Rafaello's Mistress

‘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.

‘You’re not going back to Birmingham…’ Rafaello intoned, allowing his lean fingers to glide down her slender arms and then enclosing her smaller hands in his without warning.

‘No!’ Glory cried, yanking herself free of that imprisoning hold with the abruptness of a woman suddenly waking up to the threat. ‘You’re not listening to me, are you? I’m not accepting your offer. I want nothing to do with you—’

With a roughened groan of raw impatience, Rafaello meshed one hand into the soft coils of her honey-blonde hair to hold her still and he brought his mouth crashing down with hungry intensity on hers. For a split-second, she went rigid with shock and he took advantage. He backed her up against the cool metallic wall and splayed his hands beneath her hips to lift her up to him. And then he let his tongue drive between her parted lips with erotic force, plundering the tender interior within, and every nerve-ending in her quivering body went haywire.

She wrapped her arms round his neck and clung, kissing him back with mindless fervour. A tormented moan of response was dragged from low in her throat. She couldn’t get enough of that drugging passion which she had once worked so hard to forget. The very strength and power of the hard male physique keeping her pinned back to the wall inflamed her with dangerous heat. Helpless in the grip of her own increasing excitement, she was beyond thought or objection when he splayed her thighs round him, the better to anchor her to him.

And then, without any warning whatsoever, Rafaello froze. With a ragged groan, he released her swollen mouth and gazed down at her with heavily lidded smouldering golden eyes that had a faintly dazed light. ‘Per meraviglia… We are in a lift in a public building!’

In an equally sudden movement, Rafaello settled her back down onto her own feet. In shock, Glory finally realised that the lift was still and that all the lights on the control panel were flashing but that the doors had yet to open. ‘Why isn’t it moving?’

‘I stopped it,’ Rafaello admitted curtly, stabbing a couple of buttons.

With a slight lurch the lift set off downward again, while Glory smoothed shaking hands down her rucked sweater. She could not bring herself to look at him. It was one of those moments when intense mortification and essential honesty combined to prevent her from coming up with a single face-saving excuse. Her lips burning from the heat of his, her trembling body still struggling to come down from the heights of anticipation he had contrived to fire within seconds of touching her, she felt shattered.

‘We’ll go back to my apartment,’ Rafaello breathed thickly.

Sensing that lunch would not be Rafaello’s most pressing goal, Glory reddened to the roots of her hair with shame. ‘Nothing doing. I’m going home. I told you that. This was an accident—’

‘An…accident?’ Rafaello repeated in thunderous disbelief.

‘Like when you take your eyes off the road and crash!’ Glory stressed shakily, almost being eaten alive by the strength of her own self-loathing.

The lift doors swept back with an electronic beep of warning, exposing them to all onlookers. There was a crush of bodies waiting outside but their impatient surge forward was arrested by the sight of the male within. A sea of wildly curious faces stared in at Rafaello and Glory.

Glory lurched into frantic motion. She pushed her way through the stilled crowd and then raced across the busy ground-floor foyer for the exit doors. She ran a good half of the way back to the train station and then, winded and barely able to catch her breath, was forced to halt her mad flight and walk instead.

However, the sense of panic and severe embarrassment induced by what she had allowed to happen between herself and Rafaello was in no way lessened. How could she have behaved like that? One minute telling him she had only come back to give him a piece of her mind, the next winding herself round him like the weakest of choking vines. Talk about handing out conflicting signals!

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