Mistress Bought and Paid For

Her thin shoulders slumped, guilt racking her. It was a familiar feeling. Things always went horribly wrong, and it seemed that it was her fault…

When Lydia had been ten years old she had survived a boating accident in which her father and her kid brother had drowned. Her mother, Virginia, had been distraught. ‘This is your fault!’ she had screamed furiously at her daughter. ‘Who was it who begged and begged to go on that stupid boat trip? You killed them. You killed the two of them!’

And, even though other people had hushed the hysterical older woman, Lydia had known that her grieving parent was only speaking the unpalatable truth. Then, when her father’s business had gone bankrupt, and their comfortable standard of living had vanished overnight, Lydia had known that she was to blame for that as well. It had been a huge relief when she’d discovered just a few years later that she had the earning power to give that luxury lifestyle back to her mother. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one Lydia had made a small fortune as a model.

But then, Lydia acknowledged wretchedly, she had become selfish—stupidly, wickedly selfish. And shortsighted. She’d hated modelling, and a bad experience and a broken heart had persuaded her to leave the fashion world behind and train as a garden designer. Everything that since had gone wrong could be traced back to that single foolish and fanciful decision…

Still in fear of the press cameras that had greeted her arrival at the police station, Lydia walked stiffly out to the reception area. Thankfully the only person to show the slightest interest in her appearance was the small curvaceous brunette seated there. Her cousin Gwenna stood up, frowning when she saw the exhaustion etched on Lydia’s face. Yet the younger woman still looked so incredibly beautiful that even Gwenna found it hard not to stare. The pure lines of Lydia’s delicate bone structure, allied to her dazzling blue eyes and the mane of naturally pale blonde hair, took most people’s breath away.

‘Gwenna?’ Lydia was dismayed that the other woman had subjected herself to the embarrassment of coming to the police station on her behalf. ‘You shouldn’t have come—’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Gwenna scolded her in Welsh as she marched her much taller cousin out into the night and on to the car park, with her head held high and her chin at a determined angle, defying the camera flashes. ‘You’re family—and where else should I be? I’m here to take you home—’

Lydia was too touched by Gwenna’s appearance to be able to find the right words in Welsh, a language that she had only recently rediscovered. She swallowed hard on the thickness in her throat and climbed into Gwenna’s ancient hatchback. As a young child she had often stayed in Gwenna’s Welsh-speaking home while her own parents were abroad. Eighteen months back, when Lydia’s life had been in awful turmoil, Gwenna had phoned to invite her to use the family farm as a bolthole. The generous warmth of that offer had meant a great deal to Lydia at a time when her friends had abandoned her.

‘I really appreciate you doing this, but I think you should forget that you know me for a while—’

‘I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear that,’ Gwenna interposed, in probably much the same no-nonsense tone that she employed with the teenagers she taught. In her early thirties, she had short dark hair that shone as though it had been polished.

When Lydia unlocked the door of the tiny terraced house where she now lived, Gwenna headed straight for the kitchen. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea while you nip upstairs and pack a bag.’

Lydia stiffened. ‘No, I’m not coming home with you. This is a small community and you have to live and work here. You mustn’t get caught up in my problems.’

Gwenna turned. ‘Lydia—’

‘No…’ Fierce conviction made Lydia’s soft voice unusually firm. ‘I mean it. Think of your father. He’s barely over the loss of your mother. Let’s not upset him with this as well.’

The brunette’s look of disconcertion told Lydia that she had stumbled on the one argument that would work—for Gwenna was protective of her elderly parent.

‘But thanks for caring,’ Lydia tacked on gently.

Sudden anger brightened Gwenna’s troubled gaze. ‘But it’s not a matter of caring. You didn’t take that money and we all know who did!’

Her colour fluctuating at that assertion, Lydia breathed, ‘Maybe you think you know—’

‘Come off it! You’re so straight you can’t tell a lie without crossing your fingers!’ her cousin told her impatiently. ‘Do you expect me to keep quiet while you take the rap for a woman who couldn’t care less about you?’

Losing colour at that blunt statement, Lydia switched on the kettle. Gwenna had never been able to understand the nature of Lydia’s relationship with her mother. The brunette’s family had been blessed with a quiet and secure lifestyle, while Virginia had survived tragedy and a succession of thoroughly unreliable men that would have broken a lesser woman. ‘My mother has had a very tough life—’

‘Look, she was telling you that when you were five years old, making you fetch and carry like a little slave while she moaned about the horrors of motherhood. And let’s not overlook the fact that between them your mother and your stepfather have managed to spend every penny you ever earned!’

There was reproach in Lydia’s troubled gaze. ‘You can’t blame them because the nightclub failed and I lost everything last year. I was naïve about the amount of money I’d made as a model. I thought it would last a lifetime—’

‘It would have done if you had only been keeping yourself, and not Virginia and Dennis with their huge house and flash cars. I can’t believe that you had the slightest personal interest in opening a nightclub either.’ Her companion sighed.

Lydia said nothing. When she had stopped modelling she had effectively dispossessed her stepfather of his job managing her career and her money. Agreeing to provide the capital for a nightclub had seemed the least she could do. Sadly, the enterprise had crashed. But Lydia had come to terms with the loss of her financial security. Although she was only twenty-two years old, she was well used to picking herself up after a disappointment.

Busily engaged in making tea, Gwenna was wishing that she could get her hands on Lydia’s greedy mother and thieving stepfather. Given the chance she would soon tell them what she thought of them! The couple had turned Lydia into the family cash cow, and had enjoyed the high life on the lucrative proceeds of her modelling career. Although Virginia had never worked herself, she had always been able to spend like there was no tomorrow.

‘You have to deal with this,’ Gwenna told her cousin impatiently. ‘Virginia stole the money you raised from the fashion show and spent it—’

Lydia shook her head in tired disagreement. ‘Dennis had left her with a pile of debts. She knew I couldn’t help and she panicked.’

‘Stop making excuses for her. She forged your signature on the cheques that emptied the Happy Holidays account. She did everything she could to make you look like the guilty party, and now she’s done a runner! Don’t let her do this to you,’ Gwenna pleaded in frustration. ‘A criminal conviction will wreck your life. How many people will employ an ex-con?’

When Gwenna had gone home, Lydia retrieved the letter that she’d seen lying on her doormat and read it with a growing hollow feeling inside. It was a brief note from a couple who had accepted her quote to design their garden. They would have been her first proper clients since she had completed her college course. But they had dropped this letter through her letterbox earlier today to say that they had changed their minds. She suspected that what had changed their minds had been news of her visit to the local police station. No doubt her face would be all over the tabloids tomorrow morning.

Later, in bed, she tossed and turned. The evening before she’d had to go out to buy food. An odd little pool of silence had seemed to enclose her as she’d packed her groceries at the supermarket. When she’d looked up, a couple of women had been treating her to a contemptuous appraisal. Evidently rumours of the stolen money had already spread to the highly efficient local grapevine. It had been a disturbing experience.

On the edge of an uneasy doze, Lydia was yanked rudely back to full wakefulness by the sound of a crash and glass breaking. Switching on the bedside light, she got out of bed. Had someone smashed a bottle outside on the street? She went downstairs and found the window in her small cosy sitting room broken. She hovered in the doorway, wondering how such a thing could have happened, and then she saw something lying on the floor in the middle of the shattered glass. It was a stone with a piece of paper wrapped round it. Frowning she spread it out to read.

YOU THIEVING BITCH GO BACK TO WHERE YOU BELONG!

The brutal capitals were written in red felt-tip. Her heart started to hammer like crazy and she felt physically sick. She made herself fetch a brush and dustpan to clean up the glass. She propped an old cupboard door from the coal shed over the gaping hole and slowly climbed back up the stairs. But if sleep had been elusive before, it was now impossible, and she lay still and quiet and barely breathing, flinching at every sound she heard.

Having finally fallen asleep around seven the next morning, she was still in bed when the doorbell went at ten. She assumed that it was the postman and, knowing that he would not wait long, rose in haste, pulling on her cotton wrap and racing downstairs to answer the door.

As her stunned gaze took in the very tall black-haired male outside on the street, she was gripped by total disbelief and pinned to the spot in complete stillness. Cristiano Andreotti. Even though she thought he could only be a figment of her imagination, the compelling effect of his exotic dark charisma and hard-edged masculinity still knocked her for six. Her heart started pounding and her soft pink mouth opened on a soundless ooh.

His magnificent bone structure was accentuated by the smooth olive planes of his high cheekbones. Although he shaved twice daily, faint blue-black shading still emphasised his strong jaw and beautifully modelled mouth. But her mind refused to move on from recognition to acceptance. Because Cristiano Andreotti did not belong on the doorstep of a terraced house in the back street of a nondescript Welsh market town. His natural milieu was much more exclusive, and always redolent of the privilege of the very rich.

Cristiano studied her with unflinching intensity. He had never seen her without make-up before. He saw the changes in her, picked up on every flaw with the eagerness of a man who had dimly expected and possibly even hoped to be disappointed in her. She had lost weight. She was pale, and her tiredness was patent. Her mane of fair hair fell in a tangle round her slight shoulders, no longer glossy and styled into smooth layers of silk by a professional hand. In the midst of cataloguing those differences with the precision of a male to whom no detail was too small, he met eyes as blue as sapphires. Just as suddenly he realised that she was, if anything, more breathtakingly beautiful than ever. Only this time around she was as nature had made her, with glorious eyes, skin like clotted cream and full, pouting mouth. Desire ripped through his big powerful frame with the dangerous force of a storm tide.

‘May I come in?’ he enquired lazily, his rich, resonant drawl wrapping round her rigid spinal cord like a silk caress. The habit of command and high expectation was so engrained in every syllable that it did not even occur to her to deny him.

CHAPTER TWO

ONLY when Cristiano broke the pounding silence could Lydia credit the reality of his appearance. Snatching in a startled breath, she blinked, her long brown lashes fluttering as she struggled to get a hold on the bone-deep shock gripping her. Even in that very first moment she knew that the flame of her hatred for him burned as bright as ever. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip and her legs felt wobbly. She stared fixedly at him, controlled by a heady mixture of fear and fascination, curiosity and loathing.

Predictably, Cristiano took advantage of her astonishment to move forward, and she automatically retreated. Although she was five foot eleven in her bare feet, he still towered over her by a comfortable six inches. A snaking little frisson of awareness curled somewhere low in her belly, and she went rigid at the novelty of that almost forgotten sensation. All senses on hyper-alert, she could feel the tender tips of her breasts tingle and pinch.

Hot colour flared through her pallor as shame and confusion filled her, and suddenly she found her voice. ‘What do you want?’

Cristiano closed the front door with a casual, lean brown hand. He was feeling his power and enjoying it. ‘Don’t you know?’

Painfully embarrassed by the way her treacherous body had reacted to him, Lydia tilted her chin in a defiant manner that would have surprised any one of her relatives. She felt trapped and angry and raw. Deep down inside her lurked the wounding recollection of just how much she had once cared for Cristiano Andreotti and how savagely he had hurt her. It didn’t show on the surface, but he had changed her—and not for the better. ‘How could I know why you’re here?’

‘I thought some sixth sense survival instinct might kick in…’ Cristiano surveyed her with liquid dark eyes full of mockery. ‘Might spell out a simple message.’

‘Obviously not.’ She folded her arms in a defensive gesture and tried to still the trembling aftershock that was threatening to take her over.

‘I’m here because I want to see you…obviously,’ Cristiano traded, his sexy accent wrapping round the syllables in the most extraordinarily melodic way.

Without having realised what she was doing, Lydia found she was staring up at him, at those brilliant, beautiful dark eyes that had haunted her dreams. Eyes that betrayed only the most superficial emotion and her own reflection. He gave nothing away. He was famous for a detachment that veered on indifference, even icy coldness. She had felt ten feet tall when she’d made him laugh or smile.

Fighting that tide of memory, she shook her head as though to clear it. She strove feverishly to blank him out, remembering fearfully how it had been for her for a crazy couple of months when he had been all she could think about, when his mere presence had been enough to ensure that she was blind to everybody and everything but him.

‘I don’t want you here…’ Even as she spoke, she knew that the remedy of asking him to leave was in her hands, but that for reasons she was afraid to examine she could not yet bring herself to actually tell him to go.