Читать книгу Visconti's Forgotten Heir - Elizabeth Power, Elizabeth Power - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

MAGENTA WOKE WITH a start, sweating and trembling. She had been dreaming that she was looking for something and didn’t even know what it was, but as the trembling subsided and the fog lifted from her brain things started to become a little clearer.

She had been sobbing while she was asleep because of something she had lost and desperately wanted back, but it wasn’t anything tangible that she had been looking for. She knew it had been something to do with Andreas....

She was lying on top of the bed, where she had slumped, drained and exhausted, after coming home from that interview today and after that unsettling time in his office. She’d remembered so much. The restaurant. His father and grandmother. Even snatches of their brief but tempestuous affair. But there were aspects of their relationship that still continued to elude her. Like what had happened to make him so hostile towards her? Had it been to do with her modelling career? And why was he so convinced that Marcus Rushford was Theo’s father?

Think!

She lay there for a while, until her brain felt fit to burst, and then with a frustrated groan forced herself off the bed and into the bathroom.

Her body had changed very little since her teenage years, she thought, catching a glimpse of the tall, slender figure in the mirror. And ever since she had grown up her unusual looks had attracted far more attention from the opposite sex than she’d wanted or encouraged—and because of it a name she hadn’t even earned.

Stepping into the shower, Magenta thought reluctantly of how her mother’s reputation hadn’t helped. With no father, and no knowledge of any, she recalled that she’d had a string of ‘uncles’ who had drifted in and out of her young life. Her mother had been unable to maintain a steady relationship with any man. One disastrous affair after another had led to her seeking solace by drinking too much, and it had been her daughter who had always borne the brunt of it. Add the stigma of her birth poverty, because Jeanette James had never been able to work, and Magenta’s schooldays had been hard—both at home and in the classroom. Somehow she had never quite fit in with her classmates, and consequently had never made friends easily. For that reason she had grown up wanting to rise above the situation she was in. And because of her face and figure—both accidents of birth—a modelling career had seemed the only way to do it.

Her physical attributes together with her background, however, had caused men to expect more from her, Magenta thought bitterly, than she’d been prepared to give. But she had resisted them all until...

By instinct alone she knew that there had only ever been one man who had set her body on fire, and that man was Andreas Visconti. But everything he had said to her today—and the other night in the wine bar—implied the contrary. For some reason he truly believed that she had had some sort of sexual liaison with Marcus Rushford....

As she lathered soap over her body a picture of a room and then a whole apartment rose before her mind’s eyes. A coldly furnished, expensive apartment. Marcus’s! she realised, shocked. She had been staying there. No, not staying. Living there, she thought, shaking her head to induce more of the same troubling recollections. But try as she did her memory refused to oblige. Whatever it was that still remained buried, she knew that it fell within a definite period. And that was the nine or ten months prior to the day just over five years ago when her mother had woken up unusually early and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor.

Her cell phone was ringing just as she was stepping out of the shower, and Magenta raced over and snatched it off the windowsill.

‘Hello, darling.’ Emotion welled up inside her until she thought her heart would burst just from hearing her little son’s voice.

‘Aunt Josie asked me to ask you if you got the job.’

Of course. She’d talked of nothing else for weeks, she reflected, shrugging into her robe and thinking of the better life she had told Theo she’d be able to give him if she was lucky enough to get through the interview—of the new football boots and the Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover she had promised him.

She shuddered as she thought of how—almost—she had had no job at all, and wondered how she would have coped if Andreas had blocked her chances of working for his company altogether. If he hadn’t gone on to offer her the temporary position she had finally agreed to take.

‘Tell Aunt Josie I didn’t take that one because I got an even better one.’ She tried to sound excited, although she didn’t know what could be better about securing a job that put her immediately under a man who had no reservations about showing how much he despised her. Except the money...

Selling herself to the highest bidder.

She shivered, wondering if by agreeing to work for him she wouldn’t be playing right into Andreas’s hands.

She had to take this job—she didn’t have any choice. Even if she was still dangerously and unbelievably attracted to him, and even though he was displaying a ruthless desire to get even with her.

But was he going to use her vulnerability and her attraction to him to do it? she wondered, with a contrary mix of apprehension and excitement. Everything about him had suggested he intended to when she had been in his office today. If he was, she thought, she only hoped she would be strong enough emotionally to resist him. At least taking this job might help to restore her memory—even if she had a deep-rooted anxiety inside about what remembering might reveal....

* * *

Andreas had arranged to pick Magenta up the following Monday morning, and he noticed the curtains twitch in an upstairs window as he pulled up outside a characterless nineteen-seventies semi-detached house which, from the two doorbells beside the rather jaded-looking front door, had obviously been converted into two flats.