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Magenta stood there for a moment, feeling as though she had just come through some invisible, indescribable battle. She felt sick, and her head was thumping, and all she wanted to do was run away and hide. But someone had started giving her an order and she knew she couldn’t just run off without doing her job, even if it was under the smug gaze of a man who clearly despised her.
‘Is that guy a boyfriend of yours?’ Thomas asked over his shoulder as Magenta finished serving the woman.
Over the sounds of a live band setting up their instruments in the designated corner of the wine bar, she could only manage a negative murmur as she shook her head.
‘No?’ A mousy eyebrow disappeared beneath a tangled mass of equally mousy hair. ‘Then why was he looking at you as though he was determined to rip that dress off?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Dazed though she was, her colleague’s observation pumped up Magenta’s skittering heart-rate, lending a pink tinge to her otherwise colour-leeched face. ‘He’s with someone.’
‘He was.’
‘What?’ She couldn’t see past the wall of customers and the band doing its sound check against a babble of laughter and mixed conversation.
‘I swear he downed that whisky in one and hustled his girlfriend out the door before she had time to draw breath.’
For some reason Magenta’s stomach seemed to turn over. ‘He did?’ Another glimpse towards his table through a sudden gap in the human wall showed only an empty tumbler and a barely touched glass of orange juice that had clearly been hastily abandoned.
‘So? They must have been in a hurry to get somewhere,’ Magenta supplied, wondering why they had left in such a rush. Was it because of her? she speculated, her heart hammering against her ribcage and her head starting to swim. Couldn’t he stand being under the same roof with her long enough for the woman he’d brought with him even to finish her drink?
‘Hey! Are you all right?’ she heard Thomas ask again as she staggered, dropping her head into her hands to try and stanch the rising nausea.
‘No, I’m sorry. Could you call me a taxi?’ she appealed to Thomas, before staggering to the Ladies’ again, where she was violently sick.
* * *
He had behaved badly, Andreas thought as he was driving home alone, but it had been both shocking and unsettling—far more unsettling than he wanted to admit—seeing Magenta again.
He had been twenty-three to her nineteen, and just a dogsbody in his father’s floundering business, and yet he should have known right away what kind of a girl she was. She had been living in a rundown terraced house with her man-crazy alcoholic mother, who hadn’t even known who Magenta’s father was!
He’d taken pity on her, Andreas told himself, as the beam of oncoming headlamps slashed cold light across his hardening features. Why else would he have got himself mixed up with her? But hot on the heels of that self-deluded question came the real answer—one that heated his veins and caused a heavy throbbing in his blood.
Because she’d been warm and exciting and more beautiful than any other girl he had ever met in his life—and he had known quite a few, even then. Although not enough to have learned that girls like Magenta James were only out for one thing. A good time—regardless of the cost to anyone else, particularly the poor sucker who happened to be providing her with that good time!
Tension locked his jaw as he turned the steering wheel to cross a junction.
She had known she was beautiful. That was the problem. A part-time receptionist who had been on every model agency’s books, following every lead and promotion she could grasp in a bid to capitalise on her beauty. That was when she hadn’t been at home, trying to shake her mother out of a drunken stupor!
They had become lovers almost at once, just a few days after they’d started dating, and only a week after he had seen her in his father’s restaurant with a group of women during a lively hen party. Surprisingly, she had been a virgin the first time he had made love to her, and yet he had unleashed a fire in her that he’d been foolish enough to believe burned for him alone.
They had made love everywhere. In his van. In the flat above the restaurant when his father and grandmother were out. In her surprisingly immaculate, sparsely furnished little bedroom which had seemed like an oasis amidst the clutter and chaos of her mother’s damp and crumbling, sadly neglected Edwardian house.
It hadn’t mattered one iota that his family hadn’t liked her—although he had wondered, with the gentle memory of his mother, how she might have viewed Magenta if she hadn’t died while he was still very young. His grandmother, though, had been totally out of touch with people of his generation, and his father...
He slammed his mind shut as a well of excruciating pain and reproach threatened to invade it. Their disapproval, he remembered, had only intensified the excitement of being with her.
Of course they had known what she was like; they had been able to see through the thin veil of her bewitching beauty when he hadn’t. He had been blinded and totally duped by her impassioned but hollow declarations of love.
He had been hardworking, loyal to his father, and yet ambitious. And he had at least been able to see and recognise the flaws in the way in which his father had run the restaurant. Giuseppe Visconti had been a far more proficient chef than he had been a businessman, and as proud an Italian as he’d been a dictator of a father, and he had refused to listen to his son’s radical plans for saving and developing the business.
‘Over my dead body.’
Andreas still flinched now from recalling his father’s exact words.
‘You will never have a foothold in this business. Dio mio! Never! Not while you are stupid enough to be mixed up with that girl.’
He had been a blind and naive fool to believe that love could conquer all, that with Magenta James beside him he could overcome his family’s prejudices and his father’s stubbornness. What he hadn’t realised, he reflected coldly, was that the lovely Magenta had only been amusing herself in his bed—that even as he had been drowning in the heat of their mutual passion she had already been sexually entangled with someone else.
He hadn’t wanted to believe his father’s smug revelations—and wouldn’t have if he hadn’t gone round to her house unexpectedly and seen Rushford’s car parked outside. A huge and expensive black saloon that had stood out like a sore thumb in her rather downmarket neighbourhood, and especially outside her mother’s particularly rundown house.
He’d driven away on that occasion, still unable to believe his eyes—and indeed what his family had been telling him. But hadn’t he had graphic proof of her infidelity himself?
‘Do you really think I was ever serious about you? About this?’ she had scoffed on an almost hysterical little bubble of laughter the last time he had seen her.
She’d shot a disparaging glance around the deserted and already failing restaurant. That was when she had informed him of all her precious Svengali was doing for her and all that she was intending to achieve.
He had had a row with Giuseppe Visconti that night. One of many, he reflected. But this one had been different. It had been the squaring up of two male animals intent only on victory over the other. Savage. Almost coming to blows. He’d blamed his father for the outcome of his relationship with Magenta. Giuseppe had called her names, foul names that Andreas had never been able to repeat, and he’d accused his father of being jealous of his youth and his prospects, of depriving him of his right to be his own man.
His father had died in his arms that night after the angry tirade that had been too much for his unexpectedly weak heart to take. Two months later his grandmother had put the restaurant on the market to pay off the loans the business had been unable to meet, determined to go back to her native Italy.
Some time afterwards, when Andreas had been in America, someone—he couldn’t remember who—had told him that Magenta was living in the lap of luxury with a big-shot called Marcus Rushford and that she was expecting his baby.
Yes, he’d behaved badly tonight, Andreas reflected grimly as he swung his car through the electrically operated gates of his Surrey mansion. But at the end of it, looking back, he decided that he hadn’t behaved badly enough!
CHAPTER TWO
ALL THE WAY home in the taxi Magenta’s head was throbbing, pulsating with an invasion of jumbled images. When at last she had paid the driver, was staggering towards the privacy of her own bathroom, the kaleidoscope of confusing images started to take some form.
Meeting Andreas in that restaurant. Laughing with Andreas. Making love with him.... Where, it didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered then. She pressed the heels of her hands against the wells of her eyes, her breath catching as a heated and desperate desire took hold in her mind. Why had it been desperate? She shook her head to try and jolt herself into remembering. She had to remember...
There was a big man. Sullen. Andreas’s father! And Maria. Maria was his grandmother! Oh, but there had been such ill feeling! She recalled feeling the lowest of the low. There was shouting now. Andreas was shouting at her. Telling her she was shallow-minded and materialistic. Telling her she was no good—just like her mother.
In a crumpled heap beside the toilet she relieved herself of the nausea that remembering produced and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. For the first time she was glad that Theo was spending part of his school holiday in the country with her great-aunt. It would have distressed her little boy to have seen her in such a state.
Winding her arms around herself, she ached for him, missing him as much as on the day when she had woken up from that coma to realise she’d lost not only two months of her life, but also the baby she’d remembered carrying. It was the only thing she had remembered. Except that she hadn’t lost him...
She started sobbing with all the same poignancy with which she’d sobbed that day when her widowed aunt, Josie Ashton, had brought her healthy eight-week-old son into the hospital and laid him against her breast. Dear Great-Aunt Josie, with her abrupt manner and her outspokenness, whom Magenta hadn’t seen for at least ten years. But the woman had had no qualms, she remembered, about answering her mother’s cry for help when a sick daughter and the arrival of a new grandson had been too much for Jeanette James to cope with.
She was sobbing equally, though, for the way her mind had blanked out her child’s father. How could she have forgotten him? she agonised, feeling the loss for her son, for the lack of a father figure in his life, rather than for herself. What had he done that had driven her subconscious into shut down so completely? What had she done? she wondered, suddenly seized by the frightening possibility that she might somehow deserve his condemnation.
For heaven’s sake, think! she urged herself, desperate for answers.
But the floodgates that had started to open refused to budge any further, and by the time she arrived at her interview the following week, she felt worn out from the effort of trying to force them apart.
‘I see from your CV that you only acquired your qualification in Business Studies over the last eighteen months, and that you didn’t work anywhere on a permanent basis for the preceding four years,’ said the older of the two women who were interviewing her.
There was a middle-aged man there too, who suddenly chipped in with, ‘May I ask what you were doing in the meantime?’
‘I’ve been bringing up my son,’ Magenta supplied, relieved to be able to say it without any hesitation in her speech, especially when she felt as though she were facing an inquisition.
The interview was for the post of PA to the marketing manager of a rapidly expanding hotel chain, and Magenta had gone for a totally sophisticated image. With her hair up, and wearing a tailored grey suit and maroon camisole, with the stripes in the silk scarf around her neck blending the two colours, she didn’t think she could have looked smarter if she had tried.
She was desperate to get this job to help her pay off her mounting debts so that she could stay on in her flat and give her child all the security and comforts she herself had never had. For that reason she had chosen not to disclose everything about herself when she had applied for this position three weeks ago, certain that the reason she hadn’t been offered any of the endless list of the other jobs she had applied for was because she had been too forthcoming with the truth.
But this job looked as if it was hers—particularly as the older woman on the other side of the desk was making no secret of the fact that she favoured Magenta over the only other candidate on the shortlist.
‘And you won’t find it a problem dividing your time between the demands of the office and those of a five-year-old?’ The younger, fair-haired woman, by the name of Lana Barleythorne, was challenging her. ‘He can’t have been at school very long...’
‘Well over a year,’ Magenta supplied, proud of how bright and advanced for his age her little boy was. ‘And I do have very satisfactory childcare.’ She didn’t tell them about Great-Aunt Josie, who had shown her and Theo such unconditional love when they had needed it most.
Her answer seemed to please her interviewers, because the more matronly of the two women was now explaining that the marketing manager for whom she’d be working was attending a conference that day but had asked if Magenta would be prepared to come in and meet her later in the week.
Yes! Had she been on her own Magenta would have punched the air in triumph. ‘Of course,’ she answered calmly instead, hoping she didn’t look too desperately relieved.
She was still trying to keep her concentration on what they were saying, and to stop herself grinning from ear to ear, when a knock had her gaze swivelling across the large modern office to the tall man in an immaculate dark suit who was striding in.
Andreas! Magenta tried to force his name past her lips but no sound came out.
What was he doing here? she wondered, aghast. And why had he barged in dressed like that, as though he had every right to?
‘Mr Visconti...’ The older woman, looking surprised, was getting to her feet, but a silent command from him had her subsiding back onto her chair. ‘This is Miss James,’ she explained. ‘We were just about to wind up her interview.’
‘I know.’
The deep voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. But he hadn’t yet looked her way and Magenta guessed that he hadn’t connected the name with her or realised that it was his ex the woman was referring to, now sitting there in a state of shock.
‘That’s why I came in.’
The impact of his sudden entrance had made her go weak all over, she realised, and then he suddenly glanced her way and his intensely blue eyes met the stunned velvety-brown of hers.
‘Mr Visconti is our Chief Executive,’ her principal interviewer was telling Magenta, through what seemed like a thick and muffling fog.
Chief Executive? How could he be? she wondered when she finally managed to grasp what the woman had said.
‘He’s the man we’re all ultimately answerable to,’ said Lana Barleythorne, who seemed to be having difficulty keeping her eyes off him. ‘He has the last word on whatever changes might be taking place throughout the chain.’
‘And I’m afraid this position has already been filled.’
He took his eyes off Magenta only briefly, to direct a glance towards the people she now realised, staggeringly, were his employees.
‘But we thought—’ piped up Lara, his clearly adoring fan.
‘It’s Miss Nicholls—the last candidate,’ he stated tonelessly, and in a way that imparted to anyone who might dare to challenge him that his decision was final and no one else had the authority to question it. ‘I’ve already spoken to...’
Numbly, Magenta only half heard him saying that he had spoken to his marketing manager and she was happy to take the other candidate on.
‘I see.’ The woman who was obviously the spokesperson for the three sounded surprised.
And all at once, through her shock and mounting dismay over losing a job that had not only been within her grasp but which she had been counting on to get her out of financial deep water, Magenta began to see things as they really were.
He had known she was in here. Probably from some list he had vetted before coming in. Which was why he hadn’t shown any sign of surprise or shock when he had seen her. Because he had already decided—even before he had opened that door—to snatch the chance of that job right out of her hands!
‘Miss James...’
The woman Magenta knew she had won over from the start made a futile little gesture with her hands.
‘What can I say? Except that I think we owe you an apology.’
For what? Magenta thought, hurting, angry. For building up her hopes? For making her think she could be out of the woods with her finances and her barely affordable flat? For throwing her back into the never-ending queue for far too few realistically paid jobs? Perhaps they didn’t have bills to pay and debts to settle, but she did! And now, just because she’d walked into a company controlled by this man with an obvious score to settle, none of those bills were ever likely to be paid!
Not caring any more about what impression she created, she leaped up from her chair and, in response to the woman’s suggestion about owing her an apology, uttered, ‘Yes, I believe you do! I’ve had to take a whole morning off work—without pay—to enable me to come to this interview today, and I think that the least you could have done in return would have been to get your facts straight! It might not be any skin off your noses to drag people here under false pretences, but if this is the way your company operates then I hope your paying customers don’t arrive at their hotels only to find the previous guests still occupying their beds!’
She felt sorry for her interviewers—particularly the woman who had shown such enthusiasm for her capabilities before their cold and calculating boss had walked in. Her venom was directed solely at Andreas. She hadn’t wanted to show him up in front of his staff, but if she had, she thought fiercely, then after what he had just done it was no more than he deserved!
‘That’s all I have to say,’ she concluded. And she had done so without embarrassing herself, or even tripping over her words, she realised, pivoting away from them—from him—as the ordeal and the thought of what it would mean for her and Theo brought shaming tears to her eyes.
‘Miss James.’
The deep, masculine voice addressed her formally from across the room but she ignored it, tearing over the high-polished floor to the door through which she had come with such high hopes only half an hour earlier.
‘Magenta!’
He didn’t seem bothered by what the others might make of him calling her by her first name, and images of a young man swam before her eyes. A young man who was determined, high-spirited and unrestrained—a young Andreas who refused to be dominated by his father’s will....
His softer command—and it had been a command, though infused with a persuasive familiarity—stopped her in her tracks.
Standing there, with her heart banging against her ribcage, she brought her head up, breathing deeply to control her humiliating emotion, squaring her back beneath the silver-grey jacket before she steeled herself to turn around.
‘There is another vacancy,’ Andreas said.
The distance she had put between them had given him a greater vantage point from which to study her, and he was doing just that, allowing his cool gaze to travel over the slender lines of her body in a way that made Magenta almost forget that there were other people in the room.
She looked at him questioningly but he was addressing the other three, who appeared to be silently querying his declaration.
‘It’s all right. I’ll handle this,’ Andreas told them, and one by one they filed out—the younger woman seeming to shoot daggers in Magenta’s direction, the elder sending her a surprisingly knowing smile.
‘So what is the vacancy?’ Magenta’s mouth felt dry as the door closed behind them. The air seemed charged with something sensual, stiflingly intimate even in the spacious modern office. ‘Or is this all a clever ploy to try and keep me here?’
Andreas moved around the desk and leaned back against it, his hands clutching his elbows, one foot crossed over the other.
‘I think we should talk first,’ he said.
‘What about? Why you just ruined my chances of getting a job I was counting on?’ Tremblingly, because she was almost afraid of knowing the answer, she tagged on, ‘What did I ever do to you that you should dislike me so much?’
He laughed very softly, but there was no humour in his eyes. ‘Come and sit down,’ he ordered with a jerk of his chin towards her vacated chair.
‘I prefer to stand, if you don’t mind.’
She did, however, move closer to him—close enough to bring her hands down on the back of the chair for some much-needed support.
‘As you wish.’ This was accompanied by a gesture of one long, lean hand.
‘Tell me what I did. I told you—I’m having difficulty remembering.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘And from experience we both know that you can be remarkably sparing with that.’
His tone flayed, bringing Magenta’s lashes down like lustrous ebony against the pale translucency of her skin.
‘We dated...’ She came around the chair and like an automaton, despite what she had said, sat down upon it, starkly aware of the cynical sound her comment produced.
‘Well, that’s one up on what you claimed to know last Friday,’ he remarked. ‘But if my memory serves me correctly we did a whole lot more than that.’
Images invaded of ripping clothes and devouring kisses. Of tangled limbs and naked bodies. Of herself spread-eagled on a bed in glorious abandon to this man’s driving passion.
She shook her head and realised that he had relinquished his position on the desk.
‘You’re crying,’ he observed, coming towards her and noting the emotion still moistening her eyes after losing the job she’d struggled so long and hard for. ‘It always heightened my pleasure to kiss you after you had been crying. It made your mouth so inviting. So unbelievably soft...’
His voice had grown quieter, Magenta realised, tormented again by sensual images of the two of them together, by the arousing sensations that were invading every erogenous zone in her body.
‘I’m not crying,’ she bluffed, in rejection of everything he was saying—and then caught a sudden, startling glimpse of herself from somewhere in her past, crying bitterly. She was sobbing because she had to leave him. She’d known she had to get away from him. But why? ‘I’m annoyed—angry—humiliated. But I’m certainly not crying. If you want to hurt me then that’s your problem—not mine. But, just for the record, was that rather uncalled-for remark a roundabout way of saying that you were always upsetting me?’
Within the hard framework of his features his devastating mouth turned uncompromisingly grim. ‘I wasn’t the one responsible for causing you pain in the past, and I certainly did nothing to make you weep. Except in bed.’
His continual references to the passion they had shared were unsettling her beyond belief. As he probably intended them to, she realised, catching a different sound now from the darkest corners of her mind. The sound of herself sobbing with desire at the enslaving, unparalleled pleasure he was giving her. But there were other things too. Things she didn’t want to remember, which his disturbing presence alone was bringing back to her.
‘Your family hated me.’
‘That was my family.’
‘Especially your father.’
His face took on the cast of an impregnable steel mask. ‘And with good cause, I think. In the end.’