Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Copyright

“We can be friends…”

“Friends?” Lorenzo almost laughed at that, his eyebrows shooting up in an expression of contempt that made her burn. “I’m sure you’d like nothing better, Isobel.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, only that I’m rich, successful——the two prerequisites, if I remember correctly, for any man to be worthwhile in your eyes.”

“That’s not true!” Memories flooded back and she felt faint.

“No? Then pray tell me why you married Jeremy….“

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.

Vengeful Seduction
Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

WHITE was a dreadful colour. Isobel stared at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror and thought that she would probably never wear it again. It would forever conjure up a feeling of despair.

She began brushing her hair, long dark hair, almost black, which fell down her back in small waves. Sooner or later, she knew, she would have to stop brushing it. She had been up here in her bedroom for well over two hours now, getting dressed, but in reality dodging the inevitable which would be progressing now downstairs.

There was a knock on the door and her mother pushed it open and came inside, smiling. Isobel smiled back. The muscles in her jaw ached from the effort but she had no choice. Brides were supposed to be radiant. It was their hallmark. Whoever heard of a depressed bride?

‘I’m nearly ready,’ Isobel said, turning around and hearing the rustle of her dress under her. The sleeves felt too tight, restricting almost, and the neckline was too low, but then she had only herself to blame. Her input in choosing the thing had been next to nil. She had allowed her mother to pick the design from a magazine without even glancing at it. It had a top fitted to the waist, from where it fell in a series of chiffon layers down to her calves. She had been measured for it, had tried it on, had nodded at her mother and the seamstress, and she had hardly seen it at all.

Now she realised that she hated it, but then, she thought, she would have hated any bridal dress.

‘How do I look?’ she asked, standing up, and her mother’s smile broadened.

‘A picture, darling,’ her mother said, with a sheen in her eyes, and Isobel said quickly, firmly,

‘No tears—you promised.’ Cry, she thought, and I shall burst into tears, and as well as being a depressed bride I shall end up being a depressed bride with mascara streaming down my face. Not an attractive sight.

‘But where has my little girl gone?’ Mrs Chandler held her daughter’s hands and Isobel looked back at her with great love and a growing lump in her throat.

‘I’m still here, Mum,’ she said. ‘You’re not losing a daughter; you’re gaining a son.’ That took quite a bit of doing, and saying it made her feel ever so slightly sick.

‘Of course I am, darling,’ Mrs Chandler agreed, ‘but your dad and I…well…Where have all the years gone? One minute you’re a toddler, and now here you are getting married.’

‘I had to grow up some time.’ It was important to keep her voice light, carefree. It wouldn’t do at all to have her parents suspect, even for a moment, that all was not well in Bride City. They would immediately start asking questions, and Isobel couldn’t afford for that to happen. She loved them both far too much. She had been the much longed for and only child of a couple who had given up hope of ever having children, and from the day of her birth she had been showered with parental adoration. They had both taken an inordinate delight in everything she had done, said, thought, and Isobel had returned their joy with the same deep love.

‘And how do I look?’ Mrs Chandler gave a small twirl and Isobel grinned broadly.

‘Spectacular.’ She did, too. Mrs Chandler was as tall as her daughter was, but fair where Isobel was dark, although they both had the same shade of violet-blue eyes and the same long, thick eyelashes. She was sixty now, but her face was still beautiful, with that amazing bone-structure and that clear, faultless complexion. Parkinson’s disease might have tainted her movements, slowed her speech, but it had not diminished her lustre.

‘Dad’s a lucky man,’ Isobel said, and when she thought of her father she had another one of those awful lumps in the back of her throat again.

Mrs Chandler laughed. ‘If you could have seen him an hour ago,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have described him as a man toppling over under the weight of his good luck. He was scowling rather heavily and trying to squeeze into a dinner-jacket. He insisted that he could still get into the one he wore when we married, and of course he can’t. The odd button at the bottom will have to be left undone, but I don’t think anyone will notice, do you? All eyes will be on you today, my darling.’

That made Isobel feel almost as sick as she had felt when she had told her mother about not losing a daughter but gaining a son, but she smiled again and tried to look terribly radiant at the thought of that.

‘How are the preparations going?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been helping, but…’

‘But nothing. You can’t be scurrying around a marquee in your gown, making sure that everything is all right! I know you’re nervous—I was awfully nervous on my wedding-day—but there are enough hands downstairs making sure that nothing goes horribly wrong. The caterers have been wonderful, the food looks delicious and the guests have now started trickling in. Your father’s holding the fort with Aunt Emma and your cousins. Telling his usual jokes. You know.’ She was smiling, her eyes distant and full of affection.

The perfect family unit, Isobel thought. Except nothing was perfect, was it? As she had discovered to her cost.

‘Has Jeremy arrived yet?’ The question almost strangled her, but she kept right on smiling and looking happy.

‘Due shortly.’ Mrs Chandler started moving towards the door slowly. ‘Darling, I shall have to go and help your father. He’ll come and fetch you in a short while, when everything’s about to start.’ She paused by the door. ‘I’m so happy for you, my dear. I know we both said——’ she spoke carefully, seriously ‘—that we were a little disappointed that you didn’t finish your university education, but I’m sure, seeing you now, that it’s all for the best, and you knew what you were doing.’

She left and Isobel sat on the bed. Now that there was no one in the room, she felt free to stop smiling. She wished that her mother had not brought up the subject of university. She had had to swallow many bitter pills for this marriage, and that had been one of them.

She sighed, and across the room her eyes caught her image looking back at her from the full-length antique pine mirror in the corner of the room. Never mind the years slipping past; that didn’t worry her. What worried her was the prospect of the future hurtling towards her.

She slipped on her high, satin shoes. They felt uncomfortable. She was a tall girl and accustomed to wearing flat shoes, but this dress needed high ones. They completed the image, and there was no doubt that the image was a remarkably beautiful one.

Her mother had once told her, rather proudly, that she had been striking even as a baby, and Isobel had never had any reason to doubt that. She only had to look in the nearest mirror to see that those striking looks had never abandoned her.

Her waist-long hair was like finely spun silk, black silk; her skin was ivory-white and her features were perfect. From a very young child she had known admiration, and over the years she had become accustomed to it, even though she felt that her beauty had been a blessing, but in the end it was an irrelevance. Beauty, after all, was transitory, and sometimes, quite frankly, it could be a terrific disadvantage. It opened doors, but the reception waiting at the other end was not always the one you had hoped for.

She walked across to the window and stared down into the huge back garden which her parents had diligently cultivated ever since they had moved into the house. In a few years’ time they would have to get a gardener to help them out, or else convert some of the land into pasture, if that were possible, but of course they would defer that until the last possible moment. Her mother had been told at the onset of her illness that her condition would worsen, but Isobel knew that she would continue to tend her garden, lovingly if not as thoroughly.

From here she couldn’t see the arriving guests. They would be entering through the front door. Relatives, some of whom she had not seen for a long time; her university friends, who would probably gape and feel dwarfed by the dimensions of her parents’ house, because she had never let on just how wealthy her background was; and of course schoolfriends, hers and Jeremy’s, shared friends whom they had known from the year dot—just as they had known each other from the year dot.

She gazed down into the garden and attempted to speculate on their reactions to this marriage. Most, she supposed, would see it as a sort of natural conclusion, something expected, but some, her closest friends, had already expressed their horror at the match. She had always been the high achiever, the girl with everything, and they had told her, with varying degrees of tact, just how amazed they were that she was throwing it all away, throwing away a medical degree, for God’s sake, to settle down and get married. Naturally she had said nothing. How could she?

Her parents had been disappointed as well, even though they had taken great pains not to condemn her choice. The fact was that they had instilled in her from day one the importance of education, and they had been bewildered when she had arrived home six months previously, sat them down and tonelessly announced her decision to marry Jeremy Baker.

Their immediate concern was that she was pregnant, which, Isobel had thought at the time, had been the only amusing thing about the whole sorry affair.

‘It’s just that it’s all so sudden, darling,’ her mother had said, frowning and trying to make sense of the impossible. ‘I didn’t even think that you and Jeremy were that close. I thought…’

Isobel had known what she had thought, and she had cut in hurriedly, with some nonsense about deciding at last where her heart lay.

‘But can’t it wait?’ her father had asked in a concerned voice, and she hadn’t been able to meet his eyes.

‘We feel that this is the best way for us,’ she had mumbled, and later, when they had gently asked her about her medical degree, she had fudged and muttered something about blood and guts not really being up her street after all.

In the end, they had left it, and her mother had embarked on the wedding preparations with zeal.

Her father was an influential man in the community and strings had been pulled so that everything fell into place with the perfection of an event that could have taken years in the making. Nothing was too small or too great for their daughter, and from the sidelines Isobel had watched and choked back the sickening misery that had threatened to overwhelm her at every turn.

She was consulted on the design for the wedding-invitations, the serviettes, the colours of the flowers which hung in profusion downstairs in the marquee, every conceivable shade of yellow because, her mother had decided, spring was yellow and so the flowers would all represent spring. Frankly, winter would have been more appropriate but she had bitten back the caustic observation and gone along with the general flow.

She began pacing about the room, glancing at the reminders of her childhood which still clung here and there: adventure books which she had devoured in her youth, before biology texts became much more fascinating, a doll which she could remember being given to her as a birthday present from her parents when she was five, a picture of her family which she had done when she was four and which her parents had proudly framed—three figures with odd shapes and stick-like fingers. Her parents had been immensely proud of that picture, but in fact art had been just about the only thing that had eluded her. She had a mind more attuned to the logical.

Ironic, she thought now, that her life, which had been cheerfully pacing towards the most logical conclusion in the world—a degree in the subject she had adored, a career helping people—had petered out into the most irrational ending.

That made her think of Jeremy, and she swallowed down the bitter resentment rising up her throat.

In less than one hour’s time she would be his wife, and there was little point in constantly whipping herself with the insanity of it when there was nothing she could possibly do to remedy the situation.

She heard another knock on the door and stiffened in alarm. Surely not her father. Surely not yet. She looked at her watch, which showed that she still had at least forty-five minutes left of freedom, and said, ‘Yes? Come in!’

If was probably her mother with some detail that needed sorting out, or eIse Abigail, the least tactful but closest of her childhood friends, who would no doubt launch into another lecture on the stupidity of the marriage.

‘Fine,’ she had said when Isobel had told her about Jeremy. ‘Throw your life away on that worm! Throw away your hopes of being a doctor! And while you’re about it, why don’t you fling yourself under the nearest bus as well?’ Abigail was studying drama and had cultivated a theatrical way of talking. ‘I shall never mention another syllable on the subject again!’ But she had continued to expound on the theme whenever they had met, and Isobel assumed that she was about to recommence.

It wasn’t Abigail. It wasn’t her mother. It was the last person in the world she wanted to face, but face him she did, defiantly across the length of the room.

‘So,’ he said, strolling into the room and shutting the door behind him, ‘the bride is ready.’ His voice was sneering, his expression hard and contemptuous.

‘What are you doing here?’ Isobel asked. Her heart was beating quickly, making her feel giddy and deprived of air. He had always had this sort of dramatic effect on her, as if his presence threw her system into some weird kind of overdrive.

‘Didn’t you think that I’d turn up?’ Lorenzo smiled humourlessly. ‘Why, Isobel, my dearest, I’m the best man.’

‘Yes.’ She licked her dry lips. ‘But you should be downstairs, with everyone else.’

What she really meant was that he should be anywhere else, but not here, not in her room. She couldn’t bear this game of cruelty he had played ever since he had found out about Jeremy, even though she could understand it.

‘I never thought you’d do it,’ he bit out, advancing towards her. ‘When you told me five months ago what you were planning, I thought that it was a joke, some kind of mad joke.’

‘No joke, Lorenzo.’

His hands shot out, grasping her arms, and she winced in pain.

‘Why? Why, damn you!’

‘I told you…’

‘You told me nothing!’ He flung her away and walked towards the dressing-table, resting on it with clenched fists.

Isobel followed him, stared at his back, the downbent head, and struggled not to put her arms around him.

Presently he turned around and faced her, his face dark and savage.

‘Why are you doing this, Isobel? You’re not in love with Jeremy Baker.’ There was a sneer in his voice and she answered quickly, to avoid the subject of love.

‘How can you speak about him in that tone of voice? I thought he was your friend!’

‘We both know him,’ Lorenzo bit out. ‘He’s unstable, reckless. You told me so yourself. Wasn’t that one of the reasons that you stopped seeing him, even as a friend, after he went to work for your father? He frightened you. You were glad to be at university.’

‘You frighten me too,’ she said, ‘when you’re like this.’ They stared at each other. He was furious and his fury, she knew, was given edge by his frustrated bewilderment at the situation. She looked at him, at the whip-hard strength of his body, the dark, sexy good looks which had turned every girl’s head at school when he had joined years ago. He had only been sixteen at the time, but already his face had held promise of the powerfully striking man he was to become.

‘I am trying to be reasonable, Isobel,’ he said in a voice that didn’t sound reasonable at all. ‘I am trying to work out whether there’s something here I’m missing or whether you need to be carted off to the nearest asylum in a strait-jacket.’

His eyes narrowed on her, curiously light eyes that were especially striking given the darkness of his hair and the olive tint of his skin. He was Italian, the son of emigrants who had settled in England, choosing their spot carefully so that their brilliant and gifted only son could be sent to one of the finest private schools in the country. He had easily gained a place on a scholarship and had landed among the students, bright enough but mostly with rich backgrounds, like a leopard in a flock of sheep.

He was different from them all, and he had never seemed to give a damn. He hadn’t needed to. His brains were enough to guarantee respect. At sixteen, he possessed a formidable intellect that, it was whispered, outranked some of the professors. His mind was brilliant and creative, and his drive to succeed was formidable. Nothing since had changed.

‘I know what I’m doing, Lorenzo,’ she whispered, looking away to her hands which were clasped in front of her.

‘You damn well don’t!’ he roared, and she glanced nervously at him and then at the door.

‘You’ll bring everyone rushing up to see what’s going on!’

‘And I’ll tell them exactly what I’m telling you now! That you’ve gone off your rocker!’

‘You don’t understand!’ she retaliated, and he moved towards her.

‘What don’t I understand?’ He stood in front of her, staring down.

For a second she didn’t have a clue what to say. From the start there had been a thread of suspicion underneath his anger at her decision and she realised that her words, spontaneously spoken, had tightened the thread. She couldn’t afford for that to happen. He was too clever by half for him to be allowed a glimpse of the truth behind the black farce.

‘I care about Jeremy,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, and he tilted her chin up in a rough gesture.

‘Like hell you do.’ His hand moved from her chin to coil into her hair so that she was forced into looking at him. ‘There’s only one person you care about. Would you like me to prove it to you?’ His mouth twisted into a smile but there was nothing gentle in it.

‘Lorenzo, don’t!’

‘Why? Are you frightened?’

‘No, of course I’m not frightened!’ She tried to laugh but it came out as a choked sound. ‘I am going to marry him,’ she said, placing her palms on his chest and feeling his masculine energy whip into her like an electric current. ‘You may not like the idea, but it’s a fact of life and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.’

‘You were my lover,’ he said in a low, rough voice. ‘Were you playing games behind my back with him? Is that it?’

‘No!’

‘You hardly saw him when you were at university. You hardly went home and weekends were with me.’ His brain was ticking, thinking it through, applying the same ruthless intelligence to the enigma as he applied to any problem. ‘He could hardly have come up to see you during the week. He wouldn’t have been able to wangle the time off from his job.’

‘He wrote,’ she admitted. It was a small concession and it was true. Jeremy had written.

‘You arranged a wedding courtesy of written correspondence?’ Lorenzo sneered, and his grasp on her hair tightened. ‘Don’t make me laugh. You went out with the boy for one term when you were sixteen, yet you set a wedding-date by virtue of a few letters?’

‘This is pointless,’ she whispered, and anger flooded his face.

‘You,’ he said grimly, ‘have been mine since you were sixteen. You are twenty now and we have been lovers for over a year. Jeremy has never been a part of that picture. You have always belonged to me.’

The words invaded her mind and threw up images of Lorenzo, his strong arms wrapped around her, his mouth exploring her body. He had been her first and only lover.

‘I belong to myself,’ she muttered, trying to wriggle free.

‘Tell me that you’re in love with him,’ Lorenzo murmured savagely in her ear. ‘Let me hear you say it.’

He was so close to her that she could feel his heart beating, smell the rough sweetness of his skin. Ever since she had known that she would marry Jeremy, she had avoided Lorenzo Cicolla like the plague, because his proximity was the one thing she had feared most and, standing here, she knew that she had been right.

‘You can’t, can you?’ he taunted. ‘Then why? Has he threatened you? Answer me!’

‘Of course not,’ she heard herself say quickly, too quickly. ‘I’ve known him since we were children. We played together. We had the same set of friends.’

‘I played marbles with a girl called Francesca when I was ten but that didn’t automatically mean that we were destined for each other, for God’s sake! Anyway, you’re talking in the past tense. The past tense is history.’

‘History makes us!’

‘You forget, I know him well too. Well enough to know that he can be dangerous. He has always taken risks, stupid risks, and the only reason he’s got away with them is because his parents have had the money to bail him out every time.’

‘He holds down a job!’

‘That means nothing.’

‘Why are you his best man if you hate him so much?’ she asked bitterly. Why are you? Why did you have to be here?

‘Don’t you know? He offered it as a challenge, Isobel, and I never refuse a challenge.’

‘You’re as bad as he is.’

‘My intelligence outstrips his,’ he said in a hard, controlled voice. ‘Any risks I take are born from cool calculation. Jeremy saw me as a threat the minute I set foot in that school and when he discovered that I couldn’t be bullied into taking his orders, he did the next best thing. He decided to befriend me, and frankly I didn’t care one way or the other. But don’t you know that underneath the friendship there has always been an undercurrent of envy and resentment?’

‘I know,’ Isobel muttered. ‘But he did like you.’

‘He respected me.’ Lorenzo said this without a trace of vanity. ‘When he asked me to be his best man, we both knew the reason. The reason was you.’

She turned away, not wanting to hear any more. Everything he said was tearing her apart.

‘You were the prize draw,’ he mocked. ‘You have always been the prize draw. In this little, tight-knit community, you were the light that outshone the rest. You dazzled everyone. You were the greatest trophy.’

‘Where is this getting us, Lorenzo?’ she asked, doing her utmost to keep the misery out of her voice.

‘You’re catapulting yourself headlong into disaster,’ he grated, a dull red flush spreading over his cheeks. ‘There is still time to get out of its path.’

This, she knew, was the closest he would ever get to begging, and it made every bone in her body ache with the craving to do just what he asked.

Everything he had said about Jeremy was true. Jeremy had been obsessed with her. He had singled her out and it had never really occurred to him that his privileged background, which had bought him everything, couldn’t similarly buy him her. He had proposed to her when she was sixteen, still at school, while he had been at university, four years her senior. She had laughed. Now the joke was on her.

‘I will marry Jeremy——’ she looked at her watch ‘—in less than thirty minutes’ time,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’

His lips tightened and his expression changed subtly from anger to contempt. She didn’t know which she hated more.

‘I never took you for a coward or a fool, Isobel Chandler, but I’m rapidly revising my opinion.’

‘People are more complex than you give them credit for,’ she said in a low voice.

‘What are you trying to say to me?’ His eyes glinted and the sun, streaming in behind him through the large bay window, gave him a brooding, dangerous air that frightened and excited her. He had always frightened and excited her, she realised. He had walked into that school and she had been open-mouthed. She and every other girl in the class. They had been a group hesitatingly crossing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, realising with an uncertain thrill that boys were not quite as uninteresting as they had once assumed. Lorenzo Cicolla with his bronzed skin and his black hair, four years older but vastly more mature than the other boys of his own age, had captivated their imagination. They had giggled from the sidelines, observed him from the distance with the blushing innocence of youth.

The fact that he had not looked at her, at any of them, even with the mildest of curiosity, had only added to his appeal. In fact, it was only when she was sixteen, ironically through Jeremy, that they had struck up a tentative friendship and he had admitted, with amusement at her reaction, that he had always noticed her. He might have been young, but he had already cultivated the dark, intense composure that had hardened as he got older.

‘I’m not trying to say anything.’

‘No? Why do I get the impression that you’re talking in riddles?’

‘I have no idea.’ She shrugged but her hands were trembling, and she quickly stuck them behind her back and clasped them together.

‘What did those letters say?’

She gave him a blank look, and then realised what he was talking about. She might have guessed that he would not have left for too long her unwary admission that Jeremy had written to her. There had only been one letter, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

‘This and that,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘Why are we going through this?’

‘Be more specific.’

‘I can’t. I don’t remember.’

‘Ah.’ His face cleared and he shot her a cruel, cold look. ‘You can’t remember what was said in those letters, yet you still decided to marry the man.’

‘No! You don’t understand! You’re putting words into my mouth,’ she said in confusion.

‘Can you blame me, dammit?’ He gripped her and his eyes were so ferocious that she was terrified that he would do something awful, shake her until she came apart. She opened her mouth to protest and his lips met hers in a kiss that was fuelled by anger.

Isobel whimpered and pushed at him and eventually he stood back and stared down at her.

‘What’s the matter, Isobel?’ he asked, his mouth twisting. ‘Can’t you bear to bid a fond farewell to your lover?’

‘Stop it!’ she moaned. She felt close to tears. When she had first told him about Jeremy, he had been angry, but proud. Too proud to question. He had stormed out of her university flat and had not returned. Time had obviously worked on his fury, stoking it. It was a strange, back-handed compliment to her, but one she would rather have avoided.

‘Why?’ he snarled.

‘You know why! I belong to Jeremy now. It’s just the way it is.’

He turned away abruptly, but not before she caught the hatred that her remark had aroused. She realised, because she knew him so well, that she had not phrased her heated reply in the most tactful way possible, but just then, with her passions threatening to soar out of control, she had had to say something that would deflect him from realising how powerful his effect on her still was.

She made a stilted move towards him, then there was a knock on the door and she sprang back as though she had been burned.

It was her father. He came into the room and gave them a puzzled look, in answer to which Lorenzo said, in a normal voice, as though nothing had happened between them, ‘Just wishing the bride good luck. I doubt I shall see much of her once the wedding is under way, and we’ve known each other for so long and——’ he faced her with a smile even though his eyes were as hard as diamonds ‘—so well, that I thought a private last farewell would be in order.‘

Her father came into the room, oblivious to the undercurrents, and nodded with genial understanding.

‘Quite understand, my dear fellow,’ he said warmly. He had always liked Lorenzo. ‘Lucky chap, getting this beautiful daughter of mine.’

Lorenzo looked at her with icy courtesy. ‘I don’t know whether luck had a great part to play in it. Love, perhaps, wouldn’t you say, Isobel?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, reaching out to hold her father’s hand. She couldn’t look at Lorenzo. That would have been a Herculean feat quite beyond her just at that moment.

‘Well, dear girl, luck or love doesn’t change the fact that your time has come.’ Her father cleared his throat and patted her hand and she thought how true his unwitting choice of expression was. ‘I hope you’re not feeling too dicky. I need your support or else I might just collapse with nerves before we make it to the altar.’ He turned to Lorenzo with a grin. ‘Wait until you’re my age and your daughter is about to marry. You’ll soon discover what nerves are all about. I’ve addressed enough roomfuls of people, but I’ve never felt this fraught before.’ He rested his hand on his stomach. ‘Viola says that it’s indigestion caused by trying to fit my frame into this outfit. Mothers! Don’t know a thing.’ His voice held the same level of tender affection when he spoke of his wife as hers did when she spoke of him.

‘Try telling them that,’ Lorenzo said drily. ‘My mama has always maintained that she rules the roost, which, of course, she does.’ They both laughed at this and Isobel forced her lips into a mimicry of a smile.

‘Well, my dear, shall we go down and make our grand entrance?’ He looked at Lorenzo. ‘Jeremy has been looking for you. Told him I didn’t know whether you’d arrived or not. Didn’t know that you were up here, paying your last respects, so to speak.’ He had moved towards the door, his mind already on the task ahead, and he missed their various reactions to Jeremy’s name.

Isobel clutched his hand and they stood aside so that Lorenzo could leave first, which he did, taking the steps two at a time. She heard his footsteps fading along the marble hallway and felt a dreadful sense of resignation, as if she had aged fifty years in the space of half an hour.

The wedding-ceremony and the reception were both being held in the massive yellow and white marquee, which had been connected to the back doors. She wouldn’t even have the impersonal, imposing view of the inside of a church to fall back on. No, in the marquee they would all be standing close together, too close. Her mother had thought it a wonderful idea, and with cheerful apathy Isobel had agreed. Now she wished that she hadn’t.

She and her father walked sedately down the winding staircase, through the hallway, into the grand apricot and green drawing-room, which had efficiently been cleared of empty glasses and full ashtrays by some of the hired help, and finally through the open French doors and into the marquee, and the further they progressed, the stiffer Isobel felt.

By the time they reached the marquee, and all eyes swivelled in their direction, she felt dead inside. She stared straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s eye, least of all her dissenting clique of friends who had all, naturally, convened in the front row. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Abigail—straight blonde hair, firm features, disapproving eyes.

Ahead she saw Lorenzo, dark and deadly and staring at her with a veiled contempt which only she would recognise. And beyond him Jeremy, dear, obsessed Jeremy, whose fate would now be entwined with hers forever.

CHAPTER TWO

THE accountant was saying something. Isobel looked at him and tried to focus her mind on what was happening. Next to her, her mother sat like a statue on the flowered upright chair, leaning forward slightly, her body stiff as board, her face set in lines of pain. She had been like this for the past three months. Her body moved, her mouth spoke, but the soul had gone out of her.

‘It’ll take time,’ Richard Adams had told Isobel in the privacy of the surgery. ‘She’ll go through all those emotions of anger, despair, shock, disbelief, but she’s strong enough to pull through. In time.’

Isobel looked at the unmoving figure with distress, and wondered whether her mother’s strength hadn’t been over-exaggerated.

‘I advise you strongly to sell,’ the accountant was saying, flicking through his paperwork.

‘Sell?’ Isobel shot him a dazed look, and he shook his head impatiently. He was a small man, balding, with quick, darting eyes and a manner that implied constant nervous movement. He was efficient, though. He and his team of two had run through her father’s accounts like torpedoes—dispassionately, ruthlessly.

‘Your father’s company has its head above water at the moment,’ Mr Clark said, his fingers twitching over the paperwork. ‘But only just. There has been some shocking mismanagement over the past few years. Not,’ he added hurriedly, seeing Mrs Chandler’s face turn towards him in sad, pained accusation, ‘because of anything Mr Chandler did. After all, he had virtually resigned by the time…Yes, well, we often find that this is a problem in family firms. They employ friends, and there’s altogether too much trust and too little ruthlessness. It shows in the company accounts eventually.’ He sat back, crossed his legs, linked his fingers together on his lap, and fixed them with what was, for him, a relatively serene stare.

‘The fact of the matter is that the company has been left jointly to you both, but it would be madness to continue running it keeping on some of the management who are currently employed there. In no time at all it would cease to be a going concern, and then if you did decide to sell it would fetch you next to nothing. It would become the victim of a predator looking for a dying company to dissect. Simple as that.’

Isobel looked at her mother and said gently, ‘You go, Mum. You look tired.’

Mrs Chandler forced a smile on to her face. ‘No, of course not, darling. After all, this affects me as well.’ She made a small, despairing gesture with her hands and lapsed back into silence.

‘I have a prospective buyer already,’ Mr Clark said bluntly, ‘and I suggest that you give very serious thought to selling to him. He has offered an absurdly generous price. You and your mother could retire millionaires.’

That was not a well-chosen remark. Mrs Chandler looked away with tear-filled eyes and said in a choked voice, ‘The money means nothing at all to me, to us. It won’t bring David back, will it? Or…’ She couldn’t go on. She began to sob quietly, resting her forehead in her hands, and Isobel hurried over to her side and wrapped her arms around her. She had hardly had time herself to grieve. She had had to carry her mother through her grief; she had had to be strong for her.

She made a silent, brushing gesture over her mother’s head to Mr Clark, who awkwardly rose to his feet, cleared his throat and muttered a belated, red-faced apology.

‘Wait in the hall for me, Mr Clark,’ Isobel said briefly, and he nodded and left noiselessly through the drawing-room door.

‘I’m sorry, my darling,’ Mrs Chandler said, ‘I know I should be pulling myself together.’ She raised her red eyes to Isobel, who tried to maintain a strong, reassuring face when she felt like breaking up inside. ‘You poor love.’ She managed a watery smile which made Isobel feel worse. ‘I’ve been no comfort to you, have I?’

‘You always are. Whatever you do.’

‘Your loss has been double,’ she sighed, and then said finally, ‘Run along, darling, see what Mr Clark suggests. I’ll leave it all to you.’

Isobel hesitated, but only for a moment. Things needed to be sorted out. The issues which Mr Clark had raised left no time for grief. Life continued to march on, demanding involvement. It had no respect for death.

Mr Clark was waiting patiently in the hall when Isobel went out to join him. She ushered him through to the kitchen, poured him some coffee, which he accepted with alacrity, and then took the chair facing him across the kitchen table.

‘Who is the buyer, Mr Clark?’ she asked, coming to the point, and he relaxed. Displays of emotion, she suspected, made him uneasy. He was only at home when discussing work.

‘I have been dealing with a Mr Squires from London,’ he said, sipping his coffee. ‘There have, in fact, been several poachers waiting on the sidelines. Your father’s business may have been mismanaged, but it still has considerable potential and an impressive client portfolio.’

‘That being the case, what is there to stop me from running the business myself?’

‘Knowledge.’ He carefully placed the cup on the saucer, fixed her with those quick eyes, and said with clipped certainty, ‘Good intentions won’t make a success out of a business. Most of the hierarchy in your father’s firm will have to be sacked. Many of them are friends of the family. Could you do that? Your training, if you don’t mind my pointing it out, is not financial. Of course, I can only advise, but keeping the company going under your own auspices, merely for sentimental reasons, is not going to do much good. In the end, if it dissolves, you will see the loss of a great many more jobs than those which will be lost should you sell now.’

Isobel thought about that. What he said made sense. Everything he had said over the past few weeks made sense. Mr Clark, it had to be faced, was an eminently sensible man.

‘When,’ she asked, ‘will you need my answer?’

‘The sooner the better.’

She nodded and stood up, and he followed suit, collecting his various files and stacking them into his briefcase. He had come well-prepared. Statistics had been shown her, profit and loss columns had been methodically pointed out, budgets analysed, and he had been right: she knew very little about finance. In time, she was sure, she could get to grips with it, but ‘in time’ might not be soon enough, and she knew that it would have broken her father’s heart to witness the dissolution of his beloved company. Better for it to carry on in a different form. Wasn’t it?

She showed Mr Clark out, looked in on her mother, who had fallen into a fitful sleep on the chair, and then retreated to the library to think.

It was so hard being strong, she thought wearily. Decisions had to be made and her mother, she knew, was in no fit state to make them.

Isobel sat back in the leather swivel chair and closed her eyes. Memories were the worst. Her father sitting her on his knee when she was a child, going for walks with her, patiently telling her about the various plants and trees in the garden.

She didn’t sob like her mother. The tears squeezed themselves out, but she didn’t brush them away. They fell on to her hands, on her lap, her dress.

That dreamlike feeling of unreality which had first dogged her had gone. Now she could think of the policeman at the door, breaking the news to them that there had been a car accident, that both occupants had been killed outright, without trying to convince herself that she would wake up at any moment and find that it had only been a terrible nightmare.

Jeremy had been at the wheel of the Jaguar. He had been overtaking another car and had been hit by an oncoming lorry. He had been over the limit.

She had tried very hard, but bitterness towards him had overlaid any pain she might have felt. He had ruined her life.

The following morning she telephoned Mr Clark and told him to go ahead with the sale of the company.

‘You have my trust in this matter, Mr Clark,’ she said down the line. ‘I will sign whatever needs signing, but I want no involvement beyond that.’

Her mother was out for the day, taken under wing by Jeremy’s mother, who had been distraught at the funeral but over the past weeks had been a source of strength to Mrs Chandler. They were going to have tea in one of the coffee-shops in the village.

That left Isobel on her own, and she made her way back to her own house. Ever since the accident she had been living with her mother, and it had been something of a relief.

The house she had shared with Jeremy, even after four years of marriage, had never felt like a home. She had looked after the gardens, arranged flowers in vases, hung paintings, but it had still remained a stiff, empty shell. A house could never become a home without love to fill it, and love was something that had been conspicuous by its absence.

She pushed open the front door, stooped down to collect the dribs and drabs of mail, and then, unemotionally, she resumed her sporadic job of packing Jeremy’s clothes into boxes which she had retrieved from the attic. She should have done it sooner, weeks ago, but time had flown past so quickly.

Suits, ties, trousers, jumpers, shirts. She would give them all to charity.

It had all been so pointless. She could remember being twenty, being in love, Lorenzo. Her throat constricted. Of course that had been another life, and she had got over him. Time healed everything; that much was true.

She hadn’t even had the reminder of his mother, because Mrs Cicolla had emigrated to America to be with her son three years previously.

She could still remember that dead, sickly feeling that had spread over her when he had announced at the wedding, not to her but to her parents, that he had decided to emigrate.

‘Within a fortnight,’ he had said casually, his hand in his pocket, his eyes not looking at her at all, eliminating her from his life in one fell swoop. Ex-lover with another man’s ring on her finger. No longer worth so much as token politeness.

That had been four years ago, but the memory was as clear as if it had been only yesterday, only a few hours ago.

She heard the buzz of the doorbell and ran down the stairs to answer it. Abigail. Isobel’s face broke into a smile of pure joy. She hadn’t seen Abigail, apart from briefly at the funeral three months ago.

‘I tried your mum’s house first,’ Abigail said, coming inside, ‘and when there was no reply, I thought that you might be here.’ She looked sympathetically at Isobel. ‘Do you need a hand with anything?’

They went upstairs and continued boxing the clothes, chatting. Abigail’s status, in the space of only a few years, had reached mammoth proportions. She was in the newspapers all the time, her movements shadowed and faithfully, or unfaithfully, reported back on.

‘How’s your mum coping?’ she asked casually, and Isobel paused to look at her.

‘Not very well,’ she answered truthfully. ‘She seems to have retreated into herself.’

‘It’s understandable.’

‘She doesn’t even venture out into the garden. She says every blade of grass reminds her of him.’

Abigail didn’t say anything for a while. ‘And you, Izzy?’ She looked away and busied herself with stuffing more clothes into boxes. Jeremy had had a lot of clothes. He had liked dressing the part of the wealthy landowner.

‘He’s in my mind,’ Isobel said in a low voice.

‘And Jeremy?’

Isobel stood up, dusted herself down and replied shortly, ‘You know that he caused the accident. The coroner told me that in privacy. I asked him if he could withhold the information from his parents, and from Mum.’

‘You always hated him, didn’t you?’

‘No.’ Isobel thought about it, for the first time putting into words what had never been said before. ‘He trapped me into marriage, and please don’t ask me how or why.’ Those papers. She frowned. Where were they? He must have hidden them somewhere. They could not have vanished into thin air. Oh, no. He would never have been so careless as to misplace them—after all, they were the stick to be waved over her if ever she thought of desertion. ‘Of course I hated him to start with, but you can’t hate forever. It’s too tiring. After a while, the instinct for self-preservation takes over or else you would just go mad.’ She shrugged and they went down to the kitchen to have some coffee.

It helped having someone to talk to. It made her co-ordinate her thoughts, and Isobel found herself telling Abigail about Mr Clark’s offer, what she intended to do with her house, her job.

‘I might even contemplate finding out whether I can’t complete some kind of medical course, take it up,’ she said, blushing. ‘Richard thinks it’s a good idea.’

‘Richard?’ Abigail’s eyebrows quirked. ‘Dr Adams, you mean?’

‘He’s very encouraging.’

‘And, so that’s how the land lies.’

‘Of course not!’ Isobel laughed. ‘You and that dramatic mind of yours! Richard and I are simply good friends. He’s been kind to me over the years.’

And they left it at that. Abigail departed late that evening and Isobel returned to find her mother in better spirits than she had been for weeks.

‘Emily is helping me to put everything in perspective, the dear woman,’ she said, sipping tea and picking bits of salad from her plate like a choosy bird deliberating over which morsels to consume. ‘David is gone, and hiding myself away isn’t going to change that. I’ve spent too long hiding. I want to start thinking about tomorrow. What did Mr Clark say?’

So Isobel told her, and the following morning, by some uncanny coincidence, he telephoned to inform her that the purchaser had arrived and would she come down to his offices on the High Street to sign some bits of paper.

Isobel dressed carefully for the occasion. A sober grey wool suit, because the chill of autumn was in the air, her pearls, cream-coloured shoes.

She looked in the mirror and saw the reflection of a twenty-four-year-old woman, nearly twenty-five, who, in the midst of loss, now found herself on the brink of freedom for the first time in four long years.

She smiled, and the image smiled back, showing her what she hadn’t seen for a very long time. The same stunning face, but with the black hair trimmed to a bob, a tall, lithe body, eyes that were a little sad, as though they had seen too much.

She swept out of the house, feeling better than she had done for a while, and arrived at Mr Clark’s offices well in time.

Mr Squires wasn’t there. Isobel drank coffee, made small talk to the accountant, and began to feel slightly annoyed that she was being kept waiting. Hadn’t this man heard of common politeness?

She glanced at her watch and caught Mr Clark’s eye. He was looking worriedly at his own watch. Presently he stood up, and said that he would go and have a look to see what had happened to the gentleman in question.

‘Perhaps he’s lost,’ he volunteered politely, to which she was tempted to point out that he could only have found himself lost in a town the size of theirs if he was a mental incompetent, in which case was she really doing the right thing by selling him her father’s company?

He vanished out of the room and ten minutes later, having quietly convinced herself that Mr Squires, the invisible man, was definitely not in the running as a prospective buyer for the company, she heard the door being pushed open.

She automatically looked around.

The shock she felt on seeing Lorenzo Cicolla standing in the doorway was as great as if she had looked out of the window and casually seen a mushroom cloud hanging over the town, announcing nuclear war.

He strolled into the room, not taking his eyes off her face, and she stood up, drained of colour. She was shaking, trembling like a leaf, like someone who had seen a ghost. Her mind felt as though it was being bombarded by so many images, so many feelings, that any minute it would shut down from overload.

‘Lorenzo Cicolla! What are you doing here? I’m expecting a Mr Squires—he should be here any moment. You’re not Mr Squires,’ was all she managed to get out, which was an achievement since her vocal cords appeared to have deserted her.

She had never expected to see Lorenzo Cicolla again. He had been the stick of dynamite thrown into her young life, blowing it to pieces, and those pieces had never successfully been put together again. But still, she had relegated him to the past. She had locked that haunting image into a safe room and she had tried damned hard never to open the door.

What was he doing here?

‘No,’ Lorenzo agreed smoothly, unsmiling, his pale eyes assessing her with arrogant thoroughness. ‘I’m not, am I?’

He sat down in the chair next to her and crossed his legs, and she wished desperately that she could stop staring but she couldn’t. It had been a long time.

The passage of time showed itself in the tiny lines by his eyes and mouth, the hardness of his features, but apart from that she might have been staring at the Lorenzo of old. He had the same terrifying sex-appeal, the same dark, brooding good looks.

‘I apologise for staring,’ Isobel said stiltedly, ‘but I can’t believe that it’s really you, sitting there.’ She threw him a tentative smile which met with a blank wall.

‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ he said abruptly, looking away. ‘I’m afraid the news was rather late in reaching me.’

‘Thank you. Yes. It was a tragic accident.’ Platitudes were becoming easier to mouth. No one felt comfortable with raw emotion and she had learned to control her responses to the polite condolences of neighbours and people in the village.

‘And of course, Jeremy.’

‘Thank you. Of course.’

‘What exactly happened?’

She shrugged and her fingers nervously plucked her wool skirt. ‘The car went out of control. There was a lorry coming in the opposite direction. Jeremy was killed outright. My father——’ she paused and took a deep, stabilising breath ‘—died in the ambulance.’

‘How is your mother coping with it?’

‘Why are you here?’ It was easier to ask that now that she had recovered some of her self-control.

He smiled coolly, and she could see dislike and contempt lurking beneath the surface. It made her blood run cold. ‘Surely we aren’t yet finished with the preliminaries, are we, Isobel? It’s been years—four years to be precise.’

‘Yes. I know. You left this town without a backward glance, Lorenzo.’ Her heart was still beating irregularly and she had the strangest feeling of having stepped into a mad, nonsensical world, like Alice in Wonderland. One blink and it would all disappear. She blinked but nothing disappeared, not even the breathless tension gripping her lungs, making breathing laborious and difficult.

He shrugged. ‘I always knew that I would return, when the time was right.’

‘And why is the time right now?’

‘Because, my dear, I am about to buy your father’s company.’

‘You!’ She looked at him in stunned silence. ‘But Mr Clark said…He told me…’

‘That Mr Squires was interested. Yes. Mr Squires was interested, on my behalf.’

She stood up and began pacing the room, while Lorenzo remained where he was, watching her, his face revealing nothing.

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said at last, standing in front of him but not too close, because something about him was vaguely menacing. Had this been the same man who had fired her passions once upon a time? Surely not!

‘I have never been more serious about anything in my entire life.’

‘But why?’

His lips thinned. ‘Because I like the beauty of the wheel that turns full circle.’

‘Revenge, Lorenzo?’ she whispered incredulously.

‘Oh, revenge is too strong a word.’

‘Then why my father’s company?’

‘It poses an interesting challenge,’ he drawled, but the lazy cruelty was still there in his voice and in the rigid lines of his face.

‘And the fact that my father owned it has nothing to do with it?’

‘A little, I suppose.’ He shrugged dismissively, although his eyes never left her face, not for a second. ‘Besides, I’ve become tired of city life. Chicago has lost its appeal. It will be nice returning here for a while.’ ‘You’ll be coming back here to live?’

‘But of course. What else did you expect?’

Not that. Anything but that, Isobel thought. Four years ago they had parted in anger and bitterness. Words had been spoken, things said…She stifled the memory of her disastrous wedding-day, that awful confrontation in the garden, before he had walked out of her life forever. Had he simply been biding his time until an opportunity such as this arose, or had the death of Jeremy and her father rekindled buried feelings of anger?

‘You don’t look too thrilled with the prospect,’ he said, eyebrows raised, his mouth curling with a hint of cynicism.

‘Of course, it will be nice to see you…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Don’t lie, Isobel. Your face is too transparent.’

She flushed angrily. ‘What do you want me to say? You walk back into town after four years and announce that you plan on settling here, but there’s nothing pleasant about the announcement, is there? You’re not planning on settling here for the good of the community. You’re planning on settling here because you have a chance to settle old scores.’ She looked at him bitterly. ‘Aren’t we both too old for this?’

He banged his fist on the table with such force that Isobel jumped and looked at him warily. He wasn’t going to get violent, was he? Then she laughed nervously to herself. Of course not. How could he in such a public place? Besides, she knew Lorenzo. He had never been a man given to displays of violence.

You don’t know him now, though, a little voice warned. People change. The face she was staring at with apprehension was the face of a stranger, a dark, menacing stranger.

‘Too old?’ he sneered. ‘Too old to forget the past, Isobel?’

‘What happened happened a long time ago…’ She glanced at the door and he followed the line of her eyes with a cold smile.

‘Mr Clark has been told to wait until I am ready.’

‘What?’

‘I informed him that there were things I wanted to discuss with you in private.’

‘The sale of my father’s business isn’t a private matter,’ she began, but that wasn’t the object of his discussion, was it? ‘Can’t we put the past behind us? We can be friends…’

‘Friends?’ He almost laughed at that, his eyebrows shooting up in an expression of contempt that made her burn. ‘I’m sure you’d like nothing better, Isobel.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, only that I’m here, rich and successful—the two prerequisites, if I remember correctly, for any man to be worthwhile in your eyes.’

‘That’s not true!’ More memories flooded back and she felt faint.

‘No?’ He relaxed back in the swivel chair and folded his hands on his lap. ‘Then pray tell me why you married Jeremy, and why you stayed married to him for four long years? Your precious status quo. You needed it so badly that you sacrificed your life for it.’

Isobel stood up, trembling, white. ‘I don’t have to remain here and listen to this,’ she said curtly, turning towards the door.

‘Sit back down!’

She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘You don’t give me orders, Lorenzo Cicolla!’

‘Sit back down!’ he roared, and she hastily sat back down, wondering whether his bellow wouldn’t bring Mr Clark scurrying back into his office. But no one came.

‘Now you listen to me,’ he said, and his voice was the voice of a man with steel running through his veins. He leaned forward. ‘Your father’s company needs a buyer if it’s to survive in one piece.’

‘I can choose my buyer,’ she said coldly, and he laughed under his breath.

‘Really?’

‘Mr Clark told me that there are several offers in the pipeline.’

‘No offers, Isobel.’

‘But…’

‘I am the only bidder. Without me, your father’s company will quickly fall into ruin. It’s a wonder that it hasn’t before now. If it falls into ruin, my darling, it will be sold off in bits and pieces to the highest bidders and you will watch your father’s handiwork go down the drain. Do you want that?’

Isobel looked at him with dislike. He was enjoying this. He was enjoying her discomfort, enjoying watching her in a position of helpless subservience. How could she ever have felt love for this man? He was a sadist.

She could, she knew, explain, after all these years, why she had married Jeremy, but if he was hell-bent on revenge, then might not that confession give him the ammunition he needed? It was a chance she could not take. Her father was dead. He was beyond pain. But her mother was still alive, ill, vulnerable, and already buffeted by enough misfortune.

Besides, and she might as well face it, the Lorenzo Cicolla she had known, the man who had once, so long ago that she could scarcely recall, made love to her, laughed with her, was gone. This was someone else. Someone she no longer understood.

‘What do you gain from all this, Lorenzo?’ she asked with quiet desperation.

‘Passing satisfaction,’ he said, his lips twisting, and she clenched her fists uselessly at her sides.

‘At my expense.’

‘Is that so difficult to understand?’ He smiled with sarcasm.

‘Why fight when we can——?’

‘Make love?’

Colour swept into her face. She could feel it burning through her, making her perspire lightly, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

‘When we can be friends…’ she whispered.

He was looking at her, his eyes roving insolently over her body. ‘A tempting thought,’ he said silkily. ‘You’re still a beautiful woman. More so. Time has put character into your face. But no, I think I can resist you.’ He was smiling again, that cool smile that made her want to hit him. ‘I don’t think I could stomach the thought that your friendship had only been offered because I am now rich enough to pay the right price.’

‘You’re despicable.’

That brought an angry flush to his face. ‘Your marriage to Jeremy Baker was hardly what I would call a noble gesture, Isobel. Or perhaps it’s simply my peasant mind that persists in thinking in such inconvenient black and white terms.’

Isobel looked at him from under her lashes. Peasant? Hardly. He might have come from the wrong side of the tracks, as Jeremy had been fond of saying whenever his name cropped up, but no one looking at him would ever have guessed that. Sitting there, in his expensive tailored suit, he looked what he was: wealthy, sophisticated, ruthless.

‘Why didn’t you stay in America?’ It was more the agonised voicing of a private thought than a question demanding an answer.

‘I told you. I lost interest in the bright lights.’

She doubted that. He had not ‘lost interest’ in the bright lights. He had merely decided that there was a bigger, more fulfilling challenge waiting for him here.

He would initially have been drawn to her father’s company because it probably fell into the realms of what he was accustomed to dealing with. The actual ownership was, she suspected, added spice.

‘How did you find out about…?’

‘It was reported in the financial news,’ Lorenzo answered. ‘Bob Squires, my man in London, faxed me the article. He thought that I might find the coincidence amusing as well as a possibility for take-over. Of course, he doesn’t know a great deal about my personal life, but he did know where I had lived in my youth.’

‘I see. And does anyone know much about your personal life, Lorenzo?’ she asked bitterly, and was rewarded with a look of angry discomfort. It only lasted seconds but in that time she had a fleeting glimpse of something lying beneath the cold, arrogant exterior.

‘I dislike people who try to pry into what’s no business of theirs.’ He stood up abruptly and gazed out of the window, his back to her.

‘What a lonely life you must have led all these years? she murmured, and he spun around to face her, his eyes savage and mocking.

‘I hardly think that you’re someone qualified to pass judgement on the quality of other people’s lives,’ he said tersely. ‘Marriage for money, quite frankly, makes me sick. Were you ever happy, Isobel? When the socialising was over and there were just the two of you left in your big, expensive, empty house?’

She looked away, agitated, and said nothing.

‘I thought not.’ He had regained his composure but he didn’t sit back down. He prowled restlessly around the room, staring at her, and she felt like a trapped rabbit, knowing that whatever he said she would lose because she was incapable of justifying her past.

‘If you want me to sign papers,’ she said stiffly, ‘I shall do so. If not, I’m leaving.’

‘You’ll leave when I’m ready for you to leave.’

She met his cool grey eyes with anger. ‘I don’t work for you, Lorenzo. You’re not my boss! I’m prepared to sell my father’s company to you because the move was recommended by Mr Clark, but beyond that I want nothing to do with you!’

‘Now there’s a thought,’ he murmured, moving behind her and resting his hands on either side of her chair. Her body froze. She wanted nothing to do with him but his sexuality, which had held her in its snare all those years ago, was as powerful as ever. She could feel it emanating from him, from those strong arms only inches away from her.

‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, licking her lips nervously.

‘You could,’ he murmured, ‘always work for me. Wouldn’t that be fun?’

‘No,’ Isobel muttered in a strangled voice. She wanted badly to move but she was afraid, she realised, of touching him.

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘perhaps it wouldn’t be. Or perhaps it wouldn’t be enough.’ The grey eyes swept over her, the eyes of a predator that had trapped its quarry and was lazily contemplating what course of action to take next.

‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ Her voice had risen a pitch higher.

‘The fate of your father’s company is in my hands, Isobel. Without me, everything he spent a lifetime working for will vanish like a puff of smoke.’ He smiled as though the thought afforded him immense satisfaction.

Isobel looked at him in frozen shock.

‘Another buyer can be found,’ she persisted weakly.

‘I think not.’ Another smile, and she felt a quiver of confused alarm.

‘No…’ He strolled lazily to the window, his hands in his pockets, and turned to face her. ‘I have returned, Isobel, and this time I am calling the shots. I will have you, Isobel Chandler, and then, when I tire of you, I shall cast you aside.’

‘And you said that you didn’t want revenge?’ There was a dangerous electricity in the air.

He contemplated her coldly.

‘Revenge. Such a basic word. But maybe you’re right. Maybe revenge is the only thing that can satisfy me. I will put a ring on your finger and you will be mine for however long I want you. In return, I will salvage your father’s company.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘NEVER!’ Shock made her start back and she found that her hands were gripping the arms of the chair. ‘You’re mad!’

‘Why?’ His voice was controlled, but whip-hard, and his eyes pierced into her with a venom that made her cringe.

‘I can’t believe that you would go to such lengths, Lorenzo…The past is over and done with…’

‘It is never over and done with. Do you understand me? It has festered inside me and now that I have my opportunity to do something about it, I damn well will.’

‘I will never marry you!’ He hated her. It was as simple as that. Dislike, contempt, wounded male pride, those were never strong enough to describe what he felt towards her. She could see that now, and she knew with utmost finality that she could never unburden her secret to him. If he was prepared to marry her simply to sate his desire for revenge, then how could she ever trust him?

‘You will do precisely what I say, Isobel, because you have no choice.’

‘Never! Do you understand, Lorenzo Cicolla? Never, never, never!’ She stood up because she was too agitated to sit down, but she didn’t walk towards the door. Something in the room kept her rooted to the spot.

‘Why ever not, my dear?’ he asked with aggravatingly exaggerated politeness. He was standing behind the desk, towering over her. ‘In fact, I have no idea how you could resist such a charming proposition. After all, you’ll be able to maintain your status quo; you’ll have your wealthy lifestyle. If I recall correctly, those were the things that meant so much more to you than I ever did.’ There was no fondness in his voice as he recalled their shared past, no softening in his features. If anything his face hardened, and she shivered.

‘Believe what you will,’ she muttered, looking away, and he moved around the desk so swiftly that before she realised it he was standing next to her. He curled his fingers into her hair and dragged her face to his.

Her heart began to beat, to pound, and she licked her lips nervously. She would never marry him, but some primitive response to his masculinity unfurled deep within her and her eyes widened in shock and an instinctive response to retreat as quickly as she could.

But retreat was impossible. His grip was like a vice. She stood completely still and tried to stifle the treacherous warmth rushing through her.

‘Believe what I will, Isobel?’ he asked, his lips curling. ‘Surely you mean, believe what you told me? Told me four years ago?’

She didn’t answer. Was there a way to answer the unanswerable?

The memories sprang up at her like monsters rushing out from the dark. The wedding-day, gloriously sunny, a still, fine spring day that had felt more like summer. Jeremy, looking at her with satisfaction, knowing that he now owned her.

She had been surprised and taken aback when Lorenzo had remained for the reception. She had thought that he would take the first opportunity to leave a situation which he despised, but a part of her realised that he would remain because to leave would be to throw in his hand; it would have been running away, tail between legs, admitting defeat. It would have been what Jeremy wanted. But it would not have been the Italian way: there would have been no retreat without honour.

She had mixed with friends and relatives and she had watched Lorenzo out of the corner of her eye.

In retrospect, she could see that the explosion had been only a matter of time.

Jeremy had spent the afternoon showing her off, baiting his bitter rival. Little snide remarks scattered here and there, and then more often.

Isobel could remember gritting her teeth in frustrated anger at Jeremy’s game-playing. He had always been fond of displaying his parents’ wealth to Lorenzo.

Money. It had always been the one thing that had separated Lorenzo from the rest of them. His parents had come to England with very little, and although his father had held down a responsible job at one of the engineering companies, he had always had what had amounted, in comparison with the rest of them, a minuscule income. Lorenzo’s school uniforms had been bought from the second-hand sales at the school, and text-books were never bought at all; they were borrowed from the library.

‘Thinking about it, Isobel?’ The smooth, cruel voice brought her back to the present, and she blinked and looked at him, disorientated.

‘Thinking about what?’ He had always had an amazing ability to read her mind, but she preferred to plead ignorance rather than to admit that he was spot on.

‘Your glorious, happy wedding-day. So many people milling around, all the pillars of the little community, elaborately turned out for the affair of the year.’

‘That’s not fair!’

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘And of course you looked the part—you did your parents proud, Isobel, my dear.’

Isobel closed her eyes. She remembered the compliments. She had looked exquisite. She had been told that over and over again, and she had smiled prettily every single time. Her mouth had ached by the end of the evening.

‘“Lucky Jeremy Baker.” I could see the thought running through more than one envious male mind.’ The dislike was thick in his voice and she kept her eyes lowered and her hands clenched in front of her. ‘Lucky Jeremy Baker, netting the biggest fish in the sea. He paled next to you, but then everyone did, didn’t they, Isobel?’ he asked softly. ‘Everyone except me.’

Her heartbeat quickened. She pictured them together, making love, his bronzed body wrapped against her flawless ivory one.

The thought flashed with startling clarity through her mind, and she shoved it back with a certain amount of disturbed confusion.

She remembered Jeremy. Slim, blond-haired, blue eyed, with that brand of good looks that were always charming in young children but in men were hardly ever sexy.

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