Desire's Captive

CHAPTER ONE

'Saffron, my dear, you look wonderful—so like your mother!'

Behind the pride in her father's voice, Saffron caught the note of pain and understood the reasons for it.

For so long they had been estranged from one another—almost from the day of her mother's death when she was a schoolgirl of twelve and her father a busy, grief-stricken man of forty. Now that was over, miraculously they had found the way back to one another, and both of them treasured their new-found relationship.

'You approve then?' Saffron pirouetted in front of her father, the gauzy skirts of her dress fluttering round her body. The dress had been hideously expensive! She had bought it in London, especially for this occasion, which had been meant to herald the beginning of their long-awaited holiday together, but as he was the head of Wykeham Industries, Sir Richard's time was not entirely his own, and on the eve of their departure for Rome he had had to tell Saffron that it would be several days before he could join her at their villa in southern Italy.

'Most definitely,' Sir Richard assured her. 'And that's after being presented with the bill.' He marvelled at the change in her, from rebellious teenager to poised young woman; and it had happened almost overnight. He was so proud of this daughter, the child he had so nearly lost completely through his own bitterness following his wife's death. He had forgotten that Saffron had lost a mother too, and his guilt showed a little in the concern with which he regarded her.

'I am sorry about our holiday,' he added, 'but with luck I shouldn't need to be in San Francisco for long. You'll enjoy yourself tonight at least. Signor Veldini appears to have invited most of Rome society to this party.'

'To impress you so that you'll agree to invest in his business,' Saffron commented shrewdly. The warm gold skin and dark red hair she had inherited from her mother, coupled with a bone structure a model would have envied, had resulted in looks that had made her a photographer's favourite almost all her teenage life. Add to the sculptured perfection of her face, a perfect pocket Venus-shaped body, and it was no wonder that his daughter never lacked male escorts, Richard Wykeham thought as he watched her.

The dress she had chosen for tonight's party made her look as fragile and ethereal as a water-nymph. A frown creased his forehead momentarily, and seeing it Saffron smiled encouragingly.

'Don't worry,' she whispered as she took his arm and he opened the door of her hotel room. 'I won't let you down by sulking all evening because you can't come with me—those days are gone.'

'They should never have been. If I hadn't been so wrapped up in my business ...'

'We made a pact not to dwell on the past,' Saffron reminded him, the green depths of her eyes momentarily shadowed as she remembered the arid years of her adolescence and the pain of losing her mother.

A limousine was waiting to ferry them to the Veldinis' impressive villa in one of Rome's most exclusive suburbs. Saffron had spoken no less than the truth when she had stated that Signor Veldini was hoping to persuade her father to invest in his company, but Richard Wykeham had a formidable reputation as an astute businessman and Saffron knew that it would take far more than a society party to convince him.

As they sped through the city she glanced at her father's face. She had been so looking forward to their holiday—their first together since the death of her mother. Her father had done his best. There had been a constant stream of mother-substitutes in the form of boarding schoolmistresses and housekeepers, but it hadn't been enough, and in an effort to make her father take notice of her she had involved herself in scrape after scrape. It was only within the last twelve months—since her twentieth birthday—that she had abandoned the wild set she had taken up with after leaving school—young adults like herself; the first generation offspring of self-made men, whose fathers had more money than time to spend on them and who themselves had been set apart from their parents by virtue of the public school education their parents had so proudly bought for them.

When would parents learn that children needed love, not money? Saffron wondered to herself. The greater part of her own rebellion had sprung not from any desire to share the wilder exploits of her set, but simply to draw her father's attention to her. It had taken the death of one of that set from drug abuse to shock her into the realisation of where her life was going, forcing her to attempt to reach out for her father one last time, and miraculously he had responded.

In the last twelve months there had been far fewer aimless shopping sprees and hectic weekends of partying, and instead Saffron had discovered that she was becoming more and more involved in the welfare side of her father's business. His companies were known for their caring attitude towards their employees and, encouraged by her father, Saffron had become involved in a newly organised department designed to take this one step further, particularly to help the single-parent families amongst the employees, and Saffron had found this so absorbing that she had gradually let her old life slip away.

She knew her father was glad. If she did go out nowadays, it was normally for dinner, or to dance in a far more sedate nightclub than those she had previously frequented. Many of her old friends scoffed. Some of the boys in her crowd had been particularly mocking, reminding her of how she had always been the life and soul of the party, ready for any enterprise, always the first to agree to some impractical scheme.

But that was before she had realised the fine tightrope they were all walking. It was considered smart in her set to indulge in drinks and soft drugs, although something in Saffron had always made her hold back from experimenting herself— not from any moral objection but simply because she had seen the effect it had on others, and was reluctant to lose control of herself and her life in the same way—something she had a morbid fear of happening, which was probably why she had never become seriously involved with any of her dates. None of them knew, for instance, that she was still a virgin. Each thought that he was the only one not to enjoy a more intimate relationship with her. This was a belief she had fostered knowing that there was more safety for her in their fear of scorn at being the single failure than there ever would be in making public her innocence. Not even her father knew that the stories and rumours circulated about her in the gossip columns were just that, and somehow she found herself shy of broaching the subject with him. However, she was beginning to wonder if he hadn't started to suspect the truth. There had been a particularly amused glint in his eyes the previous weekend, for instance, when she had emerged from a taxi outside their London home, dexterously extricating herself from the expert and amorous embrace of the younger son of one of the French Ambassadorial staff. Jean-Paul was considered something of a catch in the circles in which she moved, but Sir Richard had been rather scathing about the young Frenchman's morals and abilities. 'Dilettante,' he had snorted, 'and not even particularly good at that!' And contrary to her previous practice, Saffron had found herself listening to and agreeing with her father's summing up.

Tonight, because he was going away and she wouldn't see him for some days, she wanted him to carry a good image of her. She had dressed carefully for the party; her beautiful Belinda Bellville dress, all shimmering white silk, and a froth of

underskirts, the low-cut neckline trimmed with pink silk roses—and she was young enough to wear it—the diamonds which had been her mother's; tiny studs for her ears arid a matching necklace and bracelet, both delicate and dainty. For the occasion she was wearing her hair up, in a soft chignon, tiny wisps of dark red hair caressing her neck. The silk rustled as her father helped her out of the car. The Veldinis' villa was ablaze with lights, and a liveried footman threw open the doors as they arrived.

'Very fin-de-siècle,' Sir Richard murmured in Saffron's ear as they climbed a shallow flight of marble stairs which led to an impressive marble-columned ballroom.

Signor Veldini had obviously been on the lookout for them. He reached the door at the same moment as they did, greeting Saffron's father with profuse and voluble exclamations of pleasure, before turning to admire Saffron.

'And this ravishing creature is your daughter? You are a very lucky man!'

His appreciation was entirely male and all Italian, and Saffron responded with a calm smile; A small movement several yards away caught her eye, and as she lifted her head she found herself looking straight up into the eyes of a tall, dark-haired man, standing alone. The dark hair and tanned skin proclaimed his Italian origins, but he was far taller than any other man in the room; topping even her father's six feet by a couple of inches, and even at this distance Saffron could see that his eyes were grey. She caught her breath as she saw the twinkle in them; as though he had read her mind when she had smiled to coolly and so reprovingly at Signor Veldini, and all at once her mood lightened. She had been feeling very depressed because her father could not travel on to southern Italy with her as they had planned. He would join her at the villa later when his business in San Francisco had been concluded, he had promised, but still she was disappointed.