The Italian Demands His Heirs. LYNNE GRAHAM

Mancini marries you, you will never have cause to fear that scandal again because naturally the man who referred to you in those terms would scarcely be marrying you if you were a...er...woman of ill repute.’ Her grandfather selected the phrase with distaste. ‘Obviously, a rich, extremely successful man from his aristocratic background would never consider such a wife.’

      ‘I’d sooner marry a toad than Raffaele di Mancini!’ Vivi flung back at the older man in furious disbelief. ‘But the real truth is that I don’t want to marry anyone!’

      ‘Winnie is happy,’ he reminded her doggedly.

      ‘My sister’s a people pleaser and I’m not!’ Vivi countered with spirit. ‘I love her to death but what’s all right for her isn’t all right for me. When I get married, I want it to be real, not some phoney cobbled-together arrangement for the sake of appearances and status!’

      ‘I can’t believe you’d want to keep Mancini!’ Stam sniped, refusing to get the point or listen and hanging onto his mindset with the tenacity of a bulldog gnawing at a particularly tough bone.

      Refusing to rise to that bait, Vivi tossed her head. ‘I can’t believe you’re such a miser that you couldn’t save my foster parents’ home for them without attaching unreasonable conditions to your generosity! We’re supposed to be family but you don’t behave like family are supposed to behave. But then what would I know about that, never really having had that experience?’ she muttered, falling into an awkward silence.

      ‘You are my family and I will always look after you,’ Stam intoned stubbornly.

      ‘Looking after me is not marrying me off...however briefly...to that Mancini rat! And how could you possibly persuade him to marry me anyway?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘I suspect he would sooner go to his grave than agree to marry a woman he believes to have been a prostitute.’

      In his old-fashioned way, Stam winced and sighed, ‘I have what you could call an irresistible proposition to lay before Mancini, which will persuade him.’

      ‘I don’t care if you’re offering him the moon as an inducement. Well, actually I do,’ Vivi admitted on a fresh gust of anger that made her almost violet eyes shimmer as bright as polar stars against her porcelain skin. ‘Having anything to do with him at all, never mind marrying him, would be humiliating!’

      ‘No,’ Stam had argued equally strongly. ‘This time around, all the power will be in your hands, Vivi. Don’t you want that experience? Don’t you want to see the man who insulted you forced to eat his own words?’

      No, Vivi could live without revenge, she conceded as she emerged from the memory of that argument. As long as she never saw Raffaele di Mancini again in this lifetime, she would be happy. He was a reminder of too much that she wanted to forget and leave buried. She had become very fond of Arianna and, no doubt at Raffaele’s behest, Arianna had immediately dumped their friendship as well. And then there had been her seemingly growing relationship with Raffaele himself at the time. She closed off that train of thought angrily. Just a stupid kiss, just one stupid kiss, even a teenager would have known not to get unduly excited by something that trivial, she castigated herself.

      But then Vivi knew that she tended to be more vulnerable with men than other more experienced and emotionally secure women. Vivi had not known security until she was fourteen and living with her final set of foster parents, the kindly John and Liz, who had reunited the three sisters within their home. Before John and Liz, there had been a series of unsuitable foster homes where Vivi had been bullied, verbally abused and, on several occasions, sexually threatened.

      Winnie, Vivi and Zoe had lost their parents in a car accident. At the age of twenty-three, Vivi barely remembered them. Their father, however, had been Stam’s youngest son, who had been estranged from him for years. Stam had not even known his grandchildren existed until they had contacted him as adults, seeking his financial help when their foster parents were facing the repossession of their home where they were still caring for troubled children. He had welcomed them into his life with great enthusiasm but had set outrageous terms for giving them his help, demanding that they all marry men of his choice to raise their status.

      Vivi had still to make up her mind about what she thought of her grandfather. Was he, simply, an incredible snob? Or crazy? Or, more worryingly, the kind of personality who had to get revenge on anyone who wronged a member of his family? Well, Winnie and Vivi had been wronged but their youngest sister, Zoe, had only been wronged by unfortunate foster care. Vivi knew she had to stand up to her grandfather for Zoe’s sake because Zoe was frail and emotionally vulnerable, subject to extreme shyness and panic attacks. Zoe would never manage to fight with the older man; indeed Zoe was so self-effacing that the very idea of her confronting anyone struck the bolder Vivi as ridiculous.

      For that reason, Vivi knew that she had to stand strong. She tried not to be bitter about the past, for bitterness achieved nothing. At present she and Zoe were living in a small, luxurious town house owned by their grandfather and offered to them rent-free. But the house felt empty without Winnie’s toddler son, Teddy, running about and Vivi was too distrustful of her grandfather to spend the money she wasn’t currently forking out on rent. Instead she was saving that money, waiting anxiously for the day when he might tire of her defiance and throw them back out into the cold.

      That meant that she still couldn’t afford to get her awful hair straightened again, she thought ruefully, picking up a corkscrew copper curl and dropping it again with antipathy. It was the hair from hell and she had been born with it and she was only content with her appearance when she could transform it into a smooth straight fall. Right now it was rioting across her shoulders, round her face and down her back like a rag doll’s wig, she thought irritably. Not that Jude, her current boyfriend, seemed to mind.

      But then Jude didn’t really seem to mind much about anything. She had met him at her gym where he worked as a martial arts teacher. He was blond and laid-back, and he had a good body but she had yet to experience a desire to see that body naked. Possibly their casual relationship came down to being mates more than anything else, she reflected ruefully. If she hadn’t met Raffaele and been immediately attracted to him, she would’ve believed that she was really not that bothered about sex. Men usually came and went in Vivi’s life without her ever particularly caring. Only Raffaele had hurt her and that had come along with a whole lot of other damage so she tried not to dwell on his rejection.

      It was thanks to Raffaele that she had been forced to work in a succession of menial jobs before finally surrendering to the very effective changing of her surname. Only then had she contrived to shed the scandal that had seen her hounded out of two good jobs. And all because she had taken a first job straight after graduating with her marketing degree as a receptionist in a business that had ultimately turned out to be functioning as a modelling and an undercover escort agency, with many of the models working as escorts on the side. And as if that hadn’t proved bad enough a pop-up brothel had been operating in the back of the building as well, and it had been the police raid of that facility that had exploded the agency’s cover and led to her being captured on camera running down the street to escape the whole explosive mess. That photo and her name had been splashed over a notorious tabloid newspaper and in that photo she had looked ridiculously glamorous, because Arianna had cleared out her wardrobe and had given her a pile of her discarded but still gorgeous outfits to wear.

      Her phone buzzed and she lifted it, hoping it wasn’t Jude calling to cancel because she had been looking forward to the film they were supposed to be seeing. Instead a voice she had hoped never to hear again sounded in her ears. That voice was deep and rich and accented with a positive purr. Even Raffaele’s voice dripped sex appeal, she had once thought, but right at that moment, with the phone clamped too tightly to her ear, she couldn’t think rationally at all because that he should actually dare to contact her had not only never occurred to her but it also plunged her deep into shock.

      ‘Vivi?’ he queried. ‘It’s Raffaele. We need to talk.’

      Vivi rang off without speaking and immediately blocked his number. He might be willing to dance to her grandfather’s tune