Millionaires: Rafaello's Mistress / Damiano's Return / Contract Baby
He unlocked the passenger door of the car first. She climbed in, her lovely face pale as marble and as expressionless, but inside herself she was just dying. She had not meant to say all that but he had hurt and provoked her. He swung in beside her and the horrible silence pulsed.
She laced her hands together to stop them trembling. ‘Dad and Sam just think I’ve moved and they haven’t asked the address because they don’t write me letters. They assume I’m using a public phone with a number they can’t call me back on. I didn’t have to tell any lies,’ she explained in tight voice. ‘Neither of them has ever visited me in Birmingham, so they don’t really have much curiosity about my life there.’
‘I’m sorry. I misunderstood,’ Rafaello breathed with icy cool, but there was an underlying roughness to his accented drawl. ‘I employ your father. I thought your brother was a decent kid. I asked you to be discreet for their sake and yours, not my own.’
‘No point advertising that you’re slumming on a temporary basis, is there?’ Glory heard herself say nastily. ‘After all, now you’ve dressed me up in the designer togs, nobody could possibly tell that you took me off a factory floor!’
If the previous silence had pulsed, the one that followed that blunt and inflammatory response fairly sizzled. Again Rafaello said nothing, which really infuriated her. She knew she would have been better saying nothing too but entire speeches that would rip him to shreds were trembling in readiness on the tip of her tongue and holding them back tortured her. He drove off. She would have liked him to grate through the gears and jerk the wheel to demonstrate emotional upset but he drove as if he had just come through an advanced driving test with pronounced care and caution.
She kept quiet for a whole ten minutes and then it got too much for her. ‘I really hate you, Rafaello Grazzini!’
‘Naturally you do,’ he murmured flatly. ‘Sex and debt are hardly a satisfactory basis for any relationship. My choice, my mistake.’
Tears drenched Glory’s eyes in a tidal wave. She squeezed her eyes shut, hating herself for tearing away the barriers and leaving them both without defence. But at the same time she was powerfully tempted to kick him. Why was he making things worse? Was he fed up with her, bored already? But what did it matter if he was? Wasn’t she leaving anyway? For how could she stay with him when her waistline was going to vanish?
Back at the villa, she locked herself in the bathroom. Ripping off her clothes, she got into the shower and turned it on full so that she could sob to her heart’s content. It was an hour before she crept out, eyes stinging from all the cold water she had splashed in them. Mercifully the bedroom was unoccupied. She dug into a drawer for a nightdress, the first she had worn since her arrival, and crawled into bed.
Somewhere in the early hours when she was lying there sleepless, drowning in buckets of self-pity, the bedroom door opened. She froze. She had not bothered to close the curtains and in the clear moonlight she saw a bronzed male silhouette. It was Rafaello, only a white towel knotted round his lean hips. She shut her eyes tight and seconds later noted the slight give in the mattress as Rafaello sank down on it.
She rolled over and arrived on his side of the bed only a moment after he did. Expelling his breath in a slightly startled hiss, Rafaello closed his arms round her. ‘We have to talk …’
Panic assailed Glory, for she did not want to talk. He might not appreciate it but the die was already cast. Nothing could be resolved, nothing could be changed. Gliding up over his lean, hard, muscular body in the circle of his arms, she pressed herself close and found his mouth for herself. For a horrendous instant as he tautened in surprise at the blatant invitation she thought he might push her away. Then, just as suddenly, he reacted by pinning her beneath him and deepening that kiss with a driving hunger that shook her.
In the moonlight he threw up his head again and scanned her with fathomless dark eyes. ‘I want you but—’
Glory had no desire to hear what came after. Sinking desperate fingers into the black hair still damp from the shower, she drew him down to her again. A throaty groan escaped him but she was stronger when it came to the wiles of a temptress. She knew what he could not resist. She knew what drove him wild. Within minutes he was as much the prisoner of his own hunger as she was and way past rational speech.
There was none of the long, teasing rise to gradual excitement with which they had wiled away many a long afternoon. She had unleashed a storm of fierce passion that was well out of her control. He sank into her with delicious driving force, sent her out of her senses with pleasure, and every time she reached a peak it would all start again. A seemingly endless cycle of raw excitement and ecstatic satisfaction left her drained and rather shell-shocked around dawn, when he finally fell into a much-deserved sleep of exhaustion.
Glory lay beside him, questioning what had been different apart from the silence, and then it came to her: he had been saying goodbye to her. He knew it was over. He had decided that before he even came to bed, probably expecting her to be sound asleep. He wanted out. Only not because he was bored with her or because he no longer desired her. Earlier this evening things had got messy, and Rafaello did not like messy scenes. Perhaps it had finally dawned on him that, far from hating him, she loved him.
And, if he hadn’t already guessed just how deep her emotional involvement already went, what had just happened between them would have got the message home to him fast. She had thrown herself at him like a brazen hussy. Not in a subtle, seductive way either. She cringed for herself and then swithered feverishly between fear and uncertainty. Stress about being pregnant and her own insecurity could be making her oversensitive, she reasoned. Maybe she was just imagining that she somehow knew what he was thinking.
But later that same morning she seemed to receive her answer to that question. Fully dressed, Rafaello wakened her. In a lightweight jacket worn with a dark blue shirt and teamed with faultlessly tailored beige chinos, he looked so gorgeous, he took her breath away.
‘I have to go out,’ he told her flatly. ‘Jack Woodrow called me last week to ask for investment advice and I still haven’t taken care of it.’
The first week of her stay Rafaello had taken her over to dine at the Woodrows’ palatial villa. The prospect of being entertained by a genuine earl and his wife had made Glory feel quite sick with nerves. However, the scornful Fiona had been nowhere to be seen and the brunette’s parents, Lord and Lady Woodrow, had turned out to be a delightful and charming older couple. They had greeted Rafaello with fond affection and welcomed Glory to their summer home without the smallest sign of discomfiture.
Rafaello sent her a veiled glance, his tension pronounced in the hard angles of his strong profile. ‘Look, we’ll talk when I get back but you should pack. We’re flying back to London this afternoon.’
Well, she wasn’t hanging around for that denouement, Glory told herself steadily. She would save them both from an embarrassing final encounter followed by an even more painful three-hour flight back home. No doubt he would try to ditch her with courteous consideration. What had got into him five years earlier she would never know, for the callous indifference he had shown towards her feelings then had not been his style.
At her request, Rafaello’s manservant, Hilario, took her to the airport an hour later. But as soon as Hilario had departed again Glory got into a taxi and travelled back into town. She had seen several casual jobs advertised in cafés and bars. If Rafaello was leaving Corfu, why should she? Back in England, she no longer had either a home or a job. Furthermore, she had very little money. Nor could she face the prospect of returning to the gardener’s cottage on the Montague Park estate. Her pregnancy would distress and embarrass her father a great deal and gossip might even carry the news of her condition right back to Rafaello. No, she was on her own and it was time she got used to that idea again …
CHAPTER SEVEN
STANDING beneath the awning that shaded the empty tables in the narrow alleyway, Glory took the opportunity to rub at the small of her back where the ache was worst. Late afternoon the bar attracted little passing trade, but no matter how quiet it was she was not allowed to sit down.
Eight weeks had passed since Glory had walked out of Rafaello’s villa to save face. She had soon lived to regret that impulsive decision, for nothing had gone quite as she had planned. Renting a room in Corfu town had proved to be much more expensive than she had naïvely expected and she had used up all the money she had before she had finally got a job as a waitress. Indeed she had only recently managed to save up enough to cover the purchase of an air ticket back to London.
In addition, now that the summer crowds of tourists were thinning, temporary bar staff were being laid off, so she was unlikely to have a job for much longer. When she finally flew back to England she would still be very short of cash. Staying on in Corfu had not been a good idea. Back home she would have had a better chance of finding employment while she did not look pregnant, she reflected ruefully. Now she could only get into trousers with elasticated waists and her once flat tummy was beginning to protrude, no matter how hard she tried to hold it in.
So why had she let Rafaello escape the consequences of their short-lived affair? In retrospect, her own behaviour seemed foolish and short-sighted. Recognising his tension that day when he had asked her whether she was feeling unwell because it was that time of the month, she had said yes out of an instinctive need to lessen his obvious concern. Unfortunately, her recognition of his relief in receipt of the premature reassurance had sealed her fate and left her with the pretence to maintain. But, naturally, Rafaello had been relieved, Glory told herself miserably. Sex was sex but babies were something else entirely to the average male. She had heard that some men actually got broody just like women did. However, it had seemed pretty obvious that nature had so far left Rafaello untouched by a craving for fatherhood.
But it would have been more sensible for her to have steeled herself and told him the truth: that she was expecting his child and that she intended to have her baby. Why had she felt so guilty about that decision? Even more to the point, why on earth did she miss Rafaello so unbearably? It was madness for her to be missing him when he had been on the brink of ditching her anyway. After just three weeks too. All that romantic holding of hands, all the compliments, the charm, the seemingly insatiable level of his desire for her … and what had all that been worth at the end of the day? Feeling her eyes prickle, Glory blinked back the tears that of late seemed to come all too easily to her. No doubt wiser women than she was had been fooled by men, but how many of them had been taken in twice over by the same guy?
Glory suppressed a groan as she thought of the effort she had made and the pride she had dumped just to look classy for him. She should have gone for really tarty clothes and embarrassed the hell out of him every chance she got. That was what he had deserved. But oh, no, Glory Little had acted like a bimbo right to the fall of the final curtain. Remembering how she had passed that last night in Rafaello’s bed made her shrink with mortification. Here she was, pregnant, poor, miserable and alone, and she had not even the consolation of knowing that she had told him where to get off!
Out of the corner of her eye she finally registered that one of the tables at the far end of the bar’s pitch had been taken. After two steps in that direction she recognised the angle of that arrogant dark head, the mysterious fluid arrangement of that lithe, lean body that, even seated, contrived to put out an impression of cool command and wealthy exclusivity. Her feet faltered and her heart leapt into what felt like the foot of her convulsing throat.
Rafaello removed his sunglasses. Lustrous, dark deep-set eyes zoomed in on her. His hard jawline clenched. Even wearing that grim and tense expression and clad in what appeared to be a formal business suit, he looked incredibly sleek and sexy.
A seriously debilitating wave of love and lust gripped Glory. She wanted him to smile. Why did he look so bleak? After all, what had she done? Taken herself off without fanfare? Hardly a hanging offence. Indeed, a lot of men would have been grateful to have been spared the inevitable messy and awkward scene of their parting. She tilted her chin but felt the hot betraying colour of awareness flood her cheeks.
‘Sit down,’ Rafaello suggested.
‘I can’t. I’m not allowed to,’ she said unevenly, wondering wildly if he had missed her too and if he had sought her out to tell her so. Gripped by so much desperate hope that she could no longer look him in the face, she added jerkily, ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘Either sit down or tell me where you’re staying and we’ll go there to talk,’ Rafaello countered tautly.
‘How did you find me?’
‘With the greatest of difficulty.’ Lines of strain girded his wide sensual mouth as she stole a glance at him from beneath her lashes. ‘But Sam was of some help—’
‘Sam?’ His reference to her kid brother in that line bewildered Glory.
‘Glory … I have news that you are likely to find distressing.’
Her own fantasy that he might be making an approach to persuade her back to him burned into her soul like acid. By no stretch of the imagination could he believe that such a proposition would qualify as ‘distressing’.
‘Nothing you could tell me would distress me, and if you don’t want a drink I’m not hanging around here to chat.’ Employing that scornful assurance in an effort to conceal her own pitiful sense of disappointment, Glory began to turn away again.
‘Santo cielo!’ Rafaello gritted in a driven undertone and he thrust back his chair to rise to his full commanding height. ‘Your father is ill …’
Glory jerked into the stillness of complete shock and gaped at him.
‘I’m here to fly you home so that you can be with him,’ Rafaello explained, temper back under control again, his voice level and quiet.
Her skin had turned damp and chilled and her head was starting to swim. She blinked at him. ‘Ill with … what?’
‘He had a brain tumour,’ Rafaello admitted after a pronounced hesitation. ‘He …’
Horror engulfed Glory. A brain tumour? Dizziness swept over her and, as she lurched towards one of the seats with the belated intent of sitting down, everything blacked out and she fainted.
Surfacing with a muzzy head again, Glory discovered that she was lying on the narrow bed in her room on the floor above the café. Her employer’s wife was chattering excitably to Rafaello in Greek and nodding with approval as though impressed by his responses. Her dad was dead, Glory recalled with stricken recoil. That was the news that Rafaello had been trying to break gently to her, only obviously he had not wanted to make that announcement in a public place.
‘Did Dad just go like Mum did? Suddenly?’ Glory whispered sickly.
Rafaello wheeled round, his brow indented with a frown. ‘Your father’s not dead,’ he assured her immediately. ‘He’s had surgery, major surgery. He’s holding his own … just.’
Pale as parchment paper, Glory attempted to follow that explanation but her brain was slow to comprehend, for she was numb with shock. She had reacted to Rafaello’s arrival on a very personal level, only to discover that he had sought her out again for another reason entirely. She felt completely disorientated. ‘Dad’s … alive?’
‘Yes, but I’m afraid he hasn’t recovered consciousness as yet.’
‘I was talking to him on the phone only a few days ago,’ Glory protested as she pushed herself up on her elbows and sat up.
Rafaello sank down on the edge of the bed so that they were on a level. His brilliant dark eyes were very serious. ‘It happened very fast and with little apparent warning. Your father developed a severe headache and simply collapsed. Sam called an ambulance and he was rushed to the local hospital and from there to a larger facility where scanning equipment was available.’
‘But the medics operated, so there’s hope,’ Glory said, more for her own benefit than his. ‘That’s what I’ve got to concentrate on.’
‘I’ll wait downstairs.’ Rafaello slid upright again. ‘If you can pack quickly we can be in London by late evening.’
Glory was frantic with concern for her father but she appreciated the fact that Rafaello had not offered her empty reassurances. She knew that he was afraid that her parent might not survive the night.
‘Did you have business over here?’ Glory asked on the drive to the airport, belatedly wondering how he had become involved in the situation.
‘No. I came for you. Sam could only tell me that you were working somewhere in this town in a bar. I put my staff on the phones. Bar owners rarely register casual workers and only personal enquiries were likely to receive an honest response.’
‘I should have given Sam my address. I’m so sorry,’ Glory mumbled, appalled by the trouble and inconvenience he had been put to in his efforts to locate her. He had flown all the way out to the island purely for her benefit.
‘I flew out on spec, hoping that you would be traced by the time I arrived. Jon Lyons struck lucky when I was halfway here,’ Rafaello completed, tight-mouthed.
Gritty tears lashed the backs of Glory’s eyes. Willing them back, she thanked him again and fell silent. He had to be furious with her and she could not blame him. Grateful though she was that he had found her, she was recognising once again that unfortunate extra dimension to her relationship with him. He was her father’s employer and the Grazzinis had always prided themselves on being good to their employees. Sam was only sixteen and someone had had to take responsibility in the crisis. It cut her to the bone that the adult forced to take that no doubt unwelcome responsibility had been Rafaello.
She fell asleep during the flight. Rafaello wakened her about an hour before the jet landed and she went to freshen up. When she returned a meal awaited her, and although she had small appetite she did her best to eat in the hope that food would give her more energy. But never had Glory felt more miserable. Even in the midst of fretting about her father, she was horribly conscious of the change in Rafaello’s attitude to her. While being concerned, polite and in every way supportive, he was also maintaining a detached and impersonal approach.
‘I can manage to get to the hospital on my own,’ Glory said tightly as soon as they arrived in London. ‘Thank you. You’ve been wonderful.’
‘I’m coming with you. Try to persuade Sam to take a break. He’s exhausted,’ Rafaello urged. ‘You’ll also find my housekeeper keeping a vigil by your father’s bed—’
‘Maud Belper?’ Glory glanced at him in surprise.
‘I understand that Archie asked her to marry him last week.’ Registering her astonishment at that information, Rafaello sighed. ‘I gather Sam didn’t keep you up to speed on what was happening on the homefront.’
He guessed right, but when Glory thought that development over it became less of a surprise to her. Her father and Maud Belper had known each other all their lives. If long-standing friendship had finally warmed into something more, she ought to be happy for them both. After all, her parent had been a widower for a long time, she reasoned, striving not to feel hurt and excluded at the news that her father had decided to remarry without even mentioning his plans to her. But then, why should he have done otherwise? For a long time she had lived only on the periphery of her father’s life.
She looked at Rafaello but only when he was not looking at her. It struck her that his hard-boned features had fined down since she had last seen him. He was so tense as well. He was obviously hating every moment of their enforced proximity, she thought painfully.
‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ she muttered as she hurried into the hospital lift in advance of him.
As the lift doors whirred shut, Rafaello surveyed her with impenetrable dark eyes, his lean, strong face taut. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me when I say that I don’t feel comfortable with your gratitude. You don’t owe me any apologies either. I did what I had to do. It wasn’t much. Let’s leave it at that.’
Glory lowered her wounded gaze to the floor. She so badly wanted to feel his arms around her again but she knew that that was not going to happen. A gulf the challenging depth and width of an ocean now separated them. Sam was in the waiting room. He rushed to greet her with relief but the whole time he was hugging her his every conversational sally was addressed over her shoulder to Rafaello.
‘I can’t believe that you got back here with Glory so fast!’ Sam was saying. ‘I knew you said you would but I thought there would be delays and stuff. Most of the time I’ve just let Maud sit with Dad—’
‘I’d like to see him,’ Glory slotted into her brother’s fraught flood of speech.
‘Maud will have to come out,’ Sam told her. ‘Only one person is allowed by his bed in the ICU. There just isn’t the space for more.’
Rafaello vanished from the doorway.
‘He’ll sort it,’ Sam muttered, his lanky length sagging into a weary slouch. ‘He’s done everything. Dad would be dead right now if it wasn’t for Rafaello. Did he tell you that the surgeons here said they couldn’t operate on Dad?’
‘No …’
Her brother explained that the only surgical procedure capable of giving their father a fighting chance of survival had not been done in the UK before. Rafaello had had to fly in a top-flight neurosurgeon from New York to perform the operation. This was the same guy who could not stand to be thanked, Glory reflected wretchedly. Rafaello had moved heaven and earth to help her and her family.
Ushered into the ICU by a kindly nurse, Glory focused on her father and all the machinery surrounding him and then breathed in deep. She stopped thinking about herself and her own problems and started praying instead and willing the older man to come through. Around dawn her father’s vital signs began showing a marked improvement and, revitalised by that information, Glory went in search of her brother.
But it was Maud Belper who hurried forward when she entered the waiting room, Maud, whose existence Glory had entirely forgotten. In a guilty rush at that awareness, Glory shared the good news. Tears of release from severe stress swam in the older woman’s red-rimmed eyes. She gripped Glory’s hand. ‘Would you mind if I went back in for a while?’
‘No, I’ve been very selfish. Go ahead,’ Glory encouraged. ‘Where’s Sam?’
‘Mr Grazzini took him back to his city apartment. Sam was out on his feet. Will you phone them?’ Maud begged, her impatience to be back by the side of the man she so obviously loved palpable.
Lingering only long enough to pass on the phone number, Rafaello’s housekeeper disappeared. Glory called. Rafaello answered almost immediately and agreed that her news was wonderful but he also insisted that Sam should be left to sleep for as long as possible. She was taken aback by that insistence on the score of her own brother but was too drained to argue. Curling up in a corner seat, she waited out what remained of the night hours.
Mid-morning, Rafaello brought Sam back to the hospital. By then the general prognosis was that Archie Little was on the road to recovery. He had regained consciousness, squeezed Maud’s hand and recognized his daughter with a weak smile. As Sam hurried off to take her place by his father’s side, Rafaello studied Glory. ‘You can come back to my apartment now and sleep—’