The Italian Boss's Mistress. Lynne Graham

but even more terrified of being found eavesdropping, Pippa crept back out to the corridor and fled without her coat. In that one devastating dialogue, she had learned why Cheryl instead of herself was to be Venstar’s next finance manager. Pippa Plain? Her tummy rolled with nausea but she refused to let herself cringe. Ricky Brownlow had laid it on the line: unlike Pippa, Cheryl was extremely attractive and popular with men. The curvaceous brunette’s looks rather than her ability had influenced her selection.

      A cold, sick knot of humiliation in her stomach, Pippa swallowed hard and blinked back stinging tears. It was so unfair. That job had had her name on it and she had worked darned hard for promotion. Nobody had the right to judge another person on their appearance. It was utterly wrong and against all employment legislation and Venstar deserved to be sued for treating her so shabbily. She imagined standing up at a tribunal and being forced to relate Ricky’s demeaning comments and compressed her lips with a shudder of recoil. No, there was no way that she would take the company to a tribunal and make herself an object of sniggering pity.

      Her best friend couldn’t call her a looker…Pippa Plain? Was that a fact? Doubtless Ricky would never credit that when she was fifteen years old a modelling agency had offered her a lucrative contract. Of course, her father had been outraged by the mere suggestion that his daughter would engage in what he deemed to be a lowbrow career. But for the eight years that had followed Pippa had secretly cherished the memory of her one stolen day of rebellion against Martin Stevenson’s strict dictates. She had gone to the agency in secret and let them make her up and do her hair. She had watched in fascination as cosmetic magic and clever clothing had transformed her from a pale, skinny beanpole into a glowing, leggy beauty. Then the old lech of a photographer had made a pass at her and sent her fleeing for home again, convinced that everything her father had said about the dangerous corruption of the modelling industry was true.

      Why shouldn’t she try to effect even some small part of that transformation on her own behalf? She could attend the party looking her best just to confound Ricky Brownlow and that sexist louse, Andreo D’Alessio. How could a man be so stupid that he put beauty ahead of brains even in a business capacity?

      Standing in the rain getting absolutely soaked through, Pippa dug out her mobile phone and rang her friend Hilary. Hilary Ross was a hairdresser and when asked if she could squeeze Pippa in for a last-minute hair-rescue mission, she was so taken aback by the request that she gasped, ‘Are you being frivolous at last? Is it Christmas or something?’

      ‘Or something,’ Pippa confirmed a little unevenly. ‘I’m going out tonight and it’s really important.’

      Hilary had a heart the size of a world globe and told her to come straight over, while adding that Pippa should have known better than to think that she had to phone and ask one of her oldest friends for an appointment. ‘Especially when you only make the effort to get your hair done about once a year!’ she teased in conclusion.

      Pippa caught an underground train that would take her to Hilary’s salon in the west London suburb of Hounslow. As she was jostled by other passengers while she stood in the aisle because there were no seats available Pippa’s teeming thoughts were troubled. Sad though it was to acknowledge, she was relieved that her father was not alive to be shamed and disappointed by her failure to win promotion. But then when had she ever managed to meet her parent’s expectations and make him proud of her? she asked herself with pained and guilty regret.

      Her mind travelled back almost six years to the summer that her family life had been destroyed. She had been just seventeen when her parents and three other families had gone on their final holiday together to the Dordogne region of France. Her friendship with Hilary Ross stretched back as far as their childhoods. The Ross family had been part of the group that had gone to France and as the holiday had been an annual event there had been no reason to suspect that that year would be any different from any previous year. But that particular summer everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. In fact it had been a disastrous vacation for all concerned but nobody had had the nerve to admit that and it had still lasted almost the full six weeks.

      No sooner had they arrived in France than her then best friend, Tabby, had got involved in a passionate secret fling with a French guy staying nearby and had become so besotted that she had scarcely noticed that Pippa had been alive for the remainder of their stay. During that same period, however, Pippa had had her heart broken and her self-esteem smashed without anybody even noticing.

      But the conclusive life-altering event of that fatal holiday had been the dreadful car accident that had left Pippa’s mother dead and put her father into a wheelchair. Tabby’s father, Gerry Burnside, had got drunk and crashed a car full of passengers, shattering the lives of all his friends. Pippa had been much closer to her mother than she had ever been to her harsh and demanding father and she had been devastated by her mother’s sudden death. Before the crash her father had been a science teacher and an active sportsman and he had never managed to come to terms with his disability.

      Furthermore, as a young man Martin Stevenson had wanted to be a doctor but had narrowly missed out on the exam grades required. From the hour of Pippa’s birth, her father had been determined that his daughter should live out his dream of becoming a doctor for him and she had been pressed into doing her academic best from a very early age. But the consequences of that appalling car accident, which had also claimed the lives of Tabby’s father, Hilary’s parents and both Jen’s and Pippa’s mothers had traumatised Pippa and she had had to tell her father that she could not face a career in medicine.

      The cruel intensity of her father’s disappointment had been almost more than Pippa’s conscience could bear and his bitterness had been terrible to live with. For nearly six years afterwards, Pippa had nonetheless been her parent’s main carer. But, no matter how hard she had worked to please him with high grades in the economics degree she’d pursued and with tender care of his needs at home, he had never forgiven her for turning her back on the chance to become a doctor. Pippa remained wretchedly aware of what she saw as her own shortcomings. She was totally convinced that the really gutsy woman whom she wanted to be would have been fired by an unquenchable desire to study medicine after that car accident rather than put off for life and convinced that she was too soft to last the course.

      When she made herself remember just how much she had once adored France, she could hardly credit that she had not visited the country of her own mother’s birth since that tragic summer. She had even made excuses to avoid attending Tabby’s wedding. Thankfully, however, Tabby’s husband, Christien, brought his wife over to London on regular visits, so Pippa had been able to maintain contact with her friend. But wasn’t it really past time that she came to terms with her mother’s death and visited Tabby and Christien at Duvernay, the Laroche family’s beautiful château in Brittany? How often had her friend invited her? Her conscience twanged. Shouldn’t she spend at least part of the holiday she had to take with Tabby in France?

      ‘Oh, no, this is the day you close at lunchtime and I completely forgot!’ Pippa groaned in dismay when Hilary, having met her at the door of her tiny apartment took her across the passage into the hairdressing salon, which was strikingly silent and empty. ‘For goodness’ sake, why didn’t you remind me that it was your half-day?’

      Hilary was small and slim with enormous grey eyes and spiky blonde hair that had the very slightest hint of blue to match her T-shirt. Only a year Pippa’s junior, she actually looked barely eighteen and she grinned. ‘Are you kidding? Do I look that patient? You’re finally going out on a date and I can’t wait to find out who the bloke is!’

      Pippa stiffened. ‘There’s no bloke. It’s the big party for the new MD tonight—’

      ‘But you were all out of breath on the phone and I thought you were excited—’

      ‘Not excited…upset,’ Pippa conceded jerkily. ‘I bombed out at work, I fell flat on my face—’

      ‘What on earth—?’

      ‘I didn’t get the job,’ Pippa muttered in a wobbly undertone and then the whole unhappy story came tumbling out.

      Hilary listened and tried not to wince while she dug into a cupboard