Rafaello's Mistress

‘Run that by me again,’ Rafaello breathed, abandoning all play with her hair, his Italian accent screaming at her the way it always did when he was very tense.

‘I’m not taking any precautions or using anything,’ Glory clarified shakily.

Rafaello’s hard jawline clenched. Narrowed dark eyes scanned her anxious upturned face and an expression of incredulous fury slowly fired his gaze. In a sudden movement that made her flinch, he sprang out of the bed. ‘But I asked you if it was OK to make love to you!’

A silence, fragile as a sheet of glass about to smash, stretched.

Her heart sinking, Glory gulped. ‘When I said yes, I thought you meant that question literally…I didn’t know you were asking whether or not it might be s-safe,’ she stammered, ready to curl up and die as she realised how foolish she had been. ‘I didn’t think—’

‘You didn’t think. So you’re trying to say that it was only a simple misunderstanding?’ Rafaello ground out, glittering dark golden eyes smouldering with furious condemnation, his accent thick as molasses. ‘Do you honestly think I’ll believe anything that unlikely?’

‘What else could it have been but a misunderstanding?’ Glory was sincerely taken aback by his attitude.

‘How about a textbook case of entrapment?’ Rafaello shot at her with lethal contempt, his hard cheekbones prominent beneath his bronzed skin, accentuating his ferocious tension.

‘Entrapment?’ she repeated without comprehension.

‘I really fell for it, didn’t I?’ Rafaello raked at her fiercely. ‘And, knowing my luck where you’re concerned, you’ll probably fall pregnant—’

‘I hope not…’ It was a stricken whisper.

Shattered by his suspicions, Glory was frozen to the bed. How could he think that she would deliberately run the risk of unprotected sex? How could he believe that she would welcome an unplanned pregnancy? The mere prospect of such a development terrified Glory. She had an instant vision of unwed motherhood combined with horrendous poverty. One or two of her schoolfriends had taken that route within a couple of years of leaving school and had lived to regret the choice.

‘Do you really? If I’ve knocked you up I’ll be keeping you and the kid for the next twenty years at least!’ Rafaello informed her in outraged conclusion. ‘That’s a bloody high price to pay for your precious virginity. I need a shower!’

As he strode into the connecting bathroom and the door slammed shut Glory felt gutted. Her happiness had been so short-lived that it now seemed like an illusion she had dreamt up. How could he imagine that she would sink that low? Was there no end to his distrust? What sort of an idiot had she been to think that she could so easily change his opinion of her? And wasn’t she now getting exactly what she deserved for her foolishness?

Nothing was ever going to change. He was very rich. She was poor. There was no equality and there never would be. Without the equality, maybe respect and trust could not exist, she reasoned wretchedly. She was Glory Little, the gardener’s daughter, the gypsy’s daughter, the factory worker. He was Rafaello Grazzini, an extremely succe

ssful businessman and famed for his entrepreneurial skills.

He was hurting her again. How could she be letting him do that to her a second time? Didn’t she ever learn? She had agreed to be his mistress. He had said he only wanted sex. She had given him what he wanted. End of story. What on earth had she been doing, clinging to him? A textbook case of entrapment? Glory shuddered, nausea stirring in her sensitive stomach. As if she was some greedy, scheming little tramp he had picked up off a street corner!

She threw herself off the bed and viewed the tangled bedsheets with shamefaced discomfiture. Well, retribution had come even faster than she had warned. ‘If you don’t value yourself, no man will,’ her mother had once told her harshly. So what had she expected to achieve when she had sold herself? Choking tears of regret clogging her aching throat, Glory knew she needed to get a grip on herself before she risked facing Rafaello again. But her dress was nowhere to be seen. Just as she was wondering if her dress lay beneath the bedspread heaped on the carpet, she heard the shower switch off and panic filled her.

As her case was still downstairs, she raced over to the sleek built-in units that covered one wall and yanked open a door. Seeing a row of shirts hanging, she trailed one off a hanger and dug her arms into it at frantic speed. Within ten seconds she was out of the bedroom and hurrying down the stairs. Catching a glimpse of Rafaello’s manservant clearing a table in one of the ground-floor rooms, she realised that the only true sanctuary available was the outdoors. As she sped out of the front door, emerging into the bright path of the outside lights, she found herself in the very teeth of a surprisingly strong wind. But she hesitated only a moment before she fled down the path to the beach and into the cover of the tamarisk trees ringing the cove.

CHAPTER SIX

GLORY could not credit that she had come out to a fabulous, scenic Greek island in the month of June only to find herself fighting to walk through a howling gale with sand blowing in her face.

The sea was foaming like a cauldron, mirroring the seething tempest of emotion inside her. Rafaello despised her. He truly did. She had to accept that but she didn’t want to accept that, couldn’t bear to accept that, she discovered. All the messy feelings she had buried five years earlier were escaping their bonds. Taking shelter beneath an overhanging rock in the massive outcrop near the end of the beach, she sat down, closing out the angry surge of the surf. With those painful emotions came the memories…

Glory had left school at sixteen. She had wanted to stay on but her father had asserted that no Little had ever been academic, and she had found work as an office junior at the local auctioneers. By the time she reached eighteen, sightings of Rafaello had become rare events. After all, the Grazzinis had divided their time between their Italian and English homes and, having completed his business degree, Rafaello had bought a London apartment and only visited Montague Park occasionally.

Glory had taken a long time to come to terms with their first humiliating encounter when she was sixteen and the horror of having been delivered home to her furious parents like a juvenile delinquent. When, afterwards, Rafaello would drive past Glory and award her a nod or smile of recognition, she would barely raise her head in acknowledgement. Yet, in spite of the lack of encouragement, one week after her eighteenth birthday Rafaello had raked his Ferrari to a halt in the drive and offered her a lift.

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Glory had told him through the window he lowered, straining every sinew to play it cool while striving not to overdo it.

‘How would you like to go out to dinner tonight?’

She had got into his passenger seat almost before he finished speaking.

‘That was the magic combination, was it?’ Rafaello had murmured with a slanting smile that turned her all-too-vulnerable heart upside-down and left her dizzy.

‘Maybe I’m just hungry.’ The truth would have been that she had never been invited out for a meal. The males she met invited her to bars, clubs, sports fixtures and the cinema.

For the following six weeks Glory had walked on air and her feet hadn’t touched the ground once. True, mixing with his friends had sometimes been a strain. She had discovered entire conversational topics that had previously been unknown to her. Winter skiing, opera, ballet, yachting and the total agony of not being able to locate the latest must-have designer handbag. While warning her that only grief could be coming in her direction, her own friends had pooled their clothes and loaned her outfits to wear. Dating Rafaello had been something of a community effort.