by Julia James
Rachel had known her mother had become the mistress of Enrico Farneste, head of the giant Farneste Industriale. That it was his luxurious villa she lived in, his yacht she took her holidays on, his gilded world she moved in. And she had known, too, that it was thanks to Enrico Farneste that she went to her exclusive boarding-school, that Auntie Jean now lived in a nice bungalow outside Brighton, not a council flat, and that when she stayed with her mother in London it was Enrico Farneste who ended up paying for the hotel, and supplying the money her mother spent.
Her mother was untroubled by the irregularity of the liaison.
‘On the Continent these things are understood,’ she had told Rachel, in her crisp voice. Her vowels had completely lost their flattened, lower-class origins, and her spoken English now was almost as good as her expensively educated daughter’s. ‘In a Catholic country a wife can never be divorced, so men have no choice but to stay married. It’s a perfectly acceptable arrangement, and no one thinks anything of it. Just as no one,’ she added offhandedly, ‘thinks anything of the fact that your father and I were not married.’
She had sounded so convincing that Rachel had believed her.
Until Enrico’s son had ripped that illusion from her with a handful of casually vicious words. As ugly as they were true.
Surely to God that should have been warning enough?
But it hadn’t been.
The ugliness of the words had not been enough to make her forget the beauty of the man who had delivered them. From that day onwards Rachel had hidden a shameful secret—that in her adolescent heart every male who ever came her way, whether real or on screen, was compared to Vito Farneste. Even as the years passed, and the routine of school dominated, still, in the dark recesses of her secret mind, she knew she could never expunge the image, burnt on her retina by the bright Italian sun, of that figure walking down the steps with lithe, leashed grace, like a dark, beautiful young god.
She had told no one—Vito Farneste had remained a secret sin.
It was one she was to pay for bitterly.
Was still paying for. In dreams that had turned into a nightmare.
A nightmare that was the dark, deadly sting of Vito Farneste’s eyes as she told him her conditions for relinquishing the Farneste emeralds.
He sat back in his chair.
‘Get real,’ he said, his voice soft. Soft as blood.
Rachel could feel the scorn, the derision, lashing out at her like the fine, cruel tip of a whip across the broad desk. She saw him reach out a long-fingered hand and pull open one of the drawers of the desk, take out a leather cheque-book case. He flicked it open, and picked up a gold pen, sliding off the top and holding it over a cheque.
‘Cash,’ he said. ‘That’s the currency for women like you and your mother. Hard cash.’ His eyes narrowed, and Rachel could feel the leashed fury lashing within. ‘But don’t even think of trying to bleed me. You can have a million euros in exchange for the emeralds. Not a cent more. Take it or leave it.’
He was starting to write. Assured, decisive, the black ink flowing smoothly across the blank spaces of the cheque.
‘No sale.’
Rachel’s voice was controlled. Very controlled. It had to be.
Vito didn’t even pause in writing, just went on, scrawling ‘one million euros’ in the required space.
‘You didn’t hear me, did you?’ Rachel said. Was her voice less controlled? No—she would not allow it to be. Must not allow it. Too much depended on her keeping her control total. Absolute. Unbreakable.
Vito glanced up, his look corrosive. ‘I heard you make a joke in such poor taste I would not have thought even you could stoop so low.’
He went back to completing the cheque, signing it with his dark, flowing hand. He tore the page from the cheque-book and pushed it across the desk towards her.
‘I’ve dated it three days from today. Bring me the emeralds tomorrow, and then you can cash the cheque.’
She didn’t even look at it. Instead, in a tight, rigid voice, she said, ‘It was no joke. If you want the emeralds back, you marry me. That’s all. Take it or leave it.’
She could not resist throwing back his own words to her. It helped, however minutely, to ease by a fraction the tension racking her so tightly she thought she might snap at any moment.
Vito set down his pen. It was a slow, deliberate movement. Then, in a movement equally slow, equally deliberate, he leaned forward again.
‘I would rather,’ he spelt out, his voice low, lethal, ‘take a toad as a wife than you.’
His eyes rested on her. Dark. Deriding.
A dull stain of colour seeped out along her cheekbones.
‘I’m not suggesting a real marriage.’ She tried to inject scorn into her voice, but it didn’t seem to come out that way. She could feel the colour spreading now, staining her cheeks. ‘I simply want your ring on my finger for a limited duration.’
A pang struck her, stabbing with a pain she should have got accustomed to but hadn’t. Couldn’t.
‘Six months—no longer.’
The tightness in her voice was unbearable, crushing her larynx so she could hardly speak. The pain stabbed at her again.
She tried to stare him down, match his cold, levelling gaze with one of her own.
‘I have already given you my answer. Do you add selective hearing to all your other…flaws?’ was Vito’s response. ‘Including, of course, stupidity. Do you imagine I would ever, under any circumstances, marry you?’
Her face was so tense it ached, all the way across her jaw, up through the bones in her skull. Her spine was stiff with the strain of holding herself upright.
‘I know what you think of me, Vito— I don’t need it spelt out.’
A slashing, hostile smile flashed across his face. Utterly devoid of humour.
‘Then, if you know that, even more do I question your sanity in coming here like this. Daring to try and sell back to me what was never your bitch of a mother’s to take!’
Emotion—deep, agonised—twisted in Rachel’s face.
‘Don’t speak of her like that!’ Her words spat at him.
Vito’s face darkened, as if night had closed over him.
‘Your mother got her greedy, grasping claws into my father and wouldn’t let go! She made my mother’s life a non-stop misery!’
His words, his voice, cut at her like a knife. Rachel closed her eyes against it. How could she deny what he had said? How could she argue back against what he had thrown at her? And yet to hear her mother spoken of in such terms gutted her. A vision of how she had last seen Arlene seared into her mind, and she had to open her eyes again to banish it. But she could not banish the shaft of anguish that went with the vision.
She raised her hand in a sharp, sweeping movement, as if to brush away the feelings ripping through her.
With monumental effort she fought back to take control of her emotions, to keep this conversation where it had to be—at the level of business, nothing more. Where Vito Farneste would gain something he wanted and so would she.
‘This is irrelevant,’ she said dismissively. ‘The sole issue is whether you want the Farneste emeralds back again—on the terms I’ve just set out. I want your ring on my finger. For no more than a few months—’ she fought to keep her voice steady as she spoke ‘—and that’s all. You can have your precious emeralds back on our wedding day. No cash will be necessary.’
She bit out the final sentence.
Vito stared at her. His expression was veiled. And suddenly the way he was looking at her was far, far worse than when his eyes had been dark with fury, his face cold with disgust.
She felt her heart start to quicken, her stomach plunge as though she’d just swallowed an ice-cube.
‘Why?’ he asked quietly, but there was no softness in his voice, just a low, disturbing shimmer of menace. ‘Why?’ he asked again.
His shoulders eased into the soft leather curve of his executive chair and it swung slightl
y at the redistribution of weight. His eyes never left her face.
She shifted uneasily. What was going on? Why was he looking at her like that?
She tightened her jaw.
‘Why what? Why don’t I want money for the emeralds?’
‘No. Why do you imagine that I would entertain, even for a nanosecond, your…proposal?’
His voice was still quiet, but it withered the flesh on her body.
‘Because,’ she answered, through gritted teeth, ‘you want the emeralds back. And this is the only way you’re going to get them.’
Something flashed in his eyes. In a single fluid movement he was on his feet.
His hand flew up.
‘Basta! This idiocy has gone far enough! I am prepared to buy back the emeralds in cash—but I am not prepared to have my time wasted a second longer with this farce! So either take the cheque or get out!’
She was reeling from the force of his anger. Her fingers dug into the soft leather of her handbag.
‘If I walk now you’ll never get your precious emeralds back!’
She tried to hurl her words at him, but they came out shaking.
‘Never is a long time,’ he retorted caustically. ‘At some point you’ll sell them—just to realise their value. And if you don’t sell them to me, what do I care? I’ll buy them from whoever you sell them to.’
‘My mother will never sell them!’ An image of the way Arlene had let the green jewels run through her fingers, gloating with triumph over her possession of them, shot through her mind. ‘Never!’
‘Then you can bury them in her grave with her!’
Rachel’s face whitened, draining of blood. Faintness drummed in her ears.
‘You bastard,’ she whispered.
His face stayed unrelenting, like unyielding marble. ‘No—that’s you. Remember?’
It finished her. Finished her totally.
Numb, she turned on her heel, walking back towards the closed double doors that seemed suddenly to be a hundred metres away. The urge to run, to get out, was overwhelming. Only at the door did she find one last vestige of courage. She took the handle, steadying herself.
Then she turned. Her face was totally blank.
‘May you rot in hell, Vito Farneste!’
She swung back, yanking open the double doors, and walked out. She just made it inside the lift before her legs all but buckled beneath her, and she had to sag against the bronzed wall for support.
As the lift plunged downwards, so did her heart.
She had blown it. Totally blown it. Her wild, stupid, insane idea had failed utterly, miserably.
Despair filled her, and in its wake the floodgates to grief opened yet again, drowning her.
In his office, Vito stood for one long, last moment, his face rigid. Fury so overwhelming he thought it would burst through tore at him, but he leashed it tight, with rigid control.
How dared she come here! Stroll into his office and coolly, insolently, lay down conditions for the return of his own property?
And such conditions…
His eyes narrowed with cold, disbelieving rage.
Had she really imagined that he would pay the slightest consideration to what she demanded? Could she really be that insane? Walking in, out of the blue, three years after he’d finally torn Arlene Graham’s grasping claws from the Farneste coffers, and thinking that he might actually consider, let alone accept paying such a price for the purloined Farneste emeralds?
Out of what sordid hole had she crawled, anyway? And why now? Were times hard for the pair of them these days? He’d made sure Arlene Graham had taken the minimum of booty with her when he’d despatched her after his father had died, but a woman like her would have squirrelled away funds for years. Other than sending his useless pack of lawyers to try and extract the one trophy she had managed to carry off, he’d let Arlene Graham rot, glad that he’d finally got her out of Italy. Where she’d gone he neither knew nor cared. If she’d taken another protector he’d have been surprised—her youth had gone and her market rate was all but zero.
Another thought seared across his mind.
Had she turned her daughter to the same trade? Leeching off rich men in exchange for sleeping with them? She was certainly dressed as if a rich man had paid for her appearance…
Even at the thought something stabbed at him. So brief that he dismissed it. Instead he found himself jabbing at the intercom to his PA.
‘The woman who left my office just now. Have her followed.’
CHAPTER THREE
RACHEL turned the key in the lock and let herself into her flat. She felt overwhelmed with emotion, shaking in the aftermath of her encounter with Vito Farneste.
It had been worse, far worse than she had imagined it could be—even though she had been dreading it ever since the realisation that she would have to go and confront him had gelled inside her all those weeks ago.
She collapsed down on the bed. It sagged ominously under her weight. But she took no notice. The grim condition of the rented bedsit she lived in was of no concern to her—she had ceased to notice its noisome condition some time ago, and if she missed her small but beautifully decorated one-bedroom flat in the old Victorian house in a leafy inner London suburb, she did not regret its sale by an iota. It had had to go, and go it had. And that was that.
Only one thing concerned her now—had concerned her for the last five gut-churning weeks.
Getting Vito Farneste to marry her.
Had she really thought she had a chance of succeeding? She might as well have tried to scale Everest on her hands and knees! She stared bleakly ahead of her, every excruciating moment of that ghastly scene playing itself inside her head like an unstoppable CD.
Her stomach writhed as if it were full of sea snakes, and her hands, she realised, were still clenched tightly around her handbag. Forcibly she made herself unclench them, and tossed the bag on the bed’s shabby coverlet. She glanced down at the threadbare carpet.
It had all been pointless. The whole sorry, stupid expedition! The idiotic, no-hope, ludicrous plan! How could she possibly have thought it would succeed? That Vito Farneste would actually consider going along with her proposal to get his precious emeralds back? Agree to anything so absurd, so insane as going through any kind of marriage ceremony with her? However temporary, however limited.
Not even getting back the Farneste emeralds was worth such a sacrifice on his part.
I must have been mad even to consider it…
No, not mad, she thought, her eyes screwing shut in anguish. Just desperate.
Desperate enough to do anything, anything to make Arlene happy…
Pain ate at her. Like a huge, engulfing pool it flooded over her. Washing through every pore of her body. She could not stop it—did not even try to these days. Because if she did, it didn’t work, simply hit her again, over and over.
Getting to her feet again, she reached to pick up her handbag and extract her mobile phone. The number she knew off by heart, and dialled it automatically. When it answered, her words were automatic as well.
‘Hello. This is Arlene Graham’s daughter. How is she?’
She waited while the appropriate records were checked, and the same carefully neutral phrase came back to her. Rachel nodded, murmuring her thanks, and disconnected.
Stable. No change. As well as can be expected. Comfortable.
The familiar litany drilled through her head. None of it sufficient to hide the one word that was the truth about her mother.
Dying.
Depression sank over her like a heavy weight, pressing down on her so that she felt slow and cumbersome as she moved around the cramped bedsit, carefully proceeding to take off her expensive, extravagant outfit and smooth it carefully inside the curtained-off hanging space which was the closest the accommodation got to providing a wardrobe.
As she eased the beautiful fabric off another emotion penetrated her cawl of depression. Bitterness that she had wasted so mu
ch scarce money on such a pointless expenditure. She might as well have saved it for all the good it had done! Had she really thought that looking the part would help persuade Vito Farneste to accept her ludicrous conditions?
How could it have? Making her his wife—on whatever terms imaginable—was anathema to him, whatever clothes she was wearing!
Get real, he had sneered at her, and he was right. She’d been indulging in a pathetic fantasy, thinking the Farneste emeralds might be a sufficient inducement to go along with her absurd plan.
Again in her mind she heard his contemptuous, angry words cutting her idiotic fantasy into tiny shreds!
Well, it was an idiotic fantasy…the whole thing—emeralds or not!
Just how many times does Vito Farneste have to say vile things to you before you learn your lesson about him?
If she’d been smart, the first insult he’d thrown at her when she was fourteen would have been the last! If she’d been more worldly-wise she’d never have given him the benefit of the doubt again.
But she hadn’t been smart, she thought savagely. She’d been stupid—criminally, culpably stupid. Indulging herself in an idiotic, ridiculous fairytale.
She tried to stop herself, but it was no good. Like a sweeping, drowning tide memory rushed through her, taking her shakingly, shudderingly back into the past that was like a curse over her life still, all these years later.
Eighteen.
She’d been eighteen.
Such a dangerous age. An age for dreams.
For fairytales.
Her school exams had been over, and the senior class had been allowed two weeks away from school in the summer term as a reward. Her friends Jenny and Zara had whisked her away with them, gleefully informing her that they were going to spend the fortnight in Rome, at Jenny’s father’s company flat. Rachel had been apprehensive—although she’d been one of the oldest girls in her year she’d known that she was the least worldly-wise—but excited as well.
