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‘And of course the magnificent Blackjack.’
Was that comment as loaded as he made it sound? The truth she knew about the stallion, and the way it made her father’s deal with Raoul null and void, sat like a lump of lead in Imogen’s stomach, forcing her to fight against a twisting rush of nausea.
Raoul reached forward and took Angel’s reins from her limp hands, leading the mare into the open stall. The movement meant that their fingers touched just for a moment, something like electricity fizzing between them, so that Imogen couldn’t stop herself from snatching her hand away as if she’d been burned. Angel didn’t like the unexpected movement and shifted restlessly with a whinny of protest.
‘Sorry, sweetheart...’ she soothed, and the softness of her tone caught on an image in Raoul’s mind, pouring acid onto an already bitter memory.
She had once spoken to him like that, in the darkness of the night, turning the sound of his name into a caress. The change that the spontaneous smile brought to her face was almost magical. Her eyes lit from within for a moment and her skin glowed. He cursed inwardly as the clutch of physical hunger grabbed at him right between his legs so that he shifted uncomfortably where he stood. Wanting to hide the betraying response, he bent to unfasten the girth and ease the saddle from the mare’s back. He had never expected still to have this primitive and instantaneous response to her. Not after all he now knew about her. But it seemed that he could hate and hunger in the same heartbeat.
‘Everyone’s interested in Blackjack,’ Imogen said and, although her eyes were on the bridle she was removing from Angel’s head, he could tell that the words were not the throwaway remark she wanted them to sound like.
She wore no make-up, and the pallor of her porcelain skin was emphasised by the brush of dark shadow under those sapphire eyes, making them look faintly bruised and disturbingly wounded. She was thinner than when he had known her before, he thought again. He knew that brides were traditionally said to lose their appetites before the wedding, but she looked more like someone who was going to face execution rather than marry the man of her dreams.
But, of course, he wasn’t the man of her dreams. Just the thought twisted harshly in his guts. If he’d even suspected that she really cared for Adnan Al Makthabi, then there was no way he would be here. But it was obvious this was a union arranged because of the financial benefits it brought—to the O’Sullivan family at least.
Once again, the cold-blooded gold-digger who had aimed to win herself part of his fortune was setting her sights on someone who had the money she sought. Someone who, it seemed, was more easily persuaded. Or so he’d believed. But, now that he’d met Adnan Al Makthabi, he wouldn’t have put the other man down as the sort to be so easily fooled. He’d also been startled to find that he actually liked him.
But then yesterday he had discovered more about this proposed marriage than either she or her lying father had been prepared to acknowledge.
‘Look, about...’ Imogen began, then hesitated, broke off and, when she began again, Raoul was sure that she had not taken up where she’d left off but had veered onto another topic altogether.
‘Where did you get to last night?’
She tossed the question at Raoul, trying so very hard to make it sound casual and relaxed, and failing miserably on both counts.
‘Nowhere.’
‘But I saw you leave...’
The words faded awkwardly and he raised a dark, cynical eyebrow as he saw the moment she realised she had given herself away. She should have been occupied with her guests, her family and friends, but she hadn’t missed the fact that he had left the dinner early, with no explanation.
‘I needed some air.’
He had been suffocating in the atmosphere in the room. Three O’Sullivans—because of course the father had been there, knocking back the vintage champagne as if it were water—was more than enough for anyone to take. Not caring if anyone noticed, he’d slid his plate away from him, pushed back his chair and stood up.
The huge patio doors had been open to the garden, voile curtains wafting in the gentle breeze. He’d slipped out into the cool of the evening air, the silence of the night. Over to the left were the stables and the exercise yard, the occasional sound of the thoroughbred horses shifting in their stalls and whickering softly to each other reaching him across the stillness.
He could fall in love with this place, he’d admitted to himself as he’d strolled to the edge of the huge patio. The soft green hills and lush fields of this country were so unlike the rougher, drier terrain of his homeland. Here, the climate was closer to the one in the mountains—and of course there was always so much rain. It had been drizzling just a little and he’d held his face up to the moisture while drawing in deep breaths of the clear night air, filling his lungs with it and wishing he could fill his mind in the same way, to wipe away the anger and disgust he felt at finding himself amongst the members of this corrupt, immoral family.
He had almost left then, headed straight for the airport, onto a plane and away. Only the thought that if he went then the O’Sullivan family—the weak, corrupt father and those scandalous O’Sullivan sisters—would all get away with what they’d done and go on their way so carelessly had stopped him. He’d come here to make sure that didn’t happen, and he was not going to back out now.
‘I had hoped that you might show me around,’ he said now, lifting the saddle and carrying it out of the stall to place it with all the other tack at the end of the stables. ‘I’d like to see more of the stud.’
‘I’m afraid I’m much too busy.’
Imogen flashed a cold, tight smile in Raoul’s direction. She certainly didn’t want to spend any time with him if she could possibly help it, and luckily the preparations for the wedding gave her the perfect excuse. He didn’t need to know that there was nothing she had to prepare; that Geraldine Al Makthabi had everything in hand and that her future mother-in-law was enjoying every minute of the time she spent making sure everything was perfect.
‘I have things to do. I am getting married...’
She flung the words at him like a dart. His presence might put her totally on edge, as if she was balancing on a very high, very tight rope with savage, bone-shattering rocks beneath, but she wanted him to understand that she was not alone and defenceless. She was in her family home, with her father and her sister—her fiancé just ten minutes away.
No...the instant curdling in her stomach at that thought brought a wave of nausea up into her throat. Adnan might be her friend, and currently her family’s saviour, but he was also a proud and powerful man. His bloodline was saturated with the ferocious strength and arrogance of his Bedouin ancestors. She knew Adnan could be a hard man, a difficult man if his temper was roused. She’d heard stories of his reputation with women, and as a shrewd businessman, but she’d never had that side of him shown to her, and she never wanted to either.
He might have agreed to this marriage of convenience, but if it turned out to be anything else or, heaven help her, became inconvenient, then she had little doubt he would call the whole thing off without even blinking.
‘I’m aware of that.’
Raoul’s wickedly knowing smile left her only too aware of the fact that her attempt at attack had simply bounced off the cold steel of his armoured heart—if it really was a heart that beat inside that powerful chest.
‘That is why I’m here.’
That—and what else? The words were on the tip of her tongue, but at that moment the door opened and Ciara wandered into the stables. Her red-gold hair tumbled round her shoulders, her green-and-white floral sun dress with its thin straps and flirty short skirt looking cool and comfortable in the already growing heat of the day.
‘Hello, honey!’
Imogen’s smile of welcome was blended with a rush of relief at the thought that she was no longer alone with Raoul. The verbal fencing, neither of them coming right out and saying anything real, had stretched her nerves to breaking point. So much so that her heart was racing, her breathing shallow at the ordeal of just being in his company.
She was no longer the wide-eyed innocent who had first met Raoul Cardini on a warm summer evening on a beautiful Corsican beach. Met and fallen in love in the time between the sun burning directly overhead in the middle of the day, and the moment when that fiery ball had slipped below the horizon. She’d found herself in the warm darkness with her heart no longer inside her body but handed over to the care of the devastating man she had secretly nicknamed the Corsican Bandit.
If she had only known how appropriate that nickname would come to be, she would have turned and run, as far and as fast as she possibly could. But now she was two years older, she’d been tested by life, been down some long, dark tunnels and had reached the other side. Perhaps she was still bruised and bloody, with scars barely healing over deep wounds she’d endured, but she was standing, and she wasn’t going to let anyone knock her down again.
But there was a huge difference between feeling that and actually challenging someone like Raoul Cardini to come right out and say exactly what his plans were. Especially when she didn’t know how much danger her whole family was in.
She was aware of the way Ciara had reacted last night when she’d learned that Raoul was their guest, staying at Blacklands for the days leading up to the wedding. She had been subdued all through the evening and this morning; something was clearly upsetting her sister. She looked distracted and unusually unsure of herself, her eyes slightly puffy from lack of sleep in a way that concerned Imogen.
‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle O’Sullivan,’ Raoul inserted smoothly, strolling out of the tack room with lazy grace. Ciara shot a swift, strangely nervous glance in his direction.
‘Morning,’ she muttered almost inaudibly, her hazel eyes focused on Imogen’s face. ‘So, what do we have left to do today, Immi?’
‘Perhaps you can give me a guided tour of the stud that Imogen is apparently too busy to manage today,’ Raoul put in, something in his lazy drawl scraping uncomfortably over nerves that were far too close to the surface of Imogen’s skin. And Ciara’s too, it seemed.
It was definitely an appeal for help that Ciara turned on her now—a plea to be rescued from heaven knew what—but it obviously had something to do with Raoul Cardini. Just what had frightened her sister so badly? Could it be that Raoul had come here not just for the business deal he had described, but perhaps for something to do with Ciara’s past? Perhaps to do with the reason her job as a nanny had ended so rapidly, which her sister had refused to reveal to her? Imogen wished she’d had more time to get to know Ciara properly before the threat of total ruin had brought this wedding on them.
‘There’s plenty still to do,’ she managed over-breezily. ‘We have to sort out that hemline on your bridesmaid’s dress...’
Imogen had made the right move. Immediately some of the tension left her sister’s face and she almost smiled.
‘And you promised Geraldine you’d help her with the name cards for the table.’
Raoul would never know just what a fiction that one was. Adnan’s mother was totally in charge of every preparation for the reception and she would give anyone who tried to intervene very short shrift indeed. But the glance of gratitude from Ciara made the lie worthwhile. Her sister was already turning towards the door, looking like a rabbit that had just been released from a trap,
‘I hope you have a good day, Mr Cardini,’ Imogen tossed in his direction, not quite having the nerve to meet his stony glare, though she hoped her rather breathless tone could be taken for airy and unconcerned. ‘I’ll ask one of the grooms to give you the tour, if you like.’
The tour of the part of the business they’d be happy to show him, and not the one he’d obviously been angling for. The one that wouldn’t let him pry into secrets that were none of his business. So far they’d managed to hide just how bad things were; she didn’t want Raoul finding out more.
‘Oh, don’t bother.’
That lazy voice was back but she could catch the thread of steel that ran through it like a warning rumble of thunder before a storm broke.
‘I’m sure I can manage on my own. You can find out the things you most want to know that way.’
It was meant to sound casual, indifferent, but there was so much more in his voice. The growing storm was coming nearer, dangerously so. She would have to find out just what was happening with Ciara and figure out how she could proceed from there. And she’d have to make sure that, whatever Raoul had in mind, he didn’t get a chance to put it into action.
This sleek, elegant man with the closely cropped black hair, the burning golden eyes above lean, bronzed cheeks and the arrogant tilt to his proud head was so very different from the man she had met on that magical holiday. The young, carefree, raw and sexy Raoul with the suntanned skin, bare feet and over-long hair was the man she had fallen in love with. The man who had broken her heart. Then his friend Rosalie had warned her that Raoul was not all he seemed, but she’d been so deep in love she’d ignored it. Or at least hadn’t listened to it properly. So she’d been stunned to find that her own teasing nickname for him was the very one that was used in the international business world to describe his ruthless, cold-blooded determination to make a profit.
The Corsican Bandit was the man she was dealing with now. Because of that, she was going to have to tread carefully. And her sister’s arrival had reminded her that there was more than her own future at stake.
‘Enjoy your day!’ she said over-brightly, praying it didn’t sound as fake to him as it did to her own ears. ‘Come on, Ciara, we have lots to do!’
Moving to the open doorway, Raoul stood, eyes narrowed, feet firmly planted wide apart, as he watched the two women walk away across the lush green field towards Blacklands House. He wouldn’t have known the two women were sisters if he hadn’t been told, he reflected. Ciara was shorter, with more rounded curves, and her hair was a glorious red-gold. Just Pierre’s type, damn him.
‘She’s so young, Raoul, and so lovely.’ Marina’s words echoed in his head. ‘And twenty years younger than me—it’s no wonder he’s entranced. I wish I’d never given her the job as nanny!’
Deep in his pockets, his hands clenched into tight, aggressive fists. The image of Imogen and her sister walking so close together, arms linked without a care in the world, it seemed, brought back a bitter remembrance of that photograph in the papers.
The Scandalous O’Sullivan Sisters. His breath hissed in between clenched teeth.
Yesterday had been just the start. A preliminary survey to get the lie of the land. Tomorrow he would put his plan into operation and he would set himself to bring down the O’Sullivan family, one by one.
Starting with Imogen.
CHAPTER THREE (#u7b890bb2-a12f-55c4-b3e9-65094d87c0ff)
IT WAS FAR worse than she had thought. Imogen had tried to imagine all sorts of things that Raoul might have against her sister, but never this. Her blood ran cold. It was bad enough to think that Raoul Cardini had appeared out of her past, to be the spectre at her wedding feast, but to realise that her younger sister too was caught up in the dark shadows he had brought with him made her nerves knot in her stomach.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before now?’
‘I couldn’t,’ Ciara admitted, and Imogen was shocked to see how white she looked. ‘I didn’t really know you when all this happened.’
That was her mother’s fault, Imogen reflected, feeling the raw scrape of bitterness on her soul. Lizzie O’Sullivan had abandoned her marriage when she’d run off with her much younger, much more glamorous lover. Arturo had never wanted children, but Lizzie had persuaded him to take her toddler daughter with them. She had always struggled to get close to Imogen whose bookish, studious nature was nothing like her mother’s. Besides, the elder girl had inherited her father’s love for horses and the stud that provided their livelihood, while her mother loathed and feared the great, enormous beasts. Determined to break off all ties with the family she had left behind in Ireland, Lizzie had never even told Ciara that she had a sister—and to hide it she had adopted Arturo’s name for the family.
The memory of the long years not knowing anything about her little sister still had the power to hurt Imogen. When Lizzie had finally resurfaced, abandoned by her lover and left without the financial support she had looked to him for, it was to demand her right to one half of the O’Sullivan ‘fortune’. A fortune that had dwindled dangerously while their father Joe had taken his hands off the reins and let the stud run down desperately. Her mother’s demands had threatened to bring bankruptcy crashing down on their heads, but Joe had been determined to pay her off to get her out of his life, even though it had taken every last penny and put the stud even further into debt. That was why Imogen had finally agreed to Adnan’s businesslike suggestion of a marriage of convenience between them.
The one good thing that had come out of her mother’s reappearance was that it had brought the sisters back in touch with each other. Only then had Imogen discovered that Ciara and her mother had been estranged for some time and that her sister had been working as a nanny in Australia, but the job had come to an end and she was now living in London.
At last, Imogen had finally made contact with her again and they had arranged to meet up. It had only been in the time she’d spent away from Blacklands and the stresses of her father’s gambling addiction that she’d noticed her period was late. A pregnancy test had confirmed her fears.
Imogen nodded sadly. ‘We might be sisters, but we were complete strangers at the start.’
‘And we didn’t have enough time to get to know each other when I was heading for that new job in Melbourne.’
A brief visit to the stud before she’d left was all they’d managed to fit in. That was why she’d had such high hopes when Ciara had come to the wedding. Perhaps now they could build real bridges and finally erase the separation of the past.
‘Then you were so ill...’
This time Imogen had to bite down hard on her lower lip to hold back the pain that almost escaped her.
‘I don’t think I’d have got through losing my baby without you.’
Ciara had held her tight when Imogen had endured the agony of an ectopic pregnancy, losing the baby she had conceived during those magical two weeks on the island of Corsica. It had meant so much to have another female to hold her and murmur soothing words. She had endured so many long years without a mother’s comfort, so a sister’s love had been a wonderful solace when she most needed it. She had never been able to share anything of her sadness with her father. He had been busy driving himself down the path to destruction, turning to the bottle for solace, and had never even picked up on her unhappiness.
She only wished she could have brought her sister home to see the stud as it had been, if not in its glory days, at least in some degree of stability and success. But Ciara had only been in London temporarily. She’d been looking forward to creating a new life in Australia.
Ciara had never shared just what was troubling her when she had returned home. Did that mean Imogen hadn’t really been there when her sister had needed her? Had her own misery blinded her to the way Ciara was feeling when she had lost her job—and the circumstances in which she’d lost it?
Imogen had never suspected that Raoul Cardini was the brother-in-law of Pierre Moreau, the man who had caused her sister so many problems, dragged her name through the mud and ultimately sacked her in disgrace. Now that she did know, it seemed obvious that Raoul would delight in making Ciara pay for what he saw as the insult to his family, his sister and her children. The tension that had been dragging at her insides just knowing Raoul was here, bringing with him those dark shadows of the past they had once shared, twisted into tight, painful knots. What did Raoul plan to tell Adnan? Because he did mean to expose someone and something, that much was certain.
Imogen was determined to make sure Raoul did nothing to hurt Ciara. It was the way she could make up for not realising just how low her sister had been at that first meeting.
She’d been trying to find Raoul ever since she’d made her way back to the stud but there hadn’t been a trace of the damn man. In the end, she’d had to take the chance that he still had the same number as the one she’d been weak enough to keep on her own phone in a last attempt to reach him.
What would Adnan do if Raoul revealed all he knew about her own past, and her sister’s? Would he go through with the wedding? Or would he decide that even their friendship, and the prospect of keeping his promise to his grandfather to provide him with an heir, cost too much at the price of tying himself to her scandalous family? He was a friend, but was he that much of a friend?
* * *
Raoul’s phone beeped again, for perhaps the tenth time that afternoon, and a twitch of a smile curled the corners of his mouth as he saw Imogen’s name as the sender of the incoming text.
We need to talk.
‘Answer it,’ the man with him said easily.
Raoul shook his head, his shoulders lifting in a shrug of indifference.
‘It’s not important—it can wait.’
‘No, answer it. I’ll make us another drink.’
As his companion got out of his seat and strolled out of the room, Raoul reached lazily for the phone that was still buzzing annoyingly.
We have things we need to talk about.
His thumb flew over the keyboard, casually creating his reply.
I’m busy.
He waited a nicely calculated moment, then added:
I’m talking to Al Makthabi right now.
After that he deliberately switched off the phone and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
* * *
Just how long could Raoul be talking to Adnan—and about what? Imogen stared out of her bedroom window and down onto the winding drive that led to the main house, her fingers drumming against the window pane.
Her phone calls had gone straight to voicemail, her texts unanswered after that final declaration that he was with her fiancé, and she had heard nothing, seen nothing of him, for the rest of the day.
With a sigh, she rested her aching head on the hand that rested on the window pane—a hand that had been carefully manicured, the nails painted a delicate pink, ready for the moment when Adnan would place a gold ring on it and make her his wife. Behind her, the beautiful white silk dress hung outside the wardrobe, protected by a cotton covering. Imogen hadn’t been able to bring herself even to look at it since the dressmaker had delivered it. She had always had contradictory feelings about it, knowing it was part of a wedding of convenience, not a true, romantic marriage of love. But now she felt the nerves tightening in her throat and stomach as her eyes blurred after too long spent watching to see when Raoul would appear.
