His Poor Little Rich Girl

by MELANIE MILBURNE

  ‘Rachel?’ Alessandro prompted.

  She met his dark eyes. ‘I have been pretty busy just lately trying to save my label,’ she said. ‘There hasn’t been a lot of time for socialising.’

  ‘Tell me about your friend,’ he said. ‘You are business partners, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘Caitlyn and I met at design school. We got on well and had similar goals. She was a great support to me when I ended things with Craig. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She once had a violent controlling partner so she knew what it was like to …’

  Alessandro was very quiet and Rachel looked up to see him studying her with a frowning expression on his face. ‘Sorry … I’m rambling,’ she said.

  ‘Did Hughson hurt you physically?’ he asked, still frowning heavily.

  ‘No, but he made threats,’ Rachel said. ‘I guess that’s how he controlled me for so long. I was never sure what he was capable of. I wasn’t game to risk it. I finally got the courage to end things but only because of Caitlyn’s help. She showed me how I was being manipulated.’ She lowered her gaze from his. ‘I was too stupid to see it for myself.’

  Alessandro reached across the table and put his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

  Rachel felt the slow spreading warmth of his flesh on hers. His skin was so tanned compared to hers. His fingers so long and dusted with masculine hair, the nails clean and short, strong hands, capable hands, hands that could stroke and caress and light fires underneath her skin. She swallowed as a wing-like flutter erupted in her belly. She slowly brought her gaze up to his. It felt as if he had summoned it with the sheer power of his magnetic presence. His pupils were black holes in a dark blue unfathomable sea. It occurred to her then she could drown in that sea if she wasn’t careful. ‘I guess you must be really pleased I had to lie down on the bed of my own making,’ she said.

  Alessandro removed his hand from her arm and sat back in his chair. ‘I am not sure it is a worthwhile exercise relishing in someone else’s misfortune,’ he said. ‘No one gets it right all the time. I have made decisions I have come to regret in hindsight.’

  Rachel could just imagine what he most regretted. Asking her to marry him and then only minutes later to have her introduce another man as her fiancé would surely be up there with the most regrettable of actions. If only he knew how much she wished she had said yes to him instead. Her life would have been so very different.

  ‘I’ll get the next course,’ she said to break the awkward silence.

  While she was in the kitchen she looked down at her arm where his hand had lain and fully expected it to show some mark, so heightened were her senses. Her skin tingled, each nerve prickling beneath the surface of her skin.

  She rubbed at her arm, annoyed with herself for reacting like an infatuated schoolgirl instead of a mature and sensible adult. She could not afford to be distracted by his potent allure. She was on a mission to save her label and that had to remain her top and only priority.

  Once Rachel had served the meal Alessandro turned the conversation to more neutral topics. It was as if he was making a concerted effort to steer away from any mention of the past. Rachel found him to be a convivial host when he put his mind to it. He asked her what books she had read lately, what movies she had enjoyed and where she had last holidayed. He even laughed at one of her anecdotes about a visit to a celebrity client for a private fitting. Rachel suddenly realised she had never heard him laugh before. It was a deep rich sound that trickled down her spine like a flow of champagne. It was a magical moment, connecting them in a way that she had not experienced with him before. She caught a glimpse of the man he was and had always been in spite of his difficult background: respectful, disciplined, driven but decent. Why had it taken her this long to realise it?

  Before she knew it the time had come for coffee.

  ‘Have you been back to Australia since you left?’ she asked as she poured them each a cup of the rich fragrant brew.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He stirred his black coffee even though she hadn’t seen him put in any sugar. ‘It is a good country—a great country,’ he said. ‘I have never said it wasn’t, but my heart is in Italy. As soon as I got off the plane I felt as if I had come home.’

  ‘Your father was Italian, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ He picked up his cup and took a sip. ‘He travelled to Australia on a working holiday but ended up staying after he met my mother.’

  Rachel had never heard him speak of his parents before. ‘So why did you end up in foster homes?’ she asked.

  His expression was remote. ‘My father died in a workplace accident when I was a small child. Things came unstuck after that.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He was tall like me and had the same colouring. He worked hard trying to get ahead but he never quite made it. Everything seemed to work against him, including my mother.’

  ‘Is she still alive?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘She died a few years ago,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear about it until the funeral was over.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t try to keep in touch with her?’ His eyes met hers, dark, veiled and deep. ‘I tried but it didn’t always help matters. In the end I thought it best to keep out of her life.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘She was totally unreliable,’ he said ‘She was always changing addresses and or partners, most of whom were her dealers. She was the reason my father had to work three jobs to keep food on the table. She shot most of what he earned up her arms. It was a problem she couldn’t fight alone. Once he died she spiralled out of control without him there to support her.’

  Rachel’s throat constricted. She had always known he had come from a difficult background but she had never bothered to ask how difficult. She had heard rumours that he had been kicked out of numerous foster homes and thus assumed he had always been a rebel of some sort, that he was the problem. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, her voice coming out as soft as a whisper. ‘I had no idea things had been that bad for you. I thought you were just one of those hard-to-manage kids. You never said anything.’

  ‘My father was a fool for falling in love with my mother,’ he said. ‘Her first love wasn’t him, it was her next high. He should have realised there are some people who are beyond help. He got caught in the addiction web and it cost him his life.’

  ‘It must have been so awful for you having no one to rely on after your father was killed,’ Rachel said. ‘How did you manage?’

  ‘How does any kid manage?’ he said. ‘The survival instinct kicks in. I was a bit wild for a time until I made a decision to follow my father’s dream of a better life. I got off the streets and got an education.’

  ‘I am sure he would be very proud of you,’ Rachel said.

  Alessandro gave an indifferent shrug. ‘I am not proud of my background but it has made me the man I am today. I suppose I should be grateful, sì? I could have followed my mother’s example. So many people do. It is all they know. It’s as if it is somehow programmed into their genes. Generational dysfunction or some such thing it is called.’

  ‘How did you change the cycle when so many can’t or won’t?’

  ‘I wanted to win, Rachel,’ he said with a determined set to his features. ‘I have always wanted to win because my father’s chance was thrown away.’

  ‘So winning at any cost is important to you?’

  His eyes burned a pathway to her soul. ‘Very important,’ he said. ‘I will not stop until I get what I want.’

  Rachel picked up her coffee cup for something to do with her hands. She wanted to reach out and lay her hand on his arm as he had done to her earlier but she wasn’t sure how it would be interpreted. When it came to that she wasn’t sure how she would react. Would her touch turn into a caress or a plea for forgiveness or both? Would she slide her hand up and down his hair-roughened arm, maybe
even entwine her slim, small fingers with his long, strong ones? Her belly gave another little two-step shuffle and she gripped her coffee cup a little harder, but the cup was hot and somehow she lost her hold, the liquid spilling on the stark whiteness of the tablecloth, some of it splashing against her chest.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Alessandro asked. ‘You didn’t burn yourself, did you?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ she said, using the napkin he had rapidly handed her to mop up the spillage. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not normally so clumsy.’

  He remained seated while she cleared the table, which she tried not to be annoyed about. He was paying her and generously to wait on him. She had no right to feel resentful. If anything she should be bending over backwards to get him to consider backing her label. It was demeaning to be in such a position but she really had no choice. ‘Alessandro …’ she began, ‘I just want to say how much I—’

  ‘Go to bed, Rachel,’ he said as if dismissing an overtired child from the adults’ dinner table. ‘Your work here is finished for the day. We will speak again in the morning.’ ‘But I—’

  ‘Don’t argue with me, Rachel,’ he said. ‘You are obviously exhausted. I should not have kept you up so late. I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.’

  Rachel turned and left, not happy about being dismissed but she realised by the way the shutters came down on his face that he was probably regretting revealing so much about his background. She felt ashamed that she hadn’t probed him about it five years ago. Why had she just assumed he was a bad boy? Why hadn’t she looked a little closer and understood why he was so driven and determined? He was a man on a mission to succeed and she had been a part of that plan but had defaulted. No wonder he was enjoying watching her taking orders from him.

  Success, after all, was the ultimate revenge.

  It was only as she was washing her face in preparation for bed that she realised her mother’s pendant was missing from around her neck. A tight band of panic wrapped around her insides as she shook out her clothes to see if it had caught on them as she had undressed but there was no sign of it. She then retraced her steps, all over the large bedroom and then back to the en suite, her eyes scouring the floor as she went for the glint of a diamond and the silver of the fine chain, but there was nothing. She spread out the contents of her handbag on the bed, going through everything meticulously but still not able to see the pendant anywhere. She checked the sink of the basin she had used, but without the services of a plumber to undo the S-bend she was unable to know for sure if it had slipped down there or not. She bit her lip and thought hard about when she had last felt it around her neck. But because she wore it most of the time she was so used to feeling it there that she didn’t feel it. It was a part of her that just was … well, a part of her. And now it was gone.

  A choked sob rose in her throat. She couldn’t lose it. It was all she had of her mother. She just couldn’t possibly lose it. She would tear this wretched villa asunder to find it even if it took her the whole night to do it.

  There was a satin robe that Lucia had given her earlier and she wrapped it around herself quickly to continue the search.

  She went down the stairs, turning on lights as she went, her eyes on the floor the whole time. She went across the foyer and then down to the dining room and opened the door. The table was as she had left it, shiny and cleared with a vase of roses in the centre filling the room with their scent.

  She got on her hands and knees and went over the thick carpet with her hands and strained eyes. She was close to tears by now, her heart sinking at the thought of losing that final link with her mother.

  ‘Oh, dear God, where are you?’ she said out loud as she sat back on her heels and pushed the hair out of her face.

  Rachel had her back to the door and it took her a moment to shuffle around on her knees in order to identify the sound that had whispered over the thick carpet like a fox on velvet paws.

  Her heart swung like a wildly flung anvil in her chest when she saw Alessandro sitting in a wheelchair, his blue-black eyes meeting hers. ‘Is this what you are looking for?’ he asked, her mother’s pendant dangling from his long tanned fingers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  RACHEL gulped, her eyes going to the chair and then back to his unflinching gaze. ‘I … I …’

  He gave her a dispassionate look. ‘I am sorry I can’t rise in your presence but I am confident that within the next few days I will be able to do so.’

  Her face exploded with shame. She felt every single capillary fill with it. ‘I had no idea … I’m so sorry … I wish I had known. I would never have said the things … Oh, God, the awful things I said.’ She bit on her lip so hard she tasted blood. She mentally recalled every insult, every horrible insult she had flung at him for not standing. It had never occurred to her that he couldn’t. Oh, dear God, what must he think of her? Emotion clogged her throat, tightening it until she couldn’t speak. Every moment she had spent with him he had been sitting, apart from when he had been in the pool, but even there she could not recall him standing. He had leaned against the edge and later had pulled himself out of the water and sat with his legs in the water. Why hadn’t he said something? Why hadn’t Lucia warned her? What was going on?

  Alessandro used his hands to roll the wheelchair towards her. ‘You can stand up,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to kneel at my feet like a servant from the Dark Ages.’

  Rachel scrambled ungainly to her feet, momentarily forgetting she was dressed in nothing but a slip of satin that was probably showing every contour of her body. It was only as she felt his dark blue gaze run over her that she wished she had asked Lucia for something a little less revealing to wear. ‘You found my pendant,’ she said unnecessarily.

  ‘Yes.’ He handed it to her. ‘It must have fallen from your neck when you dabbed at your spilt coffee on your top. It was on the floor. I found it as I was leaving to go upstairs.’

  Rachel tried to put the pendant back on but her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. She gave it another try but it slipped out of her hands and she had to kneel down again to retrieve it off the floor.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’

  She leaned towards him but it brought her so close to his face her breath stalled in her throat. They were eye to eye.

  His eyes were so very dark. His breath was minty and fresh as it caressed her face. She could see the pinpoints of stubble on his jaw, the fresh dark growth triggered by the rush of his potent male hormones. Her fingers ached to feel the rasp of his stubble under her fingertips, to trace the sensual contour of his mouth. Her lips tingled to feel the hard press of his on hers, her heart beat so hard and so fast in anticipation she was sure he could hear it. For that matter she could hear it. It was like the roar of the ocean in her ears: pounding, tumultuous, deafening.

  Alessandro took the pendant from her fingers and looped it around her neck, one of his hands lifting the curtain of her hair to free it from the snare of the chain. Rachel’s skin shivered in reaction, not just her neck but her entire body, inside and out. His touch was like fire. Her skin felt as if it were going to erupt into flames; every nerve ending was fizzing like a child’s bonfire-night sparkler.

  ‘There,’ he said, leaning back once the catch was secure. ‘You should probably get a jeweller to look at it to make sure it doesn’t come loose again.’

  Rachel fingered the pendant, her eyes still locked on his as if tethered there by some invisible energy source. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a scratchy-sounding voice. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if I had lost it.’

  ‘It is obviously very valuable to you.’

  ‘Yes, it was my mother’s,’ she said, sitting back on her heels. ‘It’s all I have of hers.’

  ‘Well, at least you have it back now,’ he said.

  Rachel bit her lip and then dived right in. ‘How did it happen?’

  He looked at her for a long pause without speaking. She waited with baited breath, wondering if he wa
s weighing up the odds about revealing what had happened to him. Was this why she had been made to sign the confidentiality agreement? Did he think so poorly of her that he had to go to that extreme?

  ‘Have you heard of Guillain-Barré syndrome?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ she said. ‘It’s caused by a virus, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘About two months ago after a trip abroad I developed a slight chest infection. It was nothing out of the ordinary, or so I thought. A few days later I developed some weakness in my legs. Again, I thought I had just overdone it. I had been training for a marathon before I got sick. But it turned out to be Guillain-Barré. The illness results in the inflammation and destruction of myelin in the peripheral nerves. Sometimes the paralysis can be far more serious when it affects the breathing or the ability to swallow. I am told I am one of the lucky ones. It is only my legs that have been affected, hopefully not permanently.’

  Rachel didn’t know what to say. She was still reeling from the shock of it all. She was still flaying herself for everything she had said to him. Why hadn’t he said something? Surely he hadn’t hoped to keep his condition a secret from her while she was here? Or had he deliberately left it as long as he could so she could hang herself with the rope he had so very cleverly fed out to her?

  ‘Don’t worry, Rachel,’ he said with an embittered look. ‘It’s not catching.’

  She frowned as she realised how he had interpreted her silence. ‘I’m not in the least concerned about that.’

  One brow rose cynically. ‘Are you not?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  ‘So, you’re not planning on leaving at first light?’ he asked.