Rafaello's Mistress

‘Si…yes,’ Rafaello confirmed as the spilt liquid flowed over the expensive fibres in a spreading stain and she just stared fixedly at it, paralysed where she sat. ‘Naturally my father told me what it cost to persuade you that I was not, after all, the love of your life. And it was a fitting footnote to our relationship. A lousy five grand when you could have had ten, twenty, thirty times that for the asking. But I guess five grand seemed like a small fortune to you then.’

Glory was still watching the seeping pool of coffee. She was appalled that he had found out about that payment. She felt sick. She was in an agony of shame. Rafaello knew, Rafaello knew about the money. ‘He said it would be a secret, he said you would never know…’ she mumbled strickenly.

‘Dio mio…do you believe everything you’re told?’ Rafaello murmured with a cruel enjoyment that she could feel like a knife plunging between her ribs. ‘I was amused—’

‘Amused?’ Folding her arms over her churning tummy, Glory gazed up at him in shaken disbelief.

‘My father acting like some clumsy Victorian squire trying to pay off a maidservant he saw as a threat to family unity. So unnecessary,’ Rafaello mused. ‘I never entertained a single serious thought about our relationship. But I wasn’t amused when you took the money like the greedy little gold-digger he said you were. That was cheap and inexcusable.’

Glory sat there as if she were turned to stone. She said nothing. She had nothing to say, for, as the money had not been returned, she could not defend herself. It would scarcely help her father’s case if she was now to confide that Archie Little had refused to allow her to destroy that cheque. Indeed, he had taken her to the bank that same day and the money had been transferred into his account. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, he had said when she argued with him. If she was being forced to leave home to please Benito Grazzini, her father had believed that he was due some compensation. Deprived of her help in the household, not to mention the extra money her job brought in, how was he to manage?

A greedy little gold-digger? So that was how Rafaello had learned to think of her over the past five years. True bitterness scythed through Glory. She thought of the games rich people played and the damage they could wreak. Their money could give them the power to bully smaller people and make them do what they didn’t want to do. She had left home because her father’s job and his very survival had been at stake and for no other reason. It seemed bitterly ironic that she was now facing Rafaello again for much the same reason.

She squared her shoulders and veiled her eyes. ‘Now that you’ve told me what you think of me, can we discuss why I asked for this appointment?’

‘Go ahead…’ Rafaello said drily.

‘You’ve given my father a month’s notice—’

‘Don’t tell me you’re surprised.’ Rafaello elevated a sleek dark brow. ‘If it hadn’t been for your father’s incompetence, your punk of a brother would never have gained access to my home—’

‘Sam nicked the keys when Dad was asleep,’ Glory protested, rising to her feet in a sudden defensive movement. ‘Since Dad could hardly have guessed what Sam was planning to do, you can’t blame him for what happened!’

‘But I can certainly blame your father for telling the police a pack of lies and trying to protect your brother and his nasty destructive friends,’ Rafaello cut in with ruthless bite. ‘Have you any idea how much damage has been caused to the Park?’

‘Sam told me everything.’ However, Glory’s combative stance had instantly evaporated when she was faced with that daunting question. ‘Rugs stained and furniture scratched and windows broken, but at least the damage was restricted to two rooms. As soon as Sam realised that his mates were too drunk for him to control, he ran for help. Dad should have called the police himself and he should have told the truth when the housekeeper called the police in the next morning—’

‘But he didn’t,’ Rafaello slotted in with lethal timing.

‘He was scared of the consequences. My brother’s only sixteen. But Sam did tell the truth when the police questioned him. He’s very ashamed and very sorry—’

‘Of course he is. He doesn’t want to be prosecuted.’

Having turned noticeably paler at that blunt statement of possible intent, Glory said in desperation, ‘Didn’t you ever kick up a lark that went horribly wrong at his age?’

‘If you’re asking, did I ever trespass on someone else’s property or vandalise it?…the answer is no.’

‘But then, I bet you had more exciting outlets at Sam’s age,’ Glory persisted. ‘Only there’s virtually nothing for teenagers to do in the area and nowhere for them to go either. None of them have any money—’

‘Cut the bleeding-heart routine,’ Rafaello advised with cold impatience. ‘I’ve got no time for anyone who violates either my home or my property. The clean-up bill alone will run into thousands—’

‘Thousands?’ she stressed in astonishment.

She received a nod of confirmation.

‘You’re being ripped off!’ Glory told him. ‘Everybody knows that you’re loaded. I bet you’re being quoted a crazy figure for the clean-up because the firm knows you can afford it.’

Rafaello surveyed her with sardonic cool. ‘Glory…it takes highly trained professionals to repair valuable antiques and restore damaged plasterwork. That kind of expertise comes at a premium charge.’

Feeling very foolish, feeling all the confused embarrassment of someone who had not a clue about the care of antiques, Glory subsided and set off doggedly on another tack. ‘I feel awful that we can’t offer you any financial compensation—’

‘I feel awful that sentencing tearaway teenagers to thirty lashes has gone out of fashion,’ Rafaello imparted very drily. ‘But the return of the snuff box that was removed from the drawing-room might…just might persuade me not to prosecute your brother.’

Glory had gone very still. ‘Something was—er—taken? But why didn’t the police mention that to Sam yesterday?’

‘They weren’t aware of it until this morning when I realised that it was missing,’ Rafaello explained grimly. ‘The snuff box is tiny and would’ve been easily slipped into a pocket.’

‘A snuff box?’ Glory parrotted weakly, aghast at the news that an item of value might have been stolen from the Park, for that was an infinitely more serious offence.

‘German, eighteenth century, made of gold and covered with precious stones. It will be virtually impossible to replace,’ Rafaello outlined.

Glory parted her taut lips. ‘How much is it worth?’

‘About sixty grand.’

Glory tried and failed to swallow. ‘Sixty thousand…pounds?’

‘I have excellent taste—’

‘And you think it’s been stolen?’ Glory exclaimed. ‘I mean, have you searched? Are you sure?’

‘I would not have reported it to the police otherwise. It puts rather a different complexion on your touching portrayal of bored teenagers with nowhere to go and nothing to do, and I have every intention of pressing charges on the score of that theft.’

Her lips bloodlessly compressed and her knees wobbling, Glory sank down almost clumsily into the seat she had vacated mere minutes before. ‘No way would Sam have stolen anything—’

‘Someone did.’

Her head felt as if it was going round and round. The situation was even worse than she had realised. There had been around twenty teenagers at that impromptu party. Any one of them could have lifted something small without attracting attention. A tiny box worth sixty thousand pounds? She felt physically sick. Sam having let himself into the huge house to throw a party for his drunken friends had been serious enough…but theft as well?

‘Obviously you’re planning to press charges against Sam and you have no intention of changing your mind about dismissing my dad.’ Glory could see that she had no hope of dissuading him on either count now.

‘Did you think I would be so overwhelmed by your fabulous face and body that I would write it all off for old times’ sake?’ Rafaello murmured softly and smoothly but she felt his contempt right down into her bones and recoiled from it.

‘No…but I had to try to reason with you,’ she stressed shakily, looking up to encounter hard dark eyes with a shocking sense of betrayal. She could neither bear nor yet accept how low she had sunk in his estimation. ‘My father and my brother deserve to be in trouble for being stupid but you’re talking about wrecking their lives. Dad’s got no fancy gardening qualifications and he won’t get another job at his age. All because of this snuff box going missing? What do you need with a stupid box costing that much anyway?’

‘Beautiful things give me pleasure,’ Rafaello admitted without hesitation.

‘Is there anything I can say or do…?’ Glory demanded feverishly.

‘You’re asking me to advise you on how to change my mind?’ Rafaello slung her a sardonic appraisal and then he vented a husky laugh. ‘What have you got to offer me in return?’

‘Undying gratitude?’ Glory suggested without much hope.

‘Something for nothing is not my style. Perhaps you should appeal to my baser instincts. Let me think. What do I want that you can give me?’ Rafaello rested dark deep-set eyes that were shimmering with glints of awakening on her taut seated figure. ‘Only one thing. Sex.’

CHAPTER TWO

SEX? What sort of a crack was that to make? Glory released a nervous laugh. Eyes very wide and blue pinned to him, she muttered unevenly, ‘You don’t mean that…you don’t mean that like it sounds.’

‘Don’t I? I’m the guy you sold out for a derogatory five grand. You’ll never convince me that moral standards are a subject likely to keep you awake at night,’ Rafaello murmured in a hypnotically quiet undertone that rasped down her taut spine like sandpaper on silk. ‘So what about it, Glory?’

‘What about what?’ Glory snapped half an octave higher, still refusing to credit that he could actually mean what he was saying and springing restively upright again. She pushed back a straying strand of honey-blonde hair from her brow in a defensive movement. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’

‘A joke? Far from it. You should be flattered.’ Lounging at his ease, Rafaello gazed steadily back at her. ‘I’m offering to whisk you off the factory floor and install you in my bed while at the same time allowing your useless male relatives off the hook. Now if that’s not generous, what is?’

‘You’re just saying this stuff to humiliate me because you don’t like me—’

‘Glory…I don’t need to like or respect you to want you under me, over me and any other way I can think of having you,’ Rafaello countered with level cool, his unapologetic bluntness in delineating that earthy reality shattering what few illusions she still retained.

‘How can you talk to me like this?’ Glory demanded half under her breath, her damp hands clenching into fists by her sides.

‘Don’t knock the lust factor when it can work to your advantage. Even dressed as you are now, you’re gorgeous.’ Rafaello ran brilliant dark golden eyes over the full swell of her breasts below the sweater, let his meaningful scrutiny of her charms slide to the pronounced curve of her hips below her tiny waist and then lower still.

She stood there with her face burning. She felt that unashamedly male appraisal like a flame of sexual contempt singeing her sensitive skin. But, worst of all, she was experiencing sensations she had almost forgotten she could feel. That enervating little tightening frisson of physical response low in her pelvis, the mortifying sensation of liquid heat between her clenching thighs.

‘I don’t want to hear any more!’ she gasped, spinning away from him, sucking in a stark breath, fighting to stop her body reacting to the erotic buzz in the atmosphere, to him.

‘But the more I contemplate the possibilities, the more I warm up to the idea, cara,’ Rafaello confided huskily. ‘Straightforward sex. An honest agreement, free of all those restrictive relationship complexities. I keep you…and you please me.’

‘You are not going to keep me and I am not going to bed with you, Rafaello Grazzini!’ Glory launched at him furiously. ‘I’m not a whore!’

‘You have…’ with offensive detachment, Rafaello shrugged back his shirt cuff to glance at the narrow gold watch on his strong wrist ‘…three and a half hours to make your mind up. If you’re not back here by two this afternoon, the offer is closed.’

Aghast at that level announcement, Glory stared at him with shaken bright blue eyes, finally accepting that he was serious. ‘Do you honestly think that I would trade my body—?’

‘To the highest bidder? Yes,’ Rafaello incised without hesitation. ‘Five years ago, I was very slow to catch on to what you really wanted from me. I didn’t give you any expensive gifts. Nor did it occur to me to put cold, hard cash on the table and pay the price for the intimacy I wanted—’

‘Stop it!’ Glory exclaimed in angry chagrined despair, whirling away from him again to conceal her pained mortification. ‘It wasn’t like that between us.’

‘You took money to stay out of my bed. Presumably you would’ve accepted a better offer to get into it!’

‘No, I wouldn’t have done!’ Inflamed by that assertion, Glory turned back to yell at him, her voice breaking with distress, ‘I loved you!’

‘Only you couldn’t love me to the value of five grand?’ Rafaello shot her a derisive appraisal and then his expressive mouth curled into a hard smile of chilling amusement. ‘You’ve got some nerve telling me that.’

‘I hate you…’ Glory bit out with a shudder of violent resentment at the humiliation he was inflicting on her. ‘I really hate you now.’

‘I can live with that…I can live with that fine.’ Arrogant dark head high, brilliant eyes level, Rafaello surveyed her as if she had thrown down a gauntlet and challenged him.

‘You won’t be asked to live with it!’ Glory shot at him tempestuously, stalking back to the chair to snatch up her bag. Her beautiful face was furiously flushed, her blue eyes bright as sapphires with anger. ‘Does it give you a cheap thrill to think that you have power over me?’

‘I don’t call writing off a debt of eighty grand cheap. As to the power—how do I feel about that? Pretty damned good, cara,’ Rafaello confided.

‘You don’t have power over me. You have no power unless I give it to you!’ Glory snapped back in so much rage she could hardly vocalise.

‘But you’d do anything for your father and your brother. Do you think I don’t know that? Where are the spineless cowards lurking, anyway?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Archie and Sam. I notice they’re conspicuous by their absence,’ Rafaello extended with perceptible scorn as he strolled to the door with fluid grace and held it open for her, demonstrating an inbred courtesy that set her teeth on edge even more. ‘But then, maybe it was your idea to come alone in their place—’

At that moment, Glory was past caring what he thought of her, for she only wanted to escape. ‘Maybe it was—’

‘Maybe you fancied your chances with me again—’

‘You really think you’re something, don’t you?’ she condemned between compressed lips.

‘At the very least, cleverer than you are. Either you should have brought the male back-up or sat weeping and whingeing until revulsion wore me down—’

‘I don’t weep or whinge!’

‘I wouldn’t want you if you did.’ Rafaello focused on Jon Lyons, who was standing down at the reception area at the far end of the corridor, trying not to look as if he was watching them. He skimmed his attention back to her with derisive dark eyes that sent a wave of colour flaming across her slanted cheekbones. ‘Five minutes here and you’ve got my executive assistant panting at your heels like a pet dog. Do him a favour. Give him the big freeze on the way out!’

‘Go to hell!’ she hissed and stalked away, shivering with rage and shame and bitterness.

For what could she do and what could she possibly say to defend herself? Rafaello thought she was greedy and unscrupulous. Whether she liked it or not, she had to accept that five years ago she had made a serious error of judgement and now she was paying the price for it. She had allowed her father to take that cheque for five thousand pounds and keep it. Archie Little had been in debt and desperate for money. After Glory had endured that demeaning interview with Rafaello’s father she hadn’t had enough fight left in her to resist her own parent’s demands and stand up for what was right. She had felt microscopic in size by the time Benito Grazzini had finished talking to her. He had left her with few illusions about the myth of social equality.

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.’