Rich and Outrageous

‘Half a man?’ he said.

‘I never said that,’ she said. ‘I never even thought it.’ ‘It’s what most people think.’

‘I’m not most people,’ she said. ‘I know you think I’m spoilt and shallow and I was before. I freely admit that. But the last few years have changed me. I don’t judge people on appearances or what they lack in terms of background or breeding. We are all the same on this earth. Everyone is equal.’

He gave a snort of derision. ‘You expect me to believe you have reinvented yourself? You haven’t got a clue how the other half lives, Rachel. You have never had to beg for a meal. You have never had to sleep rough when the cold creeps into your bones until you can barely move the next morning. You have never had to fight off predators who want your soul for the price of their next fix.’

His words seemed to hit her like physical blows and he instantly regretted revealing so much of his sordid past. As soon as he had done it last night he had wished he hadn’t. She could so easily use it against him. He’d had plenty of opportunities to tell her five years ago but he’d always held back. He hadn’t wanted to sully their budding relationship with the dark shadows of his past. He realised now part of her allure back then had been that air of sassy innocence she had perfected.

She bit her lip again. He saw the way her teeth pushed the blood away until her lip turned almost bone-white, and then how when she released it the blood flooded back, making her lips cherry-red. Damn it, why did she keep doing that?

‘I think I’ll go inside and shower,’ she said, moving back to the steps.

‘Rachel.’

She stopped and turned to look at him. ‘Yes?’

‘I have a proposition for you,’ Alessandro said.

She looked at him warily. ‘You do?’

‘I have decided to give you the backing you need,’ he said.

A gleam of excitement shone in her eyes. ‘You have?’

‘But I want something in return.’

The excitement faded. ‘Which is?’ she asked.

He nailed her with his eyes. ‘I want you to be my mistress for the rest of the month.’

Her eyes went wide and her cheeks flushed. ‘P-pardon?’

Alessandro smiled. Dio, she was good at playing the game. So coy, so convincing. ‘You heard.’

‘I’m sorry, but for a moment there I thought you said you want me to be your mistress.’ She gave her head a little shake. ‘I must have water in my ears.’

Alessandro waited for a beat. ‘I am willing to fully back your label as well as pay you generously for each day of our time together.’

Her expression tightened, her eyes narrowing in anger. ‘I knew you would do this. I knew you would change the rules to suit yourself.’

‘Whether you sleep with me will be entirely up to you,’ he said. ‘It is not a condition on the deal.’

She faltered for a moment, a frown pulling at her smooth brow. ‘I … I don’t understand … You just said you would pay me to be your mistress.’

‘In public, not necessarily in private,’ Alessandro said.

Her frown deepened. ‘You want me to act as if I’m your mistress?’

‘I am sure you can do it convincingly,’ he said. ‘After all, you have done it before, sì?’

Her mouth flattened in anger. ‘Do you have any idea of how much I hate you for doing this?’

‘Right back at you, little rich girl,’ he said.

She got out of the pool and snatched up her towel. ‘You expect me to say yes, don’t you?’ she said.

‘I expect you to think carefully before you throw away your only lifeline,’ he said.

She gave him a look that would have cut through a diamond. ‘Let me get back to you on that,’ she said.

‘I have so far managed to keep the news of my affliction out of the press,’ he said. ‘I realise that will be impossible if I am not able to regain my full mobility over the next few weeks, but I refuse to accept that outcome. I can now manage a few steps with support. My goal is to move to crutches in the next couple of days. That will make being seen in public a lot less complicated and no one will blink an eye about it. I will explain it as a sprain or something. You read and signed the disclosure contract. Do I have to remind you of the consequences of not playing by the rules?’

‘Do you think so badly of me that you think I would do something like that?’ she asked.

‘I will have another contract drawn up ready for you to sign this evening,’ he said.

‘And if I don’t sign it?’

Alessandro smiled an indolent smile. ‘You will sign it, Rachel.’

‘Your confidence is admirable but I am not for sale,’ she said with an icy look. ‘I will look at other options before I sink that low.’

‘You will sign it because you have no choice,’ he said. ‘Not unless you want to go begging on the streets for your next meal.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I can’t go out in public with you without clothes.’

‘Do not worry, cara,’ he said. ‘I will make sure your luggage is delivered to the door today.’

‘And if it isn’t?’

‘Then I will pay for new clothes for you,’ he said.

She glowered at him resentfully. ‘I don’t want to owe you any more than I have to.’

‘You were the one who came to me, Rachel,’ he reminded her. ‘You are here now and who knows? Perhaps we might even be friends at the end of it.’

‘You have a very strange way of recruiting friends,’ she tossed back.

Alessandro watched as she wrapped the towel around her body and flounced off. The red-hot blood of desire thundered in his veins, filling him, making him ache with a need that refused to go away. He wanted her more than he had wanted any woman. He wanted her more now than he had five years ago. It was burning like an inferno inside him; day and night it was all he could think about. How much he longed to surge inside her, claiming her as his own, showing her the pleasures of the fiery chemistry that had always been there between them. If it was more money she wanted in exchange for her body, then he would give it. He would part with a fortune to have his fill of her.

But he would still let her go at the end of it.

Rachel stormed into the shower, turning the water on full, her anger at Alessandro practically bursting through the pores of her skin. Had he planned this right from the start? Of course he had. He had lured her here to play his petty little power games with her. This was a masterstroke at payback. He couldn’t have planned a better move. He knew she couldn’t say no. Not unless she was prepared to lose everything, including all that Caitlyn had put into the company. How would she be able to face her staff and tell them it was over? She couldn’t do it. And Alessandro knew it and was humiliating her with it.

She had not long got out of the shower when he called her on the extension in her room. Her luggage had finally been located and was being delivered within a couple of hours. She marvelled that a single phone call from him had achieved what several from her had not. It was another reminder of the power he had at his fingertips. Power he could use to break her if he chose to.

‘I have some work to do so I would like to be left undisturbed until lunch, which I would like served at one,’ Alessandro said. ‘I hope you can find something to do to occupy your time.’

‘I’m sure I can find a doorknob or two to polish,’ Rachel said tartly.

‘Lucia is returning in the morning so your duties as a housekeeper will cease from midnight tonight,’ he said. ‘I have told her you will be staying on till the end of the month.’

‘I haven’t said I would do it yet,’ she reminded him.

He ignored her statement as he continued, ‘Lucia is also aware that our relationship is not like my usual ones.’

‘What? You mean you don’t usually blackmail your other women into doing whatever you want?’ she shot back.

‘I have not had to resort to such means in the past,’ he said. ‘Most women are perfectly happy with the fringe benefits of sharing my life for a specified time.’

‘How can you specify the duration of a relationship?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Do you have some sort of reminder in your calendar in case you accidentally run over a couple of days? Beep. Time’s up. Out you go. Next please.’

‘You need have no fear of that happening with us, Rachel,’ he said. ‘You will be back on that plane to Australia on the first of next month. I can guarantee it.’

He ended the call with an abruptness Rachel found intensely irritating. He was reminding her of her tenuous position here as little more than a servant. It was all part of his mission to extract revenge for the choice she had made, a choice that if she’d had her time over again she would have made so very differently. She put the phone extension back in its cradle and thought back to the night of her twenty-first birthday party.

The mansion was filling with guests for the black-tie affair. Rachel had taken great care over her appearance and was putting on the last touches to her make-up when her father came to see her.

‘Rachel, I need a word with you,’ he said, looking uneasy.

‘Sure,’ she said, putting down her tube of lipstick. ‘What it is, Dad?’

He pulled at the collar of his dress shirt as if it were strangling him. ‘Honey, I need to ask you for a favour, a big one,’ he said.

‘If you want me to dance with that geeky guy Albert from your firm, forget it,’ she said, picking up her lipstick again. ‘I can’t stand his fleshy hands all over me. He did that at the staff Christmas party and I—’

‘Craig has asked for your hand in marriage.’

Rachel looked at her father. ‘Shouldn’t he have asked me first?’

‘I guess he didn’t see the necessity,’ he said. ‘You’ve both always known you would eventually make a go of it. Your mother and I talked of it when you were kids. His parents Kate and Bill wanted it too. They still want it. Now seems the right time to announce it publicly.’

Rachel put a hand to the diamond pendant around her neck that her father had given her only that morning. Her mother had been given it on her twenty-first birthday. She had been wearing it the day she died. ‘Dad, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you—’

‘Craig has invested in my business,’ her father cut her off. ‘He’s really going places, Rachel. He can set you up. He has connections in a modelling agency. They will take you on straight away with just a word from him. You’ll travel the world: Paris, London, New York. You’ll become a household name.’

‘But I’m not in love with him,’ Rachel said. ‘I thought I was once, when we were teenagers, but not now.’

‘Do you think I loved your mother?’ her father said through tight lips. ‘Don’t get me wrong. She was a nice girl but that was the point. I had to marry a nice girl. Not one from the wrong side of the tracks. There are women you sleep with and there are women you marry. It’s the same for young women like you born to wealth. You can have your flings if you must, but you have to marry well. You have to marry your own kind. It’s a fact of life.’

‘But I’m not ready to settle down just yet,’ she said. ‘I need more time to make up my mind.’

Her father frowned blackly. ‘What’s this talk of making up your mind? You’ve always known Craig was the one.’

Rachel swallowed. ‘I’ve just started seeing someone …’

‘Who?’ The word came out like a bullet.

She felt her stomach begin to churn at the dark threatening look in her father’s eyes. ‘Alessandro,’ she said.

Her father’s face turned puce. ‘The yard boy?’

‘He’s not just a yard boy,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s doing a business degree, an MBA in fact. He only continues to work here to pay his university tuition.’

‘He’s trailer trash,’ her father said, spittle forming at the side of his mouth. ‘He’s a mongrel, a crossbreed. For God’s sake, he doesn’t have a penny to his name!’

‘He treats me like a princess,’ Rachel said. ‘He treats me with respect even though I’ve been awful to him in the past. I’m just starting to get to know him and I think he’s one of the nicest—’

‘Are you a complete fool?’ he said, his eyes bulging with disgust and scorn. ‘You’re being used, Rachel, and you’re too stupid to see it. He’s using you to get ahead. By hooking up with you he gets access to the high-flyers. If you were a poor girl from the suburbs he wouldn’t look twice at you.’

Rachel stared at her father open-mouthed. Was it true? Had Alessandro targeted her as his ticket to the big time? They had only been dating a few weeks. She had insisted on keeping their relationship private but he hadn’t had the same misgivings. He had wanted to make it public right from the start, he had said he had nothing to be ashamed of in seeing her, but then why would he if what her father had said was true?

‘He’ll drag you down to the gutter where he came from,’ her father continued. ‘I’m warning you, Rachel. If you don’t accept Craig’s offer of marriage then you will be cut out of my life. I will never speak to you again. Do you hear me?’

Rachel looked at her father in wounded shock. Did he mean it? Did he love her so little that he could cast her from his life without a single slice of regret? Could she risk it? She had already lost her mother. She would have no one if her father cut her off.

‘I am sending Craig upstairs as soon as he arrives,’ her father went on. ‘I want you to come downstairs together as an engaged couple. This is your chance to do something for me, to make me proud. God knows you’ve given me little to be proud of so far. But this will change everything. I will be the proudest father alive to see you settled with Craig Hughson.’

Rachel’s heart sank as her father left the room. The knock on her door a few minutes later made her heart sink even further but, when she opened it, it wasn’t Craig standing there, but Alessandro.

She said the first thing that came into her head. ‘How did you get in? My father has a security team down there to keep out gatecrashers.’

‘I know one of the security guards,’ Alessandro said with a flash of his heart-stopping smile.

She closed the door of her bedroom and leaned back against it for support, her eyes avoiding his. ‘You can’t be here, Alessandro,’ she said. ‘Not tonight.’

‘I wanted to see you on your birthday,’ he said. ‘I have something I want to ask you.’

She looked at the small velvet package he was holding in one hand. ‘I can’t take that.’ She moved past him to stand in front of the dressing table. She gripped the back of the chair until her knuckles looked as if they would break through her skin.

He came over and, turning her gently, took one of her hands and closed her fingers over the package. ‘Rachel,’ he said. ‘I know we’ve only been officially dating a few weeks but we’ve known each other for much longer than that.’

Rachel swallowed as she saw the sincerity in his dark blue gaze as it caught and held hers. ‘Don’t,’ she choked. Please don’t.

His hands squeezed hers gently. ‘I love you,’ he said, smiling down at her. ‘I think I fell in love with you the first day I came to work here and you insulted me about my manners or my hair, or was it my clothes? It doesn’t matter. I love you and I want to marry you. Will you do me the honour of being my wife?’

She tried to get her voice to work but her lips felt as if they were starched. ‘Alessandro … I …’

There was a loud knock on Rachel’s bedroom door and before she could open her mouth Craig Hughson came in as if he had every right to.

He took in the little tableau with a sneering look. ‘What’s he doing here?’ he asked Rachel.

She couldn’t look at Alessandro but she could feel the pressing weight of his gaze. ‘He’s just leaving,’ she said. ‘He just wanted to wish me a happy birthday.’

‘Well, you can congratulate us while you’re at it, Vallini,’ Craig said, slinging an arm around Rachel’s shoulders.

Alessandro’s expression turned to stone. ‘Congratulate you on what?’

‘Rachel and I are engaged,’ Craig said with a smug smile. ‘We’re just going downstairs to announce it now. Aren’t we, babe?’

‘Is that true?’ Alessandro asked, firing the question at Rachel, his eyes like laser beams.

Rachel wanted to deny it. She ached to deny it. She thought of her father waiting downstairs with all the guests, all the celebrities and high-flyers of Melbourne society, all the well-to-do family friends. They were all assembled waiting for her and Craig to appear. Her father had probably primed them all. They probably had champagne glasses filled and ready for the first congratulatory toast. Could she go down there and say she wouldn’t do it, that she wouldn’t accept Craig’s offer of marriage? She had no home but this one. No other relative but her father. How could she cut herself off from all that was familiar to take a chance on a relationship that was only in its infancy? She wasn’t sure if what she felt for Alessandro was love. It felt like it but how could she know for sure? What if he was asking her to marry him to get ahead in life as her father had implied? She would be better marrying the devil she knew than the one she didn’t.

‘Is it true?’ Alessandro repeated his question, each word enunciated with lethal precision.

Rachel schooled her features into the haughty mask she had used so many times to disguise her true feelings. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ she said. She gave Craig a tight smile and linked her arm through his. ‘We’re getting married.’

Alessandro didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. His anger was a palpable force. It was like a vibration in the room, invisible sound waves of fury. He gave Rachel a look of savage contempt before he moved past, closing the bedroom door with a snap that was as final as a punctuation mark.

Rachel blinked herself out of the past. She didn’t want to think about her shameful, cowardly behaviour. She didn’t want to think of the two years of hell with Craig, how he had cheated on her the whole time they had been together, how he had borrowed money in her name, falsifying her signature, leaving her up to the eyeballs in debt and her reputation in ruins. She didn’t want to think about the life she could have had with Alessandro. She might not have been in love with him at the time but she hadn’t been far off it. Now he hated her and he had every right to.

The villa was blissfully quiet. Rachel was used to a busy crowded workspace, people bustling about as she tried to get everything done that needed to be done. It was amazingly liberating to be left alone with just her thoughts for company, and not just her thoughts, but her creative energy. She found her mind suddenly buzzing with new designs, elegant, sophisticated and inspired by her exotic surroundings. She took out her sketchbook and drew some outlines, using quick fluid strokes that captured the essence of what she wanted to produce for her next collection, barely stopping until thirst and an aching gnaw in her stomach reminded her it was time to prepare lunch.

Once the meal was set up, this time on a shady part of the terrace, she went in search of Alessandro. He wasn’t in his study or in any of the sitting rooms. The pool was empty, for she had checked it as she had laid the outdoor setting on the terrace.

She walked past a room on the lower level that she hadn’t seen before. She opened the door without knocking. In one quick glance she could see the room was a gym. And then her eyes went to Alessandro, who was on some type of rehabilitation walking frame, beads of sweat on his brow as he forced one leg in front of the other. It looked as if every step were a marathon. His mouth was set in a grimly determined line, every muscle in his arms bunched and quivering as they tried to hold his weight as he moved along the short distance across the floor.

Rachel hadn’t been aware of making a sound but she must have because he suddenly looked her way and growled at her, his expression savage, like a snarling dog. ‘Get out. Get the hell out of here!’

Her hand fell to her side, her chest feeling tight and restricted. ‘I’m sorry … I thought you wanted lunch at one …’

He gave her a cutting look. ‘I’m not hungry. Now leave.’

She swallowed convulsively as she took in the equipment surrounding him. Weight machines and bench presses, a treadmill that she suspected he hadn’t used in a while. All of it a reminder of what he had once been and might never be again. She had secretly admired the sculptured perfection of his muscles all those years ago. She had secretly admired him and compared him to the other men in her life: Craig, who was handsome but lacked definition, her father, who after years of excessive drinking and lack of exercise had become a bloated effigy of the striking-looking man he had once been. Alessandro had surpassed them easily; he always had. His touch had lingered like a memory in her flesh, catching her off guard, taking her by surprise, alerting her to the chemistry that simmered underneath the history of their tricky relationship.

‘I told you to get out, Rachel,’ he said, his mouth still flat and tight.

‘That looks like hard work,’ she said, refusing to be daunted, even though her legs were feeling as trembling and unsteady as his seemed to be.

His eyes darkened to midnight blue. ‘It is and I would rather not have an audience.’

She moved across to where a pulley with weights attached was hanging from a machine. ‘What’s this for?’ she asked, touching it experimentally.

She heard him draw in a harsh breath behind her. ‘It’s to maintain my upper body strength,’ he said.

She moved to the leg press machine, running a finger over the smooth shiny metal. ‘And this?’ she asked.

She heard him swear in Italian, a short sharp expletive that for some reason sent a trickling feeling to the base of her spine. Her mind exploded with erotic images of him making love to her, his body strong and in control, pumping, thrusting, filling her with his male presence, stretching her, taking her to the heights of human pleasure. Her face coloured as she realised where her thoughts were taking her.

‘I’ve never seen anyone get hot and sweaty before from just looking at gym equipment,’ Alessandro said drily.

Rachel turned away to inspect the hand weights, desperately hoping her colour would subside. She picked up the lightest pair of weights and did a couple of bicep curls. ‘I’ve never really got into the gym thing,’ she said. ‘I have friends who do several sessions a week. They get antsy if they don’t go. It’s like an addiction.’

‘There are worse things to be addicted to.’

She put the weights down and turned and looked at him again. ‘Yes, I suppose so …’

He was studying her, the hard angry look replaced now with a guarded one. ‘So what do you do to keep so trim and slim?’ he asked. ‘Hot and sweaty sessions with your latest lover?’

Rachel felt her face flame again. ‘I told you I’ve been too busy working on my label. I haven’t dated in a while. Actually, not since I broke off my engagement.’

His eyes registered her statement with a tiny flicker of surprise but then he covered it quickly. His voice when he spoke was cynical. ‘I somehow can’t picture you as a born-again virgin, Rachel. You were always starving for male attention. It didn’t matter who they were as long as you could get their notice. I fell for it and I can imagine many have done so since, more fool them.’

‘You’re never going to let it go, are you?’ she said.

His expression remained coolly calm, detached. ‘I suppose you are referring to my rather clumsy marriage proposal.’

Rachel’s heart was thudding as if she had just done a triple circuit of the equipment in the room with a half marathon thrown in as well. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to … to—’

‘To what?’ He cut her off almost savagely, his eyes blazing again. ‘To admit I loved you?’

She tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth. ‘I was surprised, that’s all. I didn’t think people fell in love that quickly, or at least not men.’

He gave a grunt of derision. ‘I didn’t love you, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I was in lust with you, just like every other man who came within a bull’s roar of you. Didn’t your father tell you that about men? There are woman you love and there are women you lust after. You are the latter. You will always be the latter.’