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 for the right price but she was not. Or was she? She thought of John and Liz’s predicament and the great debt she and her siblings owed to the couple for their kindness and care at a time when the girls had been young and vulnerable. And then she felt sick with uncertainty while she wondered how Raffaele had got her phone number. We need to talk. Raffaele di Mancini, born into an Italian dukedom even if he didn’t use his title, just had to be kidding! Only if he had a sense of humour he had never revealed it to her.
He was good at staring though, she recalled abstractedly, suddenly thrown back to their first meeting over the meal that Arianna had insisted on inviting her to. And all Arianna’s intimidating brother had seemed to do was stare at her, eyes as dark as jet between thick black lashes. Eyes that were set in an extravagantly handsome face, eyes that could unexpectedly warm to a melted golden caramel hue and send her heartbeat inexplicably racing.
Yes, there had been very little normal getting-to-know-you conversation over that family dinner with poor Arianna being left to pick up the slack and usually sharp Vivi finding her tongue inexplicably glued to the roof of her mouth for the first time in her life. And what had she done? While Arianna had blithely chattered, Vivi had stared back, fascinated by Raffaele in the strangest way, little arrows of heat darting through her as she’d noticed new and seemingly important things about him. The commanding angle of his black brows; the masculine strength of his jaw line; the olive-toned planes and hollows of his fabulous bone structure; the classic arch of his nose and the wildly sensual curve of his sculpted lips. She had noted his perfect manners, his elegant hands and the fluid movement of them. She had sat there like a schoolgirl ogling him, forgetting to eat, forgetting everything, seduced by the new energising excitement filtering through her bloodstream like a charge of adrenalin.
And much good it had done her, she recollected with self-loathing, emerging back into the less exciting present...
* * *
Across London, Raffaele cast down his phone and moved without hesitation on to Plan B. Vivi wouldn’t speak to him. Well, he had to admit that that was a surprise but he had to find a way to make her deal with him. If civil and calm didn’t work as an approach, he would take a leaf out of her grandfather’s book and try heavy duty persuasion. And if that didn’t work out either, he would work right through the alphabet in plans until he found the magic combination to make Vivi do what he needed her to do for Arianna’s benefit.
Raffaele had a rare sleepless night, spent remembering his dismay at his stepmother’s sudden death from an overdose when he was only twenty and still a student. Her passing, mere months after his father’s demise, had impacted heavily on Raffaele’s life. Without any warning or