by Julia James
‘I wanted you to be good enough to marry. I wanted you to be the kind of woman that men married, made their wife. To be good for something more than sex. When Vito seduced you I nearly died… He’d taken you and used you, tried to turn you into what Enrico had turned me into…’
Arlene’s eyes closed, exhaustion and defeat in her face.
‘I had a dream. So real I sometimes thought that it had actually happened. A dream that Vito would marry you—as his father would never marry me. I saw you as a bride—a Farneste bride! With the Farneste emeralds around your neck!’
Her mother’s eyes flew open, feverish, over-bright.
‘That’s why I took them! They were there, in the Rome apartment—the apartment that Vito took you to, to try and make you someone like me—good enough for sex and nothing else! I was there when Enrico collapsed with his heart attack, and after the ambulance had taken him away I never saw him again. Never! Vito gave orders for me not to be allowed into the hospital. Not even to say goodbye. Not even to say that I loved him—though he had never wanted my love. Only my body. But Vito would not let me see him. He had me thrown out of the Rome apartment.
‘I went back to the villa, and then, three days later, when I was eaten with fear for Enrico and what was happening to him—because when I phoned the hospital they would give me no news. Vito had ordered them not to! A black security van drove up to the villa. I was evicted. The day’s newspaper had finally disclosed that Enrico Farneste of Farneste Industriale had died the day before in Rome, with his son and his “beloved wife” at his bedside! And I, his “beloved mistress”, didn’t even know. Didn’t even know that Enrico had died. Until Vito had me thrown out of the villa, stripping me of everything that I’d had with Enrico.’
Arlene drew breath again, painful, rasping, and Rachel sat, holding her hand, her heart crushed in a vice, as she listened to her mother’s unburdening.
‘But Vito didn’t know.’ Arlene’s eyes glittered again, fever-bright. ‘Didn’t know that I’d taken the emeralds with me to the villa, and when he threw me out I took them with me. They’re yours, my darling girl! Yours! For when you are a Farneste bride.’
Rachel tried to protest, gently, carefully. But Arlene’s morphine-clouded mind had created a new reality, one based entirely on final, desperate hope, however hopeless, however forlorn.
‘It’s my only wish for you,’ she whispered, her eyes huge, flowing with maternal love so long held in check, repressed and suppressed. ‘If I could see you as Vito’s bride—oh, my darling girl—then I would die happy…’
Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes as she stared blindly through the net curtains.
She might have been insane to think that she could force Vito Farneste to put a ring on her finger, even for so brief a time as what was left of Arlene’s life, but for all that, for all her pathetic failure this afternoon, she knew with agonising certainty that she had been right to do what she had attempted. It might have been hopeless, ludicrous—as insane as Vito had so sneeringly dubbed it. But she would not have rested easily until and unless she had at least tried—tried to fulfil her mother’s dying wish.
Death changes everything, she thought. It makes a new reality and destroys the old one. Gives new imperatives, new urgencies.
All that was important to her now was her mother’s brief remaining span of time. Nothing else. Not herself. Not her feelings, or wishes, or fears.
Nor Vito Farneste’s either.
They didn’t count at all.
Nor did he.
The November night was bleak and dreary by the time Rachel returned from her visit to her mother. Every visit was painful, but today, after having endured the ordeal of trying to make her mother’s hopeless dying wish come true, it had been even more so. Arlene had seemed weaker, and one of the nurses had let slip the word that Rachel had dreaded to hear.
Hospice.
Pain clutched her again as she walked into her shabby flat.
They had so little time left together—and they had wasted so much. Even now, knowing as she did why Arlene had packed her off to school, seen so little of her while she was growing up, it still hurt desperately.
‘I didn’t want you associated with me!’ Arlene had told her, and Rachel’s heart had been crushed with grief as she heard the truth about her mother’s feelings for her. ‘I didn’t want you tainted by my relationship with Enrico! And—’ her voice had darkened ‘—I didn’t want that satyr Vito coming anywhere near you.’
Rachel cut the memory. It was too awful, too painful. Now, with the rawness of setting eyes on Vito again after so many years, the pain was exacerbated tenfold, scraping along her nerves. How right her mother had been to keep her away from Vito Farneste…
And yet even as her head spoke her heart betrayed her.
Vito—to see him again, a few hours ago, had been agony.
And ecstasy.
He had not changed—he would never change—he would always be to her what he had always been.
The most beautiful man in the world.
Through the consuming anguish of grief at her mother’s illness another feeling thrust itself through.
This time around she knew what it was. When she’d been eighteen she hadn’t even known its name, its existence. Now, at twenty-five, she did.
Desire.
Desire for a man who made her yearn to press against him, to feel that lean, hard body against hers, to reach up and taste that beautiful, sinful mouth…
How can you want a man who despises you—who has always despised you? It’s shameful, pathetic, unforgivable!
But knowing it and feeling it were two completely different things.
If only I hadn’t gone today! If only I hadn’t seen him again!
A sick longing went through her, shaming her.
She forced it aside. She would never set eyes on Vito Farneste again.
She had tried this afternoon to do what love for her mother had impelled her to do. It had been the most useless, mortifying experience, but at least she had tried! At least she would not have it on her conscience that she hadn’t even summoned the courage to try and grant her mother’s dying wish—impossible though she had always known it to be! She had failed—failed miserably—but at least it was over.
With a crushed, heavy heart she prepared her supper—baked beans and toast. Cheap, quick. When she had eaten, having had to force every mouthful, she fetched her laptop.
She’d never gone to the prestigious university she would no doubt have qualified for had she finished school. Instead she’d taken evening classes at a local college, funding them out of her waitress wages, until she’d had sufficient language qualifications to get a job in the marketing department of an international company. She had earned enough to put down a deposit on a tiny but comfortable flat in London. The same flat she had sold to help pay for her mother’s private hospital treatment.
She gave a bitter smile. After the luxury that Enrico Farneste had kept her in, her mother’s finances had not fared well. Perhaps grief, a broken heart and the bitterness that had consumed her mother had made her uncaring of the money she had put aside. Certainly it was running out fast now—the expense of the private hospital was heavy—but Rachel didn’t care. Arlene would live in comfort for the rest of her life…
She opened up the laptop and started to work. She had found—and was grateful for it—freelance work, translating marketing literature from Spanish and French. It wasn’t well paid, but it was flexible, and it allowed her to spend as much time as she could with her mother. While she still could.
The out-of-tune sound of the battered Entryphone halted her abruptly. Perturbed—for who on earth was wanting her at this hour?—she went to the door and picked up the phone.
‘Yes?’ she answered guardedly. ‘Who is it?’
‘Vito Farneste,’ came the terse reply.
CHAPTER FOUR
FOR about five frozen seconds Rachel just stood there, numb, unable to believe wha
t she had just heard. Then she reached to press the button for entry to the front door of the house conversion downstairs. But even as she did so a shiver of fear went through her.
What did he want?
As she tentatively opened her bedsit door, two storeys up, she heard the rapid, decisive tread of his step on the uncarpeted staircase. A moment later he appeared around the corner of the stairs, heading straight up to her.
His face was dark and forbidding, and she felt even more nervous. Did he think she had the Farneste emeralds here, in the flat? Was he planning simply to help himself to them forcibly?
And anyway, how had he found out where she lived?
Agitation and turmoil made her blurt out the question aloud, even before he came up to her.
‘How did you know where I lived?’
His mouth tightened as he approached her.
‘I had you followed when you left. Is living here some kind of joke? Meant to deceive me?’
Vito walked up to her and all but pushed her aside to stride into the bedsit. His coruscating glance around its confined shabby space made his brows snap together.
His eyes swivelled to Rachel, standing stricken by the doorway.
Emotion churned in her like a washing machine gone mad, tumbling round and round inside her. Fear, shock, resentment, bewilderment—and something far more powerful than any of those. A leaping of her blood that overpowered everything else going through her.
He was still wearing his business suit, but he’d discarded his tie since she had seen him that afternoon. Its lack made him look no less formidable, but somehow slightly raffish as well. So too did the graze of a shadow over his jaw. She felt her stomach clench.
He stood at the centre of the room, such as it was, given its narrow confines, his hands splayed at his waist, jacket pushed back.
‘Why this dump? Are you really so broke? You didn’t look it when you sailed into my office this afternoon. Or were you trying to impress me?’
There was a sneer in his voice.
Her face tightened. She was fighting hard for control, but she knew she was losing. Vito Farneste was the last person she’d expected to see here, and shock was making her stupid.
‘Well?’ he demanded, his eyes flickering over her.
This time there was disdain in them.
Rachel was not surprised. This afternoon she had looked as good as she knew she could. Now she was just about the opposite. She was wearing a grey track suit, her face was devoid of make-up, and her hair was drawn back into a tight, workmanlike, unflattering knot.
From somewhere she managed to find a retort to his demand.
‘What business are my finances of yours?’
His eyes hardened. He was obviously not liking her tone of voice.
‘Considering you just turned down a million euros from me, I would have thought your finances were indeed my concern. And, since you’re not even going to get to first base with your ludicrous “conditions” you might as well take the money, no? Where are the emeralds?’
He looked around, his expression of disdain deepening—as if, thought Rachel angrily, his precious family jewels might be contaminated by being in such a lowly abode! But then, she thought bitterly, he probably thought they’d been contaminated already, just by having been in her mother’s possession.
‘They’re in a bank!’ she answered sharply. ‘Where else do you think they’d be?’
‘Which bank?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t have to tell you that. If you came here to try and get me to sell them to you, you can get out! My mother will never sell!’
‘Not even if it means you’re so broke you’re living in this dump? Where is Arlene anyway? Is she broke too? I can’t imagine her letting her precious bambina live in this place while she spends the rest of what she got from my father!’
Rachel’s face closed.
He mustn’t find out about her mother. If he did, and showed the slightest sign of satisfaction that his father’s hated mistress was reaping the wages of sin, she would kill him with her bare hands…
An urgent, overwhelming need to protect her mother from this man who hated her so much, when she was so pitifully weak and vulnerable, consumed her.
‘She’s abroad!’ she lied quickly. ‘Spain. She likes warm weather.’
She could feel Vito’s gaze pressing on her.
‘So how come you feel free to dispose of the emeralds? Do you even have possession of them?’
‘Yes,’ answered Rachel baldly. She did have possession. Arlene had granted her power of attorney over her affairs two months ago, before her mother had become too ill to look after them herself any longer.
So, yes, she had possession of the Farneste emeralds.
But she had known she could never sell them. Had known that when her mother was dead she would return them, gratis, to the one person to whom they truly belonged—Enrico’s widow. She understood why her mother had taken them, but she knew that Arlene had no right to them, and nor did she.
Had Vito agreed this afternoon to her ‘conditions’ then she would have returned them in that fashion—she wanted nothing from Vito but his name on her wedding certificate, and wedding photos to show her mother, to convince her that she had truly married Enrico’s son, that—however unlikely the notion was to anyone not at the extremity of life as Arlene was—she was going to be what Arlene had never been: a respected wife, not a mistress open to insults and sneers.
But Vito had shot down her ridiculous attempt to make her mother’s dying wish come true. And so she must keep the emeralds until Arlene was dead, when she could return them to Signora Farneste.
As she answered him, something changed in his face—something that made her blood run colder.
‘You do realise, don’t you, that you have admitted that you are in possession of the Farneste emeralds, whose ownership by your mother I strongly dispute, whatever the total inadequacy of the law in that respect? So tell me, cara mia, what is to stop me persuading you to return them to me?’
There was a glitter in his eyes, and Rachel felt fear stab through her again. But she could not—must not—feel fear in front of him. Defiantly she shot back at him.
‘I don’t give squat what you think the law is about the emeralds! If you could have got them back legally by now you would have! And if you so much as lay a finger on me I’ll have you done for assault so fast you won’t have time to squeal! And the precious tabloids can go to town on the scandal!’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘So if that’s all you came here for—to try out your bully-boy tactics—you can clear out just as fast!’
The glitter in his eyes had intensified, and suddenly the poky bedsit seemed even smaller than it was. Her breathing had quickened, she could tell, and adrenalin was coursing through her bloodstream.
It was because of the fear she was denying, the tension—that was all.
But she knew she was deceiving herself. Adrenalin was flowing in her veins for a quite different reason.
She could feel her body responding to his presence, feel every nerve leap to quivering life.
It mortified her. She had to damp it down—hard. If Vito saw it—saw her reacting to him—she would die, just die! It would give him another weapon over her that she could never hope to defeat.
Because she knew, with a terrible, sickening sense of doom, that she would feel this way about Vito Farneste for the rest of her life. She would never be able to stop the tide of desire, of longing, of wanting pulsing through her whenever she was near him. She was in thrall to him, and it was a captivity she could never escape.
Like a magnet, the dark glitter in his eyes drew her—and frightened her.
But his next words frightened her even more.
And sent a humiliating, debilitating shiver down her spine.
‘I was thinking,’ he said, and his voice, out of nowhere, was a dark purr, ‘of a quite different method of persuasion, cara mia.’
His dark eyes reste
d on her, and in them she saw an expression that ripped the years away. Her stomach hollowed out, her legs going instantly shaky.
Desperately she struggled against its bone-dissolving effect.
It was fake then and it’s fake now! Fake, fake, fake!
He put it on then, when you were eighteen, fooling you that he found an eighteen-year-old English schoolgirl virgin attractive, and he’s putting it on now!
Besides, she knew what she looked like right now—the glossy finery she had worn this afternoon had gone, and she was back to the way nature had made her, with a passion-killer track suit and her hair pulled back into a stark knot, and not a scrap of make-up to soften the image.
He saw her reaction and it amused him, she could see, but beneath the humour anger was running—she could sense that too.
She watched him walk towards her. There was purpose in his stride, and she felt again that rush of adrenalin that so shamed her. She wanted to move, jerk away, scream, shout, run out of the door, back away to the end of the bed, lock herself in the tiny bathroom—anything to get away from him.
But she was rooted to the spot, and as she stood there he stopped in front of her. The glitter in his eyes quickened her breathing.
Even as he halted his hand reached out, curving around the nape of her neck, and to her shame, her everlasting, shuddering shame, she felt her head bow slightly, as if to ease the cool, exquisite sliding of his fingers along the sensitive skin at the back of her neck.
Sensation dissolved through her in a drowning rain, washing away every long, long year of the seven that had passed since Vito Farneste had last caressed her.
Her eyes drooped closed. She was unable to resist the temptation of the silken, sensuous glide of his fingers, the delicate stroking of their tips against her quivering skin.
She heard him murmur something in Italian. She did not know what it was. Her entire battery of senses were coalesced into a single sense—touch.
His other hand curved around her jaw and cheek, lifting her face. Helplessly her eyes fluttered open again, and she watched, caught in that silken, sensuous thrall, as he lowered his head.
