‘Once Mancini marries you, you will never have cause to fear that scandal again because naturally the man who referred to you in those terms would scarcely be marrying you if you were a...er...woman of ill repute.’ Her grandfather selected the phrase with distaste. ‘Obviously, a rich, extremely successful man from his aristocratic background would never consider such a wife.’
‘I’d sooner marry a toad than Raffaele di Mancini!’ Vivi flung back at the older man in furious disbelief. ‘But the real truth is that I don’t want to marry anyone!’
‘Winnie is happy,’ he reminded her doggedly.
‘My sister’s a people pleaser and I’m not!’ Vivi countered with spirit. ‘I love her to death but what’s all right for her isn’t all right for me. When I get married, I want it to be real, not some phoney cobbled-together arrangement for the sake of appearances and status!’
‘I can’t believe you’d want to keep Mancini!’ Stam sniped, refusing to get the point or listen and hanging onto his mindset with the tenacity of a bulldog gnawing at a particularly tough bone.
Refusing to rise to that bait, Vivi tossed her head. ‘I can’t believe you’re such a miser that you couldn’t save my foster parents’ home for them without attaching unreasonable conditions to your generosity! We’re supposed to be family but you don’t behave like family are supposed to behave. But then what would I know about that, never really having had that experience?’ she muttered, falling into an awkward silence.
‘You are my family and I will always look after you,’ Stam intoned stubbornly.
‘Looking after me is not marrying me off...however briefly...to that Mancini rat! And how could you possibly persuade him to marry me anyway?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘I suspect he would sooner go to his grave than agree to marry a woman he believes to have been a prostitute.’
In his old-fashioned way, Stam winced and sighed, ‘I have what you could call an irresistible proposition to lay before Mancini, which will persuade him.’
‘I don’t care if you’re offering him the moon as an inducement. Well, actually I do,’ Vivi admitted on a fresh gust of anger that made her almost violet eyes shimmer as bright as polar stars against her porcelain skin. ‘Having anything to do with him at all, never mind marrying him, would be humiliating!’
‘No,’ Stam had argued equally strongly. ‘This time around, all the power will be in your hands, Vivi. Don’t you want that experience? Don’t you want to see the man who insulted you forced to eat his own words?’
No, Vivi could live without revenge, she conceded as she emerged from the memory of that argument. As long as she never saw Raffaele di Mancini again in this lifetime, she would be happy. He was a reminder of too much that she wanted to forget and leave buried. She had become very fond of Arianna and, no doubt at Raffaele’s behest, Arianna had immediately dumped their friendship as well. And then there had been her seemingly growing relationship with Raffaele himself at the time. She closed off that train of thought angrily. Just a stupid kiss, just one stupid kiss, even a teenager would have known not to get unduly excited by something that trivial, she castigated herself.
But then Vivi knew that she tended to be more vulnerable with men than other more experienced and emotionally secure women. Vivi had not known security until she was fourteen and living with her final set of foster parents, the kindly John and Liz, who had reunited the three sisters within their home. Before John and Liz, there had been a series of unsuitable foster homes where Vivi had been bullied, verbally abused and, on several occasions, sexually threatened.
Winnie, Vivi and Zoe had lost their parents in a car accident. At the age of twenty-three, Vivi barely remembered them. Their father, however, had been Stam’s youngest son, who had been estranged from him for years. Stam had not even known his grandchildren existed until they had contacted him as adults, seeking his financial help when their foster parents were facing the repossession of their home where they were still caring for troubled children. He had welcomed them into his life with great enthusiasm but had set outrageous terms for giving them his help, demanding that they all marry men of his choice to raise their status.