, without either of his parents in his life, felt the same. He had never said. He had never talked of his childhood. All she knew from what little she had heard from others was he had spent a lot of time in foster homes or on the streets while growing up. Maybe his parents were dead. Maybe they were alive. Maybe he didn’t want to know.
Alessandro pressed an intercom button on his desk and summoned Lucia. ‘Miss McCulloch is ready to leave.’
‘Sì, Signor,’ Lucia answered. ‘I will come now.’
Rachel didn’t like being dismissed. It irritated the hell out of her that he just sat there issuing orders. She wanted more time with him so she could irritate him right back. Her anger towards him bubbled up inside her. She wanted to grab him by the front of his immaculate shirt and tell him exactly what she thought of him. ‘You’re really getting a kick out of this, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Careful, Rachel,’ he said, eyeballing her darkly. ‘Don’t go biting the hand that is about to pay for your next meal.’
Lucia arrived at that moment. ‘Signorina? I will see you to the gate,’ she said, holding the study door open.
‘Thank you,’ Rachel said, but not before flinging one last cutting glare to Alessandro. ‘Goodbye, Alessandro. I hope I never have to see you again.’
He didn’t answer, which irritated her even more.
Alessandro watched as his housekeeper accompanied Rachel to the front entrance of the villa. He clenched and unclenched his hands on the side of his chair in rising tension. He turned away from the window and stared at his computer screen sightlessly. A couple of months ago he would have paid her to stay. He would have paid her to occupy his bed. He would have enjoyed showing her all she had missed out on in choosing Craig Hughson over him. And then he would have cast her adrift, coldly, callously, just as she had done to him.
But everything was different now.
He couldn’t afford to let her know what had happened to him. So far only his housekeeper and doctor and physical therapist knew. People in business were unpredictable, fickle at the whisper of a personal problem. One word in the press that he had suffered a health setback such as this could jeopardise his negotiations for the biggest coup of his career. A massively wealthy sheikh from Dubai was considering using Alessandro’s business analysis services. It was the sort of contact that would bring in even more wealthy clients, those with the sort of wealth that outshone even his current ones. He didn’t want anything to compromise the already tricky negotiations. The doctor had told him he needed another month of rehabilitation. One more month of privacy and then he could get on with his life.
The intercom sounded on his desk and he leaned forward to answer. ‘Yes, Lucia?’
‘I had to bring Miss McCulloch back into the villa,’ Lucia said.
‘Why?’ he barked the word at her.
‘She’s not well. I think she has a touch of heatstroke.’
Alessandro drummed his fingers on the desk until his fingertips went numb. His conscience jabbed at him again. He could hardly send her away ill. He could probably get away with a couple of days and nights with her in the villa without revealing the extent of his condition. Lucia would be discreet. It might even be amusing to see Rachel leave at the end of her brief stay with no idea of what he was hiding from her and the world at large. ‘All right,’ he said to his housekeeper. ‘Put her in one of the guest suites well away from mine. Does she need to see a doctor?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Lucia said. ‘She just needs to get some fluids on board and rest for a day or two. She is still a little jet-lagged.’
‘You’re too soft, Lucia,’ Alessandro said gruffly.
‘Maybe, but she seems a nice young woman,’ Lucia said.
‘You don’t know her like I do,’ he said. ‘For all you know this could be an act.’
‘It’s not an act,’ Lucia said. ‘She was sick a few minutes ago. I had to half carry her back to the villa. I thought she was going to pass out.’
Alessandro frowned. ‘Are you sure she doesn’t need a doctor?’
‘I will call one if she doesn’t improve after a rest,’ Lucia said. ‘I think she’ll be a lot better by tomorrow.’
Alessandro sat back in his chair once the conversation ended. One or two days was all he was prepared to allow Rachel to stay. It was risky, but then wasn’t everything in life that was enjoyable? A slow smile tugged at his mouth as he thought of entertaining her. It would be quite diverting to see her grovel for more money. He assumed that was what she would do. She hadn’t got what she wanted from him and would surely have another go to achieve her goal. He wondered how far she would take things. What sort of artifice would she employ this time to get him to lower his guard? He would play along with it, reeling her in just as she had done him, and then he would pull the rug from under her feet.
That would be the most entertaining part of it all.
Rachel woke from a deep and refreshing sleep. She looked at the clock by the bed and was shocked to see she had slept the clock around. Her headache had thankfully gone and the grumbling nausea had passed. Her temperature was normal and after a shower she felt almost human again, even though she had no choice but to put the same clothes back on, although the housekeeper had very kindly laundered and pressed them for her. Rachel had yet to hear from the bus company about the whereabouts of her luggage. There were no messages on her phone and no missed calls.
Her mobile rang from beside the bed and she reached across to answer it. ‘Hello?’
‘So how did it go?’ Caitlyn asked. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours and hours for you to tell me. Did you get the backing?’
‘No, not exactly,’ Rachel said and quickly filled in her friend and business partner on what had occurred.
‘Gosh, that’s disappointing,’ Caitlyn said. ‘Do you think you can have another talk to him about it?’
‘I’ll try but I don’t think it’s going to work,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s only allowing me to stay here now because I was ill yesterday. And that was only after the housekeeper put the hard word on him.’
‘He sounds very bitter.’
‘He is,’ Rachel said. ‘He looked at me with such loathing I found it unnerving.’
‘Well, you did turn down his marriage proposal in the past,’ Caitlyn said. ‘Some men find rejection really hard to take.’
‘But I wasn’t sure if I loved him enough to marry him,’ Rachel said in her defence.
‘You didn’t love Craig either,’ Caitlyn reminded her.
‘I know,’ Rachel said, feeling a cringe of shame at how she had handled things. In an effort to please her unpleasable father she had chosen money over a man’s love. Alessandro had told her he loved her. Even her father had never said those three little words. Craig had never said them either.
Rachel hated thinking of the two years of hell she had lived through being engaged to Craig Hughson. Thank God she hadn’t married him. She had come close but had found out just in time about his double life. How could she have been so naive to have allowed him to control her the way he had? It had taken the last couple of years to move on but, even so, now and again something would appear in the press about his underworld connections and it would bring it all back to her. This latest red flag on her account made her worry that she might never be able to put it behind her.
This much-anticipated trip to Italy was the first time she had felt a glimmer of hope that her luck was going to change, that she would find her feet again, be the success she had always dreamed she could be, not because of her looks, not because of her family background, but because of her own hard work. The sudden withdrawal of financial backing had knocked her sideways. But that had surely been Alessandro’s plan. He had deviously engineered things so that he could maximise her humiliation. She hated him for it.
There was a knock on the door and the housekeeper, Lucia, announced that refreshments would be served out by the pool if she felt up to joining Alessandro. Feeling hopelessly unprepared, Rachel made her way down to the pool area. She had no bathing costume. Her bikini was in the luggage somewhere between here and Milan. Not that Alessandro had shown much interest in her as a woman, she thought. She could probably turn up naked and he wouldn’t blink. She had tried to gauge his expression during their brief meeting to see if he gave off any signals of physical interest, but to her chagrin he had not. She was annoyed with herself for feeling piqued. She was not vain; well, certainly not as vain as she had been in her youth. Craig’s constant put-downs had more or less destroyed her self-esteem, and in the years since she had worked hard to build up her confidence again. But she wouldn’t be female if she didn’t appreciate the occasional compliment, either verbal or non-verbal. But while Alessandro hadn’t said or shown any interest, there had been that faintly disturbing undercurrent in the room. She still felt it now, the dusting of goose bumps on her skin when she thought of his dark blue unwavering gaze holding hers.
The terrace where the pool was situated was drenched in warm afternoon sunlight with a light breeze coming in from the ocean so far down below. Rachel felt her heart give a little kick when she saw Alessandro was in the pool, swimming in long easy strokes, his arms slicing through the water effortlessly, his long tanned legs barely needing to kick for the powerful strength in his upper body. She couldn’t stop looking at him, the way the muscles of his back and shoulders bunched beneath his tanned skin with each movement he made. The way the water sluiced off his hard male flesh in shiny droplets that splashed like diamonds as they fell back into the pool. He didn’t tumble turn at the end, but stopped and looked up and met her eyes with his water-spiked dark, thickly lashed blue ones.
‘Do you have swimwear with you?’ he asked, glancing at her white linen trousers and top.
‘No, I didn’t think I would be staying any longer than a few minutes,’ she said, feeling her colour rise in her cheeks. ‘And I’m still waiting to hear from the bus company about my luggage.’
‘Lucia can find something for you,’ he said. ‘I am sure there are bikinis somewhere upstairs from previous guests.’
Rachel put up her chin. ‘I am not wearing one of your ex-lovers’ cast-offs.’
His eyes gleamed. ‘Then you will have to swim naked, won’t you?’
Rachel felt the searing heat of his gaze as it ran over her from head to toe. She felt as if every article of clothing she wore were suddenly transparent. Her skin burned and tingled, her breasts tightened and peaked against her bra, and her inner thighs flickered with a sensation she flatly refused to identify as desire. She hated him more every minute she spent in his company. He was an annoying reminder of all the mistakes she had made in the past. She didn’t like the way those critical dark blue eyes made her feel so exposed. She felt he could see right through her poise and sophisticated veneer to the insecure woman she still felt on the inside. He had always made her feel that way. She had never been able to hide behind her social standing with him. He threatened her in a way she could not handle. He still had that powerful effect on her and she didn’t have a clue how to manage it or counteract it. ‘I am perfectly fine sitting out here,’ she said coldly.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said, brushing his wet hair back off his face with one of his hands.
Rachel rolled her lips together, wishing she could tear her gaze away from the broad expanse of his chest, but her eyes were like two iron filings being lured by a powerful magnet. His pectoral muscles were so well defined. He must be lifting bulldozers in the gym, she thought. Unlike a lot of men of his generation he had resisted removing the masculine sprinkling of hair that went from a T shape across his chest to a narrow trail that disappeared beneath the black bathers he was wearing. She was glad the edge of the pool prevented her from looking any further. She had more than once felt the hard ridge of his maleness against her lower body when he had kissed her in the past. Her response to him back then had totally shocked her. It had shamed her that she had been so wanton with him, that in his arms she had turned into a ravenous tigress desperate for his kisses and his searing touch.
He was not the type of man her father had wanted her to associate with. He was beneath her in every way imaginable, he was untouchable, he was forbidden fruit. But still she had been drawn to him time and time again, unable to stop herself from stealing clandestine moments with him. Her behaviour had been unpardonable. She had led Alessandro on shamelessly when all the time she had never had any intention of going against her father’s wishes.
Rachel became aware of Alessandro’s gaze on hers and wondered if he was remembering those few stolen passionate kisses and that final showdown the night of her twenty-first birthday party when her engagement to Craig had been formally announced. It still made her heart jerk painfully when she recalled the look in Alessandro’s eyes that night. She had never seen such loathing, such contempt and anger. It had been red-hot. It had scorched her to the backbone. No wonder he still wanted to punish her.
She swallowed the tense knot in her throat, hating that she was hot and sticky and perspiring while he looked so cool and composed. It was ironic that he was the one in deep water, but, although she was standing on the rock-steady sun-baked flagstones, she felt as if she were in over her head.
‘Lucia has left drinks on the table over there in the shade,’ Alessandro said. ‘Would you mind bringing me a cold beer?’
Rachel glanced at the tray of drinks and then pursed her lips when she faced him again. ‘Why don’t you get it yourself?’ she said.
‘I am enjoying the water too much,’ he said.
She folded her arms in a recalcitrant manner. ‘I am not your slave.’
He gave her a slow smile that sent another shock wave between her thighs. It unsettled her so much she turned on her heel and stomped over to the drinks and poured herself an ice-cold wine. She sat down on the terrace furniture, crossing one leg over the other as she sipped from her glass. She had almost finished the wine and he still hadn’t moved from the side of the pool.
She knew he was watching her. She felt the weight of his gaze. She had always been aware of him watching her in the past. She had developed a sixth sense where he was concerned. She poured herself another wine and began sipping it, slower this time, aware that she was probably still a little low on fluids given how warm it was. The last thing she wanted to do was lose her head while in the presence of Alessandro Vallini.
God, she was so hot. Why hadn’t she packed a bikini in her handbag? It would have taken no space. Why hadn’t she thought? Luggage went missing all the time. It was one of the drags of travelling. She should have been more prepared. She pushed some sticky strands of hair off her face and took another cautious sip of her wine.
‘Have you got sunscreen on?’ Alessandro said.
‘Have you?’ she threw back.
‘I always use protection.’
Rachel felt that disturbing quiver again deep and low in her belly and to distract herself, jumped up and snatched a cold lager off the tray and took it to him. ‘Do you want a glass with that?’
‘No, this is fine. Thank you.’
She watched as he tipped his head back and drank from the bottle, the column of his long strong throat making her wonder what his skin would taste like if she were to trail her tongue along the dark stubble along his jaw …
She shied away from her traitorous thoughts like a cat springing away from a snapping dog. She went back to the chair in the shade and picked up her wine, holding it with both of her hands to control their sudden trembling. She had definitely been too long in the sun or something. She was acting so out of character. She wasn’t the type to be affected by a hot body and a slow sensual curve of a smile. Not any more. She was sensible and sorted out now. Life had taught her to get her priorities in order. No more infatuations, no more silly little dreams of being loved unconditionally. Everyone was out for what they could get and she was no different. She wished she could make him change his mind about backing her, however. If only she had more time with him to convince him of the potential of her label. If she could just get him to sit down with her and look at her spring and summer collection surely he would see how serious she was about this? How could she get him to change his mind?
Alessandro finished his beer and set the bottle well back from the edge of the pool. ‘Are you sure you won’t join me?’ he asked.
‘No, thank you.’
‘You could swim in your bra and knickers,’ he said. He waited a beat and added with another glint in his eyes, ‘You are wearing a bra and knickers, aren’t you?’
Rachel’s face felt like a furnace. How she hated him for taunting her like this. He was reminding her of the times when he had been at her father’s estate in the early years when she had deliberately paraded her scantily clad body before him. She had thought it amusing back then. It had made her feel so powerful. But now he was the one with all the power.
‘Of course I am wearing underwear,’ she said primly.
‘I am sure it is far more modest than some of the bikinis I have seen in this pool,’ he said.
Rachel could just imagine the minuscule scraps of fabric his lovers would prance around in. Not that she could talk. She had worn plenty of racy little numbers herself in the past. And he had seen her in them too. She had made sure of it. These days she went for a more classic look. ‘I might come down later after you’ve gone,’ she said.
‘I’m not planning on leaving any time soon,’ he said. ‘I swim for an hour each day, sometimes twice a day.’
Hence the strong pecs, Rachel thought. ‘That seems rather excessive,’ she said. ‘Are you training for something? The next Olympics maybe?’ She didn’t care that she sounded sarcastic. She didn’t see why she should pull any punches with him. He had insulted her from the moment she had stepped into his presence. It wasn’t helping her cause, she knew, but it sure felt good to give as good as she got from him.
His expression became shuttered, closed off, shadowed. ‘I like the exercise,’ he said. ‘It’s good for the mind as well as the body.’
He resumed swimming, length after length, the same rhythmic action having an almost hypnotic effect on her as she watched from the shade.
She sat for a bit longer finishing her wine, and in spite of the overhanging branches of the tree beside the table and chairs the heat became a torment. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps it was the streak of wilfulness in her personality that refused to let Alessandro think he could win any tussles with her.
She stood up and slipped out of her sandals and linen trousers and top, leaving them folded over the back of the chair she had just vacated. The bra and knickers ensemble she was wearing was thankfully a decent set Caitlyn had bought her for her last birthday. It was white with tiny pink rosebuds sewn in between the cups of the bra and on the front of the knickers. It covered her far more than some of the bikinis she had worn in the past, but even so as she walked towards the pool she felt as naked as the day she had been born.
Alessandro was at the other end of the pool when she slipped into the water but he turned to look at her as if some internal radar had signalled to him she had joined him. ‘Changed your mind?’ he said.
‘I was practically melting out there,’ she said, disguising a sigh of pure bliss as the cool water embraced her.
‘You should be used to the heat coming from Melbourne.’
‘It’s winter there now and it’s been a cold one,’ she said.
He leaned against the end of the pool in an indolent pose. ‘Come over here,’ he said. ‘It’s deeper.’
‘I’m fine here,’ Rachel said. ‘I like to be able to touch the bottom.’
‘You can still swim, can’t you?’
‘Of course, but I’m clearly not in quite the same league as you,’ she said.
‘I’ve been putting in a little extra practice just lately,’ he said in a tone touched with wryness as he effortlessly hauled himself out of the pool to sit on the edge, his legs still dangling in the water.
Rachel’s eyes went to his flat abdomen seemingly of their own volition. There was not a spare gram of flesh on him. Every abdominal muscle was clearly defined as if drawn by an anatomy artist. Her fingers itched to explore those hard ridges, to feel the texture of his skin, to tiptoe through the hair that marked him as a healthy potent male. Her heart began to beat heavily and she hadn’t even swum a stroke. Her breathing too was uneven, stopping and starting in her chest as if her lungs were being squeezed on and off by a large hand.
‘Are you going to do a length or two?’ Alessandro asked.
‘Are you going to criticise me if I don’t do it like a professional athlete?’ she tossed back archly.
