Vengeful Seduction

‘Perhaps he’s lost,’ he volunteered politely, to which she was tempted to point out that he could only have found himself lost in a town the size of theirs if he was a mental incompetent, in which case was she really doing the right thing by selling him her father’s company?

He vanished out of the room and ten minutes later, having quietly convinced herself that Mr Squires, the invisible man, was definitely not in the running as a prospective buyer for the company, she heard the door being pushed open.

She automatically looked around.

The shock she felt on seeing Lorenzo Cicolla standing in the doorway was as great as if she had looked out of the window and casually seen a mushroom cloud hanging over the town, announcing nuclear war.

He strolled into the room, not taking his eyes off her face, and she stood up, drained of colour. She was shaking, trembling like a leaf, like someone who had seen a ghost. Her mind felt as though it was being bombarded by so many images, so many feelings, that any minute it would shut down from overload.

‘Lorenzo Cicolla! What are you doing here? I’m expecting a Mr Squires—he should be here any moment. You’re not Mr Squires,’ was all she managed to get out, which was an achievement since her vocal cords appeared to have deserted her.

She had never expected to see Lorenzo Cicolla again. He had been the stick of dynamite thrown into her young life, blowing it to pieces, and those pieces had never successfully been put together again. But still, she had relegated him to the past. She had locked that haunting image into a safe room and she had tried damned hard never to open the door.

What was he doing here?

‘No,’ Lorenzo agreed smoothly, unsmiling, his pale eyes assessing her with arrogant thoroughness. ‘I’m not, am I?’

He sat down in the chair next to her and crossed his legs, and she wished desperately that she could stop staring but she couldn’t. It had been a long time.

The passage of time showed itself in the tiny lines by his eyes and mouth, the hardness of his features, but apart from that she might have been staring at the Lorenzo of old. He had the same terrifying sex-appeal, the same dark, brooding good looks.

‘I apologise for staring,’ Isobel said stiltedly, ‘but I can’t believe that it’s really you, sitting there.’ She threw him a tentative smile which met with a blank wall.

‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ he said abruptly, looking away. ‘I’m afraid the news was rather late in reaching me.’

‘Thank you. Yes. It was a tragic accident.’ Platitudes were becoming easier to mouth. No one felt comfortable with raw emotion and she had learned to control her responses to the polite condolences of neighbours and people in the village.

‘And of course, Jeremy.’

‘Thank you. Of course.’

‘What exactly happened?’

She shrugged and her fingers nervously plucked her wool skirt. ‘The car went out of control. There was a lorry coming in the opposite direction. Jeremy was killed outright. My father——’ she paused and took a deep, stabilising breath ‘—died in the ambulance.’

‘How is your mother coping with it?’

‘Why are you here?’ It was easier to ask that now that she had recovered some of her self-control.

He smiled coolly, and she could see dislike and contempt lurking beneath the surface. It made her blood run cold. ‘Surely we aren’t yet finished with the preliminaries, are we, Isobel? It’s been years—four years to be precise.’

‘Yes. I know. You left this town without a backward glance, Lorenzo.’ Her heart was still beating irregularly and she had the strangest feeling of having stepped into a mad, nonsensical world, like Alice in Wonderland. One blink and it would all disappear. She blinked but nothing disappeared, not even the breathless tension gripping her lungs, making breathing laborious and difficult.

He shrugged. ‘I always knew that I would return, when the time was right.’

‘And why is the time right now?’

‘Because, my dear, I am about to buy your father’s company.’

‘You!’ She looked at him in stunned silence. ‘But Mr Clark said…He told me…’

‘That Mr Squires was interested. Yes. Mr Squires was interested, on my behalf.’

She stood up and began pacing the room, while Lorenzo remained where he was, watching her, his face revealing nothing.

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said at last, standing in front of him but not too close, because something about him was vaguely menacing. Had this been the same man who had fired her passions once upon a time? Surely not!

‘I have never been more serious about anything in my entire life.’

‘But why?’

His lips thinned. ‘Because I like the beauty of the wheel that turns full circle.’

‘Revenge, Lorenzo?’ she whispered incredulously.

‘Oh, revenge is too strong a word.’

‘Then why my father’s company?’

‘It poses an interesting challenge,’ he drawled, but the lazy cruelty was still there in his voice and in the rigid lines of his face.

‘And the fact that my father owned it has nothing to do with it?’

‘A little, I suppose.’ He shrugged dismissively, although his eyes never left her face, not for a second. ‘Besides, I’ve become tired of city life. Chicago has lost its appeal. It will be nice returning here for a while.’ ‘You’ll be coming back here to live?’

‘But of course. What else did you expect?’

Not that. Anything but that, Isobel thought. Four years ago they had parted in anger and bitterness. Words had been spoken, things said…She stifled the memory of her disastrous wedding-day, that awful confrontation in the garden, before he had walked out of her life forever. Had he simply been biding his time until an opportunity such as this arose, or had the death of Jeremy and her father rekindled buried feelings of anger?

‘You don’t look too thrilled with the prospect,’ he said, eyebrows raised, his mouth curling with a hint of cynicism.

‘Of course, it will be nice to see you…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Don’t lie, Isobel. Your face is too transparent.’

She flushed angrily. ‘What do you want me to say? You walk back into town after four years and announce that you plan on settling here, but there’s nothing pleasant about the announcement, is there? You’re not planning on settling here for the good of the community. You’re planning on settling here because you have a chance to settle old scores.’ She looked at him bitterly. ‘Aren’t we both too old for this?’

He banged his fist on the table with such force that Isobel jumped and looked at him warily. He wasn’t going to get violent, was he? Then she laughed nervously to herself. Of course not. How could he in such a public place? Besides, she knew Lorenzo. He had never been a man given to displays of violence.

You don’t know him now, though, a little voice warned. People change. The face she was staring at with apprehension was the face of a stranger, a dark, menacing stranger.

‘Too old?’ he sneered. ‘Too old to forget the past, Isobel?’

‘What happened happened a long time ago…’ She glanced at the door and he followed the line of her eyes with a cold smile.

‘Mr Clark has been told to wait until I am ready.’

‘What?’