Rich and Outrageous

Once Rachel had served the meal Alessandro turned the conversation to more neutral topics. It was as if he was making a concerted effort to steer away from any mention of the past. Rachel found him to be a convivial host when he put his mind to it. He asked her what books she had read lately, what movies she had enjoyed and where she had last holidayed. He even laughed at one of her anecdotes about a visit to a celebrity client for a private fitting. Rachel suddenly realised she had never heard him laugh before. It was a deep rich sound that trickled down her spine like a flow of champagne. It was a magical moment, connecting them in a way that she had not experienced with him before. She caught a glimpse of the man he was and had always been in spite of his difficult background: respectful, disciplined, driven but decent. Why had it taken her this long to realise it?

Before she knew it the time had come for coffee.

‘Have you been back to Australia since you left?’ she asked as she poured them each a cup of the rich fragrant brew.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He stirred his black coffee even though she hadn’t seen him put in any sugar. ‘It is a good country—a great country,’ he said. ‘I have never said it wasn’t, but my heart is in Italy. As soon as I got off the plane I felt as if I had come home.’

‘Your father was Italian, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ He picked up his cup and took a sip. ‘He travelled to Australia on a working holiday but ended up staying after he met my mother.’

Rachel had never heard him speak of his parents before. ‘So why did you end up in foster homes?’ she asked.

His expression was remote. ‘My father died in a workplace accident when I was a small child. Things came unstuck after that.’

‘Do you remember him?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He was tall like me and had the same colouring. He worked hard trying to get ahead but he never quite made it. Everything seemed to work against him, including my mother.’

‘Is she still alive?’ Rachel asked.

‘She died a few years ago,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear about it until the funeral was over.’

‘You mean you didn’t try to keep in touch with her?’ His eyes met hers, dark, veiled and deep. ‘I tried but it didn’t always help matters. In the end I thought it best to keep out of her life.’

‘Why was that?’ Rachel asked.

‘She was totally unreliable,’ he said ‘She was always changing addresses and or partners, most of whom were her dealers. She was the reason my father had to work three jobs to keep food on the table. She shot most of what he earned up her arms. It was a problem she couldn’t fight alone. Once he died she spiralled out of control without him there to support her.’

Rachel’s throat constricted. She had always known he had come from a difficult background but she had never bothered to ask how difficult. She had heard rumours that he had been kicked out of numerous foster homes and thus assumed he had always been a rebel of some sort, that he was the problem. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, her voice coming out as soft as a whisper. ‘I had no idea things had been that bad for you. I thought you were just one of those hard-to-manage kids. You never said anything.’

‘My father was a fool for falling in love with my mother,’ he said. ‘Her first love wasn’t him, it was her next high. He should have realised there are some people who are beyond help. He got caught in the addiction web and it cost him his life.’

‘It must have been so awful for you having no one to rely on after your father was killed,’ Rachel said. ‘How did you manage?’

‘How does any kid manage?’ he said. ‘The survival instinct kicks in. I was a bit wild for a time until I made a decision to follow my father’s dream of a better life. I got off the streets and got an education.’

‘I am sure he would be very proud of you,’ Rachel said.

Alessandro gave an indifferent shrug. ‘I am not proud of my background but it has made me the man I am today. I suppose I should be grateful, sì? I could have followed my mother’s example. So many people do. It is all they know. It’s as if it is somehow programmed into their genes. Generational dysfunction or some such thing it is called.’

‘How did you change the cycle when so many can’t or won’t?’

‘I wanted to win, Rachel,’ he said with a determined set to his features. ‘I have always wanted to win because my father’s chance was thrown away.’

‘So winning at any cost is important to you?’

His eyes burned a pathway to her soul. ‘Very important,’ he said. ‘I will not stop until I get what I want.’

Rachel picked up her coffee cup for something to do with her hands. She wanted to reach out and lay her hand on his arm as he had done to her earlier but she wasn’t sure how it would be interpreted. When it came to that she wasn’t sure how she would react. Would her touch turn into a caress or a plea for forgiveness or both? Would she slide her hand up and down his hair-roughened arm, maybe even entwine her slim, small fingers with his long, strong ones? Her belly gave another little two-step shuffle and she gripped her coffee cup a little harder, but the cup was hot and somehow she lost her hold, the liquid spilling on the stark whiteness of the tablecloth, some of it splashing against her chest.

‘Are you all right?’ Alessandro asked. ‘You didn’t burn yourself, did you?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ she said, using the napkin he had rapidly handed her to mop up the spillage. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not normally so clumsy.’

He remained seated while she cleared the table, which she tried not to be annoyed about. He was paying her and generously to wait on him. She had no right to feel resentful. If anything she should be bending over backwards to get him to consider backing her label. It was demeaning to be in such a position but she really had no choice. ‘Alessandro …’ she began, ‘I just want to say how much I—’

‘Go to bed, Rachel,’ he said as if dismissing an overtired child from the adults’ dinner table. ‘Your work here is finished for the day. We will speak again in the morning.’ ‘But I—’

‘Don’t argue with me, Rachel,’ he said. ‘You are obviously exhausted. I should not have kept you up so late. I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.’

Rachel turned and left, not happy about being dismissed but she realised by the way the shutters came down on his face that he was probably regretting revealing so much about his background. She felt ashamed that she hadn’t probed him about it five years ago. Why had she just assumed he was a bad boy? Why hadn’t she looked a little closer and understood why he was so driven and determined? He was a man on a mission to succeed and she had been a part of that plan but had defaulted. No wonder he was enjoying watching her taking orders from him.

Success, after all, was the ultimate revenge.

It was only as she was washing her face in preparation for bed that she realised her mother’s pendant was missing from around her neck. A tight band of panic wrapped around her insides as she shook out her clothes to see if it had caught on them as she had undressed but there was no sign of it. She then retraced her steps, all over the large bedroom and then back to the en suite, her eyes scouring the floor as she went for the glint of a diamond and the silver of the fine chain, but there was nothing. She spread out the contents of her handbag on the bed, going through everything meticulously but still not able to see the pendant anywhere. She checked the sink of the basin she had used, but without the services of a plumber to undo the S-bend she was unable to know for sure if it had slipped down there or not. She bit her lip and thought hard about when she had last felt it around her neck. But because she wore it most of the time she was so used to feeling it there that she didn’t feel it. It was a part of her that just was … well, a part of her. And now it was gone.

A choked sob rose in her throat. She couldn’t lose it. It was all she had of her mother. She just couldn’t possibly lose it. She would tear this wretched villa asunder to find it even if it took her the whole night to do it.

There was a satin robe that Lucia had given her earlier and she wrapped it around herself quickly to continue the search.

She went down the stairs, turning on lights as she went, her eyes on the floor the whole time. She went across the foyer and then down to the dining room and opened the door. The table was as she had left it, shiny and cleared with a vase of roses in the centre filling the room with their scent.

She got on her hands and knees and went over the thick carpet with her hands and strained eyes. She was close to tears by now, her heart sinking at the thought of losing that final link with her mother.

‘Oh, dear God, where are you?’ she said out loud as she sat back on her heels and pushed the hair out of her face.

Rachel had her back to the door and it took her a moment to shuffle around on her knees in order to identify the sound that had whispered over the thick carpet like a fox on velvet paws.

Her heart swung like a wildly flung anvil in her chest when she saw Alessandro sitting in a wheelchair, his blue-black eyes meeting hers. ‘Is this what you are looking for?’ he asked, her mother’s pendant dangling from his long tanned fingers.

CHAPTER FOUR

RACHEL gulped, her eyes going to the chair and then back to his unflinching gaze. ‘I … I …’

He gave her a dispassionate look. ‘I am sorry I can’t rise in your presence but I am confident that within the next few days I will be able to do so.’

Her face exploded with shame. She felt every single capillary fill with it. ‘I had no idea … I’m so sorry … I wish I had known. I would never have said the things … Oh, God, the awful things I said.’ She bit on her lip so hard she tasted blood. She mentally recalled every insult, every horrible insult she had flung at him for not standing. It had never occurred to her that he couldn’t. Oh, dear God, what must he think of her? Emotion clogged her throat, tightening it until she couldn’t speak. Every moment she had spent with him he had been sitting, apart from when he had been in the pool, but even there she could not recall him standing. He had leaned against the edge and later had pulled himself out of the water and sat with his legs in the water. Why hadn’t he said something? Why hadn’t Lucia warned her? What was going on?

Alessandro used his hands to roll the wheelchair towards her. ‘You can stand up,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to kneel at my feet like a servant from the Dark Ages.’

Rachel scrambled ungainly to her feet, momentarily forgetting she was dressed in nothing but a slip of satin that was probably showing every contour of her body. It was only as she felt his dark blue gaze run over her that she wished she had asked Lucia for something a little less revealing to wear. ‘You found my pendant,’ she said unnecessarily.

‘Yes.’ He handed it to her. ‘It must have fallen from your neck when you dabbed at your spilt coffee on your top. It was on the floor. I found it as I was leaving to go upstairs.’

Rachel tried to put the pendant back on but her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. She gave it another try but it slipped out of her hands and she had to kneel down again to retrieve it off the floor.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’

She leaned towards him but it brought her so close to his face her breath stalled in her throat. They were eye to eye.

His eyes were so very dark. His breath was minty and fresh as it caressed her face. She could see the pinpoints of stubble on his jaw, the fresh dark growth triggered by the rush of his potent male hormones. Her fingers ached to feel the rasp of his stubble under her fingertips, to trace the sensual contour of his mouth. Her lips tingled to feel the hard press of his on hers, her heart beat so hard and so fast in anticipation she was sure he could hear it. For that matter she could hear it. It was like the roar of the ocean in her ears: pounding, tumultuous, deafening.

Alessandro took the pendant from her fingers and looped it around her neck, one of his hands lifting the curtain of her hair to free it from the snare of the chain. Rachel’s skin shivered in reaction, not just her neck but her entire body, inside and out. His touch was like fire. Her skin felt as if it were going to erupt into flames; every nerve ending was fizzing like a child’s bonfire-night sparkler.

‘There,’ he said, leaning back once the catch was secure. ‘You should probably get a jeweller to look at it to make sure it doesn’t come loose again.’

Rachel fingered the pendant, her eyes still locked on his as if tethered there by some invisible energy source. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a scratchy-sounding voice. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if I had lost it.’

‘It is obviously very valuable to you.’

‘Yes, it was my mother’s,’ she said, sitting back on her heels. ‘It’s all I have of hers.’

‘Well, at least you have it back now,’ he said.

Rachel bit her lip and then dived right in. ‘How did it happen?’

He looked at her for a long pause without speaking. She waited with baited breath, wondering if he was weighing up the odds about revealing what had happened to him. Was this why she had been made to sign the confidentiality agreement? Did he think so poorly of her that he had to go to that extreme?

‘Have you heard of Guillain-Barré syndrome?’ he asked at last.

‘Yes, I think so,’ she said. ‘It’s caused by a virus, isn’t it?’

‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘About two months ago after a trip abroad I developed a slight chest infection. It was nothing out of the ordinary, or so I thought. A few days later I developed some weakness in my legs. Again, I thought I had just overdone it. I had been training for a marathon before I got sick. But it turned out to be Guillain-Barré. The illness results in the inflammation and destruction of myelin in the peripheral nerves. Sometimes the paralysis can be far more serious when it affects the breathing or the ability to swallow. I am told I am one of the lucky ones. It is only my legs that have been affected, hopefully not permanently.’

Rachel didn’t know what to say. She was still reeling from the shock of it all. She was still flaying herself for everything she had said to him. Why hadn’t he said something? Surely he hadn’t hoped to keep his condition a secret from her while she was here? Or had he deliberately left it as long as he could so she could hang herself with the rope he had so very cleverly fed out to her?

‘Don’t worry, Rachel,’ he said with an embittered look. ‘It’s not catching.’

She frowned as she realised how he had interpreted her silence. ‘I’m not in the least concerned about that.’

One brow rose cynically. ‘Are you not?’

‘Of course not,’ she said.

‘So, you’re not planning on leaving at first light?’ he asked.

‘I’m not leaving.’ As soon as she said the words she realised how deeply she meant them. He thought her a woman without honour and principles but she would show him just how honourable and principled she had become. She would stand by her agreement with him. She would stay as long as he needed her.

He pushed his chair back from where she was kneeling on the floor. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ he said, biting out each word as if they were something bitter and distasteful.

‘I’m not offering you pity,’ she said. ‘I think it’s terrible that you’ve been dealt this but that’s empathy, not pity.’

‘Get up off the floor, for God’s sake,’ he said irritably.

Rachel stood up and brushed the borrowed wrap back down over her thighs. ‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked. ‘Can I help you with anything?’

His dark eyes glittered as they held hers. ‘What exactly are you offering, Rachel? Your delectable body to awaken my half-dead nerves?’

Her face suffused with colour all over again. ‘That wasn’t part of the arrangement,’ she said.

‘We could make it part.’

Her eyes rounded. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘I can do what I want, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I am the one holding the purse strings now, remember?’

‘Am I to be punished for every horrible word I ever said to you?’ she asked. ‘Is that what this is about? You want a whipping boy and I am it?’

His eyes were dark blue chips of ice. ‘Go to bed, Rachel. I will see you in the morning.’

‘Don’t dismiss me like a child,’ she said with a late show of her wilfulness. ‘You’re always doing that. It’s so annoying.’

His hands gripped the turning mechanism on his chair. ‘Are you determined to see me lose my temper?’

‘I’m not scared of you, Alessandro,’ Rachel said.

‘Then you should be,’ he said, fixing her with a searing look. ‘I can do more harm to you than ten of your worthless, spineless fiancés. One word from me and your fashion career will be over. No one in the whole of Europe will touch you with a bargepole. Am I making myself clear?’

Rachel swallowed a walnut-sized restriction in her throat. ‘If you do that you will not just be destroying me but my business partner too.’

A pulse ticked at the side of his mouth. ‘Then you had better behave yourself, hadn’t you, cara?’ he said and, without waiting for a response from her, he turned on his wheels and left.

Rachel lay in bed much later without any hope of getting to sleep. She had watched the clock go around in fifteen-minute slots, each one seeming slower than the one before. It was now close to dawn. She could see the fingers of sunlight poking through the gap in the curtains, casting the room in an incandescent glow of pink and gold.

Alessandro’s threat was still ringing in her ears. He could destroy her with a word. She had no way of knowing whether he would do it or not. He certainly had the motivation to do so. She had no choice but to do everything his way. Failing this time would not just be devastating professionally but personally as well. It would be the confirmation of all of her worst fears that she didn’t have the talent and drive to achieve anything in life.

She had heard the whirr and grind of the lift taking Alessandro to his suite of rooms a couple of hours ago. It seemed he too was late to bed. She wondered if he had been to sleep or whether he had tossed and turned as she had done. He had said he hoped to be back on his feet within a few days, but what if it took longer? She wasn’t sure what the timeframe of the syndrome was or whether it was different for every person. All she knew was that he was one of the most physically active people she had ever met. The fact that her father had exploited Alessandro’s willingness to work so hard had not really occurred to her until later when those very standards had clashed with her own. She hadn’t spoken to her father in a couple of years, not since he had asked her to bail him out of yet another gambling disaster. The fact that he had lost everything, including the house and garden her mother had loved so much, destroyed any hope of a continuing relationship with him. He would have pawned her mother’s pendant if she hadn’t caught him just in time.

She threw back the covers and wandered over to the window, pulling back the curtains with the beaded chain hanging by the side. The pool below was sparkling invitingly. Before she could change her mind she put on her rinsed out bra and knickers, and, wrapping her body in a bath sheet as a sarong, went down the marble staircase to the door that led out to the terrace.

She slipped into the water and practised her strokes. It was a beautiful morning, warm already with a promise of later heat. The water was a perfect temperature and she turned onto her back, closing her eyes as she floated.

Alessandro frowned as he read the email from Sheikh Almeed Khaled. The sheikh requested Alessandro bring his current partner to a private dinner at his luxury hotel in Paris the following week. There would be follow-up meetings during the week, but to meet privately was a good sign the sheikh was moving closer to sealing the deal. However, the invitation presented Alessandro with a problem. Turning up without a partner for the dinner, let alone the week, could make the sheikh suspicious that all was not well with him. He had seen deals brokered and lost before on the whisper of an illness. The business world he moved in was ruthless. People did not make allowances for personal issues. It was cut-throat and heartless but that was the way things worked. A deal was a deal.

He turned away from the computer to look out of the window, his brain ticking over the best way to handle the situation, when he caught sight of the miscreant mermaid floating in his pool in the early morning light. The sun had painted her slim body in an ethereal glow, her hair streaming out behind her in silken strands. He drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair as he thought of how he could work things to his advantage.

Rachel needed money.

He needed a temporary mistress.

Like all the other women in his life she would serve her purpose for the allotted time but that would be the end of it. His relationships were just like any other business transaction. Both parties teamed up for a specified time and parted with what they had agreed on at the outset. The rest of the month with Rachel would prove to him he was able to walk away without a single pang of regret.

He would feel nothing.

Zip.

Nada.

Niente.

He smiled as he made his way down to the pool. This was going to be far more entertaining that he had first thought.

Rachel turned over and saw him by the pool, her sea-glass eyes blinking the water out as she stood and shielded her lace-covered breasts with her hands. ‘I—I didn’t hear you,’ she said.

Alessandro gave her a semblance of a smile as he tapped the wheels with his hands. ‘It’s the deluxe model,’ he said, ‘streamlined and stealthy.’

She bit her lip in that childlike way of hers that undid him every time. He would have to work harder at covering it, at conquering it. She was not a guileless child. She never had been. She was a manipulating, down-on-her-luck gold-digger. She had already sold herself once. She would do it again. It would be amusing to watch her game play this time around.

‘I’ll get out to give you some more room,’ she said, and moved towards the side of the pool.

‘I am sure there is room in there for the two of us,’ Alessandro said.

She stalled with her hands on the rails that led from the steps. ‘I just thought you might like some privacy.’

He sent his eyes over her slim form, taking his time over the upthrust of her breasts before he met her gaze. He felt the stab of lust deep in his groin, his body springing to life, aching, pulsing, filling and lengthening. ‘If anyone deserves some privacy it is you,’ he said, keeping his expression deadpan. ‘Hopefully the rest of your luggage will arrive within the next twenty-four hours.’

‘I didn’t think you would be down here this early,’ she said. ‘I had a bad night. I couldn’t sleep. I thought some exercise would help.’

He moved his chair closer to the pool. ‘It’s a great panacea for many ills.’

He was conscious of her watching him as he manoeuvred himself from the chair to the railing of the pool steps. He was able to take a couple of steps, which was better than even twenty-four hours ago. It spurred him on to work harder and harder at his exercises.

He would beat this.

He refused to consider any other alternative.

He swam a couple of lengths to loosen up his muscles and came back to where she was still standing, holding the rails of the steps. ‘I haven’t contaminated the water, you know,’ he said.

She frowned at him. ‘I wish you wouldn’t immediately assume the worst of me.’

‘Swim with me, then,’ he said. ‘We can train together. I could do with the company. It gets pretty boring going up and down by oneself.’

She stepped back down into the water. ‘You’re very good at this, swimming, I mean,’ she said. ‘No one would ever think that you … I mean …’