‘You have to deal with this,’ Gwenna told her cousin impatiently. ‘Virginia stole the money you raised from the fashion show and spent it—’
Lydia shook her head in tired disagreement. ‘Dennis had left her with a pile of debts. She knew I couldn’t help and she panicked.’
‘Stop making excuses for her. She forged your signature on the cheques that emptied the Happy Holidays account. She did everything she could to make you look like the guilty party, and now she’s done a runner! Don’t let her do this to you,’ Gwenna pleaded in frustration. ‘A criminal conviction will wreck your life. How many people will employ an ex-con?’
When Gwenna had gone home, Lydia retrieved the letter that she’d seen lying on her doormat and read it with a growing hollow feeling inside. It was a brief note from a couple who had accepted her quote to design their garden. They would have been her first proper clients since she had completed her college course. But they had dropped this letter through her letterbox earlier today to say that they had changed their minds. She suspected that what had changed their minds had been news of her visit to the local police station. No doubt her face would be all over the tabloids tomorrow morning.
Later, in bed, she tossed and turned. The evening before she’d had to go out to buy food. An odd little pool of silence had seemed to enclose her as she’d packed her groceries at the supermarket. When she’d looked up, a couple of women had been treating her to a contemptuous appraisal. Evidently rumours of the stolen money had already spread to the highly efficient local grapevine. It had been a disturbing experience.
On the edge of an uneasy doze, Lydia was yanked rudely back to full wakefulness by the sound of a crash and glass breaking. Switching on the bedside light, she got out of bed. Had someone smashed a bottle outside on the street? She went downstairs and found the window in her small cosy sitting room broken. She hovered in the doorway, wondering how such a thing could have happened, and then she saw something lying on the floor in the middle of the shattered glass. It was a stone with a piece of paper wrapped round it. Frowning she spread it out to read.
YOU THIEVING BITCH GO BACK TO WHERE YOU BELONG!
The brutal capitals were written in red felt-tip. Her heart started to hammer like crazy and she felt physically sick. She made herself fetch a brush and dustpan to clean up the glass. She propped an old cupboard door from the coal shed over the gaping hole and slowly climbed back up the stairs. But if sleep had been elusive before, it was now impossible, and she lay still and quiet and barely breathing, flinching at every sound she heard.
Having finally fallen asleep around seven the next morning, she was still in bed when the doorbell went at ten. She assumed that it was the postman and, knowing that he would not wait long, rose in haste, pulling on her cotton wrap and racing downstairs to answer the door.
As her stunned gaze took in the very tall black-haired male outside on the street, she was gripped by total disbelief and pinned to the spot in complete stillness. Cristiano Andreotti. Even though she thought he could only be a figment of her imagination, the compelling effect of his exotic dark charisma and hard-edged masculinity still knocked her for six. Her heart started pounding and her soft pink mouth opened on a soundless ooh.
His magnificent bone structure was accentuated by the smooth olive planes of his high cheekbones. Although he shaved twice daily, faint blue-black shading still emphasised his strong jaw and beautifully modelled mouth. But her mind refused to move on from recognition to acceptance. Because Cristiano Andreotti did not belong on the doorstep of a terraced house in the back street of a nondescript Welsh market town. His natural milieu was much more exclusive, and always redolent of the privilege of the very rich.
Cristiano studied her with unflinching intensity. He had never seen her without make-up before. He saw the changes in her, picked up on every flaw with the eagerness of a man who had dimly expected and possibly even hoped to be disappointed in her. She had lost weight. She was pale, and her tiredness was patent. Her mane of fair hair fell in a tangle round her slight shoulders, no longer glossy and styled into smooth layers of silk by a professional hand. In the midst of cataloguing those differences with the precision of a male to whom no detail was too small, he met eyes as blue as sapphires. Just as suddenly he realised that she was, if anything, more breathtakingly beautiful than ever. Only this time around she was as nature had made her, with glorious eyes, skin like clotted cream and full, pouting mouth. Desire ripped through his big powerful frame with the dangerous force of a storm tide.
‘May I come in?’ he enquired lazily, his rich, resonant drawl wrapping round her rigid spinal cord like a silk caress. The habit of command and high expectation was so engrained in every syllable that it did not even occur to her to deny him.
CHAPTER TWO
ONLY when Cristiano broke the pounding silence could Lydia credit the reality of his appearance. Snatching in a startled breath, she blinked, her long brown lashes fluttering as she struggled to get a hold on the bone-deep shock gripping her. Even in that very first moment she knew that the flame of her hatred for him burned as bright as ever. Perspiration beaded her short upper lip and her legs felt wobbly. She stared fixedly at him, controlled by a heady mixture of fear and fascination, curiosity and loathing.
Predictably, Cristiano took advantage of her astonishment to move forward, and she automatically retreated. Although she was five foot eleven in her bare feet, he still towered over her by a comfortable six inches. A snaking little frisson of awareness curled somewhere low in her belly, and she went rigid at the novelty of that almost forgotten sensation. All senses on hyper-alert, she could feel the tender tips of her breasts tingle and pinch.
Hot colour flared through her pallor as shame and confusion filled her, and suddenly she found her voice. ‘What do you want?’
Cristiano closed the front door with a casual, lean brown hand. He was feeling his power and enjoying it. ‘Don’t you know?’
Painfully embarrassed by the way her treacherous body had reacted to him, Lydia tilted her chin in a defiant manner that would have surprised any one of her relatives. She felt trapped and angry and raw. Deep down inside her lurked the wounding recollection of just how much she had once cared for Cristiano Andreotti and how savagely he had hurt her. It didn’t show on the surface, but he had changed her—and not for the better. ‘How could I know why you’re here?’
‘I thought some sixth sense survival instinct might kick in…’ Cristiano surveyed her with liquid dark eyes full of mockery. ‘Might spell out a simple message.’
‘Obviously not.’ She folded her arms in a defensive gesture and tried to still the trembling aftershock that was threatening to take her over.
‘I’m here because I want to see you…obviously,’ Cristiano traded, his sexy accent wrapping round the syllables in the most extraordinarily melodic way.
Without having realised what she was doing, Lydia found she was staring up at him, at those brilliant, beautiful dark eyes that had haunted her dreams. Eyes that betrayed only the most superficial emotion and her own reflection. He gave nothing away. He was famous for a detachment that veered on indifference, even icy coldness. She had felt ten feet tall when she’d made him laugh or smile.
Fighting that tide of memory, she shook her head as though to clear it. She strove feverishly to blank him out, remembering fearfully how it had been for her for a crazy couple of months when he had been all she could think about, when his mere presence had been enough to ensure that she was blind to everybody and everything but him.
‘I don’t want you here…’ Even as she spoke, she knew that the remedy of asking him to leave was in her hands, but that for reasons she was afraid to examine she could not yet bring herself to actually tell him to go.
Cristiano angled his sleek dark head to one side and studied her with maddening cool. ‘Don’t you?’
Her tummy seemed to somersault, as if he had punched a panic button. For a crazy moment she worried that