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Mandy’s eyebrows flew up. This time she was detecting. And accurately.
‘You know him,’ she said on a note of discovery.
That’s what comes of losing your cool, Rachel told herself, annoyed. Aloud she said repressively, ‘We’ve met.’
‘Wow.’ Mandy was impressed. ‘You’ve been clubbing on the quiet?’
‘Of course not. Even if that was how I got my kicks, which it isn’t, what time do I have to go clubbing? When I’m not working I’m trying to persuade two adolescents that school isn’t all bad.’
Mandy chuckled. ‘I don’t see di Stefano at a PTA meeting,’ she allowed. ‘Where on earth did you meet him, for heaven’s sake?’
Rachel grimaced. Take it lightly, she adjured herself. It was never important. Don’t build it up into something it was not.
She shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. I shouldn’t think he even remembers.’
And I’m going to do everything I can think of to stop him remembering, she resolved fiercely.
‘Have you said anything to him?’
‘No.’ Rachel was unable to disguise her horror.
Mandy looked even more intrigued. Rachel realised she could be getting herself into exactly the kind of trouble she had hoped to avoid—the kind of trouble that slapped an ice-pack on the back of her neck and sent her normally logical mind into meltdown. She could trust Mandy, of course, but if she told her it was a secret Mandy would inevitably start to wonder what it was all about. It was only human nature. It was also horrifying.
I can’t stand that sort of speculation, Rachel thought. How can I avoid thinking about him if every time I put my head out of my office my secretary’s asking herself what Riccardo di Stefano was to me in my dark past?
She felt panic rise. It took all her self-control to quell it, to think of a plausible story. It was half the truth anyway.
‘Look,’ said Rachel, ‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it. It was no big deal but I was very young.’ She managed to sound rueful, even faintly embarrassed. She was impressed with herself. ‘It wouldn’t do my credibility much good to remind him. I don’t want him thinking he’s negotiating with a spotty teenager with no control over her temper.’
No hint of the inner panic. Well done, Rachel, she congratulated herself. Mandy was taking it at face value anyway.
‘No control...’ Mandy stared. ‘You?’
‘Youth,’ said Rachel. She gave a very good shrug, quite as if she did not care. She even managed a light laugh.
That was not quite so convincing, evidently. At least, it did not convince Mandy. ‘Did you have a crush on him?’ she demanded.
‘No,’ said Rachel with unmistakable truth. In spite of her determination to stay cool, she could not repress a shudder.
Mandy was not just a colleague, she was a friend. She saw the shudder and drew her own conclusions.
‘Well, if he hasn’t remembered yet, he probably won’t,’ she said comfortingly. ‘Not with Sandy Marquis to keep him happy.’
‘I’m relying on it,’ said Rachel. She went into her office. In the doorway she paused and looked back. ‘Oh, we’ve got a deadline. Two o’clock with Mr Jensen. You’d better find out what the group want in their sandwiches.’
Mandy grimaced. ‘Right you are. Action stations.’ She was already on the telephone when Rachel closed the door.
The room was uncannily quiet without the hum of the photocopier. Rachel sank down behind her desk and stretched out her legs in front of her. They were trembling.
There was an unfamiliar tension between her shoulderblades. She bent her head forward and sideways and the tension eased. It did not go away entirely; though. If she was any judge, it was not going to go away until Riccardo di Stefano was safely back on his own side of the Atlantic.
‘Blast,’ she said.
She rubbed her hand across the back of her neck in an uncharacteristic gesture. The muscles felt like iron. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she remembered another time when she had done the same thing. Her hand fell.
Another time and a whole world away. She got up and went to the window. Outside the rain ran greyly down the window. But the world of her too vivid memory was drenched in sunshine.
Rachel tipped her head forward and rested her brow against the window-pane. How could she ever have thought she had forgotten?
She closed her eyes and let the memories flood back.
She had never wanted to go. She had tried so hard not to. But she had been eighteen and the opposition had all been over twenty-one and had had the big guns.
‘It will be the holiday of a lifetime,’ her father had said heartily. Too heartily. Rachel had not noticed that at the time, of course. ‘You’ve been tying yourself to your books too much. Now the exams are over you deserve a really good time. Judy and I both want you to go.’
And that had been the first objection. Rachel had never warmed to her father’s second wife. Judy felt the same, she’d been sure. Most of the time they’d been polite to each other but that was as far as it had gone. Rachel had frankly been appalled at the idea of going off on a Caribbean holiday with her stepmother for company.
She had not said that to her father, of course. And what she had said had only caused him to persuade harder.
‘Judy needs a holiday as much as you do. It’s been a tough year, with the takeover and everything. She needs to get away from it all. Sun, sea and a bit of exotic night-life.’ He laughed. ‘Do you both good.’
Rachel said, ‘Exotic night-life doesn’t sound like me, Dad.’
But he was not to be deflected. ‘Nonsense. All girls of your age want to spread their wings a bit.’
Presumably Judy had told him that. Presumably she had also convinced him that she and Rachel were virtual contemporaries and could not be better friends. None of Rachel’s protests had any effect.
‘It’s very good of Judy to suggest it,’ her father said in the end.
His tone had stopped being hearty. Rachel recognised an order when she heard it. He might just as well have said she did not have a choice.
‘She’s been invited to stay with some very old friends. They have taken a house in the Caribbean. Film-star luxury, I’m told. Judy needn’t take you along, you know. Since she’s offered, you owe it to all of us to accept gracefully.’
So she went. Later it occurred to her to wonder whether her father was already suspecting his young wife’s restlessness. Maybe he’d sent Rachel along to act as some sort of chaperon. Or even as a substitute for conscience. If he had, he had been singularly out of luck, she thought now.
She had not suspected any such thing at the time, of course. To be honest, Rachel had not seen much of her father or Judy, particularly over the last year when her father’s company had got into difficulties. Rachel herself had been working furiously hard to get into university. She and her father had met occasionally over the coffeepot in the small hours. They’d exchanged tired quips. But they had not really talked since he’d married Judy.
So, if there were strains in the marriage, at that time Rachel had not known it. She’d just known she did not like Judy, and she had not been able to imagine why her stepmother would want to take her on holiday.
It had been some time before she’d found out why, but she had. By that time she’d no longer cared. She’d had her own hurt and her own guilt by then. By that time she’d no longer cared about anything except getting away and never seeing any of the inhabitants of the Villa Azul ever again.
Rachel opened her eyes and stared blindly at the London rain. In all the three weeks she had spent at the Villa Azul, it had never rained once, she remembered. She would wake up in the huge colonial bed to a sound like rain, but when she’d rushed to the window it had been to find that the sound was only the wind through the palm trees. She had been so homesick. So hungry for familiar sights and sounds. So alone.
Open-eyed, she stared out at the rain. Alone! She gave a harsh laugh that contained no amusement at all. Oh, she had been alone all right. Until that last night, when she had learned, briefly and unforgettably, that there were worse things than being alone—and that the worst loneliness of all was when you could not reach the person you were with. She felt sick, remembering.
But there was nothing else for it. Now she had started, the whole thing was coming back in cruel Technicolor.
The first time she’d met Riccardo di Stefano she had almost run away He had been like an alien from another galaxy. Well, they all had been, at the Villa Azul. By that time Rachel had learned to expect every new acquaintance to possess a degree of sophistication she knew she could not deal with. By the time he arrived, Riccardo di Stefano was exactly what she was expecting.
Tall and slim, he arrived in the Caribbean with an all-year-round tan and the inscrutable dark glasses to go with it. His hair was so dark that it looked blue in the glare of the midday sun. He was wearing piratical cutoffs that could have belonged to the ragged urchins in the town, had it not been for the indiscreet designer label at the back of the belt.
He was not bothering with a shirt that day and even to Rachel’s jaundiced eye its absence revealed muscles that could only be called impressive. He moved lazily, gracefully, as if he knew every eye was on him and did not give a damn. Rachel loathed him on sight.
The Villa Azul loved him. It was only to be expected.
But by that time she was loathing the Villa Azul and all its inhabitants with a ferocity that she would never have thought possible. It could not have been further away from the relaxing holiday her father had fondly described. There was no possibility of relaxing. Rachel had never felt more on edge in all her eighteen years.
One thing her father had been right about was the luxury, though. Rachel had never seen anything like it. The house party seemed to drink champagne at all hours, change their designer outfits three times a day and have personal trainers and hairdressers in constant attendance.
In fact, at first she thought Riccardo di Stefano was a new fitness expert. Only, then he took off the arrogant shades to reveal even more arrogant eyes. Rachel revised her opinion rapidly.
Slowly he surveyed the company scattered round the pool and the exotic gardens. His expression announced that he was supremely bored. None of the tennis professionals and expert scuba-divers would have allowed themselves to look like that. It would have cost them their job. It did not make Rachel like him any better.
And then their eyes met.
It was oddly shocking. Even on edge as she was, Rachel felt her inner tension go up a couple of notches. She stepped back as if she had walked too close to a fire.
The stranger in the designer rags looked her up and down. Rachel had just come up from the beach to collect some fruit for her lunch. She had not bothered with a wrap because she did not intend to stay. She was going to go back to the beach and carry on reading in the shade of a coconut palm. Indeed, she was still marking the place in her book with one finger.
So all she was wearing was a dark one-piece bathing suit. By the standards of the Villa Azul it was modest to the point of puritanism. But, under that cool inspection, Rachel felt that she might as well have been naked. Her face flamed.
Even across the width of the flamboyant garden, the pirate recognised her reaction. His eyebrows rose. He was clearly amused. Rachel blushed harder, and hated him for it.
Nobody else paid any attention at all. At least, not to her. That was nothing unusual. The sophisticated house party had been bewildered by her arrival. Since then, they had done their best to ignore her. Because, of course, Judy had dumped her the moment they’d got to the estate.
‘This is Bill’s daughter,’ she had said, waving a hand in Rachel’s general direction.
After that she’d stripped off and dived into the pool. She had not exchanged more than a dozen words with Rachel since. She had not even bothered to introduce their host.
He was, Rachel discovered, Anders Lemarck and said to be something in oil. The other guests were vague on his profession but very precise on his wealth, which was described as serious. On their arrival, he’d considered Rachel appraisingly, decided she was not worth getting up for and raised a casual hand in her direction.
‘Hi, Bill’s daughter.’
After that he’d ignored her too. If it had not been for the friendly islanders who ran the Villa Azul, Rachel would not even have had anywhere to sleep.
‘Part of my education,’ the eighteen-year-old Rachel had told herself. ‘Nobody said education had to be pleasant.’
She’d established a routine of swimming and reading, keeping out of the way of the main party as much as she could. Until now it had worked fine. But the piratical stranger was something else.
In spite of herself she could not look away. She stared into the face she did not recognise and knew that she would recognise it anywhere in the world for evermore. It was not just the barbecue-deep tan and insolent eyes. It was something that seemed to look right into the heart of her and imprint his image on her very core. Rachel felt helpless all of a sudden.
If the other guests continued to ignore her, they were more than-enthusiastic to greet him. Women in tiny, jewel-coloured bikinis converged on him; men turned from discussing stock-market prices to greet him. Even Anders got out of his hammock to shake his hand.
And I’m no better, standing here like a mesmerised rabbit, staring at him, thought Rachel. She was disgusted with herself. It was a real physical effort to break that eye contact. Even across the garden she could feel his resistance. But she did it.
She turned away and made for the terrace where the luxurious cold lunch was set out. These days, Rachel had learned to mingle with the sophisticated diners with reasonable confidence.
She was bending all her attention on a dish of exotic fruits, when she felt a butterfly touch against her bare arm. She brushed it away absently. Warm fingers caught and held her own.
Rachel gave a thoroughly unsophisticated squeak and let go of her plate. The pirate caught it neatly, one-handed.
‘Don’t tell me—you’re the discus professional.’ His voice was as casual as his appearance. Casual and low and horribly sexy.
He returned the plate to her with an enigmatic smile. Rachel swallowed hard. This was where that education proved its usefulness. She tried to remember all that the holiday had taught her about dealing with these people.
‘Thank you,’ she said, clutching at the plate. It tilted dangerously and half a mango fell off it. He caught that too.
‘Not the discus,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe ping-pong?’
Rachel was embarrassed. That education did not seem to have stuck after all.
Annoyed with herself, she said curtly, ‘Sorry, no,’ and held out her hand for the fruit.
He turned it over with a grimace. ‘Is this all you’re eating?’
‘I like fruit in the middle of the day.’ Why did she sound so defensive?
His eyes crinkled at the corners. With half the garden between them she had thought his eyes were dark. Now she saw that they were a swirl of curious, complicated mineral colours, flecked with green. They were also oddly weary.
She thought suddenly, He looks as if he’s seen everything in the world. And nothing matters to him any more.
She gave herself a quick shake. This was silly, melodramatic. He was a stranger. And not a very kind stranger, from the expression in those eyes. She did not think he would be kind if he knew what she was thinking about him, anyway.
He looked round at the little groups of people sitting under the trees.
‘Who are you with?’
Rachel almost jumped. ‘What?’ Then she realised what he meant. ‘Oh. I’m not. I mean—’
He looked surprised, his brows rising interrogatively. ‘You don’t eat with the guests?’
‘No,’ she admitted. It felt like owning up to her lack of sophistication all over again. She looked away.
He buffed his knuckles against the top of her arm.
‘No need to look like that. So where do you take your plunder?’
She looked up at that, laughing in quick surprise. At once his eyes narrowed, became intent. Rachel saw that the hand holding the mango clenched. Then slowly, as if in an act of will, he relaxed his fingers and gave her a slow, lazy smile.
‘Well? Do you climb a tree, or what?’ The laughing voice said he shared her amusement.
‘I’ve got a beach,’ Rachel admitted. Laughter always warmed her. The trouble was—and she had not learned enough yet to know how dangerous this was—it also took her off her guard.
‘Really? A whole beach?’
‘Well, no one else seems to use it.’
The pirate looked over his shoulder at the party again. He shrugged.
