‘I’m relying on it,’ said Rachel. She went into her office. In the doorway she paused and looked back. ‘Oh, we’ve got a deadline. Two o’clock with Mr Jensen. You’d better find out what the group want in their sandwiches.’
Mandy grimaced. ‘Right you are. Action stations.’ She was already on the telephone when Rachel closed the door.
The room was uncannily quiet without the hum of the photocopier. Rachel sank down behind her desk and stretched out her legs in front of her. They were trembling.
There was an unfamiliar tension between her shoulderblades. She bent her head forward and sideways and the tension eased. It did not go away entirely; though. If she was any judge, it was not going to go away until Riccardo di Stefano was safely back on his own side of the Atlantic.
‘Blast,’ she said.
She rubbed her hand across the back of her neck in an uncharacteristic gesture. The muscles felt like iron. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she remembered another time when she had done the same thing. Her hand fell.
Another time and a whole world away. She got up and went to the window. Outside the rain ran greyly down the window. But the world of her too vivid memory was drenched in sunshine.
Rachel tipped her head forward and rested her brow against the window-pane. How could she ever have thought she had forgotten?
She closed her eyes and let the memories flood back.
She had never wanted to go. She had tried so hard not to. But she had been eighteen and the opposition had all been over twenty-one and had had the big guns.
‘It will be the holiday of a lifetime,’ her father had said heartily. Too heartily. Rachel had not noticed that at the time, of course. ‘You’ve been tying yourself to your books too much. Now the exams are over you deserve a really good time. Judy and I both want you to go.’
And that had been the first objection. Rachel had never warmed to her father’s second wife. Judy felt the same, she’d been sure. Most of the time they’d been polite to each other but that was as far as it had gone. Rachel had frankly been appalled at the idea of going off on a Caribbean holiday with her stepmother for company.
She had not said that to her father, of course. And what she had said had only caused him to persuade harder.
‘Judy needs a holiday as much as you do. It’s been a tough year, with the takeover and everything. She needs to get away from it all. Sun, sea and a bit of exotic night-life.’ He laughed. ‘Do you both good.’
Rachel said, ‘Exotic night-life doesn’t sound like me, Dad.’
But he was not to be deflected. ‘Nonsense. All girls of your age want to spread their wings a bit.’
Presumably Judy had told him that. Presumably she had also convinced him that she and Rachel were virtual contemporaries and could not be better friends. None of Rachel’s protests had any effect.
‘It’s very good of Judy to suggest it,’ her father said in the end.
His tone had stopped being hearty. Rachel recognised an order when she heard it. He might just as well have said she did not have a choice.
‘She’s been invited to stay with some very old friends. They have taken a house in the Caribbean. Film-star luxury, I’m told. Judy needn’t take you along, you know. Since she’s offered, you owe it to all of us to accept gracefully.’
So she went. Later it occurred to her to wonder whether her father was already suspecting his young wife’s restlessness. Maybe he’d sent Rachel along to act as some sort of chaperon. Or even as a substitute for conscience. If he had, he had been singularly out of luck, she thought now.
She had not suspected any such thing at the time, of course. To be honest, Rachel had not seen much of her father or Judy, particularly over the last year when her father’s company had got into difficulties. Rachel herself had been working furiously hard to get into university. She and her father had met occasionally over the coffeepot in the small hours. They’d exchanged tired quips. But they had not really talked since he’d married Judy.
So, if there were strains in the marriage, at that time Rachel had not known it. She’d just known she did not like Judy, and she had not been able to imagine why her stepmother would want to take her on holiday.
It had been some time before she’d found out why, but she had. By that time she’d no longer cared. She’d had her own hurt and her own guilt by then. By that time she’d no longer cared about anything except getting away and never seeing any of the inhabitants of the Villa Azul ever again.
Rachel opened her eyes and stared blindly at the London rain. In all the three weeks she had spent at the Villa Azul, it had never rained once, she remembered. She would wake up in the huge colonial bed to a sound like rain, but when she’d rushed to the window it had been to find that the sound was only the wind through the palm trees. She had been so homesick. So hungry for familiar sights and sounds. So alone.
Open-eyed, she stared out at the rain. Alone! She gave a harsh laugh that contained no amusement at all. Oh, she had been alone all right. Until that last night, when she had learned, briefly and unforgettably, that there were worse things than being alone—and that the worst loneliness of all was when you could not reach the person you were with. She felt sick, remembering.
But there was nothing else for it. Now she had started, the whole thing was coming back in cruel Technicolor.
The first time she’d met Riccardo di Stefano she had almost run away He had been like an alien from another galaxy. Well, they all had been, at the Villa Azul. By that time Rachel had learned to expect every new acquaintance to possess a degree of sophistication she knew she could not deal with. By the time he arrived, Riccardo di Stefano was exactly what she was expecting.
Tall and slim, he arrived in the Caribbean with an all-year-round tan and the inscrutable dark glasses to go with it. His hair was so dark that it looked blue in the glare of the midday sun. He was wearing piratical cutoffs that could have belonged to the ragged urchins in the town, had it not been for the indiscreet designer label at the back of the belt.
He was not bothering with a shirt that day and even to Rachel’s jaundiced eye its absence revealed muscles that could only be called impressive. He moved lazily, gracefully, as if he knew every eye was on him and did not give a damn. Rachel loathed him on sight.
The Villa Azul loved him. It was only to be expected.
But by that time she was loathing the Villa Azul and all its inhabitants with a ferocity that she would never have thought possible. It could not have been further away from the relaxing holiday her father had fondly described. There was no possibility of relaxing. Rachel had never felt more on edge in all her eighteen years.
One thing her father had been right about was the luxury, though. Rachel had never seen anything like it. The house party seemed to drink champagne at all hours, change their designer outfits three times a day and have personal trainers and hairdressers in constant attendance.
In fact, at first she thought Riccardo di Stefano was a new fitness expert. Only, then he took off the arrogant shades to reveal even more arrogant eyes. Rachel revised her opinion rapidly.
Slowly he surveyed the company scattered round the pool and the exotic gardens. His expression announced that he was supremely bored. None of the tennis professionals and expert scuba-divers would have allowed themselves to look like that. It would have cost them their job. It did not make Rachel like him any better.
And then their eyes met.
It was oddly shocking. Even on edge as she was, Rachel felt her inner tension go up a couple of notches. She stepped back as if she had walked too close to a fire.
The stranger in the designer rags looked her up and down. Rachel had