Vengeful Seduction

He vanished out of the room and ten minutes later, having quietly convinced herself that Mr Squires, the invisible man, was definitely not in the running as a prospective buyer for the company, she heard the door being pushed open.

She automatically looked around.

The shock she felt on seeing Lorenzo Cicolla standing in the doorway was as great as if she had looked out of the window and casually seen a mushroom cloud hanging over the town, announcing nuclear war.

He strolled into the room, not taking his eyes off her face, and she stood up, drained of colour. She was shaking, trembling like a leaf, like someone who had seen a ghost. Her mind felt as though it was being bombarded by so many images, so many feelings, that any minute it would shut down from overload.

‘Lorenzo Cicolla! What are you doing here? I’m expecting a Mr Squires—he should be here any moment. You’re not Mr Squires,’ was all she managed to get out, which was an achievement since her vocal cords appeared to have deserted her.

She had never expected to see Lorenzo Cicolla again. He had been the stick of dynamite thrown into her young life, blowing it to pieces, and those pieces had never successfully been put together again. But still, she had relegated him to the past. She had locked that haunting image into a safe room and she had tried damned hard never to open the door.

What was he doing here?

‘No,’ Lorenzo agreed smoothly, unsmiling, his pale eyes assessing her with arrogant thoroughness. ‘I’m not, am I?’

He sat down in the chair next to her and crossed his legs, and she wished desperately that she could stop staring but she couldn’t. It had been a long time.

The passage of time showed itself in the tiny lines by his eyes and mouth, the hardness of his features, but apart from that she might have been staring at the Lorenzo of old. He had the same terrifying sex-appeal, the same dark, brooding good looks.

‘I apologise for staring,’ Isobel said stiltedly, ‘but I can’t believe that it’s really you, sitting there.’ She threw him a tentative smile which met with a blank wall.

‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ he said abruptly, looking away. ‘I’m afraid the news was rather late in reaching me.’

‘Thank you. Yes. It was a tragic accident.’ Platitudes were becoming easier to mouth. No one felt comfortable with raw emotion and she had learned to control her responses to the polite condolences of neighbours and people in the village.

‘And of course, Jeremy.’

‘Thank you. Of course.’

‘What exactly happened?’

She shrugged and her fingers nervously plucked her wool skirt. ‘The car went out of control. There was a lorry coming in the opposite direction. Jeremy was killed outright. My father——’ she paused and took a deep, stabilising breath ‘—died in the ambulance.’

‘How is your mother coping with it?’

‘Why are you here?’ It was easier to ask that now that she had recovered some of her self-control.

He smiled coolly, and she could see dislike and contempt lurking beneath the surface. It made her blood run cold. ‘Surely we aren’t yet finished with the preliminaries, are we, Isobel? It’s been years—four years to be precise.’

‘Yes. I know. You left this town without a backward glance, Lorenzo.’ Her heart was still beating irregularly and she had the strangest feeling of having stepped into a mad, nonsensical world, like Alice in Wonderland. One blink and it would all disappear. She blinked but nothing disappeared, not even the breathless tension gripping her lungs, making breathing laborious and difficult.

He shrugged. ‘I always knew that I would return, when the time was right.’

‘And why is the time right now?’

‘Because, my dear, I am about to buy your father’s company.’

‘You!’ She looked at him in stunned silence. ‘But Mr Clark said…He told me…’

‘That Mr Squires was interested. Yes. Mr Squires was interested, on my behalf.’

She stood up and began pacing the room, while Lorenzo remained where he was, watching her, his face revealing nothing.

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said at last, standing in front of him but not too close, because something about him was vaguely menacing. Had this been the same man who had fired her passions once upon a time? Surely not!

‘I have never been more serious about anything in my entire life.’

‘But why?’

His lips thinned. ‘Because I like the beauty of the wheel that turns full circle.’

‘Revenge, Lorenzo?’ she whispered incredulously.

‘Oh, revenge is too strong a word.’

‘Then why my father’s company?’

‘It poses an interesting challenge,’ he drawled, but the lazy cruelty was still there in his voice and in the rigid lines of his face.

‘And the fact that my father owned it has nothing to do with it?’

‘A little, I suppose.’ He shrugged dismissively, although his eyes never left her face, not for a second. ‘Besides, I’ve become tired of city life. Chicago has lost its appeal. It will be nice returning here for a while.’ ‘You’ll be coming back here to live?’

‘But of course. What else did you expect?’

Not that. Anything but that, Isobel thought. Four years ago they had parted in anger and bitterness. Words had been spoken, things said…She stifled the memory of her disastrous wedding-day, that awful confrontation in the garden, before he had walked out of her life forever. Had he simply been biding his time until an opportunity such as this arose, or had the death of Jeremy and her father rekindled buried feelings of anger?

‘You don’t look too thrilled with the prospect,’ he said, eyebrows raised, his mouth curling with a hint of cynicism.

‘Of course, it will be nice to see you…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Don’t lie, Isobel. Your face is too transparent.’

She flushed angrily. ‘What do you want me to say? You walk back into town after four years and announce that you plan on settling here, but there’s nothing pleasant about the announcement, is there? You’re not planning on settling here for the good of the community. You’re planning on settling here because you have a chance to settle old scores.’ She looked at him bitterly. ‘Aren’t we both too old for this?’

He banged his fist on the table with such force that Isobel jumped and looked at him warily. He wasn’t going to get violent, was he? Then she laughed nervously to herself. Of course not. How could he in such a public place? Besides, she knew Lorenzo. He had never been a man given to displays of violence.

You don’t know him now, though, a little voice warned. People change. The face she was staring at with apprehension was the face of a stranger, a dark, menacing stranger.

‘Too old?’ he sneered. ‘Too old to forget the past, Isobel?’

‘What happened happened a long time ago…’ She glanced at the door and he followed the line of her eyes with a cold smile.

‘Mr Clark has been told to wait until I am ready.’

‘What?’

‘I informed him that there were things I wanted to discuss with you in private.’

‘The sale of my father’s business isn’t a private matter,’ she began, but that wasn’t the object of his discussion, was it? ‘Can’t we put the past behind us? We can be friends…’

‘Friends?’ He almost laughed at that, his eyebrows shooting up in an expression of contempt that made her burn. ‘I’m sure you’d like nothing better, Isobel.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, only that I’m here, rich and successful—the two prerequisites, if I remember correctly, for any man to be worthwhile in your eyes.’

‘That’s not true!’ More memories flooded back and she felt faint.

‘No?’ He relaxed back in the swivel chair and folded his hands on his lap. ‘Then pray tell me why you married Jeremy, and why you stayed married to him for four long years? Your precious status quo. You needed it so badly that you sacrificed your life for it.’

Isobel stood up, trembling, white. ‘I don’t have to remain here and listen to this,’ she said curtly, turning towards the door.

‘Sit back down!’

She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘You don’t give me orders, Lorenzo Cicolla!’

‘Sit back down!’ he roared, and she hastily sat back down, wondering whether his bellow wouldn’t bring Mr Clark scurrying back into his office. But no one came.

‘Now you listen to me,’ he said, and his voice was the voice of a man with steel running through his veins. He leaned forward. ‘Your father’s company needs a buyer if it’s to survive in one piece.’

‘I can choose my buyer,’ she said coldly, and he laughed under his breath.

‘Really?’

‘Mr Clark told me that there are several offers in the pipeline.’

‘No offers, Isobel.’

‘But…’

‘I am the only bidder. Without me, your father’s company will quickly fall into ruin. It’s a wonder that it hasn’t before now. If it falls into ruin, my darling, it will be sold off in bits and pieces to the highest bidders and you will watch your father’s handiwork go down the drain. Do you want that?’

Isobel looked at him with dislike. He was enjoying this. He was enjoying her discomfort, enjoying watching her in a position of helpless subservience. How could she ever have felt love for this man? He was a sadist.

She could, she knew, explain, after all these years, why she had married Jeremy, but if he was hell-bent on revenge, then might not that confession give him the ammunition he needed? It was a chance she could not take. Her father was dead. He was beyond pain. But her mother was still alive, ill, vulnerable, and already buffeted by enough misfortune.

Besides, and she might as well face it, the Lorenzo Cicolla she had known, the man who had once, so long ago that she could scarcely recall, made love to her, laughed with her, was gone. This was someone else. Someone she no longer understood.

‘What do you gain from all this, Lorenzo?’ she asked with quiet desperation.

‘Passing satisfaction,’ he said, his lips twisting, and she clenched her fists uselessly at her sides.

‘At my expense.’

‘Is that so difficult to understand?’ He smiled with sarcasm.

‘Why fight when we can——?’

‘Make love?’

Colour swept into her face. She could feel it burning through her, making her perspire lightly, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

‘When we can be friends…’ she whispered.

He was looking at her, his eyes roving insolently over her body. ‘A tempting thought,’ he said silkily. ‘You’re still a beautiful woman. More so. Time has put character into your face. But no, I think I can resist you.’ He was smiling again, that cool smile that made her want to hit him. ‘I don’t think I could stomach the thought that your friendship had only been offered because I am now rich enough to pay the right price.’

‘You’re despicable.’

That brought an angry flush to his face. ‘Your marriage to Jeremy Baker was hardly what I would call a noble gesture, Isobel. Or perhaps it’s simply my peasant mind that persists in thinking in such inconvenient black and white terms.’

Isobel looked at him from under her lashes. Peasant? Hardly. He might have come from the wrong side of the tracks, as Jeremy had been fond of saying whenever his name cropped up, but no one looking at him would ever have guessed that. Sitting there, in his expensive tailored suit, he looked what he was: wealthy, sophisticated, ruthless.

‘Why didn’t you stay in America?’ It was more the agonised voicing of a private thought than a question demanding an answer.

‘I told you. I lost interest in the bright lights.’

She doubted that. He had not ‘lost interest’ in the bright lights. He had merely decided that there was a bigger, more fulfilling challenge waiting for him here.

He would initially have been drawn to her father’s company because it probably fell into the realms of what he was accustomed to dealing with. The actual ownership was, she suspected, added spice.

‘How did you find out about…?’

‘It was reported in the financial news,’ Lorenzo answered. ‘Bob Squires, my man in London, faxed me the article. He thought that I might find the coincidence amusing as well as a possibility for take-over. Of course, he doesn’t know a great deal about my personal life, but he did know where I had lived in my youth.’

‘I see. And does anyone know much about your personal life, Lorenzo?’ she asked bitterly, and was rewarded with a look of angry discomfort. It only lasted seconds but in that time she had a fleeting glimpse of something lying beneath the cold, arrogant exterior.

‘I dislike people who try to pry into what’s no business of theirs.’ He stood up abruptly and gazed out of the window, his back to her.

‘What a lonely life you must have led all these years? she murmured, and he spun around to face her, his eyes savage and mocking.

‘I hardly think that you’re someone qualified to pass judgement on the quality of other people’s lives,’ he said tersely. ‘Marriage for money, quite frankly, makes me sick. Were you ever happy, Isobel? When the socialising was over and there were just the two of you left in your big, expensive, empty house?’

She looked away, agitated, and said nothing.

‘I thought not.’ He had regained his composure but he didn’t sit back down. He prowled restlessly around the room, staring at her, and she felt like a trapped rabbit, knowing that whatever he said she would lose because she was incapable of justifying her past.

‘If you want me to sign papers,’ she said stiffly, ‘I shall do so. If not, I’m leaving.’

‘You’ll leave when I’m ready for you to leave.’

She met his cool grey eyes with anger. ‘I don’t work for you, Lorenzo. You’re not my boss! I’m prepared to sell my father’s company to you because the move was recommended by Mr Clark, but beyond that I want nothing to do with you!’

‘Now there’s a thought,’ he murmured, moving behind her and resting his hands on either side of her chair. Her body froze. She wanted nothing to do with him but his sexuality, which had held her in its snare all those years ago, was as powerful as ever. She could feel it emanating from him, from those strong arms only inches away from her.

‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, licking her lips nervously.

‘You could,’ he murmured, ‘always work for me. Wouldn’t that be fun?’

‘No,’ Isobel muttered in a strangled voice. She wanted badly to move but she was afraid, she realised, of touching him.

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘perhaps it wouldn’t be. Or perhaps it wouldn’t be enough.’ The grey eyes swept over her, the eyes of a predator that had trapped its quarry and was lazily contemplating what course of action to take next.

‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ Her voice had risen a pitch higher.

‘The fate of your father’s company is in my hands, Isobel. Without me, everything he spent a lifetime working for will vanish like a puff of smoke.’ He smiled as though the thought afforded him immense satisfaction.

Isobel looked at him in frozen shock.

‘Another buyer can be found,’ she persisted weakly.

‘I think not.’ Another smile, and she felt a quiver of confused alarm.

‘No…’ He strolled lazily to the window, his hands in his pockets, and turned to face her. ‘I have returned, Isobel, and this time I am calling the shots. I will have you, Isobel Chandler, and then, when I tire of you, I shall cast you aside.’

‘And you said that you didn’t want revenge?’ There was a dangerous electricity in the air.

He contemplated her coldly.

‘Revenge. Such a basic word. But maybe you’re right. Maybe revenge is the only thing that can satisfy me. I will put a ring on your finger and you will be mine for however long I want you. In return, I will salvage your father’s company.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘NEVER!’ Shock made her start back and she found that her hands were gripping the arms of the chair. ‘You’re mad!’

‘Why?’ His voice was controlled, but whip-hard, and his eyes pierced into her with a venom that made her cringe.

‘I can’t believe that you would go to such lengths, Lorenzo…The past is over and done with…’

‘It is never over and done with. Do you understand me? It has festered inside me and now that I have my opportunity to do something about it, I damn well will.’

‘I will never marry you!’ He hated her. It was as simple as that. Dislike, contempt, wounded male pride, those were never strong enough to describe what he felt towards her. She could see that now, and she knew with utmost finality that she could never unburden her secret to him. If he was prepared to marry her simply to sate his desire for revenge, then how could she ever trust him?

‘You will do precisely what I say, Isobel, because you have no choice.’

‘Never! Do you understand, Lorenzo Cicolla? Never, never, never!’ She stood up because she was too agitated to sit down, but she didn’t walk towards the door. Something in the room kept her rooted to the spot.

‘Why ever not, my dear?’ he asked with aggravatingly exaggerated politeness. He was standing behind the desk, towering over her. ‘In fact, I have no idea how you could resist such a charming proposition. After all, you’ll be able to maintain your status quo; you’ll have your wealthy lifestyle. If I recall correctly, those were the things that meant so much more to you than I ever did.’ There was no fondness in his voice as he recalled their shared past, no softening in his features. If anything his face hardened, and she shivered.

‘Believe what you will,’ she muttered, looking away, and he moved around the desk so swiftly that before she realised it he was standing next to her. He curled his fingers into her hair and dragged her face to his.

Her heart began to beat, to pound, and she licked her lips nervously. She would never marry him, but some primitive response to his masculinity unfurled deep within her and her eyes widened in shock and an instinctive response to retreat as quickly as she could.

But retreat was impossible. His grip was like a vice. She stood completely still and tried to stifle the treacherous warmth rushing through her.

‘Believe what I will, Isobel?’ he asked, his lips curling. ‘Surely you mean, believe what you told me? Told me four years ago?’

She didn’t answer. Was there a way to answer the unanswerable?

The memories sprang up at her like monsters rushing out from the dark. The wedding-day, gloriously sunny, a still, fine spring day that had felt more like summer. Jeremy, looking at her with satisfaction, knowing that he now owned her.

She had been surprised and taken aback when Lorenzo had remained for the reception. She had thought that he would take the first opportunity to leave a situation which he despised, but a part of her realised that he would remain because to leave would be to throw in his hand; it would have been running away, tail between legs, admitting defeat. It would have been what Jeremy wanted. But it would not have been the Italian way: there would have been no retreat without honour.

She had mixed with friends and relatives and she had watched Lorenzo out of the corner of her eye.

In retrospect, she could see that the explosion had been only a matter of time.

Jeremy had spent the afternoon showing her off, baiting his bitter rival. Little snide remarks scattered here and there, and then more often.

Isobel could remember gritting her teeth in frustrated anger at Jeremy’s game-playing. He had always been fond of displaying his parents’ wealth to Lorenzo.

Money. It had always been the one thing that had separated Lorenzo from the rest of them. His parents had come to England with very little, and although his father had held down a responsible job at one of the engineering companies, he had always had what had amounted, in comparison with the rest of them, a minuscule income. Lorenzo’s school uniforms had been bought from the second-hand sales at the school, and text-books were never bought at all; they were borrowed from the library.

‘Thinking about it, Isobel?’ The smooth, cruel voice brought her back to the present, and she blinked and looked at him, disorientated.

‘Thinking about what?’ He had always had an amazing ability to read her mind, but she preferred to plead ignorance rather than to admit that he was spot on.

‘Your glorious, happy wedding-day. So many people milling around, all the pillars of the little community, elaborately turned out for the affair of the year.’

‘That’s not fair!’

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘And of course you looked the part—you did your parents proud, Isobel, my dear.’

Isobel closed her eyes. She remembered the compliments. She had looked exquisite. She had been told that over and over again, and she had smiled prettily every single time. Her mouth had ached by the end of the evening.

‘“Lucky Jeremy Baker.” I could see the thought running through more than one envious male mind.’ The dislike was thick in his voice and she kept her eyes lowered and her hands clenched in front of her. ‘Lucky Jeremy Baker, netting the biggest fish in the sea. He paled next to you, but then everyone did, didn’t they, Isobel?’ he asked softly. ‘Everyone except me.’

Her heartbeat quickened. She pictured them together, making love, his bronzed body wrapped against her flawless ivory one.

The thought flashed with startling clarity through her mind, and she shoved it back with a certain amount of disturbed confusion.

She remembered Jeremy. Slim, blond-haired, blue eyed, with that brand of good looks that were always charming in young children but in men were hardly ever sexy.

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