Millionaires: Rafaello's Mistress / Damiano's Return / Contract Baby

‘It’s really beautiful.

But not one quarter as beautiful as him, Glory reflected helplessly, scanning his lean, dark, devastating face with dreamy eyes of appreciation. Not once in five years had she known such happiness as she had experienced with him in recent weeks. She could not bring herself to destroy what had been a time of enchantment with the brutally realistic and unwelcome announcement that she was going to have his baby.

So if she was a bit sad now it was only to be expected. What goes around comes around. She had been right, he had been wrong and, whether he knew it or not, their time together was slowly running out. Her body was already changing with pregnancy. The speed of that development filled her with both fascination and fear. Her breasts were tender and the mere smell of certain foods made her nauseous. But surely she could manage to conceal those facts for another few weeks?

Linking sure fingers with hers, Rafaello walked her down the steep steps outside the shop and back into the colourful lively crowds passing through the narrow street. She adored Corfu town: the legacy of tall Italianate buildings adorned with shutters and balconies left behind by four centuries of Venetian rule, the buzz of the streets and cafés, the array of fascinating shops filled with silver, olive wood, needlework and leather-craft items. Even the locals came out to promenade round their town during the long evenings.

‘I suppose now we head for your favourite place,’ Rafaello commented lazily.

‘If you don’t mind …’

A Frenchman had built the Liston as a copy of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. The arched façade filled with fashionable cafés overlooked a lush green cricket pitch surrounded by trees. She adored sitting there to watch the world go by with Rafaello by her side.

‘Why do people keep on staring at us?’ she had asked uncomfortably on her first visit.

‘You are a very beautiful woman.’ His amused but appreciative smile that she should even ask such a question had dissolved the insecure feelings she always struggled to hide from him and made her heart sing. She had a desperate need to believe that she could look like the sort of woman who belonged with him.

While Rafaello ordered wine for himself Glory pored over the ice-cream menu to make her selection. Then she rested back in her comfortable seat to survey him, torn between pain and pleasure. He was a visual joy to her from the crown of his gleaming dark head to the soles of his feet. Nothing about him jarred. She was so much in love with him, she could have shouted it from the rooftops. But, denied that outlet, she burned with inner intensity and quailed in torment at the prospect of tearing herself from him.

Suppressing that miserable awareness, Glory made herself dwell instead on the wonderful days they had shared and the endless nights of mutual passion. One day drifting into the next, seamless, timeless, marred by only the rarest disagreement and resealed by the fastest reconciliations on record. He had taught her to swim but had made several biting comments when he finally realised that she still preferred drifting round the villa pool in a large plastic ring like an overgrown child or just sitting at the foot of the Roman steps, submerged but safe. Only when he had appreciated the fear of deep water that she had overcome initially only for his benefit had he appreciated the level of her achievement. He thought her ring was cute now. He didn’t laugh when she just paddled down on the beach either.

She would carry away memories of wandering through the cool, shaded orchards that surrounded the villa, endlessly talking while they picked a path through the lush green trees laden with velvety peaches, tangerines and cherries beneath the burning blue sky. She would remember the glittering white of the sand-dunes at noon and the dark atmospheric richness of the church dedicated to the island’s revered St Spyridon. But most of all she would cherish the reality that he had never once called her his mistress or treated her with anything less than respect.

‘If you don’t start talking soon about what’s bothering you, cara mia,’ Rafaello murmured with his lustrous dark golden eyes fixed to her with magnetic probing force, ‘I’m likely to get annoyed with you.’

Glory froze as if he had turned a gun on her, dismayed that her façade of contentment had not been as good as she had imagined. It really shook her that he had evidently noted a change in her behaviour.

‘Not that annoyed,’ Rafaello groaned with rueful amusement.

‘I just don’t know why you should think there’s anything bothering me,’ Glory said tautly and she shrugged for good measure, but one of her hands had found its way down to her still flat tummy under the table.

‘You are not a naturally silent woman but for the last few days it’s been as though you’re not quite with me any more, mia preziosa. So what’s wrong? Is it your family? You never mention them but possibly that’s because you’re missing them.’ Rafaello regarded her expectantly.

Glory turned scarlet with discomfiture. She never mentioned her family, not only because she could not bear to recall the arrangement that had brought her out to Corfu in the first place but also because she dreaded any further reference to that five thousand pounds which had branded her as mercenary in his estimation.

‘If you’re discreet I don’t see why you shouldn’t phone them,’ Rafaello proffered with the air of a male making a generous gesture.

‘But … but I’ve been calling them every few days since I got here,’ Glory admitted in some bewilderment.

Rafaello tensed in evident shock.

Glory frowned. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t stay on the phone long.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Rafaello breathed in a charged undertone, golden eyes smouldering. ‘Even though I asked you to be discreet, you have been chattering your dizzy head off to your father and your brother every few days?’

Glory paled and stiffened and then slowly nodded, wondering why on earth he was looking so angry.

Rafaello vented a single foreign word that sounded as though it might be a rude word.

Glory gulped and wondered if her own excusable omissions lay at the heart of his annoyance. Feeling horribly guilty, she muttered, ‘You know, I never thanked you for being so very kind to Sam … I just didn’t want to discuss all that stuff that happened. I’m sorry, I—’

‘Shut up,’ Rafaello urged not quite levelly, evidently striving to get a grip on his temper and not one whit cooled by her sincere offering of gratitude. Almost simultaneously he rose from his seat, tossed some banknotes down on the table and strode down the steps to await her.

Her own temper rising, Glory moved to join him at slow-motion speed.

‘Have you the smallest conception of what you have done?’ Rafaello ground out in a raw undertone.

‘Don’t you talk to me like I’m a brick short of the full load!’ Glory warned him in a sideways hiss.

‘I hate to state the obvious, bella mia …’ Rafaello countered grittily, grasping her hand and resisting all her covert attempts to pull free of his hold ‘… but if you have cheerfully let your family know that you’re out here shacked up with me—’

‘Of course I haven’t done that!’ Glory snapped even as pain stabbed her at his use of that particular description of their relationship.

Rafaello stopped dead and turned to survey her. ‘You … haven’t?’

‘Dizzy I may be sometimes but not downright thick. You think I’m proud of being here with you? Well, you think wrong and I’d be ashamed to let my father or my brother know how low I’ve sunk!’ Glory completed in a shaking but fierce undertone.

Rafaello stared at her, his fabulous bone-structure prominent beneath his bronzed skin, his hard gaze darker than the blackest night. He said nothing and it was Glory who turned away first and began walking back in the direction of the car again. She was feeling sick. Her legs didn’t feel strong enough to hold her upright either.

He unlocked the passenger door of the car first. She climbed in, her lovely face pale as marble and as expressionless, but inside herself she was just dying. She had not meant to say all that but he had hurt and provoked her. He swung in beside her and the horrible silence pulsed.

She laced her hands together to stop them trembling. ‘Dad and Sam just think I’ve moved and they haven’t asked the address because they don’t write me letters. They assume I’m using a public phone with a number they can’t call me back on. I didn’t have to tell any lies,’ she explained in tight voice. ‘Neither of them has ever visited me in Birmingham, so they don’t really have much curiosity about my life there.’

‘I’m sorry. I misunderstood,’ Rafaello breathed with icy cool, but there was an underlying roughness to his accented drawl. ‘I employ your father. I thought your brother was a decent kid. I asked you to be discreet for their sake and yours, not my own.’

‘No point advertising that you’re slumming on a temporary basis, is there?’ Glory heard herself say nastily. ‘After all, now you’ve dressed me up in the designer togs, nobody could possibly tell that you took me off a factory floor!’

If the previous silence had pulsed, the one that followed that blunt and inflammatory response fairly sizzled. Again Rafaello said nothing, which really infuriated her. She knew she would have been better saying nothing too but entire speeches that would rip him to shreds were trembling in readiness on the tip of her tongue and holding them back tortured her. He drove off. She would have liked him to grate through the gears and jerk the wheel to demonstrate emotional upset but he drove as if he had just come through an advanced driving test with pronounced care and caution.

She kept quiet for a whole ten minutes and then it got too much for her. ‘I really hate you, Rafaello Grazzini!’

‘Naturally you do,’ he murmured flatly. ‘Sex and debt are hardly a satisfactory basis for any relationship. My choice, my mistake.’

Tears drenched Glory’s eyes in a tidal wave. She squeezed her eyes shut, hating herself for tearing away the barriers and leaving them both without defence. But at the same time she was powerfully tempted to kick him. Why was he making things worse? Was he fed up with her, bored already? But what did it matter if he was? Wasn’t she leaving anyway? For how could she stay with him when her waistline was going to vanish?

Back at the villa, she locked herself in the bathroom. Ripping off her clothes, she got into the shower and turned it on full so that she could sob to her heart’s content. It was an hour before she crept out, eyes stinging from all the cold water she had splashed in them. Mercifully the bedroom was unoccupied. She dug into a drawer for a nightdress, the first she had worn since her arrival, and crawled into bed.

Somewhere in the early hours when she was lying there sleepless, drowning in buckets of self-pity, the bedroom door opened. She froze. She had not bothered to close the curtains and in the clear moonlight she saw a bronzed male silhouette. It was Rafaello, only a white towel knotted round his lean hips. She shut her eyes tight and seconds later noted the slight give in the mattress as Rafaello sank down on it.

She rolled over and arrived on his side of the bed only a moment after he did. Expelling his breath in a slightly startled hiss, Rafaello closed his arms round her. ‘We have to talk …’

Panic assailed Glory, for she did not want to talk. He might not appreciate it but the die was already cast. Nothing could be resolved, nothing could be changed. Gliding up over his lean, hard, muscular body in the circle of his arms, she pressed herself close and found his mouth for herself. For a horrendous instant as he tautened in surprise at the blatant invitation she thought he might push her away. Then, just as suddenly, he reacted by pinning her beneath him and deepening that kiss with a driving hunger that shook her.

In the moonlight he threw up his head again and scanned her with fathomless dark eyes. ‘I want you but—’

Glory had no desire to hear what came after. Sinking desperate fingers into the black hair still damp from the shower, she drew him down to her again. A throaty groan escaped him but she was stronger when it came to the wiles of a temptress. She knew what he could not resist. She knew what drove him wild. Within minutes he was as much the prisoner of his own hunger as she was and way past rational speech.

There was none of the long, teasing rise to gradual excitement with which they had wiled away many a long afternoon. She had unleashed a storm of fierce passion that was well out of her control. He sank into her with delicious driving force, sent her out of her senses with pleasure, and every time she reached a peak it would all start again. A seemingly endless cycle of raw excitement and ecstatic satisfaction left her drained and rather shell-shocked around dawn, when he finally fell into a much-deserved sleep of exhaustion.