Tears streaked her face as she drove along the mountain road back to Monte Carlo and the family-owned hotel there. To her child. Her small, beautiful, fatherless child.
He would be better off without her!
She had no heart left now—knew that it was broken in two, that it would never mend.
If she were no longer here, then her brother Cesare would care for Marco, would protect him from the stigma attached to his birth, would care for him as his own, safeguarding him, so that nothing and no one could ever hurt him.
Could she do this? Could she end this now?
End the pain of Pierre’s rejection?
His lies had brought her to this desperation.
His utter betrayal of a love she had thought so beautiful and perfect…!
Yes, she accepted, as she looked at the Mediterranean glittering and beckoning so temptingly far beneath her, like a diamond. Yes, she could do this. She could drive off the edge of this cliff and end the pain once and for all…
He had no idea there was a car approaching from the other direction. He only had time to register that neither of them had attempted to turn the bend in the road. The two vehicles met, joining with a crunch of screeching metal, then hurtled off into nothingness.
He turned to look at the driver of the other car, to register the beauty of the young woman’s face, and she looked back at him with haunted dark eyes.
And then the two vehicles began to fall, plunging down towards the deep, mesmerising depths of the Mediterranean….
CHAPTER ONE
‘THE WOMAN WITH Charles Ingram—do you know who she is?’ Cesare demanded harshly.
‘Sorry?’ Peter Sheldon, his male acquaintance, frowned his confusion.
Cesare’s mouth tightened as he bit back his impatient reply. After all, despite being at a charity dinner, the two men had been in the middle of a business conversation when Cesare’s attention had wandered. He’d been captivated by the woman who stood across the room at Charles Ingram’s side, looking so glitteringly gorgeous.
Next to Cesare’s bitterest enemy!
Cesare gave a smile, which showed the even whiteness of his teeth against his olive skin, but which did not reach the darkness of his eyes. ‘I was merely wondering who the beautiful woman is accompanying Charles Ingram…’ he voiced more calmly, his tone deliberately neutral even as his narrow-eyed stare remained on the ill-matched pair.
Charles Ingram was aged in his late fifties, silver-haired, and still a handsome man. In a room full of beautiful women wearing glittering jewellery and designer gowns, and elegantly suave men in tailored dinner suits, the tall, graceful woman who stood at Charles Ingram’s side still managed to stand out as extraordinary.
Her hair was the colour of honey, falling in lustrous waves halfway down her spine, and her eyes, even from this distance, were, Cesare could see, a deep, deep violet. She was laughing at something Charles Ingram said to her now, those eyes glowing. Her skin was a creamy magnolia, her mouth a full, tempting pout, her neck long and smooth, and the deep swell of her breasts was visible above the simple white gown she wore that nevertheless hugged the perfection of her alluring curves.
One of her hands—slender hands that could and no doubt did caress a man to the edge of madness—rested slightly possessively on the arm of her escort, and Cesare found himself gritting his teeth at the air of intimacy, of exclusivity, that surrounded the couple, despite the vast difference in their ages.
‘A beauty, isn’t she?’ Peter Sheldon murmured appreciatively. ‘Beautiful, but unattainable,’ he added regretfully.
‘Ingram has exclusive rights, you mean?’ Cesare questioned hardly, his jaw clenching just at the thought of all that sensual beauty being wasted on Charles Ingram.
‘Not at all,’ his business acquaintance dismissed humorously. ‘The lady in question is Robin Ingram—Charles’s daughter,’ he explained dismissively, when Cesare looked at him blankly for several seconds.
Robin Ingram.
Charles Ingram’s daughter?
Not the mistress Cesare had imagined at all. She wasn’t a mistress whom, just as an amusement to himself, after noting her own interested gaze fixed upon him, Cesare had been happily contemplating seducing away from her aging lover.
In the last three months Cesare had gathered all the information that he could on Charles Ingram—wanted to learn everything that he could about his sworn enemy, up to and including his shirt size.
Ingram’s second child had been included in that information, of course. But Cesare had assumed—erroneously, it now seemed!—that Robin was Charles Ingram’s younger son, and as such of little real interest.
‘I had thought that Robin was a man’s name?’ Cesare enquired. His English was faultless. As was his native Italian, and his French, German and Spanish.
‘It can be,’ his companion acknowledged lightly. ‘But it’s also one of those names that can be used by either sex.’
So Charles Ingram’s second child—Robin—was a woman…A beautiful, sexually alluring woman.
Which perhaps changed the direction of Cesare’s plans for his revenge on the Ingram family….
‘Daddy, do you know that man? No, don’t look over yet,’ Robin pleaded huskily, as her father would have turned to look in the direction of her own fascinated gaze. ‘There’s a man across the room—a dark-eyed, foreign-looking man—’
‘A handsome, dark-eyed, swarthy-looking man?’ her father teased lightly.
‘Well…yes,’ she conceded with a slight grimace. ‘But that isn’t the reason I noticed him.’
‘No?’ Her father smiled indulgently.
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘He’s been staring at me for the last ten minutes or so—’
‘I would stare at you too, if you weren’t my daughter!’ Charles assured her laughingly. ‘You look exceptionally beautiful tonight, Robin,’ he added approvingly as he sobered. ‘I’m glad you persuaded me to come here with you this evening. You were right. We can’t keep hiding away from everyone just because they might mention Simon.’
Robin dragged her eyes away from the man staring at her so intently from across the other side of this crowded and noisy room and looked at her father instead, easily recognising the lines of grief that still creased his brow and grooved beside his nose and mouth.
The last three months hadn’t been easy for either of them—the unexpected death of her brother Simon in a car accident having ripped their lives apart.
It was a loss that neither of them had come to terms with yet, and perhaps they never would completely. But she had persuaded her father to come to this charity dinner with her this evening—had felt that it was time they picked up the threads of their lives again, and that it was what Simon would have wanted.
‘Anyway, let’s forget about that for now and get back to your handsome dark-eyed stranger.’ Her father deliberately infused jollity into his tone. ‘Which one is he?’ He turned to look across the room crowded with socialites who had paid five thousand pounds a head to attend this event this evening.
‘You can’t miss him,’ Robin replied ruefully, as she once again found herself the focus of eyes so dark that they appeared almost black. ‘Tall. Very tall,’