The Parenti Marriage: The Reluctant Surrender

CHAPTER FOUR

GISELLE could see from the illuminated face of her small bedside clock that it was almost half past two in the morning, but sleep was impossible. How could she possibly sleep after what had happened? She had no idea why Saul had kissed her. She could only presume it had been his way of punishing her. He had been so angry when she had dared to suggest that he might have tried to trick her.

What had he expected her to do? He had made it plain that he didn’t want her seconded to him. He had even said that he would be waiting for her to prove herself not up to the job so that he could demand a replacement for her. Under such circumstances surely anyone would need to be suspicious in order to protect themselves.

In fact for all she knew her suspicions were correct, and his anger could have been because she had not fallen into the trap he had set for her. Had he kissed her as a way of trying to force her to leave? If only she could do just that. If only she could ask, even beg her employers to send someone else to Saul in her place.

She’d picked up a newspaper on her way home, in the desperate hope that by some miracle she might find a job advertised in it that would offer her a means of escape. She had even gone online to check out some job search websites, but the reality was that nobody was hiring in the current climate—and, much as she hated to admit it, the increased salary Saul Parenti was paying her meant that it would be impossible for her to find another job in London that would pay her as much.

As much as she loathed the blow her pride would suffer every day she had to step across the threshold of the Parenti Organisation, and despite her suspicions that Saul was doing everything he could to manipulate her into leaving, the debt she owed her great-aunt was such that she would just have to bear it. Without her great-aunt…Giselle dreaded to think what would have happened to her if her elderly relative had not stepped in and offered her a home, a safe haven. She had been so kind to her—shielding her, protecting her—but Giselle had caught the small fragments of adult conversations that had dropped to whispers, and then shaken heads and knowing looks when those adults had realised that she was there. She had known they were talking about her, known too of their suspicions about her. As a child she’d had nightmares, dreaming of ghostly voices reaching out to accuse her, and ghostly hands reaching out to drag her down into the darkness.

It had never been discussed between them, but Giselle knew that her great-aunt knew about the secret that could never be spoken. How could she not know when it had been the direct cause of her mother and baby brother’s deaths and the indirect cause of her father’s? She didn’t know the exact details, though—that Giselle had deliberately disobeyed her mother, that she had let go of the pram, pulling back onto the pavement and then watching as the pram’s momentum had carried it and her baby brother, and then her mother, who had clutched desperately at the pram’s handle, straight under the front wheels of a lorry.

She would never sleep now. She was too afraid of the memories that would surface if she did. She must not go down that dark and tormenting road. She already knew where it led, and the horrors that waited for her at its end.

If only her life could be different. If only right here, right now, there were comforting, loving male arms waiting to enfold her—a strong male chest for her to lean on, and the protection of a man who understood and forgave all that there was to understand and forgive and still went on loving her.

If only there was a man in her life—a lover—whose desire for her and hers for him could prevent her from suffering the sharp pangs of aching sexual need she had felt earlier in Saul’s arms, when her body had been on fire with the intensity of what he had aroused within her.

But there wasn’t. There never would be; there never could be. The kind of man she wanted to love, the kind of lover she wanted to share such intimacy with, would be the kind of man who carried in his genes a need for the traditional things in life: a relationship, commitment, children.

Children! A shudder galvanised her body. She could not, must not ever have a child. And equally she could not and must not ever put a man she might love in a position where loving her back would mean that he would be deprived of his own right to be a parent.

The wilder shores of sexual promiscuity and the supposed ‘fun’ they afforded were not for her. Even if her own nature had not inclined her against them, Giselle suspected that her upbringing by her great-aunt would have done so.

Until now—until Saul Parenti—she had been free to believe that her sexuality was under her own control, and that there was no danger whatsoever of her physical desire for a man making her want to break the rules she had set for herself.

Until now.

Those few minutes in Saul’s arms, with her senses hungering beneath Saul’s kiss, her flesh clamouring for Saul’s touch, had changed everything. Like a genie let out of a bottle by a person who did not believe such things could exist, she was now having to deal with something that she had believed could never happen.

How was it possible for her of all people to feel such an uncontrollable flood tide of physical desire for a man she actively disliked? It went against everything she knew and understood about herself. Or rather everything she had thought she knew and understood about the person she wanted to be. Inside her head she could see once again the small family group: the mother, preoccupied, tense and impatient, the baby—the good child—sleeping in the pram, whilst she—the bad child—disobeyed her mother’s instructions, ignoring them to give in to her inner need to follow her own instincts. As a result of that two members of that trio had died whilst she, the third, had survived.

Since then she had worked unceasingly to be ‘good’ and to make amends, but now, thanks to Saul, she was being forced to accept that the wilful, reckless side of her nature had not been banished at all.

Nothing could be returned to what it had been before Saul’s fierce kiss had ripped from her the protection of her own delusion to show her the raw, physical reality of her desire for him.

How had it happened, when she had always been so careful and so controlled? She didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that trying to deny its existence would be pointless—as pointless as trying to hold back the tide. It had seared its reality into her senses and sealed itself there with the pain of its white-hot heat. Perhaps this was her punishment for the past? The agonising price she must pay for what she had done? To be tormented by a need that would never be satisfied.

She might not know why she was being forced to endure the agony of physical desire for a man she disliked, and whom she knew disliked her, but what she did know was that Saul must never discover her weakness. He must never know that she wanted him, that the desire he aroused in her was overwhelming—and, most humiliating of all, that it was unique in her own experience and felt for him alone.

Like love.

The treacherous thought slid into her mind, to be instantly and frantically denied.

No! What she felt for Saul was nothing like love at all. It was merely physical—physical and nothing else.

Her only comfort was that Saul did not desire her with an equally irrational and overwhelming hunger. Because if he did…But, no—she must not go there.

Her eyes were dry and gritty from lack of sleep and suppressed emotion, and Giselle warned herself that she must try and get some sleep. It was now gone four o’clock in the morning, and she would have to be at her desk for nine—or risk the consequences to her pride. Taking time off because she couldn’t bear to face Saul was not an option she was willing to allow herself.

Broodingly Saul stood staring out of his window and watched Giselle as she entered the building. He should not have kissed her. He wished fiercely that he had not done so. Kissing her had breached his own moral barriers against that kind of intimacy with someone he employed—and, even more disturbingly, deep down inside himself he knew that it had also breached his emotional defences. So why make the hole she had driven through those defences even bigger by spending time he should be giving to other things—far more important things—not only thinking about what had happened but actively dwelling on it?

Because he needed to dwell on it—to focus on it and come up with a plan to deal with it and its potential consequences.

Abruptly Saul turned and strode purposefully across his office.

Apprehensively Giselle headed directly for her office, desperate to avoid seeing Saul, only allowing herself to feel safe when she had closed the door behind her with a sigh of relief—only to realise that she was not safe and that Saul was there, standing in the shadows, watching her.

‘We need to talk,’ he told her peremptorily, not looking directly at her at all as he crossed over to the window and stood there, looking out of it. His dark-suited figure was highlighted by the light coming in through the window. His back was to her, so that she could not read his expression, but she knew that if he chose to do so he could turn round and see hers exposed by the merciless beam of sunlight pouring into the office.

‘What happened between us was a mistake and should not have happened,’ he said.

Giselle could feel her pain fanning her anger.

‘Do you think that I wanted it to happen?’ she challenged him. ‘Well, I didn’t. Because you are who you are, I dare say you believe that all women want to…to be physically intimate with you, and that they hope intimacy will lead to a relationship. Well, I don’t. I don’t want that and I never will.’

Her angry claim was heartfelt enough to surprise Saul into turning round to look at her.

‘It’s easy enough to say that, but show me a woman who doesn’t claim she wants to be free and then claims that all she’s ever wanted is motherhood the minute she’s managed to get pregnant by a man she sees as her meal ticket and I’ll show you a liar,’ Saul retaliated brutally.

His words hit Giselle as brutally as though they had been physical blows, bringing to life her deepest fear.

‘I shall never be that woman,’ she told him passionately. ‘I shall never have a child. Never! And as for…for what happened, I wish with all my heart that it had not.’

She meant it, Saul recognized, and he nodded his head and informed her crisply, ‘That makes two of us. For once it seems we are in accord.’

As he strode past her to the door Giselle turned her back to him and pretended to be engrossed in the plans laid out on the large desk beside her.

Back in his own office, though, Saul discovered that neither Giselle nor their kiss was easy to put out of his mind. Last night in his impressively elegant Chelsea townhouse Saul hadn’t been able to sleep, despite the comfort of his bed with its stratospherically expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, changed and smoothed to perfection every day by the small and discreet army of service staff provided by the agency he used, because Giselle had got under his skin as effectively as a handful of grit placed under those sheets to deliberately irritate him. And now he couldn’t erase her from his thoughts.

In fact her presence in his thoughts had gone way beyond mere irritation, Saul acknowledged, remembering how he had watched the dawn breaking, its grey light coming in through the bedroom window that he preferred to keep open to the light, etching smudged lines across the glass. That dull dawn light would have suited Giselle Freeman, he thought unkindly, with her too-often-washed black suit and her pale hair and skin.

Too late Saul realised his mistake, as the image that immediately formed inside his head was not one that focused on the shabbiness of Giselle’s clothes but instead on the way her shirt pulled against her breasts.

His head might be willing to create an unflattering image of her, but his memory was not being anything as like as co-operative—and as for his body!

Against his will he remembered what it had felt like to hold her. If he closed his eyes now he would almost be able to feel her body trembling against his own, inciting within him the desire to cover her mouth with his and take the sweet, soft movement of her lips hostage. He could imagine the weight of her slender body leaning against his, producing an effect on him as erotic as if she had physically and deliberately placed her hand on his sex and openly caressed him. He could visualise her breasts, naked and revealed for his pleasure. As a young man one of his first sexual experiences had been with an older woman who had liked him to fill his mouth with ice before emptying it to take her hot, swollen nipple into the icy chill of his mouth. She loved the sensuality of his ice-cold mouth against her sex-hot breast. He thought of Giselle, shuddering wildly under such an embrace, her fingers entwined with his as he pinioned her hands back and suckled on her nipples until she was writhing with the pleasure of his caress.

Abruptly Saul dragged his thoughts back under the control of his mind. He’d never been a fan of cold showers, but right now that was exactly what he needed—and being forced to acknowledge that didn’t please him one little bit.

Saul wasn’t used to anything whatsoever in his life not being under his control, never mind his own body.

It was as though for some reason his own flesh was rebelling against him. What other logical explanation could there be for its maddening insistence on telling him that it found Giselle desirable when he had strictly forbidden it to do any such thing?

Swiftly Saul mentally reviewed the women he had taken to bed over the last five years. He’d never felt any need to prove himself as a man via a list of sexual conquests, but his sexual appetite had been sharpened on and satisfied by some very beautiful women—women who were skilled and adept at appealing to a man’s ego, women who did not steal car park spaces nor fill him with an irrational sense of guilt mixed with compassion which was then laced with anger because they wore shabby clothes that made them stand out from their peers in all the wrong ways.

That was it, Saul decided grimly. Put Giselle Freeman in the kind of clothes the other women in his employ wore and, instead of standing out from them, thus forcing him to focus on her, she would fade into the wallpaper, so to speak. Problem solved!

Impatiently Saul buzzed through to his PA and gave her his instructions. He heard her indrawn breath and demanded, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Saul, if I may say so, I don’t think that being told to present herself at Harvey Nichols’ personal shopping suite in order to be provided with some new work clothes so that her appearance fits with that of your other female employees will go down very well with Giselle.’

‘If she argues, tell her that she doesn’t have any choice,’ Saul commanded, before ending the call.

He was pleased—not just because he had solved his problem, but because, even more importantly, he felt that he had found the cause for it. He was focusing on Giselle because she stood out from the other women. Once she ceased to do that he would cease to notice her and when he ceased to notice he would cease to…To want her? He did not want her, Saul assured himself. Not really.

Wanting a woman—any woman—was the first dangerous step down a road he had no intentions of travelling. His father had almost worshipped his mother, and look where that had got him. Dead because his mother had refused to give up her aid work and his father had not been able to bear being apart from her. He never wanted to risk loving a woman to that extent. Better by far not to love at all—and that was exactly what he intended to do. He never intended to love and he never intended to have a child. Children were vulnerable—helpless hostages to fate, their emotions so tender that a parent could with the smallest sentence, the briefest gesture, accidentally scar them. He did not want the burden of carrying that responsibility.

His mother, in particular, had been burdened by the responsibility of having him. He could vividly remember how, after a wonderful fortnight spent with his parents, the first summer after he had gone to boarding school, he had begged his mother to allow him to stay with them all the time.

‘I could learn from books,’ he had told her. ‘You could teach me like you teach other kids—you and Papa.’

‘No, Saul,’ his mother had refused, quietly but firmly. ‘If your papa and I were to devote our time to you, then how could we do the work that is so important for helping all the thousands of children who do not have the advantages you have? They have so little and need so much.’

They have you. Saul remembered his eight-year-old self wanting to protest. But of course he had not done so, knowing how much such a comment would have displeased his mother, to whom it had been so important that he understood the needs of the children she worked with from war torn and disaster-struck parts of the world. Children so much more deserving of her time and her love than he himself.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘SAUL has done what?’

Moira sighed silently to herself as she heard the note of outrage in Giselle’s voice.

‘He’s instructed me to arrange an appointment for you at Harvey Nichols for four this afternoon with one of their personal shoppers. He feels…’ The PA paused, trying to find the right words. ‘Saul has explained that because of the expense of your great-aunt’s healthcare you can’t afford to…’

‘To what?’ Giselle stopped her angrily. ‘To buy my own clothes?’

‘He simply felt it would be easier for you to fit in if you were provided with some suitable business outfits to wear whilst you are working here. He thought it would help you if—’

‘Help me? By embarrassing me like this?’

‘I don’t think for one minute that that was his intention, Giselle.’ Moira tried to comfort and placate her. ‘In fact I gained the impression that he rather admires you for what you are doing—as indeed I do myself. It can’t be easy for you.’

Giselle’s body stiffened as she heard the pity in the older woman’s voice.

‘What can’t be easy for me? Wearing cheap clothes? I can think of plenty of things that would be far harder to bear.’

Moira tried another tack.

‘A large part of Saul’s business comes from the international high finance set, and it is all about convincing them that becoming partners with him and investing in his construction projects will bring them good returns. For that reason he believes that it is important to maintain the right kind of image. We have a mainly young staff, and their standards of grooming tend to be high.’

‘So it isn’t for my benefit that he has given instructions that I am to be shamed and patronised, then,’ Giselle challenged her, ‘but for his own?’

‘For his own and for yours,’ Moira insisted.

‘I won’t do it,’ Giselle told her fiercely. ‘He can get someone else from the firm—in fact I wish he would.’

‘Do you? That would mean being sent back to your employers in disgrace. Saul is their most important client. I can understand how you feel, but you have your CV and your future to think of. And with your greataunt’s care to provide, taking any kind of risk with your earning potential might not be a good idea.’

What Moira was saying made good sense, Giselle knew. But that did not mean that she had to welcome hearing it.

The initial surge of adrenalin-boosted fury Moira’s announcement had brought subsided now, leaving Giselle feeling emotionally raw and shaky.

Moira put her hand on Giselle’s arm. They were in Giselle’s office, where she had come to pass on Saul’s instructions.

‘I do understand how you must feel, and indeed how I would feel myself, were I you,’ she told her calmly.

No, she didn’t, Giselle thought inwardly. How could she? How could anyone? She was the one who had been subjected to the humiliation Saul was heaping on her. She was the one who had been mocked and taunted and…and kissed by him until she was reduced to a molten aching longing.

‘I cannot and will not allow Saul to buy my clothes. And since I cannot afford to buy the kind of clothes for myself he seems to deem necessary for those who work for him—’

‘It is not Saul who will be paying for them; it is the company. If as an employee you were required to wear a uniform you would not object to your employer providing that uniform for you, would you?’ Moira challenged briskly, and continued without giving her time to respond. ‘This is just the same. Saul requires you to wear the same “uniform” as his other employees.’

‘I won’t do it,’ Giselle repeated. ‘And I shall go and tell him so.’

‘You can’t,’ Moira told her, stepping in front of her as Giselle made to head for the door. ‘He isn’t here. He’s flying to New York this morning. Don’t make your mind up right now, Giselle. The appointment isn’t until four o’clock.’

This was her punishment for last night, Giselle decided after Moira had gone. She was sure of it.

Her mobile rang whilst she was still brooding on her situation. Her caller was Emma.

‘You’ll never guess what,’ Emma told her without preamble as soon as Giselle had answered the call. ‘Bill Jeffries has been called in from annual leave and suspended from work until further notice because Saul Parenti has queried some of his costings. And I should warn you, Giselle, that Bill is blaming you—and gunning for you as well. You’re lucky you’re working at Parenti’s and not over here, I can tell you.’

Listening to Emma, Giselle gripped her mobile more tightly, torn between disbelief that Saul had actually taken her disclosures seriously enough to report them to the partnership for further investigations, the realisation that she must after all have been wrong about him trying to trick her, and the recognition that the door to her escape route from Parenti had just swung closed on her.

An hour later, on her way to the communal coffee machine, one of the other girls smiled at her and asked her if she was settling in okay. Giselle couldn’t help but notice how smart Aimee looked. Her black suit wasn’t shiny from being over-washed—but then it had probably never been anywhere near a washing machine Giselle reflected ruefully. It looked far too expensive for that.