Kitabı oku: «The Mistresses Collection», sayfa 45
Angelo Di Capua was the last person whose voice she should want to hear in a time of crisis. Jack would have been more than happy to listen to her babble on about the crazy guy she had dated once. He would have offered to come over the second she told him that Ian had broken in. He knew all about Ian. But had she called him? No. Instead, her brain had gone on temporary leave and some insane instinct had taken over. Honestly. How lame was the excuse of the cottage when it came to phoning him?
“Expect me to be at the cottage some time over the weekend. Probably Sunday. If you want to be there, then fine. I can’t tell you where you can or can’t be, although if it’s my cottage then technically you’d be trespassing.” She covered her show of weakness for calling him in the first place with a virulent diatribe which didn’t make her feel any better.
“Ah, that’s more like it. Out come the claws. Have you been on the Internet to find out how much you could get for it?”
“Goodbye, Angelo. I’ll see you when I see you.”
She should have phoned Jack. Jack, who along with Amanda had packed up his belongings and fled their council estate just outside Liverpool before they had become too old or too resigned to fight the “no way out” signs. Amanda might have turned traitor, selling her friend down the river for the chance of netting Angelo, but Jack had always remained her best friend through thick and thin. Why hadn’t she called him instead of Angelo? Even though he was all loved up with his partner, Brian, a doctor at one of the big London hospitals, he would have jumped in his little car without hesitation and stayed with her until she had talked herself out of her anxiousness.
As things stood, she spent a wakeful night, listening out for noises, wondering how Ian had managed to infiltrate her haven. He didn’t have a key. She had gone out with the man once. But he must have followed her at some point to know where she lived. She shuddered thinking about it. She wondered whether there was any point contacting the police. Would they be able to do anything? Or would they say, again, that no crime had been committed? They might even doubt her when she told them that there was no way that Ian could have a key to her house.
During the course of her restless night, the idea of fleeing to the countryside seemed to make more and more sense. She would have to give notice at the restaurant, but there was a chance that they would release her if she explained the situation. she was on good terms with the head chef who ran the show.
The following morning, she rang James Foreman as early as she thought acceptable and told him that she had decided to take a look at the cottage as soon as possible.
“Today if I can,” she said, walking through the house and flinging bits and pieces of clothing into her holdall. “I know it’s very last minute, and I should have called you earlier, but I just decided on the spur of the moment.”
Excellent idea, the lawyer told her. She could come to his house for the keys, although of course Angelo had a set of his own.
“I’ll come to you,” Rosie said hastily. “I promised Mr Di Capua that I would let him know if I intended visiting the cottage and I have. I spoke to him yesterday. Of course, you might want to confirm that with him yourself. No rush there, though,” she continued vaguely. “I gather that he’s a very busy man. I’m sure he wouldn’t be interested in dashing down to Cornwall on a weekend.”
By the time the phone call had ended, a time had been arranged for her to collect the key. Having made her mind up, she couldn’t wait to go.
“I’m going to do it.” She called Jack on her mobile to tell him as she locked the front door behind her and stuck out her hand for a cab. “Long story, but I don’t feel safe in the house any more. I know Ian’s harmless, but it’s still a little scary to think…well…”
Jack did as she expected him to, spoke to her in that soothing voice of his, told her that it was a good idea and that she shouldn’t feel guilty about accepting Mandy’s gift because it was the least she could have done.
“She wrecked your life,” he said, indignant, and as always fiercely loyal.
“Or else made me see Angelo for what he really was. Just a ship passing in the night. He never loved me, Jack, or else he wouldn’t have been unfaithful behind my back with my best friend.” Yet, seeing him again, he still got to her, still fired her up and made every pore and nerve-ending in her body rush into immediate red-alert mode.
There was nothing Jack could say to that, nothing that he had ever been able to say to that. They had talked about it endlessly in the weeks after the relationship had crashed and burned, until Rosie had become aware that she was boring her friend to death. At which point she stopped, and the only conversations she had on the subject were in her head.
“She did me a favour.” Rosie thought of the glittering hatred in Angelo’s eyes, those fabulous moss-green eyes that were so sexy and so unusual in someone of his exotically dark colouring.
“He should have heard you out about those pawn tickets, Rosie baby.”
“Why would he? He didn’t care enough to hear my side of the story. He was already moving on. No, he had already moved on.” She was ashamed when she remembered how willing she would have been to force Angelo to hear her out, how happily she would have sacrificed her self-respect and begged for him to believe her. But in the end there had been no point, because he had married Amanda.
She felt drained and exhausted just thinking about it. She couldn’t believe that he was now back in her life, determined to make her suffer in whatever way he could.
Forty minutes later, with the key to the cottage in her purse, Rosie wondered whether she had the strength to fight Angelo for a cottage she hadn’t even seen and might well hate on sight. Of the three of them, Mandy had always been the one most determined to blank out the past and recreate it as something it had never been. The second she had met Angelo and sussed his wealth, she had hissed to Rosie that she should keep their background under wraps.
“A guy like that who could have anyone, literally anyone, would dump you in a heartbeat if he ever found out that you, me and Jack are refugees from a disgusting council estate up north. Can you imagine what he’d think if he knew that your dad died a drunk? That your best friend’s mum was a junkie doing time? You wouldn’t see him for dust.”
Rosie had laughed. She wasn’t ashamed of her background, even though she had wanted to escape it as badly as the other two. But, in all events, Angelo hadn’t been the sort of guy who had wanted to quiz her about where she had grown up, nor had he confided in her about his own background, save to say that he had no brothers or sisters and came from a little village in Italy. They had laughed and made love and lived purely for the moment, and she had forgotten that they came from two different worlds because he had made her feel like a princess.
She splashed out on her train ticket and felt the thud of excitement as the train slowly lurched out of Paddington station. She’d had to wait a couple of hours at the station, not having booked her ticket in advance, but she hadn’t minded. She had enjoyed sitting in one of the cafés, sipping coffee and watching the world go by.
The key in her bag felt like a good-luck charm and she had to resist the temptation to wrap her fingers around it.
She had to stop herself from grinning. She didn’t care if Angelo loathed her and wanted to buy her out of this inheritance. This was her wonderful adventure and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. She would grab it with both hands. Jack was right—why shouldn’t she? Amanda had taken a shotgun to her life and blown it apart so maybe James Foreman was right. Maybe this was her way of making amends.
She felt a shadow of apprehension when she remembered that Angelo owned the grounds alongside it, but she would just have to work out how that might affect her. They had nothing to say to one another. Once he had accepted that he couldn’t fling her off her own premises or buy her off, he would wash his hands of her. Hadn’t he said something about wanting to develop the place anyway? He could develop his own land, turn it into whatever he wanted, and when that happened he would once again disappear from her life. It wasn’t as though he would be finding excuses to show up on her doorstep. The opposite.
She sat back, closed her eyes and did her utmost to block the image of Angelo burning into her retina, tall, dark, dangerous and seeking some sort of revenge.
CHAPTER THREE
NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared Rosie for the picture-postcard cottage she walked into.
She had alternately dozed on the journey and speculated on what would be waiting for her at the end of it. She hadn’t realised how stressed out she had been for the past few months, how accustomed she had become to looking over her shoulder, but the more distance she put between herself and London the more relaxed she became.
Her hours at the restaurant were insane. Eager to pack in as much experience as she possibly could, she worked like a demon and, on weekends, would obsessively try out variations on some of the dishes she had been taught to prepare, always trying to tweak them into something else, something that would give her the confidence to break away and do her own thing.
Her social life was practically nonexistent. She had become so used to it that it was only as she was travelling away from it that she could see how unhealthy a lifestyle it had become.
And then there was Ian, always hovering in the background like a bad dream. She had trained herself to ignore his invisible presence in her life and, at least until he had found a way into her house, she had firmly believed she had succeeded. Yet, as the train had eaten up the miles between London and Plymouth, she realised that she had been kidding herself. He had been just one more thing weighing her down and stressing her out.
But the second she stood in front of that cottage, all her problems seemed to magically disappear.
It wasn’t a large cottage, but what it lacked in size it more than made up for in charm. Rosie had wondered how far away it would be from Angelo’s house. She had wondered whether she would be able to see whatever mansion he owned towering in the distance, imposing an aura of permanent threat. She had known that, should that be the case, then she would never have been able to occupy it.
In fact, it was impossible even to guess that the cottage was anywhere near any other residence. It was set back from the main road, which was little more than a quiet country lane, and bordered by a white picket fence. Rosie had always imagined that white picket fences were things only found in kids’ books. She was charmed by the reality of actually seeing one in the flesh and before even entering the cottage she spent a few minutes tracing the outline of it with her hand.
She imagined that in summer the little front garden would be a riot of colour and the apple trees on either side would be heavy with fruit. Behind the cottage, the land stretched away into fields and a copse.
It was idyllic. No wonder Angelo had reacted with rage and horror at the thought of her occupying it. Having fancied himself conned out of thousands by a conniving opportunist, he would have been seething at the prospect of her descending on what must be a very valuable slice of real estate which he considered belonged to him.
With a little sigh, Rosie let herself into the cottage. She didn’t want to think about Angelo. She didn’t want to think of him storming down to Cornwall and blazing a furious trail through her flimsy defences. She was still trying to recover from the blistering effect he had had on her two weeks ago when she had encountered him at the funeral. Now, she just wanted to luxuriate in the tranquillity of her surroundings and determine the direction of her life.
Inside the cottage was perfectly proportioned, but what captivated Rosie were the small touches that were all Amanda’s: the choice of curtain, the choice of big and squashy sofas and the colour of the paint on the walls, rose-pinks and yellows.
She had wondered whether she would be spooked at walking into a house owned by her one-time friend, but she wasn’t. She strolled from room to room and reflected that, whatever the outcome of Amanda’s relationship with Angelo, she had managed to get what she had always dreamed of—a place close to the sea, decorated just the way she wanted, which was a style pinched from the occasional house magazine they used to drool over in their poky boxed houses on the council estate.
She didn’t realise how long she had spent wandering through the cottage until her stomach began to rumble with hunger.
Of course, she hadn’t thought to bring anything to eat with her. Fortunately, the fridge was completely empty. She didn’t think she would have coped had there been proof of her friend there. Had the place been cleaned after Amanda had died? Rosie thought it might have been. Perhaps James Foreman had seen to that. He hadn’t mentioned it, but he was just the sort of thoughtful, warm person who would have made sure the task was done in anticipation of her visiting.
She would have to go out, although without a car she had no idea how that would be achieved, and she was actively deliberating whether to call a taxi back or not when the doorbell rang.
Rosie froze instantly. It couldn’t be Ian. Could it? She realised with dismay that thoughts of him were never too far away. Just in case, she tiptoed to the front door and quietly secured the chain before opening the door a crack.
Although it was only a little after five-thirty, it was already dark, a bottomless darkness quite unlike the darkness in London which was always punctuated with light from street lamps.
Whoever her caller was, he was standing to one side, just out of direct sight. Panic flared through her. She struggled for reason and told herself that there was no way that Ian could be standing outside her front door. It just wasn’t possible! Yet, hadn’t he found a way into her house in London? She wished she had thought to bring something heavy from the kitchen—a frying pan; a rolling pin. Something she could use as a weapon. Even as those thoughts flitted through her head, she was aware that she was over-reacting. She realised just how threatened she had felt by Ian over the months, even though she had stoutly told herself that she had nothing to fear from a guy who was two inches shorter than her and a very slight build.
“Well? Are you going to let me in, Rosie?” Angelo had not been to the cottage for a long time. In fact, he had only been there once, after he had allowed Amanda to have it, and then only to assess what renovations had needed doing. He had never been able to understand her reasons for demanding ownership when she had a perfectly good townhouse in London at her disposal, but then again he had never been one for the country life, despite owning his own country mansion. As investments went, it had served him well although he wouldn’t have chosen to live there if he had had a gun to his head. It was there to appreciate in value and occasionally to host large events that were workrelated. Three times a year, high-performing employees were treated to an all-expenses-paid weekend.
“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?”
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