The Italian's Future Bride (12 page)

 ‘You don’t need to be so derisive about it!’ she flashed in her own defence. ‘When this is all over with, Mr Villani, you might be unfortunate enough to have lost a deal or two because you weren’t paying proper attention, but I risk losing my whole livelihood!’

 ‘If you are carrying my child then this will never be over.’

 Placed coolly into the argument, Rachel swallowed thickly. ‘Don’t start hitting me with the worst thing that could happen again,’ she shook out huskily.

 He went to say something, then sighed and changed his mind. Tension stung—antagonism that wasn’t all to do with what they were arguing about.

 ‘You said it was family-run thing,’ he then prompted.

 ‘It is,’ she confirmed. Then she took a breath and altered that answer to, ‘Itwas a family run thing until my parents were killed five years ago in—in a road accident. Now the farm is split three ways between me, Mark and Elise.’

 ‘Which means that you do the work and they do nothing?’

 ‘I like the work, they don’t.’

 ‘Loyal little thing, aren’t you?’ he mocked her. ‘Has it not occurred to you yet that they are not very loyal to you—?’

 Raffaelle wished the words back as soon as he’d said them. But it was too late. She’d already gone pale and she lost her cup so she could make a defensive fold of her arms across her front.

 ‘My family loyalty is none of your business,’ she muttered.

 ‘You think—?’ Anger with himself made his voice sound harsh. But since the anger was there now, he took a grip on her clenched left hand and prised it upwards. ‘This ring on your finger demands that I should have your complete loyalty now.’

 ‘It’s fake.’ She grabbed the hand back and thrust it beneath her arm again.

 Things were starting to happen. Fights with women usually did end up as sexual battles and Raffaelle was beginning to feel the sexual pull. He reacted to it by snaking his hands around her slender nape and tilting her head back so he could claim her mouth.

 She tasted of mint toothpaste and pink lipstick. He found he liked the combination. And she didn’t try to fight him, which he liked even more. By the time he raised his head again, her arms were no longer defensively crossed but clinging to his shirt.

 ‘This isn’t fake,’ he rumbled out deeply, still toying with the corner of her mouth. ‘So let’s forget about Devon and go back to bed. I don’t know why we got out of it in the first place.’

 ‘No.’ She gave a push at him and when he released her she scuttled sideways. ‘I’ve got things to do.’

 ‘You mean you’re running scared all of a sudden.’ He grabbed her hand to pull her out of the kitchen and back into the dining room. ‘If you are hoping to escape to a pharmacy in Devon,’ he said brusquely, ‘then first you should take a look at these…’

 He brought her to a stop beside the dining table where a selection of the Sunday tabloids lay spread out.

 Rachel froze, wondering how she had missed seeing them before. But she knew why she’d missed them; she’d been too busy drinking him in to notice anything else in the room.

 In every photograph but one, she and he were standing outside the apartment block displaying the ring and looking convincingly loverlike and besotted. The only photograph that was different was in Mark’s paper, which bore the clever caption,‘First public kiss for newly engaged lovers.’

 ‘My fifteen minutes of fame,’ she jibed tensely, looking at the sleek stranger in the photographs, who happened to be her. Raffaelle looked no different than his tall, dark, handsome self and how he’d managed to pull off that smile without making it look cynical was worthy of a headline all by itself.

 ‘This is set to last a lot longer than fifteen minutes,cara ,’ he responded dryly.

 ‘Because you’re newsworthy.’

 ‘Which is the only reason why you hit on me in the first place,’ he pointed out. ‘This is what you wanted.’ He waved a long finger at the photograph her half-brother had taken. ‘I must admit you look very like your sister in that.’

 The picture showed a clinch which looked like they’d been lovers for ever. That wave of tingling intimacy shot down Rachel’s front again and she quickly shifted her eyes to the other more carefully staged photographs, all of which were accompanied by catchy tag lines aimed to turn them into tacky celebrity fodder.

 ‘I did not want all the rest of this, though. That was your fault.’

 ‘You cannot be so blind.’

 It was the way he said it that made Rachel look sharply at him. It had been hard and sardonic—tones that repeated themselves in the expression on his face.

 ‘Explain that,’ she demanded.

 ‘I meant nothing.’ He went to turn away.

 ‘Yes, you did!’ She caught hold of his arm. ‘And I want to know what you meant!’

 He swung back to her, face hard, eyes angry. ‘Did you never think to question if your brother’s cronies would know who his twin is? Of course they knew—’he answered his own question ‘—which is why they came after us and called out Elise’s name. They saw you looking like her and him making his quick escape, then they saw a very contrived yet really juicy scandal brewing involving Elise, Leo Savakis and Raffaelle Villani in a gripping sex triangle. I can forgive you your naïvety,cara , if you are as shocked as you appear to be, but I will not forgive your stupid brother for not thinking this thing through and foreseeing the obvious outcome if I had not intervened!’

 Rachel pulled out a chair and sat down on it. He was ohso-sickeningly right. And the worst of it was that he seemed to have worked all of it out within seconds of her explaining it all last night.

 ‘Now ask yourself how long you think it will take the press to sleuth out exactly who you are,’ he persisted. ‘And your fifteen minutes of fame becomes a roller coaster ride to hell and back while they dig into your past, with Leo Savakis waiting in the wings for you to fall off the rails and accidentally reveal it is all just a big ugly cover-up for his wife’s transgressions.’

 ‘You don’t have to say any more,’ Rachel whispered. ‘I get the full picture.’

 ‘Do you?’ he rasped. ‘Well, add this into the mix. Start running scared now and I will blow the whole lie sky high and damn your sister’s marriage. I can take the heat of the repercussions if she cannot!’

 He walked out of the room, leaving Rachel alone to stew on what he’d said. It didn’t take long. He was right and she had been running scared when she’d made that bid to leave here and go back to Devon. But that had nothing to do with the lies, though they were bad enough. Her reasons did not even have anything to do with their stupid delving into unprotected sex!

 It was to do with him and what he did to her. What he made her feel. If he could affect her this badly in only one night, then she was going to be an emotional wreck by the time it came to the end.

 If it came to an end, she then amended, recalling that marriage warning he’d made.

 Raffaelle was pacing his study wondering what was the matter with him. Why had he bitten her head off like that?

 Because she wanted to go home to collect some clothes and organise her life, or because she still persisted in defending her selfish family?

 Or was it because she’d mentioned a man down there in Devon? Aneighbour she had not bothered to mention before…?

 He did not know. He did not think hewanted to know. Something was happening here that scared him witless each time he came close to looking at it.

 He heard her moving about then and went to see what she was doing now. He found her in the living room with her bag in her hand.

 ‘I—can’t find my phone,’ she said and she looked pale and defensive again.

 ‘The battery was flat. I put it on the charger in my study. I’ll go and get it…’Then he paused. ‘Who do you want to call?’

 Irritation ripped down his backbone because he knew it was none of his business who she wanted to call. By the expression on her face, she thought the same thing.

 Still, she answered him. ‘I will have to ring round a few people if I am not allowed to leave here—’

 ‘No.’ Raffaelle shook his head. ‘We will do it your way, only we both go and we will use my car instead of the train.’

 ‘But—’

 ‘Ten minutes,’ he said gruffly, turning away again. ‘And don’t keep me waiting. The sooner we leave, the sooner we can get back.’

 He drove them in a silver Ferrari with the same reckless efficiency he’d driven the night before. But then, his driving had had to be nifty when they’d met with the paparazzi waiting outside for them to leave. They’d picked the car up from the basement car park but the moment they’d emerged on to the street they’d been spotted and all hell had broken loose as camera-toting reporters fell over themselves to get into their cars and give chase.

 ‘I don’t understand why they’re still hanging around,’ Rachel said after they’d lost their pursuers in a sequence of dizzying turns down narrow back streets. She hadn’t dared speak before then in case she broke his concentration and they ended up hitting a wall. ‘What do they think we are going to do? Get married on the apartment steps or something?’

 ‘They don’t know enough about you.’ He sounded so grim that Rachel felt a cold little shiver chase down her spine.

 ‘I hate this,’ she whispered. ‘I hated it when I used to get caught up in it with Elise. I don’t know how you people live your lives like this.’

 ‘We live in a celebrity-driven world,’ he answered levelly. ‘The masses are greedy for the intimate details of the rich and famous—or, for that matter, anyone who lives a high profile life. You have now joined the celebrity ranks, so get used to it, because this is only the beginning of it.’

 The beginning of it…

 After that Rachel did not speak another word. They reached the motorway and suddenly the powerful car came into its own, eating up the miles with the luxurious smoothness that promised to cut the journey time by half.

 He stopped once at a motorway service station, led her into the café and bought sandwiches and coffee.

 ‘Eat,’ he instructed, when she stared at the unappetizing-looking sandwich he’d placed in front of her. ‘You look like death and you have eaten nothing since you threw yourself at me last night.’

 And I look like death because I hardly had any sleep last night, she threw back at him without saying the words out loud. Because out loud meant opening a Pandora’s box full of what they’d been doing instead of sleeping.

 The indifferent-tasting sandwich was washed down by indifferent-tasting coffee. Rachel was surprised he ate his sandwich or drank the coffee. They just didn’t look like the kind of food this man would usually put anywhere near his mouth.

 When they hit the road again he wanted to talk. ‘Tell me how your family works,’ he invited.

 So she explained how her mother had lost her husband to a long-term illness while the twins had still been very young. ‘A few years later she married my father and then had me.’

 ‘So what is the age difference between you and the twins?’

 ‘Six years,’ she replied.

 ‘And who did the farm originally belong to?’

 ‘My father. But he—we—never differentiated between Mark and Elise and myself. And it isn’t really a farm,’ she then added because she thought she better had do before they arrived there and he saw it. ‘It’s what we call a smallholding, with three acres of land, a house, a couple of greenhouses and a couple of barns.’

 ‘Another lie,cara ?’

 Rachel shrugged. ‘It’s run like a farm.’

 ‘And the…neighbour that helps you out when you need it—what does he do?’

 ‘Jack owns the land adjoining our land—and hisis a farm,’ she stressed. ‘He’s been good to us since our parents died.’

 ‘Call it as it is,’ Raffaelle said. ‘He has been good to you .’

 Rachel turned to look at him. ‘Why that tone?’ she demanded.

 His grimace stopped her from becoming hooked on watching his face. ‘I don’t think I want to elaborate,’ he confessed.

 ‘Suits me,’ she said and, turning the collar up on her coat, she leant further into the seat and closed her eyes.

 His low laugh played along her nerve endings. ‘You are prickly, Miss Carmichael.’