by Lynne Graham
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—’
‘No, thanks,’ she said tightly.
‘Don’t make this more difficult than it already is,’ Rafaello told her with a look of reproof. ‘Are you planning to kip on a park bench just to score against me?’
Glory folded her arms with a jerk. She was so close to tears, she could not trust herself to speak. She felt frankly surplus to everyone’s requirements. From the doorway of the ICU she had watched her father look at Maud’s wan but smiling face and had appreciated that he took much greater strength and comfort from the older woman’s presence than from hers. Then there was Sam, rushing in beside Rafaello, bopping about like a very large, clumsy puppy and then punching Rafaello’s shoulder in that exclusive all-male way to bid him goodbye and barely awarding his sister a second glance.
Sam seemed to have succumbed to a severe case of hero worship where Rafaello was concerned. Indeed, Glory was amazed to see Sam, who could be so very reserved with strangers, so relaxed in Rafaello’s company. After all, they hardly knew each other. Obviously her father’s illness had brought down barriers but Sam was not behaving in what she considered to be an appropriate way. Rafaello was their father’s boss, for goodness’ sake, not a best mate or a big brother or something!
‘I’m not trying to score against a-anybody.’ Glory faltered to a charged halt at the rise of the sob that made her stammer.
Rafaello banded an arm round her hunched shoulders, swept up the handbag lying on the seat she had vacated and walked her into the lift. Too busy fighting to keep the tears in check, Glory was rigid for fear that she might suddenly succumb and fling herself against his chest and start sobbing all over him. Her family no longer needed her. They had got used to getting by without her. She was the needy one and Rafaello was busy supporting all of them like a positive saint. Yet he didn’t want her thanks and she didn’t want to have to be grateful. If she couldn’t have his love, she wanted nothing to do with him.
Rafaello tucked her into the limo with careful hands. ‘You’re wrecked. You need rest. Have a good cry if it makes you feel better.’
‘Stop being so nice!’ Glory gasped accusingly, throwing herself over to the far corner of the rear seat and ducking down her head.
Without warning, a pair of lean and very determined hands settled round her waist and dragged her inexorably across the space she had opened between them. Glory loosed a strangled squawk like a chicken on the run from a meat cleaver. Rafaello brought his mouth crashing down on hers and her hormones seemed to erupt like a volcano in response. She went from raging emotional turmoil and tears to raw excitement within seconds. Instantly she was kissing him back, running her hands over his shoulders, his hair, any part of him within r
each, and her heart was hammering and breathing was a luxury no longer required.
It felt so good to be back in his arms, she had no control, no thought of what she was doing. Only the elemental surge of her own love and desperate hunger guided her. The pleasure was explosive, primal, almost too hot to bear. When he threw back his head and deprived her of that connection she suffered a cruel sense of loss.
Rafaello stared down at her, golden eyes shimmering like bright sunlight in his lean face, dark colour accentuating the fierce slant of his cheekbones, his jawline clenched hard. ‘My only excuse is lack of sleep and a low patience threshold. My apologies, cara,’ he breathed in a gritty undertone. ‘But if it happens again, try pushing me away.’
Trembling and disorientated by a similar amount of sleep deprivation, Glory could not meet his gaze. Her cheeks fired up but that final comment of his filled her with rage. Yet still she had an almost overwhelming urge to haul him back to her, to lose herself in that wild heat and excitement where she did not have to think but only feel. Her emotions were all over the place. A combustible mix of love and hatred was tearing her apart.
‘Are you letting Maud stay here too?’ she asked as she entered the penthouse apartment, trying not to gape too obviously at the large expanses of polished floor stretching off in every direction.
‘No, I believe she has a sister in Clapham.’
‘Then why’s Sam staying with you and not with her?’ Glory watched him still and tense at that enquiry and her vague sense that something was not quite right was increased by his reaction to what she saw as a perfectly natural question. ‘Maud is going to be his stepmother—’
Rafaello gave her an expressionless look. ‘Maud has scarcely left the hospital since your father arrived there.’
He strode down a wide corridor, thrust open a door into a bedroom and told her where she would find a spare key for the apartment. She felt that he could not wait to get her out of his sight. She relived her own passionate response in his limo and let the tears come, the tears of stress, which she had held back for so many hours. Slumped on the bed, fully clothed, she fell asleep.