“What are you doing here?” Rosie marvelled that she could ever have imagined her caller to be Ian when the most obvious candidate was Angelo. Her irrational fear disappeared to be replaced by something else, a darker and more dangerous emotion that made her heart begin to beat erratically in her chest. He had stepped out of the shadows and she felt ridiculously overwhelmed by his tall, powerful presence.
“Didn’t I tell you that I wanted to be here when you decided to have a look at your ill-gotten legacy?” He placed his hand flat against the door. In truth, there had been no need to rush down to Cornwall, but the second he had heard her voice down the end of the phone he had had no choice. It infuriated him.
“And why the latch?” he asked with silky sarcasm. “Left-over caution from having set up camp in a dump where it pays to make sure you know who your caller is before you open the door?”
“You should have told me that you would be coming.” Rosie could hear the breathlessness in her voice, lurking just below the cool control she wanted to impose.
“Why, when the element of surprise is so much more enjoyable? Now, open the door, Rosie. I don’t intend to spend the next hour having a conversation with you on the doorstep.”
Reluctantly, Rosie unhooked the chain and opened the door, stepping aside so that he could brush past her into the hallway. She remained with her back pressed to the closed door, watching him warily as he looked around.
She had no idea what to say. She wondered what was going through his head. The woman he despised was standing in the hallway of a house that wasn’t rightfully hers, given to her in the worst possible circumstances by someone who she hadn’t set eyes on for three years. She couldn’t drag her eyes away from his starkly handsome face and she flushed with embarrassment when eventually he finished his visual tour of the hallway and caught her staring at him.
“I think Mr Foreman must have arranged to have it all cleaned.” Rosie rushed into speech whilst propelling herself away from the door towards the kitchen, simply because her legs felt too wobbly to maintain an upright position, even with the aid of the door to lean against.
“I did.” Angelo hadn’t known what to expect and he was surprised to find such muted colours and lack of personality. “I had my housekeeper for the main house bring a team in last weekend. Tell me, have you unpacked and settled in yet? You already look at home here, although maybe I’m being a little over-imaginative in thinking that it must be slightly strange walking around the house that once belonged to your friend. My mistake, your ex-friend. Or perhaps the ex makes it a little easier?” He sat on one of the kitchen chairs facing her and sprawled back, angling the chair so that he could stretch out his long legs, which he loosely crossed at the ankles.
At the funeral, she had been dressed in sombre colours as befitting a woman in so-called mourning. Now, she was back in casual attire, a pair of faded jeans, a loose, faded cotton sweater and trainers. She had always gone for the natural look and clearly nothing there had changed. He caught himself wondering whether she was wearing a bra and gritted his teeth together at his lapse in focus.
“I’m here to discuss relieving you of the property,” Angelo drawled into the tense, lengthening silence. “I’ve spoken to Foreman and the will is sound. Unacceptable though I find it, you are the rightful owner of this place along with six acres of unmaintained land. Your ship’s come in big time—no more toiling in a kitchen trying to make ends meet; no more pretending to enjoy getting hot and sweaty behind a stove while someone yells at you that you need to pick up speed and get your orders to the table.” She still blushed. She was as tough as old boots and yet she still blushed. Amazing.
“I know you’re probably going to be furious with me, Angelo, but I don’t think I want to sell this cottage to you.” She held her breath and waited for him to retaliate but he continued to sit there, lethally silent.
“And why would that be?” he asked softly.
Rosie shrugged and lowered her eyes. “I think it would do me good to leave London,” she said truthfully. “I love my job but there are one or two things...happening.”
“If you’re trying to rouse my curiosity so that you can launch into a sob story, then you can forget it. Not interested. I have plans for this land and my plans don’t include you living on it.”
“If you had plans, then why didn’t you approach Amanda for the land when she was alive? Why wait until now?”
Angelo was outraged that she dared even voice the question. It had been proven that the only thing she was interested in was money. Was she playing hardball in the hope that whatever financial deal he might offer could be upped? Or was she planning on sitting on the property until she was satisfied that it had reached its maximum value? To look at her no one would ever have guessed in a month of Sundays that she was capable of such cold-blooded calculation, yet he knew better.
“Amanda wanted this place. I gave it to her. It was not within my remit to try and wheedle it away from her for development. When it comes to you, however, the story is slightly different. And let’s be honest here, Rosie, you can be bought. The only question is how much you’re asking.”
“I resent that.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“Why are you still so bitter, Angelo?” She met his eyes and sustained his steady gaze even though she wanted to look away. “You married Mandy. It’s not my fault your marriage didn’t work out.” She felt a rush of nerves as she overstepped the mark from polite conversation to uninvited opinion. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” Restlessly, she stood up, went to the fridge and opened it, even though there was nothing there to find.
“I know what you think of me, Angelo. You think that you just have to throw money my way and I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want?” A vivid image of her back in bed with him flashed through his head with startling clarity. He stood up, turned to her and Rosie gazed back at him with the suffocating feeling of being crowded.
What had that sibilant aside meant? Did he think that she was somehow offering herself to him?
“That’s not what I meant.”
“No? Sure about that?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and leant indolently against the fridge, barring her exit path to the kitchen door. The heightened atmosphere might be utterly inappropriate, but why kid himself? He was enjoying it. He was enjoying playing with the tantalising thought of having her, of seducing her into bed, of once again getting her so mindlessly turned on by him that she could scarcely breathe. He was suddenly so turned on that he could feel his arousal pushing insistently against the zip.
How could desire be so powerful that it could push past hatred to worm its own independent path?
He stepped aside, breaking the electric connection. Hell, what was going on here?
“Don’t you have commitments to the people you work with?” Angelo drawled, giving himself sufficient physical space from her for his erection to subside. “Or do the commitments fall by the wayside when something better happens to come along?”
He strolled out of the kitchen and towards the small sitting room that overlooked the front garden. He knew that she was following him, although the rugs absorbed the sound of her footsteps.
“I have a very understanding boss,” Rosie muttered helplessly. She hovered in the doorway, aware of how dangerous it was to get too close to him. For a second there in the kitchen, she had had a horrible feeling that if he had reached out and touched her, she would have melted, like wax in a hot flame. Did she have no pride or self-respect? Had she been giving off some crazy, subliminal signals that had encouraged him to think that she was still hot for him? Or had she imagined the whole surreal scenario—the lazy way he had looked at her, as though she could be his for the taking?
“I haven’t had a chance—” she fought for composure and was pleased that she didn’t
sound as out of control as she felt “—to look outside—but if there’s any chance that I could cultivate the land then I certainly will try and establish myself here. I know that my boss has a lot of contacts in this part of the world. I’m sure we would be able to work out a business proposition that would benefit both of us mutually.” She couldn’t read a thing in his brooding expression. She just knew that she couldn’t let the messy past influence her now. The sooner she made her mind up, the quicker he would stop pursuing her in the hope of being able to buy her off. She couldn’t deal with having him in the same space as her. After all this time, she was still far too vulnerable, even though she told herself that he was hateful, that she was over him, that he was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
“So you’ll have to give up trying to buy me off.”
“And what happens if your optimistic prediction of a catering business doesn’t materialise? This is your last chance to get your paws on a substantial amount of money. Turn it down now and it won’t come your way again. Of course, you could always sell the house on the open market if it turns out that you need to, but times are tough even in this beauty spot. You could be sitting on bricks and mortar for months, with a floundering catering service and bailiffs banging on your door.”
“Thanks very much for the vote of confidence, Angelo.” There was a time when he would have backed her every inch of the way. She tore her mind away from that and focused on the image of Ian and the shadowy feelings of unease she had been living with for the past few months.
“And what about other commitments you might be leaving behind?” he murmured, his eyes roving lazily over her flushed face. He remembered that feeling he had got when he had asked her about her private life, that very slight pause before she answered. He found that he didn’t much care for a boyfriend in the background, at least not while he was having hot fantasies about her.
“I guess I’ll lose my deposit on the house. My landlord isn’t the most sympathetic person in the world.” Goodbye money she could ill afford, hello debt and a bank loan for a business which, as he had eloquently pointed out, could collapse around her, leaving her in a financial nightmare. She might have inherited a beautiful cottage and she might be intent on living in it, but she wasn’t exactly bringing a great deal of disposable income with her to the table. She had managed to save a little, but how long would that last?
And what if Angelo decided to put a spoke in her wheel? He was rich, powerful, influential and he still hated her after all these years. Would he try and blow her out of the water because she had stubbornly refused to give in to him? Would he stoop that low? How steep was the price might she have to pay for running away from an awkward situation?
“I wasn’t referring to your landlord and the small change you might owe him in a deposit.”
“You might think that a few hundred pounds is small change, but it’s not for me.”
Angelo shot her a contemptuous, curling smile and refrained from telling her that she shouldn’t have squandered the money she had taken from him. His initial reaction, on seeing her for the first time in three years at the funeral, and on hearing of the legacy that had been bequeathed to her, had been one of fury. He had not envisaged her living in the cottage. He would either fight her through the courts and wrench it out of her grasping hands, or he would fling sufficient money her way to make her disappear from his line of vision for good.
He hadn’t banked on the unexpected, uninvited and one-hundred-percent untamed urgency of his physical response to her. Now, he wondered whether it might not be more satisfying to see her fail. He had never considered himself vengeful. Bitter, yes; angry, most definitely; but why waste time and energy on thoughts of revenge? And yet, the possibility of revenge now seemed to be landing neatly in his lap and he would be a saint not to yield to its temptation. Angelo knew for a fact that “saintly” was the last thing he was.
“Actually, I was referring to the man in your life,” he murmured with just the right hint of indifference in his voice.
Rosie wondered what he would say if she told him that she was running away from that particular man. Would it give him a sense of satisfaction? Would he give her a smug lecture on the wheel turning full circle for a woman like her?
“And, like I said to you before, my private life is none of your concern. James, Mr Foreman, tells me that there are a few legalities to go through before I move down here, but I intend to make the move as quickly as possible. I’m just telling you so that you don’t think that you can try and work out a way of scaring me off.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Scaring you off?”
“You know it is, Angelo. First you tell me that you’ll pay to get rid of me, and then you tell me that if I don’t agree to sell to you then any business idea I have is doomed to failure.”
“And here I was thinking that I was being realistic.” He wondered if the man she denied having in her life—or rather the man she wanted to keep a secret from him—was her boss. Maybe the guy was married, had kids. It was a distasteful thought and his lips thinned in immediate revulsion at the idea.
“I don’t need you being realistic on my behalf,” Rosie said coolly. “I’ll take my chances.”
“And if it turns out you need a rescue package? I don’t suppose your parents will be able to pick up the pieces.”
“I beg your pardon?” Rosie had no idea what he was talking about and she looked at him in bewilderment. “What parents?”
“The ones you have concealed up north somewhere. An accountant and a primary school teacher, if I’m not mistaken? You made sure never to mention their existence to me when we were going out, but then again, we didn’t do much talking, did we?”
“We talked a lot.” She looked at him and wondered whether he had deliberately demoted their relationship to a purely sexual one in an attempt to hurt her or whether she had misconstrued what they had meant to each other, reading too much into too little. “Who told you that my parents were a... What did you say? A teacher and an accountant?”
“Three guesses. No, you’d probably only need one. Amanda explained that you probably never talked about them because you were worried that I might find them too drab.”
Rosie couldn’t help herself. Even though her nerves were stretched to breaking point, she burst out laughing. She laughed until her eyes watered while Angelo stared at her, frowning with incomprehension.
“I would have been overjoyed to have had parents who were accountants or teachers,” she finally said. “And I’m not surprised that Mandy made that story up.” She felt a sudden burst of affection for the friend she had once had. “We used to long for normal parents.”
Now it was Angelo’s turn to be confused. He stilled as he sought to unravel the direction of her conversation, although he was half-distracted by the lingering smile on her face. “What are you talking about?”
“What did Mandy tell you about her parents?” Rosie asked curiously and Angelo’s frown deepened. When had he lost control of the situation?
“There was nothing to tell,” he said curtly. “She had none. She was raised by her grandmother who died a year before she moved to London. Where are you going with this?”
“I’m not the one who raised the topic,” Rosie pointed out.
“Are you telling me that Amanda lied about her background? About yours?”
“I was raised by my father who was an alcoholic, Angelo, and I loved him. A lot. Even though he had a problem with his drinking. Even though he never came to a single parents’ meeting or any sports event at school. Actually, even though he wasn’t that bothered whether I went to school or not. Just for the record, I never played truant.”
Angelo felt white-hot fury race through his bloodstream but he contained it. “So not only were you an opportunist,” he gritted, “But you were also an out and out liar.”
“I can’t believe I was conned by the pair of you. Are you going to tell me next that my dearly beloved late wife has a sprawling family tucked away somewhere?”
“No family, Angelo. She lived with Annie, her grandmother. I’m sorry I never mentioned my dad to you,” she was constrained to tell him. “I didn’t think it was important.”
“Correction. You didn’t want me to be influenced by it.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t!” Rosie burst out with sudden anger. “And can you blame me? The way you’re looking at me now...!”
“Do you really think I would have given a damn where you came from?” He didn’t want to become embroiled in a fruitless discussion with a woman who dug herself deeper and deeper into a hole with every sentence that passed her lips but, like a thorn, she had burrowed under his skin. “I despise liars,” he imparted grimly. He wanted to ask her what other lies might he expect from her and had to remind himself that she was no longer his concern. She was disposable. Were it not for extraordinary and unforeseeable circumstances, he wouldn’t even be sitting here in this cottage with her, having this conversation.
A Deal with Di Capua Page 5