by Lynne Graham
‘I don’t want it.’
‘It belongs to you now. I gave it to you.’
Her breath quickened, her pulse-rate accelerating as her tension increased. ‘But I don’t want anything from you,’ she stressed, striving to keep her voice level and cool.
‘Perhaps this is not a good time to tell you that I am in the process of buying your apartment.’
Her head whipped round in shock. ‘Too late. You’ve missed the boat!’ she returned sharply. ‘I agreed the sale today.’
‘With whom?’
‘A Swiss company.’
‘I own the company.’
The soft assertion dragged a soft sound of incredulity from her throat. Wide-eyed, she stared at him. ‘You own it?’
‘Who else would pay over the odds to secure your ownership?’ Angelo queried drily. ‘I’ll sign it back to you as soon as the sale is complete—’
‘Why would you want to buy my apartment for me?’ Kelda demanded, anger and a kind of threatened horror coalescing out of her shock.
‘I told you in Italy that I would pick up all the bills,’ Angelo reminded her smoothly. ‘And naturally that includes securing your home for your occupancy. I’ll sort out all your financial problems. I will clear your credit cards, settle any outstanding debts and make arrangements for an allowance to be paid into your account.’
In a daze, she listened while he listed his intentions. A dark mist of humiliation enveloped her. Her fair skin reddened in a painful flush. And then anger stirred out of her disbelief. ‘I’m not a fixture you can buy along with my apartment!’ she asserted rawly. ‘I am not for sale!’
‘I didn’t say that you were,’ Angelo murmured with calm emphasis. ‘But we made an agreement in Italy—’
‘There was no agreement!’ Kelda blitzed back at him.
‘Shall we say that when you allowed me access to that exquisite body I rather took agreement for granted.’
The flush drained away, leaving her pale. She wanted very badly to claw at him for his ruthless determination to portray her as greedy, immoral and sexually available. She had never hated him as much as she did in that moment, could not comprehend how that hatred had failed to kill all desire for him...yet, it had failed quite spectacularly. All of a sudden, she was very grateful that if Angelo came back to her apartment tonight he would be greeted by Russ. Even Angelo would not be able to disregard so blatant a rejection!
Even so, she found that she was still trembling with the sheer force of her emotions. ‘I told you that it was over in Italy...I made that crystal-clear,’ she told him tightly, staring rigidly out of the windscreen. ‘It was a mistake I don’t intend to repeat and I never at any stage had any intention of becoming your mistress. So you’ve just bought yourself an empty apartment, Angelo. I will be moving out within the month.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Angelo murmured silkily and parked the car.
She walked ahead of him into the restaurant, quickly espying her mother’s blonde head in a corner. Daisy was openly relieved at their arrival, Tomaso rising with alacrity to at first advance his hand and then smilingly give her a light kiss on the cheek. He was thinner and older-looking than she remembered and her eyes pricked with unexpected tears as she registered the extent of the happiness glowing in her mother’s face.
‘A bit of a coincidence, you both being in Italy at the same time,’ Tomaso observed heartily, ordering up a round of aperitifs.
‘Were you—?’ Kelda turned to Angelo with manufactured surprise.
‘You wouldn’t have run into each other,’ Tomaso assured her. ‘Angelo was in the south, inspecting a factory...isn’t that right?’ he added, addressing his son.
‘How terribly boring,’ Kelda sighed with mock sympathy, encountering a chilling black glance of warning from beneath Angelo’s long, luxuriant lashes. A slight darkening over his hard cheekbones told her that he was not wholly at ease lying to his trusting papa. She was bitterly amused by the discovery.
In other circumstances, it might have been a pleasant evening. Tomaso was on tremendously good form. He kept on patting her mother’s arm possessively, stealing little glances at her and smiling. It was clear that he too was very happy. The wedding was discussed. A date was already in the offing which suggested that Angelo’s belief that she had the power to prevent their remarriage by influencing her mother had been grossly exaggerated.
‘You really don’t mind?’ Daisy prompted in the cloakroom.
Kelda embraced her much smaller mother and murmured, ‘If Tomaso makes you happy, I’m happy.’
‘Good...so what’s going on between you and Angelo?’ Daisy enquired anxiously.
Kelda froze. ‘Going on?’
‘Don’t treat me as if I’m stupid or blind,’ Daisy breathed ruefully. ‘I’m neither. A week ago, you were furious at the idea of Tomaso’s and my getting back together again—’
‘I was being childish and selfish—’
‘When Angelo told me that he would bring you here tonight to dine with us, I told him he was aiming at the moon,’ her mother shared. ‘But here you are just like he promised and he keeps on watching you and you keep on touching him—’
‘Touching him?’ Kelda echoed blankly.
‘A couple of times, you’ve put your hand on his arm when you’ve been speaking—’
‘Really?’ Kelda said weakly because she couldn’t remember doing it.
‘And I know you,’ her mother persisted. ‘You’re not the sort of a person who touches others unless you’re very familiar with them, and Angelo of all people—’
‘Mum, don’t you think you’re—?’
‘And why is he looking at you all the time?’ Daisy demanded worriedly. ‘And you never looked at him once—’
‘Maybe I’m just not that comfortable with Angelo,’ Kelda suggested unsteadily, shaken by her mother’s unexpected perception.
‘He is very, very good-looking,’ Daisy remarked uneasily. ‘And very clever. He has a lot of charm when he wants to use it—’
‘You sound as if you don’t like him very much—’
‘I don’t want you to be hurt again,’ her mother whispered. ‘Angelo isn’t the settling down type and there’s something different about you, Kelda...’
Dear heaven, the mother with X-ray vision! Concealing her panic at Daisy’s persistence, Kelda forced a smile. ‘Being pleasant to Angelo takes a lot out of me.’
After the interrogation about a couple of gestures she hadn’t even been aware of making, it was a relief when the evening came to an end. Angelo slid silently into the Ferrari.
‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ Kelda muttered, massaging her temples which were starting to ache with the onset of a tension headache.
‘What did you tell Daisy?’ Angelo shot at her without warning.
‘Nothing! And you can stop treating me like your partner in crime,’ Kelda told him flatly, bitterly. ‘I am not in the habit of lying to my mother and I didn’t enjoy doing it.’
‘You told her something,’ Angelo repeated darkly.
‘One more word and I’m calling a cab!’ Kelda swore. ‘If I’d told her anything, she would have been so shattered, the entire restaurant would have known about it before we got out!’
‘It won’t matter once they’re married. They’ll spend most of their time abroad. It will seem natural that I should visit my stepsister—’
‘Angelo...I want nothing to do with you!’ she practically screamed at him in frustration. ‘Why do you find that so impossible to accept?’
He insisted on seeing her right to the door of her apartment. He was walking right into the trap without the smallest encouragement from her. Her headache had turned into a killer by the time he took her key from her and unlocked the door. Russ would be waiting...she hoped. Then it would all be at an end.
‘You’re not feeling well.’ Angelo pressed her over the threshold and followed her in. ‘Can I get you anything?’
That he had noticed su
rprised her. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Her exasperated gaze was probing the lounge for Russ. He wasn’t there.
‘Will you be all right?’ Abruptly Angelo swore and stilled, the hand at her spine dropping away.
Kelda’s strained green eyes widened to their fullest extent as Russ strolled out of her bedroom, only a small towel wrapped round his hips. ‘I thought you were never coming home, darling,’ he sighed reproachfully, and smiled at Angelo. ‘Thanks for bringing her back safely.’
Outraged incredulity had clenched Angelo’s hard dark features. He swung round. ‘You bitch,’ he grated in a shaken undertone, seemingly unable to take his eyes off Russ.
Kelda was trembling. The look in Angelo’s eyes was flat and cold and dead. And somehow that terrified her. She had to resist an extraordinary and utterly ridiculous urge to start explaining that Russ was a close friend of the platonic variety, pretending to be something else at her request.
‘I couldn’t believe...’ Angelo fell silent, shot her a glance of such smouldering violence that she stumbled back against the wall, afraid of physical attack. The front door thudded shut in his wake. Kelda sagged like a rag doll.
Russ sighed. ‘How did I do?’
‘You were incredible.’ Her own voice sounded as if it was coming from miles away. Her head felt as if it was about to split wide open.
‘You weren’t having second thoughts about me doing this, were you?’ Russ studied her shuttered white face anxiously.
‘Of course not.’
It was done. It was over. Angelo was gone...but why did that knowledge hurt so much?
Russ expelled his breath. ‘I thought it would be funny, but it wasn’t,’ he acknowledged. ‘Rossetti was shattered.’
‘His ego was dented...that’s all,’ Kelda mumbled, suddenly deathly tired and drained.
* * *
Kelda’s week in New York modelling designer knitwear stretched to five weeks in the end. Russ had tugged some useful strings, put her on the cover of two glossy magazines and all of a sudden she had found that her career was taking off again. For a month she was heavily in demand. Ella was constantly on the phone to her and slowly but surely she got word of possible assignments back home as well. The world had a short memory. Danny Philips was old news.
She was flicking through her diary on the flight back to London when she noticed. She raked through the pages again, certain she had made a mistake. But she had not made an oversight. There was no familiar little cross marking the start of her last period. She was three weeks overdue.
She sat there in a blank haze of shock, suddenly cold and shivery. Her heart had plunged to her stomach and her stomach felt as if she had swallowed an indigestible lump of concrete. It had felt like that several times before over the past ten days. She had lost weight through her lack of appetite but that hadn’t worried her. A model could never be too thin for the camera.
She had blocked out those days in Italy very efficiently since leaving London. Work had been her panacea, her saviour. She had been too busy and too tired to torment herself with vain regrets for what couldn’t be altered. It was over. She had made a mistake. She could learn to live with that...that was what she had told herself when her mind strayed.
And now this. It couldn’t happen to her, she had thought in Italy, brushing that spur of fear away with confidence. She had never thought about being pregnant, couldn’t even imagine being pregnant, and now she was faced with the possibility that she might well be. In defiance, she listed all the other things that might have made her late, but the cloud of dark foreboding refused to lift.
She bought a pregnancy test at the airport. Even that embarrassed the hell out of her. Her name came over the public address system while it was being wrapped and she froze.
Tomaso and Daisy had come to meet her off the plane but traffic had held them up. She was touched, but her recent purchase weighed like lead in her holdall.
‘We’ve got a surprise for you,’ Daisy asserted.
Kelda gave her mother a rather weak smile and climbed into the back of Tomaso’s stately Rolls. ‘What sort of a surprise?’
‘The cottage is yours,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And after next week I won’t be needing it any more—’
Next week—the wedding that Kelda was dreading.
‘Tomaso wanted to buy your apartment but it went very quickly, didn’t it?’ Daisy sighed. ‘I assumed it would be on the market for ages and I was wrong—’
Kelda bent her head, not knowing where to look. She had found a rented flat in Highgate before she went to New York and her mother had promised to supervise the removal of her personal possessions when Kelda had discovered that she wouldn’t be back in London in time to make the move herself.
‘I want you to have the cottage back. After all, you bought it for me,’ Daisy stressed.
‘A very generous gesture on your income.’ Tomaso dealt her a warm approving smile. ‘I will always be grateful that you looked after your mother when she wouldn’t allow me to look after her.’
‘I don’t need anybody looking after me,’ Daisy muttered a shade tartly, but she beamed at Tomaso all the same.
The cottage. Kelda hadn’t even thought about it. But she was driven back there. Her own cushions adorned her mother’s chairs. And Daisy’s display of ruby glass in the lounge had been displaced by the ornamental frogs Kelda had been collecting since childhood. Her mother squeezed her elbow. Kelda blinked back tears.
The cottage had two dormer bedrooms, both with en-suite facilities, a lounge and a cosy dining-room open on to the kitchen as well as a small but very private garden. All of a sudden she had a home of her own again. She sat down on the edge of the bed and then tore into her holdall for the test.
‘What do you want for dinner?’ Daisy called upstairs brightly.
‘I’m not hungry!’
‘Rubbish!’
Forty minutes later she knew, but she sat on the side of the bath simply staring at the kit, telling herself that maybe she had done the test wrong and re-reading the instructions. She felt terribly sick and even more terribly scared. She felt just like a teenager, not like an adult at all. Pregnant. It was a black joke. She couldn’t believe she was, couldn’t credit that one mistake could lead to such frightening consequences.
Three days later, her mother found her being sick in the bathroom for the second morning in succession. ‘You’ve caught some bug,’ Daisy muttered anxiously. ‘This time, I’m not listening to you, I’m calling the doctor!’
‘No!’
Ignoring her protests, her mother marched over to the phone.
Kelda was already under sufficient stress ‘Don’t!’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Daisy continued to dial.
‘For goodness’ sake, I’m not sick...I’m pregnant!’ Kelda suddenly sobbed in frustration and then a silence, utterly unlike any other, fell as Daisy stared back at her in disbelief and Kelda realised what she had said. She had not intended to tell her mother until she returned from her honeymoon.
It took an hour to calm Daisy down.
Her own eyes as swollen as her parent’s, Kelda whispered, ‘I didn’t want you to know yet.’
‘How am I going to tell Tomaso?’
‘Don’t you dare tell Tomaso!’ Kelda gasped.
‘He’s going to have to know some time! Kelda...how could you go to bed with some man you hardly know at a party?’ Her mother broke down in tears again.
That seemed the worst aspect of it all in her parent’s eyes. Kelda turned her head away, wishing that she could have told the truth but in the circumstances that was impossible. She didn’t sleep a wink that night. Tomorrow, Daisy and Tomaso were getting married. And she had ruined her mother’s wedding for her with the sort of news few parents wished to hear. Her conscience was in agony. And as if that wasn’t enough, she knew that tomorrow she would have to face Angelo again.
Would she tell him? How could she tell him? The right words for such an announcement evaded her. Af
ter he had seen Russ strolling out of her bedroom half naked, why should he even believe that her baby was his? Too exhausted to even think any more, Kelda lay there in the darkness, wrapped in turmoil.
When she came down for breakfast, Daisy was astonishingly all smiles and buoyance. ‘You could get a nanny and we could keep the baby when you had to be away overnight. Tomaso loves children. He’ll probably be delighted when he gets over the...the surprise,’ Daisy selected tactfully. ‘After all, society has changed. Single parenthood is much more acceptable these days. Would you like one rasher or two?’
‘Mum, I—’ Kelda hesitated and then abruptly found herself wrapped in her mother’s arms. ‘The smell of that bacon makes me sick,’ she confided with a tiny catch in her voice.
The wedding was at a register office. The first person Kelda saw was Angelo, and the effect of Angelo sheathed in a superb light grey suit was powerful. She stumbled in the doorway, briefly unable to take her eyes off him. Dear lord, the ground beneath her feet seemed to tilt and her skin was damp and her heart was racing. Eyes of gold deep enough to drown in, ebony hair that felt like silk against her fingertips. A welter of erotic imagery she had locked tight within her memory banks suddenly overwhelmed her.
‘That’s Fiona,’ her mother hissed. ‘I forgot to mention that she’d be coming. Gorgeous, isn’t she? Tomaso thinks she’s been the most promising yet. She’s a banker and she has two degrees—’
‘Two degrees,’ Kelda muttered jerkily, her stomach a rolling turmoil of nausea as she belatedly focused on the six-foot-plus-tall Amazon standing beside Angelo. From her waterfall-straight black hair and bright sapphire-blue eyes to the soles of her elegantly shod feet, Fiona was stunning.
‘I was so silly that night we all dined together,’ Daisy whispered in haste as Tomaso bore down on them. ‘I had this stupid idea that Angelo and you were—’
Tomaso’s arrival mercifully silenced her mother.
He has another woman. Well, what did you expect...why are you so shocked? Kelda couldn’t answer that question. She knew only that the sight of Angelo with another woman had devastated her. The brief ceremony over, she swiftly spun on her heel and approached Tomaso’s brother and his wife. ‘Would you mind giving me a lift back to the—?’