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The diamonds glittered with cold fire from their bed of faded blue velvet. Appalled, Lisa’s eyes widened as he lifted the choker of magnificent stones in an elaborate white gold setting and moved behind her to fasten it around her neck.
Her vow to remain steadfastly calm and sensible flew out of her head as she jerked away and blurted, ‘I don’t want them!’
‘You’re not getting them, believe me. They are on lo
an for this evening only. To complete the picture and give me the pleasure of looking at outward perfection.’
Smarting under that deliberate put down, Lisa stood like a stone when he brushed her hair aside and fastened the choker around her neck. Move by so much as an inch and those strong hands would pull her back to him again. The touch of his hands would start her shaking all over. Already, knowing that those long fingers were just a hair’s breadth away from her skin as he dealt with the tricky clasp, a tingling sensation spread all the way through her.
The bracelet came next. A double row of fine stones in an exquisite setting that matched that of the choker. Diego said flatly, ‘The family jewels my mother finds too old-fashioned for her tastes are kept in the strong room here. She sometimes picks through them when she and my father visit. She says it gives her something to do.’
Diamond studs with tear-shaped droppers completed the suite. The backs of his fingers brushed the heated skin of her cheeks as he fixed them in place. When he stood back a pace to survey the finished result Lisa, even though her face was flaming as the result of that light, erotic touch, got a little of her own back as she asked with manufactured brightness, ‘How often do they visit? Shall I meet them?’ knowing that in his present mood of icy dignity the question would affront him.
‘Hardly. There are women a man would be happy to introduce to his parents. Patently, you are not one of them,’ he replied, a honed edge to his voice, and she knew she’d been right in her assumption and didn’t care because, after what she had to say to him tonight, he wouldn’t be able to hurt her any more.
At least that was what she told herself as Rosa and Manuel arrived to serve dinner, but when Diego held her chair out for her and murmured softly for her ears only, ‘I will have something beautiful to look at while we eat. The sight of you will give me pleasure,’ she wasn’t so sure. He could hurt her simply by being himself, a man who was loved and loathed in equal and utterly confusing measure. Did she want to give him that kind of pleasure? The cool, objective pleasure of a man who had acquired an expensive artefact. Like the diamonds, a possession to be admired occasionally then locked away again and forgotten. Certainly not the pleasure of passionate possession. And that did hurt although she did her best to convince herself that it shouldn’t.
Between them, Rosa and Manuel served the baked scallops, poured wine, brought quails with herb dressing and roast vegetable salad, poured more wine and finally left them with coffee and little dishes of cream-filled profiteroles and tiny baskets of fruit.
‘You should kit them out with roller skates,’ Lisa said with forced lightness, an attempt to counteract the unnerving effect of having his eyes on her throughout the seemingly interminable meal. ‘They’d get from one end of this mile-long table much quicker.’ She said it partly to amuse herself but most of all to let him know that all this formal splendour, the king’s ransom of diamonds on her neck her arm and in her ears, wasn’t impressing her at all.
No reaction. Diego leaned against the elaborately carved back of his chair, his hands lightly placed on the armrests, his eyes still on her, considering. So she said firmly, ‘I’m leaving in the morning. Even if I have to walk. Do what you like about the rescue package you put together. This unpleasant charade is beginning to bore me and I’ve decided that if you pull out of your side of the bargain I can put up with my father’s displeasure. After all, I’ve endured it, or something very like it, for all of my life.’
She hadn’t meant it, any of it, had only said it to jolt him out of this new unbearably autocratic coldness. She didn’t want to leave until they’d talked over the wrongs of five years ago. He didn’t know she’d seen him with that beautiful woman, witnessed so painfully how they’d been together, so he couldn’t know her subsequent bad behaviour had been down to a heart that was shattered and twisted with jealousy.
It was time the truth came out. All of it. He’d stopped her, back in London, by saying he wasn’t prepared to listen to a ‘tissue of lies’. Somehow she had to force him to hear her side of the story.
The sudden unwelcome thought that he might be just as bored by the charade as she’d said she was and would immediately agree to her leaving, chilled her for a moment, but the bleak smile he gave her, the softly spoken, ‘If you go, I’ll follow. If you hide, I’ll find you,’ froze her to the very core of her being.
For all the softening of his voice it sounded menacing but she wouldn’t let it throw her. She said brittly, ‘I’m sure there must be a law against that sort of harassment. And there’s no law that says I have to stay here. However—’ she took a last sip of her wine to bolster the nonchalant image she was desperate to portray ‘—I’ll stay if you agree to answer one or two questions. But not here—it’s far too formal. I’ll be in the courtyard if you think you can go along with that.’
How she got out of that room without falling down she would never know. And she didn’t know if he would follow, either. But he did, unnumbered, nerve-scratching minutes later.
He had shed the jacket of his dark immaculate suit and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up above his elbows, his black tie discarded. In the pale moonlight he dazzled her with his physical perfection, with the careless arrogance of the way he moved.
He had taken his time before joining her but at least he looked far more approachable, Lisa decided thankfully, monitoring the shiver of excited anticipation that quivered down her spine at the thought that at last they could go some way towards sorting out the past, putting it behind them.
But she changed her mind, realising that nothing concerning him could ever be that easy when he walked over the moon-bathed flagstones to the table beneath the sheltering, shading branches of an ancient fig tree and drawled, ‘Let’s get one thing straight, shall we? You may ask questions but I may not choose to answer them. And you stay here until I say you may go.’ He put the bottle and glasses he carried down on the table. ‘Sit where I can see you.’ He indicated a seat facing the vine-covered wall and miraculously the area was flooded with soft light.
He must have pressed a hidden switch, Lisa thought distractedly as the diffused light of concealed uplighters and downlighters glowed through banks of lush foliage. He was obviously in no mood for a heart-to-heart, no mood for closure.
Diego Raffacani was still pulling her strings, she thought sinkingly as she sat where he had said she must. And, to her shame, she was actually letting him.
Determined to do something about that degrading state of affairs, she sat up very straight and said, ‘You’re treating me like a criminal. You heap the blame for what happened five years ago entirely on me. But consider this—you lied to me from the first time we met. So what does that make you?’
A liar, she answered inside her head, her eyes lowered as he calmly poured wine into both glasses, pushing one of them across the table to her. And the only man she had ever loved. After him, no other man could hope to hold her stupid heart in the palm of his hand—and she still wanted him, warts and all, she acknowledged unhappily.
She wanted her Diego back, back the way he had been in those ecstatic days when they had been falling in love with each other. But it wasn’t going to happen. Not a chance. He had not been what she had thought he was. Now she was seeing him in his true colours. And still wanting him, for her sins!
He lowered himself into the seat opposite hers. That was better because six foot plus of looming, magnificent, sexually charged manhood was more than she felt she could possibly cope with. But it made little difference to the lurching sensation around her heart because, whereas she was illuminated, he was in shadow.
It was impossible to read his expression, make a stab at guessing what he was thinking. His voice was just slightly amused as he came back with, ‘As a criminal you’re getting five star treatment without receiving your punishment. I really wouldn’t complain if I were you. And—’ his voice hardened ‘—I have never lied to you, so don’t insult me by saying I have.’ He lifted his wine glass and
reflected moonlight shimmered and danced as he idly swirled the contents. ‘But that’s what women do, isn’t it? When they’re cornered they fling out patently absurd counter-accusations.’
‘You must have known a few really weird women,’ Lisa replied quietly. If she allowed her voice to rise by the merest fraction she would go out of control, start to rant and rave. ‘So you can take back that sexist remark and explain why you told me you were a humble waiter when all the time you were sickeningly wealthy.’
She picked up her own glass. Her hand was shaking. She put it down again before she disgraced herself and spilled the lot. Diego, leaning well back in his chair, remarked, ‘You decided I was a humble waiter. I told you, quite truthfully, that I spent almost all of my evenings working in one of the hotel restaurants. You see, my tarnished angel, how I remember every word we ever said to each other? The hotel we were to meet in on that last night was the latest in the family chain. My father, being a sensible man, insisted that I had hands-on experience of each branch of the varied business enterprises. I was acting night manager at that time.’
