Rafaello's Mistress

Yet she had still sensed that Rafaello’s father did not like what he was doing any more than she had liked having such cruel pressure put on her. He had just wanted her out of his son’s life and had evidently decided that the end must justify the means. So he had pointed out that he would be well within his rights if he dismissed her father for his less than adequate job performance at that time. She had known that, shorn of stability of both home and employment, her father would have never found the strength to get his life back on track.

In that same year, six months before Glory reached her eighteenth birthday and before she even went out with Rafaello, her stable, happy home life had begun to unravel at the seams. Without the smallest warning her mother, Talitha, had died—a heart attack—there one moment, gone the next. Her mother had been the strong one in her parents’ marriage and the cement that held their family together. Her father had gone to pieces and hit the bottle hard.

Glory had found herself engaged in a constant losing battle to keep the older man sober. No matter how hard she struggled to support him, he had often been in no state to work and on many occasions he had simply wandered off during working hours to drink himself into a stupor. Most employers would have sacked him. But, surprisingly, Benito Grazzini had been sympathetic towards the grieving widower and he had kept on giving Archie Little another chance to straighten himself out. That reality had given him strong ammunition when he asked Glory to leave her home.

‘Look at your family background and tell me that you are not wrong for my son. I believe that it is best for everyone concerned that you should move away and make a fresh start somewhere else,’ Rafaello’s father had pronounced with the harshness of a man who had steeled himself to perform an unpleasant duty. ‘In return I will promise to do all that is within my power to help your father overcome his problems.’

Her background. No further explanation had been required once that word had been spoken. Her once respected father had been behaving like a drunken layabout, and her late mother? Talitha Little had never won local acceptance, for she had been born and bred a gypsy. In Romany parlance, she had ‘married out’ and once she had made that choice custom had demanded that even her own family have nothing more to do with her. Yet the new life she had chosen with her gadjo husband, Archie Little, had been no more welcoming. Her herbal lore and superstitious ways had been foreign and threatening to her village neighbours. Talitha had much preferred the privacy of their isolated woodland cottage on the Montague estate.

As Glory re-entered the lift on the top floor of Grazzini Industries she was too worked up even to register Jon Lyons’ hovering presence nearby. Her brother and her father were waiting for her in a café near the train station. She wondered what on earth she was going to tell them. That Rafaello Grazzini had made her an offer she could not accept? That she would sooner boil in oil than be any man’s kept woman? But most especially his?

Oh, yes, most especially his woman! Distraught with the strength of the conflicting feelings attacking her, Glory hurried through the crowded city streets. Why was Rafaello doing this to her? Five years ago, they had only been together six weeks. Long enough for her to fall irrevocably in love but not long enough to persuade her to surrender her virginity to a male who had made not the smallest mention of love.

She could thank her mother for that ingrained caution. Talitha Little had believed that a woman’s most precious possession was purity, for that was exactly how she had been raised. When Glory had first been given that message she had not even properly understood what physical intimacy was. But long before she reached the age of temptation she had absorbed the unnerving impression that her life would go horribly wrong if she broke that rule before she was safely married.

Rafaello had thought that was hilariously funny until he realised over the space of several weeks that Glory was serious. Then he had suggested it was a little weird and that, with all due respect to her late mother’s convictions, Glory really should not let herself be affected by such superstitious fears.

Emerging from that recollection, Glory discovered that she was lodged stock-still in front of a shop window and smiling with a silly far-away look fixed to her face. Her smile died. As she crushed out that ruefully amusing recollection of Rafaello’s efforts to persuade her into his bed, her dulled eyes stung with hot tears of regret.

She walked on, striving to concentrate and find a solution to her family’s predicament. Sam was a minor in the eyes of the law and Rafaello could press charges to his heart’s content, but he had no proof whatsoever that her kid brother had been involved in the theft of that snuff box. The worst that was likely to happen to Sam was…what? A police caution? Sam had never been in trouble before and how would he bear up to that challenge?

‘Sam’s different,’ Glory’s mother had once muttered in exasperation. ‘He’s too sensitive and emotional for a boy. He’ll get the life teased out of him if he doesn’t toughen up.’ Happily, Sam’s talent on the sports field had made him popular at school. But he had once shaken Glory with the admission that he hated sport of all kinds. She wondered how many of his friends knew that Sam spent every spare moment sketching people and animals. Or that sometimes Sam listened to depressing items on the news and became deeply upset by them, that he took things too much to heart.

And what about her father? Might he fall off the wagon and begin drinking again? He was a kind man, a good man, but he was weak, she acknowledged painfully. In times of trouble, he crumpled.

Her father and her brother were seated at the back of the half-empty café nursing cups of tea. Their eyes flew to her as she drew level with their table. She sat down beside her brother, deeply troubled by the misery that he could not hide.

‘What did Mr Grazzini say?’ her father demanded, his lined brow furrowed beneath his greying blond hair, his faded blue eyes red-rimmed with the effects of strain and insufficient sleep. He looked older than his fifty-seven years and drained.

‘Dad…’

‘It’s bad, isn’t it? If only this had happened before Benito Grazzini retired and handed over the estate to his son,’ Archie Little muttered in a bitter tone of defeat. ‘That Rafaello’s as hard as nails. I don’t know what you ever saw in him, Glory. But nothing I could say would turn you away from him—’

‘Sam,’ Glory cut in hurriedly, turning to address her brother before her father could say anything more in a similar vein. There was little resemblance between brother and sister, because Sam was much taller with very dark hair and dark eyes. He had taken after their mother’s side of the family, while she had inherited their father’s fair colouring. But right now, for all his size and athletic breadth, Sam looked very much like a scared ten-year-old kid.

‘What happened?’ her brother prompted anxiously.

‘Rafaello told me that a very valuable snuff box went missing while you and your friends were partying—’

‘Are you saying something was stolen? Well, it couldn’t have been any of us!’ Sam gave his sister a shocked look of reproach. ‘Do you think we’re stupid?’

‘You need to pass the word round your friends that that box must be returned, because Rafaello is not going to let it go. It’s worth a great deal of money.’

‘I didn’t see any of my mates with a box,’ Sam told her with a perplexed frown.

‘Rafaello said it was tiny…small enough to be hidden in a pocket,’ Glory informed him, and she was relieved at the need to make that explanation to her brother, for his ignorance satisfied her that he could have had nothing to do with the theft.

Listening to that dialogue between his son and daughter, Archie Little had turned a sickly grey shade. ‘Something being stolen finishes us. No wonder you couldn’t get anywhere with Rafaello Grazzini,’ he said heavily. ‘He’ll be furious. Can’t blame him either. Sam had enough cheek even going into the Park, never mind the damage he and his mates caused, and now this…’

‘I’m sorry, Dad…’ Sam mumbled chokily. ‘I swear I’ll never do anything like that again—’

‘You’re not likely to get the chance, son.’ Rising wearily to his feet, the older man studied his troubled daughter and sighed. ‘We’ll go home now and you go on back to Birmingham. I’m sorry, Glory. I wish I hadn’t dragged you into this mess.’

‘Why did you think Rafaello would listen to me?’ Glory could not help asking.

Her father sighed. ‘Something your mother once said. You know, one of those strange notions she used to take…’

‘What did she say?’

‘That he would always look after you. Silly,’ he said wryly. ‘It didn’t make sense then and it makes even less now.’

But those words that she had never heard before sent the oddest shiver down Glory’s spine. Just before they parted outside the café, her brother grabbed her in a sudden bone-crushing hug that let her know just how frantic with worry he was. With tears in her eyes, she watched her brother and father walk away. She hadn’t even been asked what had passed between her and Rafaello. But then, would she have told the truth had she been asked? The minute she had mentioned that stolen snuff box, her father had given up all hope of matters being settled more amicably.

And how did she feel now? Horribly guilty, she discovered, for protecting herself when she might have helped her father and brother. But at what cost might she have helped? By putting herself in the power of a male who despised her? Two wrongs did not make a right, and Rafaello had wronged her in his big flashy office. She should have told him that too, should have told him that he had had no business treating her like that. And while she was doing that she ought to have told him the unlovely truth about his own father’s treatment of her five years earlier! Benito Grazzini might’ve informed Rafaello that she had taken that cheque for five thousand pounds. But she was darned sure that Rafaello’s father had not also admitted the cruel pressure he had brought to bear on a frightened eighteen-year-old girl, fearful of the consequences to her family if she dared to stand up for herself!

In a sudden decisive movement, Glory turned in her tracks and headed back in the direction of Grazzini Industries. She was going to tell Rafaello Grazzini what she thought of him! And his lousy, rich, bullying father, that fine upstanding man whom Rafaello had always regarded with such immense respect. She wasn’t the only one with embarrassing and dishonest relatives and it was time he faced that fact!

By the time Glory arrived on the top floor of Grazzini Industries for the second time that day, she was dizzy with the number of emotions buzzing about inside her. The receptionist called Rafaello on the phone.

‘You can go straight in,’ Glory was told.

What was she going to say to Rafaello? Was she really about to tell Rafaello that his father had broken her heart and that it had taken the meanest and nastiest blackmail to frighten her into giving him up? Did she really want to tell Rafaello that? Did his ego deserve the news that she had truly loved him to distraction five years ago? Indeed, exactly why was she back in his office building desperate to confront him again?

Suffering a sudden loss of confidence at the way her own mind worked, Glory hovered outside Rafaello’s office door. An awful suspicion was growing on her by the minute. She could not entirely ignore the amount of exhilaration that the prospect of seeing him again induced inside her…

Disorientatingly while she was still engaged in her inner battle the door opened. ‘Still having second thoughts?’ Rafaello murmured with expressionless cool.

Glory studied him. Her tongue was glued to the dry roof of her mouth. Her heart was suddenly beating so fast that she could hardly get breath into her straining lungs. That lean, strong face and those dark deep-set eyes of his. Having once made that visual connection, she could not break it. It was as if a very powerful magnet had been turned on her and she was too weak to fight the strength of that pull.

She gulped. ‘Don’t get this wrong. I came here…I came back here solely to give you a piece of my mind.’

‘You can do it over lunch,’ Rafaello countered in his lazy accented drawl, curving a casual arm around her spine to flip her round and urge her back in the direction of the lift again.

‘Lunch?’ Glory exclaimed, taken aback.

‘I’m hungry.’ Rafaello rested shimmering dark golden eyes on her. ‘I am so hungry.’

Glory trembled, her bemused blue eyes sinking to the level of the sensual slant of his beautiful mouth and noting the faint blue-tinged roughness of the skin on his strong jawline. She recalled that he had always had to shave twice a day. And that stray abstracted reflection somehow sent her off on the memory of how he kissed, how he had once made her feel. She had never truly appreciated the depth of her own hunger for him until she had discovered that no other man had the ability to send her temperature rocketing as he had.

‘Intense, isn’t it, cara?’ Rafaello purred like a big jungle cat, emanating an amount of masculine satisfaction that suddenly made her want to slap him hard and snapped her free of the potent spell he cast for long enough to make her think again.

Why had she come back? Had it been a case of grabbing at any excuse just to see him again? For what good reason had she raced back to Grazzini Industries? What had happened five years ago didn’t matter any more. What he thought of her no longer mattered either. And if her reappearance had now given him entirely the wrong impression, wasn’t that her fault too?

‘I’ve decided I don’t want to give you a piece of my mind any more,’ Glory confided in a rush as he swept her inexorably into the lift with him. ‘I shouldn’t be here, but while I am here I might as well tell you that I told Sam about that box and I’m absolutely convinced that he had nothing to do with its disappearance—’

As Glory paused for the breath with which to continue, Rafaello backed her into the corner of the lift and rested his lean hands on her slight, tense shoulders. ‘You’re talking too much.’

‘But Sam’s going to pass the word round his friends, so hopefully something will come from that, and I’m going back to Birmingham,’ Glory continued at an even faster and more breathless trot. She was hugely aware of the lean, powerful length of him within inches of her own taut body and the wave of heat darting up through her no matter how hard she fought to hold it down.