LITMIR.BIZ

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dysfunction or some such thing it is called.’

      ‘How did you change the cycle when so many can’t or won’t?’

      ‘I wanted to win, Rachel,’ he said with a determined set to his features. ‘I have always wanted to win because my father’s chance was thrown away.’

      ‘So winning at any cost is important to you?’

      His eyes burned a pathway to her soul. ‘Very important,’ he said. ‘I will not stop until I get what I want.’

      Rachel picked up her coffee cup for something to do with her hands. She wanted to reach out and lay her hand on his arm as he had done to her earlier but she wasn’t sure how it would be interpreted. When it came to that she wasn’t sure how she would react. Would her touch turn into a caress or a plea for forgiveness or both? Would she slide her hand up and down his hair-roughened arm, maybe even entwine her slim, small fingers with his long, strong ones? Her belly gave another little two-step shuffle and she gripped her coffee cup a little harder, but the cup was hot and somehow she lost her hold, the liquid spilling on the stark whiteness of the tablecloth, some of it splashing against her chest.

      ‘Are you all right?’ Alessandro asked. ‘You didn’t burn yourself, did you?’

      ‘No, I’m fine,’ she said, using the napkin he had rapidly handed her to mop up the spillage. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not normally so clumsy.’

      He remained seated while she cleared the table, which she tried not to be annoyed about. He was paying her and generously to wait on him. She had no right to feel resentful. If anything she should be bending over backwards to get him to consider backing her label. It was demeaning to be in such a position but she really had no choice. ‘Alessandro …’ she began, ‘I just want to say how much I—’

      ‘Go to bed, Rachel,’ he said as if dismissing an overtired child from the adults’ dinner table. ‘Your work here is finished for the day. We will speak again in the morning.’ ‘But I—’

      ‘Don’t argue with me, Rachel,’ he said. ‘You are obviously exhausted. I should not have kept you up so late. I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.’

      Rachel turned and left, not happy about being dismissed but she realised by the way the shutters came down on his face that he was probably regretting revealing so much about his background. She felt ashamed that she hadn’t probed him about it five years ago. Why had she just assumed he was a bad boy? Why hadn’t she looked a little closer and understood why he was so driven and determined? He was a man on a mission to succeed and she had been a part of that plan but had defaulted. No wonder he was enjoying watching her taking orders from him.

      Success, after all, was the ultimate revenge.

      It was only as she was washing her face in preparation for bed that she realised her mother’s pendant was missing from around her neck. A tight band of panic wrapped around her insides as she shook out her clothes to see if it had caught on them as she had undressed but there was no sign of it. She then retraced her steps, all over the large bedroom and then back to the en suite, her eyes scouring the floor as she went for the glint of a diamond and the silver of the fine chain, but there was nothing. She spread out the contents of her handbag on the bed, going through everything meticulously but still not able to see the pendant anywhere. She checked the sink of the basin she had used, but without the services of a plumber to undo the S-bend she was unable to know for sure if it had slipped down there or not. She bit her lip and thought hard about when she had last felt it around her neck. But because she wore it most of the time she was so used to feeling it there that she didn’t feel it. It was a part of her that just was … well, a part of her. And now it was gone.

      A choked sob rose in her throat. She couldn’t lose it. It was all she had of her mother. She just couldn’t possibly lose it. She would tear this wretched villa asunder to find it even if it took her the whole night to do it.

      There was a satin robe that Lucia had given her earlier and she wrapped it around herself quickly to continue the search.

      She went down the stairs, turning on lights as she went, her eyes on the floor the whole time. She went across the foyer and then down to the dining room and opened the door. The table was as she had left it, shiny and cleared with a vase of roses in the centre filling the room with their scent.

      She got on her hands and knees and went over the thick carpet with her hands and strained eyes. She was close to tears by now, her heart sinking at the thought of losing that final link with her mother.

      ‘Oh, dear God, where are you?’ she said out loud as she sat back on her heels and pushed the hair out of her face.

      Rachel had her back to the door and it took her a moment to shuffle around on her knees in order to identify the sound that had whispered over the thick carpet like a fox on velvet paws.

      Her heart swung like a wildly flung anvil in her chest when she saw Alessandro sitting in a wheelchair, his blue-black eyes meeting hers. ‘Is this what you are looking for?’ he asked, her mother’s pendant dangling from his long tanned fingers.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      RACHEL gulped, her eyes going to the chair and then back to his unflinching gaze. ‘I … I …’

      He gave her a dispassionate look. ‘I am sorry I can’t rise in your presence but I am confident that within the next few days I will be able to do so.’

      Her face exploded with shame. She felt every single capillary fill with it. ‘I had no idea … I’m so sorry … I wish I had known. I would never have said the things … Oh, God, the awful things I said.’ She bit on her lip so hard she tasted blood. She mentally recalled every insult, every horrible insult she had flung at him for not standing. It had never occurred to her that he couldn’t. Oh, dear God, what must he think of her? Emotion clogged her throat, tightening it until she couldn’t speak. Every moment she had spent with him he had been sitting, apart from when he had been in the pool, but even there she could not recall him standing. He had leaned against the edge and later had pulled himself out of the water and sat with his legs in the water. Why hadn’t he said something? Why hadn’t Lucia warned her? What was going on?

      Alessandro used his hands to roll the wheelchair towards her. ‘You can stand up,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to kneel at my feet like a servant from the Dark Ages.’

      Rachel scrambled ungainly to her feet, momentarily forgetting she was dressed in nothing but a slip of satin that was probably showing every contour of her body. It was only as she felt his dark blue gaze run over her that she wished she had asked Lucia for something a little less revealing to wear. ‘You found my pendant,’ she said unnecessarily.

      ‘Yes.’ He handed it to her. ‘It must have fallen from your neck when you dabbed at your spilt coffee on your top. It was on the floor. I found it as I was leaving to go upstairs.’

      Rachel tried to put the pendant back on but her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. She gave it another try but it slipped out of her hands and she had to kneel down again to retrieve it off the floor.

      ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’

      She leaned towards him but it brought her so close to his face her breath stalled in her throat. They were eye to eye.

      His eyes were so very dark. His breath was minty and fresh as it caressed her face. She could see the pinpoints of stubble on his jaw, the fresh dark growth triggered by the rush of his potent male hormones. Her fingers ached to feel the rasp of his stubble under her fingertips, to trace the sensual contour of his mouth. Her lips tingled to feel the hard press of his on hers, her heart beat so hard and so fast in anticipation she was sure he could hear it. For that matter she could hear it. It was like the roar of the ocean in her ears: pounding, tumultuous, deafening.

      Alessandro took the pendant from her fingers and looped it around her neck, one of his hands lifting

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