The Blackmailed Bridegroom
The Blackmailed Bridegroom
Miranda Lee
If Antonio Scarlatti wanted to be CEO of Fortune Productions, he had to marry the boss's daughter! At first Antonio refused to give in to such blackmail, but then he reconsidered: would it be so difficult to bed and wed the beautiful Paige, and then divorce her?But Antonio was unaware that Paige had secretly been in love with him for years, and neither was prepared for the explosion of passion between them…!
“Antonio, a girl has her pride.”
“Pride?”
“Everyone knows you’re the love-’em-and-leave-’em type. I have no intention of being added to your list of idle conquests. So you can lend me the money for a taxi.”
Antonio began to fume. We’ll see about that, Miss Love-’em-and-leave-’em yourself! I’ve got news for you.You won’t be loving and leaving me, honey.You’re going to be my wife. “I wouldn’t dream of sending you home in a taxi,” he said with a smooth smile. “Just give me a minute.…”
VIVA LA VIDA DE AMOR!
They speak the language of passion.
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for anyone who’s passionate about love and life. Look out for our next Latin Lovers title: The Italian Groom by Jane Porter Harlequin Presents #2168 Available in March
Miranda Lee
The Blackmailed Bridegroom
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
THE jumbo jet was twenty minutes late setting down at Mascot Airport, but Antonio was one of the first to alight. The head of Fortune Productions, European Division, didn’t look as if he’d been on a gruelling twenty-two-hour flight from London to Sydney. His superb grey suit was sleek and uncrumpled. His thick jet-black hair was slicked back from a freshly shaven face. His dark eyes were clear and rested.
The advantage of flying first class.
Not that Antonio Scarlatti had always travelled first class. He knew what it was like to do it tough. He knew what it was like to travel long hauls cramped in steerage, with wall-to-wall passengers and little chance of sleep, then have people look down their nose at him at the other end, when his suit had been wrinkled and his job far less prestigious than the one he now held.
Antonio had no intention of ever going back to that existence. He’d made it to the top, and the top was where he was going to stay. The world was for the winners. And the wealthy. At the age of thirty-four, he was finally both.
The company limousine was waiting in its usual spot, the engine idling at the ready. Antonio opened the back door and slid into its air-conditioned comfort.
‘Morning, Jim,’ he addressed the chauffeur.
‘Mornin’, Tone.’
Antonio smiled. He was back in Australia all right. In London, and all over Europe, he was always addressed by his drivers as ‘Mr Scarlatti’. But that wasn’t the way down under, especially after an acquaintance of some time.
Antonio leant back against the plush leather seat with a deeply relaxing sigh. It was good to be home and off the merry-go-round for a fortnight’s break. His contract stated he could fly home for two weeks rest and recuperation every three months, a necessity since he worked seven days a week when on the job. Being in charge of selling and promoting Fortune Productions’ extensive list of television programmes to the hundreds of stations and cable networks all over Europe was a challenging job.
‘Straight home, Jim,’ he said, and closed his eyes. He’d bought himself a luxury serviced apartment overlooking the harbour bridge a couple of years back, and couldn’t wait to immerse himself in its privacy and comfort. The last few days had been a nightmare of negotiations and never-ending meetings. Antonio needed some peace and quiet.
‘No can do, Tone,’ the chauffeur returned as he eased the lengthy car past the long line of taxis which had queued up to meet the flight from London. ‘The boss wants you to join him for breakfast.’
Antonio’s eyes opened on a low groan. He hoped it wasn’t one of those media circus breakfasts Conrad was always getting invited to and which he occasionally attended. Antonio couldn’t stand them at the best of times. ‘Where, for pity’s sake?’ came his irritable query.
‘The Taj Mahal.’
‘Thank God,’ Antonio muttered.
The Taj Mahal was Jim’s nickname for Conrad Fortune’s residence at Darling Point. It was an apt term. The place was over the top with its grandeur and opulence, a monolithic mansion sprawled across an acre of some of the most expensive land in Sydney’s exclusive Eastern suburbs.
What the house lacked in taste, it made up for in sheer size. The fac¸ade had more columns than the Colosseum, the foyer more marble than the British Museum, and Romanesque statues and ornate fountains dominated the front landscaping. The sloping backyard was more low key, terraced to incorporate the solar-heated swimming pool and two rebound ace tennis courts.
Antonio thought the place ostentatious in the extreme. But it was impressive, no doubt about that. Socialites grovelled to be included on the lists for Conrad’s celebrated parties. Magazines and television programmes clamoured to photograph beyond the high-security walls which enclosed the property.
Not Conrad’s television programmes, of course. They knew better.
‘You wouldn’t have any idea what he wants me for, Jim, would you?’ Antonio probed.
‘Nope.’ A man of few words, Jim.
Antonio decided not to speculate. Time would tell, he supposed.
Fifteen minutes later, the limousine slid to a smooth halt in front of the grand front steps, and this time Jim did the honours with the door.
‘You won’t be needing that,’ he advised when Antonio went to pick up his laptop.
Antonio shot the chauffeur a sharp look. So he did have some idea of what was up. And clearly it wasn’t a business matter.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The housekeeper answered the door. Evelyn was in her late forties, and very homely, as were all of Conrad’s female employees. No fool, was Conrad. He’d been stung once, by an ambitious and beautiful maid, and had no intention of harbouring any females under his roof who might present him with unwise temptations. Although now rising seventy, Conrad was still very interested in the opposite sex, as evidenced by the three mistresses he kept. One here in Sydney, one in Paris and one in the Bahamas.
Evelyn had been Conrad’s housekeeper now for over a decade. She was efficient and reliable. More importantly, she knew how to keep her mouth shut to the press.
‘Conrad’s expecting you,’ she told Antonio straight away. ‘He’s in the morning room.’
The morning room overlooked the terrace, which overlooked the pool. The floor-to-ceiling windows faced north-east, and captured the sun all year round. On a winter morning, the room was a dream. In summer, the air-conditioning had a tough job preventing the place from turning into a hothouse. Spring found it coolish, especially since the sun was only just rising at six-thirty.
Conrad was sitting at the huge glass oval table in the centre of the conservatory-style room, wrapped in a thick navy bathrobe. Despite his age, he still had a full head of hair—a magnificent silvery grey—and piercing blue eyes. They flicked up at Antonio’s entrance, and raked him from head to toe, disconcerting Antonio for a moment. Why on earth was Conrad looking him over like that, as though he’d come to audition for one of his soap operas? What was going on here?
‘Sit down, Antonio,’ Conrad ordered. ‘Take a load off your feet and have some decent coffee for a change.’ He picked up the coffee pot and poured an extra mugful of steaming brown liquid.
‘What’s the problem?’ Antonio asked as he sat down and pulled the coffee towards him.
His employer gave him another long, considering look over the table, and Antonio’s gut tightened further. He knew, without being told, that he wasn’t going to like what Conrad had to say.
‘Paige has come home again,’ came the abrupt announcement.
Antonio almost said, So? What’s new?
Conrad’s wild and wilful daughter had been running away from home regularly since she was seventeen. She turned up again regularly too, every year or so. But no sooner had she returned than she’d be off again, saying she was going to share a flat with some girlfriends. But only once had this been the case. Usually, when the private investigator’s report came in several weeks later, her flatmate was male and good-looking, invariably an artist or a musician. Paige seemed to like creativeness. Not one of them had denied sharing more with Paige than the cooking.
At first, Conrad had worried Paige might be exploited for her money. A whole family could have lived comfortably on his only child’s generous monthly allowance! But perversely, from the day she’d first left home, Paige had never touched a cent of the thousands deposited in her bank account every month. When Conrad had found out his money was being donated to the RSPCA, and that Paige was working to support herself, he’d stopped the allowance altogether.
‘Let her work, if that’s what she wants to do!’ he’d raged to Antonio, but would still cringe when he learnt that she was working as a waitress in some café, or behind the bar in a club or pub.
His worst nightmare, however, was that Paige would fall pregnant to one of her live-in boyfriends and then bring the baby home with her. Conrad was not large on babies. Which gave Antonio an idea.
‘She’s not pregnant, is she?’ he asked.
‘No, but she’s going to come to a sticky end, that girl, unless I do something about it. Do you realise she turns twenty-three next week?’
Antonio was surprised. How the years had flown!
‘I would imagine you’ve tried everything,’ he said sincerely. Most girls would give their eye-teeth for what Paige had once had. A lovely home. Designer clothes. An allowance fit for a princess, if she’d wanted to claim it. If none of that was enough to keep her happy, and at home, then Lord knows what was!
‘Not…everything,’ Conrad said slowly, and he set those penetrating blue eyes on Antonio again. ‘There’s one thing I haven’t tried.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Marriage,’ he pronounced. ‘To a man who could control her.’
Antonio couldn’t help it. He laughed. ‘You think Paige would marry a man of your choice?’
‘Of course not. I was thinking of a man of her choice. Namely, you, Antonio.’
‘Me?’ Antonio was floored.
‘Yes, you. Don’t pretend, Antonio. I know exactly what happened just before Paige ran away from home that first time. The first thing Lew did when I put him on the job of tracing her was to question all the staff here at Fortune Hall. Did you think that little incident by the pool between you and my daughter hadn’t been overheard?’
When Antonio opened his mouth to explain, Conrad waved it shut.
‘Please don’t bother to defend your actions,’ he swept on. ‘You have nothing to answer for. You did exactly the right thing. How were you to know that the silly little fool would take your rejection so badly and run off with her broken heart?’
‘Her heart wasn’t broken,’ Antonio contested heatedly. ‘She took up with the next fellow soon enough!’
‘A girl rarely forgets her first love.’
‘I was never her love, first or otherwise!’
Hell, he hadn’t even kissed the girl. He’d been polite to her when she’d been at home on holiday from boarding school, making small talk when their paths had crossed. Hard not to run into her when he’d been living at Fortune Hall in his position as Conrad’s personal assistant, his first job with the company. No one had been more surprised than him when she’d thrown herself into his arms that day by the pool and declared her undying love and devotion.
Antonio hadn’t taken advantage of her schoolgirl crush, despite acknowledging she was a serious temptation to any man, especially dressed as she’d been that day, in a minute pink bikini. On top of that, Antonio was always physically attracted to blond women. He especially liked tall, slender blond women, with big blue eyes, high, full breasts and a waist his hands could span.
His hands had spanned Paige’s waist that day, as he’d reluctantly put her aside, then told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t return her feelings and that he thought of her as a silly little girl.
Not strictly true, of course. He’d thought of her as a silly big girl, extremely beautiful and extraordinarily sexy. Some evenings, when she’d been home from school and she’d come down to dinner in one of those tight, short low-cut little dresses she’d favoured, he’d been glad to be sitting at a table with a serviette covering his lap. If Paige had been any other man’s daughter things might have turned out differently by the pool that day. But Antonio had had no intention of losing a second job because of the boss’s daughter. No way!
Perhaps his rejection had been a little rough. Paige’s obvious humiliation and tears had caused him pangs of guilt for a while, especially when she’d run away instead of returning to school, not sitting for her final exams into the bargain.
He’d got over his guilt soon enough, however, when Lew, Conrad’s personal private investigator, had found her less than a month later, living on a remote North Coast beach with some surfing bum a good few years older than herself. Since the shack they’d been sharing only had one bedroom, it wasn’t difficult to conclude their relationship had been far from platonic. She certainly hadn’t denied it when Antonio himself had travelled all the way up there and tried to bring her back at Conrad’s request.
Antonio’s male ego had been dented by her indifferent reaction to his arrival on her doorstep, but any lingering concern for the girl had been well and truly dispelled once he’d seen for himself what sort of life she’d chosen to live.
Paige was trouble, in his opinion, an opinion reinforced every time their paths crossed, which thankfully wasn’t often. The last time he’d seen her had been at Conrad’s Christmas party the previous year. She’d sashayed downstairs, wearing a short strapless red dress which might have ended up around a less shapely females’ ankles, so precariously had it been perched. To his eternal irritation and frustration, Antonio had found himself wanting to sweep her back up the stairs, rip that infernal scrap of red satin from her body and ravage her senseless upon the first available bed. Or floor. Or whatever.
Instead, he’d had to forcibly keep his eyes away from Paige’s luscious young flesh, pretending to be enraptured by his date, a female lawyer on Fortune Productions’ payroll. To his discredit, Antonio had shamelessly used the woman—both at the party and later—to sate the dark desires Paige had evoked.
Not that she’d minded. As it had turned out, she’d liked her sex a little rough, and without strings.
He hadn’t seen Paige since that night, and tried not to think of her at all these days. But he was certainly thinking of her now.
‘You can’t be serious about this, Conrad,’ he said disbelievingly.
‘I’m very serious.’
‘It’s a crazy idea!’
‘Why? She was in love with you once, whether you like it or not. And that was before you developed into the man you are today. Do you think I haven’t noticed the way women react to you? You could make any woman fall in love with you. A girl like Paige should be a cinch.’
‘But I don’t want Paige to fall in love with me,’ he pointed out icily. ‘And I don’t want to marry her.’ Her, least of all, he thought angrily.
‘Why?’
Antonio did not feel like explaining that he’d been in love very deeply once, with the daughter of his previous boss. He’d thought Lauren had loved him as much as he’d loved her. But when push had come to shove she hadn’t been prepared to actually marry an Italian migrant with a questionable background and nothing to his name but his modest salary as a wine salesman. She’d just been slumming for a while, before moving on from her cosy, cushy life as a rich man’s daughter to the cosy, cushy life of a rich’s man’s wife.
He’d stupidly turned up at her house on the night of her engagement party and made a big scene. Naturally, he’d been given the sack, with no references. It had been several months before he’d been able to get another job, during which he’d practically had to eat the paint off the walls. When Conrad had hired him to be his assistant and interpreter he’d been eternally grateful, even though he suspected he’d been the only applicant who could speak the five languages Conrad required during his business trips overseas.
Antonio had worked his guts out to get where he was today. He had no intention of giving it up for anyone, or of sharing his life with the same sort of silly, selfish, shallow creature who’d once almost destroyed him.
‘When and if I marry, Conrad,’ he said with cold fury, ‘it will be because I’m so much in love that I couldn’t bear not to.’ Which was about as likely as Conrad himself breasting the altar once more.
When his boss said nothing to this, Antonio’s black eyes narrowed. ‘If I don’t agree with this plan of yours, is it going to cost me my job?’
‘No, of course not!’ Conrad denied expansively. ‘What kind of man do you take me for?’
Antonio hesitated to say. But you didn’t get to be one of the richest men in Australia by being full of the milk of human kindness. Over the six years in Conrad’s employ, Antonio had gleaned a lot of information about his boss.
Conrad had started out with nothing, as the son of penniless Polish migrants, changing his name from Fortuneski to Fortune and getting in on the ground floor with television in Australia when it had started, in the fifties, working behind the camera at first before forming his own production company and buying the Australian rights to a successful American game show. It had made him his first million. More game shows had followed, and more millions. Then, in the late sixties, he’d tried one of the first soaps made in Australia, an outrageously sexy series which had made its name with scandalous storylines. Serious millions had begun to roll in, and Fortune Productions had never looked back. Neither had its ambitious bachelor owner.
Conrad had lived and breathed his work, and had had no intention of getting married. But then, in his mid-forties, Conrad had made the mistake of giving his then housekeeper carte blanche to hire and fire staff, and she’d taken on Paige’s mother to serve at table. During a misguided interlude after a rather lengthy and boozy dinner party, Paige had been conceived.
Once presented with the reality of a child-to-be, Conrad had done the right thing and married the woman. He’d been hoping for a son and heir to take over the business. Instead, Paige had been born.
It had not been a happy union, and when his wife of one year had run off to America with a salesman, Conrad hadn’t been shattered. Antonio imagined that his boss also hadn’t lost much sleep over the news, a few years later, that his errant wife had been found dead in a New York hotel room of a drug overdose.
He was not a sentimental man.
‘I’m planning on retiring at the end of the year,’ Conrad went on now, snapping Antonio back to the matter at hand. ‘I’ll be moving permanently to my home in the Bahamas. When I do, the position of CEO of Fortune Productions will become vacant. I intend to promote you, Antonio,’ he said, and Antonio sucked in a sharp breath. ‘But only if you’re my son-in-law at the time,’ Conrad finished.
Antonio exhaled with a rush. ‘Damn and blast it, Conrad, that’s blackmail!’
‘No. That’s good business. Who better to look after one’s interests but family? You, as a born and bred Italian, should appreciate that.’
Antonio kept his temper with difficulty. ‘And if I refuse?’ he bit out.
‘I’ll make the same offer to Brock Masters. I imagine he could handle both jobs almost as well.’
Antonio gritted his teeth. Brock Masters was head of the North American Division. Publicly, he was all capped teeth and false charm, in Antonio’s opinion. Handsome as Satan, but privately he had the morals of the Marquis de Sade.
‘He’ll ruin the company,’ Antonio warned. ‘And he’ll destroy your daughter,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘If you think that, Antonio,’ Conrad said smoothly, ‘you know what to do.’
‘You’re a ruthless devil, do you know that?’
‘Takes one to know one.’
‘Yet you want me to marry your daughter!’
‘She needs a real man for a change. One who will keep her on her toes in order to keep him. And one who can give her what she keeps looking for.’
‘Which is?’
‘What all women want. Love, of course.’
‘For pity’s sake, Conrad, you know darned well I don’t love her.’
Conrad shrugged. ‘What’s love but an illusion anyway? Just tell Paige you love her. The silly little fool won’t know the difference, as long as the sex is good. And the sex will be good, I’m sure. The way the ladies chase after you—even after one short evening in your bed—speaks volumes for your abilities in that department.’
Antonio stared at the man. He almost felt sorry for Paige, having such a cold-blooded bastard for a parent. He could not understand how a father could do such a thing to his daughter.
Still, Antonio was not a fool. He knew if he knocked Conrad back on this he was finished at Fortune Productions. Brock Masters hated his guts. Antonio supposed he could quit and find another job with a rival company, settle back and watch the rot set in at Fortune Productions. It would serve Conrad right if he did just that.
But pride in a job well done—and in the company—would not let him seriously consider such an action. And then there was the added image of Paige, being seduced, corrupted and destroyed by an amoral, cocaine-snorting pervert.
Antonio’s stomach turned over. A silly little fool she might be, but she didn’t deserve that.
‘Under the circumstances,’ he said, in that coolly ruthless voice which emerged when he was cornered, ‘I will expect something in writing.’
Conrad beamed. ‘But of course, Antonio. I’ll have it ready for you when you come to dinner here tonight.’
Antonio frowned. ‘Tonight?’
‘I thought the sooner you got started the better. After all, you have to be back in London in a fortnight. A whirlwind romance is just what the doctor ordered. I see no reason why Paige shouldn’t travel back with you, once she’s wearing your engagement ring.’
‘You expect her to agree to marry me in two short weeks?’
‘You’ve negotiated more difficult contracts in much faster time, Antonio. Speaking of contracts, the day you marry Paige you will have your contract as CEO of Fortune Productions, plus I will give you the deeds to this house as a wedding present.’
‘No, thank you, Conrad. The contract will do. I wouldn’t want to live here.’ Even if he could tolerate the space, he didn’t want to be surrounded by Conrad’s extra ears.
Conrad smiled. ‘I had a feeling you’d say that. Shall we expect you around seven-thirty, then?’
‘Are you sure Paige will still be here?’ Antonio commented caustically.
‘I should think so. Her latest boyfriend gave her quite a scare.’
‘Oh?’
‘He hit her.’
Antonio was surprised at how angry this news made him. There again, violence against women had always pushed savage buttons in him. ‘I gather you know this charmer’s name and address?’ he ground out.
‘Actually, no, I don’t.’
‘But you always know where Paige is living and who with!’
Conrad sighed. ‘I stopped putting Lew on the job this past year. I just couldn’t take it any more. I have no idea what she’s been up to since January. Paige rang me out of the blue last night around one, and asked if Jim could come and pick her up at Central Station. She sounded scared, which, as you know, isn’t like Paige at all. But the penny dropped once I saw the big bruise on her face. She wouldn’t tell me anything when I asked her last night. But maybe she’ll tell you.’
‘Maybe.’ If she did, Antonio was going to teach the creep a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry!
Still, it had only been a question of time before Paige became mixed up with a really unsavoury type. The girl never could see the risks she was taking in living with men she didn’t really know. She had no common sense, and no appreciation of the consequences of her actions. She’d be the perfect victim for the likes of Brock Masters!
Possibly there were excuses for her many and potentially dangerous relationships—Antonio was beginning to appreciate there’d been little enough warmth and affection here at home—but one would have thought she’d have learned by now. Almost twenty-three, and she was still looking for love in all the wrong places!
Well, she certainly won’t find it with you, either, came the coldly cynical thought.
‘You know, Conrad,’ he said with a sardonic twist of his mouth. ‘Has it occurred to you that Paige might say no to marriage, whether she falls in love with me or not?’
‘It did cross my mind. If needs be, I suggest you use a method as old as time.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Get her pregnant.’
Antonio’s eyes widened.
‘I’m sure you won’t find such a task beyond you,’ his boss drawled. ‘I gather the Wilding girl had to have a little operation before she could become engaged to the Jansen millions. Which was understandable. She couldn’t risk a black-eyed baby born to a blond, blue-eyed father, could she?’
Antonio momentarily went white. Lauren had been pregnant when she’d run home to Daddy? She’d aborted his child, just to marry money?
‘You really know how to strike below the belt, Conrad,’ he said bitterly. ‘How long have you known about my relationship with Lauren?’
‘From the start. Do you honestly think I would employ a man to be my personal assistant and to live in my home if I hadn’t had him thoroughly checked out? Forget the Wilding girl, Antonio. She was a fool, and so was her father. I know a good man when I see one. Marry my daughter, and you’ll never regret it.’
Now that, Antonio conceded ruefully, was a matter of opinion.
Rising from his chair, he set a cool black gaze upon his future father-in-law and stretched out his hand. ‘It’s a deal.’
Conrad took, then pumped his hand. ‘Splendid, my boy. Splendid. I knew you’d make the right decision. See you tonight, around seven-thirty. We’ll have a celebratory drink together before dinner.’
Antonio said nothing to that, just spun on his heels and strode towards the doorway.
Evelyn barely had time to retreat hastily from where she’d been listening to every single word.
CHAPTER TWO
PAIGE woke mid-afternoon and just lay there for a while, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, thinking.
Home again.
If you could call this wretched house a home, that was.
The word home normally conjured up feelings of peace and warmth. It was where you could be yourself; where you were most relaxed; where you felt loved and accepted.
But home had never been like that for Paige. Fortune Hall was a cold, heartless place which evoked nothing in her but feelings of failure and inadequacy, of being unwanted and unloved, of being unsure of who she was or what she wanted out of life.
Only once had Paige momentarily been happy in this house: the year when Antonio Scarlatti had first come to Fortune Hall to live.
The memory of their first meeting was indelibly imprinted on her brain. It had been her last year in high school, and she’d caught the train home for the Easter break, feeling miserable when her father had said he couldn’t possibly meet her at Central.
‘Just catch a taxi home, Paige,’ had been his offhand and impatient words on the telephone the night before. ‘It’s not as though it’s far. I can’t leave an important meeting for such a silly little thing.’
Such a silly little thing! That was what she was to him. A silly little thing. It was what she’d always been to him. A nuisance. An inconvenience. He’d never loved her, or made time for her. Not once.
Paige had stepped off the train at Central, no longer expecting to be met, so she’d been startled when a dark-haired, dashingly handsome young man had approached her and introduced himself as her father’s new personal assistant, Antonio Scarlatti. She vaguely remembered thinking he didn’t have an Italian accent at all, but that he had the most riveting eyes. Black and penetrating and incredibly sexy.
‘Your father mentioned your arrival by train today,’ he’d added, while those eyes held hers. ‘I didn’t think it right for you to make your way home all by yourself, so I told him it would be my pleasure to meet you. Come…’ And he’d cupped her elbow with a gallant hand.
She’d been captivated from that moment.
Captivated and completely infatuated.
By the time he’d driven her through the gates of Fortune Hall, her racing heart had succumbed to a hero worship which had banished every other male idol whom her love-starved teenage heart had gathered over the previous few years. Her favourite music and movie stars were nothing compared to Antonio Scarlatti.
By the end of the two-week break she’d centred a thousand romantic hopes and dreams around him, crying her devastation when the holiday had ended all too swiftly. During the next term at school she’d spent long hours every day, imagining and fantasising all sorts of exciting scenarios with her handsome Italian at centre stage, till she’d begun to believe her own fantasies, turning each simple smile he’d given her into evidence that he was as secretly enamoured with her as she was with him.
Her schoolwork had suffered for her daydreaming, and the comments on her report card had been none too impressive to bring home at the end of term: Paige would do a lot better if only she would concentrate! Paige is an intelligent girl but her mind doesn’t seem to be on her work!
Which it hadn’t been. Yet what a wonderful term it had been! What secret pleasures she’d hugged to herself, thinking about her beautiful Antonio all the time, weaving all sorts of fanciful dreams around him.
Her next holiday at home had seemed to cement all those dreams. The things he carefully hadn’t said. Those secretive but scorching glances he’d bestowed on her across the dinner table. The way he’d held her slightly longer than necessary the day they’d run into each other on the stairs. The inordinate time he’d taken to help her find a book in the library one evening.
Paige had been sure he was just waiting till she finished school that year before he showed his hand. By then she would be eighteen, and a woman!
In her mind, they would eventually get married and have half a dozen babies, beautiful, black-eyed children who adored their mother and father and were so very happy, wrapped in the type of warm cocoon of family love that she’d never experienced herself, but she’d vowed to give her children.
By the time she’d come home again in September she’d become totally obsessed with him, her rather romantic feelings taking a more physical turn when she’d spotted him swimming in the pool the first morning of her holiday. She’d watched him from her bedroom window while he’d done lap after impressive lap, her eyes widening when he’d climbed out and just stood there as he towelled himself down, wearing only the briefest of black swimming costumes.
There had been something decidedly animal in his powerful physique, with its deeply olive skin and light covering of dark body hair, plus the way he was drying himself, with rough, rubbing strokes. Paige had gobbled him up with her eyes while the sexuality simmering deep within her feelings surfaced, stark and startling in its raw and naked need. Suddenly, she’d craved more than his love. She’d craved the man, and that part of him which made him a man, her galloping heart seizing up with shock at the explicitness of her desire.
When he’d looked up and spied her watching him at the window she’d nearly died, her face flushing wildly. He’d stared back at her for a few seconds, before whirling away and striding off inside the pool house.
Paige hadn’t needed another sign.
Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to finish school, or for him to say something. She had to speak up first. But when she’d gone in search of him after breakfast it had been to find her father and his assistant had left on a business trip. They would not be back for a week. It had been the longest week of Paige’s life, only made bearable by the heart to hearts she’d had with Brad, her oldest and closest friend.
By the time Antonio had come back she’d been dying to talk to him, breathless and emboldened by the surety of his love.
Oddly enough, Paige could no longer recall exactly what she’d said to him. Or what he’d said back. The only words which lived on in her memory were his calling her a silly little girl. They remained very clear, as did the overwhelming wave of humiliation which had accompanied them.
Suffice to accept that it had been the most awful moment of her life.
Paige found it ironic that she didn’t rate what had happened last night to be nearly as awful. Jed might have hurt her physically, and he’d frightened her enough into coming home, but he didn’t have the power to hurt her where the hurt never healed. How could he, when she didn’t love him?
Her right hand lifted to push her hair back behind her ear before gingerly touching the tender swelling just below her temple. Pity the blow hadn’t knocked some sense into her, she thought bitterly.
Still being in love with Antonio was insane. She could see that. But recognising the stupidity of her feelings seemed to make no difference.
Brad had talked her out of her ‘infatuation’ for a while, had made her temporarily believe it was nothing but a schoolgirl crush, a romantic obsession which had nothing to do with reality.
‘You don’t even know the man,’ he’d reasoned with her during the dark days after Antonio’s visit to the beach-house. ‘Your love’s a figment of your romantic teenage imagination, conjured up because you need someone to love, and to love you back. But it’s not real, Paige. It’s a destructive self-indulgence to keep harbouring such a one-sided obsession. Let it go, love. Let him go.’
So she had, for a while, and eventually she’d settled for a different sort of love with Brad than the one she’d dreamt of in Antonio’s arms.
Still, looking back, she did not regret it. Brad had been kind to her. Kind and understanding and undemanding. He’d taught her a lot about the sort of person she was, made her see that she was very intelligent, despite not having done too well at school. He’d even encouraged her to go to the local tech and finish her schooling, which she had. She might still have been with him if one stormy afternoon and an unforgiving sea hadn’t ended their carefree and easygoing co-existence.
She’d stayed on at the beach-house for a few weeks. Brad had always paid the rent ahead in three-month lots. But in the end loneliness—and curiosity, perhaps—had sent her back home to Sydney, to Fortune Hall, her father, and Antonio.
A big mistake.
For nothing had changed.
Nothing.
She hadn’t been able to get out of the place fast enough, answering an ad in the paper to share a flat with two other girls and taking the first job she could get, waitressing in a coffee house on Circular Quay.
Another big mistake. Not the job. She’d rather liked waitressing, enjoying the contact with tourists and people always on the go. Paige had soon found, however, that sharing accommodation with other girls was hazardous in the extreme, unless you looked like the back of a bus. Unfortunately, Paige’s long blond hair, pretty face and striking figure had caused all sorts of troubles with the other girls’ boyfriends, who hadn’t been able to keep their eyes and hands off. After one extremely unpleasant encounter—and a disbelieving flatmate—Paige had found herself out on the street with nowhere to go except home once more.
This time Antonio had no longer been in residence, thanks to a promotion and a new apartment of his own somewhere.
Perversely, Paige had been disappointed. Had she become addicted to the emotional turmoil the sight of her unrequited love caused?
Possibly, because after leaving home again, to live with two male flatmates who had been closet gays and had caused her no trouble at all, she’d still deliberately returned at Christmas—and every Christmas after that—for no other reason than that was the season her father entertained a lot, with dinner parties and other larger parties, to which Antonio was always invited.
She had seen him a few times, but he’d invariably ignored her, or just said a few polite words before turning his attention elsewhere, usually to some woman. Paige knew he had lots of women—she’d made a point of questioning a few of the staff at home about his dating activities. Not Evelyn, of course. But the cook, the maids, and Jim, the chauffeur.
Paige consoled herself with the thought that there never seemed to be anyone special, anyone who lasted. On top of that, she’d never experienced the agony of actually seeing him in action with a woman…till last year’s big Christmas Eve party.
Paige had turned twenty-two the previous October, and believed she’d never looked better. Her skin had been lightly tanned, and her long honey-blond hair fell halfway down her back in one smooth shiny curtain. She’d come downstairs, dressed in a very sexy strapless red dress, hoping against hope that this time Antonio might see that she was at last a woman, not a silly little girl.
Antonio had just arrived with a date, a striking and sophisticated creature of thirty-something who had still made Paige feel like a little girl by comparison. His gaze had skated over her—and her revealing dress—with nothing but barely held irritation.
Never had the futility of her feelings been hammered home so strongly as that evening, when she’d watched him turn from her to dance attendance on his date, never once giving Paige a second glance. Each touch of his hand on the woman’s arm had been like a dagger in Paige’s heart. Each drink he’d given her. Each dance.
But the coup de gr
ce had come when Paige came across them kissing on the terrace—if ‘kissing’ was the appropriate word to describe what they’d been doing. For it hadn’t just been their mouths which were locked, but their whole bodies. Moulded and melded together in the most erotic fashion, one of Antonio’s legs jammed hard between the woman’s, one of hers lifting to run sinuously up and down his thigh.
Paige was sure she’d cried out in pain, but nothing short of an atomic bomb exploding would have disturbed their passionate clinch. No one but the most naive could not imagine how their evening would end, or that Antonio wouldn’t be the most unforgettable of lovers.
But then, Paige had already known he would be.
It was that same intense, all-consuming passion she’d thought she’d found in Jed. Only this time it had been directed at her, not some other woman. She’d been so flattered by Jed’s pursuit of her. Flattered, yet disastrously deluded.
Paige winced as she touched the bruise once more.
She was about to go into the bathroom and inspect the damage more closely when there was a knock on her bedroom door.
‘Who is it?’ she asked agitatedly. Not her father again. Oh, please not him. He’d harangued her for ages last night, wanting to know what had happened, who had done this to her, what was his name, and his address? Had she been living with him? Was he her boyfriend, her lover? What had she done to make him hit her? She must have done something!
Dismay had kept her silent, and defiant, as usual. She’d speared her father with a coldly contemptuous gaze before finally escaping to her room, only to fall onto the bed and cry herself to sleep. But now she was conscious again, and the transitory peace of oblivion was no longer hers.
‘It’s Evelyn. I’ve brought you up a tray.’
The door swung open before Paige could say another word, and in swept Evelyn. She was dressed in the same sort of bleak black dress she practically always wore, as though it were required uniform for a housekeeper. Paige noticed that she’d put on more weight this past year. Her cheeks had become jowly, and her already small eyes looked smaller within her pudgy face.
‘Your father said you were not to be allowed to skip meals while you’re here this time,’ Evelyn pronounced haughtily as she placed the tray on the bedside table. ‘He expects to hear that you’ve eaten every bite. And he expects to see you downstairs for dinner tonight as well. Right on eight. In a dress,’ she added, throwing a derisive glance over Paige’s jeans.
‘I didn’t bring any dresses with me,’ Paige said, already regretting her decision to come home, despite not having any other real alternative this time. She needed the safety and security Fortune Hall provided, for she suspected Jed was not going to take her leaving him lightly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Paige,’ came the sneering retort. ‘You left a whole wardrobe full of clothes behind when you first left home. I moved them all into the guest room next door when I thought you weren’t coming back and this room needed a thorough spring clean. There’s plenty of dresses among them.’
‘For pity’s sake, Evelyn,’ Paige pointed out wearily, ‘you can’t expect me to wear the same clothes I wore at seventeen.’
‘Why not? I seem to recall you spent all that year buying and wearing clothes that were way too old for you. On top of that,’ Evelyn added drily, ‘if there’s one thing I’ve learned since working for the rich and famous, it’s that designer clothes don’t date all that much. I’m sure you’ll find something among them that’ll do. It’s not as though you’ve put on any weight. You’re as skinny as ever.’
Evelyn had always made comments about her weight and Paige hated it. She was a tall girl, and naturally slim. But one could hardly call her ‘skinny’.
‘Whatever you say, Evelyn.’ She was too tired of spirit to argue. And what did it really matter?
Evelyn went to leave, then stopped, peering closely at Paige’s face. ‘That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got there, dear,’ she said, with a malicious glint in those beady eyes of hers. ‘Walk into a door?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You should watch where you’re going, or one day you might really get hurt.’ And, with an expression which implied such a prospect would please her no end, Evelyn exited the room, deliberately leaving the door open behind her.
Sighing, Paige rose and closed the door before returning to see what Evelyn had brought her to eat. Two huge club sandwiches, stuffed with mayonnaise. A piece of cream-filled cake big enough to feed an army, and a huge chocolate milkshake.
Paige knew she wouldn’t be able to consume that amount, let alone such rich food. But she didn’t dare leave any behind. Evelyn would report back to her father, who would lecture her on everything from anorexia to ingratitude. Defiance always had its price around Fortune Hall.
If only Blackie were still alive, she thought wistfully as she flushed half of the food down the toilet. That dog had been the perfect garbage disposal.
Paige’s heart turned over as she thought of her long-deceased pet. As dogs went, Blackie had been exceedingly ugly: a flea-bitten mongrel Paige had rescued from the pound after they’d put his photograph in the Sunday papers. Her father had been furious when she’d bought him and brought him home. Blackie had almost been as old as she was. Seven to her nine. Her father had declared him a health hazard because he was recovering from mange. He’d told her that if she returned him he would get her a proper pup, a poodle with a pedigree and papers.
But she’d dug her heels in—the forerunner of future rebellions—and said stubbornly that she wasn’t taking Blackie back to die and that she’d look after him herself, using her weekly allowance. He’d cost her a small fortune in vet bills, but she’d managed. Dog and girl had been inseparable till that dreadful day when she’d had to leave for boarding school. The housekeeper had promised to look after him, but when Paige had come back on her first home weekend, a month later, Evelyn had been installed as the new housekeeper and Blackie was declared dead, supposedly run over by a car. She’d never quite believed this story, but could never prove otherwise.
Paige had vowed to get herself another dog one day. But she never had. It was hard to risk one’s heart a second time after being so badly hurt, she’d found. Very hard.
With half the food flushed away, and the rest reluctantly stuffed down into her fragile-feeling stomach, Paige went along to the next room to review the dresses that had appealed to her seventeen-year-old taste.
She shook her head over most of them. If ever she needed evidence of her schoolgirl obsession with Antonio, it was in the collection of clothes before her. Never had she seen such an array of painfully provocative purchases: all designed to flaunt her body, and all, as Evelyn had pointed out, way too old for a seventeen-year-old.
No wonder Antonio had stared at her across the dinner table when she’d come down dressed in those. Any living, breathing man would have given her a second glance. Paige was not ignorant of her physical attractions. She’d had them thrown in her face often enough in the past few years.
Her hand ran along the hangers, searching for something—anything—which was suitable for a simple dinner with her father. She bypassed everything which was too short, too clingy, or too low-cut.
Her eye finally landed on a cornflower-blue trouser suit which she’d never actually worn at all, come to think of it. She’d bought it at one of those end-of-season sales because the saleslady had raved about her in it. But when she’d got it home Paige had childishly thought it far too simple and plain.
Now, she liked its elegant simplicity very much. And blue always looked good on her, with her fair hair and blue eyes. But it wasn’t a dress, was it? Too bad, she decided mutinously, and tugged the hanger out.
Fortunately, the left-behind shoes didn’t present any choice problem at all. Paige had been five-nine by the time she was fourteen, so she’d never bought too high a heel, not even during her Antonio-mad year.
Selecting a pair of open-toed cream shoes with a lowish heel, she returned to her room, where she stripped down to her undies and tried on the trouser suit. The reflection in the full-length cheval mirror in the corner brought an instant frown. Dear heaven, but she looked terribly busty! Bras did that to her in some clothes. Taking off the cardigan-style top, she removed her bra, then slid the silky cardigan back on, doing up the three small pearl buttons and having another look.
Much, much better. Her breasts looked smaller for having settled lower and wider apart on her chest, and there wasn’t an in-your-face cleavage filling the deep V-neckline. There were no ugly bra lines, either, to mar the way the silky top smoothly outlined her bust before falling loosely to her hips. The trousers had a similar cut, fitting snugly around her hips before falling straight down to her ankles in softer folds. It was a very wearable and comfortable outfit which would fit a wide variety of occasions. She really must remember to take it with her when she next left.
Whenever that would be…
Paige hadn’t just lost the roof over her head last night. She’d lost her clothes as well. Which was a pity. She’d spent quite a bit putting together a decent work wardrobe to go with her new career direction.
If only she’d dared go back into Jed’s bedroom and get her set of keys before sneaking out of the place. If she had, she’d be able to slip into the building—and the apartment—while Jed was at work.
Paige sighed. She could hardly see herself showing up while Jed was home, and politely asking permission to come up and get the rest of her clothes. Better she cut her losses and just disappeared.
Maybe it was time to head interstate. Maybe up north to Queensland, where there were plenty of holiday resorts, and plenty of jobs going for an attractive girl with a wide range of working experience.
A move to Queensland, however, would require money for her fare and some new clothes. She had some savings, but would need every cent to set herself up in a flat. Bond money and such. Her father would give her money if she asked, Paige knew. He might even resume putting that obscene monthly allowance into her bank account, if she begged.
Frankly, she was tempted. All she had to do was eat humble pie and tell her father he was the greatest.
But then she would have nothing left, would she? No self-respect. No independence. No pride.
She had to find some other way out of the hell-hole she’d dug for herself this time. Maybe she could stay here for a while, and get a job which had a uniform and gradually put together a wardrobe. She supposed she could bear Evelyn and her father for a few weeks. And at least she had one decent interview outfit!
Paige stripped off again and headed for the bathroom. Time to have a long, relaxing bath. Time to pretend she hadn’t totally stuffed up her life once more. Time to transport herself to a world where the man she was with would never dream of raising his hand to her, where the rings on her left hand spoke of love and commitment, and the babies they made together would never know the hurt and unhappiness which had marred her own childhood.
When at her lowest, Paige always kept herself sane by wallowing in just such a fantasy world. So she lay there for ages beneath the lavender-scented bubble bath she’d found in the vanity and conjured up old faces, old dreams, and old desires. Time flew by, and if, eventually, tears rolled down Paige’s cheeks, her soul had still been strangely soothed by her imaginings.
At five to eight that evening, Paige carried her softened and perfumed body slowly down the huge sweeping staircase, crossed the cavernous foyer, with its domed, chandeliered ceiling, and entered the huge living area which led into the smaller and more elegant room where her father always had pre-dinner drinks. He did this for half an hour before every meal, regardless of whether he had visitors or not. Paige never joined him, partly because she didn’t like to drink on an empty stomach, but mainly because she didn’t like to give her father the opportunity to hurt her. When he drank, he developed a sarcastic tongue.
Given that it was a Monday, Paige assumed he would be alone. So when she opened the door which led into the drawing room she was startled to see that wasn’t the case at all.
No…startled did not adequately describe her reaction to the sight of an elegantly attired Antonio, sitting in one of the armchairs which flanked the fireplace, a crystal flute of champagne in his hands. Stunned better described her instant state of mind. Stunned and sickened.
Antonio was the last man in the world she wanted to see again, especially tonight, with the mark of another man’s contempt for her glowering angrily on her cheekbone.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR a few fraught, fragile moments, Paige just stared at Antonio. Hard not to when the sight of him had always made her heart hammer madly against her ribs.
This time was no different, except that her head began whirling angrily at the same time. Why hadn’t Evelyn warned her Antonio would be here for dinner? She must have known he was coming.
The answer was obvious, and cruel.
Because she didn’t want you to be prepared. She wanted you to stumble in here and make a fool of yourself, as you always do in Antonio’s presence.
Paige knew there wasn’t anything that happened around Fortune Hall which Evelyn wasn’t privy to. What the housekeeper didn’t come to know by virtue of her position she found out through slyness and stealth. Over the years, Paige had caught the woman eavesdropping more than once, especially on the telephone. Her omission to mention Antonio’s presence at dinner could only have had a malicious intent, which meant the hateful woman was aware of Paige’s feelings for Antonio.
Pride came to the rescue, as did some hard-won experience. Maybe she was getting used to handling the emotional devastation seeing Antonio always caused her. Or was it that at last she was beginning to grow up?
‘Why, hello, Antonio,’ she said casually as she strolled into the room and over towards the drinks cabinet in the corner. ‘You startled me there for a moment. No one said anything about you being here tonight. You’re looking well,’ she added, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Well was not a word one would use to describe Antonio. It was far too insipid for his brand of raw physical impact.
Tonight, he was looking exceptionally sexy all in black, his fine woollen suit given a casual look by being teamed with a black crew-necked top rather than his usual shirt and tie. The outfit seemed to intensify his dark colouring and brooding sex appeal, a fact which certainly didn’t escape Paige’s poor, pathetic heart.
‘I was thinking the same of you, actually,’ he returned silkily. ‘Considering…’
She laughed, sliding a mocking glance over her shoulder at him. ‘You mean for someone who’s boyfriend has just beaten her up?’ Paige had found over the last few years that being mealy-mouthed and defensive around Fortune Hall only brought more looks and lectures on the way she was living her life. Better to face any sticky situation head-on, with a suitably defiant fac¸ade.
‘Paige, for pity’s sake!’ her father protested.
‘Pity, Father?’ she scoffed as she swept the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and poured herself a glass. Suddenly, drinking on an empty stomach was not only desirable but imperative!
‘Now that’s a word I’ve not heard often in this house,’ she muttered, and turned back round, the crystal flute cupped firmly in her hands, her knuckles white in the effort to stop them from shaking. ‘So what have you been drinking to with this very expensive champagne? I can’t imagine its your health. You’ll both still be taking the television world by storm when I’m six foot under.’
Her gaze swept over the two men, who stared back at her with perfect poker faces, telling her nothing, and everything. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said drily. ‘It’s a secret, is it? Something to do with business. Something silly little girls like me couldn’t possibly understand, or shouldn’t know.’
Paige was surprised to see her spiked sarcasm brought a wry smile to Antonio’s beautifully shaped mouth. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind your knowing.’
Did Antonio see the warning glance her father shot him? If he did, he ignored it.
‘We’re celebrating a forthcoming and hopefully desirable merger,’ he went on smoothly, his black eyes glittering with some secret amusement. Or was it suppressed anger? One could never quite tell with Antonio. ‘Unfortunately, negotiations are at too early and too delicate a stage to supply you with more details right now.’
‘How delightfully vague!’ she exclaimed, rolling her eyes at him. She should have known Antonio wouldn’t cross her father. He knew what side his bread was buttered on.
Not that Antonio was easily cast in the role of flunkey. He was far too strong-willed and opinionated to be a mindless yes-man. She’d heard him disagree with her father more than once when it came to business.
But she was still piqued that he felt he could play with words around her. It was so patronising. And so like the treatment she’d always received around Fortune Hall. If she’d been born a boy she would have been drawn into their world of negotiations and deals, not excluded, then cynically condescended to!
Her eyes flashed as she lifted her glass in a mock toast. ‘To the forthcoming and hopefully…what kind of merger did you say it was, Antonio?’
‘Desirable,’ he said quietly, and that inscrutable black gaze of his ran slowly over her from head to toe.
Paige’s heart tripped, then stopped altogether when those eyes began to travel back up her body even more slowly, lingering on the swells and dips of her female form, leaving them burning in his wake. He inspected her mouth for what felt like an interminable length of time, forcing her lips to fall apart and drag in some much needed air for her starving lungs.
Now his eyes lifted to hers, holding them in a hard and merciless gaze which was as blatantly sexual as it was chillingly cold.
She quivered. All over. Inside and out.
It was the most erotic thing which had ever happened to her.
Her heart began to race, an uncomfortable heat suffusing her skin.
Paige did the only thing she could think of to survive the moment. She quaffed back the chilled champagne she was holding. The whole lot.
Unfortunately, her ragged breathing sent some down the wrong way and she began to choke.
Antonio was beside her in a flash, slapping her firmly between the shoulders. The champagne came flying back up and sprayed out from her mouth, most of it falling to the carpet but some dribbling down her front.
‘Try to breathe slowly and evenly,’ Antonio advised, once she’d stopped choking to death.
She tried, but it was almost impossible with him standing so close to her, then perfectly impossible when Antonio drew a snow-white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and started wiping down her top where the champagne had stained it, stroking the handkerchief down over the swell of her right breast, working his way closer and closer to her hardening nipple. As he drew dangerously close she felt her flesh tighten even further in anticipation of his touch, craving the contact, practically begging for it.
Paige sucked in sharply when the handkerchief finally slid over the tautened peak, her head spinning wildly. He did it again. Then again.
Confusion flung her eyes wide to search his. Was he being deliberately cruel? Did he have any idea what he was doing to her? She dared not believe this was real, but when their eyes met Paige was stunned to see he was as enthralled as she was by what he was doing.
The handkerchief came to rest over the traitorous peak, hiding it from sight. ‘Do you want to go upstairs and change?’ he asked her in a low, thickened voice.
‘I…I don’t have anything to change into,’ came her shaky reply, and Antonio frowned.
‘There’s no time to change,’ Conrad snapped irritably, from where he’d risen and was moving towards the now open dining room door. ‘Dinner’s ready to be served.’
‘Why don’t you have anything to change into?’ Antonio asked in a disconcertingly gentle tone as he led her still shaken self to her place at the table. ‘Or don’t you want to tell me?’
Suddenly, she did want to tell him. Suddenly, he wasn’t the disapproving, remote, unattainable man he’d become over the years. He was more like that other Antonio Scarlatti, the one who’d kindly met her train that day, and started her obsession with him.
Was one of her futile dreams in danger of coming true? Had Antonio finally seen her tonight as a grownup woman, and not a silly little girl?
‘Later,’ she whispered to him when he pulled her seat out for her.
His breath was warm against her ear as he scooped her chair under her. ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he murmured, and she quivered helplessly.
Dinner was agony. And ecstasy. One minute she would be smiling and sparkling at him, then doubts would besiege her and she’d fall worriedly silent. Why now? she agonised. Why tonight? Did her father have anything to do with this? Had he ordered Antonio to be nice to her?
No, no, that couldn’t be it, she decided at long last. If Antonio’s ambitions lay in that direction, he would not have waited this long to pursue her. No, he was genuinely attracted to her tonight. She could feel it. There was a predatory glitter in his eyes, eyes which didn’t stop looking at her. Paige knew what it was like to be the object of a man’s sexual interest, and she could feel Antonio’s desire hitting her in waves.
He wanted to make love to her.
The thought was breathtaking. And compellingly exciting.
It was only a sexual thing, of course. Paige was not naive enough to think anything else. Antonio was a man of the world, a confirmed bachelor type whose commitment was to the company. His bed-partners were transitory, and replaceable, like her father’s. According to the staff at Fortune Hall, Antonio hadn’t brought the same woman to dinner, or a party there, in all the years of his employ. If Paige let him seduce her, he would promise her nothing but passing pleasures, followed by the ultimate in pains.
But, oh…those passing pleasures…
Paige could barely begin to imagine them.
The ultimate in pains, however, she could imagine.
She groaned a silent groan. She’d have to be crazy to set herself up for that!
‘Paige!’ her father snapped. ‘Evelyn’s asking you if you want some dessert. What’s the matter with you tonight, girl? One minute chattering away sixty to the dozen, the next off in some dream world!’
Her blue eyes cleared to see the hated housekeeper smirking at her from her position at her father’s shoulder.
‘No dessert, thank you,’ Paige said stiffly, while she struggled to suppress the overwhelmingly negative feelings the woman always evoked in her.
‘You’re not becoming anorexic again, are you?’ her father demanded, exasperation in his voice.
‘I was never anorexic!’ she defended hotly. ‘I have no idea where you ever got such an idea,’ she finished, whilst looking daggers at Evelyn.
The housekeeper’s beady eyes didn’t move an inch.
‘Then prove it by having some apple crumble!’ her father insisted. ‘Bring Paige a large helping, Evelyn. With plenty of cream.’
A helpless fury flooded Paige as the housekeeper swanned off with a triumphant expression on her face. If Antonio hadn’t been at the table she would have left the room. Instead, she was stuck there, feeling belittled and foolish. She could not bear to look over at Antonio, afraid to see his earlier attraction for her had faded because she was being treated like a difficult and wayward child.
‘The reason Paige probably turned dessert down, Conrad,’ Antonio said, and Paige’s eyes snapped up to stare across the table at him, ‘is because she promised to have supper with me later. I should have said no to dessert as well.’
Paige was as amazed as her father by this announcement. She’d only agreed to talk to Antonio later. Nothing more. But she wasn’t about to say anything. Not now.
‘You and Paige are having supper together?’ her father challenged. ‘Tonight?’
Antonio didn’t look at all concerned by his employer’s tone of disapproval. ‘I trust you have no objection to that?’ he returned, an icy counter-challenge in his voice.
Paige was mesmerised by the exchange.
‘No, no, I suppose not. It’s just that…well…I’m surprised, that’s all.’
No more than herself, Paige thought dazedly.
‘You only flew into town this morning,’ her father went on a little testily. ‘I would have thought you’d be too tired to go out.’
‘I slept on the plane,’ Antonio explained coolly. ‘I’m only home for two weeks, as you know. Terrible to waste my holiday sleeping it away, don’t you think? There are much better ways to spend one’s leisure time. What say you, Paige? Should we make our escape now, before Evelyn returns and force-feeds us both?’
Paige didn’t need any encouragement. She was on her feet in a flash. Too late, however. Evelyn was already coming into the room, carrying a tray of desserts towards the table.
Paige hesitated. Not so Antonio, who strode around the table towards her.
‘Our apologies, Evelyn,’ he said smoothly as he took Paige’s elbow and steered her towards the doorway. ‘Paige and I are going out and haven’t time for dessert right now.’
Paige expected the woman to look put out. Instead, she smiled oh, so sweetly at them both as they passed. ‘That’s quite all right, Antonio. Dessert will keep. It’s nice to see you and Paige are friends at long last.’
Paige’s mouth dropped open at Evelyn’s hypocrisy. There was no level to which that woman would not stoop!
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Miranda Lee
If Antonio Scarlatti wanted to be CEO of Fortune Productions, he had to marry the boss's daughter! At first Antonio refused to give in to such blackmail, but then he reconsidered: would it be so difficult to bed and wed the beautiful Paige, and then divorce her?But Antonio was unaware that Paige had secretly been in love with him for years, and neither was prepared for the explosion of passion between them…!
“Antonio, a girl has her pride.”
“Pride?”
“Everyone knows you’re the love-’em-and-leave-’em type. I have no intention of being added to your list of idle conquests. So you can lend me the money for a taxi.”
Antonio began to fume. We’ll see about that, Miss Love-’em-and-leave-’em yourself! I’ve got news for you.You won’t be loving and leaving me, honey.You’re going to be my wife. “I wouldn’t dream of sending you home in a taxi,” he said with a smooth smile. “Just give me a minute.…”
VIVA LA VIDA DE AMOR!
They speak the language of passion.
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you’ll find a special kind of lover—full of Latin charm. Whether he’s relaxing in denims or dressed for dinner, giving you diamonds or simply sweet dreams, he’s got spirit, style and sex appeal!
Latin Lovers is the new miniseries from Harlequin Presents
for anyone who’s passionate about love and life. Look out for our next Latin Lovers title: The Italian Groom by Jane Porter Harlequin Presents #2168 Available in March
Miranda Lee
The Blackmailed Bridegroom
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
THE jumbo jet was twenty minutes late setting down at Mascot Airport, but Antonio was one of the first to alight. The head of Fortune Productions, European Division, didn’t look as if he’d been on a gruelling twenty-two-hour flight from London to Sydney. His superb grey suit was sleek and uncrumpled. His thick jet-black hair was slicked back from a freshly shaven face. His dark eyes were clear and rested.
The advantage of flying first class.
Not that Antonio Scarlatti had always travelled first class. He knew what it was like to do it tough. He knew what it was like to travel long hauls cramped in steerage, with wall-to-wall passengers and little chance of sleep, then have people look down their nose at him at the other end, when his suit had been wrinkled and his job far less prestigious than the one he now held.
Antonio had no intention of ever going back to that existence. He’d made it to the top, and the top was where he was going to stay. The world was for the winners. And the wealthy. At the age of thirty-four, he was finally both.
The company limousine was waiting in its usual spot, the engine idling at the ready. Antonio opened the back door and slid into its air-conditioned comfort.
‘Morning, Jim,’ he addressed the chauffeur.
‘Mornin’, Tone.’
Antonio smiled. He was back in Australia all right. In London, and all over Europe, he was always addressed by his drivers as ‘Mr Scarlatti’. But that wasn’t the way down under, especially after an acquaintance of some time.
Antonio leant back against the plush leather seat with a deeply relaxing sigh. It was good to be home and off the merry-go-round for a fortnight’s break. His contract stated he could fly home for two weeks rest and recuperation every three months, a necessity since he worked seven days a week when on the job. Being in charge of selling and promoting Fortune Productions’ extensive list of television programmes to the hundreds of stations and cable networks all over Europe was a challenging job.
‘Straight home, Jim,’ he said, and closed his eyes. He’d bought himself a luxury serviced apartment overlooking the harbour bridge a couple of years back, and couldn’t wait to immerse himself in its privacy and comfort. The last few days had been a nightmare of negotiations and never-ending meetings. Antonio needed some peace and quiet.
‘No can do, Tone,’ the chauffeur returned as he eased the lengthy car past the long line of taxis which had queued up to meet the flight from London. ‘The boss wants you to join him for breakfast.’
Antonio’s eyes opened on a low groan. He hoped it wasn’t one of those media circus breakfasts Conrad was always getting invited to and which he occasionally attended. Antonio couldn’t stand them at the best of times. ‘Where, for pity’s sake?’ came his irritable query.
‘The Taj Mahal.’
‘Thank God,’ Antonio muttered.
The Taj Mahal was Jim’s nickname for Conrad Fortune’s residence at Darling Point. It was an apt term. The place was over the top with its grandeur and opulence, a monolithic mansion sprawled across an acre of some of the most expensive land in Sydney’s exclusive Eastern suburbs.
What the house lacked in taste, it made up for in sheer size. The fac¸ade had more columns than the Colosseum, the foyer more marble than the British Museum, and Romanesque statues and ornate fountains dominated the front landscaping. The sloping backyard was more low key, terraced to incorporate the solar-heated swimming pool and two rebound ace tennis courts.
Antonio thought the place ostentatious in the extreme. But it was impressive, no doubt about that. Socialites grovelled to be included on the lists for Conrad’s celebrated parties. Magazines and television programmes clamoured to photograph beyond the high-security walls which enclosed the property.
Not Conrad’s television programmes, of course. They knew better.
‘You wouldn’t have any idea what he wants me for, Jim, would you?’ Antonio probed.
‘Nope.’ A man of few words, Jim.
Antonio decided not to speculate. Time would tell, he supposed.
Fifteen minutes later, the limousine slid to a smooth halt in front of the grand front steps, and this time Jim did the honours with the door.
‘You won’t be needing that,’ he advised when Antonio went to pick up his laptop.
Antonio shot the chauffeur a sharp look. So he did have some idea of what was up. And clearly it wasn’t a business matter.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The housekeeper answered the door. Evelyn was in her late forties, and very homely, as were all of Conrad’s female employees. No fool, was Conrad. He’d been stung once, by an ambitious and beautiful maid, and had no intention of harbouring any females under his roof who might present him with unwise temptations. Although now rising seventy, Conrad was still very interested in the opposite sex, as evidenced by the three mistresses he kept. One here in Sydney, one in Paris and one in the Bahamas.
Evelyn had been Conrad’s housekeeper now for over a decade. She was efficient and reliable. More importantly, she knew how to keep her mouth shut to the press.
‘Conrad’s expecting you,’ she told Antonio straight away. ‘He’s in the morning room.’
The morning room overlooked the terrace, which overlooked the pool. The floor-to-ceiling windows faced north-east, and captured the sun all year round. On a winter morning, the room was a dream. In summer, the air-conditioning had a tough job preventing the place from turning into a hothouse. Spring found it coolish, especially since the sun was only just rising at six-thirty.
Conrad was sitting at the huge glass oval table in the centre of the conservatory-style room, wrapped in a thick navy bathrobe. Despite his age, he still had a full head of hair—a magnificent silvery grey—and piercing blue eyes. They flicked up at Antonio’s entrance, and raked him from head to toe, disconcerting Antonio for a moment. Why on earth was Conrad looking him over like that, as though he’d come to audition for one of his soap operas? What was going on here?
‘Sit down, Antonio,’ Conrad ordered. ‘Take a load off your feet and have some decent coffee for a change.’ He picked up the coffee pot and poured an extra mugful of steaming brown liquid.
‘What’s the problem?’ Antonio asked as he sat down and pulled the coffee towards him.
His employer gave him another long, considering look over the table, and Antonio’s gut tightened further. He knew, without being told, that he wasn’t going to like what Conrad had to say.
‘Paige has come home again,’ came the abrupt announcement.
Antonio almost said, So? What’s new?
Conrad’s wild and wilful daughter had been running away from home regularly since she was seventeen. She turned up again regularly too, every year or so. But no sooner had she returned than she’d be off again, saying she was going to share a flat with some girlfriends. But only once had this been the case. Usually, when the private investigator’s report came in several weeks later, her flatmate was male and good-looking, invariably an artist or a musician. Paige seemed to like creativeness. Not one of them had denied sharing more with Paige than the cooking.
At first, Conrad had worried Paige might be exploited for her money. A whole family could have lived comfortably on his only child’s generous monthly allowance! But perversely, from the day she’d first left home, Paige had never touched a cent of the thousands deposited in her bank account every month. When Conrad had found out his money was being donated to the RSPCA, and that Paige was working to support herself, he’d stopped the allowance altogether.
‘Let her work, if that’s what she wants to do!’ he’d raged to Antonio, but would still cringe when he learnt that she was working as a waitress in some café, or behind the bar in a club or pub.
His worst nightmare, however, was that Paige would fall pregnant to one of her live-in boyfriends and then bring the baby home with her. Conrad was not large on babies. Which gave Antonio an idea.
‘She’s not pregnant, is she?’ he asked.
‘No, but she’s going to come to a sticky end, that girl, unless I do something about it. Do you realise she turns twenty-three next week?’
Antonio was surprised. How the years had flown!
‘I would imagine you’ve tried everything,’ he said sincerely. Most girls would give their eye-teeth for what Paige had once had. A lovely home. Designer clothes. An allowance fit for a princess, if she’d wanted to claim it. If none of that was enough to keep her happy, and at home, then Lord knows what was!
‘Not…everything,’ Conrad said slowly, and he set those penetrating blue eyes on Antonio again. ‘There’s one thing I haven’t tried.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Marriage,’ he pronounced. ‘To a man who could control her.’
Antonio couldn’t help it. He laughed. ‘You think Paige would marry a man of your choice?’
‘Of course not. I was thinking of a man of her choice. Namely, you, Antonio.’
‘Me?’ Antonio was floored.
‘Yes, you. Don’t pretend, Antonio. I know exactly what happened just before Paige ran away from home that first time. The first thing Lew did when I put him on the job of tracing her was to question all the staff here at Fortune Hall. Did you think that little incident by the pool between you and my daughter hadn’t been overheard?’
When Antonio opened his mouth to explain, Conrad waved it shut.
‘Please don’t bother to defend your actions,’ he swept on. ‘You have nothing to answer for. You did exactly the right thing. How were you to know that the silly little fool would take your rejection so badly and run off with her broken heart?’
‘Her heart wasn’t broken,’ Antonio contested heatedly. ‘She took up with the next fellow soon enough!’
‘A girl rarely forgets her first love.’
‘I was never her love, first or otherwise!’
Hell, he hadn’t even kissed the girl. He’d been polite to her when she’d been at home on holiday from boarding school, making small talk when their paths had crossed. Hard not to run into her when he’d been living at Fortune Hall in his position as Conrad’s personal assistant, his first job with the company. No one had been more surprised than him when she’d thrown herself into his arms that day by the pool and declared her undying love and devotion.
Antonio hadn’t taken advantage of her schoolgirl crush, despite acknowledging she was a serious temptation to any man, especially dressed as she’d been that day, in a minute pink bikini. On top of that, Antonio was always physically attracted to blond women. He especially liked tall, slender blond women, with big blue eyes, high, full breasts and a waist his hands could span.
His hands had spanned Paige’s waist that day, as he’d reluctantly put her aside, then told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t return her feelings and that he thought of her as a silly little girl.
Not strictly true, of course. He’d thought of her as a silly big girl, extremely beautiful and extraordinarily sexy. Some evenings, when she’d been home from school and she’d come down to dinner in one of those tight, short low-cut little dresses she’d favoured, he’d been glad to be sitting at a table with a serviette covering his lap. If Paige had been any other man’s daughter things might have turned out differently by the pool that day. But Antonio had had no intention of losing a second job because of the boss’s daughter. No way!
Perhaps his rejection had been a little rough. Paige’s obvious humiliation and tears had caused him pangs of guilt for a while, especially when she’d run away instead of returning to school, not sitting for her final exams into the bargain.
He’d got over his guilt soon enough, however, when Lew, Conrad’s personal private investigator, had found her less than a month later, living on a remote North Coast beach with some surfing bum a good few years older than herself. Since the shack they’d been sharing only had one bedroom, it wasn’t difficult to conclude their relationship had been far from platonic. She certainly hadn’t denied it when Antonio himself had travelled all the way up there and tried to bring her back at Conrad’s request.
Antonio’s male ego had been dented by her indifferent reaction to his arrival on her doorstep, but any lingering concern for the girl had been well and truly dispelled once he’d seen for himself what sort of life she’d chosen to live.
Paige was trouble, in his opinion, an opinion reinforced every time their paths crossed, which thankfully wasn’t often. The last time he’d seen her had been at Conrad’s Christmas party the previous year. She’d sashayed downstairs, wearing a short strapless red dress which might have ended up around a less shapely females’ ankles, so precariously had it been perched. To his eternal irritation and frustration, Antonio had found himself wanting to sweep her back up the stairs, rip that infernal scrap of red satin from her body and ravage her senseless upon the first available bed. Or floor. Or whatever.
Instead, he’d had to forcibly keep his eyes away from Paige’s luscious young flesh, pretending to be enraptured by his date, a female lawyer on Fortune Productions’ payroll. To his discredit, Antonio had shamelessly used the woman—both at the party and later—to sate the dark desires Paige had evoked.
Not that she’d minded. As it had turned out, she’d liked her sex a little rough, and without strings.
He hadn’t seen Paige since that night, and tried not to think of her at all these days. But he was certainly thinking of her now.
‘You can’t be serious about this, Conrad,’ he said disbelievingly.
‘I’m very serious.’
‘It’s a crazy idea!’
‘Why? She was in love with you once, whether you like it or not. And that was before you developed into the man you are today. Do you think I haven’t noticed the way women react to you? You could make any woman fall in love with you. A girl like Paige should be a cinch.’
‘But I don’t want Paige to fall in love with me,’ he pointed out icily. ‘And I don’t want to marry her.’ Her, least of all, he thought angrily.
‘Why?’
Antonio did not feel like explaining that he’d been in love very deeply once, with the daughter of his previous boss. He’d thought Lauren had loved him as much as he’d loved her. But when push had come to shove she hadn’t been prepared to actually marry an Italian migrant with a questionable background and nothing to his name but his modest salary as a wine salesman. She’d just been slumming for a while, before moving on from her cosy, cushy life as a rich man’s daughter to the cosy, cushy life of a rich’s man’s wife.
He’d stupidly turned up at her house on the night of her engagement party and made a big scene. Naturally, he’d been given the sack, with no references. It had been several months before he’d been able to get another job, during which he’d practically had to eat the paint off the walls. When Conrad had hired him to be his assistant and interpreter he’d been eternally grateful, even though he suspected he’d been the only applicant who could speak the five languages Conrad required during his business trips overseas.
Antonio had worked his guts out to get where he was today. He had no intention of giving it up for anyone, or of sharing his life with the same sort of silly, selfish, shallow creature who’d once almost destroyed him.
‘When and if I marry, Conrad,’ he said with cold fury, ‘it will be because I’m so much in love that I couldn’t bear not to.’ Which was about as likely as Conrad himself breasting the altar once more.
When his boss said nothing to this, Antonio’s black eyes narrowed. ‘If I don’t agree with this plan of yours, is it going to cost me my job?’
‘No, of course not!’ Conrad denied expansively. ‘What kind of man do you take me for?’
Antonio hesitated to say. But you didn’t get to be one of the richest men in Australia by being full of the milk of human kindness. Over the six years in Conrad’s employ, Antonio had gleaned a lot of information about his boss.
Conrad had started out with nothing, as the son of penniless Polish migrants, changing his name from Fortuneski to Fortune and getting in on the ground floor with television in Australia when it had started, in the fifties, working behind the camera at first before forming his own production company and buying the Australian rights to a successful American game show. It had made him his first million. More game shows had followed, and more millions. Then, in the late sixties, he’d tried one of the first soaps made in Australia, an outrageously sexy series which had made its name with scandalous storylines. Serious millions had begun to roll in, and Fortune Productions had never looked back. Neither had its ambitious bachelor owner.
Conrad had lived and breathed his work, and had had no intention of getting married. But then, in his mid-forties, Conrad had made the mistake of giving his then housekeeper carte blanche to hire and fire staff, and she’d taken on Paige’s mother to serve at table. During a misguided interlude after a rather lengthy and boozy dinner party, Paige had been conceived.
Once presented with the reality of a child-to-be, Conrad had done the right thing and married the woman. He’d been hoping for a son and heir to take over the business. Instead, Paige had been born.
It had not been a happy union, and when his wife of one year had run off to America with a salesman, Conrad hadn’t been shattered. Antonio imagined that his boss also hadn’t lost much sleep over the news, a few years later, that his errant wife had been found dead in a New York hotel room of a drug overdose.
He was not a sentimental man.
‘I’m planning on retiring at the end of the year,’ Conrad went on now, snapping Antonio back to the matter at hand. ‘I’ll be moving permanently to my home in the Bahamas. When I do, the position of CEO of Fortune Productions will become vacant. I intend to promote you, Antonio,’ he said, and Antonio sucked in a sharp breath. ‘But only if you’re my son-in-law at the time,’ Conrad finished.
Antonio exhaled with a rush. ‘Damn and blast it, Conrad, that’s blackmail!’
‘No. That’s good business. Who better to look after one’s interests but family? You, as a born and bred Italian, should appreciate that.’
Antonio kept his temper with difficulty. ‘And if I refuse?’ he bit out.
‘I’ll make the same offer to Brock Masters. I imagine he could handle both jobs almost as well.’
Antonio gritted his teeth. Brock Masters was head of the North American Division. Publicly, he was all capped teeth and false charm, in Antonio’s opinion. Handsome as Satan, but privately he had the morals of the Marquis de Sade.
‘He’ll ruin the company,’ Antonio warned. ‘And he’ll destroy your daughter,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘If you think that, Antonio,’ Conrad said smoothly, ‘you know what to do.’
‘You’re a ruthless devil, do you know that?’
‘Takes one to know one.’
‘Yet you want me to marry your daughter!’
‘She needs a real man for a change. One who will keep her on her toes in order to keep him. And one who can give her what she keeps looking for.’
‘Which is?’
‘What all women want. Love, of course.’
‘For pity’s sake, Conrad, you know darned well I don’t love her.’
Conrad shrugged. ‘What’s love but an illusion anyway? Just tell Paige you love her. The silly little fool won’t know the difference, as long as the sex is good. And the sex will be good, I’m sure. The way the ladies chase after you—even after one short evening in your bed—speaks volumes for your abilities in that department.’
Antonio stared at the man. He almost felt sorry for Paige, having such a cold-blooded bastard for a parent. He could not understand how a father could do such a thing to his daughter.
Still, Antonio was not a fool. He knew if he knocked Conrad back on this he was finished at Fortune Productions. Brock Masters hated his guts. Antonio supposed he could quit and find another job with a rival company, settle back and watch the rot set in at Fortune Productions. It would serve Conrad right if he did just that.
But pride in a job well done—and in the company—would not let him seriously consider such an action. And then there was the added image of Paige, being seduced, corrupted and destroyed by an amoral, cocaine-snorting pervert.
Antonio’s stomach turned over. A silly little fool she might be, but she didn’t deserve that.
‘Under the circumstances,’ he said, in that coolly ruthless voice which emerged when he was cornered, ‘I will expect something in writing.’
Conrad beamed. ‘But of course, Antonio. I’ll have it ready for you when you come to dinner here tonight.’
Antonio frowned. ‘Tonight?’
‘I thought the sooner you got started the better. After all, you have to be back in London in a fortnight. A whirlwind romance is just what the doctor ordered. I see no reason why Paige shouldn’t travel back with you, once she’s wearing your engagement ring.’
‘You expect her to agree to marry me in two short weeks?’
‘You’ve negotiated more difficult contracts in much faster time, Antonio. Speaking of contracts, the day you marry Paige you will have your contract as CEO of Fortune Productions, plus I will give you the deeds to this house as a wedding present.’
‘No, thank you, Conrad. The contract will do. I wouldn’t want to live here.’ Even if he could tolerate the space, he didn’t want to be surrounded by Conrad’s extra ears.
Conrad smiled. ‘I had a feeling you’d say that. Shall we expect you around seven-thirty, then?’
‘Are you sure Paige will still be here?’ Antonio commented caustically.
‘I should think so. Her latest boyfriend gave her quite a scare.’
‘Oh?’
‘He hit her.’
Antonio was surprised at how angry this news made him. There again, violence against women had always pushed savage buttons in him. ‘I gather you know this charmer’s name and address?’ he ground out.
‘Actually, no, I don’t.’
‘But you always know where Paige is living and who with!’
Conrad sighed. ‘I stopped putting Lew on the job this past year. I just couldn’t take it any more. I have no idea what she’s been up to since January. Paige rang me out of the blue last night around one, and asked if Jim could come and pick her up at Central Station. She sounded scared, which, as you know, isn’t like Paige at all. But the penny dropped once I saw the big bruise on her face. She wouldn’t tell me anything when I asked her last night. But maybe she’ll tell you.’
‘Maybe.’ If she did, Antonio was going to teach the creep a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry!
Still, it had only been a question of time before Paige became mixed up with a really unsavoury type. The girl never could see the risks she was taking in living with men she didn’t really know. She had no common sense, and no appreciation of the consequences of her actions. She’d be the perfect victim for the likes of Brock Masters!
Possibly there were excuses for her many and potentially dangerous relationships—Antonio was beginning to appreciate there’d been little enough warmth and affection here at home—but one would have thought she’d have learned by now. Almost twenty-three, and she was still looking for love in all the wrong places!
Well, she certainly won’t find it with you, either, came the coldly cynical thought.
‘You know, Conrad,’ he said with a sardonic twist of his mouth. ‘Has it occurred to you that Paige might say no to marriage, whether she falls in love with me or not?’
‘It did cross my mind. If needs be, I suggest you use a method as old as time.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Get her pregnant.’
Antonio’s eyes widened.
‘I’m sure you won’t find such a task beyond you,’ his boss drawled. ‘I gather the Wilding girl had to have a little operation before she could become engaged to the Jansen millions. Which was understandable. She couldn’t risk a black-eyed baby born to a blond, blue-eyed father, could she?’
Antonio momentarily went white. Lauren had been pregnant when she’d run home to Daddy? She’d aborted his child, just to marry money?
‘You really know how to strike below the belt, Conrad,’ he said bitterly. ‘How long have you known about my relationship with Lauren?’
‘From the start. Do you honestly think I would employ a man to be my personal assistant and to live in my home if I hadn’t had him thoroughly checked out? Forget the Wilding girl, Antonio. She was a fool, and so was her father. I know a good man when I see one. Marry my daughter, and you’ll never regret it.’
Now that, Antonio conceded ruefully, was a matter of opinion.
Rising from his chair, he set a cool black gaze upon his future father-in-law and stretched out his hand. ‘It’s a deal.’
Conrad took, then pumped his hand. ‘Splendid, my boy. Splendid. I knew you’d make the right decision. See you tonight, around seven-thirty. We’ll have a celebratory drink together before dinner.’
Antonio said nothing to that, just spun on his heels and strode towards the doorway.
Evelyn barely had time to retreat hastily from where she’d been listening to every single word.
CHAPTER TWO
PAIGE woke mid-afternoon and just lay there for a while, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, thinking.
Home again.
If you could call this wretched house a home, that was.
The word home normally conjured up feelings of peace and warmth. It was where you could be yourself; where you were most relaxed; where you felt loved and accepted.
But home had never been like that for Paige. Fortune Hall was a cold, heartless place which evoked nothing in her but feelings of failure and inadequacy, of being unwanted and unloved, of being unsure of who she was or what she wanted out of life.
Only once had Paige momentarily been happy in this house: the year when Antonio Scarlatti had first come to Fortune Hall to live.
The memory of their first meeting was indelibly imprinted on her brain. It had been her last year in high school, and she’d caught the train home for the Easter break, feeling miserable when her father had said he couldn’t possibly meet her at Central.
‘Just catch a taxi home, Paige,’ had been his offhand and impatient words on the telephone the night before. ‘It’s not as though it’s far. I can’t leave an important meeting for such a silly little thing.’
Such a silly little thing! That was what she was to him. A silly little thing. It was what she’d always been to him. A nuisance. An inconvenience. He’d never loved her, or made time for her. Not once.
Paige had stepped off the train at Central, no longer expecting to be met, so she’d been startled when a dark-haired, dashingly handsome young man had approached her and introduced himself as her father’s new personal assistant, Antonio Scarlatti. She vaguely remembered thinking he didn’t have an Italian accent at all, but that he had the most riveting eyes. Black and penetrating and incredibly sexy.
‘Your father mentioned your arrival by train today,’ he’d added, while those eyes held hers. ‘I didn’t think it right for you to make your way home all by yourself, so I told him it would be my pleasure to meet you. Come…’ And he’d cupped her elbow with a gallant hand.
She’d been captivated from that moment.
Captivated and completely infatuated.
By the time he’d driven her through the gates of Fortune Hall, her racing heart had succumbed to a hero worship which had banished every other male idol whom her love-starved teenage heart had gathered over the previous few years. Her favourite music and movie stars were nothing compared to Antonio Scarlatti.
By the end of the two-week break she’d centred a thousand romantic hopes and dreams around him, crying her devastation when the holiday had ended all too swiftly. During the next term at school she’d spent long hours every day, imagining and fantasising all sorts of exciting scenarios with her handsome Italian at centre stage, till she’d begun to believe her own fantasies, turning each simple smile he’d given her into evidence that he was as secretly enamoured with her as she was with him.
Her schoolwork had suffered for her daydreaming, and the comments on her report card had been none too impressive to bring home at the end of term: Paige would do a lot better if only she would concentrate! Paige is an intelligent girl but her mind doesn’t seem to be on her work!
Which it hadn’t been. Yet what a wonderful term it had been! What secret pleasures she’d hugged to herself, thinking about her beautiful Antonio all the time, weaving all sorts of fanciful dreams around him.
Her next holiday at home had seemed to cement all those dreams. The things he carefully hadn’t said. Those secretive but scorching glances he’d bestowed on her across the dinner table. The way he’d held her slightly longer than necessary the day they’d run into each other on the stairs. The inordinate time he’d taken to help her find a book in the library one evening.
Paige had been sure he was just waiting till she finished school that year before he showed his hand. By then she would be eighteen, and a woman!
In her mind, they would eventually get married and have half a dozen babies, beautiful, black-eyed children who adored their mother and father and were so very happy, wrapped in the type of warm cocoon of family love that she’d never experienced herself, but she’d vowed to give her children.
By the time she’d come home again in September she’d become totally obsessed with him, her rather romantic feelings taking a more physical turn when she’d spotted him swimming in the pool the first morning of her holiday. She’d watched him from her bedroom window while he’d done lap after impressive lap, her eyes widening when he’d climbed out and just stood there as he towelled himself down, wearing only the briefest of black swimming costumes.
There had been something decidedly animal in his powerful physique, with its deeply olive skin and light covering of dark body hair, plus the way he was drying himself, with rough, rubbing strokes. Paige had gobbled him up with her eyes while the sexuality simmering deep within her feelings surfaced, stark and startling in its raw and naked need. Suddenly, she’d craved more than his love. She’d craved the man, and that part of him which made him a man, her galloping heart seizing up with shock at the explicitness of her desire.
When he’d looked up and spied her watching him at the window she’d nearly died, her face flushing wildly. He’d stared back at her for a few seconds, before whirling away and striding off inside the pool house.
Paige hadn’t needed another sign.
Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to finish school, or for him to say something. She had to speak up first. But when she’d gone in search of him after breakfast it had been to find her father and his assistant had left on a business trip. They would not be back for a week. It had been the longest week of Paige’s life, only made bearable by the heart to hearts she’d had with Brad, her oldest and closest friend.
By the time Antonio had come back she’d been dying to talk to him, breathless and emboldened by the surety of his love.
Oddly enough, Paige could no longer recall exactly what she’d said to him. Or what he’d said back. The only words which lived on in her memory were his calling her a silly little girl. They remained very clear, as did the overwhelming wave of humiliation which had accompanied them.
Suffice to accept that it had been the most awful moment of her life.
Paige found it ironic that she didn’t rate what had happened last night to be nearly as awful. Jed might have hurt her physically, and he’d frightened her enough into coming home, but he didn’t have the power to hurt her where the hurt never healed. How could he, when she didn’t love him?
Her right hand lifted to push her hair back behind her ear before gingerly touching the tender swelling just below her temple. Pity the blow hadn’t knocked some sense into her, she thought bitterly.
Still being in love with Antonio was insane. She could see that. But recognising the stupidity of her feelings seemed to make no difference.
Brad had talked her out of her ‘infatuation’ for a while, had made her temporarily believe it was nothing but a schoolgirl crush, a romantic obsession which had nothing to do with reality.
‘You don’t even know the man,’ he’d reasoned with her during the dark days after Antonio’s visit to the beach-house. ‘Your love’s a figment of your romantic teenage imagination, conjured up because you need someone to love, and to love you back. But it’s not real, Paige. It’s a destructive self-indulgence to keep harbouring such a one-sided obsession. Let it go, love. Let him go.’
So she had, for a while, and eventually she’d settled for a different sort of love with Brad than the one she’d dreamt of in Antonio’s arms.
Still, looking back, she did not regret it. Brad had been kind to her. Kind and understanding and undemanding. He’d taught her a lot about the sort of person she was, made her see that she was very intelligent, despite not having done too well at school. He’d even encouraged her to go to the local tech and finish her schooling, which she had. She might still have been with him if one stormy afternoon and an unforgiving sea hadn’t ended their carefree and easygoing co-existence.
She’d stayed on at the beach-house for a few weeks. Brad had always paid the rent ahead in three-month lots. But in the end loneliness—and curiosity, perhaps—had sent her back home to Sydney, to Fortune Hall, her father, and Antonio.
A big mistake.
For nothing had changed.
Nothing.
She hadn’t been able to get out of the place fast enough, answering an ad in the paper to share a flat with two other girls and taking the first job she could get, waitressing in a coffee house on Circular Quay.
Another big mistake. Not the job. She’d rather liked waitressing, enjoying the contact with tourists and people always on the go. Paige had soon found, however, that sharing accommodation with other girls was hazardous in the extreme, unless you looked like the back of a bus. Unfortunately, Paige’s long blond hair, pretty face and striking figure had caused all sorts of troubles with the other girls’ boyfriends, who hadn’t been able to keep their eyes and hands off. After one extremely unpleasant encounter—and a disbelieving flatmate—Paige had found herself out on the street with nowhere to go except home once more.
This time Antonio had no longer been in residence, thanks to a promotion and a new apartment of his own somewhere.
Perversely, Paige had been disappointed. Had she become addicted to the emotional turmoil the sight of her unrequited love caused?
Possibly, because after leaving home again, to live with two male flatmates who had been closet gays and had caused her no trouble at all, she’d still deliberately returned at Christmas—and every Christmas after that—for no other reason than that was the season her father entertained a lot, with dinner parties and other larger parties, to which Antonio was always invited.
She had seen him a few times, but he’d invariably ignored her, or just said a few polite words before turning his attention elsewhere, usually to some woman. Paige knew he had lots of women—she’d made a point of questioning a few of the staff at home about his dating activities. Not Evelyn, of course. But the cook, the maids, and Jim, the chauffeur.
Paige consoled herself with the thought that there never seemed to be anyone special, anyone who lasted. On top of that, she’d never experienced the agony of actually seeing him in action with a woman…till last year’s big Christmas Eve party.
Paige had turned twenty-two the previous October, and believed she’d never looked better. Her skin had been lightly tanned, and her long honey-blond hair fell halfway down her back in one smooth shiny curtain. She’d come downstairs, dressed in a very sexy strapless red dress, hoping against hope that this time Antonio might see that she was at last a woman, not a silly little girl.
Antonio had just arrived with a date, a striking and sophisticated creature of thirty-something who had still made Paige feel like a little girl by comparison. His gaze had skated over her—and her revealing dress—with nothing but barely held irritation.
Never had the futility of her feelings been hammered home so strongly as that evening, when she’d watched him turn from her to dance attendance on his date, never once giving Paige a second glance. Each touch of his hand on the woman’s arm had been like a dagger in Paige’s heart. Each drink he’d given her. Each dance.
But the coup de gr
ce had come when Paige came across them kissing on the terrace—if ‘kissing’ was the appropriate word to describe what they’d been doing. For it hadn’t just been their mouths which were locked, but their whole bodies. Moulded and melded together in the most erotic fashion, one of Antonio’s legs jammed hard between the woman’s, one of hers lifting to run sinuously up and down his thigh.
Paige was sure she’d cried out in pain, but nothing short of an atomic bomb exploding would have disturbed their passionate clinch. No one but the most naive could not imagine how their evening would end, or that Antonio wouldn’t be the most unforgettable of lovers.
But then, Paige had already known he would be.
It was that same intense, all-consuming passion she’d thought she’d found in Jed. Only this time it had been directed at her, not some other woman. She’d been so flattered by Jed’s pursuit of her. Flattered, yet disastrously deluded.
Paige winced as she touched the bruise once more.
She was about to go into the bathroom and inspect the damage more closely when there was a knock on her bedroom door.
‘Who is it?’ she asked agitatedly. Not her father again. Oh, please not him. He’d harangued her for ages last night, wanting to know what had happened, who had done this to her, what was his name, and his address? Had she been living with him? Was he her boyfriend, her lover? What had she done to make him hit her? She must have done something!
Dismay had kept her silent, and defiant, as usual. She’d speared her father with a coldly contemptuous gaze before finally escaping to her room, only to fall onto the bed and cry herself to sleep. But now she was conscious again, and the transitory peace of oblivion was no longer hers.
‘It’s Evelyn. I’ve brought you up a tray.’
The door swung open before Paige could say another word, and in swept Evelyn. She was dressed in the same sort of bleak black dress she practically always wore, as though it were required uniform for a housekeeper. Paige noticed that she’d put on more weight this past year. Her cheeks had become jowly, and her already small eyes looked smaller within her pudgy face.
‘Your father said you were not to be allowed to skip meals while you’re here this time,’ Evelyn pronounced haughtily as she placed the tray on the bedside table. ‘He expects to hear that you’ve eaten every bite. And he expects to see you downstairs for dinner tonight as well. Right on eight. In a dress,’ she added, throwing a derisive glance over Paige’s jeans.
‘I didn’t bring any dresses with me,’ Paige said, already regretting her decision to come home, despite not having any other real alternative this time. She needed the safety and security Fortune Hall provided, for she suspected Jed was not going to take her leaving him lightly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Paige,’ came the sneering retort. ‘You left a whole wardrobe full of clothes behind when you first left home. I moved them all into the guest room next door when I thought you weren’t coming back and this room needed a thorough spring clean. There’s plenty of dresses among them.’
‘For pity’s sake, Evelyn,’ Paige pointed out wearily, ‘you can’t expect me to wear the same clothes I wore at seventeen.’
‘Why not? I seem to recall you spent all that year buying and wearing clothes that were way too old for you. On top of that,’ Evelyn added drily, ‘if there’s one thing I’ve learned since working for the rich and famous, it’s that designer clothes don’t date all that much. I’m sure you’ll find something among them that’ll do. It’s not as though you’ve put on any weight. You’re as skinny as ever.’
Evelyn had always made comments about her weight and Paige hated it. She was a tall girl, and naturally slim. But one could hardly call her ‘skinny’.
‘Whatever you say, Evelyn.’ She was too tired of spirit to argue. And what did it really matter?
Evelyn went to leave, then stopped, peering closely at Paige’s face. ‘That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got there, dear,’ she said, with a malicious glint in those beady eyes of hers. ‘Walk into a door?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You should watch where you’re going, or one day you might really get hurt.’ And, with an expression which implied such a prospect would please her no end, Evelyn exited the room, deliberately leaving the door open behind her.
Sighing, Paige rose and closed the door before returning to see what Evelyn had brought her to eat. Two huge club sandwiches, stuffed with mayonnaise. A piece of cream-filled cake big enough to feed an army, and a huge chocolate milkshake.
Paige knew she wouldn’t be able to consume that amount, let alone such rich food. But she didn’t dare leave any behind. Evelyn would report back to her father, who would lecture her on everything from anorexia to ingratitude. Defiance always had its price around Fortune Hall.
If only Blackie were still alive, she thought wistfully as she flushed half of the food down the toilet. That dog had been the perfect garbage disposal.
Paige’s heart turned over as she thought of her long-deceased pet. As dogs went, Blackie had been exceedingly ugly: a flea-bitten mongrel Paige had rescued from the pound after they’d put his photograph in the Sunday papers. Her father had been furious when she’d bought him and brought him home. Blackie had almost been as old as she was. Seven to her nine. Her father had declared him a health hazard because he was recovering from mange. He’d told her that if she returned him he would get her a proper pup, a poodle with a pedigree and papers.
But she’d dug her heels in—the forerunner of future rebellions—and said stubbornly that she wasn’t taking Blackie back to die and that she’d look after him herself, using her weekly allowance. He’d cost her a small fortune in vet bills, but she’d managed. Dog and girl had been inseparable till that dreadful day when she’d had to leave for boarding school. The housekeeper had promised to look after him, but when Paige had come back on her first home weekend, a month later, Evelyn had been installed as the new housekeeper and Blackie was declared dead, supposedly run over by a car. She’d never quite believed this story, but could never prove otherwise.
Paige had vowed to get herself another dog one day. But she never had. It was hard to risk one’s heart a second time after being so badly hurt, she’d found. Very hard.
With half the food flushed away, and the rest reluctantly stuffed down into her fragile-feeling stomach, Paige went along to the next room to review the dresses that had appealed to her seventeen-year-old taste.
She shook her head over most of them. If ever she needed evidence of her schoolgirl obsession with Antonio, it was in the collection of clothes before her. Never had she seen such an array of painfully provocative purchases: all designed to flaunt her body, and all, as Evelyn had pointed out, way too old for a seventeen-year-old.
No wonder Antonio had stared at her across the dinner table when she’d come down dressed in those. Any living, breathing man would have given her a second glance. Paige was not ignorant of her physical attractions. She’d had them thrown in her face often enough in the past few years.
Her hand ran along the hangers, searching for something—anything—which was suitable for a simple dinner with her father. She bypassed everything which was too short, too clingy, or too low-cut.
Her eye finally landed on a cornflower-blue trouser suit which she’d never actually worn at all, come to think of it. She’d bought it at one of those end-of-season sales because the saleslady had raved about her in it. But when she’d got it home Paige had childishly thought it far too simple and plain.
Now, she liked its elegant simplicity very much. And blue always looked good on her, with her fair hair and blue eyes. But it wasn’t a dress, was it? Too bad, she decided mutinously, and tugged the hanger out.
Fortunately, the left-behind shoes didn’t present any choice problem at all. Paige had been five-nine by the time she was fourteen, so she’d never bought too high a heel, not even during her Antonio-mad year.
Selecting a pair of open-toed cream shoes with a lowish heel, she returned to her room, where she stripped down to her undies and tried on the trouser suit. The reflection in the full-length cheval mirror in the corner brought an instant frown. Dear heaven, but she looked terribly busty! Bras did that to her in some clothes. Taking off the cardigan-style top, she removed her bra, then slid the silky cardigan back on, doing up the three small pearl buttons and having another look.
Much, much better. Her breasts looked smaller for having settled lower and wider apart on her chest, and there wasn’t an in-your-face cleavage filling the deep V-neckline. There were no ugly bra lines, either, to mar the way the silky top smoothly outlined her bust before falling loosely to her hips. The trousers had a similar cut, fitting snugly around her hips before falling straight down to her ankles in softer folds. It was a very wearable and comfortable outfit which would fit a wide variety of occasions. She really must remember to take it with her when she next left.
Whenever that would be…
Paige hadn’t just lost the roof over her head last night. She’d lost her clothes as well. Which was a pity. She’d spent quite a bit putting together a decent work wardrobe to go with her new career direction.
If only she’d dared go back into Jed’s bedroom and get her set of keys before sneaking out of the place. If she had, she’d be able to slip into the building—and the apartment—while Jed was at work.
Paige sighed. She could hardly see herself showing up while Jed was home, and politely asking permission to come up and get the rest of her clothes. Better she cut her losses and just disappeared.
Maybe it was time to head interstate. Maybe up north to Queensland, where there were plenty of holiday resorts, and plenty of jobs going for an attractive girl with a wide range of working experience.
A move to Queensland, however, would require money for her fare and some new clothes. She had some savings, but would need every cent to set herself up in a flat. Bond money and such. Her father would give her money if she asked, Paige knew. He might even resume putting that obscene monthly allowance into her bank account, if she begged.
Frankly, she was tempted. All she had to do was eat humble pie and tell her father he was the greatest.
But then she would have nothing left, would she? No self-respect. No independence. No pride.
She had to find some other way out of the hell-hole she’d dug for herself this time. Maybe she could stay here for a while, and get a job which had a uniform and gradually put together a wardrobe. She supposed she could bear Evelyn and her father for a few weeks. And at least she had one decent interview outfit!
Paige stripped off again and headed for the bathroom. Time to have a long, relaxing bath. Time to pretend she hadn’t totally stuffed up her life once more. Time to transport herself to a world where the man she was with would never dream of raising his hand to her, where the rings on her left hand spoke of love and commitment, and the babies they made together would never know the hurt and unhappiness which had marred her own childhood.
When at her lowest, Paige always kept herself sane by wallowing in just such a fantasy world. So she lay there for ages beneath the lavender-scented bubble bath she’d found in the vanity and conjured up old faces, old dreams, and old desires. Time flew by, and if, eventually, tears rolled down Paige’s cheeks, her soul had still been strangely soothed by her imaginings.
At five to eight that evening, Paige carried her softened and perfumed body slowly down the huge sweeping staircase, crossed the cavernous foyer, with its domed, chandeliered ceiling, and entered the huge living area which led into the smaller and more elegant room where her father always had pre-dinner drinks. He did this for half an hour before every meal, regardless of whether he had visitors or not. Paige never joined him, partly because she didn’t like to drink on an empty stomach, but mainly because she didn’t like to give her father the opportunity to hurt her. When he drank, he developed a sarcastic tongue.
Given that it was a Monday, Paige assumed he would be alone. So when she opened the door which led into the drawing room she was startled to see that wasn’t the case at all.
No…startled did not adequately describe her reaction to the sight of an elegantly attired Antonio, sitting in one of the armchairs which flanked the fireplace, a crystal flute of champagne in his hands. Stunned better described her instant state of mind. Stunned and sickened.
Antonio was the last man in the world she wanted to see again, especially tonight, with the mark of another man’s contempt for her glowering angrily on her cheekbone.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR a few fraught, fragile moments, Paige just stared at Antonio. Hard not to when the sight of him had always made her heart hammer madly against her ribs.
This time was no different, except that her head began whirling angrily at the same time. Why hadn’t Evelyn warned her Antonio would be here for dinner? She must have known he was coming.
The answer was obvious, and cruel.
Because she didn’t want you to be prepared. She wanted you to stumble in here and make a fool of yourself, as you always do in Antonio’s presence.
Paige knew there wasn’t anything that happened around Fortune Hall which Evelyn wasn’t privy to. What the housekeeper didn’t come to know by virtue of her position she found out through slyness and stealth. Over the years, Paige had caught the woman eavesdropping more than once, especially on the telephone. Her omission to mention Antonio’s presence at dinner could only have had a malicious intent, which meant the hateful woman was aware of Paige’s feelings for Antonio.
Pride came to the rescue, as did some hard-won experience. Maybe she was getting used to handling the emotional devastation seeing Antonio always caused her. Or was it that at last she was beginning to grow up?
‘Why, hello, Antonio,’ she said casually as she strolled into the room and over towards the drinks cabinet in the corner. ‘You startled me there for a moment. No one said anything about you being here tonight. You’re looking well,’ she added, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Well was not a word one would use to describe Antonio. It was far too insipid for his brand of raw physical impact.
Tonight, he was looking exceptionally sexy all in black, his fine woollen suit given a casual look by being teamed with a black crew-necked top rather than his usual shirt and tie. The outfit seemed to intensify his dark colouring and brooding sex appeal, a fact which certainly didn’t escape Paige’s poor, pathetic heart.
‘I was thinking the same of you, actually,’ he returned silkily. ‘Considering…’
She laughed, sliding a mocking glance over her shoulder at him. ‘You mean for someone who’s boyfriend has just beaten her up?’ Paige had found over the last few years that being mealy-mouthed and defensive around Fortune Hall only brought more looks and lectures on the way she was living her life. Better to face any sticky situation head-on, with a suitably defiant fac¸ade.
‘Paige, for pity’s sake!’ her father protested.
‘Pity, Father?’ she scoffed as she swept the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and poured herself a glass. Suddenly, drinking on an empty stomach was not only desirable but imperative!
‘Now that’s a word I’ve not heard often in this house,’ she muttered, and turned back round, the crystal flute cupped firmly in her hands, her knuckles white in the effort to stop them from shaking. ‘So what have you been drinking to with this very expensive champagne? I can’t imagine its your health. You’ll both still be taking the television world by storm when I’m six foot under.’
Her gaze swept over the two men, who stared back at her with perfect poker faces, telling her nothing, and everything. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said drily. ‘It’s a secret, is it? Something to do with business. Something silly little girls like me couldn’t possibly understand, or shouldn’t know.’
Paige was surprised to see her spiked sarcasm brought a wry smile to Antonio’s beautifully shaped mouth. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind your knowing.’
Did Antonio see the warning glance her father shot him? If he did, he ignored it.
‘We’re celebrating a forthcoming and hopefully desirable merger,’ he went on smoothly, his black eyes glittering with some secret amusement. Or was it suppressed anger? One could never quite tell with Antonio. ‘Unfortunately, negotiations are at too early and too delicate a stage to supply you with more details right now.’
‘How delightfully vague!’ she exclaimed, rolling her eyes at him. She should have known Antonio wouldn’t cross her father. He knew what side his bread was buttered on.
Not that Antonio was easily cast in the role of flunkey. He was far too strong-willed and opinionated to be a mindless yes-man. She’d heard him disagree with her father more than once when it came to business.
But she was still piqued that he felt he could play with words around her. It was so patronising. And so like the treatment she’d always received around Fortune Hall. If she’d been born a boy she would have been drawn into their world of negotiations and deals, not excluded, then cynically condescended to!
Her eyes flashed as she lifted her glass in a mock toast. ‘To the forthcoming and hopefully…what kind of merger did you say it was, Antonio?’
‘Desirable,’ he said quietly, and that inscrutable black gaze of his ran slowly over her from head to toe.
Paige’s heart tripped, then stopped altogether when those eyes began to travel back up her body even more slowly, lingering on the swells and dips of her female form, leaving them burning in his wake. He inspected her mouth for what felt like an interminable length of time, forcing her lips to fall apart and drag in some much needed air for her starving lungs.
Now his eyes lifted to hers, holding them in a hard and merciless gaze which was as blatantly sexual as it was chillingly cold.
She quivered. All over. Inside and out.
It was the most erotic thing which had ever happened to her.
Her heart began to race, an uncomfortable heat suffusing her skin.
Paige did the only thing she could think of to survive the moment. She quaffed back the chilled champagne she was holding. The whole lot.
Unfortunately, her ragged breathing sent some down the wrong way and she began to choke.
Antonio was beside her in a flash, slapping her firmly between the shoulders. The champagne came flying back up and sprayed out from her mouth, most of it falling to the carpet but some dribbling down her front.
‘Try to breathe slowly and evenly,’ Antonio advised, once she’d stopped choking to death.
She tried, but it was almost impossible with him standing so close to her, then perfectly impossible when Antonio drew a snow-white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and started wiping down her top where the champagne had stained it, stroking the handkerchief down over the swell of her right breast, working his way closer and closer to her hardening nipple. As he drew dangerously close she felt her flesh tighten even further in anticipation of his touch, craving the contact, practically begging for it.
Paige sucked in sharply when the handkerchief finally slid over the tautened peak, her head spinning wildly. He did it again. Then again.
Confusion flung her eyes wide to search his. Was he being deliberately cruel? Did he have any idea what he was doing to her? She dared not believe this was real, but when their eyes met Paige was stunned to see he was as enthralled as she was by what he was doing.
The handkerchief came to rest over the traitorous peak, hiding it from sight. ‘Do you want to go upstairs and change?’ he asked her in a low, thickened voice.
‘I…I don’t have anything to change into,’ came her shaky reply, and Antonio frowned.
‘There’s no time to change,’ Conrad snapped irritably, from where he’d risen and was moving towards the now open dining room door. ‘Dinner’s ready to be served.’
‘Why don’t you have anything to change into?’ Antonio asked in a disconcertingly gentle tone as he led her still shaken self to her place at the table. ‘Or don’t you want to tell me?’
Suddenly, she did want to tell him. Suddenly, he wasn’t the disapproving, remote, unattainable man he’d become over the years. He was more like that other Antonio Scarlatti, the one who’d kindly met her train that day, and started her obsession with him.
Was one of her futile dreams in danger of coming true? Had Antonio finally seen her tonight as a grownup woman, and not a silly little girl?
‘Later,’ she whispered to him when he pulled her seat out for her.
His breath was warm against her ear as he scooped her chair under her. ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he murmured, and she quivered helplessly.
Dinner was agony. And ecstasy. One minute she would be smiling and sparkling at him, then doubts would besiege her and she’d fall worriedly silent. Why now? she agonised. Why tonight? Did her father have anything to do with this? Had he ordered Antonio to be nice to her?
No, no, that couldn’t be it, she decided at long last. If Antonio’s ambitions lay in that direction, he would not have waited this long to pursue her. No, he was genuinely attracted to her tonight. She could feel it. There was a predatory glitter in his eyes, eyes which didn’t stop looking at her. Paige knew what it was like to be the object of a man’s sexual interest, and she could feel Antonio’s desire hitting her in waves.
He wanted to make love to her.
The thought was breathtaking. And compellingly exciting.
It was only a sexual thing, of course. Paige was not naive enough to think anything else. Antonio was a man of the world, a confirmed bachelor type whose commitment was to the company. His bed-partners were transitory, and replaceable, like her father’s. According to the staff at Fortune Hall, Antonio hadn’t brought the same woman to dinner, or a party there, in all the years of his employ. If Paige let him seduce her, he would promise her nothing but passing pleasures, followed by the ultimate in pains.
But, oh…those passing pleasures…
Paige could barely begin to imagine them.
The ultimate in pains, however, she could imagine.
She groaned a silent groan. She’d have to be crazy to set herself up for that!
‘Paige!’ her father snapped. ‘Evelyn’s asking you if you want some dessert. What’s the matter with you tonight, girl? One minute chattering away sixty to the dozen, the next off in some dream world!’
Her blue eyes cleared to see the hated housekeeper smirking at her from her position at her father’s shoulder.
‘No dessert, thank you,’ Paige said stiffly, while she struggled to suppress the overwhelmingly negative feelings the woman always evoked in her.
‘You’re not becoming anorexic again, are you?’ her father demanded, exasperation in his voice.
‘I was never anorexic!’ she defended hotly. ‘I have no idea where you ever got such an idea,’ she finished, whilst looking daggers at Evelyn.
The housekeeper’s beady eyes didn’t move an inch.
‘Then prove it by having some apple crumble!’ her father insisted. ‘Bring Paige a large helping, Evelyn. With plenty of cream.’
A helpless fury flooded Paige as the housekeeper swanned off with a triumphant expression on her face. If Antonio hadn’t been at the table she would have left the room. Instead, she was stuck there, feeling belittled and foolish. She could not bear to look over at Antonio, afraid to see his earlier attraction for her had faded because she was being treated like a difficult and wayward child.
‘The reason Paige probably turned dessert down, Conrad,’ Antonio said, and Paige’s eyes snapped up to stare across the table at him, ‘is because she promised to have supper with me later. I should have said no to dessert as well.’
Paige was as amazed as her father by this announcement. She’d only agreed to talk to Antonio later. Nothing more. But she wasn’t about to say anything. Not now.
‘You and Paige are having supper together?’ her father challenged. ‘Tonight?’
Antonio didn’t look at all concerned by his employer’s tone of disapproval. ‘I trust you have no objection to that?’ he returned, an icy counter-challenge in his voice.
Paige was mesmerised by the exchange.
‘No, no, I suppose not. It’s just that…well…I’m surprised, that’s all.’
No more than herself, Paige thought dazedly.
‘You only flew into town this morning,’ her father went on a little testily. ‘I would have thought you’d be too tired to go out.’
‘I slept on the plane,’ Antonio explained coolly. ‘I’m only home for two weeks, as you know. Terrible to waste my holiday sleeping it away, don’t you think? There are much better ways to spend one’s leisure time. What say you, Paige? Should we make our escape now, before Evelyn returns and force-feeds us both?’
Paige didn’t need any encouragement. She was on her feet in a flash. Too late, however. Evelyn was already coming into the room, carrying a tray of desserts towards the table.
Paige hesitated. Not so Antonio, who strode around the table towards her.
‘Our apologies, Evelyn,’ he said smoothly as he took Paige’s elbow and steered her towards the doorway. ‘Paige and I are going out and haven’t time for dessert right now.’
Paige expected the woman to look put out. Instead, she smiled oh, so sweetly at them both as they passed. ‘That’s quite all right, Antonio. Dessert will keep. It’s nice to see you and Paige are friends at long last.’
Paige’s mouth dropped open at Evelyn’s hypocrisy. There was no level to which that woman would not stoop!
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Miranda Lee
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: If Antonio Scarlatti wanted to be CEO of Fortune Productions, he had to marry the boss′s daughter! At first Antonio refused to give in to such blackmail, but then he reconsidered: would it be so difficult to bed and wed the beautiful Paige, and then divorce her?But Antonio was unaware that Paige had secretly been in love with him for years, and neither was prepared for the explosion of passion between them…!