Rafaello's Mistress

Her companion kept on trying to chat her up but she played dumb. The closer they got to the imposing door and the foot of the corridor, the more enervated she became and her steps grew shorter and slower. Rafaello would be on the other side of that door waiting for her. But he had agreed to see her, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that hopeful? At least, his secretary had come back to her with an appointment fairly quickly and she wasn’t fool enough to think that she could have got that far without Rafaello’s agreement. Rafaello was rich and important and much in demand. She was really lucky that he was giving her the chance to speak up in her family’s defence, she reminded herself.

So what was she actually going to say to Rafaello? Please, please think again? Please don’t sack my father? Please don’t blame him for my kid brother’s antics?

Sam had done a stupid, stupid thing. Helping himself to the keys entrusted to their parent during the housekeeper’s overnight absence, Sam had thrown an impromptu party in the Grazzini family’s fabulous English home, Montague Park. The party had got out of hand. Panicking at the damage being done, Sam had run to their father for help. Then their father had made his mistake. Instead of admitting his son’s guilt, her father had foolishly and unsuccessfully attempted to cover Sam’s tracks and deny his involvement. Paling as she contemplated the challenge of trying to excuse such dishonest behaviour, Glory walked in through the door spread wide for her. Once over the threshold, she froze.

Her companion, who had remained in the corridor, had to nudge her a few inches deeper into the room to get the door closed behind her. Dry-mouthed, Glory scanned the vast office, her attention jumping from the contemporary glass and wrought-iron furniture to the wall of tinted glass windows and the sheer luxury of so much unoccupied and wholly unnecessary space. Where was Rafaello? Appreciating that he had yet to join her, she breathed in deeply and slowly exhaled again, fighting to get a firmer grip on herself.

But her own mind was working against her like a secret enemy. As she stood there doing the careful breathing exercises that a magazine article had said were a great aid to achieving a calm state of mind, she started getting something rather akin to flashbacks. Her first true sighting of Rafaello Grazzini eight years earlier…

Glory’s father, Archie Little, was the head gardener at Montague Park. Just as his father had been and his father before him, for her ancestors had worked on the Montague estate for a couple of centuries. About seventy-odd years back, Rafaello’s grandfather had married the last of the Montague line and had resisted all pleas to assume his wife’s maiden name. The fair and rather chinless Montagues had been replaced by the infinitely more exotic and good-looking Grazzinis with their dark flashing eyes and aggressive jawlines.

Before her father became head gardener the Littles had lived in the village several miles from Montague Park, but when he was promoted he had been provided with a comfortable cottage on the estate. Her parents had been delighted but Glory had been distraught because all her friends had lived in the village. Being stuck in the midst of several thousand acres of beautiful unspoilt countryside had seemed to her a fate worse than death.

One afternoon soon after that move, out walking and still wallowing in self-pity, Glory had enjoyed one of those rare life-changing experiences: she had seen Rafaello Grazzini on a scrambler motorbike, racing a friend with a breathtaking lack of caution for his own safety. No youthful male had ever appeared to greater advantage to an impressionable fifteen-year-old girl than he did that day. She had watched him wheeling the powerful bike to a halt and wrenching off his helmet. His black hair had blown back from his vibrant dark features, strong and bold against the washed-out colours of a too dry English summer. Glory had discovered right there and then that living in the rural depths had one major consolation: Rafaello Grazzini, six years older, and unlikely to notice she occupied the same earth but very worthy of becoming the target of her first besotted crush.

Only somewhere along the line something had gone wrong, Glory conceded dully. She had not outgrown the crush. Even when he had maddened and mortified her beyond belief in an unfortunate first encounter the following year, she had stayed dangerously loyal and keen. And when, two years later, all her dreams came true and she actually went out with Rafaello it had taken precious little encouragement for her to move from the base of that juvenile infatuation into being passionately in love.

Without warning, a door on the far side of the office opened. Sprung from her unwelcome mental trawl back through past events, Glory jumped as though someone had fired a gun behind her and spun round.

‘I’m afraid I was waylaid by one of the directors,’ Rafaello murmured, cool as a long drink of icy water on a hot day.

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.’