Читать книгу The Blackmailed Bridegroom - Miranda Lee - Страница 7

PAIGE woke mid-afternoon and just lay there for a while, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, thinking.

Home again.

If you could call this wretched house a home, that was.

The word home normally conjured up feelings of peace and warmth. It was where you could be yourself; where you were most relaxed; where you felt loved and accepted.

But home had never been like that for Paige. Fortune Hall was a cold, heartless place which evoked nothing in her but feelings of failure and inadequacy, of being unwanted and unloved, of being unsure of who she was or what she wanted out of life.

Only once had Paige momentarily been happy in this house: the year when Antonio Scarlatti had first come to Fortune Hall to live.

The memory of their first meeting was indelibly imprinted on her brain. It had been her last year in high school, and she’d caught the train home for the Easter break, feeling miserable when her father had said he couldn’t possibly meet her at Central.

‘Just catch a taxi home, Paige,’ had been his offhand and impatient words on the telephone the night before. ‘It’s not as though it’s far. I can’t leave an important meeting for such a silly little thing.’

Such a silly little thing! That was what she was to him. A silly little thing. It was what she’d always been to him. A nuisance. An inconvenience. He’d never loved her, or made time for her. Not once.

Paige had stepped off the train at Central, no longer expecting to be met, so she’d been startled when a dark-haired, dashingly handsome young man had approached her and introduced himself as her father’s new personal assistant, Antonio Scarlatti. She vaguely remembered thinking he didn’t have an Italian accent at all, but that he had the most riveting eyes. Black and penetrating and incredibly sexy.

‘Your father mentioned your arrival by train today,’ he’d added, while those eyes held hers. ‘I didn’t think it right for you to make your way home all by yourself, so I told him it would be my pleasure to meet you. Come…’ And he’d cupped her elbow with a gallant hand.

She’d been captivated from that moment.

Captivated and completely infatuated.

By the time he’d driven her through the gates of Fortune Hall, her racing heart had succumbed to a hero worship which had banished every other male idol whom her love-starved teenage heart had gathered over the previous few years. Her favourite music and movie stars were nothing compared to Antonio Scarlatti.

By the end of the two-week break she’d centred a thousand romantic hopes and dreams around him, crying her devastation when the holiday had ended all too swiftly. During the next term at school she’d spent long hours every day, imagining and fantasising all sorts of exciting scenarios with her handsome Italian at centre stage, till she’d begun to believe her own fantasies, turning each simple smile he’d given her into evidence that he was as secretly enamoured with her as she was with him.

Her schoolwork had suffered for her daydreaming, and the comments on her report card had been none too impressive to bring home at the end of term: Paige would do a lot better if only she would concentrate! Paige is an intelligent girl but her mind doesn’t seem to be on her work!

Which it hadn’t been. Yet what a wonderful term it had been! What secret pleasures she’d hugged to herself, thinking about her beautiful Antonio all the time, weaving all sorts of fanciful dreams around him.

Her next holiday at home had seemed to cement all those dreams. The things he carefully hadn’t said. Those secretive but scorching glances he’d bestowed on her across the dinner table. The way he’d held her slightly longer than necessary the day they’d run into each other on the stairs. The inordinate time he’d taken to help her find a book in the library one evening.

Paige had been sure he was just waiting till she finished school that year before he showed his hand. By then she would be eighteen, and a woman!

In her mind, they would eventually get married and have half a dozen babies, beautiful, black-eyed children who adored their mother and father and were so very happy, wrapped in the type of warm cocoon of family love that she’d never experienced herself, but she’d vowed to give her children.

By the time she’d come home again in September she’d become totally obsessed with him, her rather romantic feelings taking a more physical turn when she’d spotted him swimming in the pool the first morning of her holiday. She’d watched him from her bedroom window while he’d done lap after impressive lap, her eyes widening when he’d climbed out and just stood there as he towelled himself down, wearing only the briefest of black swimming costumes.

There had been something decidedly animal in his powerful physique, with its deeply olive skin and light covering of dark body hair, plus the way he was drying himself, with rough, rubbing strokes. Paige had gobbled him up with her eyes while the sexuality simmering deep within her feelings surfaced, stark and startling in its raw and naked need. Suddenly, she’d craved more than his love. She’d craved the man, and that part of him which made him a man, her galloping heart seizing up with shock at the explicitness of her desire.

When he’d looked up and spied her watching him at the window she’d nearly died, her face flushing wildly. He’d stared back at her for a few seconds, before whirling away and striding off inside the pool house.

Paige hadn’t needed another sign.

Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to finish school, or for him to say something. She had to speak up first. But when she’d gone in search of him after breakfast it had been to find her father and his assistant had left on a business trip. They would not be back for a week. It had been the longest week of Paige’s life, only made bearable by the heart to hearts she’d had with Brad, her oldest and closest friend.

By the time Antonio had come back she’d been dying to talk to him, breathless and emboldened by the surety of his love.

Oddly enough, Paige could no longer recall exactly what she’d said to him. Or what he’d said back. The only words which lived on in her memory were his calling her a silly little girl. They remained very clear, as did the overwhelming wave of humiliation which had accompanied them.

Suffice to accept that it had been the most awful moment of her life.

Paige found it ironic that she didn’t rate what had happened last night to be nearly as awful. Jed might have hurt her physically, and he’d frightened her enough into coming home, but he didn’t have the power to hurt her where the hurt never healed. How could he, when she didn’t love him?

Her right hand lifted to push her hair back behind her ear before gingerly touching the tender swelling just below her temple. Pity the blow hadn’t knocked some sense into her, she thought bitterly.

Still being in love with Antonio was insane. She could see that. But recognising the stupidity of her feelings seemed to make no difference.

Brad had talked her out of her ‘infatuation’ for a while, had made her temporarily believe it was nothing but a schoolgirl crush, a romantic obsession which had nothing to do with reality.

‘You don’t even know the man,’ he’d reasoned with her during the dark days after Antonio’s visit to the beach-house. ‘Your love’s a figment of your romantic teenage imagination, conjured up because you need someone to love, and to love you back. But it’s not real, Paige. It’s a destructive self-indulgence to keep harbouring such a one-sided obsession. Let it go, love. Let him go.’

So she had, for a while, and eventually she’d settled for a different sort of love with Brad than the one she’d dreamt of in Antonio’s arms.

Still, looking back, she did not regret it. Brad had been kind to her. Kind and understanding and undemanding. He’d taught her a lot about the sort of person she was, made her see that she was very intelligent, despite not having done too well at school. He’d even encouraged her to go to the local tech and finish her schooling, which she had. She might still have been with him if one stormy afternoon and an unforgiving sea hadn’t ended their carefree and easygoing co-existence.

She’d stayed on at the beach-house for a few weeks. Brad had always paid the rent ahead in three-month lots. But in the end loneliness—and curiosity, perhaps—had sent her back home to Sydney, to Fortune Hall, her father, and Antonio.

A big mistake.

For nothing had changed.

Nothing.

She hadn’t been able to get out of the place fast enough, answering an ad in the paper to share a flat with two other girls and taking the first job she could get, waitressing in a coffee house on Circular Quay.

Another big mistake. Not the job. She’d rather liked waitressing, enjoying the contact with tourists and people always on the go. Paige had soon found, however, that sharing accommodation with other girls was hazardous in the extreme, unless you looked like the back of a bus. Unfortunately, Paige’s long blond hair, pretty face and striking figure had caused all sorts of troubles with the other girls’ boyfriends, who hadn’t been able to keep their eyes and hands off. After one extremely unpleasant encounter—and a disbelieving flatmate—Paige had found herself out on the street with nowhere to go except home once more.

This time Antonio had no longer been in residence, thanks to a promotion and a new apartment of his own somewhere.

Perversely, Paige had been disappointed. Had she become addicted to the emotional turmoil the sight of her unrequited love caused?

Possibly, because after leaving home again, to live with two male flatmates who had been closet gays and had caused her no trouble at all, she’d still deliberately returned at Christmas—and every Christmas after that—for no other reason than that was the season her father entertained a lot, with dinner parties and other larger parties, to which Antonio was always invited.

She had seen him a few times, but he’d invariably ignored her, or just said a few polite words before turning his attention elsewhere, usually to some woman. Paige knew he had lots of women—she’d made a point of questioning a few of the staff at home about his dating activities. Not Evelyn, of course. But the cook, the maids, and Jim, the chauffeur.

Paige consoled herself with the thought that there never seemed to be anyone special, anyone who lasted. On top of that, she’d never experienced the agony of actually seeing him in action with a woman…till last year’s big Christmas Eve party.

Paige had turned twenty-two the previous October, and believed she’d never looked better. Her skin had been lightly tanned, and her long honey-blond hair fell halfway down her back in one smooth shiny curtain. She’d come downstairs, dressed in a very sexy strapless red dress, hoping against hope that this time Antonio might see that she was at last a woman, not a silly little girl.

Antonio had just arrived with a date, a striking and sophisticated creature of thirty-something who had still made Paige feel like a little girl by comparison. His gaze had skated over her—and her revealing dress—with nothing but barely held irritation.

Never had the futility of her feelings been hammered home so strongly as that evening, when she’d watched him turn from her to dance attendance on his date, never once giving Paige a second glance. Each touch of his hand on the woman’s arm had been like a dagger in Paige’s heart. Each drink he’d given her. Each dance.

But the coup de grce had come when Paige came across them kissing on the terrace—if ‘kissing’ was the appropriate word to describe what they’d been doing. For it hadn’t just been their mouths which were locked, but their whole bodies. Moulded and melded together in the most erotic fashion, one of Antonio’s legs jammed hard between the woman’s, one of hers lifting to run sinuously up and down his thigh.

Paige was sure she’d cried out in pain, but nothing short of an atomic bomb exploding would have disturbed their passionate clinch. No one but the most naive could not imagine how their evening would end, or that Antonio wouldn’t be the most unforgettable of lovers.

But then, Paige had already known he would be.

It was that same intense, all-consuming passion she’d thought she’d found in Jed. Only this time it had been directed at her, not some other woman. She’d been so flattered by Jed’s pursuit of her. Flattered, yet disastrously deluded.

Paige winced as she touched the bruise once more.

She was about to go into the bathroom and inspect the damage more closely when there was a knock on her bedroom door.

‘Who is it?’ she asked agitatedly. Not her father again. Oh, please not him. He’d harangued her for ages last night, wanting to know what had happened, who had done this to her, what was his name, and his address? Had she been living with him? Was he her boyfriend, her lover? What had she done to make him hit her? She must have done something!

Dismay had kept her silent, and defiant, as usual. She’d speared her father with a coldly contemptuous gaze before finally escaping to her room, only to fall onto the bed and cry herself to sleep. But now she was conscious again, and the transitory peace of oblivion was no longer hers.

‘It’s Evelyn. I’ve brought you up a tray.’

The door swung open before Paige could say another word, and in swept Evelyn. She was dressed in the same sort of bleak black dress she practically always wore, as though it were required uniform for a housekeeper. Paige noticed that she’d put on more weight this past year. Her cheeks had become jowly, and her already small eyes looked smaller within her pudgy face.

‘Your father said you were not to be allowed to skip meals while you’re here this time,’ Evelyn pronounced haughtily as she placed the tray on the bedside table. ‘He expects to hear that you’ve eaten every bite. And he expects to see you downstairs for dinner tonight as well. Right on eight. In a dress,’ she added, throwing a derisive glance over Paige’s jeans.

‘I didn’t bring any dresses with me,’ Paige said, already regretting her decision to come home, despite not having any other real alternative this time. She needed the safety and security Fortune Hall provided, for she suspected Jed was not going to take her leaving him lightly.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Paige,’ came the sneering retort. ‘You left a whole wardrobe full of clothes behind when you first left home. I moved them all into the guest room next door when I thought you weren’t coming back and this room needed a thorough spring clean. There’s plenty of dresses among them.’

‘For pity’s sake, Evelyn,’ Paige pointed out wearily, ‘you can’t expect me to wear the same clothes I wore at seventeen.’

‘Why not? I seem to recall you spent all that year buying and wearing clothes that were way too old for you. On top of that,’ Evelyn added drily, ‘if there’s one thing I’ve learned since working for the rich and famous, it’s that designer clothes don’t date all that much. I’m sure you’ll find something among them that’ll do. It’s not as though you’ve put on any weight. You’re as skinny as ever.’

Evelyn had always made comments about her weight and Paige hated it. She was a tall girl, and naturally slim. But one could hardly call her ‘skinny’.

‘Whatever you say, Evelyn.’ She was too tired of spirit to argue. And what did it really matter?

Evelyn went to leave, then stopped, peering closely at Paige’s face. ‘That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got there, dear,’ she said, with a malicious glint in those beady eyes of hers. ‘Walk into a door?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You should watch where you’re going, or one day you might really get hurt.’ And, with an expression which implied such a prospect would please her no end, Evelyn exited the room, deliberately leaving the door open behind her.

Sighing, Paige rose and closed the door before returning to see what Evelyn had brought her to eat. Two huge club sandwiches, stuffed with mayonnaise. A piece of cream-filled cake big enough to feed an army, and a huge chocolate milkshake.

Paige knew she wouldn’t be able to consume that amount, let alone such rich food. But she didn’t dare leave any behind. Evelyn would report back to her father, who would lecture her on everything from anorexia to ingratitude. Defiance always had its price around Fortune Hall.

If only Blackie were still alive, she thought wistfully as she flushed half of the food down the toilet. That dog had been the perfect garbage disposal.

Paige’s heart turned over as she thought of her long-deceased pet. As dogs went, Blackie had been exceedingly ugly: a flea-bitten mongrel Paige had rescued from the pound after they’d put his photograph in the Sunday papers. Her father had been furious when she’d bought him and brought him home. Blackie had almost been as old as she was. Seven to her nine. Her father had declared him a health hazard because he was recovering from mange. He’d told her that if she returned him he would get her a proper pup, a poodle with a pedigree and papers.

But she’d dug her heels in—the forerunner of future rebellions—and said stubbornly that she wasn’t taking Blackie back to die and that she’d look after him herself, using her weekly allowance. He’d cost her a small fortune in vet bills, but she’d managed. Dog and girl had been inseparable till that dreadful day when she’d had to leave for boarding school. The housekeeper had promised to look after him, but when Paige had come back on her first home weekend, a month later, Evelyn had been installed as the new housekeeper and Blackie was declared dead, supposedly run over by a car. She’d never quite believed this story, but could never prove otherwise.

Paige had vowed to get herself another dog one day. But she never had. It was hard to risk one’s heart a second time after being so badly hurt, she’d found. Very hard.

With half the food flushed away, and the rest reluctantly stuffed down into her fragile-feeling stomach, Paige went along to the next room to review the dresses that had appealed to her seventeen-year-old taste.

She shook her head over most of them. If ever she needed evidence of her schoolgirl obsession with Antonio, it was in the collection of clothes before her. Never had she seen such an array of painfully provocative purchases: all designed to flaunt her body, and all, as Evelyn had pointed out, way too old for a seventeen-year-old.

No wonder Antonio had stared at her across the dinner table when she’d come down dressed in those. Any living, breathing man would have given her a second glance. Paige was not ignorant of her physical attractions. She’d had them thrown in her face often enough in the past few years.

Her hand ran along the hangers, searching for something—anything—which was suitable for a simple dinner with her father. She bypassed everything which was too short, too clingy, or too low-cut.

Her eye finally landed on a cornflower-blue trouser suit which she’d never actually worn at all, come to think of it. She’d bought it at one of those end-of-season sales because the saleslady had raved about her in it. But when she’d got it home Paige had childishly thought it far too simple and plain.

Now, she liked its elegant simplicity very much. And blue always looked good on her, with her fair hair and blue eyes. But it wasn’t a dress, was it? Too bad, she decided mutinously, and tugged the hanger out.

Fortunately, the left-behind shoes didn’t present any choice problem at all. Paige had been five-nine by the time she was fourteen, so she’d never bought too high a heel, not even during her Antonio-mad year.

Selecting a pair of open-toed cream shoes with a lowish heel, she returned to her room, where she stripped down to her undies and tried on the trouser suit. The reflection in the full-length cheval mirror in the corner brought an instant frown. Dear heaven, but she looked terribly busty! Bras did that to her in some clothes. Taking off the cardigan-style top, she removed her bra, then slid the silky cardigan back on, doing up the three small pearl buttons and having another look.

Much, much better. Her breasts looked smaller for having settled lower and wider apart on her chest, and there wasn’t an in-your-face cleavage filling the deep V-neckline. There were no ugly bra lines, either, to mar the way the silky top smoothly outlined her bust before falling loosely to her hips. The trousers had a similar cut, fitting snugly around her hips before falling straight down to her ankles in softer folds. It was a very wearable and comfortable outfit which would fit a wide variety of occasions. She really must remember to take it with her when she next left.

Whenever that would be…

Paige hadn’t just lost the roof over her head last night. She’d lost her clothes as well. Which was a pity. She’d spent quite a bit putting together a decent work wardrobe to go with her new career direction.

If only she’d dared go back into Jed’s bedroom and get her set of keys before sneaking out of the place. If she had, she’d be able to slip into the building—and the apartment—while Jed was at work.

Paige sighed. She could hardly see herself showing up while Jed was home, and politely asking permission to come up and get the rest of her clothes. Better she cut her losses and just disappeared.

Maybe it was time to head interstate. Maybe up north to Queensland, where there were plenty of holiday resorts, and plenty of jobs going for an attractive girl with a wide range of working experience.

A move to Queensland, however, would require money for her fare and some new clothes. She had some savings, but would need every cent to set herself up in a flat. Bond money and such. Her father would give her money if she asked, Paige knew. He might even resume putting that obscene monthly allowance into her bank account, if she begged.

Frankly, she was tempted. All she had to do was eat humble pie and tell her father he was the greatest.

But then she would have nothing left, would she? No self-respect. No independence. No pride.

She had to find some other way out of the hell-hole she’d dug for herself this time. Maybe she could stay here for a while, and get a job which had a uniform and gradually put together a wardrobe. She supposed she could bear Evelyn and her father for a few weeks. And at least she had one decent interview outfit!

Paige stripped off again and headed for the bathroom. Time to have a long, relaxing bath. Time to pretend she hadn’t totally stuffed up her life once more. Time to transport herself to a world where the man she was with would never dream of raising his hand to her, where the rings on her left hand spoke of love and commitment, and the babies they made together would never know the hurt and unhappiness which had marred her own childhood.

When at her lowest, Paige always kept herself sane by wallowing in just such a fantasy world. So she lay there for ages beneath the lavender-scented bubble bath she’d found in the vanity and conjured up old faces, old dreams, and old desires. Time flew by, and if, eventually, tears rolled down Paige’s cheeks, her soul had still been strangely soothed by her imaginings.

At five to eight that evening, Paige carried her softened and perfumed body slowly down the huge sweeping staircase, crossed the cavernous foyer, with its domed, chandeliered ceiling, and entered the huge living area which led into the smaller and more elegant room where her father always had pre-dinner drinks. He did this for half an hour before every meal, regardless of whether he had visitors or not. Paige never joined him, partly because she didn’t like to drink on an empty stomach, but mainly because she didn’t like to give her father the opportunity to hurt her. When he drank, he developed a sarcastic tongue.

Given that it was a Monday, Paige assumed he would be alone. So when she opened the door which led into the drawing room she was startled to see that wasn’t the case at all.

No…startled did not adequately describe her reaction to the sight of an elegantly attired Antonio, sitting in one of the armchairs which flanked the fireplace, a crystal flute of champagne in his hands. Stunned better described her instant state of mind. Stunned and sickened.

Antonio was the last man in the world she wanted to see again, especially tonight, with the mark of another man’s contempt for her glowering angrily on her cheekbone.