Visconti's Forgotten Heir

He’d taken pity on her, Andreas told himself, as the beam of oncoming headlamps slashed cold light across his hardening features. Why else would he have got himself mixed up with her? But hot on the heels of that self-deluded question came the real answer—one that heated his veins and caused a heavy throbbing in his blood.

Because she’d been warm and exciting and more beautiful than any other girl he had ever met in his life—and he had known quite a few, even then. Although not enough to have learned that girls like Magenta James were only out for one thing. A good time—regardless of the cost to anyone else, particularly the poor sucker who happened to be providing her with that good time!

Tension locked his jaw as he turned the steering wheel to cross a junction.

She had known she was beautiful. That was the problem. A part-time receptionist who had been on every model agency’s books, following every lead and promotion she could grasp in a bid to capitalise on her beauty. That was when she hadn’t been at home, trying to shake her mother out of a drunken stupor!

They had become lovers almost at once, just a few days after they’d started dating, and only a week after he had seen her in his father’s restaurant with a group of women during a lively hen party. Surprisingly, she had been a virgin the first time he had made love to her, and yet he had unleashed a fire in her that he’d been foolish enough to believe burned for him alone.

They had made love everywhere. In his van. In the flat above the restaurant when his father and grandmother were out. In her surprisingly immaculate, sparsely furnished little bedroom which had seemed like an oasis amidst the clutter and chaos of her mother’s damp and crumbling, sadly neglected Edwardian house.

It hadn’t mattered one iota that his family hadn’t liked her—although he had wondered, with the gentle memory of his mother, how she might have viewed Magenta if she hadn’t died while he was still very young. His grandmother, though, had been totally out of touch with people of his generation, and his father...

He slammed his mind shut as a well of excruciating pain and reproach threatened to invade it. Their disapproval, he remembered, had only intensified the excitement of being with her.

Of course they had known what she was like; they had been able to see through the thin veil of her bewitching beauty when he hadn’t. He had been blinded and totally duped by her impassioned but hollow declarations of love.

He had been hardworking, loyal to his father, and yet ambitious. And he had at least been able to see and recognise the flaws in the way in which his father had run the restaurant. Giuseppe Visconti had been a far more proficient chef than he had been a businessman, and as proud an Italian as he’d been a dictator of a father, and he had refused to listen to his son’s radical plans for saving and developing the business.

‘Over my dead body.’

Andreas still flinched now from recalling his father’s exact words.

‘You will never have a foothold in this business. Dio mio! Never! Not while you are stupid enough to be mixed up with that girl.’

He had been a blind and naive fool to believe that love could conquer all, that with Magenta James beside him he could overcome his family’s prejudices and his father’s stubbornness. What he hadn’t realised, he reflected coldly, was that the lovely Magenta had only been amusing herself in his bed—that even as he had been drowning in the heat of their mutual passion she had already been sexually entangled with someone else.

He hadn’t wanted to believe his father’s smug revelations—and wouldn’t have if he hadn’t gone round to her house unexpectedly and seen Rushford’s car parked outside. A huge and expensive black saloon that had stood out like a sore thumb in her rather downmarket neighbourhood, and especially outside her mother’s particularly rundown house.

He’d driven away on that occasion, still unable to believe his eyes—and indeed what his family had been telling him. But hadn’t he had graphic proof of her infidelity himself?

‘Do you really think I was ever serious about you? About this?’ she had scoffed on an almost hysterical little bubble of laughter the last time he had seen her.

She’d shot a disparaging glance around the deserted and already failing restaurant. That was when she had informed him of all her precious Svengali was doing for her and all that she was intending to achieve.

He had had a row with Giuseppe Visconti that night. One of many, he reflected. But this one had been different. It had been the squaring up of two male animals intent only on victory over the other. Savage. Almost coming to blows. He’d blamed his father for the outcome of his relationship with Magenta. Giuseppe had called her names, foul names that Andreas had never been able to repeat, and he’d accused his father of being jealous of his youth and his prospects, of depriving him of his right to be his own man.

His father had died in his arms that night after the angry tirade that had been too much for his unexpectedly weak heart to take. Two months later his grandmother had put the restaurant on the market to pay off the loans the business had been unable to meet, determined to go back to her native Italy.

Some time afterwards, when Andreas had been in America, someone—he couldn’t remember who—had told him that Magenta was living in the lap of luxury with a big-shot called Marcus Rushford and that she was expecting his baby.

Yes, he’d behaved badly tonight, Andreas reflected grimly as he swung his car through the electrically operated gates of his Surrey mansion. But at the end of it, looking back, he decided that he hadn’t behaved badly enough!

CHAPTER TWO

ALL THE WAY home in the taxi Magenta’s head was throbbing, pulsating with an invasion of jumbled images. When at last she had paid the driver, was staggering towards the privacy of her own bathroom, the kaleidoscope of confusing images started to take some form.

Meeting Andreas in that restaurant. Laughing with Andreas. Making love with him.... Where, it didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered then. She pressed the heels of her hands against the wells of her eyes, her breath catching as a heated and desperate desire took hold in her mind. Why had it been desperate? She shook her head to try and jolt herself into remembering. She had to remember...

There was a big man. Sullen. Andreas’s father! And Maria. Maria was his grandmother! Oh, but there had been such ill feeling! She recalled feeling the lowest of the low. There was shouting now. Andreas was shouting at her. Telling her she was shallow-minded and materialistic. Telling her she was no good—just like her mother.

In a crumpled heap beside the toilet she relieved herself of the nausea that remembering produced and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. For the first time she was glad that Theo was spending part of his school holiday in the country with her great-aunt. It would have distressed her little boy to have seen her in such a state.

Winding her arms around herself, she ached for him, missing him as much as on the day when she had woken up from that coma to realise she’d lost not only two months of her life, but also the baby she’d remembered carrying. It was the only thing she had remembered. Except that she hadn’t lost him...

She started sobbing with all the same poignancy with which she’d sobbed that day when her widowed aunt, Josie Ashton, had brought her healthy eight-week-old son into the hospital and laid him against her breast. Dear Great-Aunt Josie, with her abrupt manner and her outspokenness, whom Magenta hadn’t seen for at least ten years. But the woman had had no qualms, she remembered, about answering her mother’s cry for help when a sick daughter and the arrival of a new grandson had been too much for Jeanette James to cope with.

She was sobbing equally, though, for the way her mind had blanked out her child’s father. How could she have forgotten him? she agonised, feeling the loss for her son, for the lack of a father figure in his life, rather than for herself. What had he done that had driven her subconscious into shut down so completely? What had she done? she wondered, suddenly seized by the frightening possibility that she might somehow deserve his condemnation.

For heaven’s sake, think! she urged herself, desperate for answers.

But the floodgates that had started to open refused to budge any further, and by the time she arrived at her interview the following week, she felt worn out from the effort of trying to force them apart.

‘I see from your CV that you only acquired your qualification in Business Studies over the last eighteen months, and that you didn’t work anywhere on a permanent basis for the preceding four years,’ said the older of the two women who were interviewing her.

There was a middle-aged man there too, who suddenly chipped in with, ‘May I ask what you were doing in the meantime?’

‘I’ve been bringing up my son,’ Magenta supplied, relieved to be able to say it without any hesitation in her speech, especially when she felt as though she were facing an inquisition.

The interview was for the post of PA to the marketing manager of a rapidly expanding hotel chain, and Magenta had gone for a totally sophisticated image. With her hair up, and wearing a tailored grey suit and maroon camisole, with the stripes in the silk scarf around her neck blending the two colours, she didn’t think she could have looked smarter if she had tried.

She was desperate to get this job to help her pay off her mounting debts so that she could stay on in her flat and give her child all the security and comforts she herself had never had. For that reason she had chosen not to disclose everything about herself when she had applied for this position three weeks ago, certain that the reason she hadn’t been offered any of the endless list of the other jobs she had applied for was because she had been too forthcoming with the truth.

But this job looked as if it was hers—particularly as the older woman on the other side of the desk was making no secret of the fact that she favoured Magenta over the only other candidate on the shortlist.

‘And you won’t find it a problem dividing your time between the demands of the office and those of a five-year-old?’ The younger, fair-haired woman, by the name of Lana Barleythorne, was challenging her. ‘He can’t have been at school very long...’

‘Well over a year,’ Magenta supplied, proud of how bright and advanced for his age her little boy was. ‘And I do have very satisfactory childcare.’ She didn’t tell them about Great-Aunt Josie, who had shown her and Theo such unconditional love when they had needed it most.

Her answer seemed to please her interviewers, because the more matronly of the two women was now explaining that the marketing manager for whom she’d be working was attending a conference that day but had asked if Magenta would be prepared to come in and meet her later in the week.

Yes! Had she been on her own Magenta would have punched the air in triumph. ‘Of course,’ she answered calmly instead, hoping she didn’t look too desperately relieved.

She was still trying to keep her concentration on what they were saying, and to stop herself grinning from ear to ear, when a knock had her gaze swivelling across the large modern office to the tall man in an immaculate dark suit who was striding in.

Andreas! Magenta tried to force his name past her lips but no sound came out.

What was he doing here? she wondered, aghast. And why had he barged in dressed like that, as though he had every right to?

‘Mr Visconti...’ The older woman, looking surprised, was getting to her feet, but a silent command from him had her subsiding back onto her chair. ‘This is Miss James,’ she explained. ‘We were just about to wind up her interview.’

‘I know.’

The deep voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. But he hadn’t yet looked her way and Magenta guessed that he hadn’t connected the name with her or realised that it was his ex the woman was referring to, now sitting there in a state of shock.

‘That’s why I came in.’

The impact of his sudden entrance had made her go weak all over, she realised, and then he suddenly glanced her way and his intensely blue eyes met the stunned velvety-brown of hers.