‘Rachel Vaile,’ she answered, her voice unwavering.
The receptionist frowned.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Vaile, there doesn’t seem to be an entry for you.’
Rachel was undismayed. ‘If you phone his office and give my name, you will find he will see me,’ she said, with calm assurance.
The receptionist looked at her uncertainly. Rachel knew why, and gave an inward, caustic smile.
You think I’m one of his mistresses, don’t you? And you don’t know what to do if I am. Am I on his current list? Or will he have given his PA orders not to put me through if I phone or, even worse, show up in person?
The caustic smile turned bitter. She knew the routine. Oh, yes, she certainly knew the routine.
‘One moment, please,’ said the receptionist, and picked up the phone.
Rachel’s lips pressed together. She would be checking with his PA, as a good Farneste employee would always do.
‘Mrs Walters? I have a Ms Rachel Vaile in Reception. I’m afraid I can’t see an appointment in the book.’
There was a moment’s silence.
Then, ‘Very well. Thank you, Mrs Walters.’ From the expression on her face Rachel could tell what she had been instructed to do—dispose of her.
She was about to put the phone down. Calmly, Rachel intercepted the movement and took the receiver from her. The receptionist made a startled objection, but Rachel paid her no attention.
‘Mrs Walters? This is Rachel Vaile. Please inform Mr Farneste that I am in Reception. Tell him…’ she paused only for a hair’s breadth of time ‘…that I am in a position to offer him something that he considers very precious to him. Thank you so much. Oh, and Mrs Walters? You should tell him straight away. In three minutes’ time I will be out of the building, and the offer will be withdrawn. Good day.’
She handed the receiver back to the receptionist, who was looking at her speechlessly.
‘I’ll wait over there,’ she told the woman coolly. She glanced at her watch, picked up her clutch handbag, and went across to the island of white leather sofas surrounding a huge circular table on which the day’s papers were arranged with punishing neatness.
She picked up a copy of The Times and started to read the front page.
Precisely two minutes and fifty seconds after she had handed the phone back to the receptionist, a phone at the desk rang. Rachel turned the page of the newspaper and continued to read.
Thirty seconds later the receptionist was standing beside her.
‘Mrs Walters will meet you on the Executive Floor, Ms Vaile,’ she told Rachel.
There was a note in her voice that Rachel would have been deaf not to recognise.
Astonishment.
The lift glided her upwards. Bronzed walls reflected her in infinite regression, increasingly shadowy. As the doors opened a neatly dressed middle-aged woman stepped forward. Her face was bland.
‘Ms Vaile?’
Rachel nodded, face expressionless.
‘If you would come this way please…’
She led the way forward along a wide expanse of space, carpeted in cream and interspersed with pieces of large, abstract statuary. It was imposing, impressive. Designed to be intimidating. Intimidating to impudent interlopers such as herself, who had no business being here.
But Rachel was here to do business.
Nothing more.
And nothing less.
As they gained the far side of the atrial space she could see another reception desk, with two young women working there, both exceptionally beautiful. Rachel’s mouth tightened, but her expression did not alter. She was led past the two receptionists, aware of them looking at her as she walked by, and then past the office that was clearly Mrs Walters’s own. She was taken straight up to a large pair of chestnut wood double doors.
Mrs Walters knocked discreetly, and opened one of them.
‘Ms Vaile, Mr Farneste,’ she announced.
Rachel walked in.
Not a trace of emotion was in her face.
He was exactly the same. Seven years had not altered him. He was, as he would remain all his days, the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
Beauty, she thought absently. Such a strange word to apply to a man. Yet it was the only one that fitted Vito Farneste.
The sable hair, the superbly chiselled face, the high, sculpted cheekbones, the fine line of his nose, the edged plane of his jaw.
And his mouth. Perfect, like an angel’s. But not an angel of light.
An angel of sin.
Temptation made visible.
He leant back in his black leather chair, perfectly still. One hand rested on the surface of the ebony desk. Against that blackness it seemed pale, yet its olive hue was dark against the pristine white of his cuff, the golden gleam of his watch.
The other hand rested on the leather arm of his chair, elbow crooked slightly, long fingers splayed, motionless.
He did not get to his feet.
Rachel heard the soft click of the door and realised that Mrs Walters had performed her duty to a T.
Eyes surveyed her, dark and expressionless, with lashes so long that they lay on his cheek. Impassive. Dispassionate.
He did not speak.
But in that silence she heard in her head, as if time had dissolved, the very first words he had ever spoken to her.
Eleven years ago. She had been fourteen. Just fourteen.
Tall. Gawky. Plain.
Like a half-grown colt.
It had been the school summer holidays. The first week. She had been supposed to go and stay for a fortnight with a schoolfriend, but on the last day of term Jenny had come down with a belated childhood infection and her parents had rescinded the invitation. The school had informed Rachel’s mother, and at the last moment a ticket had been sent, flying her out to Italy.
Rachel hadn’t wanted to go. She’d known her mother didn’t want her around. Hadn’t wanted her around ever since she’d been taken up by Enrico Farneste and had moved to Italy to be as close to him as she could. Now her mother only ever saw her for a week or so every school holiday, in a London hotel paid for by Enrico. Rachel knew Arlene was always glad when the visit was over and she could get back to Enrico.
But this holiday, with nowhere else to go, Rachel had ended up in Italy all the same.
The villa Enrico had installed her mother in was beautiful, nestled into the cliffside above a fashionable seaside village on the Ligurian coast, within easy reach of Turin, where the Farneste factories were. Never having seen the Mediterranean before, Rachel had found herself enchanted despite her reluctance to be there, and on that first afternoon, upon being deposited at the villa by the chauffeured car that had met her at the airport, she had wasted no time in running down to the azure-tinted swimming pool on the lower terrace.
Apart from a housekeeper who spoke only Italian the villa had seemed deserted, despite the presence of a sleek red monster of a car in the driveway. Her mother and Enrico, Rachel had assumed, as she glided blissfully through the warm clear water beneath the Mediterranean summer sun, must be out.
But as she’d reached the shallow end of the pool, after a dozen lengths or so, and halted momentarily, one arm hooked over the stone edge of the pool, hair slicked back in a soggy