A Tainted Beauty

CHAPTER TWO

‘I DON’T understand.’ Feeling the blood drain from her face, Lily stared at her stepmother—as if waiting for her to turn round and tell her that was all some sort of sick joke.

‘What’s not to understand?’ Suzy Scott stood beside the large, leaded windows of the drawing room—her expression registering no reaction to her stepdaughter’s obvious distress. ‘It’s very simple, Lily. The house has been sold.’

Lily swallowed, shaking her head in denial. ‘But you can’t do that!’ she whispered.

‘Can’t?’ Suzy’s perfectly plucked eyebrows were elevated into two symmetrical black curves. ‘I’m afraid that I can. And I have. It’s a fait accompli. The contracts have been signed, exchanged and completed. I’m sorry, Lily—but I really had no alternative.’

‘But why? This house has been in my family for—’

‘Yes, I know it has,’ said Suzy tiredly. ‘For hundreds of years. So your father always told me. But that doesn’t really count for much in the cold, harsh light of day, does it? He didn’t leave me with any form of pension, Lily—’

‘He didn’t know he was going to die!’

‘And I really need the money,’ Suzy continued, still without any change of expression. ‘There’s no regular income coming in and I need something to live off.’

Lily pursed her trembling lips together, willing herself not to burst into angry howls of rage. She wanted to suggest that her stepmother find some sort of job—but knew that would be as pointless as suggesting that she stop kitting herself out in top-to-toe designer clothes.

‘But what about me?’ she questioned. ‘And more importantly—what about Jonny?’

Suzy’s smile became tight. ‘You’re very welcome to stay over at my London house sometimes—you know you are. But you also know how cramped it is.’

Yes, Lily knew. But her thoughts and her fears were not for herself, but for her brother. Her darling brother who had already been through so much in his sixteen years. ‘Jonny can’t possibly live at the place in London,’ she said, trying to imagine the gangling teenager let loose on all the ghastly spindly antiques which Suzy loved to keep in her metropolitan home.

Suzy fingered the diamond pendant which hung from a fine golden chain at her throat. ‘There certainly isn’t room for him and his enormous shoes littering up my sweet little mews house, that’s for sure—which is why I’ve arranged for you to carry on living here.’

Lily blinked as a feeling of hope quelled her momentary terror. ‘Here?’ she echoed. ‘You mean in the house?’

‘No, not in the house,’ said Suzy hastily. ‘I can’t see the new owner tolerating that! But I’ve had a word with Fiona Weston—’

‘You’ve spoken to my boss?’ asked Lily in confusion, because Fiona owned Crumpets!—the tearooms for which Lily had baked cakes and waitressed ever since she’d left school. Fiona was middle-aged and matronly and, to Lily’s certain knowledge, she and her stepmother had never exchanged two words more meaningful than ‘Happy Christmas’. ‘To say what, exactly?’

Suzy shrugged. ‘I explained the situation to her. I told her that I’ve been forced to sell the house and that it’s left you with an accommodation problem—’

‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose,’ said Lily, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice.

‘And she’s perfectly willing to let you and Jonny have the flat above the tearoom—so you won’t even have that far to go to work. It’s been empty for ages—it’s almost as if it’s been waiting for you! So how’s that for a solution?’

Lily stared at her stepmother, scarcely able to believe that she could come up with such an awful scenario and consider it a good idea. Yes, the flat had been empty for ages—but there was a good reason why. Nobody wanted to live right next door to the local pub—especially since it had undergone a refurbishment and acquired an all-day licence. The last royal wedding had inspired a feeling of ‘community spirit’—which basically meant that there was now round-the-clock drinking by the locals—and a deafening din of noise, which carried on late into the night.

Lily couldn’t think of anything worse than finishing one of her shifts and then making her way up the scruffy staircase to the two-roomed apartment above. Yet what choice did she have? She was hardly in a position to flounce off and make some kind of life for herself somewhere else. She had Jonny to think of. Jonny who relied on her to provide some kind of warm base. To give him the security he so desperately wanted and the home he really needed.

‘So what do you think?’ prompted Suzy.

Lily thought this was yet another example of how life could kick you in the teeth. But what was the point of saying words which would only fall on deaf ears? ‘I’ll go and see Fiona later,’ she said.

‘Good.’

Her head still spinning from the bombshell which had been dropped, Lily found herself wondering whether she would see much of Suzy after this—or whether her stepmother would want to cut ties completely. And wouldn’t that be best, in the circumstances? Her father had been the glue which had held the precarious relationship together and now that he wasn’t here any more… ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Suzy?’ she questioned suddenly.

Suzy’s manicured fingers nervously touched the diamond pendant once more. ‘Tell you what?’

‘That you’d decided to sell. If I’d known about it before, then maybe I could have mentally prepared myself. Worked out some different kind of fate for myself, rather than having it presented to me like this. Why spring it on me like this?’

Looking uncomfortable, Suzy wriggled her shoulders. ‘That wasn’t my doing. One of the conditions of sale was that I kept the identity of the buyer secret.’

‘How bizarre. But presumably I’m allowed to know who it is now?’

‘Well, not really.’ Suzy’s thumb moved rapidly over the glittering surface of the diamond. ‘It’s not for me to disclose anything.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Lily, her frayed nerves making her voice shake with unaccustomed anger. ‘Is there really any reason…?’ But her words tailed off as she heard the approaching throb of a powerful car and saw Suzy begin to swallow nervously. ‘What is it?’

‘He’s here,’ whispered her stepmother.

‘Who’s here?’

‘The new owner.’

Lily heard a car stop and a door slam and then the crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy steps on the drive—and as the peal of the doorbell echoed through the large house some gut-deep instinct began to unsettle her. An instinct which was only compounded by the way that Suzy was touching her dark red hair—the unconscious gesture of a woman who knew that an attractive man was about to enter the room.

‘Aren’t you going to open it, Suzy?’ she questioned, her voice miraculously steady even though her heart was racing so fast that she was surprised she didn’t keel over.

‘Yes, yes. Of course.’

Clattering away on her high heels, Suzy went into the hallway and, through a kind of daze, Lily heard the opening of the front door and the sound of low voices. And one of them was a deep and accented voice… She wanted to scream. To put her hands over her eyes—to block out the now seemingly inevitable sight of Ciro D’Angelo walking into the room, her stepmother shadowing him like a bodyguard.

Lily wanted to feel anger—nothing but the pure, white heat of rage—but the worst thing was that her body seemed to have other ideas. Something he’d awoken in her the other day was clearly not going back to sleep. She felt the shimmering of awareness—as if every nerve-ending had become raw and exposed to his dark-eyed scrutiny. And far more dangerous was the urgent prickling of her breasts and the pooling of heat deep in her belly.

‘Hello, Lily,’ he said softly.

At this, Suzy stepped out of his shadow, her lips opening in bewilderment as she looked at each of them in turn. ‘You mean you already know my step—, er—you’ve met Lily before?’

‘Yes, we’ve met,’ said Lily, forcing herself to speak. To wrest back some of the control she felt had been sucked from her by the dark and sexy Neapolitan. He might have purchased her home and her stepmother might have just announced that she was being offered a crummy flat above a tearoom as a poor consolation prize, but she was damned if she’d let Ciro D’Angelo see the distress which was chewing her up inside. And wasn’t some of the distress caused by more than fear of the future? Wasn’t it motivated by the desire she felt for him—which served as yet another illustration of her shocking lack of judgement when it came to men?

She pursed her lips together to stop them from trembling and it was a moment before she felt composed enough to speak. ‘Mr D’Angelo was lurking in the grounds the other day—in fact, he crept up on me and gave me quite a scare. But instead of doing the sensible thing and phoning the police to say that we had an intruder—I was stupid enough to let him in and listen to his ridiculous story. Something about being entranced by a beautiful twist in a path and wondering where it would lead.’

‘I’m flattered you remember my words so accurately,’ Ciro observed softly.

‘Well, please don’t be flattered, Mr D’Angelo—because that wasn’t my intention,’ Lily said, even though at the time she’d loved the poetry of his words. What an impressionable fool she had been. ‘You were sneaking around—’

‘Like a cat burglar?’ he interjected silkily.

Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, Lily met the gleam of his eyes, his words reminding her of that brief intimacy they’d shared. When she’d flirted with the idea of him wearing black Lycra and he had flirted right back. When she’d felt light-headed with the sensation of being with an attractive man and her body had felt like a flower in the full heat of the sun. ‘Like a thief,’ she said fervently.

‘Lily!’ Suzy had now taken up a central position, as if she were the referee in a boxing ring. ‘You really mustn’t be so rude to Mr D’Angelo. He has made me an extremely generous offer for the Grange… an offer I couldn’t possibly refuse.’

‘I can be anything I please!’ said Lily. ‘I haven’t been conducting secret deals with him!’

‘I’m so sorry about this.’ Suzy turned to Ciro, curving her shiny lips into an exasperated smile. ‘But I’m afraid that because we’re so close in age, I’ve always had difficulty disciplining her—even when my late husband was alive.’

‘Cl-close in age?’ Lily spluttered indignantly.

Ciro saw that Lily’s face was ashen and, overcome by a mixture of protectiveness and fury, he turned to the older woman. ‘Mrs Scott, I wonder if you’d mind providing some refreshment? I’ve flown straight from New York and—’

‘Of course. You must be exhausted—jet lag always completely lays me out, too!’ gushed Suzy. ‘Would you like coffee?’

‘Coffee would be perfect,’ he said coolly.

Suzy looked across the room at Lily and for a split second she thought her stepmother was about to ask her to make it, as she normally would have done if she’d had friends round. But something in her expression must have made her change her mind because she merely gave her a quizzical smile. ‘Lily?’

‘No, thanks. I think I need a real drink,’ said Lily, walking over to the drinks cabinet and yanking open the door, afraid that if she didn’t occupy herself with something then she might just crumple to the carpet. She was aware of Ciro’s eyes burning into her as she pulled out a crystal brandy glass the size of a small goldfish bowl and recklessly splashed in a large measure of the most expensive brandy she could find. Taking a large mouthful, she felt her eyes water and she almost choked as the fiery spirit burned her throat. But somehow she managed to swallow it down and quickly took another gulp to take the taste away.

‘Easy,’ warned Ciro.

She turned on him and the fear and insecurity she’d been suppressing now came bubbling out in a bitter stream. ‘Don’t you dare tell me to go “easy”,’ she breathed, because surely defiance and anger were preferable to the hot tears which were stinging at the backs of her eyes. ‘I can’t believe that you sat down in my kitchen—sorry, your kitchen—and gave me all that wistful stuff about soup, when all the time…’ She drew in a shuddering breath and felt the brandy fumes scorching through her nostrils. ‘All the time, you must have been laughing at me, knowing that you were now the owner of this house while I had no idea.’

‘I was not laughing at you,’ he ground out.

‘No? Then why didn’t you do the decent thing and tell me you were the new owner?’

‘I thought about it.’ He paused and he could feel the tension in his body. A tension which had been there every time he’d thought about her. ‘But it wasn’t really my place to do so.’

‘Why not?’ She met his eyes—the brandy now burning in her stomach, giving her the courage to level an accusation she might normally have bitten back. ‘Because you were too busy flirting with me?’

He shrugged. ‘There was an element of that,’ he conceded.

‘So, what? You thought you’d see how far you could get before you came out and told me?’

‘Lily!’ he protested, taken aback by her burning sense of outrage. And wasn’t her response turning him on? For a man unused to any kind of resistance from a woman, wasn’t it turning him on like crazy? ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone home—that much is true. And when I stumbled across you, well…’

His words tailed off because he was reluctant to explain himself. Admitting his feelings to women wasn’t in his make-up—hadn’t that been a complaint which was always being levelled against him? Eugenia had said it all the time, especially in those early days—when she had been trying to make herself into the kind of woman she thought he wanted.

Yet Ciro could never remember feeling quite so entranced by anyone as much as Lily Scott. She seemed to embody all the old-fashioned qualities he’d never found in a woman before—and hadn’t her blue-eyed face and sexy body haunted him ever since?

‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t come up with a reasonable explanation, can you?’

Impatiently, he shook his head. ‘If anyone should have told you, it was your stepmother.’

As if on cue, Suzy came back into the room carrying a tray with coffee and a plate of Lily’s home-made ginger biscuits. Clearly she had overheard his last words because she put the tray down and gave him a reproachful look. ‘That’s not really fair, Ciro—since one of the conditions of your purchase was that I keep your identity secret.’

‘My identity, yes,’ he agreed, irritated by her over-familiarity, because he certainly couldn’t remember telling her to call him by his Christian name. Or to keep batting her damned eyelashes at him like that. ‘But I certainly didn’t ask you to keep quiet about the actual sale. No wonder Lily is hurt and upset if she’s just been told that in a few weeks’ time she has nowhere to live.’

Suzy pouted. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! This isn’t some Charles Dickens novel! She’s not some homeless urchin, you know. I offered her space at my London place, but she turned her nose up at it.’

Lily had had enough. Feeling slightly nauseous now, she put the half-drunk glass of brandy down on a table. ‘I’m not some kind of object you can just move around!’ she declared.

‘I don’t like the thought of you being thrown out of your home,’ he said roughly, thinking that she was now looking quite alarmingly fragile. ‘And I’m willing to help in any way I can.’

She met his eyes, hating the way her body prickled in response to their dark and seeking gleam. ‘Well, I neither want nor need your help, Mr D’Angelo,’ she said, with as much dignity as was possible when her head was spinning from the hastily gulped brandy. With difficulty, she only just stopped herself from swaying, but the movement was enough to make Ciro move.

He stepped towards her, his hand instinctively reaching out to catch her wrist and for a brief moment the rest of the world seemed to fade away. Her skin seemed to spark like a bonfire where he touched her and all she was conscious of was him. Him. Staring into the fathomless depths of his dark eyes, her mouth as dry as flour as she imagined him kissing her. Imagined him pulling her into the powerful and protective strength of his body and, to her horror, her breasts began to tighten in response to her fantasy. ‘Get… off me,’ she croaked, wondering if he could feel the rapid thunder of her pulse and if he realised what was causing it. ‘Just let me go.’

Reluctantly, he let her hand fall—his brow furrowing into a deep frown. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

Lily glared at him. ‘Not that it’s any of your business,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to work.’

‘You can’t—’

‘Can’t? Oh, yes, I can! I can do anything I please,’ she said, cutting across his words with fierce determination. ‘I believe your sale is completing on the third of the month, is that right? So I’ll make sure all my belongings will be out of here by then. Goodbye, Mr D’Angelo—and it really is goodbye this time.’

She could feel his gaze burning into her as she walked out of the room and somehow she made it up to the bedroom she’d had for as long as she could remember. It was only then, surrounded by the comfort of the familiar which would soon be gone, that Lily allowed the hot tears to fall.

CHAPTER THREE

‘SO WHAT do you think, Lily? I know it’s a bit small.’

Fiona Weston’s soft voice penetrated Lily’s thoughts as she stared out of the dusty apartment window onto the street below. The village wasn’t exactly in a throbbing metropolis, but it still seemed unbelievably noisy when compared to the peace and quiet she was used to. A cluster of men were standing outside The Duchess of Cambridge pub, all clutching pints and puffing away at cigarettes. A man shot past on a scooter and Lily winced as it emitted a series of ear-splitting popping sounds.

Well, she was just going to have to get used to it. No more fragrant roses scenting the air outside her window—and no more gazing out at the distant woods or gently rolling fields. Instead, she was going to have to learn to live with the sound of people and cars—because the village car park was only a short distance away.

‘It’s… it’s lovely, Fiona,’ said Lily, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, though it wasn’t easy. The brandy she’d knocked back earlier had left her with a splitting headache and she couldn’t get Ciro D’Angelo’s dark face out of her mind. Or the memory of the way she’d responded when he’d caught hold of her wrist.

It was bad enough that his purchase had caused this dramatic turnaround in her fortunes, but it was made much worse by her reaction to him. He had made her feel vulnerable and he’d made her feel frustrated, too. And while a part of her had hated the rush of pleasure she’d felt when he’d touched her—hadn’t the other part revelled in the feeling of sexual desire? She forced a smile. ‘Absolutely lovely,’ she repeated.

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ said Fiona doubtfully. ‘You can move in any time you want.’

Lily nodded like one of those old-fashioned dogs her grandfather used to have in the back of his car and she remembered his positive outlook on life. Shouldn’t she be more like that? To start counting her blessings? ‘I can’t wait! It’s such a fantastically compact little apartment—and with a lick of paint and a few pot-plants, you won’t recognise the place.’

‘It could certainly do with a facelift,’ said Fiona. ‘Though I don’t know where your brother’s going to sleep when he’s home from school.’

Lily had been wondering the same thing herself. ‘Oh, he’s very adaptable,’ she said, wondering if sixteen-year-old boys ever stopped growing. ‘And I’m going to splash out and buy a lovely new sofa-bed,’ she added.

‘Good for you.’ Fiona smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ve kept the rent nice and low.’

She mentioned a sum which seemed outrageously modest. ‘I can’t possibly let you charge me something like that,’ said Lily shakily.

‘Oh, yes, you can,’ said her boss, sounding quite fierce for once. ‘You’re a hard worker, Lily—and it’s your cakes which keep the customers coming back for more.’

On an impulse, Lily reached out to hug the kindly woman who had given her flexible working hours since the village tearooms had opened. The undemanding job had provided refuge during the dark days of her mother’s illness and her father’s rapid remarriage. Hadn’t it been a kind of release for Lily, to be able to lose herself in the simple routine of serving people cups of tea and slices of cake? And hadn’t the reassuring routine helped numb the horrible reality of the district nurse arriving daily, to give Mum another pain-killing injection?

From working on Saturdays and during school holidays, Lily had gone full time at the age of eighteen and had never really looked back. She’d started as a waitress—and when Fiona had discovered that she had a gift for baking, she’d asked Lily to supply the cakes, which she’d done ever since. For a non-academic girl who needed to be there for her brother, the job had been a gift.

Turning away from the window, Lily smiled. ‘Well, if that’s all settled, I’d better get to work or we’ll have some very discontented customers on our hands. And we can’t have that.’

‘No, we can’t!’ Fiona laughed as the two women went downstairs.

Pleased at having made a decision which seemed to be the only bright light on the horizon, Lily changed into her pink uniform and slipped on a pair of sensible shoes. But as she tidied her hair in front of the mirror she was horribly aware of the feverish glitter in her eyes and the two spots of colour which highlighted her pale cheeks.