by Julia James
All this had gone through her mind in a few scant moments, and she had realised that, since she was not an A-list female—even one far too young for him—she wouldn’t even exist for him as a member of the female species. So what would it matter if he thought her swimsuit unalluring and her face and figure likewise?
What had mattered, though, was that he might think she was trespassing—or gatecrashing, or something—some tourist chancing it at a deserted posh villa.
He had continued looking down at her, one hand still thrust into his trouser pocket, the other hanging loose, his expression blank and unreadable. Had he been waiting for her to say something? Explain her presence?
Embarrassment had flushed through her. She’d raised a hesitant hand in a sort of wave, or some sign of visual communication. The moment she’d done it she felt a fool. But it had been too late to back off.
‘Hi,’ she said awkwardly. ‘You’re probably wondering who I am, but—’
The moment she started speaking she realised she was an even bigger fool. She was speaking English, and it was totally obvious that he was Italian. No English male could ever look that svelte, that beautiful…
He cut her short.
‘I know exactly who you are,’ he said. He spoke in English, completely fluent, his Italian accent doing nothing to soften the flat harshness of his words. ‘You’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore.’
CHAPTER TWO
ELEVEN years later his voice was just as harsh, just as flat, the Italian accent just as unsoftened.
‘So, you’ve finally decided to cash in your last asset.’
His eyes went on surveying her, completely without expression.
Yet as his unblinking, impassive gaze rested on her she could see, very deep at the back of his eyes, a flash of gold.
Emotion pinpointed her, like a sniper’s bullet. And just as deadly.
That flash of gold came only at two moments.
The first was when, as she knew he must be now, he was keeping a leash on that tight, white rage that could lash out with such lethal devastation.
He had done that with the very first words he had ever said to her.
If she’d had any instinct whatsoever for survival then, she knew, with bitter accusation, she would have made sure they were the last words he’d ever spoken to her.
But that stupid, gormless fourteen-year-old had had no such instinct. Only one for encompassing with sure, deadly accuracy her own total ruin.
She felt her nails curve with a minute jerk into the soft leather of her handbag. And that was why she knew about the other moment when that flash of gold in his eyes came.
Out of nowhere, after the last seven years of ruthless, relentless suppression of any feeling to do with the man who was now sitting there, not three metres away from her, came a bolt of memory that she would have given her right hand not to be remembering now, here.
No! No!
She forced the memory aside.
You are here for one thing only. One purpose. One aim.
A single business transaction.
She sharpened the focus of her gaze on him.
Feel nothing. Remember nothing.
He sat there, waiting for her to pitch. He knew she would pitch. It was what he had let her in to do. It was the sole justification for her continued existence as a data field in his mind. She didn’t exist otherwise.
Did I ever exist?
The question came, treacherous, pointless.
No, she had never existed for him. Not her, not Rachel Vaile.
Not the person she was—her soul, her mind, her personality, her likes and dislikes—nothing, about the person she was existed for him.
Not even my body existed for him.
I thought it did, in my naïve stupidity. I thought that at least my body existed.
But it hadn’t. Only one thing had mattered to him about her.
Over the wastes of eleven long years his words echoed in her mind.
‘I know exactly who you are—you’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore…’
That was who she was to Vito Farneste. It was all she ever had been. All she ever would be.
And then, into the welling seepage of old, old bitterness, a new thought came. One that made her vicious with sudden satisfaction.
She would be more to Vito Farneste.
If he wanted to do business with her.
Her shoulders pulled back with a minute, almost invisible straightening. Her gaze rested on his blank, impassive face, no trace of emotion, none whatsoever, in her eyes.
And she pitched.
‘There are conditions,’ she began.
Vito held himself still. Every fibre, every muscle in his body was under total control.
It was essential.
If he had not imposed such ruthless control over his body it would have hurled itself from his chair, thrust past his desk and his hands would have curved around the shoulders of the woman who dared, dared to stand there offering him conditions, and he would have shaken her, and shaken her and shaken—
His mind slammed down. Even allowing himself the image was lethal. It might take over and become reality.
Instead, he merely continued sitting there, quite motionless.
Surveying her.
Rachel Vaile.
Crawling out of the woodwork after seven years.
Although in an outfit like that she wouldn’t be soiling her knees or laddering her stockings by crawling anywhere.
His eyes took in every detail.
The hair, the suit, the nails, the accessories.
He ran up a price tag for the total look.
Five hundred pounds? Easily—another few hundred if you added the shoes and the handbag.
Where was she getting the money from?
The answer knifed through his head, making the question obsolete.
Other men.
Well… He eased the sudden, inexplicable tensing of his shoulders as the answer formed in his mind. She certainly had the right genes for it.
A family profession…
He went on surveying her.
Not that she needed the family link to trade on. Her looks had matured at last. She was, he thought dispassionately, at the very peak of her physical appeal now. And she certainly knew how to package herself.
The knifeblade went through him again, but he ignored it. It was as incomprehensible as it was irrelevant.
He went back to studying her physical appeal.
She didn’t flaunt that racehorse leanness, that ash-blonde fall of hair, those wide, haunting eyes and the tender mouth…
No!
A blade sliced down over his mind.
Fine. She looked superb. Resplendent. Fantastic.
So what? Now move on. Her looks had nothing to do with him.
Nothing about Rachel Vaile had anything to do with him.
They never had and they never would.
Only one thing about Rachel Vaile was of any concern to him.
The price she was intending to exact.
Sitting back calmly in his chair, he merely allowed the sweep of his lashes to lower minutely over his eyes.
‘And your price is—?’
There was contempt in his voice. He didn’t even bother to hide it.
Did something move in her face? He couldn’t tell. But she answered in the same voice as she had first spoken. ‘I didn’t say “price”. I said “conditions”.’
That spurt of rage iced through him again. She had the insolence to come here, forcing his hand like this—
Because she was forcing it, all right! For three years—three years—he had tried by every means he could to get back what was his—his! His lawyers had been useless. Imbeciles! A gift, they had told him, was a gift. It conferred legal title on the recipient. And his father had, after all, given his mistress many gifts. Valuable ones. Expensive ones. Including jewellery…
Vito had cut off their prating with an oath.
‘
Dio mio, do you seriously mean to compare the trashy baubles he gave his whore with the piece she stole from him?’
His lawyers had looked even more spineless and useless.
‘It would be difficult to assert that she did so in a court of law, Signor Farneste,’ one of them had ventured uneasily.
Vito had rounded on him mercilessly. ‘Cretino! Of course she stole it! My father was no fool! He didn’t even give her the villa! Why the hell would he have given her something worth even more?’
‘Perhaps as a token of…ah…appreciation…er…instead of the…ah…villa?’
Vito had stilled. A closed, deadly look had come over his face. In a soft, lethal voice that had made the lawyer step back automatically, he had said. ‘You think so, do you? Tell me, what man gives his mistress his wife’s wedding present? What man gives his whore the Farneste emeralds?’
The Farneste emeralds.
Rachel could still see them now. It had been nine months ago. Her mother had insisted on Rachel accompanying her to the bank. Demanded she go into a little room, set aside, where a bank official had brought a sealed parcel to them and placed it on a table, together with a form. They had been left alone, and her mother had pulled off the restraining string around the boxlike parcel, unwrapping the brown paper to reveal a jewel box. Not a very grand one, just one that opened up, revealing a shallow upper layer and a deeper one beneath. Her mother had only glanced at the top layer, lifting it up out of the way to expose the lower one.
And Rachel had gasped. She hadn’t been able to help it.
A river of green fire had flashed in the light. Her mother had lifted it out and sat back. A look had settled on her face. An expression of extreme satisfaction. She’d let the jewels flow through her hands and given a deep, contented sigh.
‘It’s incredible!’ Rachel breathed.
Her mother smiled.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s mine.’
There was a strange note in her voice. Not just pleasure at owning such a treasure. More than that. And Rachel recognised what it was.
Triumph.
A sense of foreboding started to sound in her.
‘The Farneste emeralds,’ said her mother. ‘And they’re mine.’
Then a strange, haunted expression came into her eyes.
She looked at Rachel.
‘They’ll be yours. Your inheritance.’
Vito leant back in his chair behind the vast desk that befitted the chairman and chief executive of Farneste Industriale. The company was only three generations old, but the Farneste family went back a lot further than that. The Farnestes had been merchant princes at the time of the Renaissance, and though the family’s fortunes had fluctuated wildly over the intervening centuries, now, thanks to Enrico’s shrewd, hard and brilliant brain—a throwback to his Quattrocento ancestor—the Farneste fortune was riding high again. Vito’s task was merely to steer Farneste Industriale into the expanding global economy of the twenty-first century.
But though the Farnestes looked forward, Vito had not forgotten the past. The ancient past—which had brought the Farneste emeralds into existence in the eighteenth century—and the recent past—which had scarred his youth.
Thanks to Arlene Graham’s poisonous presence in his father’s life.
A poison he had not yet quite drawn. The very last drop of that vicious venom had yet to be extracted.
And Arlene’s daughter was here, offering him the chance to draw it.
‘Conditions?’ he said expressionlessly. ‘By this you mean exemption from prosecution for theft.’
Vito’s voice was flat. Unarguable.
Rachel shifted her weight slightly. The tension in her spine was making her back ache.
But when she replied her voice was as flat as his.
‘Had there been justification for prosecution you would have gone ahead years ago,’ she replied. ‘The conditions I require to be met are quite different.’
She watched Vito’s face for his reaction. There was none. Not even anger at being reminded of how completely impotent he was to use the force of the law to return what he considered his. He would have done so if he could. She knew that. Without the slightest hesitation Vito Farneste would have used the full force of the law to regain his possessions.
After all—her eyes shadowed—he had done it once already.
What Vito Farneste wanted, Vito Farneste got.
He made sure of it.
Whatever it was and whoever it was.
For whatever reason.
She stared at him. Stared at the man who sat there, who had nearly—so very, very nearly—destroyed her.
I was young. I was stupid. I was gullible.
She was none of those things now.
And Vito Farneste meant nothing to her. Just as she meant nothing to him. Had always meant nothing to him.
Now, only one person meant anything to her. It had come very late, but it had come. And it was for that reason she was here, standing in front of Vito Farneste, offering him the one thing he wanted from her—the only thing of any value to him.
But you were never of value to him—never! Not once, at any time! You were nothing more than a fool, to be used.
His eyes were dark, so very dark. Like the night.
For a second so brief she wanted to believe she had only imagined it, a pain went through her that was searing, agony.
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night…
The lines from Shakespeare’s bitter sonnet tore at her.
With a strength she pulled out of grief, she forced her mind away.
Vito Farneste wanted different things now from what he had wanted once, when she had been that young, stupid, gullible fool. Now what he wanted was in her possession.
But, unlike the last thing he had wanted from her, this time she would extract something in return.
Not money. Money was no use to her.
What she wanted was something quite, quite different.
Vito’s eyes had narrowed. But they remained utterly without expression. She matched hers to his.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
His gaze bored into hers.
She felt them do so as if they were a physical force, drilling through her. She took a breath—quick and sharp and shallow.
‘It’s very simple,’ she told him. ‘I want you to marry me.’
For a second there was total and absolute silence. Then, like the lash of a whip, he started to laugh.
It cut the flesh from her bones, flayed the skin from her body.
Scornful, contemptuous laughter.
She watched his head thrown back, his mouth widen, indenting lines from his nose to the edges of his lips.
Then he cut the laughter short.
With dark, poisonous venom in his eyes he leant forward.
‘In your dreams,’ he sneered.
His mocking voice sheered through her. Forcing her to acknowledge the truth of what he said.
Once, marrying Vito Farneste would have been a dream come true.
But that was in another lifetime. When she had been a different person.
Yes, so naïve I should have had a warning sign on me!
But there had been no warning. No warning of just how mortally dangerous Vito Farneste could be to her.
After that first, horrible encounter by the pool, when she was fourteen, she’d never thought she would see him again. Her mother, arriving back after a long lunch with Enrico, had been furious to discover Vito had turned up at the villa. Vito’s father hadn’t seemed pleased either.
Rachel had stayed down by the pool even after she’d heard the car arriving and assumed it was her mother and Enrico coming back. But she hadn’t been able to block out the angry exchange of deep voices echoing down from the house, culminating in the throaty roar of that red beast tearing away up the precipitous coast road. After a while her mother had come in search of her, clippin
g down the steps in high heels and looking tense and distracted. There had been two spots of colour on her cheeks, visible beneath the perfect make-up she wore. At thirty-four her mother could easily have passed for a woman nearly ten years younger, but today she showed her age.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Rachel had been moved to ask.
Her mother had given an impatient sound in her throat. ‘Vito has been here, spreading his usual discord! Enrico is angry, naturally, and that just makes for a difficult situation.’
‘Who’s Vito?’ Rachel asked, though she was pretty sure she knew just who her mother was referring to.
‘Enrico’s son. He’s driven here, quite unnecessarily, to inform his father that his mother has taken off for her mountain chalet with one of her so-called nervous attacks! Does Vito seriously think Enrico is going to rush after her? He’s only been here two days—that boy has absolutely no idea how hard his father works!’ Her mouth tightened. ‘The only thing Vito knows is how to spend money and live the dolce vita in Rome! The original Latin playboy!’ Her eyes suddenly sharpened. ‘Did you see him?’ she demanded. ‘Before Enrico and I came back?’
To her chagrin, Rachel felt the colour flush through her face.
‘He…he walked past the pool,’ she confessed, in a mumbled voice.
Her mother’s face hardened. ‘Well, at least he won’t be back now. He’s gone off to hold his mother’s perpetually swooning hand. It’s quite ridiculous the fuss he makes over her!’
Was that defensiveness in her mother’s voice, or just accusation? Rachel wondered. Whichever it was, it just made her long to be a million miles away.
She remained of that opinion for the rest of her stay at the villa. She did her very best to stay out of the way, heading down to the tiny private beach below the villa to swim in the sea, or sunbathing by the pool with a book.
Her mother and Enrico seemed to spend most of their time out and about, and she was glad. She felt no easier in Enrico’s company than in her mother’s. He seemed to be a remote figure, middle-aged and heavily built, someone around whom the whole household revolved—including, primarily, her mother.
Rachel hated seeing them together. Up till now she had accepted their relationship. It had lasted over six years, ever since Enrico Farneste, attending a conference in Brighton, had walked into the expensive boutique her mother ran in the fashionable Lanes to buy something for his current mistress and decided that Arlene Graham would make him a much better one. Rachel had been packed off, first to her mother’s elderly widowed aunt and then to an expensive boarding-school, to get her out of the way, and her mother had been whisked off to Italy.
