One Night In…

‘And why not, when the woman is as beautiful as the one seated in the window?’ one of them said smiling.

Seated? Raffaelle turned again to focus on a table by the restaurant’s window where indeed a very beautiful woman sat smiling ruefully back at him.

He had not noticed her before this moment.

He had not noticed any other women for a long time—not since Rachel came into his life.

His gaze flicked away from the smiling woman and across the street again.

He was in shock. He knew that. He knew that several important things were happening inside him even as he watched Rachel’s other Italian lover fold an arm across her shoulders and guide her towards his car.

Car horns were blaring. The street was alive with impatient car drivers trapped behind Alonso’s car.

‘One quick coffee, then,’ Rachel agreed as he swung open the door and helped her inside.

She should not be doing this. But they were drawing too much attention and getting into Alonso’s car seemed the better of two evils if coffee somewhere was the only way she was going to get rid of him.

Alonso joined her in seconds, sliding into the seat beside her and sending her one of his reckless grins as he slipped the car into gear. He drove them away with a panache that completely disregarded the minor chaos he had been causing in the street.

‘Like old times, eh?’ he laughed at her.

And it was, just like old times, when he had used to sweep up in one fast car or another without a care while he waited for her to scramble in next to him. His handsome carelessness used to excite her then. Now it just scared her witless as she glanced quickly around them as they drove off, hoping she did not see a face she recognised in the street—or worse, a camera flashing.

‘Somewhere quiet, Alonso,’ she told him quickly. ‘I can’t afford to be seen with you.’

‘Scared of what your rich new fiancé will say?’

You bet I am, Rachel thought. ‘I call it respect for his feelings.’

‘And a healthy respect for his bank balance too.’

Before she could challenge that last cynical remark, Alonso pulled into one of the less fashionable squares off the main street. Two minutes later they were sitting opposite each other at one of the pavement cafés that lined the square.

Rachel looked at Alonso and saw a man who worked very hard to look, dress, behave like the man he wished he could be but never would be.

And how did she know that? Because she had spent the last month with the genuine article, a man who didn’t need to work hard at being exclusive and special, he just simply was. It was she who, like Alonso, had to work hard at playing the part of someone she was not.

The comparison hit her low in her stomach.

As if he could tell what she was thinking, ‘You have done very well for yourself,’ Alonso said.

Rachel didn’t answer, giving her attention to the waiter who had come to their table. ‘Espresso,’ she told him. ‘N-no, I don’t want anything else.’

Alonso ordered the same, then casually dismissed the waiter with a flick of a hand. Had he always behaved with this much casual arrogance and she had been too besotted with him to notice?

‘What are you doing here in Milan?’ She repeated her question from earlier.

Sitting back in his seat and crossing a knee over the other, he said, ‘I moved here six months ago—to a better position, of course.’

Of course, Rachel acknowledged. Alonso had always been ambitiously upwardly mobile. ‘Still selling cars?’

‘Super-cars,’ cara, he corrected dryly. ‘They are not merely cars but engineering works of art. But let us talk about you,’ he said turning the subject. ‘You must be happy with your new lover. What woman would not be?’ His mouth turned cynical as his eyes drifted over her. ‘No longer the rosy-cheeked innocent up from the country, eh?’

Recalling that innocent young girl Alsono had known last year, with—if not quite straw in her hair as Raffaelle described her—then pretty close to it, made her smile.

‘No,’ she agreed.

Their coffees arrived then, putting a halt on the conversation while the waiter did his thing. Eventually, Alonso sat forward to catch the hand she’d used to reach for her cup.

‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’ he said softly. ‘I missed you when you left me to go home.’

‘Did you?’ Not so Rachel had noticed.

‘Ah, si,’ he sighed. ‘I almost came after you but—life, you know, got in my way …’

Another new conquest had got in his way, he meant.

‘And maybe I did you a very great favour,’ he added. ‘For look where you are today—betrothed to man with more connections in this city than any other that I know of. A man in possession of his own bank! I salute you, cara.’

Leaning towards him, Rachel let him lift her fingers to his lips. She let him try to seduce her with the rueful tease glinting in his sensual dark eyes. She even added a smile.

‘You know what, Alonso,’ she then said softly. ‘You were a beautiful charmer last year when I met you, and you are still a beautiful charmer now.’ He smiled and kissed her fingertips. ‘But why don’t you just tell me what it is that you want from me, because I am going to get up and leave here any minute …’

There was a moment of sharpened stillness, then he sat back in his seat and laughed. ‘How did you guess?’

Living the part of a rich man’s woman had taught her how useful other people believed she could be to them. ‘Raffaelle does not need another new car,’ she told him. ‘He has too many of them already.’

‘An introduction to him and his friends could bode well for me in the future, though.’

‘Or ruin your career,’ Rachel pointed out. ‘Raffaelle knows about you and me, caro.’

He caught on, which Rachel had known he would do. The smile died from his features, taking with it all the charm and leaving behind only a rueful kind of petulance.

Then it changed. A sudden well-remembered gleam hit his eyes. ‘I don’t suppose you would enjoy a little light diversion this afternoon with your old lover—for old time’s sake before we part again?’

The business side done with, he was back to playing the sexy charmer. Rachel couldn’t help it, she laughed. ‘No, I would not!’ she refused, still bubbling with amusement at his downright audacity.

His lazy smile reappeared and he reached across the table to gently brush her smiling mouth with his thumb. ‘Shame,’ he murmured. ‘We were so good together once, hmm, carisima …’

Across the square on the shady side, a camera caught them for posterity as Rachel reached up to close her hand around his so that she could remove his touch from her mouth.

‘One day,’ she warned him seriously, ‘some beautiful creature is going to come into your life and knock down your outrageous conceit.’

‘But she will not be you?’

‘No.’ She’d tried to do that once and had failed, had survived the experience and had now moved on—though to what, she was not certain about.

Still, it was a good feeling to realise that she was completely free of Alonso. So maybe meeting up with him had not been a bad thing to happen in her life right now.

Getting to her feet, ‘Ciao, Alonso,’ she murmured softly, then simply turned and walked away from him.

He did not try to stop her. Maybe he’d read the look in her eyes and knew he had lost the power to make her feel anything for him.

Or, more likely, he simply did not care enough to want to stop her. Who knew? It was just a good feeling to know that she no longer cared.

The camera toting paparazzo had already gone, missing the moment that she’d walked away from her old love with no regrets. And, by the time she reached the main street again, Alonso had been pushed right out of her thoughts by more important things.

Buying a pregnancy testing kit took courage, she discovered. She was constantly glancing around her to check if anyone was watching her and she found herself wandering aimlessly around the shops, putting off the evil moment for as long as she could.

Which in the end turned out to be a foolish exercise because, having found the courage to buy the darn thing, she had been back at the apartment for barely two minutes when Raffaelle arrived home unexpectedly, forcing her to shove her purchase into a bedside drawer.

He was in a strange mood, cold and distant and sarcastic as hell when she tried to speak to him. She needed to tell him about her meeting with Alonso, but he just cut her off with a curt, ‘Later,’ then locked himself away in his study and did not come out again until it was almost time for them to leave for the restaurant where they were meeting his friends for dinner that evening.

His mood had not improved by the time he’d taken a shower and changed his business suit for a more casual version made of fine charcoal-coloured linen. Her simple black halter dress drew no comment—but then why should it when he’d seen her wearing it several times before?

But she was hurt by the sudden loss of his usual attention. Confessions about surprise meetings with old lovers just did not suit the kind of mood he surrounded them with as they left.

He did not look at her. He did not touch her. When she dared to open her mouth and ask what was wrong with him, he ignored the question by turning to say something to Dino who was driving them tonight.

What with his bad mood, the stress of knowing that the pregnancy test was still burning a hole in the bedside drawer, plus the memory of her meeting with Alonso sitting heavy on her conscience, the last person she needed to see as they walked into the restaurant foyer was his stepsister Daniella, who was standing beside a tall, dark, handsome man. The elusive Gino Rossi, Rachel assumed, by the way Daniella was tucked so intimately into his side.

Raffaelle made the introductions with brusque, cool formality that made both her and Gino Rossi’s responses wary and brief. After a moment Raffaelle then turned away and centred his attention on the rest of his friends, determined to get through this damn evening before he decided what he was going to do about what he had witnessed today.

In the inside pocket of his jacket, a photograph of Rachel with her lover being cosy across a café table was trying its best to burn a hole into his chest. The fact that she had been too engrossed to notice the paparazzo who took it only fed his simmering rage. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was close friends with the newspaper owner to whom the freelance reporter had offered to sell the photograph.

He was now assured that the picture of his betrothed being intimate with another man would not appear in the tabloids, but at a cost to his dignity as well as his wallet, plus an invitation to this evening’s dinner party, along with a promised exclusive interview about his wonderful life to date.

A life that included details about the lying, cheating, two-timing blonde wearing his ring right now.

He allowed himself a glance at her, standing there looking paler than usual with an oddly fragile look to her slender stance. A frown cut a dark crease across his brow. Why fragile? Was her conscience pricking her? Did she possess one? Had she spent the afternoon comparing her old lover with her new lover?

Which of them had won the contest?

A curse rattled its way around his throat and he looked away again, wondering when the hell she had got to him so badly that he even considered that damn question?

Dio. Rachel was bad for him. She had been bad for him from the moment he’d set eyes on her. Her type, her kind, were poison to a guy like him and maybe it was time that he got himself the cure.

The owner of the newspaper arrived then, like the perfect answer to his thoughts. Tall, blonde, and beautiful, and dressed in rich, dark purple that moulded her long, slender curves, Francesca de Baggio was the kind of woman who answered most men’s desires.

Raffaelle went to meet her. They embraced with murmured greetings to each other that showed the intimacy of lovers from eons ago. As his lips brushed her cheeks he smelled her sensuous perfume, felt the smoothness of her skin at her shoulders beneath his palms. As her red lips lingered at the corner of his mouth he waited for the expected tingle to light him up from the inside.

It did not happen.

‘Ciao, mi amore,’ she moved those red lips to whisper softly in his ear. ‘The betrothed does not look happy. Have you beaten her soundly?’

Almond-shaped eyes that matched the colour of her dress gleamed up at him with a conspiratorial smile. Anger erupted inside him, fresh anger—new anger—leaping on a desire to jump to Rachel’s defence.

‘You know better than I do how a photograph can misrepresent the truth.’

The almond eyes widened and filled with amusement. How was it he had forgotten that Francesca was in the tabloid business because she loved the trouble it allowed her to cause?

‘His name is Alonso Leopardi,’ she informed him softly. ‘He sells cars for a living and loves them as much as he loves women. He also rents an apartment above the café they were sitting at being so. cosy. Convenient, hmm?’

Raffaelle was hooked like a fish and he knew it. It was perhaps fortunate that Gino and Daniella came up to greet Francesca then, because it saved him from making a bloody fool of himself by letting Francesca see that she’d reeled him in.

Looking round for Rachel, he could see her nowhere. For a tight, thick, blood-curdling second he thought she must have walked out. For a blinding, sickening, sense-drowning moment he actually saw her in his head, making a run for it, grabbing a cab and heading for her heartbreaker in a white-faced urgent adrenalin rush of need.

A clammy sweat broke out all over him. He took a step away from the group of his friends now gathering around Francesca to welcome her into their fold.

Common sense was telling him not to be so stupid. Rachel would not just walk out on him—even if the way he had been behaving tonight was enough in itself to justify her walking out.

He saw her then, right over on the other side of the busy restaurant. She was just stepping into the ladies’ room with her blonde head bowed slightly and a slender white hand pushed up against her mouth.

She’d looked pale all evening, he remembered. His mind flipped from hating her to worrying about her. How could he have forgotten the baby they could have made, which might be making its presence felt as she made a quick dash into the Ladies'?

Concern wanted to send his feet in her direction. Only common sense warned him not to make a scene here. Turning back to Francesca, he saw her watching him with an eyebrow arched curiously. Dragging on his social cloak, he forced himself to smile as he walked back to her.

Rachel was fighting the need to be sick in the toilet. The clammy sweat of nausea had flooded over her the moment she’d seen the way Raffaelle had walked into the arms of the beautiful blonde.

‘Ex-lovers,’ Daniella had whispered to her. ‘Don’t they look amazing together? He adored her once but she left him for her now ex-husband. We thought he would never get over it— maybe he didn’t. He spent the afternoon with her,’ she confided with relish. ‘I know because Gino told me Raffaelle cancelled a meeting with him to go to her. Now she’s here. An interesting development, don’t you think?’

Was it? Rachel discovered that she no longer knew anything. Her head was thumping too thickly to think. A month—a month in which she had lived and slept with him, had trailed around Europe with him as his pretend future bride. But what did she really know about Raffaelle, other than he was a fantastic lover and was willing to go to any lengths to protect himself from getting a negative press?

By the time she felt able to rejoin the party, everyone was gathered around a long wooden table. Still fighting down nausea, Rachel found herself having to take the only seat left available between Daniella and another male friend of Raffaelle’s, whose name she couldn’t recall right now.

Raffaelle was sitting at the other end of the table. The beautiful Francesca was next to him. She had arrived here on her own and Rachel supposed that, given the odd number of men to women, the dinner placements had become muddled.

But it was the first time that Raffaelle was not occupying the seat beside her like a statement of possession.

Had he even noticed that she was not sitting on his other side?

Not that Rachel could tell. His attention was too firmly fixed on his new dining partner. And she was not the only one to notice the change in place settings, or the difference in him. Others kept sending her brief telling glances, then looking down the table at him.

Raffaelle did not notice. He was too busy plying his beautiful companion with wine and food, while Rachel could barely bring herself to swallow a thing. And, to top this whole disaster of an evening, having her handsome fiancé sitting beside her was enough protection to give Daniella’s tongue back its sharpened edge.

‘How is Elise?’ she began innocently enough.

‘Fine,’ Rachel responded. ‘She’s still in Chicago with her husband and son.’

‘And your. half-brother? The one with the camera? Is he still enjoying playing tricks on the rich and famous?’

How Daniella had managed to discover that Mark was her half-brother Rachel just did not feel like finding out right now. ‘Mark is fine,’ she answered in the same level tone and tried to change the subject. ‘How are your wedding plans coming along?’

‘Wonderful.’ Daniella smiled happily. ‘I’m here in Milan for my dress-fitting. Isn’t that dress you’re wearing—?’ She named a top designer. ‘Did Raffaelle buy it for you? How much do you think you have stung him for by now?’

‘My dress is not by that particular designer,’ Rachel answered quietly, ‘and I pay for my own clothes.’

‘Well, don’t bother buying anything expensive for my wedding, darling, because by the look of it you will not be coming.’ Daniella flicked her eyes down the table. ‘Knowing Raffaelle as well as I do, I think I can positively predict that you are on your way out and Francesca is definitely on her way back in.’

One short glance down the table was enough for Rachel to confirm why Daniella felt so very sure about that. If it wasn’t enough that he had ignored her all evening, the way he was smiling that oh-so-familiar lazily sensual smile at the beautiful Francesca was the final straw for her.

‘You know what, Daniella?’ She turned back to her tormentor. ‘Watching you marry that poor fool sitting next to you is the last thing on earth that I want to do.’ The poor fool heard what she said and turned sharply to look at her. She ignored him. ‘So dance on my grave, if that’s what turns you on, darling,’ she invited. ‘And, while you’re doing it, tell your stepbrother from me that he can have his Francesca with my absolute blessing!’

Then she stood up. The nausea instantly hit her again. She pushed her chair back and walked away. Silence had fallen around the table. How many of them had heard her exit line she did not know and she did not care.

Raffaelle tuned in too late to catch anything but the sight of Rachel’s taut back retreating and the uncomfortable silence that followed. Gino was frowning angrily at Daniella. His stepsister had gone very pale. Someone else muttered a soft, ‘Dio.’

And the whole table watched as he came to his feet. Someone touched his hand. It might have been Francesca. He neither knew nor cared.

He strode after Rachel. ‘Where the hell do you think you are going?’ he raked out, catching hold of her wrist to bring her to a standstill between two tables.

It came out of nowhere, the rise in anger, the sudden swing round. Next thing she knew, she had slapped him full in the face.

A camera flashed.

His eyes lit up bright silver. ‘That’s tomorrow’s trash out of the way,’ he gritted, then hauled her up against him and kissed her hard.

The flashes kept on coming. The whole restaurant had fallen into complete silence to witness Raffaelle Villani fight with his future bride. By the time he set her mouth free her lips were burning and her heart was thumping and tears were hot in her eyes.

‘I wish I’d never met you,’ she hissed up at him, then wrenched free of him and walked away.

Outside the air was cool and she shivered. Dino stood leaning against the car in the car park but he straightened the moment he saw Raffaelle appear.

‘Rachel—’

‘Stay away from me.’ She started walking away from both the driver and Raffaelle, her spindly heels clicking on the hard pathway’s surface. Inside she was a mass of muddled feelings, nausea and the pumping, pounding need to just get right away from everything.

She managed about ten metres before the car drew up beside her, at the same time as a figure leapt out of it and a hard hand arrived around her waist.

She tried to pull free; the hand tightened. ‘You know how this works,’ Raffaelle said grimly. ‘You decide which way we do it.’

A camera flashed. They both blinked as it happened. Raffaelle muttered something nasty as his free hand pulled open the car door. Shivering, Rachel stiffened away from him and entered the car under her own steam.

The door closed her in. He walked round the car to get in beside her. With no glass partition in here to give them privacy, they were forced to hold their tongues, so the silence pulsed like a third heartbeat between them.

Anger, hostility, a tight sizzling hatred that ran dangerously close to its unrequited flipside flicked at the muscles in Raffaelle’s face and held Rachel’s frozen in her own private hell.

If he had not drunk so much wine, keeping up with Francesca in his attempt to divert her curious attention away from Rachel, Raffaelle knew he would have kicked Dino out of the car and taken his place, just to give himself something to do and stop himself from wanting to reach out and kill her for making him feel like this.

And—yes, he freely admitted it—he had been happy to give this woman sitting beside him something useful to think about! Did she think she was the only one of them who could play this game of falseness?

Game, falseness; the two words ricocheted around his head as a brutal reminder as to what this relationship was really about.

Rachel sat beside him with her face averted, fingering the ring on her finger and only realising as she felt its duller contours that she was still wearing the daytime fake.

Looking down, she could see that she had forgotten to swap the ring for the real one. So what was that little error trying to tell her?

You can’t live a lie and expect it to spin itself into the truth?

They arrived at his apartment still steeped in thick silence. The journey up in the lift was just as cold and reined in. They entered the apartment. Rachel tossed aside her purse and just kept walking. He followed her into the bedroom and shut the door.

She could feel his anger beating into her. She refused to turn and look at him. ‘If you want a row, then you’re going to have to save it until tomorrow,’ she tossed out coldly. ‘I’m not—feeling too well, so I’m going to take a shower, then I’m going to bed and I would prefer it if you found somewhere else to sleep.’

Kicking off her shoes, she headed for the bathroom.

‘Pleading a headache, cara?’

The drawling tone made her wince. ‘Yes, actually,’ she answered.

‘Perhaps even pining for your Italian heartbreaker—?’

What had made him bring up Alonso now of all times? Rachel stopped walking to turn and look at him. He was standing in front of the closed bedroom door, tall, lean, spectacularly arrogant, with that coldly cynical expression lashed to his handsome features that just said it all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AN ICY chill chased down Rachel’s spine. ‘You know I bumped into Alonso today,’ she murmured.