Rafaello's Mistress

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN Glory walked into the London headquarters of Grazzini Industries, every male head in the vicinity swivelled to watch her.

Her face was unforgettable: wide slanted cheekbones, bright eyes the colour of bluebells and a wide, full pink mouth. Even with her honey-blonde hair caught back, and clad in khaki combats and a casual top, she attracted attention. All the men stared: they couldn’t help themselves. That stunning face and lush figure endowed her with an extraordinary degree of sex appeal.

Impervious to the attention that she was receiving, Glory was engaged in frantically talking up her flagging courage. Rafaello would listen to her, of course he would listen. So what if it had been five years since they had last met? So what if they had parted on bad terms? He had hurt her so much that even now she could not bring herself to recall how she had felt back then but she knew she had not hurt him. Powerful, influential businessmen were not known for their sensitivity. Maybe she had dented his ego a little but then he had never suffered from any lack in that department. She wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that Rafaello barely recalled their painfully brief fling.

Yet she remembered every day, every hour, every minute. She remembered how naïve and trusting and stupid she had been. She remembered that last night she had hoped to spend with him and the resulting humiliation followed by the agony of loss and rejection. The oldest story in the book, she told herself, fighting to suppress those debilitating memories. She had wanted love but he had only wanted a temporary distraction. He might so easily have become her first lover but they had broken up before she trusted him enough to say yes.

Left alone in the steel-walled lift as it climbed higher and higher, Glory rested her hot, damp brow against the cooling metal surface. Pull yourself together, girl. Chin up, hold your head high. Never mind that her nerves were eating her alive. Or that her wardrobe did not run to a smart suit. Or that she felt horribly intimidated by Rafaello’s giant steel and glass office building. None of that mattered, she told herself. She was here to help her family: her dad, her kid brother, Sam.

Stepping out on to the top floor into an atmosphere of exclusive comfort and elegance, Glory approached the smart reception desk.

‘I have an appointment with Mr Grazzini…’ Her voice emerged all small and crushed by the sheer weight of her nervous tension.

The attractive brunette looked her up and down with a faint frownline etched between her perfect pencilled brows. ‘Your name, Miss…?’

‘Little. Glory Little,’ Glory supplied hurriedly.

‘Please take a seat…’ The cool ice-blue leather seating area was indicated.

Glory reached for a glossy women’s magazine. She flicked through fashion pages adorned by women wearing single garments that cost more than she earned in six months. Interest wandering, she glanced around herself, hugely impressed by her surroundings but anything but comfortable with them. Though it was certainly no surprise to her that Rafaello was doing extravagantly well in business. He had started out rich and would no doubt go on getting richer. Didn’t it run in his genes? He had once told her that the Grazzini clan had started coining it as merchants during the Middle Ages.

No wonder they hadn’t ended up together, she reflected, striving to see the humour of her own pitiful ignorance at the age of eighteen. Youthful bravado had persuaded her that things like different backgrounds and what some people called ‘breeding’ didn’t matter in a world approaching the second millennium. To think otherwise was incredibly old-fashioned, she had told a less naïve friend, who had implied that Rafaello could only be after ‘one thing’. When her father had tried to warn her off too, she had just laughed and pointed out that Rafaello didn’t give two hoots about silly stuff, like her having left school at sixteen!

‘Miss Little…?’

Snatched from her teeming thoughts, Glory glanced up to see a young man in a smart suit studying her. Clutching her bag, she got up. ‘Yes?’

‘Mr Grazzini will see you now.’

Glory managed a rather strained version of her usual sunny smile and looked down at her watch. ‘Right on the dot of ten o’clock. Rafaello hasn’t changed a bit. He was always dead keen on punctuality.’

In receipt of that chatty response, the young man looked taken aback. Glory flushed, hot embarrassed colour drenching her peaches and cream complexion right to the roots of her hair. She had said more than was required and city people didn’t gush like that and offer up unnecessary facts at the drop of a hat. But nerves had always run away with Glory’s tongue and, given the chance, she tended to rush to fill every awkward silence. Not this time, however. She knew why he had looked momentarily astonished and knowing did nothing for her self-esteem. The guy just could not imagine someone as ordinary as her ever having been on first-name terms with his rich and sophisticated employer.

‘I’m Mr Grazzini’s executive assistant,’ he informed her. ‘The name’s Jon…Jon Lyons.’

‘My name’s Glory,’ she said in turn, grateful her companion wasn’t being as stand-offish as she had expected and scolding herself for her own prejudice.

‘Very unusual…’ Jon Lyons, who was traversing the wide corridor that lay before them at the crawling speed of a snail, paused to throw her a warm and appreciative smile. ‘But very apt.’

Glory resisted the temptation to tell him that she owed her name to the fact that her father had celebrated his only daughter’s birth rather too thoroughly and had then registered her name wrongly on her birth certificate. Instead of getting to be the lofty-sounding Gloriana as her fond mother had planned, she had ended up just being called Glory. Being only five feet one inch tall and blessed with a surname like Little, she was well-accustomed to being teased. And if Jon Lyons was trying to flirt with her, she didn’t want to know.

At the age of twenty-three, she had met far too many men whose sole interest in her related to her embarrassingly lush curves. Dates that turned into wrestling sessions followed by aggrieved and aggressive ‘Why nots?’ had figured all too often in her experience. She cringed from that male attitude, found it demeaning and threatening. It was as if her body wasn’t her own and she was expected to share it whether she wanted to or not. Being bone-deep stubborn and determined to hang on in there waiting for love and commitment, she had always been punitively mean in the sharing stakes.

Her companion kept on trying to chat her up but she played dumb. The closer they got to the imposing door and the foot of the corridor, the more enervated she became and her steps grew shorter and slower. Rafaello would be on the other side of that door waiting for her. But he had agreed to see her, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that hopeful? At least, his secretary had come back to her with an appointment fairly quickly and she wasn’t fool enough to think that she could have got that far without Rafaello’s agreement. Rafaello was rich and important and much in demand. She was really lucky that he was giving her the chance to speak up in her family’s defence, she reminded herself.

So what was she actually going to say to Rafaello? Please, please think again? Please don’t sack my father? Please don’t blame him for my kid brother’s antics?

Sam had done a stupid, stupid thing. Helping himself to the keys entrusted to their parent during the housekeeper’s overnight absence, Sam had thrown an impromptu party in the Grazzini family’s fabulous English home, Montague Park. The party had got out of hand. Panicking at the damage being done, Sam had run to their father for help. Then their father had made his mistake. Instead of admitting his son’s guilt, her father had foolishly and unsuccessfully attempted to cover Sam’s tracks and deny his involvement. Paling as she contemplated the challenge of trying to excuse such dishonest behaviour, Glory walked in through the door spread wide for her. Once over the threshold, she froze.

Her companion, who had remained in the corridor, had to nudge her a few inches deeper into the room to get the door closed behind her. Dry-mouthed, Glory scanned the vast office, her attention jumping from the contemporary glass and wrought-iron furniture to the wall of tinted glass windows and the sheer luxury of so much unoccupied and wholly unnecessary space. Where was Rafaello? Appreciating that he had yet to join her, she breathed in deeply and slowly exhaled again, fighting to get a firmer grip on herself.

But her own mind was working against her like a secret enemy. As she stood there doing the careful breathing exercises that a magazine article had said were a great aid to achieving a calm state of mind, she started getting something rather akin to flashbacks. Her first true sighting of Rafaello Grazzini eight years earlier…

Glory’s father, Archie Little, was the head gardener at Montague Park. Just as his father had been and his father before him, for her ancestors had worked on the Montague estate for a couple of centuries. About seventy-odd years back, Rafaello’s grandfather had married the last of the Montague line and had resisted all pleas to assume his wife’s maiden name. The fair and rather chinless Montagues had been replaced by the infinitely more exotic and good-looking Grazzinis with their dark flashing eyes and aggressive jawlines.

Before her father became head gardener the Littles had lived in the village several miles from Montague Park, but when he was promoted he had been provided with a comfortable cottage on the estate. Her parents had been delighted but Glory had been distraught because all her friends had lived in the village. Being stuck in the midst of several thousand acres of beautiful unspoilt countryside had seemed to her a fate worse than death.

One afternoon soon after that move, out walking and still wallowing in self-pity, Glory had enjoyed one of those rare life-changing experiences: she had seen Rafaello Grazzini on a scrambler motorbike, racing a friend with a breathtaking lack of caution for his own safety. No youthful male had ever appeared to greater advantage to an impressionable fifteen-year-old girl than he did that day. She had watched him wheeling the powerful bike to a halt and wrenching off his helmet. His black hair had blown back from his vibrant dark features, strong and bold against the washed-out colours of a too dry English summer. Glory had discovered right there and then that living in the rural depths had one major consolation: Rafaello Grazzini, six years older, and unlikely to notice she occupied the same earth but very worthy of becoming the target of her first besotted crush.

Only somewhere along the line something had gone wrong, Glory conceded dully. She had not outgrown the crush. Even when he had maddened and mortified her beyond belief in an unfortunate first encounter the following year, she had stayed dangerously loyal and keen. And when, two years later, all her dreams came true and she actually went out with Rafaello it had taken precious little encouragement for her to move from the base of that juvenile infatuation into being passionately in love.

Without warning, a door on the far side of the office opened. Sprung from her unwelcome mental trawl back through past events, Glory jumped as though someone had fired a gun behind her and spun round.

‘I’m afraid I was waylaid by one of the directors,’ Rafaello murmured, cool as a long drink of icy water on a hot day.

Glory was trembling and she couldn’t help herself. It had been five years since she had seen him. Five long years that had taken her from girl to woman but, in the blink of an eye, all that painfully acquired maturity was wrenched from her by the simple act of Rafaello walking into the same room. She gazed at him in shock, for nothing could have prepared her for the strength of her own reaction. At eighteen, her cure had been steadily and repeatedly telling herself that she had romanticised and embellished her image of him beyond belief. And there he stood, every inch of him a blatant rejection of such wishful thinking…

Six feet two inches tall, much taller than she had allowed him to be in her memory, and with the wide shoulders, broad chest, narrow hips and long muscular legs of a natural athlete. Not even that formal fine grey pinstripe suit so superbly tailored to his powerful frame could shield her from the acknowledgement that whatever he had been doing in recent years he had not been allowing himself to run to seed.

Having only reached as high in her appraisal as the pristine white collar encircling the elegant knot on his dark red silk tie, Glory tipped her head back and ran headlong into the stunning effect of brilliant dark eyes fringed by inky individual lashes that stood out against his smooth olive skin. Mouth dry and heart suddenly racing so fast that it felt as if it was lodged in her throat, Glory just stared back, dragged at terrifying speed up onto the heights of helpless excitement.