Rafaello's Mistress. Lynne Graham

Lyons, who was standing down at the reception area at the far end of the corridor, trying not to look as if he was watching them. He skimmed his attention back to her with derisive dark eyes that sent a wave of colour flaming across her slanted cheekbones. ‘Five minutes here and you’ve got my executive assistant panting at your heels like a pet dog. Do him a favour. Give him the big freeze on the way out!’

      ‘Go to hell!’ she hissed and stalked away, shivering with rage and shame and bitterness.

      For what could she do and what could she possibly say to defend herself? Rafaello thought she was greedy and unscrupulous. Whether she liked it or not, she had to accept that five years ago she had made a serious error of judgement and now she was paying the price for it. She had allowed her father to take that cheque for five thousand pounds and keep it. Archie Little had been in debt and desperate for money. After Glory had endured that demeaning interview with Rafaello’s father she hadn’t had enough fight left in her to resist her own parent’s demands and stand up for what was right. She had felt microscopic in size by the time Benito Grazzini had finished talking to her. He had left her with few illusions about the myth of social equality.

      Yet she had still sensed that Rafaello’s father did not like what he was doing any more than she had liked having such cruel pressure put on her. He had just wanted her out of his son’s life and had evidently decided that the end must justify the means. So he had pointed out that he would be well within his rights if he dismissed her father for his less than adequate job performance at that time. She had known that, shorn of stability of both home and employment, her father would have never found the strength to get his life back on track.

      In that same year, six months before Glory reached her eighteenth birthday and before she even went out with Rafaello, her stable, happy home life had begun to unravel at the seams. Without the smallest warning her mother, Talitha, had died—a heart attack—there one moment, gone the next. Her mother had been the strong one in her parents’ marriage and the cement that held their family together. Her father had gone to pieces and hit the bottle hard.

      Glory had found herself engaged in a constant losing battle to keep the older man sober. No matter how hard she struggled to support him, he had often been in no state to work and on many occasions he had simply wandered off during working hours to drink himself into a stupor. Most employers would have sacked him. But, surprisingly, Benito Grazzini had been sympathetic towards the grieving widower and he had kept on giving Archie Little another chance to straighten himself out. That reality had given him strong ammunition when he asked Glory to leave her home.

      ‘Look at your family background and tell me that you are not wrong for my son. I believe that it is best for everyone concerned that you should move away and make a fresh start somewhere else,’ Rafaello’s father had pronounced with the harshness of a man who had steeled himself to perform an unpleasant duty. ‘In return I will promise to do all that is within my power to help your father overcome his problems.’

      Her background. No further explanation had been required once that word had been spoken. Her once respected father had been behaving like a drunken layabout, and her late mother? Talitha Little had never won local acceptance, for she had been born and bred a gypsy. In Romany parlance, she had ‘married out’ and once she had made that choice custom had demanded that even her own family have nothing more to do with her. Yet the new life she had chosen with her gadjo husband, Archie Little, had been no more welcoming. Her herbal lore and superstitious ways had been foreign and threatening to her village neighbours. Talitha had much preferred the privacy of their isolated woodland cottage on the Montague estate.

      As Glory re-entered the lift on the top floor of Grazzini Industries she was too worked up even to register Jon Lyons’ hovering presence nearby. Her brother and her father were waiting for her in a café near the train station. She wondered what on earth she was going to tell them. That Rafaello Grazzini had made her an offer she could not accept? That she would sooner boil in oil than be any man’s kept woman? But most especially his?

      Oh, yes, most especially his woman! Distraught with the strength of the conflicting feelings attacking her, Glory hurried through the crowded city streets. Why was Rafaello doing this to her? Five years ago, they had only been together six weeks. Long enough for her to fall irrevocably in love but not long enough to persuade her to surrender her virginity to a male who had made not the smallest mention of love.

      She could thank her mother for that ingrained caution. Talitha Little had believed that a woman’s most precious possession was purity, for that was exactly how she had been raised. When Glory had first been given that message she had not even properly understood what physical intimacy was. But long before she reached the age of temptation she had absorbed the unnerving impression that her life would go horribly wrong if she broke that rule before she was safely married.

      Rafaello had thought that was hilariously funny until he realised over the space of several weeks that Glory was serious. Then he had suggested it was a little weird and that, with all due respect to her late mother’s convictions, Glory really should not let herself be affected by such superstitious fears.

      Emerging from that recollection, Glory discovered that she was lodged stock-still in front of a shop window and smiling with a silly far-away look fixed to her face. Her smile died. As she crushed out that ruefully amusing recollection of Rafaello’s efforts to persuade her into his bed, her dulled eyes stung with hot tears of regret.

      She walked on, striving to concentrate and find a solution to her family’s predicament. Sam was a minor in the eyes of the law and Rafaello could press charges to his heart’s content, but he had no proof whatsoever that her kid brother had been involved in the theft of that snuff box. The worst that was likely to happen to Sam was…what? A police caution? Sam had never been in trouble before and how would he bear up to that challenge?

      ‘Sam’s different,’ Glory’s mother had once muttered in exasperation. ‘He’s too sensitive and emotional for a boy. He’ll get the life teased out of him if he doesn’t toughen up.’ Happily, Sam’s talent on the sports field had made him popular at school. But he had once shaken Glory with the admission that he hated sport of all kinds. She wondered how many of his friends knew that Sam spent every spare moment sketching people and animals. Or that sometimes Sam listened to depressing items on the news and became deeply upset by them, that he took things too much to heart.

      And what about her father? Might he fall off the wagon and begin drinking again? He was a kind man, a good man, but he was weak, she acknowledged painfully. In times of trouble, he crumpled.

      Her father and her brother were seated at the back of the half-empty café nursing cups of tea. Their eyes flew to her as she drew level with their table. She sat down beside her brother, deeply troubled by the misery that he could not hide.

      ‘What did Mr Grazzini say?’ her father demanded, his lined brow furrowed beneath his greying blond hair, his faded blue eyes red-rimmed with the effects of strain and insufficient sleep. He looked older than his fifty-seven years and drained.

      ‘Dad…’

      ‘It’s bad, isn’t it? If only this had happened before Benito Grazzini retired and handed over the estate to his son,’ Archie Little muttered in a bitter tone of defeat. ‘That Rafaello’s as hard as nails. I don’t know what you ever saw in him, Glory. But nothing I could say would turn you away from him—’

      ‘Sam,’ Glory cut in hurriedly, turning to address her brother before her father could say anything more in a similar vein. There was little resemblance between brother and sister, because Sam was much taller with very dark hair and dark eyes. He had taken after their mother’s side of the family, while she had inherited their father’s fair colouring. But right now, for all his size and athletic breadth, Sam looked very much like a scared ten-year-old kid.

      ‘What happened?’ her brother prompted anxiously.

      ‘Rafaello told me that a very valuable snuff box went missing while you and your friends were partying—’

      ‘Are you saying something was stolen? Well, it couldn’t have been any of us!’ Sam gave his sister a shocked look