“So tell me, cara mia, what is to stop me persuading you to return what belongs to me?”

The glitter in Vito’s eyes had intensified. Rachel’s breathing had quickened and adrenaline was coursing through her bloodstream.

But she knew she was deceiving herself.

She could feel her body responding to his presence; feel every nerve leap to quivering life.

It mortified her. She had to damp it down hard, because she knew, with a terrible, sickening sense of doom, that she would feel this way about Vito Farneste for the rest of her life. She could never stop the tide of desire, of longing, of wanting, pulsing through her whenever she was near him. She was in thrall to him, and it was a captivity she could never escape….

Harlequin Presents®

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In the Rich Man’s World

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by Sarah Morgan #2500

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His Wedding Ring of Revenge
Julia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

COOL tranquil fountains jetted softly over the rounded stones, the water pooling, crystal clear, over polished granite. A tiny spout of wind gusted off the tall building and one of the gentle plumes of water wavered slightly, a minute spray of invisible droplets misting over Rachel as she walked past.

It felt cool to her skin.

And that was what she had to be. Cool, calm and composed. Not a trace of emotion. She was here to conduct a business deal. That was all.

Because if she thought about what she was about to do in any other light then—

No! Don’t think. Don’t feel. That way you can get through this.

And, above all, don’t remember…

A switch was thrown in her brain, cutting off the line of thought.

Another mist of water flickered over her skin.

She took in the serene tranquillity of the cunningly engineered water feature that graced the entrance to the gleaming new office block. As befitted the UK headquarters of one of Europe’s largest and most successful industrial conglomerates, Farneste Industriale, it was the most prestigious of all the blocks on this swanky new business park—situated on the edge of one of London’s oldest villages, Chiswick, conveniently placed for the M4 motorway and Heathrow Airport.

She kept on walking, her high heels lifting her hips and making her sway elegantly in her expensively tailored suit. She had sat very carefully in the taxi on her way here, making sure she did not crush the lavender skirt or snag her expensive sheer stockings.

She wanted to look—immaculate.

It had taken her over two hours to get ready. Two hours of washing and styling her hair, delicately applying perfect make-up and nail varnish, carefully donning silky underwear, sheerest stockings, soft cream camisole, and then finally gliding the narrow pencil skirt over her slender hips and slipping her arms into the satin-lined, scoop-necked waisted jacket that subtly accentuated the swell of her breasts and the flatness of her stomach.

She had slid her feet into soft Italian leather shoes, in exactly the same shade as the suit, as was the matching leather clutch handbag she carried, and her outfit was complete.

It had taken her over two weeks to find it. After combing every upmarket department store and boutique from Chelsea to Knightsbridge, Bond Street to Kensington. It had to be exactly right.

After all, the person she had to impress had demanding standards. Exceptionally demanding.

She should know.

She had once failed them. Dismally. Abjectly. Humiliatingly.

She must not fail this time.

And now, as she walked up to the huge double doors that opened automatically at her approach, she promised that she would not. This time, she knew, she could hold her head high against any female she was compared with.

True, some might prefer petite brunettes or voluptuous, flashy redheads to her lean, chic blondeness, but of her style—if you liked that style—she was perfect.

Soignée. That was what her mother would have called it, approvingly.

Emotion clutched at Rachel’s heart. She subdued it instantly. Feelings of any kind would be fatal in this encounter. If she had any hope of succeeding she must be calm, confident and totally composed.

She was here to do business. Nothing more.

Absently, as she started to walk across the huge, echoing entrance lobby, she heard the automatic doors hiss softly shut behind her.

As if she were a prisoner.

A tiny prickle of apprehension snaked down her spine. She subdued it.

She was not a prisoner. She was not even a hostage.

She was here to propose a transaction, nothing more, which would have a favourable outcome for both parties.

Perfectly straightforward. So much so that no emotion whatsoever would be required of either of the participating parties.

She went on walking across the vast marbled floor, up to the huge semicircular reception floor in the middle, behind which towered another cleverly designed water feature: a wall of water so smooth it hardly seemed to be flowing at all.

Cool air wafted from the wall of water, freshening the artifice of air-conditioning that eased around the whole building.

She halted in front of the smartly dressed receptionist, who looked at her with polite enquiry.

‘I am here to see Mr Farneste,’ said Rachel.

She spoke in a composed voice, placing her clutch handbag on the wide reception desk surface that acted like a barricade around the woman she had just spoken to.

‘Your name, please?’ replied the receptionist, reaching for an appointment book.

‘Rachel Vaile,’ she answered, her voice unwavering.

The receptionist frowned.

‘I’m sorry, Ms Vaile, there doesn’t seem to be an entry for you.’

Rachel was undismayed. ‘If you phone his office and give my name, you will find he will see me,’ she said, with calm assurance.

The receptionist looked at her uncertainly. Rachel knew why, and gave an inward, caustic smile.

You think I’m one of his mistresses, don’t you? And you don’t know what to do if I am. Am I on his current list? Or will he have given his PA orders not to put me through if I phone or, even worse, show up in person?

The caustic smile turned bitter. She knew the routine. Oh, yes, she certainly knew the routine.

‘One moment, please,’ said the receptionist, and picked up the phone.

Rachel’s lips pressed together. She would be checking with his PA, as a good Farneste employee would always do.

‘Mrs Walters? I have a Ms Rachel Vaile in Reception. I’m afraid I can’t see an appointment in the book.’

There was a moment’s silence.

Then, ‘Very well. Thank you, Mrs Walters.’ From the expression on her face Rachel could tell what she had been instructed to do—dispose of her.

She was about to put the phone down. Calmly, Rachel intercepted the movement and took the receiver from her. The receptionist made a startled objection, but Rachel paid her no attention.

‘Mrs Walters? This is Rachel Vaile. Please inform Mr Farneste that I am in Reception. Tell him…’ she paused only for a hair’s breadth of time ‘…that I am in a position to offer him something that he considers very precious to him. Thank you so much. Oh, and Mrs Walters? You should tell him straight away. In three minutes’ time I will be out of the building, and the offer will be withdrawn. Good day.’

She handed the receiver back to the receptionist, who was looking at her speechlessly.

‘I’ll wait over there,’ she told the woman coolly. She glanced at her watch, picked up her clutch handbag, and went across to the island of white leather sofas surrounding a huge circular table on which the day’s papers were arranged with punishing neatness.

She picked up a copy of The Times and started to read the front page.

Precisely two minutes and fifty seconds after she had handed the phone back to the receptionist, a phone at the desk rang. Rachel turned the page of the newspaper and continued to read.

Thirty seconds later the receptionist was standing beside her.

‘Mrs Walters will meet you on the Executive Floor, Ms Vaile,’ she told Rachel.

There was a note in her voice that Rachel would have been deaf not to recognise.

Astonishment.

The lift glided her upwards. Bronzed walls reflected her in infinite regression, increasingly shadowy. As the doors opened a neatly dressed middle-aged woman stepped forward. Her face was bland.

‘Ms Vaile?’

Rachel nodded, face expressionless.

‘If you would come this way please…’

She led the way forward along a wide expanse of space, carpeted in cream and interspersed with pieces of large, abstract statuary. It was imposing, impressive. Designed to be intimidating. Intimidating to impudent interlopers such as herself, who had no business being here.

But Rachel was here to do business.

Nothing more.

And nothing less.

As they gained the far side of the atrial space she could see another reception desk, with two young women working there, both exceptionally beautiful. Rachel’s mouth tightened, but her expression did not alter. She was led past the two receptionists, aware of them looking at her as she walked by, and then past the office that was clearly Mrs Walters’s own. She was taken straight up to a large pair of chestnut wood double doors.

Mrs Walters knocked discreetly, and opened one of them.

‘Ms Vaile, Mr Farneste,’ she announced.

Rachel walked in.

Not a trace of emotion was in her face.

He was exactly the same. Seven years had not altered him. He was, as he would remain all his days, the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Beauty, she thought absently. Such a strange word to apply to a man. Yet it was the only one that fitted Vito Farneste.

The sable hair, the superbly chiselled face, the high, sculpted cheekbones, the fine line of his nose, the edged plane of his jaw.

And his mouth. Perfect, like an angel’s. But not an angel of light.

An angel of sin.

Temptation made visible.

He leant back in his black leather chair, perfectly still. One hand rested on the surface of the ebony desk. Against that blackness it seemed pale, yet its olive hue was dark against the pristine white of his cuff, the golden gleam of his watch.

The other hand rested on the leather arm of his chair, elbow crooked slightly, long fingers splayed, motionless.

He did not get to his feet.

Rachel heard the soft click of the door and realised that Mrs Walters had performed her duty to a T.

Eyes surveyed her, dark and expressionless, with lashes so long that they lay on his cheek. Impassive. Dispassionate.

He did not speak.

But in that silence she heard in her head, as if time had dissolved, the very first words he had ever spoken to her.

Eleven years ago. She had been fourteen. Just fourteen.

Tall. Gawky. Plain.

Like a half-grown colt.

It had been the school summer holidays. The first week. She had been supposed to go and stay for a fortnight with a schoolfriend, but on the last day of term Jenny had come down with a belated childhood infection and her parents had rescinded the invitation. The school had informed Rachel’s mother, and at the last moment a ticket had been sent, flying her out to Italy.

Rachel hadn’t wanted to go. She’d known her mother didn’t want her around. Hadn’t wanted her around ever since she’d been taken up by Enrico Farneste and had moved to Italy to be as close to him as she could. Now her mother only ever saw her for a week or so every school holiday, in a London hotel paid for by Enrico. Rachel knew Arlene was always glad when the visit was over and she could get back to Enrico.

But this holiday, with nowhere else to go, Rachel had ended up in Italy all the same.

The villa Enrico had installed her mother in was beautiful, nestled into the cliffside above a fashionable seaside village on the Ligurian coast, within easy reach of Turin, where the Farneste factories were. Never having seen the Mediterranean before, Rachel had found herself enchanted despite her reluctance to be there, and on that first afternoon, upon being deposited at the villa by the chauffeured car that had met her at the airport, she had wasted no time in running down to the azure-tinted swimming pool on the lower terrace.

Apart from a housekeeper who spoke only Italian the villa had seemed deserted, despite the presence of a sleek red monster of a car in the driveway. Her mother and Enrico, Rachel had assumed, as she glided blissfully through the warm clear water beneath the Mediterranean summer sun, must be out.

But as she’d reached the shallow end of the pool, after a dozen lengths or so, and halted momentarily, one arm hooked over the stone edge of the pool, hair slicked back in a soggy pony-tail over one shoulder, to catch her breath before preparing to turn and head for the deep end again, she had realised the villa was not deserted after all.

Someone had been standing at the top of a short flight of stone steps that led from the upper terrace down to the pool area. Male, late teenage, maybe even twenty, obviously Italian. Very slim. Tall.

For a moment he had gone on standing where he was, unmoving.

Then, slowly, he had begun to walk down the steps.

He’d been wearing cream-coloured chinos, immaculately cut and styled. One hand had been thrust into a pocket, tautening the material across a washboard stomach. A tan leather belt had snaked around his lean hips. An open-necked, cream-coloured shirt had been rolled back slightly at the cuffs, and around his shoulders an oatmeal jumper.

He had descended the steps with an indolent, lethal grace that had stopped the breath in Rachel’s lungs.

Her eyes had been dragged from the column of his throat, revealed by the open-necked shirt, and as they’d reached his face she had felt every muscle in her body tense unbearably.

It was the most beautiful face she had ever seen.

Sable hair, feathering slightly over a tanned brow, sculpted cheekbones, planed jaw and nose, and a mouth…a mouth that made jellyfish squirm inside her stomach.

He’d worn dark glasses, and he’d looked just so cool, so glamorous, as if he’d just stepped out of a scene from a film, or off a poster.

Her stomach had tensed with nervous awareness, making her feel stupid and dazed.

He had stopped at the bottom of the stone steps, about two metres from the edge of the pool. He had looked at her. His dark glasses had veiled his eyes, but she’d suddenly—despite the sporty cut of her swimsuit—felt incredibly exposed.

Had he known she was supposed to be here?

She hadn’t had the faintest idea who he was, but she had known instinctively that he was the sort of person who knew who he was—and that was someone who could go anywhere he pleased. It wasn’t just his breathtaking looks, there’d been a natural, arrogant grace about him that would have elicited instant accommodation to any wish he might have.

Especially by females. He was the sort of male girls would just drool over, fight over, play totally, bitchily dirty to get his attention.

With a horrible sort of dawning embarrassment Rachel had realised that, right then, it was she who was getting his attention.

And she hadn’t liked it.

It hadn’t been just that her housemistress’s parting warning about the predilections of Italian males towards young females was ringing in her ears. She’d felt self-conscious, horribly so. Because, whoever he was, he’d obviously known he had every right to be there, but, given the unexpectedness of her arrival, he might not have known that she had too. It had also been due to the way he’d looked down at her, his face, what she’d been able to see of it, given that his eyes were veiled, expressionless.

Her costume might have been the world’s least glamorous swimwear, but for all that it had moulded her body and exposed her legs and arms, shaping her figure.

She didn’t have a very good one; she had known that. Compared with some of her age group she’d been pretty underdeveloped, especially in the bust department, and all the sport she’d played had made her arms muscular. As for her face—well, it was OK-ish, she supposed, but it was pretty ordinary.

For a male like the one who had been staring down at her, ‘ordinary’ might as well not exist.

She had known exactly what kind of girls he would date. The A-list girls, the ones oozing sex appeal, who looked fabulous every moment of the day. The ones who totally outclassed all the other girls and who knew exactly just how hot they were.

Any other girls could just forget it. Give in. They wouldn’t even register on his radar.

All this had gone through her mind in a few scant moments, and she had realised that, since she was not an A-list female—even one far too young for him—she wouldn’t even exist for him as a member of the female species. So what would it matter if he thought her swimsuit unalluring and her face and figure likewise?

What had mattered, though, was that he might think she was trespassing—or gatecrashing, or something—some tourist chancing it at a deserted posh villa.

He had continued looking down at her, one hand still thrust into his trouser pocket, the other hanging loose, his expression blank and unreadable. Had he been waiting for her to say something? Explain her presence?

Embarrassment had flushed through her. She’d raised a hesitant hand in a sort of wave, or some sign of visual communication. The moment she’d done it she felt a fool. But it had been too late to back off.

‘Hi,’ she said awkwardly. ‘You’re probably wondering who I am, but—’

The moment she started speaking she realised she was an even bigger fool. She was speaking English, and it was totally obvious that he was Italian. No English male could ever look that svelte, that beautiful…

He cut her short.

‘I know exactly who you are,’ he said. He spoke in English, completely fluent, his Italian accent doing nothing to soften the flat harshness of his words. ‘You’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore.’

CHAPTER TWO

ELEVEN years later his voice was just as harsh, just as flat, the Italian accent just as unsoftened.

‘So, you’ve finally decided to cash in your last asset.’

His eyes went on surveying her, completely without expression.

Yet as his unblinking, impassive gaze rested on her she could see, very deep at the back of his eyes, a flash of gold.

Emotion pinpointed her, like a sniper’s bullet. And just as deadly.

That flash of gold came only at two moments.

The first was when, as she knew he must be now, he was keeping a leash on that tight, white rage that could lash out with such lethal devastation.

He had done that with the very first words he had ever said to her.

If she’d had any instinct whatsoever for survival then, she knew, with bitter accusation, she would have made sure they were the last words he’d ever spoken to her.

But that stupid, gormless fourteen-year-old had had no such instinct. Only one for encompassing with sure, deadly accuracy her own total ruin.

She felt her nails curve with a minute jerk into the soft leather of her handbag. And that was why she knew about the other moment when that flash of gold in his eyes came.

Out of nowhere, after the last seven years of ruthless, relentless suppression of any feeling to do with the man who was now sitting there, not three metres away from her, came a bolt of memory that she would have given her right hand not to be remembering now, here.

No! No!

She forced the memory aside.

You are here for one thing only. One purpose. One aim.

A single business transaction.

She sharpened the focus of her gaze on him.

Feel nothing. Remember nothing.

He sat there, waiting for her to pitch. He knew she would pitch. It was what he had let her in to do. It was the sole justification for her continued existence as a data field in his mind. She didn’t exist otherwise.

Did I ever exist?

The question came, treacherous, pointless.

No, she had never existed for him. Not her, not Rachel Vaile.

Not the person she was—her soul, her mind, her personality, her likes and dislikes—nothing, about the person she was existed for him.

Not even my body existed for him.

I thought it did, in my naïve stupidity. I thought that at least my body existed.

But it hadn’t. Only one thing had mattered to him about her.

Over the wastes of eleven long years his words echoed in her mind.

‘I know exactly who you are—you’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore…’

That was who she was to Vito Farneste. It was all she ever had been. All she ever would be.

And then, into the welling seepage of old, old bitterness, a new thought came. One that made her vicious with sudden satisfaction.

She would be more to Vito Farneste.

If he wanted to do business with her.

Her shoulders pulled back with a minute, almost invisible straightening. Her gaze rested on his blank, impassive face, no trace of emotion, none whatsoever, in her eyes.

And she pitched.

‘There are conditions,’ she began.

Vito held himself still. Every fibre, every muscle in his body was under total control.

It was essential.

If he had not imposed such ruthless control over his body it would have hurled itself from his chair, thrust past his desk and his hands would have curved around the shoulders of the woman who dared, dared to stand there offering him conditions, and he would have shaken her, and shaken her and shaken—

His mind slammed down. Even allowing himself the image was lethal. It might take over and become reality.

Instead, he merely continued sitting there, quite motionless.

Surveying her.

Rachel Vaile.

Crawling out of the woodwork after seven years.

Although in an outfit like that she wouldn’t be soiling her knees or laddering her stockings by crawling anywhere.

His eyes took in every detail.

The hair, the suit, the nails, the accessories.

He ran up a price tag for the total look.

Five hundred pounds? Easily—another few hundred if you added the shoes and the handbag.

Where was she getting the money from?

The answer knifed through his head, making the question obsolete.

Other men.

Well… He eased the sudden, inexplicable tensing of his shoulders as the answer formed in his mind. She certainly had the right genes for it.

A family profession…

He went on surveying her.

Not that she needed the family link to trade on. Her looks had matured at last. She was, he thought dispassionately, at the very peak of her physical appeal now. And she certainly knew how to package herself.

The knifeblade went through him again, but he ignored it. It was as incomprehensible as it was irrelevant.

He went back to studying her physical appeal.

She didn’t flaunt that racehorse leanness, that ash-blonde fall of hair, those wide, haunting eyes and the tender mouth…

No!

A blade sliced down over his mind.

Fine. She looked superb. Resplendent. Fantastic.

So what? Now move on. Her looks had nothing to do with him.

Nothing about Rachel Vaile had anything to do with him.

They never had and they never would.

Only one thing about Rachel Vaile was of any concern to him.

The price she was intending to exact.

Sitting back calmly in his chair, he merely allowed the sweep of his lashes to lower minutely over his eyes.

‘And your price is—?’

There was contempt in his voice. He didn’t even bother to hide it.

Did something move in her face? He couldn’t tell. But she answered in the same voice as she had first spoken. ‘I didn’t say “price”. I said “conditions”.’

That spurt of rage iced through him again. She had the insolence to come here, forcing his hand like this—

Because she was forcing it, all right! For three years—three years—he had tried by every means he could to get back what was his—his! His lawyers had been useless. Imbeciles! A gift, they had told him, was a gift. It conferred legal title on the recipient. And his father had, after all, given his mistress many gifts. Valuable ones. Expensive ones. Including jewellery…

Vito had cut off their prating with an oath.

‘Dio mio, do you seriously mean to compare the trashy baubles he gave his whore with the piece she stole from him?’

His lawyers had looked even more spineless and useless.

‘It would be difficult to assert that she did so in a court of law, Signor Farneste,’ one of them had ventured uneasily.

Vito had rounded on him mercilessly. ‘Cretino! Of course she stole it! My father was no fool! He didn’t even give her the villa! Why the hell would he have given her something worth even more?’

‘Perhaps as a token of…ah…appreciation…er…instead of the…ah…villa?’

Vito had stilled. A closed, deadly look had come over his face. In a soft, lethal voice that had made the lawyer step back automatically, he had said. ‘You think so, do you? Tell me, what man gives his mistress his wife’s wedding present? What man gives his whore the Farneste emeralds?’

The Farneste emeralds.

Rachel could still see them now. It had been nine months ago. Her mother had insisted on Rachel accompanying her to the bank. Demanded she go into a little room, set aside, where a bank official had brought a sealed parcel to them and placed it on a table, together with a form. They had been left alone, and her mother had pulled off the restraining string around the boxlike parcel, unwrapping the brown paper to reveal a jewel box. Not a very grand one, just one that opened up, revealing a shallow upper layer and a deeper one beneath. Her mother had only glanced at the top layer, lifting it up out of the way to expose the lower one.

And Rachel had gasped. She hadn’t been able to help it.

A river of green fire had flashed in the light. Her mother had lifted it out and sat back. A look had settled on her face. An expression of extreme satisfaction. She’d let the jewels flow through her hands and given a deep, contented sigh.

‘It’s incredible!’ Rachel breathed.

Her mother smiled.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s mine.’

There was a strange note in her voice. Not just pleasure at owning such a treasure. More than that. And Rachel recognised what it was.

Triumph.

A sense of foreboding started to sound in her.

‘The Farneste emeralds,’ said her mother. ‘And they’re mine.’

Then a strange, haunted expression came into her eyes.

She looked at Rachel.

‘They’ll be yours. Your inheritance.’

Vito leant back in his chair behind the vast desk that befitted the chairman and chief executive of Farneste Industriale. The company was only three generations old, but the Farneste family went back a lot further than that. The Farnestes had been merchant princes at the time of the Renaissance, and though the family’s fortunes had fluctuated wildly over the intervening centuries, now, thanks to Enrico’s shrewd, hard and brilliant brain—a throwback to his Quattrocento ancestor—the Farneste fortune was riding high again. Vito’s task was merely to steer Farneste Industriale into the expanding global economy of the twenty-first century.

But though the Farnestes looked forward, Vito had not forgotten the past. The ancient past—which had brought the Farneste emeralds into existence in the eighteenth century—and the recent past—which had scarred his youth.

Thanks to Arlene Graham’s poisonous presence in his father’s life.

A poison he had not yet quite drawn. The very last drop of that vicious venom had yet to be extracted.

And Arlene’s daughter was here, offering him the chance to draw it.

‘Conditions?’ he said expressionlessly. ‘By this you mean exemption from prosecution for theft.’

Vito’s voice was flat. Unarguable.

Rachel shifted her weight slightly. The tension in her spine was making her back ache.

But when she replied her voice was as flat as his.

‘Had there been justification for prosecution you would have gone ahead years ago,’ she replied. ‘The conditions I require to be met are quite different.’

She watched Vito’s face for his reaction. There was none. Not even anger at being reminded of how completely impotent he was to use the force of the law to return what he considered his. He would have done so if he could. She knew that. Without the slightest hesitation Vito Farneste would have used the full force of the law to regain his possessions.

After all—her eyes shadowed—he had done it once already.

What Vito Farneste wanted, Vito Farneste got.

He made sure of it.

Whatever it was and whoever it was.

For whatever reason.

She stared at him. Stared at the man who sat there, who had nearly—so very, very nearly—destroyed her.

I was young. I was stupid. I was gullible.

She was none of those things now.

And Vito Farneste meant nothing to her. Just as she meant nothing to him. Had always meant nothing to him.

Now, only one person meant anything to her. It had come very late, but it had come. And it was for that reason she was here, standing in front of Vito Farneste, offering him the one thing he wanted from her—the only thing of any value to him.

But you were never of value to him—never! Not once, at any time! You were nothing more than a fool, to be used.

His eyes were dark, so very dark. Like the night.

For a second so brief she wanted to believe she had only imagined it, a pain went through her that was searing, agony.

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night…

The lines from Shakespeare’s bitter sonnet tore at her.

With a strength she pulled out of grief, she forced her mind away.

Vito Farneste wanted different things now from what he had wanted once, when she had been that young, stupid, gullible fool. Now what he wanted was in her possession.

But, unlike the last thing he had wanted from her, this time she would extract something in return.

Not money. Money was no use to her.

What she wanted was something quite, quite different.

Vito’s eyes had narrowed. But they remained utterly without expression. She matched hers to his.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

His gaze bored into hers.

She felt them do so as if they were a physical force, drilling through her. She took a breath—quick and sharp and shallow.

‘It’s very simple,’ she told him. ‘I want you to marry me.’

For a second there was total and absolute silence. Then, like the lash of a whip, he started to laugh.

It cut the flesh from her bones, flayed the skin from her body.

Scornful, contemptuous laughter.

She watched his head thrown back, his mouth widen, indenting lines from his nose to the edges of his lips.

Then he cut the laughter short.

With dark, poisonous venom in his eyes he leant forward.

‘In your dreams,’ he sneered.

His mocking voice sheered through her. Forcing her to acknowledge the truth of what he said.

Once, marrying Vito Farneste would have been a dream come true.

But that was in another lifetime. When she had been a different person.

Yes, so naïve I should have had a warning sign on me!

But there had been no warning. No warning of just how mortally dangerous Vito Farneste could be to her.

After that first, horrible encounter by the pool, when she was fourteen, she’d never thought she would see him again. Her mother, arriving back after a long lunch with Enrico, had been furious to discover Vito had turned up at the villa. Vito’s father hadn’t seemed pleased either.

Rachel had stayed down by the pool even after she’d heard the car arriving and assumed it was her mother and Enrico coming back. But she hadn’t been able to block out the angry exchange of deep voices echoing down from the house, culminating in the throaty roar of that red beast tearing away up the precipitous coast road. After a while her mother had come in search of her, clipping down the steps in high heels and looking tense and distracted. There had been two spots of colour on her cheeks, visible beneath the perfect make-up she wore. At thirty-four her mother could easily have passed for a woman nearly ten years younger, but today she showed her age.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Rachel had been moved to ask.

Her mother had given an impatient sound in her throat. ‘Vito has been here, spreading his usual discord! Enrico is angry, naturally, and that just makes for a difficult situation.’

‘Who’s Vito?’ Rachel asked, though she was pretty sure she knew just who her mother was referring to.

‘Enrico’s son. He’s driven here, quite unnecessarily, to inform his father that his mother has taken off for her mountain chalet with one of her so-called nervous attacks! Does Vito seriously think Enrico is going to rush after her? He’s only been here two days—that boy has absolutely no idea how hard his father works!’ Her mouth tightened. ‘The only thing Vito knows is how to spend money and live the dolce vita in Rome! The original Latin playboy!’ Her eyes suddenly sharpened. ‘Did you see him?’ she demanded. ‘Before Enrico and I came back?’

To her chagrin, Rachel felt the colour flush through her face.

‘He…he walked past the pool,’ she confessed, in a mumbled voice.

Her mother’s face hardened. ‘Well, at least he won’t be back now. He’s gone off to hold his mother’s perpetually swooning hand. It’s quite ridiculous the fuss he makes over her!’

Was that defensiveness in her mother’s voice, or just accusation? Rachel wondered. Whichever it was, it just made her long to be a million miles away.

She remained of that opinion for the rest of her stay at the villa. She did her very best to stay out of the way, heading down to the tiny private beach below the villa to swim in the sea, or sunbathing by the pool with a book.

Her mother and Enrico seemed to spend most of their time out and about, and she was glad. She felt no easier in Enrico’s company than in her mother’s. He seemed to be a remote figure, middle-aged and heavily built, someone around whom the whole household revolved—including, primarily, her mother.

Rachel hated seeing them together. Up till now she had accepted their relationship. It had lasted over six years, ever since Enrico Farneste, attending a conference in Brighton, had walked into the expensive boutique her mother ran in the fashionable Lanes to buy something for his current mistress and decided that Arlene Graham would make him a much better one. Rachel had been packed off, first to her mother’s elderly widowed aunt and then to an expensive boarding-school, to get her out of the way, and her mother had been whisked off to Italy.

Rachel had known her mother had become the mistress of Enrico Farneste, head of the giant Farneste Industriale. That it was his luxurious villa she lived in, his yacht she took her holidays on, his gilded world she moved in. And she had known, too, that it was thanks to Enrico Farneste that she went to her exclusive boarding-school, that Auntie Jean now lived in a nice bungalow outside Brighton, not a council flat, and that when she stayed with her mother in London it was Enrico Farneste who ended up paying for the hotel, and supplying the money her mother spent.

Her mother was untroubled by the irregularity of the liaison.

‘On the Continent these things are understood,’ she had told Rachel, in her crisp voice. Her vowels had completely lost their flattened, lower-class origins, and her spoken English now was almost as good as her expensively educated daughter’s. ‘In a Catholic country a wife can never be divorced, so men have no choice but to stay married. It’s a perfectly acceptable arrangement, and no one thinks anything of it. Just as no one,’ she added offhandedly, ‘thinks anything of the fact that your father and I were not married.’

She had sounded so convincing that Rachel had believed her.

Until Enrico’s son had ripped that illusion from her with a handful of casually vicious words. As ugly as they were true.

Surely to God that should have been warning enough?

But it hadn’t been.

The ugliness of the words had not been enough to make her forget the beauty of the man who had delivered them. From that day onwards Rachel had hidden a shameful secret—that in her adolescent heart every male who ever came her way, whether real or on screen, was compared to Vito Farneste. Even as the years passed, and the routine of school dominated, still, in the dark recesses of her secret mind, she knew she could never expunge the image, burnt on her retina by the bright Italian sun, of that figure walking down the steps with lithe, leashed grace, like a dark, beautiful young god.

She had told no one—Vito Farneste had remained a secret sin.

It was one she was to pay for bitterly.

Was still paying for. In dreams that had turned into a nightmare.

A nightmare that was the dark, deadly sting of Vito Farneste’s eyes as she told him her conditions for relinquishing the Farneste emeralds.

He sat back in his chair.

‘Get real,’ he said, his voice soft. Soft as blood.

Rachel could feel the scorn, the derision, lashing out at her like the fine, cruel tip of a whip across the broad desk. She saw him reach out a long-fingered hand and pull open one of the drawers of the desk, take out a leather cheque-book case. He flicked it open, and picked up a gold pen, sliding off the top and holding it over a cheque.

‘Cash,’ he said. ‘That’s the currency for women like you and your mother. Hard cash.’ His eyes narrowed, and Rachel could feel the leashed fury lashing within. ‘But don’t even think of trying to bleed me. You can have a million euros in exchange for the emeralds. Not a cent more. Take it or leave it.’

He was starting to write. Assured, decisive, the black ink flowing smoothly across the blank spaces of the cheque.

‘No sale.’

Rachel’s voice was controlled. Very controlled. It had to be.

Vito didn’t even pause in writing, just went on, scrawling ‘one million euros’ in the required space.

‘You didn’t hear me, did you?’ Rachel said. Was her voice less controlled? No—she would not allow it to be. Must not allow it. Too much depended on her keeping her control total. Absolute. Unbreakable.

Vito glanced up, his look corrosive. ‘I heard you make a joke in such poor taste I would not have thought even you could stoop so low.’

He went back to completing the cheque, signing it with his dark, flowing hand. He tore the page from the cheque-book and pushed it across the desk towards her.

‘I’ve dated it three days from today. Bring me the emeralds tomorrow, and then you can cash the cheque.’

She didn’t even look at it. Instead, in a tight, rigid voice, she said, ‘It was no joke. If you want the emeralds back, you marry me. That’s all. Take it or leave it.’

She could not resist throwing back his own words to her. It helped, however minutely, to ease by a fraction the tension racking her so tightly she thought she might snap at any moment.

Vito set down his pen. It was a slow, deliberate movement. Then, in a movement equally slow, equally deliberate, he leaned forward again.

‘I would rather,’ he spelt out, his voice low, lethal, ‘take a toad as a wife than you.’

His eyes rested on her. Dark. Deriding.

A dull stain of colour seeped out along her cheekbones.

‘I’m not suggesting a real marriage.’ She tried to inject scorn into her voice, but it didn’t seem to come out that way. She could feel the colour spreading now, staining her cheeks. ‘I simply want your ring on my finger for a limited duration.’

A pang struck her, stabbing with a pain she should have got accustomed to but hadn’t. Couldn’t.

‘Six months—no longer.’

The tightness in her voice was unbearable, crushing her larynx so she could hardly speak. The pain stabbed at her again.

She tried to stare him down, match his cold, levelling gaze with one of her own.

‘I have already given you my answer. Do you add selective hearing to all your other…flaws?’ was Vito’s response. ‘Including, of course, stupidity. Do you imagine I would ever, under any circumstances, marry you?’

Her face was so tense it ached, all the way across her jaw, up through the bones in her skull. Her spine was stiff with the strain of holding herself upright.

‘I know what you think of me, Vito— I don’t need it spelt out.’

A slashing, hostile smile flashed across his face. Utterly devoid of humour.

‘Then, if you know that, even more do I question your sanity in coming here like this. Daring to try and sell back to me what was never your bitch of a mother’s to take!’

Emotion—deep, agonised—twisted in Rachel’s face.

‘Don’t speak of her like that!’ Her words spat at him.

Vito’s face darkened, as if night had closed over him.

‘Your mother got her greedy, grasping claws into my father and wouldn’t let go! She made my mother’s life a non-stop misery!’

His words, his voice, cut at her like a knife. Rachel closed her eyes against it. How could she deny what he had said? How could she argue back against what he had thrown at her? And yet to hear her mother spoken of in such terms gutted her. A vision of how she had last seen Arlene seared into her mind, and she had to open her eyes again to banish it. But she could not banish the shaft of anguish that went with the vision.

She raised her hand in a sharp, sweeping movement, as if to brush away the feelings ripping through her.

With monumental effort she fought back to take control of her emotions, to keep this conversation where it had to be—at the level of business, nothing more. Where Vito Farneste would gain something he wanted and so would she.

‘This is irrelevant,’ she said dismissively. ‘The sole issue is whether you want the Farneste emeralds back again—on the terms I’ve just set out. I want your ring on my finger. For no more than a few months—’ she fought to keep her voice steady as she spoke ‘—and that’s all. You can have your precious emeralds back on our wedding day. No cash will be necessary.’

She bit out the final sentence.

Vito stared at her. His expression was veiled. And suddenly the way he was looking at her was far, far worse than when his eyes had been dark with fury, his face cold with disgust.

She felt her heart start to quicken, her stomach plunge as though she’d just swallowed an ice-cube.

‘Why?’ he asked quietly, but there was no softness in his voice, just a low, disturbing shimmer of menace. ‘Why?’ he asked again.

His shoulders eased into the soft leather curve of his executive chair and it swung slightly at the redistribution of weight. His eyes never left her face.

She shifted uneasily. What was going on? Why was he looking at her like that?

She tightened her jaw.

‘Why what? Why don’t I want money for the emeralds?’

‘No. Why do you imagine that I would entertain, even for a nanosecond, your…proposal?’

His voice was still quiet, but it withered the flesh on her body.

‘Because,’ she answered, through gritted teeth, ‘you want the emeralds back. And this is the only way you’re going to get them.’

Something flashed in his eyes. In a single fluid movement he was on his feet.

His hand flew up.

‘Basta! This idiocy has gone far enough! I am prepared to buy back the emeralds in cash—but I am not prepared to have my time wasted a second longer with this farce! So either take the cheque or get out!’

She was reeling from the force of his anger. Her fingers dug into the soft leather of her handbag.

‘If I walk now you’ll never get your precious emeralds back!’

She tried to hurl her words at him, but they came out shaking.

‘Never is a long time,’ he retorted caustically. ‘At some point you’ll sell them—just to realise their value. And if you don’t sell them to me, what do I care? I’ll buy them from whoever you sell them to.’

‘My mother will never sell them!’ An image of the way Arlene had let the green jewels run through her fingers, gloating with triumph over her possession of them, shot through her mind. ‘Never!’

‘Then you can bury them in her grave with her!’

Rachel’s face whitened, draining of blood. Faintness drummed in her ears.

‘You bastard,’ she whispered.

His face stayed unrelenting, like unyielding marble. ‘No—that’s you. Remember?’

It finished her. Finished her totally.

Numb, she turned on her heel, walking back towards the closed double doors that seemed suddenly to be a hundred metres away. The urge to run, to get out, was overwhelming. Only at the door did she find one last vestige of courage. She took the handle, steadying herself.

Then she turned. Her face was totally blank.

‘May you rot in hell, Vito Farneste!’

She swung back, yanking open the double doors, and walked out. She just made it inside the lift before her legs all but buckled beneath her, and she had to sag against the bronzed wall for support.

As the lift plunged downwards, so did her heart.

She had blown it. Totally blown it. Her wild, stupid, insane idea had failed utterly, miserably.

Despair filled her, and in its wake the floodgates to grief opened yet again, drowning her.

In his office, Vito stood for one long, last moment, his face rigid. Fury so overwhelming he thought it would burst through tore at him, but he leashed it tight, with rigid control.

How dared she come here! Stroll into his office and coolly, insolently, lay down conditions for the return of his own property?

And such conditions…

His eyes narrowed with cold, disbelieving rage.

Had she really imagined that he would pay the slightest consideration to what she demanded? Could she really be that insane? Walking in, out of the blue, three years after he’d finally torn Arlene Graham’s grasping claws from the Farneste coffers, and thinking that he might actually consider, let alone accept paying such a price for the purloined Farneste emeralds?

Out of what sordid hole had she crawled, anyway? And why now? Were times hard for the pair of them these days? He’d made sure Arlene Graham had taken the minimum of booty with her when he’d despatched her after his father had died, but a woman like her would have squirrelled away funds for years. Other than sending his useless pack of lawyers to try and extract the one trophy she had managed to carry off, he’d let Arlene Graham rot, glad that he’d finally got her out of Italy. Where she’d gone he neither knew nor cared. If she’d taken another protector he’d have been surprised—her youth had gone and her market rate was all but zero.

Another thought seared across his mind.

Had she turned her daughter to the same trade? Leeching off rich men in exchange for sleeping with them? She was certainly dressed as if a rich man had paid for her appearance…

Even at the thought something stabbed at him. So brief that he dismissed it. Instead he found himself jabbing at the intercom to his PA.

‘The woman who left my office just now. Have her followed.’

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