by Lynne Graham
She was so shattered by the sight of him standing there that she gasped out loud. Her grey eyes locked to him with helplessly hungry intensity and she felt dizzy. Sheathed in a dark blue designer suit that outlined every lean, powerful line of his magnificent stature, his proud dark head at an angle, Roel was subjecting his surroundings to a keen scrutiny. He swung back, entrapping her mesmerised gaze. His dark-as-night eyes flared brilliant gold and glittered over her and he strolled fluid as a big cat towards her.
‘Are you my eleven o’clock appointment?’ she whispered.
Roel nodded in confirmation and subjected her rigid figure to a raking appraisal that drummed hot pink up into her cheeks. Clad in a white tee shirt and black cropped combat pants that hung low on her hips teamed with three-inch-high stiletto boots, Hilary discovered that she was suddenly alarmingly conscious of her every flaw. That sardonic inspection made her feverishly aware of her own body and of his deeply intimate acquaintance with it. Yet he had never looked at her before in quite that way. She realised that there was something different about him but did not know what it was. All she grasped was that she felt shamed.
‘We need to go somewhere we can talk,’ Roel murmured smooth and soft and for no reason at all that she could imagine her blood ran cold inside her veins.
‘I’m…I’m…er…working,’ she mumbled, a coward to the backbone at that instant.
‘Bene…then I assume that you don’t have a problem with your staff and your clientele hearing what I have to say to you.’ Hard, handsome face merciless, Roel switched with fluid ease from his native Italian to English. ‘I’ll begin by admitting that I’m not impressed with the business I recall you set up with my money.’
Hilary almost cringed where she stood. But a split second later she was rocked by the ramifications of what he had just said. If Roel recalled their arrangement, he could no longer be suffering from amnesia. Since she had left Switzerland, Roel had evidently recovered his memory of those five lost years. Although his consultant had forecast exactly that conclusion, Hilary was severely shaken by the knowledge that Roel now remembered everything that had ever happened between them.
Her stomach churning with nervous tension, she turned aside to Sally and asked the other woman if she could cover her appointments until lunchtime.
‘We can talk upstairs,’ she told Roel tautly. ‘When did you get your memory back?’
‘After you disappeared. That probably helped. After all, you had me living a life that wasn’t mine,’ Roel pointed out sardonically.
Hilary paled at that unfeeling jibe and unlocked the door of her flat. ‘I’m surprised you’re here. I didn’t think you’d want to see me again.’
The silence seethed. Roel sent the door flipping shut behind him. The hall was very narrow and dark and Hilary backed out of it into the kitchen/living room. Roel surveyed the worn furniture and general shabbiness and distaste flashed across his lean dark features.
‘You’re even poorer than I imagined. This place is a dump,’ Roel pronounced in a grim undertone. ‘When my foolish aunt, Bautista, contacted you when I was in hospital, the temptation to profit from my misfortune must have been overwhelming for you—’
‘It was nothing of the sort!’ Hilary was shattered by that accusation. ‘How can you say such a thing? All I was worried about was you. For goodness’ sake, I thought you were dying!’
Roel had lifted a letter lying on the table and he was reading it. He winced. ‘You’re in debt—’
Embarrassed to realise that he was looking at a communication from her bank urging her to settle the overdraft she had recently run up on her account, Hilary snatched it out of his hand again. ‘Mind your own business!’
‘Everything about you is my business. Knowing that gives me a good feeling,’ Roel informed her with stinging softness.
Hilary had no idea what he was getting at and in any case was more keen to defend herself against the charge that she had gone to Switzerland in the hope of somehow enriching herself at his expense. ‘Let me explain why I’m in debt. I spent a fortune on two very expensive last-minute flights to and from Switzerland and on paying extra wages to staff to cover for me while I was away. My budget doesn’t run to extravagances like that.’
Unimpressed, Roel elevated a scathing ebony brow. ‘Is poverty your only excuse for jumping at the opportunity to leap straight into my bed?’
Her hands balled into fists. ‘You put me in that bed—’
‘Oh, you really fought me off, didn’t you?’ Roel derided with a honeyed scorn that cut her like a knife blade. ‘You’re a conniving little con artist and you knew exactly what you were doing. Only by consummating our marriage could you ensure that you could claim a substantial divorce settlement from me.’
Hilary was bone-white. She felt horribly humiliated by his suspicions. ‘I won’t be claiming anything from you now or at any other time. I don’t understand why you’re thinking like this about me. Was it such a crime for me to want to see you when I heard you’d been injured? I told you I was sorry in my letter—’
Roel vented a sardonic laugh that made her flinch. ‘All four lines of it? Even then you couldn’t tell me the truth or admit the extent of your deception. You staged a vanishing act and you left me no explanation—’
‘When it got down to it, I just didn’t know what to say,’ Hilary muttered tightly.
‘You didn’t want to warn me that I had been sharing my bed with a lying, cheating little whore?’
‘Don’t call me that!’ Hilary launched back at him on a wave of angry hurt.
‘You were a class act, bella mia.’ Unforgiving golden eyes clashed with her anguished scrutiny and remained resolute. ‘You knew the way to my heart…for an entire week you screwed my brains out every time I asked an awkward question!’
In a wild tempest of mortified pain at that wounding crack, Hilary snatched up the mug sitting on the table and threw it at him. ‘That’s not how it was; that isn’t how I behaved!’
Offensively still, as though it was beneath his dignity to duck, Roel underlined his point by raising a speaking brow as the item hit the wall several feet to the left of him. ‘When you’re cornered you’re very childish but that doesn’t cut any ice with me. Neither do tears—’
‘I’m not going to cry over you!’ Hilary yelled at him full volume. ‘You’d have to torture me to get tears!’
‘Tears irritate me as do emotional scenes and flying pottery. But you should get it all out of your system now,’ Roel advised grimly. ‘If you make an ass of yourself in public again, I will be very angry with you.’
Growing stress was making Hilary’s brow pound with a painful pulse-beat of tension. ‘Make an ass of myself? Again? What are you talking about?’
Roel removed something from the inside pocket of his well-cut jacket and tossed it down on the table for her perusal. It was a magazine clipping and she was aghast to recognise the woman in the photo, who was clearly dashing tears from her unhappy face, as being herself. It had been taken that last day in Switzerland when she was walking into the airport at Lugano and she had not even noticed the photographer. Beneath ran several lines of French.
‘What does it say?’ Hilary finally prompted.
“‘All that money and still miserable,”’ Roel translated grittily.
Hilary folded her arms. ‘Well, I’m sorry if I embarrassed you but it does prove that I was upset about the situation we’d got into—’
Roel dealt her a chilling glance. ‘We? Who created that situation? Who claimed to be my wife? Who lied her way into my home and my trust?’
Hilary unfolded her arms again with a jerk. Her eyes were bright with appeal and discomfiture. ‘Look, try to understand that I just got in too deep. When I arrived in Switzerland I genuinely did think you were seriously hurt and I did really want to see you. I also believed you’d been asking for me—’
‘Why the hell would I have been asking for a woman I had not seen in almost four years? A woman
who meant nothing to me?’ Roel demanded. ‘And how could I have been asking for anyone while I was unconscious?’
Absorbing that salient fact for herself, Hilary’s troubled face tightened with chagrin. Yes, it did indeed sound highly unlikely that he would have been asking for her. Had her sister, Emma, told her a little white lie? Had Emma made up that touching assurance in a naive attempt to encourage her elder sister to rush over to Geneva to be with her husband?
But before Hilary could fully consider that possibility Roel’s own words sounded afresh inside her head in the cruellest of echoes. A woman who meant nothing to me? That was what he had said. That was how he thought of her. As nothing and nobody. Well, what had she expected? Tender affection? For the brief space of a week her pretences had led him to believe that he must have some feelings for her and he had behaved accordingly. But that comforting time was now at an end.
Determined not to betray how terribly hurt she was, Hilary struggled to get back to the point she had been intending to make before his casually cruel honesty had hit her like a punch in the stomach. ‘Dr Lerther warned me not to tell you anything that might disturb you—’
‘So you let me think I was married? Didn’t that strike you as very disturbing news to give a man who revelled in being single?’ Roel slammed back at her.
‘I expect you really appreciate your freedom now that you know you never lost it—’
‘I did not lose my freedom. You stole it from me.’ His stunning golden eyes were full of contempt. ‘You claimed to be my wife and now rumours abound that I am a married man. As, strictly speaking, I am a married man, I cannot deny those rumours and the paparazzi have already managed to print a photograph of you.’
Guilty tears lashed the back of Hilary’s eyes. ‘I suppose that has to be embarrassing for you—’
‘I don’t embarrass easily,’ Roel cut in drily.
‘I don’t think you understand just how sorry I am,’ Hilary mumbled wretchedly.
‘Sorry is not enough to satisfy me. You really wanted to be my wife.’
Hilary’s pallor became laced by feverish, embarrassed colour.
Roel sent her a sizzling look of scorn. ‘You wanted to be my wife so badly that you lied and you cheated your way into the position.’
Shame and anger at the humiliation he was inflicting roared through Hilary. ‘I know it looks bad but—’
‘I won’t listen to your excuses. It looks bad because it was bad,’ Roel incised. ‘You took my beautifully organised life and trashed it. I dumped my mistress for you—’
‘You did…what?’ Eyes widening, Hilary glanced up at him.
‘The gorgeous brunette…she was my mistress and I ditched her because you made me believe that I was a married man.’
Hilary just closed her eyes. The gorgeous brunette. How could she ever have allowed herself to believe that a male like Roel Sabatino had no other woman in his life and his bed? She hadn’t wanted to accept that there might be a woman because accepting that would have made her own position untenable. Wasn’t that why she had chosen to assume that Roel was free of any entanglement? How could she have been so naive when it came to her own motives and so selfish? She really had messed up his life. Guilt and shame tore at her and made her throat thicken.
‘So there is a current vacancy in my bed and you are about to fill it again.’
‘I beg your pardon…?’ A frown of incomprehension had formed on Hilary’s strained face.
‘You’re coming back to Switzerland with me—’
Hilary was bemused. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I’m not giving you a choice. Did you give me one when you told me that I was living in a fairytale marriage?’ Roel shot at her with cold condemnation.
Hilary paled as if she had been struck and evaded his harsh gaze. ‘I can’t think of one good reason why you’d want me to come back to Switzerland—’
‘I want to use you as you used me and then throw you away again when I get bored. Does that clarify the issue?’ Lean, strong face hard, Roel met her shocked stare levelly.
Hilary released a dazed little laugh. ‘You don’t mean that…’
‘I’ve arranged for us to lunch with your sister, so you should start packing.’
Hilary froze. ‘How could we be meeting Emma for lunch? She’s at a school miles out of London—’
‘As we speak she’s being driven down for the occasion.’
‘But how…I mean why would you make such an arrangement?’
‘I had excellent reasons. Did you think you were the only one of us who could pull a dirty trick? I’m a master at manipulation, bella mia.’ Roel dealt her a look of pity. ‘Emma thinks we’re enjoying a reconciliation and she is ecstatic at the news, so you’ll have to come up with loads of smiles and lots of that bouncy chatter at which you excel to keep her happy—’
Hilary’s skin had turned clammy with shock. ‘How the heck could you have even got in touch with my sister?’
‘She phoned me at the town house this week and very touchingly apologised for her hostile attitude when we first got married.’
‘Oh, no…’ Hilary groaned in guilty dismay because she realised that it was her own fault that Emma had contacted Roel. Since her return from Switzerland, Hilary had only spoken to her sister on the phone and she had ducked all the younger woman’s questions about the state of her relationship with Roel. Unable to tell the truth, she had not been able to bring herself to tell lies. ‘I never did get round to admitting to her why we got married because I was scared…well scared—’
‘That she might be less respectful of a sister who marries a man for money?’ Roel slotted in with cruel accuracy. ‘You’ll be relieved to know that I left all her illusions intact. She told me how upset she was that we appeared to be living apart again and asked if that was her fault.’
‘And what did you say…that we were having a reconciliation?’ Hilary recalled with a visible effort to overcome her disbelief. ‘Was that what you said a moment ago?’
‘We are having a reconciliation…on my terms, and if they turn out to be on the punitive side of vengeful you only have yourself to thank for that.’
‘You think I’m a lying, cheating, horrible person…I’d have to be out of my mind to go anywhere with you!’ Hilary flung at him.
‘Non c’e problema…don’t worry about it,’ Roel urged. ‘I’ll take your sister out to lunch on her own and tell her the entire unlovely story of our relationship from start to finish—’
‘That would be a rotten, nasty thing to do!’ Hilary broke in, her horror unconcealed.
‘Unlike you, I would only be telling the truth as it happened. I’m relieved that you appreciate just how inexcusable your conduct has been,’ Roel spelt out grimly as he left the room.
Hilary raced out into the hall in his wake. ‘If you want me to grovel, I will, but don’t drag Emma into this—’
Roel gave her a sardonic glance. ‘Grovelling is for peasants and you should know me well enough by now to know that when I want something, I take it. You’re going to learn how to be a Sabatino wife and you’ll save me the time and effort of picking out another mistress by taking on the role personally—’
‘No way!’ Hilary yelled at him.
‘But you worked so hard to get yourself into that position. Not indispensable, you understand,’ Roel asserted drily, striding back to the front door and pulling it open, ‘but certainly worth a return visit.’
‘You wouldn’t dare tell Emma what I did,’ Hilary told him.
‘I would…’
A chill of apprehension enclosed her. ‘But doing that wouldn’t profit you in any way. Why would you be so cruel?’
‘It’s what you deserve.’ Roel studied her with brooding dark intensity. ‘You conned me into giving you a wedding ring and, before I kick you back out of my life again, I intend to level the score.’
‘I didn’t con you…I didn’t—’
Roel did not appear to be listening. �
�A limo will collect you in an hour and a half and deliver you to the hotel where we’re lunching with Emma. I’ll meet you there. I’m calling into my London office first.’
Hilary was panicking. ‘If I leave my business again, I’ll be risking bankruptcy and I can’t do that because—’
Roel gave her a withering look. ‘I’ll settle your debts—’
Hilary bridled. ‘It’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound overdraft run up on air fares…all right, it’s money I owe, but stop talking like it’s—’
‘I’m a banker. An unauthorised overdraft is a debt—’
‘You can’t do this to me, Roel.’ In her desperation, Hilary followed him out onto the landing. ‘If I leave London, who’s going to take my place while I’m away?’
‘You hire a manager. I’ll cover the expense—’
In furious frustration and lingering disbelief, Hilary watched Roel start down the stairs. ‘If you use my relationship with my sister as a threat, I will never forgive you,’ she warned him.
Lean, intelligent face cold and impassive in cast, Roel cast her a darkling glance. ‘You think I’d care about that?’
Chilled, she slumped back against the wall and slowly breathed in deep in an effort to calm herself. He might even be glad of the excuse to punish her by revealing all to Emma. It was not a risk she could afford to run. She thought her sister might understand why she had signed up for such a marriage almost four years back when their lives had been so bleak, but she would be very hurt that Hilary had allowed her to believe that their marriage was a genuine one. To that injury would be added the facts of Hilary’s more recent behaviour and how would Emma view that? Dear heaven, would Roel let Emma realise that Hilary had actually slept with him this time around? Hilary literally writhed with horror at the idea of having her own failings paraded for her kid sister’s benefit. She was supposed to set standards for her younger sibling, not break them.
Roel had, with merciless precision, chosen the one threat capable of making Hilary dance to his tune…
