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

Glory was trembling and she couldn’t help herself. It had been five years since she had seen him. Five long years that had taken her from girl to woman but, in the blink of an eye, all that painfully acquired maturity was wrenched from her by the simple act of Rafaello walking into the same room. She gazed at him in shock, for nothing could have prepared her for the strength of her own reaction. At eighteen, her cure had been steadily and repeatedly telling herself that she had romanticised and embellished her image of him beyond belief. And there he stood, every inch of him a blatant rejection of such wishful thinking …

Six feet two inches tall, much taller than she had allowed him to be in her memory, and with the wide shoulders, broad chest, narrow hips and long muscular legs of a natural athlete. Not even that formal fine grey pinstripe suit so superbly tailored to his powerful frame could shield her from the acknowledgement that whatever he had been doing in recent years he had not been allowing himself to run to seed.

Having only reached as high in her appraisal as the pristine white collar encircling the elegant knot on his dark red silk tie, Glory tipped her head back and ran headlong into the stunning effect of brilliant dark eyes fringed by inky individual lashes that stood out against his smooth olive skin. Mouth dry and heart suddenly racing so fast that it felt as if it was lodged in her throat, Glory just stared back, dragged at terrifying speed up onto the heights of helpless excitement.

‘Take a seat,’ Rafaello urged with complete calm.

Her big blue eyes widened slightly. All around her the atmosphere was churning with so much fiery tension that she felt dizzy. Yet he was not turning a single strand of that luxuriant black hair so well-styled to his arrogant dark head. He felt nothing … he felt nothing, Glory realised, and she felt gutted. Even as he went through the polite motions of lifting a chair with one lean brown hand and planting it helpfully beside her, she was incapable of suppressing the sudden violent rise of tempestuous emotion attacking her.

Memory and bitter pain seemed to coalesce inside her. She saw the worst moment of her life afresh. Five years ago. Rafaello kissing that snobby redhead whose father was a merchant banker, standing Glory up in the restaurant that had been their place. His well-bred friends had been very amused by her tearful flight but equally relieved that Rafaello had dumped the gardener’s daughter with her local-yokel accent and lack of further education.

Stepping behind her, Rafaello curved light hands to her stiff arms and guided her down into the chair. Like a child who had just seen a very nasty accident, she sat there staring straight ahead of her while she crushed out that tormenting recollection of her humiliation and sought to resurrect her defences.

‘When people ask to see me, they usually talk a mile a minute because my time is valuable,’ Rafaello spelt out in the same collected dark drawl.

‘Maybe I don’t know what to say … I mean, it’s kind of traumatic … I mean, awkward,’ Glory stressed in an uneven rush, ‘seeing you again …’

Rafaello strolled with fluid grace back into her line of vision. He lounged back against the edge of his fancy desk and dealt her a smooth smile that somehow turned her churning tummy cold as ice. ‘I don’t feel at all awkward, Glory.’

Glory focused on his tie with deadly concentration. ‘Well, I’m sure you’re not wondering what I’m doing here, so I’ll just get on with it …’

‘Hopefully,’ Rafaello encouraged.

Just when she was about to break into her prepared speech, her mind went blank again on the helpless acknowledgement that she just loved his voice: that husky Italian accent that purred along every syllable and transformed the plainest word into something special. Something special that danced down her spine like a caress. Caress?

Cheeks crimsoning, Glory broke back into harried speech. ‘First I want to say how very sorry I am for what my brother did. Sam was very much in the wrong. I mean, he was brought up to respect other people’s property just as I was but he’s very young—’

‘I am aware of that,’ Rafaello said rather drily. ‘Do you think you could bring yourself to look me in the face? It’s rather distracting to have someone addressing my tie.’

A nervous giggle bubbled up in Glory’s throat and escaped in a rather choky sound. She lifted her chin, tilted back her honey-blonde head.

‘Better, cara,’ Rafaello pronounced, gazing at her with hooded dark eyes that gave her the shivers all over again.

‘It’s not really better for me,’ Glory muttered helplessly. ‘I’m so nervous that I keep on forgetting what I’m saying.’

‘Nervous? Of me?’ Rafaello purred like a prowling predator. ‘Surely not?’

All of a sudden, she felt controlled. Like a little toy train being wound up and set on a circular track he had already laid out. She stared at him. Lethal, dark and dangerous but so undeniably gorgeous that the average woman forgot the danger. He was so still, almost as if he was letting her gaze her fill, and suddenly she was past caring and greedy where minutes earlier she had been cautious. That lean bronzed face had haunted her dreams but had always blurred in daylight. The hard, high cheekbones, the strong nose, the beautiful, sensual mouth. She was looking for the cruelty that she had found in him too late to protect herself. But all she could recognise was his aura of tempered steel toughness, his incredibly intimidating self-command and the amount of authority he could put out even when in a relaxed pose.

‘Let’s chat for a while,’ Rafaello suggested, stretching out a lean hand to stab a button on some piece of office equipment and ordering coffee for two. ‘I doubt that we have any herbal tea on the premises.’

‘Coffee will be fine.’ Chat? Chat about what? What did they have to chat about?

‘Where are you living now?’ Rafaello enquired casually.

‘Near where I work—’

‘With?’

‘Nobody. It’s a bedsit—’

‘In?’

‘A house …?’ Glory asked, transfixed by the questions flying like bullets at her and unable to keep up.

Rafaello sighed. ‘I meant … where is the bedsit situated?’

‘Birmingham,’ she told him.

‘I always thought of you as a country girl.’

‘There aren’t many jobs going in the country these days,’ Glory pointed out tightly, thinking that his idea of chatting more closely resembled an interrogation. But then why shouldn’t he be curious? Being curious was only human, wasn’t it?

‘So where do you work?’

The knock on the door and the rattle of approaching china came as a welcome interruption. Obviously coffee was always on offer at the speed of light: a tray sitting already prepared and some fancy machine ready to dispense the hot, viciously strong brew he favoured. Her mind was going all over the place again. He never had taken to her herbal tea, Glory recalled dimly.

‘You were saying …?’ As a china cup and saucer were slid onto the small table that had appeared by her elbow by someone she did not even have the time to look at, Rafaello returned to his rather forbidding concept of casual chat.

‘Was I?’ Glory reached for the coffee. ‘Oh, yes, where I work. A factory—’

‘What kind of factory?’

‘Well … it’s nothing very interesting …’

Brilliant dark eyes settled on her. ‘You might be surprised at what interests me.’

Glory jerked a slight shoulder in submission and her coffee slopped out of the cup into the saucer. ‘The factory makes polystyrene for packaging and all sorts of other things …’

Rafaello continued to observe her as though her every word was fascinating. ‘And what do you do there?’

‘I pack it … the polystyrene. Sometimes I do other jobs—’

Rafaello was studying her with intense concentration. ‘And for how long have you been thrilling to the excitement of the factory floor?’

‘Look, it’s not exciting but I work alongside a nice bunch of people and the pay’s not bad.’ Her beautiful eyes reflecting reproach at that tone of sarcasm, Glory coloured. ‘I’ve been there two years.’

‘Forgive me for asking, cara,’ Rafaello drawled softly, ‘but what happened to your burning ambition to become a model?’

Glory paled and stiffened. ‘It wasn’t exactly a burning ambition. As you know, I had that offer and it … well, it just didn’t pan out—’

‘Why not?’

The pink tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten the taut line of her lower lip. She was extremely uncomfortable with his line of questioning and dismayed by the extent of his interest. His dark gaze dropped to her soft, full mouth and lingered with visible force. Sudden tension seemed to make the atmosphere sizzle. She felt her lips tingle as if he were touching them and her breathing seemed to choke off at source. Her bra felt too tight for her full breasts and her nipples pinched tight into straining buds of sensitivity. In dismay, she began sipping at the coffee she didn’t want with a hand that shook. Please no, she was praying, please, no, don’t let me be feeling like this again …

‘Why not?’ Rafaello persisted without remorse. ‘Why didn’t the modelling offer work out?’

He was going to dig and dig until he hit paydirt, Glory registered in mortification, and so she decided to just be honest. ‘It wasn’t the kind of modelling I wouldn’ve done. It was what they call “glamour” stuff … you know … like where you take your clothes off for the camera, rather than put clothes on?’