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‘And I’ll tell them exactly what I’m telling you now! That you’ve gone off your rocker!’
‘You don’t understand!’ she retaliated, and he moved towards her.
‘What don’t I understand?’ He stood in front of her, staring down.
For a second she didn’t have a clue what to say. From the start there had been a thread of suspicion underneath his anger at her decision and she realised that her words, spontaneously spoken, had tightened the thread. She couldn’t afford for that to happen. He was too clever by half for him to be allowed a glimpse of the truth behind the black farce.
‘I care about Jeremy,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, and he tilted her chin up in a rough gesture.
‘Like hell you do.’ His hand moved from her chin to coil into her hair so that she was forced into looking at him. ‘There’s only one person you care about. Would you like me to prove it to you?’ His mouth twisted into a smile but there was nothing gentle in it.
‘Lorenzo, don’t!’
‘Why? Are you frightened?’
‘No, of course I’m not frightened!’ She tried to laugh but it came out as a choked sound. ‘I am going to marry him,’ she said, placing her palms on his chest and feeling his masculine energy whip into her like an electric current. ‘You may not like the idea, but it’s a fact of life and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.’
‘You were my lover,’ he said in a low, rough voice. ‘Were you playing games behind my back with him? Is that it?’
‘No!’
‘You hardly saw him when you were at university. You hardly went home and weekends were with me.’ His brain was ticking, thinking it through, applying the same ruthless intelligence to the enigma as he applied to any problem. ‘He could hardly have come up to see you during the week. He wouldn’t have been able to wangle the time off from his job.’
‘He wrote,’ she admitted. It was a small concession and it was true. Jeremy had written.
‘You arranged a wedding courtesy of written correspondence?’ Lorenzo sneered, and his grasp on her hair tightened. ‘Don’t make me laugh. You went out with the boy for one term when you were sixteen, yet you set a wedding-date by virtue of a few letters?’
‘This is pointless,’ she whispered, and anger flooded his face.
‘You,’ he said grimly, ‘have been mine since you were sixteen. You are twenty now and we have been lovers for over a year. Jeremy has never been a part of that picture. You have always belonged to me.’
The words invaded her mind and threw up images of Lorenzo, his strong arms wrapped around her, his mouth exploring her body. He had been her first and only lover.
‘I belong to myself,’ she muttered, trying to wriggle free.
‘Tell me that you’re in love with him,’ Lorenzo murmured savagely in her ear. ‘Let me hear you say it.’
He was so close to her that she could feel his heart beating, smell the rough sweetness of his skin. Ever since she had known that she would marry Jeremy, she had avoided Lorenzo Cicolla like the plague, because his proximity was the one thing she had feared most and, standing here, she knew that she had been right.
‘You can’t, can you?’ he taunted. ‘Then why? Has he threatened you? Answer me!’
‘Of course not,’ she heard herself say quickly, too quickly. ‘I’ve known him since we were children. We played together. We had the same set of friends.’
‘I played marbles with a girl called Francesca when I was ten but that didn’t automatically mean that we were destined for each other, for God’s sake! Anyway, you’re talking in the past tense. The past tense is history.’
‘History makes us!’
‘You forget, I know him well too. Well enough to know that he can be dangerous. He has always taken risks, stupid risks, and the only reason he’s got away with them is because his parents have had the money to bail him out every time.’
‘He holds down a job!’
‘That means nothing.’
‘Why are you his best man if you hate him so much?’ she asked bitterly. Why are you? Why did you have to be here?
‘Don’t you know? He offered it as a challenge, Isobel, and I never refuse a challenge.’
‘You’re as bad as he is.’
‘My intelligence outstrips his,’ he said in a hard, controlled voice. ‘Any risks I take are born from cool calculation. Jeremy saw me as a threat the minute I set foot in that school and when he discovered that I couldn’t be bullied into taking his orders, he did the next best thing. He decided to befriend me, and frankly I didn’t care one way or the other. But don’t you know that underneath the friendship there has always been an undercurrent of envy and resentment?’
‘I know,’ Isobel muttered. ‘But he did like you.’
‘He respected me.’ Lorenzo said this without a trace of vanity. ‘When he asked me to be his best man, we both knew the reason. The reason was you.’
She turned away, not wanting to hear any more. Everything he said was tearing her apart.
‘You were the prize draw,’ he mocked. ‘You have always been the prize draw. In this little, tight-knit community, you were the light that outshone the rest. You dazzled everyone. You were the greatest trophy.’
‘Where is this getting us, Lorenzo?’ she asked, doing her utmost to keep the misery out of her voice.
‘You’re catapulting yourself headlong into disaster,’ he grated, a dull red flush spreading over his cheeks. ‘There is still time to get out of its path.’
This, she knew, was the closest he would ever get to begging, and it made every bone in her body ache with the craving to do just what he asked.
Everything he had said about Jeremy was true. Jeremy had been obsessed with her. He had singled her out and it had never really occurred to him that his privileged background, which had bought him everything, couldn’t similarly buy him her. He had proposed to her when she was sixteen, still at school, while he had been at university, four years her senior. She had laughed. Now the joke was on her.
‘I will marry Jeremy——’ she looked at her watch ‘—in less than thirty minutes’ time,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’
His lips tightened and his expression changed subtly from anger to contempt. She didn’t know which she hated more.
‘I never took you for a coward or a fool, Isobel Chandler, but I’m rapidly revising my opinion.’
‘People are more complex than you give them credit for,’ she said in a low voice.
‘What are you trying to say to me?’ His eyes glinted and the sun, streaming in behind him through the large bay window, gave him a brooding, dangerous air that frightened and excited her. He had always frightened and excited her, she realised. He had walked into that school and she had been open-mouthed. She and every other girl in the class. They had been a group hesitatingly crossing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, realising with an uncertain thrill that boys were not quite as uninteresting as they had once assumed. Lorenzo Cicolla with his bronzed skin and his black hair, four years older but vastly more mature than the other boys of his own age, had captivated their imagination. They had giggled from the sidelines, observed him from the distance with the blushing innocence of youth.
The fact that he had not looked at her, at any of them, even with the mildest of curiosity, had only added to his appeal. In fact, it was only when she was sixteen, ironically through Jeremy, that they had struck up a tentative friendship and he had admitted, with amusement at her reaction, that he had always noticed her. He might have been young, but he had already cultivated the dark, intense composure that had hardened as he got older.
‘I’m not trying to say anything.’
‘No? Why do I get the impression that you’re talking in riddles?’
‘I have no idea.’ She shrugged but her hands were trembling, and she quickly stuck them behind her back and clasped them together.
‘What did those letters say?’
She gave him a blank look, and then realised what he was talking about. She might have guessed that he would not have left for too long her unwary admission that Jeremy had written to her. There had only been one letter, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
‘This and that,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘Why are we going through this?’
‘Be more specific.’
‘I can’t. I don’t remember.’
‘Ah.’ His face cleared and he shot her a cruel, cold look. ‘You can’t remember what was said in those letters, yet you still decided to marry the man.’
‘No! You don’t understand! You’re putting words into my mouth,’ she said in confusion.
‘Can you blame me, dammit?’ He gripped her and his eyes were so ferocious that she was terrified that he would do something awful, shake her until she came apart. She opened her mouth to protest and his lips met hers in a kiss that was fuelled by anger.
Isobel whimpered and pushed at him and eventually he stood back and stared down at her.
‘What’s the matter, Isobel?’ he asked, his mouth twisting. ‘Can’t you bear to bid a fond farewell to your lover?’
‘Stop it!’ she moaned. She felt close to tears. When she had first told him about Jeremy, he had been angry, but proud. Too proud to question. He had stormed out of her university flat and had not returned. Time had obviously worked on his fury, stoking it. It was a strange, back-handed compliment to her, but one she would rather have avoided.
‘Why?’ he snarled.
‘You know why! I belong to Jeremy now. It’s just the way it is.’
He turned away abruptly, but not before she caught the hatred that her remark had aroused. She realised, because she knew him so well, that she had not phrased her heated reply in the most tactful way possible, but just then, with her passions threatening to soar out of control, she had had to say something that would deflect him from realising how powerful his effect on her still was.
She made a stilted move towards him, then there was a knock on the door and she sprang back as though she had been burned.
It was her father. He came into the room and gave them a puzzled look, in answer to which Lorenzo said, in a normal voice, as though nothing had happened between them, ‘Just wishing the bride good luck. I doubt I shall see much of her once the wedding is under way, and we’ve known each other for so long and——’ he faced her with a smile even though his eyes were as hard as diamonds ‘—so well, that I thought a private last farewell would be in order.‘
Her father came into the room, oblivious to the undercurrents, and nodded with genial understanding.
‘Quite understand, my dear fellow,’ he said warmly. He had always liked Lorenzo. ‘Lucky chap, getting this beautiful daughter of mine.’
Lorenzo looked at her with icy courtesy. ‘I don’t know whether luck had a great part to play in it. Love, perhaps, wouldn’t you say, Isobel?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, reaching out to hold her father’s hand. She couldn’t look at Lorenzo. That would have been a Herculean feat quite beyond her just at that moment.
‘Well, dear girl, luck or love doesn’t change the fact that your time has come.’ Her father cleared his throat and patted her hand and she thought how true his unwitting choice of expression was. ‘I hope you’re not feeling too dicky. I need your support or else I might just collapse with nerves before we make it to the altar.’ He turned to Lorenzo with a grin. ‘Wait until you’re my age and your daughter is about to marry. You’ll soon discover what nerves are all about. I’ve addressed enough roomfuls of people, but I’ve never felt this fraught before.’ He rested his hand on his stomach. ‘Viola says that it’s indigestion caused by trying to fit my frame into this outfit. Mothers! Don’t know a thing.’ His voice held the same level of tender affection when he spoke of his wife as hers did when she spoke of him.
‘Try telling them that,’ Lorenzo said drily. ‘My mama has always maintained that she rules the roost, which, of course, she does.’ They both laughed at this and Isobel forced her lips into a mimicry of a smile.
‘Well, my dear, shall we go down and make our grand entrance?’ He looked at Lorenzo. ‘Jeremy has been looking for you. Told him I didn’t know whether you’d arrived or not. Didn’t know that you were up here, paying your last respects, so to speak.’ He had moved towards the door, his mind already on the task ahead, and he missed their various reactions to Jeremy’s name.
Isobel clutched his hand and they stood aside so that Lorenzo could leave first, which he did, taking the steps two at a time. She heard his footsteps fading along the marble hallway and felt a dreadful sense of resignation, as if she had aged fifty years in the space of half an hour.
The wedding-ceremony and the reception were both being held in the massive yellow and white marquee, which had been connected to the back doors. She wouldn’t even have the impersonal, imposing view of the inside of a church to fall back on. No, in the marquee they would all be standing close together, too close. Her mother had thought it a wonderful idea, and with cheerful apathy Isobel had agreed. Now she wished that she hadn’t.
She and her father walked sedately down the winding staircase, through the hallway, into the grand apricot and green drawing-room, which had efficiently been cleared of empty glasses and full ashtrays by some of the hired help, and finally through the open French doors and into the marquee, and the further they progressed, the stiffer Isobel felt.
By the time they reached the marquee, and all eyes swivelled in their direction, she felt dead inside. She stared straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s eye, least of all her dissenting clique of friends who had all, naturally, convened in the front row. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Abigail—straight blonde hair, firm features, disapproving eyes.
Ahead she saw Lorenzo, dark and deadly and staring at her with a veiled contempt which only she would recognise. And beyond him Jeremy, dear, obsessed Jeremy, whose fate would now be entwined with hers forever.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_fc499f56-2ab4-5b98-82b7-8daf1d11f6c0)
THE accountant was saying something. Isobel looked at him and tried to focus her mind on what was happening. Next to her, her mother sat like a statue on the flowered upright chair, leaning forward slightly, her body stiff as board, her face set in lines of pain. She had been like this for the past three months. Her body moved, her mouth spoke, but the soul had gone out of her.
‘It’ll take time,’ Richard Adams had told Isobel in the privacy of the surgery. ‘She’ll go through all those emotions of anger, despair, shock, disbelief, but she’s strong enough to pull through. In time.’
Isobel looked at the unmoving figure with distress, and wondered whether her mother’s strength hadn’t been over-exaggerated.
‘I advise you strongly to sell,’ the accountant was saying, flicking through his paperwork.
‘Sell?’ Isobel shot him a dazed look, and he shook his head impatiently. He was a small man, balding, with quick, darting eyes and a manner that implied constant nervous movement. He was efficient, though. He and his team of two had run through her father’s accounts like torpedoes—dispassionately, ruthlessly.
‘Your father’s company has its head above water at the moment,’ Mr Clark said, his fingers twitching over the paperwork. ‘But only just. There has been some shocking mismanagement over the past few years. Not,’ he added hurriedly, seeing Mrs Chandler’s face turn towards him in sad, pained accusation, ‘because of anything Mr Chandler did. After all, he had virtually resigned by the time…Yes, well, we often find that this is a problem in family firms. They employ friends, and there’s altogether too much trust and too little ruthlessness. It shows in the company accounts eventually.’ He sat back, crossed his legs, linked his fingers together on his lap, and fixed them with what was, for him, a relatively serene stare.
‘The fact of the matter is that the company has been left jointly to you both, but it would be madness to continue running it keeping on some of the management who are currently employed there. In no time at all it would cease to be a going concern, and then if you did decide to sell it would fetch you next to nothing. It would become the victim of a predator looking for a dying company to dissect. Simple as that.’
Isobel looked at her mother and said gently, ‘You go, Mum. You look tired.’
Mrs Chandler forced a smile on to her face. ‘No, of course not, darling. After all, this affects me as well.’ She made a small, despairing gesture with her hands and lapsed back into silence.
‘I have a prospective buyer already,’ Mr Clark said bluntly, ‘and I suggest that you give very serious thought to selling to him. He has offered an absurdly generous price. You and your mother could retire millionaires.’
That was not a well-chosen remark. Mrs Chandler looked away with tear-filled eyes and said in a choked voice, ‘The money means nothing at all to me, to us. It won’t bring David back, will it? Or…’ She couldn’t go on. She began to sob quietly, resting her forehead in her hands, and Isobel hurried over to her side and wrapped her arms around her. She had hardly had time herself to grieve. She had had to carry her mother through her grief; she had had to be strong for her.
She made a silent, brushing gesture over her mother’s head to Mr Clark, who awkwardly rose to his feet, cleared his throat and muttered a belated, red-faced apology.
‘Wait in the hall for me, Mr Clark,’ Isobel said briefly, and he nodded and left noiselessly through the drawing-room door.
‘I’m sorry, my darling,’ Mrs Chandler said, ‘I know I should be pulling myself together.’ She raised her red eyes to Isobel, who tried to maintain a strong, reassuring face when she felt like breaking up inside. ‘You poor love.’ She managed a watery smile which made Isobel feel worse. ‘I’ve been no comfort to you, have I?’
‘You always are. Whatever you do.’
‘Your loss has been double,’ she sighed, and then said finally, ‘Run along, darling, see what Mr Clark suggests. I’ll leave it all to you.’
Isobel hesitated, but only for a moment. Things needed to be sorted out. The issues which Mr Clark had raised left no time for grief. Life continued to march on, demanding involvement. It had no respect for death.
Mr Clark was waiting patiently in the hall when Isobel went out to join him. She ushered him through to the kitchen, poured him some coffee, which he accepted with alacrity, and then took the chair facing him across the kitchen table.
‘Who is the buyer, Mr Clark?’ she asked, coming to the point, and he relaxed. Displays of emotion, she suspected, made him uneasy. He was only at home when discussing work.
‘I have been dealing with a Mr Squires from London,’ he said, sipping his coffee. ‘There have, in fact, been several poachers waiting on the sidelines. Your father’s business may have been mismanaged, but it still has considerable potential and an impressive client portfolio.’
‘That being the case, what is there to stop me from running the business myself?’
‘Knowledge.’ He carefully placed the cup on the saucer, fixed her with those quick eyes, and said with clipped certainty, ‘Good intentions won’t make a success out of a business. Most of the hierarchy in your father’s firm will have to be sacked. Many of them are friends of the family. Could you do that? Your training, if you don’t mind my pointing it out, is not financial. Of course, I can only advise, but keeping the company going under your own auspices, merely for sentimental reasons, is not going to do much good. In the end, if it dissolves, you will see the loss of a great many more jobs than those which will be lost should you sell now.’
Isobel thought about that. What he said made sense. Everything he had said over the past few weeks made sense. Mr Clark, it had to be faced, was an eminently sensible man.
