After that affair, Raffaele had begun vetting her friends as well, recognising that his sister was too vulnerable to be left at the mercy of those ready to take advantage of her gullible nature to entertain themselves at her expense.
‘Presumably you have already discussed this idea with Vivi,’ Raffaele remarked curtly. ‘And she, of course, will be keen.’
‘Keen?’ Stam surprised him by laughing out loud. ‘Vivi hates you and she definitely doesn’t want to marry you! I’m afraid that persuading Vivi to the altar is your personal challenge.’
‘You’re seriously expecting me to believe that she isn’t involved in this proposition?’ Raffaele incised in disbelief.
‘Of course, she isn’t involved. Vivi doesn’t work off logic, she works off emotion. My...er...suggestion that she marry you made her very angry but I’m sure a high achiever of your calibre will know exactly how to transform her view of you,’ Stam completed with wry amusement brightening his snapping dark eyes. ‘If you want that dossier to stay private, you have to get Vivi to the church.’
‘That’s to be my penance, is it?’ Raffaele pronounced between gritted teeth.
‘If you like to think of it in those terms, do so. It’s immaterial to me. You give her a wedding ring but you keep your hands off her,’ Stam Fotakis warned him bluntly. ‘I want her back as untouched and unharmed as she is now. Is that understood?’
Dark colour edged the smooth planes of Raffaele’s high cheekbones, accentuating his taut bone structure. He could not credit the warning he was being given. ‘I have never touched an unwilling woman in my life,’ he countered with icy hauteur.
‘Well, you will find my granddaughter very unwilling,’ Stam forecast with satisfaction. ‘I dare say you’re accustomed to a different response from women...although you didn’t rise to the bait of my PA giving you a come-on in the lift.’
‘That was a set-up?’ Raffaele breathed in thundering disbelief, momentarily betrayed into speech.
‘I like to know the nature of the men I deal with and you passed the test. You’re not a womaniser,’ Stam retorted crisply. ‘I am very protective of Vivi.’
It was on the tip of Raffaele’s tongue to say that on the one occasion he had had Vivi in his arms, the very last thing she had been was unwilling, but he swallowed back that unwise admission, choosing instead to be grateful that there were, after all, some things that Vivi’s grandfather did not know.
And now, Raffaele reflected as he travelled back to his London town house in the comfort of his limo, he had to decide what to do next. It was ironic that he had always had the comfortable belief that being very, very rich protected you, he conceded, stunned into shock and an unfamiliar sense of powerlessness by the situation he found himself in. But wealth hadn’t, after all, protected Arianna from her misfortunes from conception, nor was it sufficient to hold at bay an old man determined to claim restitution for a sin that Raffaele had not actually committed.
He had not called Vivi a prostitute. For a start, she had been an escort rather than a prostitute and he knew the difference, having met women of both persuasions in even the most exclusive circles and learned how to detect and avoid them. That Vivi had almost slipped past his guard still infuriated him. The prostitution designation, however, had been manufactured by the press to provide an attention-grabbing headline.
Unfortunately, that truth would not remove that dangerous dossier on his sister from Stam Fotakis’s calculating and vengeful hands...
* * *
An upsetting memory was playing through Vivi’s mind as she put on her make-up for her date with her boyfriend, Jude. She had had a blazing row with her grandfather during his birthday party at her sister and brother-in-law’s home in Greece and she hadn’t let off steam by telling her sisters about it because she had known it would upset them when they preferred to play happy families.
‘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 ha
d set outrageous terms for giving them his help, demanding that they all marry men of his choice to raise their status.
Vivi had still to make up her mind about what she thought of her grandfather. Was he, simply, an incredible snob? Or crazy? Or, more worryingly, the kind of personality who had to get revenge on anyone who wronged a member of his family? Well, Winnie and Vivi had been wronged but their youngest sister, Zoe, had only been wronged by unfortunate foster care. Vivi knew she had to stand up to her grandfather for Zoe’s sake because Zoe was frail and emotionally vulnerable, subject to extreme shyness and panic attacks. Zoe would never manage to fight with the older man; indeed Zoe was so self-effacing that the very idea of her confronting anyone struck the bolder Vivi as ridiculous.
For that reason, Vivi knew that she had to stand strong. She tried not to be bitter about the past, for bitterness achieved nothing. At present she and Zoe were living in a small, luxurious town house owned by their grandfather and offered to them rent-free. But the house felt empty without Winnie’s toddler son, Teddy, running about and Vivi was too distrustful of her grandfather to spend the money she wasn’t currently forking out on rent. Instead she was saving that money, waiting anxiously for the day when he might tire of her defiance and throw them back out into the cold.