- -
- 100%
- +
He gave a semblance of a smile, a fractional movement of his lips that didn’t reveal his teeth. ‘I appreciate the compliment that you automatically assumed I was the highly regarded expert, but I can assure you I had nothing to do with it.’
Rachel glared at him furiously. ‘I am about to lose everything I’ve worked so hard for. I had everything riding on that backing and I think you damn well knew it. That’s why you did what you did. No one will help me now that they’ve heard your opinion. But that was your plan, wasn’t it? To make me so desperate I would come crawling to you for help.’
He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes quietly assessing her flustered features as he idly rolled a gold pen between his index finger and thumb. ‘This little meeting you’ve cleverly orchestrated,’ he said, ‘it’s all been a ruse to get me to agree to give you money, is it not?’
Rachel was almost beyond rage. ‘I’ve orchestrated nothing! And as for you giving me money I wouldn’t dream of …’ Her words trailed off as her thoughts ran ahead. What if he were to give her the money? He was a very rich man. He had contacts and connections all over Europe that could help her like no one else. Her pride would take a beating, of course, which was probably his intention in the first place, but what was a bit of pride when she stood to lose everything if she didn’t secure finance in the next twenty-four hours? ‘Would you agree to give me money?’ she asked in a voice that hardly sounded like her own.
He continued to look at her with those incredible blue eyes, steady, watchful, unreadable. ‘I would have to know more about your business structure before I made that sort of commitment,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that is why your previous backers pulled out. Maybe they did a little digging into your background. Perhaps they were worried your fiancé might redirect their hard-earned money into his underworld drug-dealing operation.’
Rachel felt the slap of his statement. The shame of her past rose in her cheeks like a stain that nothing would wash away. She wondered if there would ever come a time when she could put it behind her: her mistakes, her blindness, her stupidity, her stubbornness. ‘I am no longer involved with Craig Hughson and I haven’t been for over three years.’
Alessandro kept rolling the pen between his finger and thumb. ‘So what about your father?’ he asked. ‘Surely he could spare some of the McCulloch millions to help his daughter?’
Rachel bit her lip, annoyed at herself for not being able to stop the betraying gesture in time. ‘I haven’t asked him.’
The dark brow lifted again and the rolling of the pen ceased. ‘Because he wouldn’t be able to help you even if you did ask him, sì?’ he said.
She gripped the strap of her handbag a little tighter. ‘I suppose you heard he lost everything three years ago,’ she said, hating him for reminding her of it. How he must be relishing in how dramatically the tables had turned. Her father had treated Alessandro appallingly in the time he had worked for him. Why Alessandro had stayed as long as he had had always surprised her. Surely there were other jobs he could have taken without the put-downs and cutting criticisms from her father.
‘He always was a gambling man,’ Alessandro said. ‘What a pity he didn’t always measure the risks.’
‘Yes …’ Rachel mumbled in response. She had found her father’s fall from grace extremely upsetting. Not because she was close to him, for, even though she was his only child, she had never managed to do anything to win his approval, apart from agreeing to marry Craig Hughson. But calling off the wedding so close to the day made her feel responsible for her father’s bankruptcy. All the money Craig had sunk into the business had been immediately withdrawn. The fact that it had been dirty money didn’t ease her conscience one iota. The family business had folded within days and her career as a model had come to one of the most ignominious halts in the history of Melbourne’s modelling world when her name and reputation had been sullied in the very public fallout.
The leather of Alessandro’s chair squeaked as he shifted his position. ‘How much are you after?’ he asked.
Rachel’s heart gave a little stumble of surprise. ‘Y-you’ll do it?’
His eyes remained steady on hers. ‘For a price.’ She tried to read his inscrutable look. ‘Interest, do you mean?’
‘Not interest, no.’
She frowned. ‘I’m not sure I’m following you,’ she said. ‘It’s financial support I’m after at this point to carry me through to a successful launch in Europe. It will have to be drawn up legally, of course. I’m prepared to pay interest but not if it’s unreasonable. I can’t stretch myself too far. I have other commitments and—’
‘I am not talking about a loan,’ he said. ‘Consider it a gift.’
Rachel’s insides gave a flip flop movement. ‘A … a gift?’
His sapphire-blue eyes held hers. ‘With conditions.’
‘I can’t possibly accept a gift of money from you,’ she said. ‘I insist on paying it back as soon as I can. It might take a while depending on how successful the launch is but—’
‘You misunderstand me, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I am not going to back your label.’
She looked at him in confusion. ‘But I thought you said you were going to give me a gift of money?’
‘I am.’
Rachel’s heart began to beat overtime. ‘But I don’t understand why you would want to do that,’ she said. ‘The last time we spoke …’ She cleared her throat, not really wanting to recall that dreadful scene on the night of her twenty-first birthday party.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what the conditions are?’ he asked.
Rachel chewed at her lip. ‘If you want me to apologise for how things turned out … urn … between us, then I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wanted to tell you about Craig and the expectation that one day we would marry. I should have told you. But as soon as you and I started dating I just couldn’t seem to do it. I didn’t want anything to spoil what we had …’
He remained silent, his face now set in stone.
She took a breath and continued, ‘I’ve had to work so hard to get this far, to be taken seriously after my modelling fiasco. I have people depending on me to make this work. I have staff with mortgages to pay and children to educate and feed. This isn’t just about me wanting to prove I can do it. It’s not just my money that will be lost if this falls over. My business partner has put everything she has into the company as well. I can’t let her down. She’s been a good friend to me.’
Alessandro slowly drummed his fingers on the desk as he sat watching her shift from foot to foot. He had waited a long time to hear her apologise for choosing another man’s money over his love. But was she apologising out of desperation or real regret?
He studied her features, drinking them in even though he had not for a moment forgotten how she looked. Her grey-green eyes were indelibly imprinted in his brain, so too was her shoulder-length glossy brown hair, the way it caught the sunlight at certain angles bringing out its natural highlights. She had aristocratic cheekbones, and a retroussé nose that gave her heart-shaped face an innocent, childlike air that was at odds with her true personality. She was all innocence on the outside but on the inside she had turned out to be a hard, conniving, conscienceless little opportunist just like every other gold-digger he had known.
Her mouth was something else he had never quite forgotten, but, instead of it being imprinted on his brain, it was for ever imprinted on his lips. He could still feel that pillowy softness beneath his mouth, the way she had opened to him like an exotic flower to the sun. He could still taste the sensual heat of her, the heady temptation she had dangled before him until she had got tired of playing with the hired help and moved on to more affluent pastures.
‘I will give you ten thousand euros,’ he said into the loaded silence.
‘But I need much more than that,’ she said, biting at her lower lip.
‘Ten thousand and that is all,’ he said.
Her grey-green eyes narrowed slightly. ‘But why would you do that? If you don’t want to back my label then why give me anything at all?’
He gave her a sardonic half-smile. ‘Because it will be worth it if you accept my conditions.’
Her eyes flared a little more and the column of her slim elegant throat slid up and down as she swallowed. ‘Wh-what are the conditions?’ she asked in a hoarse-sounding voice.
Alessandro held her trapped-in-the-headlights gaze for a pulsing moment.
How ironic she thought he was after revenge when that was the very last thing on his mind right now. ‘You can have the money in your bank account within the next half-hour,’ he said in a cool and controlled tone, ‘but only if you agree to walk out of here and never come back.’
CHAPTER TWO
HER mouth opened and closed and her throat rose and fell again. Her face paled and then flooded with colour. She glared at him, her eyes like flashes of green-tinged lightning, her slim body tight with tension, every muscle contracted in fury. ‘You’re paying me to … to leave?’ she asked.
Alessandro leaned back in his chair again. ‘Take it or leave it, Rachel. You have one minute to decide before I take the offer off the table. And I won’t be making another.’
Her hands clenched in fists by her sides, the action dislodging the precarious sling of her handbag. She shoved it back over her shoulder but the hand that pushed it back was visibly shaking. ‘That’s outrageous!’ she said.
‘That’s business,’ he returned.
‘Business?’ Her soft lip curled. ‘What sort of businessman are you that you have to pay someone to go away?’
‘You are not welcome here, Rachel,’ he said. ‘You want money and appear to be very determined not to leave until you get it. This is a compromise of sorts. For each minute you overstay your welcome the figure will go down.’
She looked at him in bewilderment. Gone was her cocky I’m-a-rich-girl-better-than-you haughtiness, in its place was a shocked, out-of-her-depth ingénue. ‘So, let me get this straight …’ She ran the tip of her tongue out over her lips before she continued. ‘You want me to walk out of here with ten thousand euros of yours, as long as I promise never to return?’
Alessandro gave a single nod.
‘But I don’t understand,’ she went on. ‘Why would you want to give me that amount of money for … for essentially nothing?’
‘I am a rich man,’ Alessandro said, borrowing a bit of her father’s philosophy. ‘I can do anything I want.’
She pressed her lips together, obviously wondering if she could trust him or not. If he hadn’t been feeling so cornered it would have amused him to watch her. She was oscillating, clearly tempted to take things on face value. It wasn’t a lot of money by her standards but it was still money. But if things were as precarious as she made out it would at least get her a bed and meals for the rest of her time in Italy. Would she take it and go, or would she try and weasel some more out of him?
He glanced at his watch. ‘The figure is now nine thousand euros, Rachel,’ he said. ‘What is your decision?’
Her eyes moved away from his, the colour on her cheeks still high. ‘You have to understand if this was just about me I would have walked out of here five minutes ago,’ she said. ‘In fact I wouldn’t have come here in the first place if it hadn’t been for what you did to sabotage—’
‘You are robbing yourself of another thousand.’
She met his gaze again, her tongue sweeping over the surface of her lips again. ‘Can I have a little more time to think about this?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘But that’s crazy!’ she said. ‘How do I know I can trust you? You might give me the money and then change the rules.’
‘I will not change the rules,’ he said. ‘I simply want you to take the money and leave.’
Her mouth flattened in anger. ‘This is payback, isn’t it? You want to make me pay for how I chose Craig instead of you.’
Alessandro kept his expression bland, uninterested, totally unmoved. ‘If you don’t want the money I am sure I can find someone else who does.’
‘But I need much more than that amount,’ she said. ‘I need to get my—’
‘That is all I am prepared to give you,’ he said. ‘Now please make up your mind before the amount left is not worth taking.’
She shifted her weight agitatedly, her mouth opening and snapping closed as if she was not quite ready to allow the words out. ‘I will accept your offer,’ she finally said.
‘Good,’ Alessandro said. ‘Give me your account details and I will transfer the funds as soon as I see you walk out of that gate.’
She wrote them on a piece of paper and passed them across. ‘So that’s it?’ she asked. ‘You don’t even want to offer me a drink or a meal or anything?’
‘No, you can get that at your hotel.’
‘I haven’t got a hotel,’ she said, ‘or at least not yet.’
‘I am sure you will find one. Positano is full of them suitable for most price brackets.’
‘But I haven’t got any luggage. It’s been misplaced. I don’t know when it’s going to turn up, if ever.’
‘Not my problem,’ he said.
‘You heartless bastard,’ she railed at him. ‘Don’t you care about anyone but yourself?’
He elevated one of his dark brows. ‘I have taken a leaf out of your book, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I no longer do anything to please anyone but myself.’
‘Do you have to pay your lovers to arrive as well as leave?’ she asked with a biting look. ‘You have a quick turnover of women in your life, or so I have heard.’
‘So you have been reading about me in the press, have you, Rachel?’ he asked, allowing himself a small smile of satisfaction.
‘The Australian press don’t have access to too many details of your life,’ she said, ‘but now and again one of the UK magazines I occasionally buy mentions you and your latest girlfriend on the society pages.’
‘Does it seem ironic to you that the man you turned down all those years ago is now richer and more powerful than both your father and your ex-fiancé combined?’ Alessandro asked.
‘How did you do it?’ she asked, but then bit down on her lip as if she had regretted the words as soon as she had said them.
‘I was prepared for success and jumped at it when the first opportunity presented itself,’ he said. ‘Leaving Australia and coming over here opened up new avenues for me that would not have occurred otherwise.’
‘It’s a shame you don’t have any family to be proud of you,’ she said.
Alessandro clenched his jaw at her little jibe. He was used to her throwing her blue-blood lines in his face in the past. She was the rich girl with the pedigree; he was the abandoned mongrel who trawled the streets for the scraps thrown to him. He hated her for tricking him into thinking he’d had a chance with her. She had lured him into her sweet honey trap before flicking him away like an annoying insect. He was not going to make that mistake again, not with her or any woman. ‘Yes, but I have many friends who more than make up for the lack of close family,’ he said. ‘Now if you will excuse me I have work to do.’
‘Aren’t you going to accompany me to the door of your fortress to make sure I don’t pinch the silver on the way out?’ she asked.
‘I will leave Lucia to escort you off the property,’ Alessandro said. ‘I have better things to do with my time.’
‘She seems very nice,’ Rachel said, deliberately stalling. ‘Your housekeeper, I mean.’
‘Lucia is a kind soul,’ he said. ‘She has worked for me ever since I came to Italy. She is like a mother to me.’
Rachel thought of her own mother, an increasingly vague, amorphous image that drifted in and out of her consciousness from time to time. She had died when Rachel was three and a half but she still missed her. There was a mother-shaped hole inside her that nothing and no one had filled since in spite of her father’s many and varied partners over the years. She wondered if Alessandro, without either of his parents in his life, felt the same. He had never said. He had never talked of his childhood. All she knew from what little she had heard from others was he had spent a lot of time in foster homes or on the streets while growing up. Maybe his parents were dead. Maybe they were alive. Maybe he didn’t want to know.
Alessandro pressed an intercom button on his desk and summoned Lucia. ‘Miss McCulloch is ready to leave.’
‘Sì, Signor,’ Lucia answered. ‘I will come now.’
Rachel didn’t like being dismissed. It irritated the hell out of her that he just sat there issuing orders. She wanted more time with him so she could irritate him right back. Her anger towards him bubbled up inside her. She wanted to grab him by the front of his immaculate shirt and tell him exactly what she thought of him. ‘You’re really getting a kick out of this, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Careful, Rachel,’ he said, eyeballing her darkly. ‘Don’t go biting the hand that is about to pay for your next meal.’
Lucia arrived at that moment. ‘Signorina? I will see you to the gate,’ she said, holding the study door open.
‘Thank you,’ Rachel said, but not before flinging one last cutting glare to Alessandro. ‘Goodbye, Alessandro. I hope I never have to see you again.’
He didn’t answer, which irritated her even more.
Alessandro watched as his housekeeper accompanied Rachel to the front entrance of the villa. He clenched and unclenched his hands on the side of his chair in rising tension. He turned away from the window and stared at his computer screen sightlessly. A couple of months ago he would have paid her to stay. He would have paid her to occupy his bed. He would have enjoyed showing her all she had missed out on in choosing Craig Hughson over him. And then he would have cast her adrift, coldly, callously, just as she had done to him.
But everything was different now.
He couldn’t afford to let her know what had happened to him. So far only his housekeeper and doctor and physical therapist knew. People in business were unpredictable, fickle at the whisper of a personal problem. One word in the press that he had suffered a health setback such as this could jeopardise his negotiations for the biggest coup of his career. A massively wealthy sheikh from Dubai was considering using Alessandro’s business analysis services. It was the sort of contact that would bring in even more wealthy clients, those with the sort of wealth that outshone even his current ones. He didn’t want anything to compromise the already tricky negotiations. The doctor had told him he needed another month of rehabilitation. One more month of privacy and then he could get on with his life.
The intercom sounded on his desk and he leaned forward to answer. ‘Yes, Lucia?’
‘I had to bring Miss McCulloch back into the villa,’ Lucia said.
‘Why?’ he barked the word at her.
‘She’s not well. I think she has a touch of heatstroke.’
Alessandro drummed his fingers on the desk until his fingertips went numb. His conscience jabbed at him again. He could hardly send her away ill. He could probably get away with a couple of days and nights with her in the villa without revealing the extent of his condition. Lucia would be discreet. It might even be amusing to see Rachel leave at the end of her brief stay with no idea of what he was hiding from her and the world at large. ‘All right,’ he said to his housekeeper. ‘Put her in one of the guest suites well away from mine. Does she need to see a doctor?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Lucia said. ‘She just needs to get some fluids on board and rest for a day or two. She is still a little jet-lagged.’
‘You’re too soft, Lucia,’ Alessandro said gruffly.
‘Maybe, but she seems a nice young woman,’ Lucia said.
‘You don’t know her like I do,’ he said. ‘For all you know this could be an act.’
‘It’s not an act,’ Lucia said. ‘She was sick a few minutes ago. I had to half carry her back to the villa. I thought she was going to pass out.’
Alessandro frowned. ‘Are you sure she doesn’t need a doctor?’
‘I will call one if she doesn’t improve after a rest,’ Lucia said. ‘I think she’ll be a lot better by tomorrow.’
Alessandro sat back in his chair once the conversation ended. One or two days was all he was prepared to allow Rachel to stay. It was risky, but then wasn’t everything in life that was enjoyable? A slow smile tugged at his mouth as he thought of entertaining her. It would be quite diverting to see her grovel for more money. He assumed that was what she would do. She hadn’t got what she wanted from him and would surely have another go to achieve her goal. He wondered how far she would take things. What sort of artifice would she employ this time to get him to lower his guard? He would play along with it, reeling her in just as she had done him, and then he would pull the rug from under her feet.
That would be the most entertaining part of it all.
Rachel woke from a deep and refreshing sleep. She looked at the clock by the bed and was shocked to see she had slept the clock around. Her headache had thankfully gone and the grumbling nausea had passed. Her temperature was normal and after a shower she felt almost human again, even though she had no choice but to put the same clothes back on, although the housekeeper had very kindly laundered and pressed them for her. Rachel had yet to hear from the bus company about the whereabouts of her luggage. There were no messages on her phone and no missed calls.
Her mobile rang from beside the bed and she reached across to answer it. ‘Hello?’
‘So how did it go?’ Caitlyn asked. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours and hours for you to tell me. Did you get the backing?’
‘No, not exactly,’ Rachel said and quickly filled in her friend and business partner on what had occurred.
‘Gosh, that’s disappointing,’ Caitlyn said. ‘Do you think you can have another talk to him about it?’
‘I’ll try but I don’t think it’s going to work,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s only allowing me to stay here now because I was ill yesterday. And that was only after the housekeeper put the hard word on him.’
‘He sounds very bitter.’
‘He is,’ Rachel said. ‘He looked at me with such loathing I found it unnerving.’
‘Well, you did turn down his marriage proposal in the past,’ Caitlyn said. ‘Some men find rejection really hard to take.’
‘But I wasn’t sure if I loved him enough to marry him,’ Rachel said in her defence.
‘You didn’t love Craig either,’ Caitlyn reminded her.
‘I know,’ Rachel said, feeling a cringe of shame at how she had handled things. In an effort to please her unpleasable father she had chosen money over a man’s love. Alessandro had told her he loved her. Even her father had never said those three little words. Craig had never said them either.
Rachel hated thinking of the two years of hell she had lived through being engaged to Craig Hughson. Thank God she hadn’t married him. She had come close but had found out just in time about his double life. How could she have been so naive to have allowed him to control her the way he had? It had taken the last couple of years to move on but, even so, now and again something would appear in the press about his underworld connections and it would bring it all back to her. This latest red flag on her account made her worry that she might never be able to put it behind her.
This much-anticipated trip to Italy was the first time she had felt a glimmer of hope that her luck was going to change, that she would find her feet again, be the success she had always dreamed she could be, not because of her looks, not because of her family background, but because of her own hard work. The sudden withdrawal of financial backing had knocked her sideways. But that had surely been Alessandro’s plan. He had deviously engineered things so that he could maximise her humiliation. She hated him for it.
There was a knock on the door and the housekeeper, Lucia, announced that refreshments would be served out by the pool if she felt up to joining Alessandro. Feeling hopelessly unprepared, Rachel made her way down to the pool area. She had no bathing costume. Her bikini was in the luggage somewhere between here and Milan. Not that Alessandro had shown much interest in her as a woman, she thought. She could probably turn up naked and he wouldn’t blink. She had tried to gauge his expression during their brief meeting to see if he gave off any signals of physical interest, but to her chagrin he had not. She was annoyed with herself for feeling piqued. She was not vain; well, certainly not as vain as she had been in her youth. Craig’s constant put-downs had more or less destroyed her self-esteem, and in the years since she had worked hard to build up her confidence again. But she wouldn’t be female if she didn’t appreciate the occasional compliment, either verbal or non-verbal. But while Alessandro hadn’t said or shown any interest, there had been that faintly disturbing undercurrent in the room. She still felt it now, the dusting of goose bumps on her skin when she thought of his dark blue unwavering gaze holding hers.