‘Why not?’ she flung at him bitterly. ‘And besides, why should I care whether you’re interested in hearing what I have to say or not? You patently don’t give a damn about me!’
‘Hurt, Isobel?’ he threw back at her, and his eyes glittered like silver. ‘Disappointed that I wasn’t prepared to pick up the pieces of our relationship from where you ditched it on the roadside four years ago?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You over-estimate your charm. You might turn any number of heads here, but you forget that America is not entirely devoid of its share of lovely women.’
He was watching her closely, like a scientist observing a live specimen, waiting to see how it would react to various stimuli.
Isobel maintained her calm with effort.
‘I do not “over-estimate” my charm, as you put it, nor am I aware of any amount of head-turning going on here, and I’m quite sure that America is bursting with lovely women—whatever that remark is supposed to mean.’
His lips tightened and she could tell he wasn’t impressed with her retort. Did he really expect her to surrender in this war without a fight? Had he expected to waltz back here and make her dance to his tune without a murmur? She was sick to death of dancing to other people’s tunes. She smiled guilelessly at him.
‘I take it you’ve wined and dined your fair share of lovely women? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?’ She didn’t like the thought of that and, more than that, she didn’t like the thought that he could still provoke this level of wild jealousy inside her.
‘What makes you think that I did the wining and dining?’ he asked with a certain amount of mockery. ‘Equality is rampant over there.’
That, she knew, was a lie. She couldn’t see him allowing any woman to pay her way. It wasn’t his style at all. With all her immense family wealth, he had never once allowed her to pay for a single meal. Instead they had eaten out at cheap bistros or else made do with bread and cheese on the bed. Followed by love. Her body warmed at the thought of that and she looked at him furtively, then glanced down at her entwined fingers.
No, Lorenzo Cicolla was Italian through and through. No amount of expensive American tailoring could ever change that.
She remembered how she had reacted on her wedding-day to his announcement that he would be leaving the country.
After the initial shock had worn off slightly, she had murmured to him in a low voice, ‘You never told me that you were thinking of going to America.’ Around them various voices were arguing, debating the pros and cons of starting life without any financial help, an argument initiated by the revelation of his trip abroad to play the options market.
‘Would it have made the slightest difference?’ he had asked cuttingly, and she had remained silent.
The silences between them were the things that she remembered most clearly about that torturous time, the things which she could not reveal, the words she could never say.
‘I thought not,’ he had said in an icy voice, and her eyes had pleaded with him for some understanding but had hit a blank wall of hostility. ‘My post-grad results will be excellent but I don’t think I’ll return to this little hot-bed of intrigue to wait for them. No, I’ve already booked my flight.’
Then she had asked, in a dull voice, ‘Where will you stay?’
‘In a slum, I expect.’ He had smiled a cool smile. ‘As we both know, penthouse apartments are out of the question for someone who hasn’t got parents rich enough to lend a convenient hand.’
Her face burned now as she thought back to her answer to that.
‘I could give you——’ she had begun and he had snarled savagely.
‘Don’t even say it. Charity is something I find repellent.’
Charity, she thought, looking at him, was clearly not an emotion he had assiduously cultivated in America. Oh, no. Charity couldn’t be further from his mind in this demonic deal he wanted to cut.
‘You’ll be bored to tears within a month of living here,’ she said, thinking prosaic thoughts so that the tingling in her blood could subside and return to its rightful place in a past which was no longer relevant.
‘Oh, I think the element of novelty should keep me going for a while.’
She knew what he was referring to. The novelty would be her. When he tired, he would leave. They looked at each other, thinking the same thought—enemies on the same wavelength.
‘In that case, you’ll have to make do without the novelty of my father’s company, because there is no way that your condition for buying the firm will be met.’
She stood and he said softly, ‘Sit back down. I’ve already made it clear to you that you don’t leave this office until I’m through.’
‘And I’ve already made it clear to you that you don’t run my life.’
‘Hasn’t Mr Clark told you what you can expect if I don’t buy the company?’ he said idly, clasping his hands behind his head and surveying her through narrowed eyes.
‘He said that the company has great potential and a large client portfolio,’ she replied, siphoning off most of what he had, in fact, told her.
‘It’s struggling to make ends meet. In less than a year its potential will be a nostalgic memory and its large client portfolio will be a thing of the past.’
‘A year is a long time,’ Isobel interjected mutinously. ‘Anything can happen in a year.’
‘For instance?’ He appeared no more than mildly interested in her answer, which infuriated her more than if he had retaliated with some scathing, pithy observation.
‘For instance,’ she snapped, racking her brains to think of a few intelligent and probable for-instances, ‘I could find someone to run the company on my behalf!’
‘Who?’
‘Well, if I had someone in mind, I wouldn’t be here, would I?’ she said heatedly. ‘Humiliating myself.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Humiliating yourself?’ he asked, as though the thought of her humiliation had not crossed his mind in any way, shape or form. ‘Sure that’s the emotion you had in mind?’
He stood up and strolled over to her, and she looked at his approaching figure with growing alarm.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, in such a breathless voice that she felt obliged to clear her throat and say as normally as she could, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He was close to her, staring down at her, and she looked up at him with impotent frustration.
Why couldn’t he have stayed put? Why couldn’t he have obliged and become a distant memory? Memories could be painful but they could also be dealt with. His presence here was altogether more intrusive and not one that she had ever bargained for.
Living with Jeremy had done wonders for her self-control. She had built a fortress around herself, a protective moat which no one could cross, and behind that moat she had concealed herself.
Now Lorenzo Cicolla had come back and already she was beginning to find cracks in her armour.
He raised his hand and ran one long finger along her cheek in a gesture so unexpected that for a second her heart seemed to stop beating.
‘Ever since you laid eyes upon me, your colour’s been a little on the hectic side,’ he said softly, with a trace of cool mockery in his voice.
‘Anger does that to a person,’ she muttered as his finger trailed along her neck. ‘Will you please remove your hand?’
‘Why?’
‘Because it makes me feel acutely uncomfortable.’
‘Why does it?’
‘Because,’ she said, trying to sound controlled, ‘I don’t relish being touched by a man who hates me.’
‘Are you quite sure, Isobel? Your mouth says one thing but your body is telling me something altogether different.’
He reached down without taking his eyes off hers, and she felt his hand cup the swell of her breast, neatly encased in its expensive grey wool suit.
There was nothing neat about her reaction, though. She had an instant
of feeling that everything had plummeted out of control. Her breast seemed to enlarge, and her nipple hardened, longing for that touch to go further.
Her breath caught sharply in her throat and she pulled away.
‘How dare you?’ she said, choked and furious, with herself and with him. ‘How dare you?’ She was running the risk of spluttering now, so she fell into silence and made do with looking at him with icy hostility.
She had forgotten what a man’s touch felt like. Her body had lapsed into a self-imposed celibacy and she had told herself that making love was something she didn’t need. How wrong she had been. Lorenzo’s brief caress, which stemmed from no more than a cruel need to prove his point, had aroused her to a pitch which she had never imagined possible.
She folded her arms around her, warding off any more potential invasion of her privacy, and glared at him.
‘You were saying?’ he prompted, as though the little interlude had not occurred.
Isobel looked at him and wondered dazedly what he was talking about now.
‘About your grand ideas for saving your father’s company?’ he continued, walking across to the window and peering down with his back to her.
It was hardly reassuring talking to a back. She got the distinct impression that reassurance was the one thing he did not intend to extend to her, and he was making the point perfectly clear without uttering a word.
‘I have no one specific in mind to run the company,’ she said in a glacial voice, while he continued to lavish his attention on what was, she knew, hardly a spectacular view. ‘But I’m sure it would be no problem finding someone.’
‘From where?’ he asked, not bothering to turn around. ‘Off the street?’
‘There are such things as employment agencies.’
He slowly turned around, reluctant, no doubt, she thought sourly, to abandon his fascination with the view of a half-empty pavement.
‘What sort of person would you ask them to trot along to you?’ he asked. He lounged indolently against the window-frame and appeared to find her thoughts on the matter vaguely amusing.
‘Someone qualified,’ she informed him.
‘Qualified in what?’
‘In triple by-pass surgery,’ Isobel snapped, which appeared to amuse him still further. ‘In running a company, of course.’
‘Ah.’ He paused, then asked with a frown, ‘How do you know that he would be any good?’
‘I’m not a moron. I would use my instinct.’
‘Speaking as an ex-medical student? I’m impressed. And what would you do with the existing members of the board? Put them out to pasture? You know all of them personally. Can you really afford to make yourself unpopular in a town of this size?’
His logic infuriated her. ‘I’d keep them on,’ she snapped.
‘And lose money even faster. What a shrewd business brain you’re displaying here.’
‘I’ll take my chances. I’d rather do that than get myself involved in any sort of alliance with you.’
The cool amusement left his face as though it had never been there.
‘You’ve become very self-righteous over the years,’ he said with icy dislike. ‘I don’t recall such an attack of primness four years ago when you threw your lot in with Jeremy Baker. You never loved him but that certainly didn’t stand in the way of progress, did it? How did you manage to justify that to yourself, Isobel? Did you grin and bear it and think of England? Was the union of two such illustrious families worth it?’
‘You’re hateful!’
‘That’s rich coming from you.’
‘You can’t buy me, Lorenzo.’ Even as she said it she knew how ridiculous it sounded. To all intents and purposes, she had been bought four years ago. She tasted the bitter truth on her tongue and fought it back.
She remembered some of Jeremy’s choice remarks at the wedding-reception.
‘You might have had a lot going for you, Lorenzo,’ he had said at one point, after he had consumed too much alcohol, and his tongue, already too loose, had loosened still further. The three of them had been sitting alone at the main table. She could still remember how embarrassing it had been. ‘But,’ he had continued in a slurred, resentful voice, ‘money was the one thing that you never had. For God’s sake, your mother used to work in some of our houses!’ He had laughed then, as though he had made some particularly amusing observation, but neither of them had joined in.
‘Money buys everything,’ Lorenzo now said scathingly, ‘and you are no exception.’
‘Money can’t buy happiness. It can’t buy love. It can’t buy respect. It can’t buy health.’
Lorenzo looked away. ‘How philosophical,’ he commented sarcastically, and she sighed, weary with the whole damned thing.
‘Please don’t do this,’ she said evenly. ‘I know that you were upset when I married Jeremy…’
‘Upset! You English! Yes, I was upset.‘
‘Not so upset that you didn’t vanish to America without a backward glance; not so upset that you didn’t cavort with God knows how many “lovely women”!’
‘Did you expect me to keep in touch with you, Isobel? Write you pining letters so that you could wisely try and mend a broken heart from across the Atlantic?’
‘You haven’t got a heart.’
His face hardened. ‘I’m a lucky man, in that case.’ He paused, then asked in a voice that was edged with contempt, ‘Was that what you wanted? To have me keep in touch even though you were married? Carry on being lovers while you and Jeremy played the perfect couple to one and all?’
‘That’s disgusting!’ Colour rushed to her face.
‘There are more disgusting things,’ he said harshly, and she wished desperately that she could find the strength to walk away from this dark stranger who wanted to hold her life in his hands so that he could crumble it in his fist whenever he chose.
He was casting his mind back. She could see it. She knew what he was thinking. It was a memory that had haunted her for four years. The memory she had tried hardest to kill. But like all bad memories it had planted roots and refused to go.
‘Don’t tell me that you’ve forgotten that pretty little scene in your parents’ garden four years ago?’ His face was set in lines of bitter hatred.
‘It’s stupid delving back into the past,’ she mumbled in a woolly attempt to avoid the unavoidable.
‘I was in the garden. Jeremy followed me. He hadn’t yet got his fill and I was actually beginning to regret my decision to stick out the damned thing when the most sensible thing would have been to decline his best man invitation and to face the fact that some challenges to one’s honour had to be surrendered.’
‘He had had too much to drink.’ Her voice was a whisper.
‘Always had been over-fond of the bottle, hadn’t he, our dear Jeremy? He followed me into the garden and took up where he had left off.’
She remembered. She had been chatting to her mother while out of the corner of her eye she had noticed their departure from the marquee. She could recall thinking, Well, at least any argument wouldn’t be overheard. She might not have wanted the wedding, but on the other hand she hadn’t particularly wanted to see it degenerate into an all-out fight between the bridegroom and the best man.
As soon as she possibly could, she had followed them both. At first she hadn’t seen them. It was a very large garden, landscaped, with quite a few trees and clumps of rhododendron. It had been designed with a view to being informal but arresting, and she had had to peer around a bit before she saw the two figures by one of the trees.
They had been arguing, that much was clear from the stance of their bodies. Jeremy had been gesticulating rather a lot, but Lorenzo’s body had been rigidly still and, as she had approached she had seen that his expression was one of tightly controlled anger.
‘Always money, wasn’t it, Isobel?’ Lorenzo asked tightly. ‘The great insurmountable divide.’
‘No.’ The monosyllabic answer was a weak denial. It had
n’t been money, not with her, never with her, but how could she explain that to him without revealing the secret which she was forced to clutch to herself?
He was pushing her into confronting things which she would be unable to defend, even now. She looked into his eyes and read the relentless fury there, still burning after all this time.
‘No? You must have an extremely short memory, in that case.’ His voice was cool and silky, but his expression wasn’t. There was a tautness about his dark features that sent a shiver through her.
‘Stop,’ she said, and he gave a short laugh.
‘If I recall, money was all that mattered to you, wasn’t it?’
Isobel didn’t answer. Her mind flew back to that scene in the garden when she had been called upon to defend Jeremy, to agree by her silence that money had mattered, that it had been the one thing which Lorenzo could never give her and the one thing that had severed their relationship.
‘My darling wife,’ Jeremy had said, with a smile of sly triumph, ‘told me that you weren’t good enough for her. She said that poverty was all right for a while, that it could be quite bohemian in a way, but that in the end it would be just too uncomfortable for her.’
And she had not been able to defend herself. Her hands had been tied.
Lorenzo had looked at her with bitter contempt, the same way that he was looking at her now, the same way that he had looked at her the minute he had set foot in Mr Clark’s office. He had forgotten nothing and he was not prepared to forgive. He would never be prepared to forgive. He would extract every ounce of blood from her and he would use whatever method came to hand to do it.
She felt the mounting despair of someone caught in a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end of it.
Jeremy’s death should have brought her release, but instead she had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire.
‘Here’s your big chance to set the record straight, Isobel. No Jeremy around now.’ He gave her a long, leisurely, cool look. ‘I’m waiting with bated breath for your version of what was said. I’m waiting for you to tell me that it was all a terrible mistake, an error of judgement on my part.’
Vengeful Seduction (Mills & Boon Vintage 90s Modern) Page 5
