Visconti's Forgotten Heir

‘Well, as I said...’ She gave a little shrug and felt a surge of panic when she realised she had completely forgotten what it was she had been going to say. It still happened sometimes. Times like now, when she felt hot and flummoxed and abnormally stressed. ‘Not...’ Mercifully the words flooded back, even though she stumbled over them in attempting to get them out. ‘Not...everything goes to plan.’

‘Evidently not.’ He glanced towards where Thomas was waiting behind the middle-aged man who clearly paid their wages, who was sorting out some problem with the cash machine.

Magenta wished he would hurry up. It was purgatory standing there talking to a man who so clearly resented her when her screaming senses were taunting her with the knowledge of how his skin had felt beneath her fingers and how he had shown her pleasure such as her untutored body had never known. If it had been untutored, she thought. As far as she knew she could have been as free with her favours as her mother had led her to believe. She had no recollection of those lost months of her life, but her torpid brain had always rejected that thought as repugnant and totally alien to her.

‘So what happened to the career? Did Rushford fail to deliver on his promises? Or is that just a rumour? Like the way he cut loose because he couldn’t face the responsibility of fatherhood?’

The fact that this man knew she had been expecting a baby sent Magenta’s thoughts spinning in a vortex of confusion. Her hand went to her forehead. Noticing the way it trembled, she brought it quickly down again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding anything but. ‘Is that still a sore point?’

His sarcasm dug deep, but she was too busy trying to stay upright to ask him why he believed Theo was Marcus Rushford’s child.

Gripping the edge of the bar with both hands for support, and dragging in lungfuls of much-needed air, she murmured, ‘I’d prefer not to discuss my son, if it’s...all the same to you.’ Had he detected that awkwardness—that lack of fluency in her speech which it had taken her a long time to overcome? ‘Not here. Not over a bar.’

Not anywhere, she resolved silently. Not until I know what happened. What it was I did to make you despise me, as you clearly do.

His black hair gleamed as he dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘I can’t help admitting I’m surprised that the girl I knew would let a little thing like motherhood stand in the way of her plans.’

That didn’t sound like her at all, Magenta thought, puzzled. She loved little Theo more than anything else in this world. He was the moon and the stars and the earth to her, she mused with a wistful little smile, and she loved him so much it hurt.

Tentatively, resting her arm on the counter and supporting her chin with her hand, she invited, ‘So, tell me about the girl you knew.’

He laughed softly and leaned forward so that she caught the shiver of his breath against her hair, the subtle and yet disturbing sensuality of his personal masculine scent. ‘I really don’t think you’d welcome hearing it,’ he murmured silkily.

The glittering blue of his eyes touched on her upturned mouth. A mouth more than one photographer had complimented, saying it had a natural pout.

Quickly Magenta drew back, standing tall again now that the swaying sensation of a few moments ago had passed.

‘Maybe you’re getting me mixed up with someone else,’ she ventured, hoping against hope that it might be true, but knowing in her heart of hearts that it wasn’t. The way her mind and her body had reacted the moment she’d seen him come through that door dispelled any doubt that they had been lovers. ‘Or maybe you just didn’t know me very well.’

‘Oh, I think I did.’

His tone, though soft, held a wealth of derogatory meaning, and Magenta wished someone else would grab her attention—demand to be served. But no one did. He obviously commanded too much respect for anyone to challenge him over monopolising one of the bar staff, and secretly she wondered what he did for a living. What it was that gave him his unmistakable air of autonomy—that bred-in-the-bone confidence? Because he hadn’t got that from working all hours in a backstreet Italian restaurant, and from the flashes of hazy memory that were puncturing her brain that was the situation in which she was putting him.

‘Well, as I said, I don’t remember.’ She would hate to admit it to this man who was being so openly hostile, and yet she was on the verge of telling him why, in the hope that he would be able to break down some of the barriers in her brain, when he let out a sound of increasing impatience.

‘You’re still trying to deny we even knew each other?’

He sounded so hard and looked so forbidding that Magenta felt her confidence waning, felt herself shrinking back behind the curtain of self-protection she’d created in order to hide from life until she was ready to grit her teeth and allow herself to take on new challenges—challenges which at the start had seemed insurmountable. But, determined not to let this man’s prejudice undo all the good that the past few years of hard work and perseverance had produced, she swallowed her fears and misgivings and plunged in.

‘What did I do? Stop seeing you because of someone else? Or was it my career? Whatever it was, at least you can go away with the satisfaction of knowing that I probably got my just deserts and didn’t realise all those dreams I was obviously stupid enough to throw you over for.’

His lips held a ruminative smile that did nothing to warm the icy blue of his eyes.

‘Now, there you’re wrong,’ he murmured in a voice that was silkily soft. ‘Our little...interlude wasn’t significant enough for me to harbour any long-term desire for revenge, so there’s no need to beat yourself up over it unnecessarily, Magenta.’ His tone suggested that that was the last thing he expected her to be doing. ‘We’re all guilty at times—especially when we’re young—of setting our sights beyond what we can realistically achieve.’

He’d said he wasn’t harbouring any desire for revenge over whatever she was supposed to have done, but it was obvious to Magenta that he was getting satisfaction from seeing her now.

‘You’d be surprised what I’ve achieved over the past five years or so.’ Her pride forced her to utter the words before she could control the urge.

‘Oh, really?’ A quizzical eyebrow lifted. ‘Like what?’

Like learning to walk again. Like holding a knife and fork! Like taking over responsibility for my own precious little baby. Like staying alive!

Unconsciously she fingered the red and black choker that lay strategically over one of her now fading scars. He didn’t need to know any of that. Or about the Business Studies course she had taken, which had enabled her to apply for the new position she was hoping to get, which would lift her out of temping by day and working behind a bar a couple of nights a week and allow her to provide a better future for her and her son.

‘It isn’t important,’ she dismissed on a defeated little note. Anyway, he was acknowledging lanky young Thomas, who had loped back with his change and was apologising for keeping him waiting.

Magenta’s gaze fell to the lean, masculine hands now lifting the tumblers off the counter. Hands which she knew had once taken her to paradise and back and which were surprisingly devoid of any rings.

But there were two glasses. Two drinks...

His eyes caught her unconcealed interest and he shifted his position slightly—deliberately, Magenta guessed—creating a breach in the crowd and allowing her eyes to make their way to the smartly dressed, very attractive redhead sitting at one of the tables. She was looking at Andreas with a smile born of familiarity and undisguised appreciation.

Looking quickly back at Andreas, Magenta felt his eyes resting too intently on her face. Eyes that were penetratingly perceptive. Much too aware...

‘As I said...’ His mouth twisted with cruel satisfaction. ‘Life’s been good,’ he reiterated, before moving away.

Magenta stood there for a moment, feeling as though she had just come through some invisible, indescribable battle. She felt sick, and her head was thumping, and all she wanted to do was run away and hide. But someone had started giving her an order and she knew she couldn’t just run off without doing her job, even if it was under the smug gaze of a man who clearly despised her.

‘Is that guy a boyfriend of yours?’ Thomas asked over his shoulder as Magenta finished serving the woman.

Over the sounds of a live band setting up their instruments in the designated corner of the wine bar, she could only manage a negative murmur as she shook her head.

‘No?’ A mousy eyebrow disappeared beneath a tangled mass of equally mousy hair. ‘Then why was he looking at you as though he was determined to rip that dress off?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Dazed though she was, her colleague’s observation pumped up Magenta’s skittering heart-rate, lending a pink tinge to her otherwise colour-leeched face. ‘He’s with someone.’

‘He was.’

‘What?’ She couldn’t see past the wall of customers and the band doing its sound check against a babble of laughter and mixed conversation.

‘I swear he downed that whisky in one and hustled his girlfriend out the door before she had time to draw breath.’

For some reason Magenta’s stomach seemed to turn over. ‘He did?’ Another glimpse towards his table through a sudden gap in the human wall showed only an empty tumbler and a barely touched glass of orange juice that had clearly been hastily abandoned.

‘So? They must have been in a hurry to get somewhere,’ Magenta supplied, wondering why they had left in such a rush. Was it because of her? she speculated, her heart hammering against her ribcage and her head starting to swim. Couldn’t he stand being under the same roof with her long enough for the woman he’d brought with him even to finish her drink?

‘Hey! Are you all right?’ she heard Thomas ask again as she staggered, dropping her head into her hands to try and stanch the rising nausea.

‘No, I’m sorry. Could you call me a taxi?’ she appealed to Thomas, before staggering to the Ladies’ again, where she was violently sick.

* * *

He had behaved badly, Andreas thought as he was driving home alone, but it had been both shocking and unsettling—far more unsettling than he wanted to admit—seeing Magenta again.

He had been twenty-three to her nineteen, and just a dogsbody in his father’s floundering business, and yet he should have known right away what kind of a girl she was. She had been living in a rundown terraced house with her man-crazy alcoholic mother, who hadn’t even known who Magenta’s father was!