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CHAPTER TEN
‘TELL ME WHAT’S happening here,’ Vivi urged, stalking deeper into the room, a tall slender figure in a turquoise sundress that floated round her long shapely legs. Both men turned to look at her.
Stam Fotakis was flushed and furious. ‘I’ve lost millions of pounds thanks to your husband! He set a trap for me.’
‘A trap that wouldn’t have worked had you not been tracking my every move in the financial markets and buying where I bought,’ Raffaele pointed out levelly.
‘Why would you track what Raffaele does?’ Vivi pressed her grandfather.
‘He’s a financial genius, Vivi. I’m not the only one doing it,’ the older man growled angrily. ‘But this time he laid a false trail and I bought into it and now I’ve lost a pile of money.’
‘Explain,’ Vivi told Raffaele, her soft mouth tightly compressed.
‘I showed interest in a company that I knew was about to go bust and, now that it has, Stam is blaming me for his reverses,’ Raffaele countered tautly.
‘And you did it to him deliberately,’ Vivi registered in shock at her husband’s behaviour, visibly paling.
‘It was nothing more than a slap on the wrist,’ Raffaele ground out in exasperated dismissal. ‘Stam may be howling as though he is mortally wounded but what he’s lost is a drop in the bucket in comparison to his wealth.’
Vivi continued to stare at her husband in bemusement. ‘But why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you warn him? I get that he shouldn’t be spying on what you do but, if you knew it was happening, why weren’t you just blunt with him? Why would you want him to lose money?’
‘Leave it, Vivi,’ Stam said abruptly, guessing where the dialogue could be heading and deciding to back off rather than expose a secret that would do him no credit in his grandchild’s eyes. ‘What’s done is done.’
‘No, you don’t get to come storming in here shouting without explaining yourself,’ Vivi interrupted, her violet eyes flaring off the older man to rest instead on the younger. ‘And you don’t get to do what you appear to have done to my grandad without explaining why.’
Raffaele stalked across the room, all flaring energy and anger, swinging back to face her from the window, his lean dark features hard and grim. ‘I was...eventually planning to tell you but at the start of all this I didn’t trust you with secrets that could damage my sister.’
‘Arianna?’ Vivi queried, more confused than ever, but gutted by his declaration of distrust even if she was struggling not to betray the fact. ‘What the heck does Arianna have to do with any of this?’
Raffaele compressed his lips. ‘Stam compiled a very harmful dossier on Arianna’s biggest mistakes in life and threatened to release the information to the media. The dossier contains embarrassing revelations that would enrage her fiancé’s very old-fashioned family. I was afraid that publication of that dossier would destroy her future with Tomas.’
Vivi was appalled by what she was hearing. ‘But why would you do such a thing?’ she began asking Stam in horror, but even as she spoke the picture was falling into place and making a dreadful kind of sense. ‘You blackmailed Raffaele into marrying me! Both of you lied to me! Both of you allowed me to believe that it was some kind of business deal. How could you threaten Arianna like that, Grandad? She never did anything to harm me...’
Raffaele watched in amazement as Stam Fotakis lowered his head in shame, his eyes evading the younger woman’s. ‘It was the only lever I had with Raffaele, Vivi. He had to pay for the damage he had done to your good name and I had to have a means of pressure to use. I didn’t relish that means but I was prepared to use it, for your sake.’
‘My sake?’ she whispered sickly, a shudder of revulsion and denial racking her slender frame. ‘You blackmailed Raffaele by threatening his sister’s future. That’s disgusting and unpardonable. Where is this dossier now? Destroyed, I hope.’
‘Not yet. I was to receive it at the wedding but Stam refused to part with it,’ Raffaele broke in harshly. ‘He was planning to continue holding it over my head and I couldn’t live with that option.’
‘You broke the terms of our deal!’ her grandfather barked angrily. ‘Vivi is pregnant.’
‘You forced us together again. You can carry the can for that!’ Raffaele slammed back rawly at the older man. ‘And now you’ve hurt Vivi, which I can’t forgive.’
Vivi parted bloodless lips because sheer shock at what was unfolding was making her feel a little sick and dizzy. ‘You’ve both hurt and disappointed me.’
The terms of our deal?
The phrase rhymed over and over again in her head as she left the room and headed for the stairs. Her marriage was a deal, the cruellest of deals. How had she ever contrived to forget that reality? But she had forgotten, had buried the awareness deep that Raffaele was supposedly marrying her to make a fat financial profit. Although, knowing what she did about his character, that explanation had never made much sense to her, she had still accepted it and questioned it no further. Really, when she had buried her head in the sand to such an extent, it was her own fault that she was now being slapped in the face by the unsavoury truth.
Raffaele had been blackmailed into marrying her, forced to gain her agreement to marry him by the threat to Arianna’s future. She knew how much Raffaele loved his kid sister and knew there was little he would not do to protect her from harm. She was also aware from some of the things that Arianna had told her in the past that her sister-in-law had made mistakes she regretted. For goodness’ sake, who hadn’t done that? But Arianna was a wealthy and beautiful heiress and what she did was less likely to go unremarked.
Looking back, Vivi could see how she had wilfully misinterpreted Raffaele’s behaviour before their marriage. In her mind she had somehow contrived to view his very persistence in seeking her agreement to marry him as a backhanded compliment related to her attraction. Without even thinking about it, she had also freely forgiven Raffaele for attempting to use blackmail on her by threatening redundancies at Hacketts Tech.
In the end that concern had been wiped out by the much more personal fact that she was pregnant and that was why she had married him. She had, however, allowed nothing to get in the way of her developing feelings for Raffaele, the love she had denied even to herself for so long. On a deep-down level she had always wanted Raffaele and, having finally got him, she hadn’t asked too many awkward questions about what had first brought him back into her life.
The terms of our deal.
That was the foundation of the marriage she was so happy in, not exactly a solid basis for a relationship in which to raise children, she conceded, stricken. As she sat down on the foot of the bed, she felt like a rag doll that had been shaken so hard its stuffing was about to fall out. As a wave of nausea assailed her, she raced for the bathroom. Afterwards, she hung onto the marble vanity unit to stay upright and freshened up with trembling hands. Feeling physically weak and sick only made her feel worse because she was seeing how she had lied to herself all along, trying to conserve her pride by refusing to admit how much she loved Raffaele even when it was painfully obvious.
How much worse was it to be forced to accept that, even though she had believed she and Raffaele had grown close, the guy she loved, the father of her twin babies, still hadn’t trusted her enough to share the truth with her? The unfortunate fact was that he was the real victim here. No, th
at reality wouldn’t have sat well with Raffaele’s fierce pride. Indeed, being forced to do anything would go against the grain for Raffaele, but he had still sacrificed his pride for his sister’s sake. And why did that make her love him more when she ought to hate him for all of it? In despair, Vivi pressed cooling hands to her tear-streaked cheeks, struggling to hold in the intensity of her warring feelings.
The bedroom door opened without warning and framed Raffaele’s tall dark silhouette in the doorway. ‘Stam’s gone. He’s going to return the dossier to me and then I’ll destroy it and hopefully that will be the end of that,’ he breathed in a raw undertone. ‘Thank you for that.’
Vivi’s eyes looked bruised against her pallor, her vivid hair making the contrast all the more striking. In that moment, she looked so frail and vulnerable he wanted to scoop her up and wrap her in cotton wool to protect her. But, sadly, he couldn’t protect her from the fallout of his own mistakes and his sins had truly come home to roost now, he acknowledged unhappily.
‘Why are you thanking me for anything?’
‘Stam was ashamed to have you know what he had done and he doesn’t want anything more to do with that threat,’ Raffaele clarified wryly.
‘Does Arianna know about this business?’ Vivi demanded.
‘Nothing about any of it,’ Raffaele admitted. ‘She would’ve been devastated and it wouldn’t have been fair. I should’ve looked after her more carefully when she was younger and ensured that she didn’t get into situations she couldn’t cope with. That she did is on me.’
‘In our marriage you were the victim but you let me go on thinking that I was,’ Vivi muttered tightly. ‘You never even hinted that you were being...constrained. You may not believe it but if you’d told me what Grandad was doing I would have intervened.’
‘At the beginning I didn’t trust you. I still harboured all those wrong convictions about you,’ Raffaele reminded her ruefully. ‘Arianna had ditched you as a friend. Why was I going to assume that you would be sympathetic in any way towards her?’
