Visconti's Forgotten Heir. Elizabeth Power

physical attributes together with her background, however, had caused men to expect more from her, Magenta thought bitterly, than she’d been prepared to give. But she had resisted them all until...

      By instinct alone she knew that there had only ever been one man who had set her body on fire, and that man was Andreas Visconti. But everything he had said to her today—and the other night in the wine bar—implied the contrary. For some reason he truly believed that she had had some sort of sexual liaison with Marcus Rushford....

      As she lathered soap over her body a picture of a room and then a whole apartment rose before her mind’s eyes. A coldly furnished, expensive apartment. Marcus’s! she realised, shocked. She had been staying there. No, not staying. Living there, she thought, shaking her head to induce more of the same troubling recollections. But try as she did her memory refused to oblige. Whatever it was that still remained buried, she knew that it fell within a definite period. And that was the nine or ten months prior to the day just over five years ago when her mother had woken up unusually early and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor.

      Her cell phone was ringing just as she was stepping out of the shower, and Magenta raced over and snatched it off the windowsill.

      ‘Hello, darling.’ Emotion welled up inside her until she thought her heart would burst just from hearing her little son’s voice.

      ‘Aunt Josie asked me to ask you if you got the job.’

      Of course. She’d talked of nothing else for weeks, she reflected, shrugging into her robe and thinking of the better life she had told Theo she’d be able to give him if she was lucky enough to get through the interview—of the new football boots and the Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover she had promised him.

      She shuddered as she thought of how—almost—she had had no job at all, and wondered how she would have coped if Andreas had blocked her chances of working for his company altogether. If he hadn’t gone on to offer her the temporary position she had finally agreed to take.

      ‘Tell Aunt Josie I didn’t take that one because I got an even better one.’ She tried to sound excited, although she didn’t know what could be better about securing a job that put her immediately under a man who had no reservations about showing how much he despised her. Except the money...

      Selling herself to the highest bidder.

      She shivered, wondering if by agreeing to work for him she wouldn’t be playing right into Andreas’s hands.

      She had to take this job—she didn’t have any choice. Even if she was still dangerously and unbelievably attracted to him, and even though he was displaying a ruthless desire to get even with her.

      But was he going to use her vulnerability and her attraction to him to do it? she wondered, with a contrary mix of apprehension and excitement. Everything about him had suggested he intended to when she had been in his office today. If he was, she thought, she only hoped she would be strong enough emotionally to resist him. At least taking this job might help to restore her memory—even if she had a deep-rooted anxiety inside about what remembering might reveal....

      * * *

      Andreas had arranged to pick Magenta up the following Monday morning, and he noticed the curtains twitch in an upstairs window as he pulled up outside a characterless nineteen-seventies semi-detached house which, from the two doorbells beside the rather jaded-looking front door, had obviously been converted into two flats.