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“Not for me to say at this juncture. Look, why don’t we nip to a little bistro I know not far from here? It should be relatively quiet at this hour and it would save you both the hassle of coming to my office in the morning. My car’s in the car park so we could go right now. Mr Di Capua, perhaps your driver could come and collect you in an hour or so?”
They were virtually at his car and Rosie heard Angelo click his tongue impatiently but he shrugged and made a brief phone call before sliding into the passenger seat, leaving her to clamber in the back. She felt as though she had no choice but to surrender to this turn of events. The short drive was completed in silence and twenty minutes later they were in a bistro which, as James Foreman had predicted, was fairly empty.
“I find it hard to believe that Amanda would leave a will,” Angelo said the second they were seated. “She had no one in her life. At least, no one of any significance.”
“You’d be surprised,” James Foreman murmured, his sharp eyes flicking between them.
“What were the difficulties you were talking about?” Rosie pressed. Next to her, Angelo’s hand, resting on the table, brought back sharp memories of how things had once been between them, cutting through the bitterness, leaving her dry-mouthed and panicked.
“Your friend was an emotional young woman carrying burdens she found difficult to cope with. She came to see me about a certain property she owned. I believe you know the property I’m talking about, Mr Di Capua—a certain cottage in Cornwall?” He turned to Rosie with a warmly sympathetic half-smile. “I understand the problems you both had. Over the years I built up a strong rapport with your friend. She was a needy soul and I became something of a father figure for her. My wife and I had her over many times for dinner. Indeed, we both did our best to counsel her on—”
“Are we ever destined to get to the point, Foreman?”
“The point is that the cottage was your wife’s prized possession, Mr Di Capua. She found refuge there.”
“Refuge from what?” Rosie interjected. She glanced across to Angelo’s hard, uncompromising profile and saw him flush darkly.
“We’re not here to discuss the state of my marriage,” Angelo bit out, meeting her puzzled stare with ice-cold eyes. “So she went a lot to the cottage.” He dragged his eyes away from her face. Hell, how was it that she could claw a reaction out of him? Was it possible that only this burning hatred could find a response in him?
“And the cottage belonged to her. In its entirety. Along with the acreage surrounding it. You recall, Mr Di Capua, she insisted shortly after you were married that you give it to her so that she could feel secure there and could be certain that it would never be taken away.”
“I recall,” Angelo said abruptly. “I agreed because I owned the estate alongside it. I could keep an eye on her.”
“Keep an eye on her? Why would you want to do that, Angelo?”
“Because.” Once again he looked at her. Once again he felt that surge of blistering, chaotic emotion which was a damn sight more than he had felt for the past few years. For as long as he could remember he had been completely dead inside. “Amanda had a problem with alcohol. She fancied the cottage because she wanted peace and quiet. On the other hand, with her fondness for the bottle, I couldn’t let her stay there without some form of supervision. She was unaware that I owned the estate abutting the cottage. I always made sure that one of my people was around to check on her now and again.”
“I can’t believe she started drinking. She was always so sure she wouldn’t go down that road.”
“Is that your convoluted way of asking me whether I drove her to drink?”
“Of course not!”
“Because you’re not sitting here at my request. Nor are you entitled to any explanations or niceties from me. You burned your bridges three years ago and lost the right to have a voice, as far as I am concerned.”
Rosie flushed bright red. She forgot that they both had an audience. The only person she was aware of was Angelo, looking at her with deep, dark hostility.
“You forget that I don’t even want to be here. Why should I? Why would I want to spend more time than absolutely necessary in your company?”
James Foreman cleared his throat and Angelo was the first to break the stranglehold of their stares.
“The cottage,” he said curtly. “Cut to the chase, man, and get on with it.”
“She left the cottage to you, Miss Tom.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Angelo cut in before Rosie had had time to assimilate what had been said to her. He placed both hands squarely on the table and leant forward, his body language bristling with intimidation, and the lawyer looked back at him with an apologetic smile.
“It’s all above board, Mr Di Capua. Amanda left the cottage to her friend.”
“Why on earth would she do that?” Rosie asked in bewilderment.
“Before you start getting any ideas,” Angelo gritted, looking at her, “over my dead body will you so much as put a foot over the threshold of that place.” He sat back and turned to stare at the lawyer who, for someone round-faced and sheepishly polite, was doing a good job of not being in the slightest bit cowed by a toweringly angry Angelo. A lesser man would have run for the hills at this point.
“I’m very much afraid that there’s very little you can do to prevent Miss Tom from accepting what has been willed to her,” James Foreman said, in the same apologetic voice. He looked at her with kindly eyes. “Whatever happened between you, my dear, there were regrets.”
“I wouldn’t dream of accepting anything Amanda may have left to me, Mr Foreman.”
“Well, hallelujah!” Angelo flung his hands up in a gesture of pure satisfaction, success rightfully accepted as his due. “So for once, we’re singing from the same song sheet. Now that this little charade is over, perhaps you two can get together and work out the paperwork to ensure that Miss Tom relinquishes whatever dodgy hold she may think she has on my property—which, in point of fact, will be a matter of necessity because I intend to develop it within the year. Now, if that’s all?”
“You always wanted to go into the catering business—am I right, Miss Tom?”
Rosie nodded dumbly. She felt as though she had been taken on a rollercoaster ride. Her thoughts were all over the place. Every part of her body was in a state of shock. All over again, and to her dismay, she was realising how powerfully Angelo Di Capua still affected her, despite her deep loathing of him.
“How did you know?”
“Amanda kept tabs on you without you realising it, I expect.” He shrugged. “With the Internet and social networks, it’s virtually impossible to remain anonymous these days. At any rate, you might want to think about what was behind this legacy to you. Of course, you must do what your heart tells you to do, but Amanda began cultivating the land around the cottage. There’s quite a bit of it, if I’m not mistaken.”
“This conversation is going nowhere!” Angelo insisted, making a slashing motion with his hand.
“It is my duty to explain the circumstances of this will,” the lawyer murmured, still looking at Rosie. “Amanda made plans of how the land was to be laid out, and what would grow where.”
“But she didn’t know that she would…She couldn’t possibly predict…”
“I think she knew, deep down, that she was not destined for a long life. I also think that she was working up the courage to contact you to give you the land. Fate got in the way.”
“This is so much to take in,” Rosie said, dazed. “Perhaps…perhaps I might just have a look at the cottage.” If nothing else, to see whether she might get full closure at least by visiting the place her one-time friend had obviously come to regard as a haven. Perhaps, more than attending a service in a chapel, visiting that cottage would be a better way to pay her final respects.
“Yes.” She made her mind up, although she didn’t dare look across to where Angelo was sitting in a silence far more threatening than any words. “Yes. I think, Mr Foreman, I would very much like to see that cottage.”
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU’RE WASTING YOUR time.” Angelo rounded on her the second the lawyer had disappeared back to his car, into the night. “You surface here from out of nowhere and suddenly you think you’re a cottage richer?”
Rosie looked up at him. He was one of the few men who towered above her when she was in heels. Once upon a time, that had made her feel very feminine and very protected. Now it made her feel intimidated.
“I don’t think anything of the sort.”
“No. Well, you moved very swiftly from wanting nothing to do with a dubious inheritance to informing us that you would be paying it a visit.” His chauffeur-driven luxury car pulled up alongside them and, as she tried to turn in the direction of the station, Angelo stepped out in front of her, blocking her path.
“Not so fast,” he said grimly.
“I need to get back.”
“Really? To whom?”
“There’s nothing to discuss, Angelo.”
“There’s a hell of a lot to discuss and we’ve only just begun. Get in the car.” He pulled open the car door and moved around so that he was now somehow cornering her into stepping into the long, powerful car. It remained gently purring while George, the guy with whom she had laughed on many an occasion in the past, stared straight ahead with a blank expression.
Their eyes locked and Rosie was the first to look away, ducking into the car with a jerky shrug of her shoulders.
“Address. Where do you live?”
“There’s no need to put yourself out. I’m fine being dropped to the station.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
Rosie snapped out her address and leant back in the car seat while Angelo relayed the information to his driver before sliding shut the partition between them. She could feel heat racing through her body like a raging fever and, although her voice was controlled, that was about the only thing that was. Her heart was beating like a jackhammer and she was struggling to string her thoughts together.
Here she was, back in this car with him! Except the good old days were now lost in the mists of time, replaced with a present that bristled with threat.
“So,” Angelo drawled. “Drop the protestations of innocence. We know each other too well. Did you know about any of this before you came here? I never thought that you had anything further to do with Amanda after you left, but maybe I was wrong.”
“No, I most certainly did not know about any cottage! And Mandy and I have not been in contact since…Well, since…” She looked away, briefly unable to speak as the circumstances of the past reared up, threatening to devour her.
She remembered the horror of the last time she and Angelo had met, when she had turned up longing to see him, excited as always, because the short periods they spent apart had always felt like an eternity. He had opened the door to her and she had known immediately that something was wrong. Her smile had faltered and she had stood there in the doorway of his amazing house in Chelsea, no longer a welcome visitor, his lover, but someone to be dispatched. She had known it before he had even uttered a word.
And, actually, he had said remarkably little. There had been no need. He had just held out all those damning little tickets, receipts from the pawnbrokers, and she had known exactly what was happening.
Their glorious relationship had terminated with him believing her to be a cheap, worthless gold-digger who had conned him out of huge sums of money, for he had been a generous lover. He had seen the evidence of her greed in the proof of items of jewellery she had sold. Evidence that had been supplied by her one-time best friend and used against her.
Was it any surprise that he was staring at her as though she was something that had crawled out from under a rock, asking her whether she had known about the existence of a cottage that might be worth something?
Rosie took a deep breath. It made her feel giddy.
“It’s not going to happen,” he informed her coldly. “You. The cottage. Forget it. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“You have no right to boss me about.” But she did look at him. Thrown into shadow, his face was all menacing angles and planes.
“Amanda and I were not divorced at the time of her death. I will fight you through the courts if you try and get your greedy little paws on so much as a square inch of that place.”
“I never said that I was going to…” But a cottage, out in the country, away from the daily grind of the city; away from Ian, a man she had met once six months previously when she had decided that enough was enough, that it was time to try and join the ranks of the living…A man who had refused to take no for an answer, who had tried to force himself on her, who had become a silent, scary stalker.
A bolt hole away from it all suddenly presented itself to her like manna from heaven.
“Then why don’t you try and justify your sudden decision to check it out?”
“Maybe I think it might be the place to say goodbye to Mandy,” Rosie told him painfully, and he burst out laughing again, just as he had when they had been standing inside the chapel at the crematorium.
“So suddenly you’re all bleeding heart and flowers?”
“Why does it matter so much to you whether I go to that cottage or not? Why does it matter if I decide that it might be somewhere I could live?” Rosie asked.
“It sits on my grounds.”
“Mr Foreman said that it had some land, that Mandy had been cultivating it.”
“Ah, so your little ears had already pricked up even while you were mouthing all the right platitudes about wanting nothing from Amanda.” What else could he expect? The woman looked like an angel and spoke in a soft voice that reeked of milk and honey, and all things good, and yet didn’t he know better? He let his eyes rove over her body. Her coat was open and he could make out a stretchy black dress underneath. He had instant recall of the length of her limbs, entwined with his, as pale as his were brown; her small breasts which she’d used to complain about laughingly but which were perfect, the perfect handful, the perfect mouthful…
He yanked himself back from the brink of memories that had no place whatsoever in his life.
“If Mandy left me that cottage with the land, then why shouldn’t I take it?” Rosie was spurred into demanding.
“At last. A bit of honesty. I can deal with that. It’s so much healthier than the sad face and the honeyed words. If that will is as watertight as Foreman implies, then you’ll be amply recompensed for letting it go. And, as we both know, money talks as far as you are concerned.” He delivered a chilling smile.
What would he say if she decided to retaliate? Rosie wondered. But she knew that she would never do that. Maybe there was just that part of her that wouldn’t be able to deal with the ugliness of the truth, with the fact that, whilst he had been seeing her, he had also been seeing Mandy. Maybe that was something she would never, ever want him to confirm. There was such a thing as too much truth.
“It’s why I told him about all that stuff you flogged,” Mandy had said when challenged. “He was looking for an excuse to break up with you so I gave him one and he took it. Didn’t think twice, in fact! More fool you for thinking that he was your knight in shining armour. People like us don’t get knights in shining armour, Rosie. People like me and you and Jack live off the scraps. Angelo was just another guy stringing you along while giving me the come-on behind your back. You should thank me for getting rid of him for you. You’d never have been tough enough to handle him.”
And how could Rosie not believe her when, a month later, there had been a wedding? She had heard it on the grapevine.
So did she want to start a tit-for-tat fight now? Did she want to hear him tell her exactly how little she had meant to him? The past was the past and re-opening old wounds was only going to hurt her. Angelo would be just fine.
And, if he never knew where that money had gone, then so be it. That too was a story wrapped up in guilt and not one she wanted to discuss.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll pay you off,” Angelo intoned harshly. For a few seconds he had lost her. When they had been lovers, he had interpreted those fleeting moments of withdrawal when her eyes had clouded over as flashes of vulnerability. He had made it his mission to wait them out until she could tell him for herself where she had gone. Now he knew the answer. She hadn’t been so much dealing with some internal tussle, which she’d had yet to confide, as calculating how much she could screw him for. Doing the maths in her head. Indulging in a bit of mental arithmetic involving his money and all those expensive items of jewellery he had lavished on her.
Angelo didn’t come from money. He’d got there the hard way, working like a beast at school, a small backwater school in Italy where it wasn’t cool to get good grades. He’d lucked out when, at the age of sixteen, he had managed to win a scholarship to study abroad.
His mother had urged him to take it. He was her only son and she had wanted nothing more than for him to succeed. She’d worked in a shop and as a cleaner on two evenings a week. Did he want to end up scraping the barrel like her? He had grabbed the opportunity with both hands and had challenged any one of those rich, private-school kids to look down on him. He had made sure to stay focused and had realised that to get on he had to do one better than everyone else. He had to go the extra mile. He had. And he had at university. The price had been steep, for during that period his mother had died and he had not been there for her.
He had reasoned that life’s experiences made you tough. He was a rock, alone in the world and determined to master it as a legacy to his mother. He wasn’t one of those gullible kids born with a silver spoon in their mouth. He couldn’t be taken in by a pretty face. Except he had been, and just thinking about it made him see red. Rosie Tom had got to him in a way no other woman ever had. Hell, she had made him start revising his priorities.
“I can have people in tomorrow evaluating its worth and I can get a cheque to you the day after.”
“Is it because it’s of sentimental value?” Rosie hazarded.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Do you feel attached to the place because it was somewhere she loved? I know that sometimes a person can feel helpless when dealing with someone who has a drinking problem.”
“Three years away and you really and truly imagine yourself as an amateur psychologist. Stick to the catering, Rosie, or the cooking, or whatever else it is you do.” Did she really think that he would ever fall for that sympathetic, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth routine again?
Rosie flushed. “I don’t imagine myself as anything of the sort. I was just curious as to…”
“As to what happened once you exited the stage and the curtain fell?” He looked at her narrowly. “I really wouldn’t bother trying to fish for information. Just tell me when you intend to go to the cottage.”
“Why do you ask?” So there weren’t going to be any confidences. This was the tenor of whatever remained between them: bitterness and dislike. Well, that would make things easier, she told herself, but it still hurt to think how far they had both come from where they had once been.
“Because I intend to make sure that I’m there at the same time.”
“What for?” Rosie’s mouth dropped open as she contemplated seeing him again, having all these emotions churned up anew. “I can let you have my decision one way or another via Mr Foreman. If I decide that I don’t want the place, then I’m sure he’ll be the first to let you know. Or maybe,” she added with acerbity, “you want to make sure that there’s nothing there that doesn’t belong to you.”
“I actually hadn’t considered that possibility but, now that you’ve mentioned it, it’s certainly one worth thinking about.” The journey had passed without him even noticing. Now they were in front of a terraced house that was claustrophobically hemmed in by a sprawl of identical terraced houses on either side of it. In the depths of winter, there was nothing whatsoever charming about it, and he thought that even in the height of summer it would still proudly announce its mediocrity.
“That’s an awful thing to say.”
“Oh well, if the cap fits…” the car had pulled to a stop, smoothly pulling in to a vacant spot right in front of the house. “I see investment wasn’t part of the grand plan when you pawned the jewellery,” he observed. “Because I can’t imagine that this place will ever get to the elevated status of the up-and-coming.” Rosie flushed and paused midway to opening the car door.
“I don’t own this, I rent it, and I would rather if we didn’t dwell on the past. I mean, it’s over and done with and we’ve both moved on.” She thought about Jack and the guilt that had followed her around for such a long time. She hadn’t hesitated in pawning those items of jewellery even though, in another place and another time, the thought of selling things given to her by the man she had fallen in love with would have been abhorrent. In a place and time where her conscience was clear.
She knew that Angelo despised her for what she had done. How much more would he have despised her if he had known the full story?
“So, in other words, the cottage really would be a fantastic opportunity for you—no rent to pay, no mortgage to cover. I’m not surprised that you’re desperate to put the past to bed.”
Rosie looked at him, sprawled indolently against the car door, a lurking, dangerous predator having fun with the prey that had once escaped him. She got the feeling that he would be happy to maul her should she make one wrong move. And expressing interest in a cottage he considered his definitely fell into that category.
Whatever had gone wrong in his marriage—and she was certain that something had somewhere along the way, for why else would Amanda have taken to the bottle?—here they now were and the past certainly had not been forgotten.
“I just want to have a look at it.”
“Like I said, I’ll expect you to inform me the instant you decide to go there. I’m going to give you my private number. Use it.”
“And if I choose not to?” Rosie dared.
“Word of advice—don’t even think of going down that road.”
Rosie spent the next week seriously wondering whether she should just leave well alone. James Foreman had been in touch again, had wanted to find out what she intended to do. There were all sorts of papers that required signing. She would need to see him; he could arrange a meeting. There were things he needed to discuss with her.
Still tense and preoccupied after seeing Angelo and being subjected to the full force of his hatred, and still smarting from his warning to ditch any thoughts of actually taking up the legacy that had been deposited at her doorstep, Rosie deferred any meeting. She honestly no longer knew what she should do. London had not turned into the stuff of dreams, but it was home, for better or for worse. Could she sacrifice it on a whim, because she was in a difficult situation at the moment? Difficult situations didn’t last for ever.
And how ethical would it be to accept something from a woman she had spent the past three years trying to forget? How hypocritical to imagine that she could conveniently overlook the dire circumstances of their broken friendship to take what was on offer because it suited her? Her lawyer had hinted at Amanda’s regrets but could accepting a guilt gift ever be justified?
In the end, Ian made up her mind for her. Just as he had been the reason for her considering the cottage in the first place.
The calls from him, containing barely veiled threats. The bombardment of text messages…
Rosie had been to the police ages ago to be told that nothing could be done. A crime had yet to be committed. With no chance of an injunction being issued against him, Rosie battened down the hatches and tried to ignore his attempts to intrude into her life. She wasn’t a kid. She was an adult. She could deal with a loser who couldn’t take no for an answer. She had dealt with far worse growing up! He was no match for any of those creeps who had tried to make her life hell on the grim council estate where she had grown up. Being attractive had never worked to her advantage. But she found that she could deal with wolf-whistles and boys circling her on their bikes and trying to get her to go out with them.