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‘Nothing between us is relevant at all. So, if you’d just let me past…’
An elegant wave of his hand indicated the fact that there was plenty of space for her to walk by him.
‘Be my guest.’
She was nearly past him when he stirred slightly and she could hear the hateful smile in his voice as it drifted after her.
‘I’ll see you back at the house.’
It stopped her dead, her head ringing as if his words had been a blow.
‘I think not!’
It was only now she realised, shockingly and disturbingly, that there was a question she had never asked. One that should have been right at the forefront of her mind from the moment he had first spoken to her but she’d been too stunned even to consider. She’d never thought fate could be so unkind. It was bad enough that he should be here, now, so close to her wedding day, but to think that this was not just an appalling error of chance…
‘You’re not coming back to the house!’
‘Oh, but I am.’
That brought her spinning round, needing to see his face. The deadly smile was still there in his voice but there wasn’t a trace of it in his expression.
‘No way. I mean…why are you here at all?’
There it was. The question she should have asked from the start. The one that, she now realised, she hadn’t dared to ask because she’d feared the answer.
Now the smile was not just in his eyes but very definitely curling the edges of that obscenely sexy mouth. At least, it was obscene for Imogen to consider anything about this man sexy. That was what had caught her in the first place, trapping her in the coils of his dark sensuality, taking her life out of her hands and putting it into his, to torment and break as he wished.
‘Your father invited me, of course.’
The deadly nonchalance with which he tossed the words at her made her stomach tighten.
‘Dad? You’re kidding!’
That was just too much. She actually laughed in a blend of shock and relief, at the realisation that this simply could not be true. How could he ever be here for the wedding? How could he have been invited when no one but her knew him well enough to offer him an invitation? She sure as hell had never let anyone know that for a brief space of time he had once been such an important part of her life. Her short-lived summer love affair and its bitter consequences would neither have concerned nor interested her father.
‘Do I look as if I’m joking?’
He looked supremely confident, totally at ease, and with not a trace of amusement on his carved features.
‘My father would never invite you here. And definitely not for this wedding.’
‘Why not?’
There was the flash of challenge in those golden eyes now, clashing with the disbelief in her own stare.
‘Not good enough, is that it? You think, ma belle, your father would not want to invite a simple olive farmer to his daughter’s wedding of the year?’
‘Oh, come on!’
She had to cover up her reaction to that casual ‘ma belle’, needing to hide the way it had the bite of acid. Once she had loved to hear him call her that, had gloried in a new-found sense of feeling beautiful in his eyes. But now the bitter memory of how quickly she had gone from being ma belle to a mere nothing, a plaything tossed aside and abandoned on the beach where they had first met, curdled in her stomach.
‘We both know you’re no simple olive farmer and you never were.’
That had been the pretence he had hidden behind when they’d met. He’d let her believe he was a hard-working farmer who was delighted to meet this young Englishwoman on holiday and spend time with her. His friend Rosalie had been the one to warn her that there was more to Raoul Cardini than that. But even she had never revealed the full story. It was only when Imogen had got home and, still nursing the hurt in her heart, had been unable to resist looking up the beautiful island of Corsica on the Internet that she had found the truth that had rubbed salt deep into the wounds his rejection had inflicted on her.
‘I don’t think the Cardini olive oil empire could ever be described as just farming!’
What had she said? It was only the truth, after all, but it was as if she had flung some vile insult into his face so that his head went back, bronze eyes narrowing, beautiful mouth clamping tight, turning his lips into a hard, thin line.
