The Italian's Rags-To-Riches Wife

‘He never wrote, not once. Never answered any of your mother’s letters. She was heartbroken—just heartbroken. Not a single letter, not a single kind word to her. He’d taken her innocence, used her and thrown her away!’

Laura’s expression hardened. That had been the reality she had grown up with.

Father? She didn’t have one. She never had.

And she didn’t have a grandfather either. Whatever the man waiting for her inside wanted to call himself.

‘This way.’

The terse, impersonal tones of Allesandro di Vincenzo interrupted her baleful thoughts. She was being directed indoors, and with an increasing sense of oppression she walked inside into a vast marble-floored entrance hall.

Allesandro strode past her, towards a pair of double doors beyond. He threw them open and walked in. Tomaso was there, at his desk by the window. He looked up immediately. There was a taut expression on his face. Tense. Expectant.

Suddenly, for all that the old man had manipulated him shamelessly, Allesandro felt he could not do this to him. He should go in first, warn the old man what he was about to get by way of a granddaughter. Then he crushed his compunction. Tomaso was playing hardball—deliberately using Allesandro’s desire for control of Viale-Vincenzo in order to make him do what he wanted. And if what he wanted was his deeply unpleasant granddaughter, he could have her.

Behind him Allesandro could hear the heavy plod of unfeminine feet shod in flat clumpy shoes that no Italian woman this side of a lunatic asylum would even have possessed, let alone worn.

The old man was getting to his feet.

‘Tomaso—your granddaughter,’ announced Allesandro, his voice studiously expressionless. ‘Laura Stowe.’

But Tomaso was not looking at him. He was staring past the younger man to the female figure that had walked in behind him. Allesandro watched his face as the old man’s expression changed.

It became bland, unreadable.

‘Laura—’ said Tomaso, and held his hand towards her.

The girl was standing there, ignoring the hand that stretched out to her. Her face was shuttered, the way it had been the entire journey. The lack of expression made the girl look like a pudding—one of those stodgy English ones, with suet in them.

‘I am your grandfather,’ said Tomaso. The face might be bland, Allesandro thought, eyes narrowing minutely, but the voice was not. It was audibly suppressing emotion.

Something flickered angrily in the girl’s face.

‘My grandfather is dead. You are merely the father of the man who ruined my mother’s life.’

The aggression in her tone was unequivocal. For a moment Allesandro saw new emotion in Tomaso’s face. Shock. Naked and raw.

The girl held her pitiless gaze.

‘The only reason I’m here,’ she told him, ‘is because that man—’ she nodded curtly in Allesandro’s direction, and he felt a spurt of vicious anger both at her manner, and at what he knew was coming next ‘—bribed me to come.’

‘He bribed you?’ The old man’s voice was a disbelieving echo.

‘Yes.’ Allesandro watched, aghast, as the girl spoke bluntly. ‘I don’t want anything to do with you, or anyone connected with the man who treated my mother so unforgivably! I can’t imagine why you thought I would have the slightest desire or interest in meeting you—any more than the man who fathered me had the slightest desire or interest in my existence, or in what he’d done to my mother!’ A sharp, tight breath made her pause, and then she went on. ‘I’m sorry your son is dead—but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing. Because your son wasn’t anything to do with me. He made that totally clear even before I was born!’

Shock edged Tomaso’s face. ‘This is not how I—This is not—’ He faltered. He looked across at the girl, half turned away. ‘I thought—I thought you would be glad—glad that I had sought you out…’

His face greyed, and then suddenly his hand was clutching at his heart. Allesandro started forward, catching him as he fell.

The next hour was endless. Allesandro had immediately summoned an ambulance, and Tomaso had been rushed to hospital. To Allesandro’s relief he was soon pronounced out of danger, even though he was being kept in overnight for monitoring.

Whatever kind of seizure Tomaso had had, Allesandro knew only one thing. That harpy, with her venomous tirade, had been responsible. His eyes darkened now, as he glared at the girl sitting stony-faced in the car taking them back to Tomaso’s villa. Her hands were clenched in her lap. She’d sat just like that in the hospital lobby while Allesandro had accompanied Tomaso into the ward.

‘Is he going to be all right?’ she asked suddenly.

‘You care?’ Allesandro derided.

‘I told you—I’m sorry his son is dead, and I’m sorry he collapsed. I wouldn’t want him to die. I wouldn’t want anyone to die.’ Her voice was terse and jerky.

‘Big of you,’ he replied. ‘But if you really want to be big, you’d better do what he wants and stay at the villa until he’s well enough to see you. God knows why he should want to, but he said he did before I left him.’

He got no answer from her, only a shoulder turning away from him, maximising the distance between them. The movement irritated him. If there was a female in the world less likely to engage his interest, she was beyond imagining.

CHAPTER THREE

LAURA sat on the bed in the bedroom she’d been shown to by one of the household staff, and stared out of the window. The view was beautiful. Formal Italianate gardens, just like in a guidebook, and then a vista of olive groves, narrow dark cypresses and rolling hills.

She turned away. She didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to be in Italy, in her grandfather’s villa—

He’s not your grandfather—don’t think of him that way!

Genes didn’t make you family. She had half her father’s genes, but that didn’t make her his daughter. It certainly hadn’t in his eyes, anyway.

She lay back on the bed. She was tired. She’d had to catch an early bus to Exeter, then the coach to Heathrow, then the flight here. Her eyelids grew heavy…

She must have nodded off, because the next thing she knew there was a maid in the room, informing her that dinner was served. Reluctantly Laura went downstairs, prudently taking a book with her. She’d have rather eaten in her room, but didn’t want to be a nuisance.

A manservant waiting at the foot of the sweeping stairs conducted her to a room opening off the hall. She walked in, and stopped dead.

Allesandro di Vincenzo was there, already seated at the table. As she clomped in he got to his feet. There was a sheaf of papers beside his place, and he’d obviously been reading them.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ she blurted, before she could stop herself.

‘Alas, no,’ came his reply. It was smooth, but terse. And very unfriendly. ‘Much though I would have preferred to return to Rome, I would not dream of abandoning a hospitalised Tomaso to nothing more than your loving presence.’

Laura felt colour mottle her cheeks.

‘How is he?’ she asked, as she went and took the only other place laid at the vast table—directly opposite Allesandro. It made him seem closer than she wanted him to be. But then she didn’t want him anywhere near her at all anyway.

The feeling was doubtless mutual, she realised, intercepting a black look from him as she pulled in her chair.

‘His condition is stable,’ he said. ‘As if you care.’

Her colour mounted. ‘I don’t want him to die—I told you that.’

‘And as I told you—that’s big of you,’ Allesandro returned. He frowned. ‘Do you have nothing better to wear for dinner?’ he demanded, his eyes flicking dismissively over her clothes.

‘No,’ said Laura. If she’d known he was going to be here she’d have insisted on a meal in her room. He was the last person she wanted to spend time with. She opened her book and started to read. To her relief, her unwelcome dining partner returned his attention to his papers.