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His lean, bronzed features remained impassive. ‘My late father would be proud of me.’
‘I’m not selling to you…I don’t care what you do. I have a great dislike of being forced to do anything, Mr Cavaliere. But most of all I have a great dislike, not to mention complete contempt, for your methods. Why do you call yourself Flynn? To mislead people?’ Harriet condemned with a heated sense of injustice. ‘I mean, who the heck would expect to find an Italian billionaire slumming somewhere like this?’
‘Let me answer you point by point,’ Rafael murmured levelly. ‘On my birth certificate it says Rafael Cavaliere Flynn, and I was born here. My mother named me. I am not concerned by the name that the press have allotted to me. Nor do I consider myself to be “slumming” in the house where many generations of Flynns have lived and died. I am proud of my ancestry.’
His immense self-assurance infuriated Harriet beyond bearing. All worked up as she was, she was already conscious that her face was hot with temper. Being rebuked for her bad manners was the last straw. She could have screamed for, ironically, she had never before dared to be that rude to anyone. ‘Are you aware that you have blighted my life like the plague since I was fifteen?’ she suddenly launched at him, half an octave higher.
Rafael quirked a mobile black brow.
‘No, I haven’t gone crazy. In the nineties you took over Benson Pharmaceuticals where my stepfather worked in the research lab and he lost his job. He was just one employee among four thousand. You shut the company down and sold off everything. The whole town died—’
‘A business has to be in profit to be sustainable.’
‘My stepfather had a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t get another job, and he had to sell our house and just about everything we owned by the end of the year. Men like you destroy lives,’ Harriet framed shakily.
‘Benson Pharmaceuticals lost a major contract to an Asian company and crashed. I was in no way responsible for its demise.’ Rafael watched her brow furrow in surprise.
He was standing below the cupola. The fall of light through the glass dome in the roof played over his superb bone structure and glinted in the dense black of his hair.
Registering that she was inadvertently staring, she tore her attention from him again, her cheeks burning. ‘That may be so, but you make nothing. You simply tear things apart to make the most money you can.’
‘You’re wrong. In the case of Bensons, I refused a highly profitable offer to buy the site and redevelop it as a shopping outlet. I knew that the town would regenerate faster if the buildings became a base for an industrial estate where other businesses could be set up.’
Harriet had stiffened with discomfiture. ‘I wasn’t aware of those facts, and if I’ve misjudged you—’
‘You have.’
‘Then I’m sorry,’ she framed between visibly clenched teeth. ‘But I imagine that you usually put profit first.’
‘Money is power. It can also be a great force for good as well as evil. I don’t apologise for what I am. Did you think I would?’
‘Two months ago you presided over the fall of Zenco. I was an account manager in charge of the Zenco marketing budget for my firm. The knock on effect of the Zenco crash was that the agency I worked for folded. Once again, you acted as a malign influence on my life. Please excuse me for not being one of your fans,’ Harriet completed curtly.
‘That is indeed quite a trail of curious coincidence. I’m not a superstitious man…’ All his attention nailed to her, Rafael was conceding that he had never seen such flawless skin as hers and wondering if she was that pale creamy colour all over. ‘But I do think you should take immediate action to avoid colliding with my influence a third time.’
‘Is that really all you have to say?’ H
arriet shot at him wrathfully.
Rafael spread wide the door to one side of him. ‘Let me show you something…’
Harriet stayed where she was, and folded her arms for good measure. He just left her standing there. The seconds ticked past until a sense of foolishness and the secret fear that she might be behaving childishly made her follow him into the room he had entered.
‘This is the drawing room. Look out of the windows,’ Rafael urged.
Arms still tightly folded, Harriet trod forward on stiff legs. His poise seemed to mock her awkwardness. Her gaze widened when she saw the ugly line of tumbledown buildings at the foot of the hill that destroyed what should have been a lovely view. The dilapidated sheds were the ones she had been planning to renovate as additional stables. He moved an eloquent lean brown hand, spreading his long fingers, and she saw his Italian genes in his fluid ability to express himself without speech. It struck her as an incredibly attractive trait that was fascinatingly at odds with the cool front he wore to the world. When he began speaking, she had to fight to regain her concentration.
‘The house that you’re living in was built as a cottage orne in the eighteenth century.’
Harriet could not hide her surprise. ‘It’s that old?’
‘It was built as a folly, not as a house to be lived in. My great-great-great grandfather, Randal Flynn, planted the arboretum around it. You are, in effect, living in what used to be part of the garden belonging to the Court.’
Harriet lifted her chin. ‘I didn’t appreciate that.’
‘The folly and the land surrounding it were sold out of financial necessity more than half a century ago, and were bought by your cousin’s parents. But the folly is an historic building and, as such, should be conserved and reunited with the estate.’
‘You can’t have it,’ Harriet told him succinctly, her fierce tension expressing the strength of her feelings on that subject.
