Trophy Husband

by Lynne Graham

  Trophy Husband

  Lynne Graham

  Hidden agendas………..

  The personal assistant: When Sara caught her fiance being unfaithful with her cousin, she felt doubly betrayed.

  Her boss: Almost miraculously, Alex Rossini was on hand to help Sara pick up the pieces. However, having worked for Alex for some time now, she knew he never did anything without expecting something in return. So why was she surprised when he revealed that he was prepared to pay the cost of having her— be it money or marriage?

  Business or pleasure?

  Sara wanted Alex so badly, she would have given herself to him with no strings attached. But in order to win Alex, she would have to play his game—and choose her price

  "I trusted you!"

  "I don't think trust played that big a role in your decision to marry me," Alex countered very dryly. .

  "Of course it did!"

  "No, Sara. Your objective was to marry well and save face. I do believe I'm the male equivalent of a trophy wife in so far as you actually take notice of my existence. So don't accuse me of using you, cara.... As I see it, I'm the one who's allowed himself to be used."

  CHAPTER ONE

  SARA paid off the taxi in a breathless rush and raced up the stairs to the flat she shared with Antonia. Had they been burgled? Had someone in the family had an accident? Worse still, had something happened to Brian? Her imagination had gone into overdrive since she had received Antonia's message at work.

  ' Dalton said you had to come home immediately, that it was very urgent,' the girl on the switchboard had stressed anxiously. 'I hope it isn't bad news, Lacey. She wouldn't even wait for me to put her call through.'

  Crossing the landing at speed, Sara unlocked the door of the flat. It was a disorientating experience. Loud music assaulted her ears. Phil Collins' latest album was playing full blast. A single electric-blue court shoe lay abandoned like a question mark on the hall carpet.

  'Antonia?' Sara called, a quick frown of bewilderment drawing her fine brows together as she glanced into the empty lounge. The bedroom door was ajar. She pressed it back.

  'Antonia?' she said again, and only then did she see the half-naked couple passionately entangled on the rumpled bed.

  'Sara?' her cousin squealed as she reeled up, her honey-blonde hair wildly mussed up, her pink mouth swollen, pale blue eyes wide with horror.

  In the very act of embarrassed retreat, Sara froze. Her attention had lodged on the tousled male head lifting off the white pillows. Recognition hit her like a punch in the stomach. Cruel fingers clutched at her heart and her lungs, tripping her heartbeat, depriving her of the air she needed to breathe.

  'Oh, my God...' Brian groaned, grabbing up his shirt and rolling off the bed in one appalled movement.

  Antonia was frantically struggling back into her blouse. 'Why the hell aren't you at work?' she screamed.

  'You phoned... left a message that I was to come home,' Sara framed unevenly, not even recognising the distant voice that emerged from her bloodless lips as her own.

  “I phoned? Are you crazy?' Antonia shrieked furiOusly. 'Whoever phoned, you can be sure it wasn't me!'

  'You bitch, Toni!' Brian bit out in stricken condemnation. 'You deliberately set me up—' 'Don't be stupid!' Antonia hissed, but then without warning defiance replaced her angry discomfiture. She rested malicious blue eyes on Sara, who was already backing away on legs that were threatening to fold beneath her. 'But I did warn you that Brian was mine for the asking...didn't I?'

  “'No...' Brian's voice wavered weakly as his gaze collided with Sara's shattered green eyes—pools of stark. pain in the dead white stillness of her triangular face. He made a sudden move towards her, both hands raised and extended as if to draw her back to him. 'This has never happened before, Sara... I swear it!'

  Sara turned jerkily away and fled. She nearly fell down the last flight of stairs—Brian's frantic calls from the, landing above acted on her like a trip-wire. Blocking him out, she steadied herself with one shaking hand on the dingy wall and made herself breathe in slowly and deeply before she walked back out onto the street.

  Antonia and Brian. Brian and Antonia. She stared down numbly at the ring on her engagement finger. Her stomach lurched in violent protest. Six weeks off the wedding day... her cousin and her fiance. It was as if the world had stopped turning suddenly, flinging her off into frightening free fall. She was in shock—so deep in shock that she couldn't even think. But her memory was relentlessly throwing up scraps of dialogue from the recent past.

  'Brian chose you like he chooses his shirts.. .you've got to look good at the company dinners and wear a long time!' Antonia had sniped.

  'Three years ago I could have lifted one littie finger and Brian would have come running... He really had it bad for me.' Antonia had savoured the words.

  Sara squared her narrow shoulders, caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window and stared. She saw a small woman with black hair worn in a tidy French plait, dressed in an unexciting navy business suit and white blouse. No competition for a five-foot-ten-inch blonde who had once made it between the covers of Vogue. She felt as if she was dying inside. She didn't know what to do, where to go.

  A bus was drawing up at the stop several yards away and she started to run. Her dazed eyes skimmed over the man standing in a nearby doorway. He turned his head abruptly, making her wonder if she looked as odd as she felt. She didn't notice that the man swiftly fell into step behind her and climbed on the same bus.

  'Do we have to have Antonia as a bridesmaid? My mother can't stand her,' Brian had complained peevishly.

  'She's a real tart,' he had muttered with distaste. 'No decent woman would take her clothes off for money...'

  Still with-the same man tracking patiently in her wake, but quite unaware of his presence, Sara wandered back into the hugely impressive London headquarters of Rossini Industries. When the receptionist on the penultimate floor addressed her, Sara didn't hear her. Blind and deaf, she was moving on automatic pilot. She entered the spacious office which she shared with Pete Hunniford. It was empty. Pete's wife had gone into labour mid-morning, she recalled then. It was like remembering something that had happened a lifetime ago. Her phone was buzzing like an angry wasp. She sat down and answered it.

  'Tasmin Laslo here. I want to speak to Alex,' a taut female voice demanded.

  ' Rossini is in conference. I am so sorry. Would you like me to—?'

  The actress said a very rude word. 'You're lying, aren't you?'

  Sara had been lying to Alex Rossini's women for the entire year that she had been employed as his social secretary. Alex Rossini was very rarely available to his lovers during office hours, and when a name was removed from a certain regularly updated list he was never available again. Lying went with the territory, no matter how much Sara despised the necessity.

  'He sent me a diamond bracelet while I was filming in Hungary and I knew it was over!' Tasmin suddenly spat tempestuously. 'He's found someone else, hasn't he?'

  'You're better off without him, Laslo,' Sara heard herself saying. 'You're a wonderful actress. You're wasted on a slick, womanising swine like Alex Rossini!'

  Incredulous silence hummed on the line. 'I beg your pardon?' Tasmin finally gasped.

  Sara looked down dazedly at the receiver and thrust it back on the cradle in shock. She was trembling all over. Dear heaven, had she really said that? She rose unsteadily upright again. Her stomach cramped with sudden, unbearable nausea. She lurched into the cloakroom across the corridor and was horribly sick.

  Ten minutes later, still shaking like a leaf, she returned to her office. The phone was buzzing again. She ignored it, walked over to Pete's desk and withdrew the bottle of brandy that he kept in the bottom
drawer. She poured a liberal amount into a cup and slowly drank it down, grimacing at the unfamiliar taste of alcohol. Maybe it would settle her stomach. Brian and Antonia. Their names linked in a ceaseless refrain inside her pounding head, making her want to smash her head against the wall in protest.

  She felt as if she was going mad. Sensible, steady Sara, who always kept her head in a crisis. But Sara had never before faced a crisis in which her whole world had fallen apart. Shivering, she helped herself to another nip of brandy, struggling to get a grip on herself. 'No decent woman...' A choked and humourless laugh escaped her. She tore the ring off her finger, dropped it in a drawer and rammed the drawer shut. She made herself pick up the phone again.

  Unfortunately it was her aunt on the line. Something about the wedding rehearsal. Sara froze while Antonia's mother talked. Then she sat down, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. 'Aunt Janice?' She hesitated and then forced herself on. 'I'm sorry but the wedding's off. Brian and I have broken up.' Even to her own ears she sounded unreal, like someone clumsily cracking a joke in the worst possible taste.

  'Don't be silly, Sara,' Janice Dalton murmured sharply. 'What on earth are you talking about?'

  'Brian and I have broken up. I'm very sorry...but we've decided we can't get married after all.'

  'If you've had some foolish argument with Brian, I suggest you sort it out quickly,' her aunt told her with icy restraint. 'Brian had lunch with us yesterday and there was nothing wrong then!'

  The line went dead as her aunt cut the connection. Sara trembled. Antonia's mother... how could she have told her the truth? Janice and Hugh Dalton had given her a home when her own mother had died. How could she possibly tell them the truth? Much better simply to pretend that she and Brian had had a change of heart-much cleaner, much less embarrassing for all concerned. The two families were neighbours and friends. A giant lump thickened her throat. Did Brian love Antonia?

  'No decent woman...' Antonia had shed her clothes with alacrity when she had been offered the chance to feature in the famous Rossini calendar. Marco, Alex Rossini's kid brother, had smoothly offered Sara the same opportunity, unperturbed by her incredulous embarrassment. 'You've got something your long, tall cousin hasn't got... You're really sexy... and you have a lot of class.'

  Marco had made the invitation in front of a highly amused audience at the staff party and it had become a tormenting, running joke in the months which had followed. The instant that Marco had seen Sara redden he had realised that he had found a real live target. Every time he saw Sara, he offered her an increasingly fantastic sum to bare all. No doubt he saw in her what everyone wanted to see, Sara reflected bitterly: a woman the exact, boring opposite of her exciting, beautiful cousin. Prim, quiet, predictable, ludicrously unlikely ever to set the world... or indeed any man... on fire.

  Antonia had had Sara christened Prissy Prude at school, and, having created that image for her, had then delighted in shattering it by sharing the news that Sara was illegitimate, the inconvenient result of her youthful mother's holiday fling with a Greek waiter. Some of the girls hadn't laughed at first but they had soon fallen into line and obediently giggled and sneered. After all, Antonia had been the undeniable leader of the pack and peer pressure had been relentless. Sara had duly been persecuted, no other girl daring to stand her ground against Antonia lest she find herself enduring the same ordeal. To escape, Sara had left school at sixteen and taken a secretarial course. And that had not been her dream.

  But Brian had been her dream...

  Suddenly, with a violence that shook her, Sara hated everything about herself—her body, her personality, her inhibitions, her clothing. She was boring, laughably out of step with other women in her age group. Old-fashioned, sexually ignorant, eager to give up her job and become a housewife and mother at twenty-three. She should have been born a century ago, not in the nineties.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she finally noticed that the door was open. Slowly she lifted her head and panic filled her, her cat-green eyes flying wide to accentuate the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Alex Rossini was standing there as silent as a sleek predator on the prowl... and both phones were ringing off the hook, unanswered. He should have been in Rome this afternoon, not here in London, she thought stupidly.

  'Coffee-break?' Alex murmured in a curiously quiet voice instead of letting fly at her as she had expected. The phones stopped abruptly as if the switchboard had cut them off, plunging them into a sudden, thunderous silence.

  In a daze, she looked back at him. Six feet three inches of lithe, rawly virile masculinity. Black hair, hard bronze profile with the deep, dark, flashing eyes of his Italian ancestry. A sexually devastating mate with an overwhelmingly physical presence that few men could equal. And Sara hated being near him. She hated the way he looked at her. She hated the way he spoke to her.

  If the cost of setting up the first marital home hadn't been so extortionate, Sara would have sacrificed her excellent salary and taken a lesser position elsewhere within a week of being exposed to Alex Rossini's sardonic asides and contemptuously amused appraisals. He made her feel so murderously uncomfortable... so self-conscious, so ridiculous. He made her feel like a curious specimen trapped behind museum glass.

  'Finish your coffee.' A lean, long-fingered brown hand casually closed round the half-full cup of brandy sitting on the edge of her desk and extended it to her.

  Didn't he smell the alcohol, realise that it wasn't black coffee? Evidently, obviously not. Jerkily, she reached out and accepted the cup and focused on his beautifully polished shoes, every muscle whip-taut. She tossed back the rest of the brandy in a burning surge. It brought tears to her eyes, which she blinked back furiously.

  'Where's Pete?'

  'Still at the hospital with his wife.' Sara struggled for some desperate semblance of normality, astonished that he wasn't cutting her to ribbons with the satirical edge of his tongue. She forced herself upright, bracing both hands on the desk. Involuntarily her gaze collided with shimmering dark golden eyes and it was like falling on an electric fence, shock waves making every raw nerve ending scream. Deliberately she turned her head away, closing him out again. No, she was not susceptible. She had proved that to her satisfaction over and over again.

  "Then I'm afraid you'll have to take his place.'

  'His place?' Nobody could possibly take Pete Hunniford's place. Pete was Alex's most devoted gofer Nothing came between Pete and ambition. He had freely admitted to Sara that his first marriage had fallen apart because he was never at home. And right at this minute, if Alex employed his mobile phone, Pete would be out of the labour ward like a rocket.

  'Nothing too onerous... Relax,' Alex breathed in that distinctively rich dark voice which rolled down her spine like golden honey, burning wherever it touched. 'I only want you to take down a couple of letters.'

  Her brow furrowed as she automatically lifted a pad and pencils. He was talking very slowly, not with his usual quick impatience. He hadn't even asked her why she hadn't answered the phones. He stood back for her to precede him from the room, and in her need to keep as much physical space between them as possible she jerked sideways and skidded off balance.

  Strong hands whipped out and closed round her upper arms to steady her. Her head swam, her heartbeat kicking wildly against her breastbone. She quivered, fighting off sudden dizziness, and he drew her back. 'OK?' he murmured, still holding her on the threshold.

  'F-fine... Sorry.' Her nostrils flared in dismay as the warm, definably male scent of him washed over her, Aromatic, intrinsically familiar., .intimate. Intimate? What was the matter with her? What the heck was the matter with her? As she stiffened he released her and she walked down the corridor with careful small steps, noticing that the double doors of his office at the end looked peculiarly out of focus. Now near, now far, now skewed. All that brandy. Drunk in charge of a phone. But it felt shamelessly, unbelievably good: a short-term anaesthetic against the enormous pain waiting to jump on her—the pa
in she could not yet face head-on. As long as she didn't think, she could protect herself.

  'Sit down, Sara.' She plotted a course across the thick carpet with immense care and sank down on the nearest seat, suddenly terrified that he would notice the state she was in. Being intoxicated suddenly didn't feel good any more. In Alex Rossini's presence, it felt like sheer insanity. Discovery would be unbelievably demeaning.

  Disorientatedly, she glanced up and found him standing over her. She flinched. Her hands trembled and she anchored them tightly round the pad. He didn't sit down. He strolled with silent grace across to the floor-length windows. A stunningly handsome man, he had an innate elegance of movement, his superbly cut mohair and silk-blend charcoal-grey suit the perfect complementary frame to wide shoulders, lean hips and long, powerful thighs.

  From beneath luxuriant black lashes he surveyed her. 'Shall I begin?'

  He didn't normally request permission. Uncertainly she nodded. He dictated with incredibly long pauses that enabled her more or less to keep up but she still missed bits because her mind wouldn't stay in one place. Shock was giving way to reality, denial giving way to bursts of agonised pain. For how long had Brian been deceiving her with Antonia? Her memory threw up the image of the open bottle of wine in the lounge, the half-filled wineglasses by the bed. No sudden passion there. They had carried the glasses with them into the bedroom. A carefully staged lunchtime encounter when Sara should have been at work.

  'Did you get all that?'

  The page currently beneath her fingers was blank. Briefly she simply closed her eyes, willing herself to find calm and control.

  'It's all right, Sara... the letter isn't important.'

  The softness of the assurance astonished her. Dazedly she glanced up, encountered Alex Rossini's brilliant dark eyes and was mesmerised by the sincerity she read there. He was resting against the edge of his polished desk, far too close for comfort. He reached down and removed the pad from her nerveless fingers, setting it carelessly aside.