Rafaello's Mistress

Glory turned scarlet with discomfiture. She never mentioned her family, not only because she could not bear to recall the arrangement that had brought her out to Corfu in the first place but also because she dreaded any further reference to that five thousand pounds which had branded her as mercenary in his estimation.

‘If you’re discreet I don’t see why you shouldn’t phone them,’ Rafaello proffered with the air of a male making a generous gesture.

‘But…but I’ve been calling them every few days since I got here,’ Glory admitted in some bewilderment.

Rafaello tensed in evident shock.

Glory frowned. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t stay on the phone long.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Rafaello breathed in a charged undertone, golden eyes smouldering. ‘Even though I asked you to be discreet, you have been chattering your dizzy head off to your father and your brother every few days?’

Glory paled and stiffened and then slowly nodded, wondering why on earth he was looking so angry.

Rafaello vented a single foreign word that sounded as though it might be a rude word.

Glory gulped and wondered if her own excusable omissions lay at the heart of his annoyance. Feeling horribly guilty, she muttered, ‘You know, I never thanked you for being so very kind to Sam…I just didn’t want to discuss all that stuff that happened. I’m sorry, I—’

‘Shut up,’ Rafaello urged not quite levelly, evidently striving to get a grip on his temper and not one whit cooled by her sincere offering of gratitude. Almost simultaneously he rose from his seat, tossed some banknotes down on the table and strode down the steps to await her.

Her own temper rising, Glory moved to join him at slow-motion speed.

‘Have you the smallest conception of what you have done?’ Rafaello ground out in a raw undertone.

‘Don’t you talk to me like I’m a brick short of the full load!’ Glory warned him in a sideways hiss.

‘I hate to state the obvious, bella mia…’ Rafaello countered grittily, grasping her hand and resisting all her covert attempts to pull free of his hold ‘…but if you have cheerfully let your family know that you’re out here shacked up with me—’

‘Of course I haven’t done that!’ Glory snapped even as pain stabbed her at his use of that particular description of their relationship.

Rafaello stopped dead and turned to survey her. ‘You…haven’t?’

‘Dizzy I may be sometimes but not downright thick. You think I’m proud of being here with you? Well, you think wrong and I’d be ashamed to let my father or my brother know how low I’ve sunk!’ Glory completed in a shaking but fierce undertone.

Rafaello stared at her, his fabulous bone-structure prominent beneath his bronzed skin, his hard gaze darker than the blackest night. He said nothing and it was Glory who turned away first and began walking back in the direction of the car again. She was feeling sick. Her legs didn’t feel strong enough to hold her upright either.

He unlocked the passenger door of the car first. She climbed in, her lovely face pale as marble and as expressionless, but inside herself she was just dying. She had not meant to say all that but he had hurt and provoked her. He swung in beside her and the horrible silence pulsed.

She laced her hands together to stop them trembling. ‘Dad and Sam just think I’ve moved and they haven’t asked the address because they don’t write me letters. They assume I’m using a public phone with a number they can’t call me back on. I didn’t have to tell any lies,’ she explained in tight voice. ‘Neither of them has ever visited me in Birmingham, so they don’t really have much curiosity about my life there.’

‘I’m sorry. I misunderstood,’ Rafaello breathed with icy cool, but there was an underlying roughness to his accented drawl. ‘I employ your father. I thought your brother was a decent kid. I asked you to be discreet for their sake and yours, not my own.’

‘No point advertising that you’re slumming on a temporary basis, is there?’ Glory heard herself say nastily. ‘After all, now you’ve dressed me up in the designer togs, nobody could possibly tell that you took me off a factory floor!’

If the previous silence had pulsed, the one that followed that blunt and inflammatory response fairly sizzled. Again Rafaello said nothing, which really infuriated her. She knew she would have been better saying nothing too but entire speeches that would rip him to shreds were trembling in readiness on the tip of her tongue and holding them back tortured her. He drove off. She would have liked him to grate through the gears and jerk the wheel to demonstrate emotional upset but he drove as if he had just come through an advanced driving test with pronounced care and caution.

She kept quiet for a whole ten minutes and then it got too much for her. ‘I really hate you, Rafaello Grazzini!’

‘Naturally you do,’ he murmured flatly. ‘Sex and debt are hardly a satisfactory basis for any relationship. My choice, my mistake.’

Tears drenched Glory’s eyes in a tidal wave. She squeezed her eyes shut, hating herself for tearing away the barriers and leaving them both without defence. But at the same time she was powerfully tempted to kick him. Why was he making things worse? Was he fed up with her, bored already? But what did it matter if he was? Wasn’t she leaving anyway? For how could she stay with him when her waistline was going to vanish?

Back at the villa, she locked herself in the bathroom. Ripping off her clothes, she got into the shower and turned it on full so that she could sob to her heart’s content. It was an hour before she crept out, eyes stinging from all the cold water she had splashed in them. Mercifully the bedroom was unoccupied. She dug into a drawer for a nightdress, the first she had worn since her arrival, and crawled into bed.

Somewhere in the early hours when she was lying there sleepless, drowning in buckets of self-pity, the bedroom door opened. She froze. She had not bothered to close the curtains and in the clear moonlight she saw a bronzed male silhouette. It was Rafaello, only a white towel knotted round his lean hips. She shut her eyes tight and seconds later noted the slight give in the mattress as Rafaello sank down on it.

She rolled over and arrived on his side of the bed only a moment after he did. Expelling his breath in a slightly startled hiss, Rafaello closed his arms round her. ‘We have to talk…’