Rafaello's Mistress

The talent scout who had sighted her out at a club one evening had tried to get her to sign up with a modelling agency in the north. She had felt terribly flattered but Rafaello had squashed any dreams she might have cherished on that score at source.

‘You’re too small to be a fashion model. The guy can’t be legit. Alternatively, you could find yourself fronting a knitting pattern or some such thing.’

Which Glory had quite understood roughly translated into the news that he did not want her chasing after a modelling career a few hundred miles away. Since the only thing in her life she truly cared about at that time was him, she had thought no more about that offer. Soon after that Rafaello had persuaded her to let him give her a tour of Montague Park, but before they had even completed the circuit of the ground floor his father had interrupted them. Glory had immediately recognised that Benito Grazzini, though he made every effort to hide the fact, was very much shocked to discover that his son was dating his gardener’s daughter.

‘He doesn’t like me seeing you,’ she had said to Rafaello afterwards.

‘He was just surprised. That’s all. You’re too sensitive,’ Rafaello had told her.

But that same week Benito Grazzini had called at the cottage on Glory’s afternoon off. Even worse, that same day her own father was upstairs sleeping off his drinking excesses, rather than out working as he should have been. Ironically, Benito Grazzini had looked awful, his eyes sunk in his head as if he hadn’t slept for days and his greyish pallor no more healthy. But he had wasted no time in spelling out his terms.

As soon as he had told her that her father would be sacked if she did not do as he asked, she had known she had no choice. If she appealed to Rafaello for support she would only be making trouble which would rebound on her family. Rafaello was close to his father but she had only been dating him for a paltry six weeks, and, while she might be in love with him, he had made no such claims. Sobered up, Archie Little had fully supported his daughter’s decision to surrender and leave home.

Glory had decided that the easiest way out of her predicament would be to tell Rafaello that she was accepting the modelling offer. At the time, Rafaello had been only weeks off spending four months setting up a branch office in Rome and she had already been afraid that that separation would end his interest in her. However, she had naïvely believed that they could part as friends.

The following afternoon that she spent with Rafaello had been one long, agonising torment for her to endure until she worked up the courage to tell him that she was going away as well.

‘Let me get this straight…you are dumping me?’ Rafaello had interrupted with a stunned look stamped on his darkly handsome features.

‘No, it’s not like that. It’s just that I’m leaving and you’re going to be abroad most of the time…I can’t imagine when we’d see each other, so isn’t a clean break better?’

‘It’s no big deal,’ Rafaello had confirmed while he smiled steadily at her.

Then she had become the author of her own humiliation. It had already been arranged that they would join his friends for dinner that evening at an exclusive local restaurant. ‘Can we still go ahead with tonight?’ Glory had begged, desperate to spend every last possible moment with him.

‘Why not?’

He had called her an hour before he was due to pick her up to inform her that he would be late and that he would meet her there instead. He had even sent a taxi for her and she had had not a clue what

was waiting for her on her arrival. She could still remember that long, slow walk across the restaurant and her own stumbling, demeaning retreat from the sight of Rafaello kissing the very lovely redhead before he pulled away again.

As if it was a moment trapped in time she recalled how he had looked across the table at her with callous cool as though he didn’t recognise her, as though she was nothing, nobody. It had felt as though everyone in the room was staring at her and laughing, and his friends had certainly been entertained by the scene of her downfall.

Rafaello hadn’t changed, Glory reflected wretchedly as her mind returned to the more pressing problems of the present. He always assumed the worst and he attacked without hesitation. Would he have been so quick to accuse a woman who came from his own privileged background? Of course not. But assuming that Glory could only be on the make came very naturally to him. She shivered, only then registering that the sea spray lashing off the rocks had soaked her to the skin.

‘Glory!’

Hearing that shout, she tensed and saw Rafaello running through the surf towards the rocks. His pale shirt and trousers glimmered in the moonlight. Evidently he had come out in as much of a hurry as she had, for he was barefoot. The wind whipped his shirt back from his bronzed, muscular chest.

‘Glory!’ He sounded frantic and she felt childish hiding from him.

Slowly and stiffly, because her chilled limbs were numb, she emerged from her shelter. For a split-second, Rafaello stilled when he saw her and then he powered over to her at even greater speed. He caught her to him. ‘When I couldn’t find you I thought you had drowned,’ he launched down at her in raw condemnation. ‘Don’t you ever do this to me again!’

Glory looked up at him in astonishment. Drowned? His lean, strong hands were biting into her slight shoulders. That he had been genuinely scared that something might have happened to her was etched into the fierce lines of his hard-boned features and the intensity with which he was staring down at her. ‘Oh, you’d have managed to come to terms with me drowning,’ Glory heard herself say none the less. ‘After all, if I was pregnant my death would be a very cost-effective solution.’

‘Per amor di Dio…how can you even say such a thing?’ Rafaello dealt her a hard look of censure, dark, deep-set eyes scanning her with angry disbelief. ‘What sort of a bastard do you think I am?’

‘You said it,’ Glory told him unsteadily, and she shivered.

‘You’re cold as ice…and you’re wet.’ Rafaello banded a strong arm to her spine and urged her back along the beach. ‘The sirocco wind can kick up a storm in the space of minutes. If you had stumbled into the water at this end of the strand there’s a steep drop just feet out. You can’t swim. Naturally, I was worried.’

Unmoved, cold and weary, Glory said nothing. Typical that he should assume she was too stupid to stay out of a roaring sea, she thought grimly. At the foot of the sloping path he bent and scooped her up into his arms. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he grated. ‘Once you’ve had a hot bath and something to eat, you’ll feel better.’

‘Not as long as you’re around,’ Glory breathed.

His arms tightened round her. ‘You’re unhurt. That’s all that matters—’

He contrived to carry her all the way back into the villa and right up the stairs with only the most minor irregularity in breathing. In the mood she was in, she would have preferred it if he had been winded and forced to abandon the macho stance and put her down. As it was, he deposited her on the chaise longue in the bathroom and proceeded to run water into the jacuzzi.