Virgin on Her Wedding Night

‘I still find it hard to believe that Matthew left you with nothing but debt,’ Joe admitted with a shake of his head. ‘I thought more of him than that. It’s a man’s job to ensure that his wife has something to live on when he’s gone.’

‘Matthew could hardly have expected to die so young.’ Caroline made her usual soothing response to comments of that nature; she’d had a lot of practice in keeping the secrets of her unhappy marriage to herself. ‘But I do wish he had been willing to buy a house, because then I would at least have had a home for the three of us.’

‘The Baileys should have helped you more than they did,’ her mother contended bitterly. ‘Of course you didn’t even have the sense to ask for a financial settlement from them.’

‘It wasn’t their fault that Matthew didn’t take out insurance cover, and they did settle all his debts…And let’s not forget that they had a stake in Hales as well, and have also lost a good deal of money,’ Caroline reminded the older woman ruefully.

‘What does that matter now, when we’ve lost everything we possess?’ Isabel Hales demanded shrilly. ‘They’ve still got their home and their household help. But we’ve got nothing! My friends have stopped phoning me. Word’s got around. Nobody wants to know you when you’re broke!’

Caroline compressed her lips and kept quiet. It was an unfortunate fact that her mother’s friendships were of the shallow sort that relied on status and money and show for fuel. Stripped of what she had once taken for granted, Isabel had been struck off the guest-lists of the well-to-do and socially prominent. It was sad for a woman of her mother’s age to suddenly find out that she had become a social pariah, but there was nothing that could be done about it. The spendthrift days of lavish entertainment, designer clothes and fancy holidays were gone for ever.

That same evening, Caroline got back to work in her studio—a converted outhouse in the courtyard behind her parents’ home. There she hammered shaped and soldered silver and precious stones into the jewellery she designed and sold on an internet website. It was painstaking, delicate work, which required a keen eye and full concentration. While she worked, her elegant seal point Siamese cat, Koko, sat like a sentinel on the bench by her side. When Caroline felt a familiar tightening round her brow she knew that one of the nasty migraines she occasionally suffered from was threatening. Soon afterwards she finished off for the night, tidied up and went up to bed.

Of course by then, even though she’d taken her medication to dull the migraine, she was still too stressed to sleep. Tomorrow she would have to start looking for accommodation, she decided, fighting to stave off a growing sense of panic. Finding somewhere suitable to live would not be easy, because she needed space to work as well. Her jewellery business was currently her family’s only means of support, aside from their small state pensions.

‘Caro?’ The next morning Isabel Hales limped painfully into the kitchen where Caroline was preparing breakfast. ‘Do you think Matthew’s parents would be willing to give us a loan for your sake?’ she asked hopefully

Caroline went pale and tensed. ‘I don’t think so. Settling Matthew’s debts was a matter of pride to them. But they’re not the type to splash out their cash unless it’s likely to benefit them in some way.’

‘If only you’d given them a grandchild everything would have been so different,’ the older woman replied, in a sharp tone of reproach.

‘I know.’ Stinging tears burned the back of Caroline’s lowered eyes. The Baileys had thrown that omission at her as well while she’d still lived with them. Evidently her failure to produce a child had been her worst flaw as a daughter-in-law, but the Baileys had also insinuated that, had she been a better wife, Matthew would have spent more time at home. She’d had a mad desire to tell them the truth about her marriage, but had mercifully contrived to keep a still tongue in her head. She could not even bear to think about the years she had lost to her unhappy marriage, and nobody would benefit from her talking now about what she had kept hidden for so long. It would only devastate Matthew’s parents and shock and upset her own.

‘I expect you never thought about the future,’ Isabel sighed. ‘You were never very practical.’

Caroline’s troubled gaze rested on her mother’s slight figure as she braced her weight on her walking stick and walked slowly away. The older woman looked horribly small and vulnerable to her daughter. Her parents were already sleeping in a room on the ground floor because of their health problems. Joe was on the waiting list for a coronary bypass. The house really was no longer suitable for them, Caroline conceded ruefully, searching for a silver lining to their situation. But for her parents to be forced out of their home of forty-odd years was a very different matter from making that decision themselves on the grounds of health and common sense.

Koko coiled round Caroline’s ankles, loudly crying for attention, and she talked indulgently to her pet while serving breakfast. She skipped eating in her eagerness to write down the urgent list of things to be done that was already unfolding inside her head. But the first list only led into the making of a second. Time, cost and location were crucial factors. At their time of life her parents would not want to move out of the area. It would take ages to track down the right property and save up enough money for a standard rental deposit.

It was fortunate that Caroline adored her adoptive parents. Whilst on one fundamental issue they had once given her what turned out to be very bad advice, they had always sincerely believed that they were putting her best interests first. And now that the elder Haleses were reliant on her financial help, she was happy to repay the debt that she felt she owed them in any way that she could.

The phone rang while she was washing the dishes. ‘Can you get that?’ she called to her father, who was reading his newspaper in the room next door.

The phone was answered. An instant later Caroline heard an urgent low-voiced exchange between her parents that she couldn’t follow and, recognising that they sounded upset, she dried her hands to go and join them

‘Caro…will you come here for a moment?’ her mother asked stiffly.

The phone was extended to her almost as though it was an offensive weapon. ‘Valente Lorenzatto,’ the older woman pronounced between tremulous lips.

Caroline froze like a wax dummy, her face wiped clean of expression. It was a name she had not heard spoken in all the months since she had become a widow, but it still had the power to make her lose colour and shiver as though a cold wind was cutting through her clothes. Valente, whom she had once loved beyond bearing; Valente, whom she had contrived to wrong beyond all possibility of forgiveness. She could not credit that he would have any reason to contact her. Gripping the cordless phone in a damp palm, she walked out into the hall and turned in an aimless circle.

‘Hello?’ she said, her voice a mere whisper of sound.

‘I want to arrange a meeting with you,’ Valente breathed in his dark, deep-accented drawl which danced teasing fingers down her taut spinal cord. ‘As the new owner of Hales Transport and your family home, I have our mutual interests to discuss.’

It was too shattering a claim for Caroline to accept all at once. ‘You own Hales…and the house?’ she questioned in stark disbelief.

‘It’s staggering, isn’t it? I made my fortune, as I said I would,’ Valente murmured with a surreal cool that mocked her quivering tension. ‘Sadly, you backed the wrong horse five years ago.’

Caroline almost laughed out loud—for she had found that out the hard way, and not for reasons he would ever comprehend. What snatched her out of the mesmeric hold of the past was the sight of her parents, staring at her across the hall, evidently having heard what she’d said. Their faces betrayed their profound shock and dismay. The merest mention of Valente Lorenzatto put them on edge, never mind a personal phone call and the suggestion that he might be the new possessor of what had so recently been theirs.

‘It can’t be true!’ Isabel Hales protested in a jagged cry of disbelief.

Caroline very much hoped that it was not true. But she had once, long ago, read about Valente’s first big business deal, which had netted him millions on the stock exchange. She had paid a high price for that knowledge, too, when Matthew had found out that she had done a Google search for Valente on their home computer. She had never allowed herself to succumb to that unhealthy streak of curiosity again—not even after she’d become a widow. The past, she believed, was more safely left where it belonged.

‘He was only a lorry driver…it’s impossible that he could have made so much money!’ Joe Hales proclaimed loudly.

‘It ought to be impossible,’ his wife agreed, tight-mouthed.

Caroline kept the phone crammed hard up against her ear to prevent Valente from overhearing these embarrassing comments. The fact that her father’s father had also been a lorry driver, a self-made man who’d built up his business from nothing by dint of hard work, was never ever mentioned in her home. The older Haleses were ashamed of the humble beginnings of their families and had hugely admired Matthew’s parents, who had enjoyed private education and were distantly related to titled people. Joe and Isabel Hales were snobs, had always been snobs and would probably be buried as unrepentant snobs, Caroline thought sadly. Valente had never stood on a level playing field with them. He had been judged for what he did and where he came from rather than as the highly intelligent and motivated individual that he was.

Caroline wandered into another room to gain privacy. ‘Why do you want to see me?’ she asked half under her breath.

‘You’ll find out when we meet,’ Valente delivered with impatience. ‘Eleven tomorrow morning, in what used to be your husband’s office.’

‘But why on earth…?’ Her voice faltered to a halt as the connection was cut without warning.

‘Let me have that phone, please,’ Joe Hales urged his daughter, and she listened while the older man contacted his solicitor to demand the name of the new owner of Hales Transport.

‘That Italian boy…’ Isabel Hales wore an expression of furious distaste. ‘I imagine he’s finally found out that you’re a widow. It’s typical of him—why can’t he leave you decently alone?’

‘I have no idea.’ Caroline could not even be amused by her mother referring to a six-foot-three-inch male of thirty-one years of age as a boy. Valente had never been a boy, she reckoned painfully. He had always had a maturity way beyond his years. She was no more entertained by her mother’s ludicrous suggestion that Valente might still cherish a romantic interest in her.

A look of astonishment on his face, her father replaced the phone. ‘Everything that was once ours has been bought up by a very large Italian-based collection of companies known as the Zatto Group,’ he proffered dully.

Valente had turned the tables on them, reversing the natural order of things in her mother’s opinion. Of all of them, Caroline was the least surprised.

CHAPTER TWO

FOR the meeting, Caroline had chosen to wear her only suit—a tailored black skirt and jacket teamed with a cream silk shirt. She had bought it to wear for her first sales pitch to the high-end London jewellery store which had been successfully selling her designs for the past year. Since then she had lost weight, and the fit was now more than a little loose on her. With her hair swept up, and a modest smattering of make-up to give her the natural colour she lacked after a stressed-out sleepless night, she looked harried when she climbed out of her hatchback car at Hales Transport the next morning.

‘Hello, Mrs Bailey,’ Jill, one of the receptionists, greeted her, with surprising good cheer for a member of a workforce that had been suffering from mass anxiety over the firm’s uncertain future for many weeks. ‘Isn’t this an exciting day?’

Caroline blinked uncertainly and brushed a straying strand of pale hair back from her too-warm brow. ‘Is it?’

‘The new boss is flying in. We’re becoming part of a big business group that’s worth billions. It can only be good news for us,’ Jill opined chirpily.

‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ remarked Laura, the senior receptionist, looking up from her computer screen to cast a rueful glance at Caroline. ‘Have you never heard of that expression “a new broom”? There’s no guarantee that we’ll all keep our jobs, or even that this business will still exist six months from now.’

A cold trickle of apprehension rolled down Caroline’s taut spine. She was really worried about what might happen to their former employees at Hales Transport. And that concern ran even deeper as she was guiltily conscious that her late husband had taken financial risks but had neglected the day-to-day running of the firm during the last year of his life.

Breathing in deep, she took a seat in the waiting area. ‘Let’s all hope for the best,’ she urged Laura.

‘I’m sure you could just go up and wait in the office,’ Jill told her innocently. ‘It’s not as if you don’t know your way around.’

Her colleague frowned at that advice. ‘I think Mrs Bailey will be more comfortable waiting down here.’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Caroline hastened to declare, her face warming in response to the curious glances she received from a group of employees passing by to mount the stairs. The low-pitched buzz of conversation that broke out among them made her skin heat even more as an anguished surge of self-consciousness gripped her.