Emerald Mistress

‘I’ll see if Mr Flynn is available. Please take a seat.’

Harriet preferred to stand. The hall was a vast semi-circular space, with walls ornamented with fantastic elaborate plasterwork. Even dirty and in need of decoration, it was a spectacular space.

‘Miss Carmichael…bad news travels fast,’ a lazy masculine drawl commented from behind her.

Her heart-shaped face tightening as though she was sucking on a lemon, Harriet spun round. Her tormentor was sheathed in a sleek black designer business suit. Staggeringly tall and vibrantly handsome, he also looked horribly intimidating. Every nerve in her tense body seemed to jump and her tummy flipped in concert. ‘Allow me to tell you that you do business like a gangster.’

His lean, bronzed features remained impassive. ‘My late father would be proud of me.’

‘I’m not selling to you…I don’t care what you do. I have a great dislike of being forced to do anything, Mr Cavaliere. But most of all I have a great dislike, not to mention complete contempt, for your methods. Why do you call yourself Flynn? To mislead people?’ Harriet condemned with a heated sense of injustice. ‘I mean, who the heck would expect to find an Italian billionaire slumming somewhere like this?’

‘Let me answer you point by point,’ Rafael murmured levelly. ‘On my birth certificate it says Rafael Cavaliere Flynn, and I was born here. My mother named me. I am not concerned by the name that the press have allotted to me. Nor do I consider myself to be “slumming” in the house where many generations of Flynns have lived and died. I am proud of my ancestry.’

His immense self-assurance infuriated Harriet beyond bearing. All worked up as she was, she was already conscious that her face was hot with temper. Being rebuked for her bad manners was the last straw. She could have screamed for, ironically, she had never before dared to be that rude to anyone. ‘Are you aware that you have blighted my life like the plague since I was fifteen?’ she suddenly launched at him, half an octave higher.

Rafael quirked a mobile black brow.

‘No, I haven’t gone crazy. In the nineties you took over Benson Pharmaceuticals where my stepfather worked in the research lab and he lost his job. He was just one employee among four thousand. You shut the company down and sold off everything. The whole town died—’

‘A business has to be in profit to be sustainable.’

‘My stepfather had a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t get another job, and he had to sell our house and just about everything we owned by the end of the year. Men like you destroy lives,’ Harriet framed shakily.

‘Benson Pharmaceuticals lost a major contract to an Asian company and crashed. I was in no way responsible for its demise.’ Rafael watched her brow furrow in surprise.

He was standing below the cupola. The fall of light through the glass dome in the roof played over his superb bone structure and glinted in the dense black of his hair.

Registering that she was inadvertently staring, she tore her attention from him again, her cheeks burning. ‘That may be so, but you make nothing. You simply tear things apart to make the most money you can.’

‘You’re wrong. In the case of Bensons, I refused a highly profitable offer to buy the site and redevelop it as a shopping outlet. I knew that the town would regenerate faster if the buildings became a base for an industrial estate where other businesses could be set up.’