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Vivi compressed her lips, totally aware that he didn’t believe her. He was such a snob, she thought sourly, so ready to credit nasty stuff about her simply because she had been downright poor in comparison to his sister and himself. What other reason could he have for being so suspicious? It wasn’t as if she had acted all alluring with him, was it? Vivi didn’t know how, didn’t have sufficient experience or the desire to act alluring with any man. She wasn’t even very good at flirting because generally the men she met were bolder and cruder than flirting required.
‘I’m not going to apologise for the fact that I dislike you,’ Vivi fired at him.
‘I don’t need you to like me to marry me in the kind of paper marriage your grandfather requires,’ Raffaele shot back in exasperation.
‘Well, there would be nothing in it for me,’ Vivi fielded, struggling not to think about her duty in John and Liz’s situation of unsettled debts. For yes, there would be something in it for her, she reflected guiltily. In fact, there would be more than one advantage to marrying him. It would help John and Liz, it would please her grandfather and leave her blessedly free to get on with the rest of her life as she saw fit with nobody to please but herself. It would release all her worries but...it would also put poor Zoe in the hot seat in her place and how could she allow that?
‘If I offered money, diamonds...’ Raffaele murmured silkily, seeking her weakness, for he was convinced there had to be one.
‘Stop right there!’ Vivi cut in angrily. ‘How could you bribe me into doing it? My grandfather would give me almost anything I wanted...’
Except the one thing she needed, which was John and Liz’s mortgage debt paid off, she completed inwardly.
Resentment darted through her at the reality that her grandfather was holding what was a ridiculously small amount of money on his terms over his granddaughters’ heads in an attempt to force them into doing his bidding. Winnie’s husband, Eros, might have been trying to find a way of getting around that fact and spiking her grandfather’s big guns but he had not, so far, contrived to do so. She needed to phone her sister, though, and check out the latest news on that front.
‘Then we would appear to have reached an impasse, for the moment,’ Raffaele tacked on because he refused to credit that he wouldn’t find a means to achieve her agreement. He never failed at anything he set out to do and saw this situation as no different. Given sufficient time and attention, he would solve the riddle of her reluctance and come up with the magic winning combination. One way or another, he told himself grimly, he would lock her down to protect Arianna.
‘We’ll have dinner tonight,’ he told her flatly.
Vivi tossed her head back, curling ringlets of copper dancing back from her triangular face, bright dark blue eyes defiant. ‘No, we won’t.’
‘Tomorrow night, then.’
The soft full pink lips he couldn’t take his eyes off tightened into a surprisingly hard line. ‘No.’
‘I think you’re forgetting about that redundancy list,’ Raffaele reminded her silkily, ready to use any weapon he had to force her into doing his bidding.
Vivi leapt out of her chair and called him a very rude word, colour streaming across her cheekbones, eyes violet-tinged again with sheer fury.
‘If not by birth, certainly by nature,’ Raffaele countered with hard amusement, thoroughly satisfied to have got a very telling reaction out of her. Temper, temper, he chanted inwardly because she had one hell of a temper.
On the other hand—and who would ever have guessed it? he marvelled—Vivi Fox cared about her work colleagues. She wasn’t quite the hard-nosed, solely mercenary beauty he had assumed, willing to use anything she had got to better herself in society. Of course, she didn’t need to be like that now, he reminded himself impatiently, not with a very rich grandfather behind her.
‘I hate you!’ she flung at him.
‘Dinner at eight tomorrow night. I want you to have time to think over this meeting. A car will pick you up,’ Raffaele stated, not batting an eyelash in receipt of her angry attack.
Vivi’s fingers turned into claws, biting into her palms. No man had ever filled her with such rage that she felt violent, only him. But she would not run the risk of calling Raffaele’s bluff. He was a banker, he was innately ruthless and if redundancies could make her dance to his tune he was unlikely to make an empty threat, she reflected wretchedly. How could she risk that happening? How could she challenge him when her fellow employees’ livelihoods could be at stake? For goodness’ sake, what on earth had Grandad offered him to make him so desperate to win her agreement?
‘Eight.’ She bit out the word as if it physically hurt her and in a way it did because giving even an inch to Raffaele di Mancini felt like a self-betrayal of pride and good judgement.
‘I shall look forward to it,’ Raffaele dared with purring satisfaction and if there had been anything within reach to throw at him, Vivi would’ve thrown it.
She went back down to the marketing department in the lift, her brain in a daze after all the emotions she had worked through. Hatred, rage and resentment assailed her in heady waves around Raffaele and it made it hard for her to think straight, to think smart, she recognised, finding another stick to beat herself with. If she was cooler, calmer, would she have found a way out? But how could she be cool and calm when he so enraged her?
Her memory went back to the day she had met Arianna with her high heel caught in a grating down the street from the modelling agency. She had only been a week into her first job there and heading out to grab lunch. She had stopped to help Arianna, who was comically trying to drag her shoe out of the grating while standing on one leg like a heron.
‘Oh, thanks...’ Arianna had said with a flashing friendly smile, a very pretty brunette, who had seemed much the same age as Vivi was.
Nothing had budged that shoe heel from the grating and, wearying of the struggle, Arianna had stepped out of the other one, swept it up, looked at it as if trying to judge what use one shoe would be and then tossed it down again in disgust. Barefoot, she had stepped onto the pavement and introduced herself and Vivi had dug into her capacious tote to offer the use of the shabby trainers she wore to travel into work. Arianna had been as grateful as if she had saved her life and had accompanied Vivi into the café where she was planning to buy a sandwich, confessing that she was hungry herself. And that was how her friendship with Arianna had begun, two young women getting to know each other and exchanging numbers over a snack. Their meeting had not been in any way engineered. Arianna had not been ‘targeted’ for her wealth, as her brother had implied to the press, because, although Arianna had been very fashionably dressed, Vivi had not recognised the designer style she herself had never been able to afford. She had noticed Arianna’s jewelle
ry and had simply assumed it was good costume stuff, rather than the real thing.
Arianna had come into Vivi’s life at a time when she was rather lonely. How had she been lonely living with two sisters? Well, back then, Winnie had been heartbroken and pregnant by Eros and no company whatsoever. And love Zoe as Vivi did, Zoe was happier reading a book in her room than in actually going out to meet people. Arianna had been full of life and cheerfulness and Vivi had liked her, felt rather protective of her, too, once she realised that the other young woman was a year younger and seemingly rather naive about city life.
Arianna had confided her dream of becoming a model the evening they had first gone out together, when she had also flashed a gold credit card and taken Vivi to a very exclusive club. That was when a little tactful questioning had revealed that Arianna came from a different world and Vivi had become a little uncomfortable in her company then.
Having spoken to the resident photographer at the agency, however, Vivi had set up the appointment for Arianna to have a modelling portfolio prepared. The day after, Arianna had invited her to join her and her brother for dinner. Two nights after that, Raffaele had unexpectedly joined them at a club and swept them up to the VIP section, scolding his sister for not being there in the first place. There he had questioned Vivi about her background and occupation and she had said defensively, ‘I’m ordinary and I was trying to explain to Arianna that people like you and her don’t become best friends with someone like me but she doesn’t seem to get that. She just looked hurt.’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t be friends,’ Raffaele had said, surprising her when she had already decided he had to be a snob with his blue-blooded background.
Of course, at that point, nothing had gone wrong, Vivi conceded wryly and it was very likely that Raffaele had viewed her friendship with his sister as harmless. Even so, it had been a mortifyingly happy time for her, she recalled with self-loathing.
