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‘The doctor I had summoned to attend to you was waiting to speak to me, and you were in no fit state to deal with a phone call.’
His argument was unanswerable.
Caroline hung her head. ‘I feel so cheap, walking out of a hotel dressed in last night’s clothes. Everybody will know I’ve had a one-night stand.’
‘I should be so lucky,’ Valente quipped, soft and low. ‘The minute we got together it was guaranteed to go wrong. There could not be two more different people on this planet than you and I.’
In the grand foyer on the ground floor, Caroline tried to behave like the invisible woman for the benefit of any interested parties who might choose to regard her as a slut for being seen wearing a cocktail dress at breakfast time. Valente, however, closed a hand over hers and urged her into the hotel boutique.
‘I called ahead,’ he breathed as a saleswoman approached them with a smile.
‘Mr Lorenzatto? I believe we have exactly what you’re looking for.’
With a smile, she extended a dressy sapphire-blue raincoat for Caroline to try on.
Caroline was duly inserted into the coat and the sash pulled tight at her waist. ‘Perfect,’ Valente pronounced, flexing a gold credit card before urging her back into the foyer again.
‘I’ll have to pay you for this,’ Caroline muttered uncomfortably, but she was relieved to have the means of concealing a dress that would have looked highly suspicious to her mother.
‘You don’t ever pay,’ Valente riposted. ‘That’s the main advantage of being the mistress of a very rich man.’
‘I didn’t know I was still in the running,’ Caroline said breathlessly, suddenly aware that his staff and security team were all waiting beside the fleet of cars parked at the front of the hotel, and eying her with intense curiosity. She blushed to the roots of her hair.
Valente noted that every man in their radius was unashamedly staring at the little figure by his side. Even when she made no effort to attract masculine attention she oozed femininity, cuteness and sex appeal from every pore. He clenched his even white teeth hard. Just minutes earlier he had been thinking that enough was enough, and he didn’t want to be involved in the complexities of any form of relationship with Caroline. But the thought of leaving her free, if poor, to be scooped up by some other man had zero attraction for him.
He turned smouldering dark golden eyes on her again. ‘But you want to stay in the running, don’t you?’
Her lashes swept up on her bright eyes and she nodded very slowly in agreement, although she couldn’t quite believe what she was doing.
‘So,’ Valente breathed huskily, ‘you believe that you can do better than last night?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Caroline told him blithely, refusing to give way to her usual sense of failure and low expectation.
His own expectations on a stimulating sexual high, Valente smiled wolfishly down at her for the first time since that unforgotten solitary vigil at the church.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘YOU don’t need to come in with me,’ Caroline told Valente as the limousine drew up outside the hospital.
Valente simply ignored the statement.
Almost running to keep up with his long stride, Caroline made a second attempt to deter him before they reached Reception. ‘You must have loads of more important things to do,’ she said breathlessly.
Valente discovered on which ward her father was from a receptionist, who gave him the kind of star-struck treatment a famous celebrity might have received for an unannounced visit. At a trot, to match his ground-breaking progress through the busy corridors, Caroline clutched at his jacket-sleeve to bring him to a halt. ‘You can’t let Mum and Dad see you. You can’t let them know I was with you last night.’
He gave her anxious face a long, steady scrutiny. ‘Are you a child or an adult?’
‘This is not about me or you-it’s about my father’s health. He mustn’t have any shocks or upsets right now. He’s on a waiting list for heart surgery,’ she explained in an urgent undertone.
‘I would still like to speak to your parents…’
‘You’re the guy who owns their business and is about to chuck them out of their home,’ she reminded him bluntly. ‘Why would they want to see you when they’re already worried sick about Dad’s health?’
Finall
y, Valente agreed to wait round the corner from the side ward where she was directed to find her father. From there, however, once the curtains round the bed were partially drawn back, he had a perfect view of Joe Hales. The older man’s face was an unhealthy colour, his rasping breathing audible even from where Valente stood. Joe was wired up to a monitor; his wife was seated by his side. Valente was shocked by how much Caroline’s parents had aged since he had last seen them. Isabel had shrunk in stature even more.
But as Caroline’s mother broke into urgent speech, Valente soon appreciated that she might have become thinner, and her back more bent with her advancing years, but her abrasive controlling personality had not mellowed at all.
