Читать книгу Millionaires: Rafaello's Mistress / Damiano's Return / Contract Baby - Линн Грэхем, LYNNE GRAHAM - Страница 10

GLORY could not credit that she had come out to a fabulous, scenic Greek island in the month of June only to find herself fighting to walk through a howling gale with sand blowing in her face.

The sea was foaming like a cauldron, mirroring the seething tempest of emotion inside her. Rafaello despised her. He truly did. She had to accept that but she didn’t want to accept that, couldn’t bear to accept that, she discovered. All the messy feelings she had buried five years earlier were escaping their bonds. Taking shelter beneath an overhanging rock in the massive outcrop near the end of the beach, she sat down, closing out the angry surge of the surf. With those painful emotions came the memories …

Glory had left school at sixteen. She had wanted to stay on but her father had asserted that no Little had ever been academic, and she had found work as an office junior at the local auctioneers. By the time she reached eighteen, sightings of Rafaello had become rare events. After all, the Grazzinis had divided their time between their Italian and English homes and, having completed his business degree, Rafaello had bought a London apartment and only visited Montague Park occasionally.

Glory had taken a long time to come to terms with their first humiliating encounter when she was sixteen and the horror of having been delivered home to her furious parents like a juvenile delinquent. When, afterwards, Rafaello would drive past Glory and award her a nod or smile of recognition, she would barely raise her head in acknowledgement. Yet, in spite of the lack of encouragement, one week after her eighteenth birthday Rafaello had raked his Ferrari to a halt in the drive and offered her a lift.

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Glory had told him through the window he lowered, straining every sinew to play it cool while striving not to overdo it.

‘How would you like to go out to dinner tonight?’

She had got into his passenger seat almost before he finished speaking.

‘That was the magic combination, was it?’ Rafaello had murmured with a slanting smile that turned her all-too-vulnerable heart upside-down and left her dizzy.

‘Maybe I’m just hungry.’ The truth would have been that she had never been invited out for a meal. The males she met invited her to bars, clubs, sports fixtures and the cinema.

For the following six weeks Glory had walked on air and her feet hadn’t touched the ground once. True, mixing with his friends had sometimes been a strain. She had discovered entire conversational topics that had previously been unknown to her. Winter skiing, opera, ballet, yachting and the total agony of not being able to locate the latest must-have designer handbag. While warning her that only grief could be coming in her direction, her own friends had pooled their clothes and loaned her outfits to wear. Dating Rafaello had been something of a community effort.

The talent scout who had sighted her out at a club one evening had tried to get her to sign up with a modelling agency in the north. She had felt terribly flattered but Rafaello had squashed any dreams she might have cherished on that score at source.

‘You’re too small to be a fashion model. The guy can’t be legit. Alternatively, you could find yourself fronting a knitting pattern or some such thing.’

Which Glory had quite understood roughly translated into the news that he did not want her chasing after a modelling career a few hundred miles away. Since the only thing in her life she truly cared about at that time was him, she had thought no more about that offer. Soon after that Rafaello had persuaded her to let him give her a tour of Montague Park, but before they had even completed the circuit of the ground floor his father had interrupted them. Glory had immediately recognised that Benito Grazzini, though he made every effort to hide the fact, was very much shocked to discover that his son was dating his gardener’s daughter.

‘He doesn’t like me seeing you,’ she had said to Rafaello afterwards.

‘He was just surprised. That’s all. You’re too sensitive,’ Rafaello had told her.

But that same week Benito Grazzini had called at the cottage on Glory’s afternoon off. Even worse, that same day her own father was upstairs sleeping off his drinking excesses, rather than out working as he should have been. Ironically, Benito Grazzini had looked awful, his eyes sunk in his head as if he hadn’t slept for days and his greyish pallor no more healthy. But he had wasted no time in spelling out his terms.

As soon as he had told her that her father would be sacked if she did not do as he asked, she had known she had no choice. If she appealed to Rafaello for support she would only be making trouble which would rebound on her family. Rafaello was close to his father but she had only been dating him for a paltry six weeks, and, while she might be in love with him, he had made no such claims. Sobered up, Archie Little had fully supported his daughter’s decision to surrender and leave home.

Glory had decided that the easiest way out of her predicament would be to tell Rafaello that she was accepting the modelling offer. At the time, Rafaello had been only weeks off spending four months setting up a branch office in Rome and she had already been afraid that that separation would end his interest in her. However, she had naïvely believed that they could part as friends.

The following afternoon that she spent with Rafaello had been one long, agonising torment for her to endure until she worked up the courage to tell him that she was going away as well.

‘Let me get this straight … you are dumping me?’ Rafaello had interrupted with a stunned look stamped on his darkly handsome features.

‘No, it’s not like that. It’s just that I’m leaving and you’re going to be abroad most of the time … I can’t imagine when we’d see each other, so isn’t a clean break better?’

‘It’s no big deal,’ Rafaello had confirmed while he smiled steadily at her.

Then she had become the author of her own humiliation. It had already been arranged that they would join his friends for dinner that evening at an exclusive local restaurant. ‘Can we still go ahead with tonight?’ Glory had begged, desperate to spend every last possible moment with him.

‘Why not?’

He had called her an hour before he was due to pick her up to inform her that he would be late and that he would meet her there instead. He had even sent a taxi for her and she had had not a clue what was waiting for her on her arrival. She could still remember that long, slow walk across the restaurant and her own stumbling, demeaning retreat from the sight of Rafaello kissing the very lovely redhead before he pulled away again.

As if it was a moment trapped in time she recalled how he had looked across the table at her with callous cool as though he didn’t recognise her, as though she was nothing, nobody. It had felt as though everyone in the room was staring at her and laughing, and his friends had certainly been entertained by the scene of her downfall.

Rafaello hadn’t changed, Glory reflected wretchedly as her mind returned to the more pressing problems of the present. He always assumed the worst and he attacked without hesitation. Would he have been so quick to accuse a woman who came from his own privileged background? Of course not. But assuming that Glory could only be on the make came very naturally to him. She shivered, only then registering that the sea spray lashing off the rocks had soaked her to the skin.

‘Glory!’

Hearing that shout, she tensed and saw Rafaello running through the surf towards the rocks. His pale shirt and trousers glimmered in the moonlight. Evidently he had come out in as much of a hurry as she had, for he was barefoot. The wind whipped his shirt back from his bronzed, muscular chest.

‘Glory!’ He sounded frantic and she felt childish hiding from him.

Slowly and stiffly, because her chilled limbs were numb, she emerged from her shelter. For a split-second, Rafaello stilled when he saw her and then he powered over to her at even greater speed. He caught her to him. ‘When I couldn’t find you I thought you had drowned,’ he launched down at her in raw condemnation. ‘Don’t you ever do this to me again!’

Glory looked up at him in astonishment. Drowned? His lean, strong hands were biting into her slight shoulders. That he had been genuinely scared that something might have happened to her was etched into the fierce lines of his hard-boned features and the intensity with which he was staring down at her. ‘Oh, you’d have managed to come to terms with me drowning,’ Glory heard herself say none the less. ‘After all, if I was pregnant my death would be a very cost-effective solution.’

‘Per amor di Dio … how can you even say such a thing?’ Rafaello dealt her a hard look of censure, dark, deep-set eyes scanning her with angry disbelief. ‘What sort of a bastard do you think I am?’

‘You said it,’ Glory told him unsteadily, and she shivered.

‘You’re cold as ice … and you’re wet.’ Rafaello banded a strong arm to her spine and urged her back along the beach. ‘The sirocco wind can kick up a storm in the space of minutes. If you had stumbled into the water at this end of the strand there’s a steep drop just feet out. You can’t swim. Naturally, I was worried.’

Unmoved, cold and weary, Glory said nothing. Typical that he should assume she was too stupid to stay out of a roaring sea, she thought grimly. At the foot of the sloping path he bent and scooped her up into his arms. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he grated. ‘Once you’ve had a hot bath and something to eat, you’ll feel better.’

‘Not as long as you’re around,’ Glory breathed.

His arms tightened round her. ‘You’re unhurt. That’s all that matters—’

He contrived to carry her all the way back into the villa and right up the stairs with only the most minor irregularity in breathing. In the mood she was in, she would have preferred it if he had been winded and forced to abandon the macho stance and put her down. As it was, he deposited her on the chaise longue in the bathroom and proceeded to run water into the jacuzzi.

‘Get in, cara …’ Rafaello prompted when the bath was ready for her. Barefoot, his trousers drenched to the knees, his black hair tousled by the wind and his aggressive jawline darkened by a blue-black shadow of stubble, he was a far cry from his usual elegance.

She was ashamed that he still seemed wildly attractive to her. ‘Only when you get out.’

His eyes flared gold. ‘I’m not leaving you alone. You might faint—’

‘You’re too used to little, fragile women who get off on big, strong men looking after them. I don’t. It’s your fault I went out in a storm to get away from you!’

Without further argument, Rafaello just picked her up and settled her into the jacuzzi. She sat in the water still wearing his shirt and stared down into the bubbles sent up by the jets. Her strained eyes were suddenly prickling with tears.

‘If I’ve got you pregnant I’ll marry you,’ Rafaello asserted harshly.

Glory was stunned. She could feel her heart racing but almost as quickly it slowed and sank again. He wasn’t serious, he could not be serious. Rafaello Grazzini marry the gardener’s daughter just because he had got her in the family way? He sounded like a male being roasted on a fire to breaking point, and his tone spoke volumes for his true feelings. It was a reluctant proposal, powered by guilt. In terms of class, she was hardly his equal. He had to be cringing at the mere thought of having to take a wife from a background as humble as hers was. ‘You can forget that option. I would never be that desperate,’ Glory responded flatly, striving to sound wholly unimpressed by an offer that had momentarily made her foolish heart leap with joy. She played fair. He didn’t love her. She knew better than to snatch at an impulsive proposal made for all the wrong reasons.

‘I made the mistake. I take full responsibility for it. I’m sorry,’ Rafaello ground out half under his breath.

‘Sorry enough to let me go home tomorrow?’ Glory whispered tightly, not looking at him, sick with disappointment that his last words should have totally confirmed what had prompted that surprising offer of a wedding ring.

The silence simmered.

‘No … not that sorry,’ Rafaello qualified in the most ludicrous tone of apology.

She hunched her shoulders. ‘What are you getting out of this?’

‘You.’

She rested back against the padded pillow surround and let the water jets buffet her weary body with warmth and relaxation. She had never felt so tired in her life. When she surfaced from her inexorable drift into sleep she was out of the bath, propped up against Rafaello, and he was stripping off the wet shirt. Before she could object he had folded her into a giant, soft towel.

‘You can’t see it now but we’re going to be great together, bella mia,’ Rafaello told her with stubborn conviction. ‘When you wake up tomorrow the sun will be shining and you’ll feel different.’

Unresponsive in her exhaustion, Glory sank into the wonderful comfort of the bed.

‘You need to eat,’ Rafaello told her.

‘I couldn’t.’ She did not think she had the strength to lift a knife and fork. Her drowsy gaze flickered over the exquisite miniature portraits set into the headboard of the bed. ‘Who are they?’

‘Saints. Those are icons.’

Glory dealt him a shaken look. ‘What are you doing with a bed with saints watching over it?’

‘It’s a Corfiot marriage bed. It belonged to my mother’s family.’

Glory had forgotten that his late mother had been an Italian raised in Corfu. ‘A marriage bed?’ So dismayed was she by the thought of how inappropriate that choice of venue had been for an unwed couple that her superstitious nature came to the fore. ‘We should never have been in it!’

‘It’s just a bed, Glory.’ Viewing her with wondering dark eyes, Rafaello slowly shook his head at that comment.

Throwing him an exasperated glance that implied that he was downright stupid not to appreciate the natural order of things, Glory closed her eyes and went to sleep, but not before she had said her prayers.

Just as Rafaello had promised, Glory woke to sunshine. She was alone in the bed and there was no telling dent in the pillow beside her own. She headed straight into the shower to wash out the sand still clinging to her hair. Wrapped in a towel, she emerged again to find that a maid was unpacking her case. Choosing a blue skirt and a white sun-top, she went back into the bathroom to get dressed.

The door she had left ajar was slowly pushed wider.

‘Breakfast?’ Rafaello stood on the threshold, heartbreakingly handsome in a black T-shirt and well-cut chinos.

‘I could eat a horse,’ Glory admitted, colour rising in her cheeks, her eyes not quite meeting his.

The table on the balcony beyond the bedroom was laid with an extravagant choice of breakfast dishes. Glory took a cushioned seat and reached for the jug of orange juice. In silence she then worked her way through a bowl of cereal.

Rafaello studied her with brilliant dark eyes that probed her evasive gaze. ‘We start fresh today.’

‘Do we?’ Honey-blonde head downbent, Glory sampled two of the cooked dishes on offer and the toast. Fresh? As though last night had never happened? Was he joking? An intimate ache new to her experience was sufficient reminder of the intimacy they had shared. However, she was infinitely more worried about the risk of pregnancy. While she had been in the shower, counting and recounting the days of her cycle had given her no comfort. Rafaello had made love to her at what was supposed to be the optimum time for a woman to conceive. An even greater concern was her own inexplicable, bone-deep conviction that what she most feared had already happened and that right now deep down inside her tiny cells of human life were engaged in frantic baby-making activity.

‘Glory …’ Rafaello reached out and ensnared her fingers before she could reach for another slice of toast. ‘Did you fast before you arrived? Or are you now eating for two?’

Slowly Glory raised her head, bright blue eyes stricken in her pale oval face. ‘Is that really your idea of a joke?’

Rafaello sighed. ‘I know the way your mind works, bella mia. You took one look at those icons on the bed last night and primitive superstition felled you right before my eyes—’

‘I do not have primitive superstitions!’ Glory snapped.

‘No? If there had been a church within walking distance you’d have been in it all night on your knees,’ Rafaello groaned in rueful amusement. ‘Are you listening to me? We did nothing wrong …’

Compressing her lips, Glory dropped her head.

‘And no dire punishment is about to come your way,’ Rafaello continued with unshakable conviction. ‘I doubt that there will be repercussions from a single encounter.’

‘Got a hotline to mother nature too, have you?’ Glory could not resist saying.

Thrusting back his chair, Rafaello reached for her hands and hauled her up into the circle of his arms. ‘You’re the most appalling pessimist. Do you remember that picnic we had years ago? You kept on saying that it was such a gorgeous day that it was sure to rain. I couldn’t quite grasp that connection—’

‘It did rain,’ Glory reminded him, recalling that midsummer afternoon five years before when everything between them had seemed almost frighteningly perfect. Within forty-eight hours they had parted. ‘It rained when we were on the way back to the car.’

‘So you took the edge off the whole occasion, fretting about something you couldn’t control?’ Rafaello pushed up her chin and stared down at her mutinous face with dark golden eyes that sought and held hers. ‘That’s a waste of time and energy. Whatever happens, I’ll look after you.’

In receipt of those particular words, Glory shivered. So she was superstitious, so she believed in ESP. She noticed that he was no longer assuring her that he would marry her, had naturally thought better of that rash statement. No doubt he was already grateful that she had not accepted his proposal. She was tempted to ask what ‘looking after’ would entail but suspected that she already knew the answer. When a guy also used terms like ‘repercussions’ and ‘dire punishment’ as euphemisms for pregnancy he was telling her far more about his own attitude than he realised. Very probably he would suggest that a termination would be the wisest solution. No way, not her baby, Glory thought fiercely.

But there was no denying that she did suffer from that innate belief that every wrong action was followed by a kind of retributive balancing act. Even so, it was plain crazy for her to be imagining that she might be pregnant within hours of making love, wasn’t it? Once again, Rafaello was right. Conception was not an event she could influence. What was the point of worrying herself to death at this stage?

‘Finish your breakfast,’ Rafaello advised. ‘It’s a treat to be with a woman who has a healthy appetite.’

An involuntary laugh tumbled from her. ‘I couldn’t manage another bite …’

‘Nor could I—’

‘You haven’t eaten,’ she protested.

‘I breakfasted while you were still asleep.’ The dark timbre of his voice had taken on a husky edge.

A lean hand splayed across her hipbone. She collided with his amazing eyes. Hot, sizzling gold. The wild flare of sensual awareness made her tense. Her mouth running dry, it was she who moved closer, charged by her own shameless yearning. She stared up into that lean, strong face, reacting to the explosive tension and the weakening surge of heat awakening deep in her pelvis.

A shimmering smile of satisfaction slashed his beautiful mouth and she trembled. Her face burned as he let his hands slowly mesh into the fall of her hair, tipping back her head, letting his thumbs caress her earlobes, making her shiver. ‘I could not have trusted myself in that bed with you last night,’ he confided.

‘No?’ Glory snatched in an audible breath, so entirely in thrall to the magnetic spell of his sensual power that she was lost.

‘You deserved a night of undisturbed rest, so I slept next door and I tossed and I turned and I had a cold shower around dawn.’

‘Masochist?’

‘A necessity. The very thought of you makes me ache …’ Rafaello told her hoarsely, his breath fanning her cheek, his mouth taking hers in a hot, hungry surge of cruel brevity before he lifted his proud, dark head again. Linking his hands with hers, he drew her slowly back into the bedroom.

Glory was all of a quiver, shaken at how fast and how easily he could turn her from rational thought. It was as if her body had a fever that only he could assuage, but no longer did she try to deny that craving. She loved him and accepting that love had only made the wanting all the more powerful a force. She had been wrong, so wrong about its being a cold, callous arrangement, she told herself. Last night he had searched for her, shown his concern and his regret. That was enough, that was truly enough to silence her worst misgivings. Nobody got everything, she argued with herself. Lots of folk had to settle for less than what they had once hoped to receive.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Rafaello demanded as he drew her, unresisting, down onto the bed with him.

‘Nothing …’ Glory let her hands rise up over his warm, muscular torso in an exploratory foray that was her very first. He stretched like a lithe tiger being stroked, brilliant eyes narrowing in slight surprise. As he bent his head a secretive smile as old as the Sphinx curved her ripe mouth. However long it lasted, he would remember her always, she swore.

As if sharing that identical ambition, Rafaello ran his expert mouth down the extended length of her throat, and her entire body hummed on the gasp of response that he dragged from her. Even the feel of him, hard and ready through the barrier of their clothes, sent the flame inside her leaping higher and proceeded to make her melt. But settling for less, she decided on the peak of another tormenting assault on her sensitised skin, could well mean receiving more pleasure than she had ever dreamt possible …

Glory studied the exquisite silver and turquoise choker in the mirror and then her bright eyes widened to take in the whole of her reflection. She did not recognise that elegant, classy lady as herself.

In the space of three weeks, her appearance had been transformed. She had swallowed her pride and allowed Rafaello to buy her clothes. Why? She had very wounding memories of never, ever having had the right clothes when she was seeing him five years earlier. Telling herself then that such superficial things shouldn’t matter had been cold comfort when she stuck out like a sore thumb in company. Neither she nor her friends had owned the kind of outfits worn by the women who were part of Rafaello’s world: the casual but oh-so-smart separates, the fashionable but understated garments that none the less screamed their designer tags. She had been tortured by fears that her appearance and her visible inability to blend in was an embarrassment to him.

Now sheathed in a Versace dress, purchased from one of the designer outlets that Corfu town offered the rich who flocked to the island over the summer, she had no such fear. The sleek dress was a magical shade somewhere between green and blue and with every movement and change of light the wonderful fabric seemed to change colour. It made her feel like a million dollars and gave her confidence.

Her thick mane of hair had been tamed and styled to fall back from her face. While she was in that exclusive salon she had taken advantage of the opportunity to be made up and had watched and learned and bought everything that was used with the gold credit card Rafaello had given her. So now she knew all about highlighting her cheekbones and using a subtle glimmer of different shadows on her eyelids. What had amused her most was the discovery of just how much work was involved in attaining that sun-kissed and wholly deceptive natural look.

Silver drop earrings with turquoise inserts hung from her ears. A silver watch encircled her wrist. Now Rafaello was set on buying her an elaborate choker. He had tried to tempt her into gold and diamonds and she had just laughed. She loved silver, and when she left she could take the silver jewellery with her without feeling bad about it, for on his terms such items cost next to nothing even in the most expensive shops. But there would be precious memories bound up in her possession of every piece. Memories she would share with their child on some distant day in the future. Her lovely face shadowing at a reality she had only had confirmed beyond doubt the day before, Glory thought back to the daunting but telling exchange she had shared with Rafaello several days earlier …

That particular morning, she had wakened feeling off-colour. As her period had already been slightly overdue, the nausea she was experiencing had reawakened her fear that she might be pregnant but she had decided that there was no point in involving Rafaello in her worries before there was any actual proof. After all, she had heard friends say that even a change of climate or a different diet could interfere with a woman’s cycle.

However, when Rafaello had teasingly called her lazy for lying in bed so late, stress had provoked Glory into a snappish reply. ‘Look, I’m just not feeling that great … OK?’

‘Is it that time of the month?’ Rafaello had queried with a frown, his sudden tension pronounced.

By putting her on the spot like that before she knew how matters stood herself, he had disconcerted and embarrassed her. ‘Probably … yes …’ she had responded hurriedly, picking up on his tension and telling herself that in all likelihood she was worrying herself unnecessarily.

‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?’ Rafaello had commented with a brilliant smile that seemed to accentuate his relief with cruel efficiency. ‘At least you’re not pregnant, bella mia.’

Once he had made that assumption and once she had witnessed his relief, wild horses could not have dragged the real truth from her. Forty-eight hours afterwards she had made a covert visit to a doctor in town and had learned that she was indeed in the very early stages of pregnancy. In choosing not to tell Rafaello, she had made the right decision, she told herself bracingly. Neither marriage nor a termination was on the cards and no way would she put him through the hypocrisy of attempting a supportive role in a pregnancy which he had so patently not wanted to happen. That would hurt her too much. After all, what did she really have left but her pride?

‘Glory …?’ The laughter in Rafaello’s dark, deep drawl dragged her back to the present.

Pasting a determined and bright smile back onto her downcurved lips, Glory finally turned away from the shop mirror.

‘I gather you like it.’ Rafaello sent her a vibrant smile of amusement and she realised that, having interpreted her long silence as sheer appreciation, he had already paid for the choker.

‘It’s really beautiful.

But not one quarter as beautiful as him, Glory reflected helplessly, scanning his lean, dark, devastating face with dreamy eyes of appreciation. Not once in five years had she known such happiness as she had experienced with him in recent weeks. She could not bring herself to destroy what had been a time of enchantment with the brutally realistic and unwelcome announcement that she was going to have his baby.

So if she was a bit sad now it was only to be expected. What goes around comes around. She had been right, he had been wrong and, whether he knew it or not, their time together was slowly running out. Her body was already changing with pregnancy. The speed of that development filled her with both fascination and fear. Her breasts were tender and the mere smell of certain foods made her nauseous. But surely she could manage to conceal those facts for another few weeks?

Linking sure fingers with hers, Rafaello walked her down the steep steps outside the shop and back into the colourful lively crowds passing through the narrow street. She adored Corfu town: the legacy of tall Italianate buildings adorned with shutters and balconies left behind by four centuries of Venetian rule, the buzz of the streets and cafés, the array of fascinating shops filled with silver, olive wood, needlework and leather-craft items. Even the locals came out to promenade round their town during the long evenings.

‘I suppose now we head for your favourite place,’ Rafaello commented lazily.

‘If you don’t mind …’

A Frenchman had built the Liston as a copy of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. The arched façade filled with fashionable cafés overlooked a lush green cricket pitch surrounded by trees. She adored sitting there to watch the world go by with Rafaello by her side.

‘Why do people keep on staring at us?’ she had asked uncomfortably on her first visit.

‘You are a very beautiful woman.’ His amused but appreciative smile that she should even ask such a question had dissolved the insecure feelings she always struggled to hide from him and made her heart sing. She had a desperate need to believe that she could look like the sort of woman who belonged with him.

While Rafaello ordered wine for himself Glory pored over the ice-cream menu to make her selection. Then she rested back in her comfortable seat to survey him, torn between pain and pleasure. He was a visual joy to her from the crown of his gleaming dark head to the soles of his feet. Nothing about him jarred. She was so much in love with him, she could have shouted it from the rooftops. But, denied that outlet, she burned with inner intensity and quailed in torment at the prospect of tearing herself from him.

Suppressing that miserable awareness, Glory made herself dwell instead on the wonderful days they had shared and the endless nights of mutual passion. One day drifting into the next, seamless, timeless, marred by only the rarest disagreement and resealed by the fastest reconciliations on record. He had taught her to swim but had made several biting comments when he finally realised that she still preferred drifting round the villa pool in a large plastic ring like an overgrown child or just sitting at the foot of the Roman steps, submerged but safe. Only when he had appreciated the fear of deep water that she had overcome initially only for his benefit had he appreciated the level of her achievement. He thought her ring was cute now. He didn’t laugh when she just paddled down on the beach either.

She would carry away memories of wandering through the cool, shaded orchards that surrounded the villa, endlessly talking while they picked a path through the lush green trees laden with velvety peaches, tangerines and cherries beneath the burning blue sky. She would remember the glittering white of the sand-dunes at noon and the dark atmospheric richness of the church dedicated to the island’s revered St Spyridon. But most of all she would cherish the reality that he had never once called her his mistress or treated her with anything less than respect.

‘If you don’t start talking soon about what’s bothering you, cara mia,’ Rafaello murmured with his lustrous dark golden eyes fixed to her with magnetic probing force, ‘I’m likely to get annoyed with you.’

Glory froze as if he had turned a gun on her, dismayed that her façade of contentment had not been as good as she had imagined. It really shook her that he had evidently noted a change in her behaviour.

‘Not that annoyed,’ Rafaello groaned with rueful amusement.

‘I just don’t know why you should think there’s anything bothering me,’ Glory said tautly and she shrugged for good measure, but one of her hands had found its way down to her still flat tummy under the table.

‘You are not a naturally silent woman but for the last few days it’s been as though you’re not quite with me any more, mia preziosa. So what’s wrong? Is it your family? You never mention them but possibly that’s because you’re missing them.’ Rafaello regarded her expectantly.

Glory turned scarlet with discomfiture. She never mentioned her family, not only because she could not bear to recall the arrangement that had brought her out to Corfu in the first place but also because she dreaded any further reference to that five thousand pounds which had branded her as mercenary in his estimation.

‘If you’re discreet I don’t see why you shouldn’t phone them,’ Rafaello proffered with the air of a male making a generous gesture.

‘But … but I’ve been calling them every few days since I got here,’ Glory admitted in some bewilderment.

Rafaello tensed in evident shock.

Glory frowned. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t stay on the phone long.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Rafaello breathed in a charged undertone, golden eyes smouldering. ‘Even though I asked you to be discreet, you have been chattering your dizzy head off to your father and your brother every few days?’

Glory paled and stiffened and then slowly nodded, wondering why on earth he was looking so angry.

Rafaello vented a single foreign word that sounded as though it might be a rude word.

Glory gulped and wondered if her own excusable omissions lay at the heart of his annoyance. Feeling horribly guilty, she muttered, ‘You know, I never thanked you for being so very kind to Sam … I just didn’t want to discuss all that stuff that happened. I’m sorry, I—’

‘Shut up,’ Rafaello urged not quite levelly, evidently striving to get a grip on his temper and not one whit cooled by her sincere offering of gratitude. Almost simultaneously he rose from his seat, tossed some banknotes down on the table and strode down the steps to await her.

Her own temper rising, Glory moved to join him at slow-motion speed.

‘Have you the smallest conception of what you have done?’ Rafaello ground out in a raw undertone.

‘Don’t you talk to me like I’m a brick short of the full load!’ Glory warned him in a sideways hiss.

‘I hate to state the obvious, bella mia …’ Rafaello countered grittily, grasping her hand and resisting all her covert attempts to pull free of his hold ‘… but if you have cheerfully let your family know that you’re out here shacked up with me—’

‘Of course I haven’t done that!’ Glory snapped even as pain stabbed her at his use of that particular description of their relationship.

Rafaello stopped dead and turned to survey her. ‘You … haven’t?’

‘Dizzy I may be sometimes but not downright thick. You think I’m proud of being here with you? Well, you think wrong and I’d be ashamed to let my father or my brother know how low I’ve sunk!’ Glory completed in a shaking but fierce undertone.

Rafaello stared at her, his fabulous bone-structure prominent beneath his bronzed skin, his hard gaze darker than the blackest night. He said nothing and it was Glory who turned away first and began walking back in the direction of the car again. She was feeling sick. Her legs didn’t feel strong enough to hold her upright either.

He unlocked the passenger door of the car first. She climbed in, her lovely face pale as marble and as expressionless, but inside herself she was just dying. She had not meant to say all that but he had hurt and provoked her. He swung in beside her and the horrible silence pulsed.

She laced her hands together to stop them trembling. ‘Dad and Sam just think I’ve moved and they haven’t asked the address because they don’t write me letters. They assume I’m using a public phone with a number they can’t call me back on. I didn’t have to tell any lies,’ she explained in tight voice. ‘Neither of them has ever visited me in Birmingham, so they don’t really have much curiosity about my life there.’

‘I’m sorry. I misunderstood,’ Rafaello breathed with icy cool, but there was an underlying roughness to his accented drawl. ‘I employ your father. I thought your brother was a decent kid. I asked you to be discreet for their sake and yours, not my own.’

‘No point advertising that you’re slumming on a temporary basis, is there?’ Glory heard herself say nastily. ‘After all, now you’ve dressed me up in the designer togs, nobody could possibly tell that you took me off a factory floor!’

If the previous silence had pulsed, the one that followed that blunt and inflammatory response fairly sizzled. Again Rafaello said nothing, which really infuriated her. She knew she would have been better saying nothing too but entire speeches that would rip him to shreds were trembling in readiness on the tip of her tongue and holding them back tortured her. He drove off. She would have liked him to grate through the gears and jerk the wheel to demonstrate emotional upset but he drove as if he had just come through an advanced driving test with pronounced care and caution.

She kept quiet for a whole ten minutes and then it got too much for her. ‘I really hate you, Rafaello Grazzini!’

‘Naturally you do,’ he murmured flatly. ‘Sex and debt are hardly a satisfactory basis for any relationship. My choice, my mistake.’

Tears drenched Glory’s eyes in a tidal wave. She squeezed her eyes shut, hating herself for tearing away the barriers and leaving them both without defence. But at the same time she was powerfully tempted to kick him. Why was he making things worse? Was he fed up with her, bored already? But what did it matter if he was? Wasn’t she leaving anyway? For how could she stay with him when her waistline was going to vanish?

Back at the villa, she locked herself in the bathroom. Ripping off her clothes, she got into the shower and turned it on full so that she could sob to her heart’s content. It was an hour before she crept out, eyes stinging from all the cold water she had splashed in them. Mercifully the bedroom was unoccupied. She dug into a drawer for a nightdress, the first she had worn since her arrival, and crawled into bed.

Somewhere in the early hours when she was lying there sleepless, drowning in buckets of self-pity, the bedroom door opened. She froze. She had not bothered to close the curtains and in the clear moonlight she saw a bronzed male silhouette. It was Rafaello, only a white towel knotted round his lean hips. She shut her eyes tight and seconds later noted the slight give in the mattress as Rafaello sank down on it.

She rolled over and arrived on his side of the bed only a moment after he did. Expelling his breath in a slightly startled hiss, Rafaello closed his arms round her. ‘We have to talk …’

Panic assailed Glory, for she did not want to talk. He might not appreciate it but the die was already cast. Nothing could be resolved, nothing could be changed. Gliding up over his lean, hard, muscular body in the circle of his arms, she pressed herself close and found his mouth for herself. For a horrendous instant as he tautened in surprise at the blatant invitation she thought he might push her away. Then, just as suddenly, he reacted by pinning her beneath him and deepening that kiss with a driving hunger that shook her.

In the moonlight he threw up his head again and scanned her with fathomless dark eyes. ‘I want you but—’

Glory had no desire to hear what came after. Sinking desperate fingers into the black hair still damp from the shower, she drew him down to her again. A throaty groan escaped him but she was stronger when it came to the wiles of a temptress. She knew what he could not resist. She knew what drove him wild. Within minutes he was as much the prisoner of his own hunger as she was and way past rational speech.

There was none of the long, teasing rise to gradual excitement with which they had wiled away many a long afternoon. She had unleashed a storm of fierce passion that was well out of her control. He sank into her with delicious driving force, sent her out of her senses with pleasure, and every time she reached a peak it would all start again. A seemingly endless cycle of raw excitement and ecstatic satisfaction left her drained and rather shell-shocked around dawn, when he finally fell into a much-deserved sleep of exhaustion.

Glory lay beside him, questioning what had been different apart from the silence, and then it came to her: he had been saying goodbye to her. He knew it was over. He had decided that before he even came to bed, probably expecting her to be sound asleep. He wanted out. Only not because he was bored with her or because he no longer desired her. Earlier this evening things had got messy, and Rafaello did not like messy scenes. Perhaps it had finally dawned on him that, far from hating him, she loved him.

And, if he hadn’t already guessed just how deep her emotional involvement already went, what had just happened between them would have got the message home to him fast. She had thrown herself at him like a brazen hussy. Not in a subtle, seductive way either. She cringed for herself and then swithered feverishly between fear and uncertainty. Stress about being pregnant and her own insecurity could be making her oversensitive, she reasoned. Maybe she was just imagining that she somehow knew what he was thinking.

But later that same morning she seemed to receive her answer to that question. Fully dressed, Rafaello wakened her. In a lightweight jacket worn with a dark blue shirt and teamed with faultlessly tailored beige chinos, he looked so gorgeous, he took her breath away.

‘I have to go out,’ he told her flatly. ‘Jack Woodrow called me last week to ask for investment advice and I still haven’t taken care of it.’

The first week of her stay Rafaello had taken her over to dine at the Woodrows’ palatial villa. The prospect of being entertained by a genuine earl and his wife had made Glory feel quite sick with nerves. However, the scornful Fiona had been nowhere to be seen and the brunette’s parents, Lord and Lady Woodrow, had turned out to be a delightful and charming older couple. They had greeted Rafaello with fond affection and welcomed Glory to their summer home without the smallest sign of discomfiture.

Rafaello sent her a veiled glance, his tension pronounced in the hard angles of his strong profile. ‘Look, we’ll talk when I get back but you should pack. We’re flying back to London this afternoon.’

Well, she wasn’t hanging around for that denouement, Glory told herself steadily. She would save them both from an embarrassing final encounter followed by an even more painful three-hour flight back home. No doubt he would try to ditch her with courteous consideration. What had got into him five years earlier she would never know, for the callous indifference he had shown towards her feelings then had not been his style.

At her request, Rafaello’s manservant, Hilario, took her to the airport an hour later. But as soon as Hilario had departed again Glory got into a taxi and travelled back into town. She had seen several casual jobs advertised in cafés and bars. If Rafaello was leaving Corfu, why should she? Back in England, she no longer had either a home or a job. Furthermore, she had very little money. Nor could she face the prospect of returning to the gardener’s cottage on the Montague Park estate. Her pregnancy would distress and embarrass her father a great deal and gossip might even carry the news of her condition right back to Rafaello. No, she was on her own and it was time she got used to that idea again …