A Deal with Di Capua

“You always wanted to go into the catering business—am I right, Miss Tom?”

Rosie nodded dumbly. She felt as though she had been taken on a rollercoaster ride. Her thoughts were all over the place. Every part of her body was in a state of shock. All over again, and to her dismay, she was realising how powerfully Angelo Di Capua still affected her, despite her deep loathing of him.

“How did you know?”

“Amanda kept tabs on you without you realising it, I expect.” He shrugged. “With the Internet and social networks, it’s virtually impossible to remain anonymous these days. At any rate, you might want to think about what was behind this legacy to you. Of course, you must do what your heart tells you to do, but Amanda began cultivating the land around the cottage. There’s quite a bit of it, if I’m not mistaken.”

“This conversation is going nowhere!” Angelo insisted, making a slashing motion with his hand.

“It is my duty to explain the circumstances of this will,” the lawyer murmured, still looking at Rosie. “Amanda made plans of how the land was to be laid out, and what would grow where.”

“But she didn’t know that she would... She couldn’t possibly predict...”

“I think she knew, deep down, that she was not destined for a long life. I also think that she was working up the courage to contact you to give you the land. Fate got in the way.”

“This is so much to take in,” Rosie said, dazed. “Perhaps...perhaps I might just have a look at the cottage.” If nothing else, to see whether she might get full closure at least by visiting the place her one-time friend had obviously come to regard as a haven. Perhaps, more than attending a service in a chapel, visiting that cottage would be a better way to pay her final respects.

“Yes.” She made her mind up, although she didn’t dare look across to where Angelo was sitting in a silence far more threatening than any words. “Yes. I think, Mr Foreman, I would very much like to see that cottage.”

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU’RE WASTING YOUR time.” Angelo rounded on her the second the lawyer had disappeared back to his car, into the night. “You surface here from out of nowhere and suddenly you think you’re a cottage richer?”

Rosie looked up at him. He was one of the few men who towered above her when she was in heels. Once upon a time, that had made her feel very feminine and very protected. Now it made her feel intimidated.

“I don’t think anything of the sort.”

“No. Well, you moved very swiftly from wanting nothing to do with a dubious inheritance to informing us that you would be paying it a visit.” His chauffeur-driven luxury car pulled up alongside them and, as she tried to turn in the direction of the station, Angelo stepped out in front of her, blocking her path.

“Not so fast,” he said grimly.

“I need to get back.”

“Really? To whom?”

“There’s nothing to discuss, Angelo.”

“There’s a hell of a lot to discuss and we’ve only just begun. Get in the car.” He pulled open the car door and moved around so that he was now somehow cornering her into stepping into the long, powerful car. It remained gently purring while George, the guy with whom she had laughed on many an occasion in the past, stared straight ahead with a blank expression.

Their eyes locked and Rosie was the first to look away, ducking into the car with a jerky shrug of her shoulders.

“Address. Where do you live?”

“There’s no need to put yourself out. I’m fine being dropped to the station.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Rosie snapped out her address and leant back in the car seat while Angelo relayed the information to his driver before sliding shut the partition between them. She could feel heat racing through her body like a raging fever and, although her voice was controlled, that was about the only thing that was. Her heart was beating like a jackhammer and she was struggling to string her thoughts together.

Here she was, back in this car with him! Except the good old days were now lost in the mists of time, replaced with a present that bristled with threat.

“So,” Angelo drawled. “Drop the protestations of innocence. We know each other too well. Did you know about any of this before you came here? I never thought that you had anything further to do with Amanda after you left, but maybe I was wrong.”

“No, I most certainly did not know about any cottage! And Mandy and I have not been in contact since... Well, since...” She looked away, briefly unable to speak as the circumstances of the past reared up, threatening to devour her.

She remembered the horror of the last time she and Angelo had met, when she had turned up longing to see him, excited as always, because the short periods they spent apart had always felt like an eternity. He had opened the door to her and she had known immediately that something was wrong. Her smile had faltered and she had stood there in the doorway of his amazing house in Chelsea, no longer a welcome visitor, his lover, but someone to be dispatched. She had known it before he had even uttered a word.

And, actually, he had said remarkably little. There had been no need. He had just held out all those damning little tickets, receipts from the pawnbrokers, and she had known exactly what was happening.

Their glorious relationship had terminated with him believing her to be a cheap, worthless gold-digger who had conned him out of huge sums of money, for he had been a generous lover. He had seen the evidence of her greed in the proof of items of jewellery she had sold. Evidence that had been supplied by her one-time best friend and used against her.

Was it any surprise that he was staring at her as though she was something that had crawled out from under a rock, asking her whether she had known about the existence of a cottage that might be worth something?

Rosie took a deep breath. It made her feel giddy.

“It’s not going to happen,” he informed her coldly. “You. The cottage. Forget it. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

“You have no right to boss me about.” But she did look at him. Thrown into shadow, his face was all menacing angles and planes.

“Amanda and I were not divorced at the time of her death. I will fight you through the courts if you try and get your greedy little paws on so much as a square inch of that place.”

“I never said that I was going to...” But a cottage, out in the country, away from the daily grind of the city; away from Ian, a man she had met once six months previously when she had decided that enough was enough, that it was time to try and join the ranks of the living... A man who had refused to take no for an answer, who had tried to force himself on her, who had become a silent, scary stalker.

A bolt hole away from it all suddenly presented itself to her like manna from heaven.

“Then why don’t you try and justify your sudden decision to check it out?”

“Maybe I think it might be the place to say goodbye to Mandy,” Rosie told him painfully, and he burst out laughing again, just as he had when they had been standing inside the chapel at the crematorium.

“So suddenly you’re all bleeding heart and flowers?”

“Why does it matter so much to you whether I go to that cottage or not? Why does it matter if I decide that it might be somewhere I could live?” Rosie asked.

“It sits on my grounds.”

“Mr Foreman said that it had some land, that Mandy had been cultivating it.”

“Ah, so your little ears had already pricked up even while you were mouthing all the right platitudes about wanting nothing from Amanda.” What else could he expect? The woman looked like an angel and spoke in a soft voice that reeked of milk and honey, and all things good, and yet didn’t he know better? He let his eyes rove over her body. Her coat was open and he could make out a stretchy black dress underneath. He had instant recall of the length of her limbs, entwined with his, as pale as his were brown; her small breasts which she’d used to complain about laughingly but which were perfect, the perfect handful, the perfect mouthful...

He yanked himself back from the brink of memories that had no place whatsoever in his life.

“If Mandy left me that cottage with the land, then why shouldn’t I take it?” Rosie was spurred into demanding.

“At last. A bit of honesty. I can deal with that. It’s so much healthier than the sad face and the honeyed words. If that will is as watertight as Foreman implies, then you’ll be amply recompensed for letting it go. And, as we both know, money talks as far as you are concerned.” He delivered a chilling smile.

What would he say if she decided to retaliate? Rosie wondered. But she knew that she would never do that. Maybe there was just that part of her that wouldn’t be able to deal with the ugliness of the truth, with the fact that, whilst he had been seeing her, he had also been seeing Mandy. Maybe that was something she would never, ever want him to confirm. There was such a thing as too much truth.

“It’s why I told him about all that stuff you flogged,” Mandy had said when challenged. “He was looking for an excuse to break up with you so I gave him one and he took it. Didn’t think twice, in fact! More fool you for thinking that he was your knight in shining armour. People like us don’t get knights in shining armour, Rosie. People like me and you and Jack live off the scraps. Angelo was just another guy stringing you along while giving me the come-on behind your back. You should thank me for getting rid of him for you. You’d never have been tough enough to handle him.”