His Wedding Ring Of Revenge. Julia James

hand. It’s quite ridiculous the fuss he makes over her!’

      Was that defensiveness in her mother’s voice, or just accusation? Rachel wondered. Whichever it was, it just made her long to be a million miles away.

      She remained of that opinion for the rest of her stay at the villa. She did her very best to stay out of the way, heading down to the tiny private beach below the villa to swim in the sea, or sunbathing by the pool with a book.

      Her mother and Enrico seemed to spend most of their time out and about, and she was glad. She felt no easier in Enrico’s company than in her mother’s. He seemed to be a remote figure, middle-aged and heavily built, someone around whom the whole household revolved—including, primarily, her mother.

      Rachel hated seeing them together. Up till now she had accepted their relationship. It had lasted over six years, ever since Enrico Farneste, attending a conference in Brighton, had walked into the expensive boutique her mother ran in the fashionable Lanes to buy something for his current mistress and decided that Arlene Graham would make him a much better one. Rachel had been packed off, first to her mother’s elderly widowed aunt and then to an expensive boarding-school, to get her out of the way, and her mother had been whisked off to Italy.

      Rachel had known her mother had become the mistress of Enrico Farneste, head of the giant Farneste Industriale. That it was his luxurious villa she lived in, his yacht she took her holidays on, his gilded world she moved in. And she had known, too, that it was thanks to Enrico Farneste that she went to her exclusive boarding-school, that Auntie Jean now lived in a nice bungalow outside Brighton, not a council flat, and that when she stayed with her mother in London it was Enrico Farneste who ended up paying for the hotel, and supplying the money her mother spent.

      Her mother was untroubled by the irregularity of the liaison.

      ‘On the Continent these things are understood,’ she had told Rachel, in her crisp voice. Her vowels had completely lost their flattened, lower-class origins, and her spoken English now was almost as good as her expensively educated daughter’s. ‘In a Catholic country a wife can never be divorced, so men have no choice but to stay married. It’s a perfectly acceptable arrangement, and no one thinks anything of it. Just as no one,’ she added offhandedly, ‘thinks anything of the fact that your father and I were not married.’

      She had sounded so convincing that Rachel had believed her.

      Until Enrico’s son had ripped that illusion from her with a handful of casually vicious words. As ugly as they were true.

      Surely to God that should have been warning enough?

      But it hadn’t been.

      The ugliness of the words had not been enough to make her forget the beauty of the man who had delivered them. From that day onwards Rachel had hidden a shameful secret—that in her adolescent heart every male who ever came her way, whether real or on screen, was compared to Vito Farneste. Even as the years passed, and the routine of school dominated, still, in the dark recesses of her secret mind, she knew she could never expunge the image, burnt on her retina by the bright Italian sun, of that figure walking down the steps with lithe, leashed grace, like a dark, beautiful young god.

      She had told no one—Vito Farneste had remained a secret sin.

      It was one she was to pay for bitterly.

      Was still paying for. In dreams that had turned into a nightmare.

      A nightmare that was the dark, deadly sting of Vito Farneste’s eyes as she told him her conditions for relinquishing the Farneste emeralds.

      He sat back in his chair.

      ‘Get real,’ he said, his voice soft. Soft as blood.

      Rachel could feel the scorn, the derision, lashing out at her like the fine, cruel tip of a whip across the broad desk. She saw him reach out a long-fingered hand and pull open one of the drawers of the desk, take out a leather cheque-book case. He flicked it open, and picked up a gold pen, sliding off the top and holding it over a cheque.

      ‘Cash,’ he said. ‘That’s the currency for women like you and your mother. Hard cash.’ His eyes narrowed, and Rachel could feel the leashed fury lashing within. ‘But don’t even think of trying to bleed me. You can have a million euros in exchange for the emeralds. Not a cent more. Take it or leave it.’

      He was starting to write. Assured, decisive, the black ink flowing smoothly across the blank spaces of the cheque.

      ‘No sale.’

      Rachel’s voice was controlled. Very controlled. It had to be.

      Vito didn’t even pause in writing, just went on, scrawling ‘one million euros’ in the required space.

      ‘You didn’t hear me, did you?’ Rachel said. Was her voice less controlled? No—she would not allow it to be. Must not allow it. Too much depended on her keeping her control total. Absolute. Unbreakable.

      Vito glanced up, his look corrosive. ‘I heard you make a joke in such poor taste I would not have thought even you could stoop so low.’

      He went back to completing the cheque, signing it with his dark, flowing hand. He tore the page from the cheque-book and pushed it across the desk towards her.

      ‘I’ve dated it three days from today. Bring me the emeralds tomorrow, and then you can cash the cheque.’

      She didn’t even look at it. Instead, in a tight, rigid voice, she said, ‘It was no joke. If you want the emeralds back, you marry me. That’s all. Take it or leave it.’

      She could not resist throwing back his own words to her. It helped, however minutely, to ease by a fraction the tension racking her so tightly she thought she might snap at any moment.

      Vito set down his pen. It was a slow, deliberate movement. Then, in a movement equally slow, equally deliberate, he leaned forward again.

      ‘I would rather,’ he spelt out, his voice low, lethal, ‘take a toad as a wife than you.’

      His eyes rested on her. Dark. Deriding.

      A dull stain of colour seeped out along her cheekbones.

      ‘I’m not suggesting a real marriage.’ She tried to inject scorn into her voice, but it didn’t seem to come out that way. She could feel the colour spreading now, staining her cheeks. ‘I simply want your ring on my finger for a limited duration.’

      A pang struck her, stabbing with a pain she should have got accustomed to but hadn’t. Couldn’t.

      ‘Six months—no longer.’

      The tightness in her voice was unbearable, crushing her larynx so she could hardly speak. The pain stabbed at her again.

      She tried to stare him down, match his cold, levelling gaze with one of her own.

      ‘I have already given you my answer. Do you add selective hearing to all your other…flaws?’ was Vito’s response. ‘Including, of course, stupidity. Do you imagine I would ever, under any circumstances, marry you?’

      Her face was so tense it ached, all the way across her jaw, up through the bones in her skull. Her spine was stiff with the strain of holding herself upright.

      ‘I know what you think of me, Vito— I don’t need it spelt out.’

      A slashing, hostile smile flashed across his face. Utterly devoid of humour.

      ‘Then, if you know that, even more do I question your sanity in coming here like this. Daring to try and sell back to me what was never your bitch of a mother’s to take!’

      Emotion—deep, agonised—twisted in Rachel’s face.

      ‘Don’t speak of her like that!’ Her words spat at him.

      Vito’s face darkened, as if night had closed over him.

      ‘Your mother got her greedy, grasping claws into my father and wouldn’t let go! She made my