The Innocent And The Playboy

Mandy’s eyebrows flew up. This time she was detecting. And accurately.

‘You know him,’ she said on a note of discovery.

That’s what comes of losing your cool, Rachel told herself, annoyed. Aloud she said repressively, ‘We’ve met.’

‘Wow.’ Mandy was impressed. ‘You’ve been clubbing on the quiet?’

‘Of course not. Even if that was how I got my kicks, which it isn’t, what time do I have to go clubbing? When I’m not working I’m trying to persuade two adolescents that school isn’t all bad.’

Mandy chuckled. ‘I don’t see di Stefano at a PTA meeting,’ she allowed. ‘Where on earth did you meet him, for heaven’s sake?’

Rachel grimaced. Take it lightly, she adjured herself. It was never important. Don’t build it up into something it was not.

She shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. I shouldn’t think he even remembers.’

And I’m going to do everything I can think of to stop him remembering, she resolved fiercely.

‘Have you said anything to him?’

‘No.’ Rachel was unable to disguise her horror.

Mandy looked even more intrigued. Rachel realised she could be getting herself into exactly the kind of trouble she had hoped to avoid—the kind of trouble that slapped an ice-pack on the back of her neck and sent her normally logical mind into meltdown. She could trust Mandy, of course, but if she told her it was a secret Mandy would inevitably start to wonder what it was all about. It was only human nature. It was also horrifying.

I can’t stand that sort of speculation, Rachel thought. How can I avoid thinking about him if every time I put my head out of my office my secretary’s asking herself what Riccardo di Stefano was to me in my dark past?

She felt panic rise. It took all her self-control to quell it, to think of a plausible story. It was half the truth anyway.

‘Look,’ said Rachel, ‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it. It was no big deal but I was very young.’ She managed to sound rueful, even faintly embarrassed. She was impressed with herself. ‘It wouldn’t do my credibility much good to remind him. I don’t want him thinking he’s negotiating with a spotty teenager with no control over her temper.’

No hint of the inner panic. Well done, Rachel, she congratulated herself. Mandy was taking it at face value anyway.

‘No control...’ Mandy stared. ‘You?’

‘Youth,’ said Rachel. She gave a very good shrug, quite as if she did not care. She even managed a light laugh.

That was not quite so convincing, evidently. At least, it did not convince Mandy. ‘Did you have a crush on him?’ she demanded.

‘No,’ said Rachel with unmistakable truth. In spite of her determination to stay cool, she could not repress a shudder.

Mandy was not just a colleague, she was a friend. She saw the shudder and drew her own conclusions.

‘Well, if he hasn’t remembered yet, he probably won’t,’ she said comfortingly. ‘Not with Sandy Marquis to keep him happy.’

‘I’m relying on it,’ said Rachel. She went into her office. In the doorway she paused and looked back. ‘Oh, we’ve got a deadline. Two o’clock with Mr Jensen. You’d better find out what the group want in their sandwiches.’

Mandy grimaced. ‘Right you are. Action stations.’ She was already on the telephone when Rachel closed the door.

The room was uncannily quiet without the hum of the photocopier. Rachel sank down behind her desk and stretched out her legs in front of her. They were trembling.

There was an unfamiliar tension between her shoulderblades. She bent her head forward and sideways and the tension eased. It did not go away entirely; though. If she was any judge, it was not going to go away until Riccardo di Stefano was safely back on his own side of the Atlantic.

‘Blast,’ she said.

She rubbed her hand across the back of her neck in an uncharacteristic gesture. The muscles felt like iron. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she remembered another time when she had done the same thing. Her hand fell.

Another time and a whole world away. She got up and went to the window. Outside the rain ran greyly down the window. But the world of her too vivid memory was drenched in sunshine.

Rachel tipped her head forward and rested her brow against the window-pane. How could she ever have thought she had forgotten?

She closed her eyes and let the memories flood back.

She had never wanted to go. She had tried so hard not to. But she had been eighteen and the opposition had all been over twenty-one and had had the big guns.

‘It will be the holiday of a lifetime,’ her father had said heartily. Too heartily. Rachel had not noticed that at the time, of course. ‘You’ve been tying yourself to your books too much. Now the exams are over you deserve a really good time. Judy and I both want you to go.’

And that had been the first objection. Rachel had never warmed to her father’s second wife. Judy felt the same, she’d been sure. Most of the time they’d been polite to each other but that was as far as it had gone. Rachel had frankly been appalled at the idea of going off on a Caribbean holiday with her stepmother for company.

She had not said that to her father, of course. And what she had said had only caused him to persuade harder.

‘Judy needs a holiday as much as you do. It’s been a tough year, with the takeover and everything. She needs to get away from it all. Sun, sea and a bit of exotic night-life.’ He laughed. ‘Do you both good.’

Rachel said, ‘Exotic night-life doesn’t sound like me, Dad.’

But he was not to be deflected. ‘Nonsense. All girls of your age want to spread their wings a bit.’

Presumably Judy had told him that. Presumably she had also convinced him that she and Rachel were virtual contemporaries and could not be better friends. None of Rachel’s protests had any effect.

‘It’s very good of Judy to suggest it,’ her father said in the end.

His tone had stopped being hearty. Rachel recognised an order when she heard it. He might just as well have said she did not have a choice.

‘She’s been invited to stay with some very old friends. They have taken a house in the Caribbean. Film-star luxury, I’m told. Judy needn’t take you along, you know. Since she’s offered, you owe it to all of us to accept gracefully.’

So she went. Later it occurred to her to wonder whether her father was already suspecting his young wife’s restlessness. Maybe he’d sent Rachel along to act as some sort of chaperon. Or even as a substitute for conscience. If he had, he had been singularly out of luck, she thought now.

She had not suspected any such thing at the time, of course. To be honest, Rachel had not seen much of her father or Judy, particularly over the last year when her father’s company had got into difficulties. Rachel herself had been working furiously hard to get into university. She and her father had met occasionally over the coffeepot in the small hours. They’d exchanged tired quips. But they had not really talked since he’d married Judy.

So, if there were strains in the marriage, at that time Rachel had not known it. She’d just known she did not like Judy, and she had not been able to imagine why her stepmother would want to take her on holiday.

It had been some time before she’d found out why, but she had. By that time she’d no longer cared. She’d had her own hurt and her own guilt by then. By that time she’d no longer cared about anything except getting away and never seeing any of the inhabitants of the Villa Azul ever again.

Rachel opened her eyes and stared blindly at the London rain. In all the three weeks she had spent at the Villa Azul, it had never rained once, she remembered. She would wake up in the huge colonial bed to a sound like rain, but when she’d rushed to the window it had been to find that the sound was only the wind through the palm trees. She had been so homesick. So hungry for familiar sights and sounds. So alone.

Open-eyed, she stared out at the rain. Alone! She gave a harsh laugh that contained no amusement at all. Oh, she had been alone all right. Until that last night, when she had learned, briefly and unforgettably, that there were worse things than being alone—and that the worst loneliness of all was when you could not reach the person you were with. She felt sick, remembering.

But there was nothing else for it. Now she had started, the whole thing was coming back in cruel Technicolor.

The first time she’d met Riccardo di Stefano she had almost run away He had been like an alien from another galaxy. Well, they all had been, at the Villa Azul. By that time Rachel had learned to expect every new acquaintance to possess a degree of sophistication she knew she could not deal with. By the time he arrived, Riccardo di Stefano was exactly what she was expecting.