LITMIR.BIZ

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hope not …’ It was a stricken whisper.

      Shattered by his suspicions, Glory was frozen to the bed. How could he think that she would deliberately run the risk of unprotected sex? How could he believe that she would welcome an unplanned pregnancy? The mere prospect of such a development terrified Glory. She had an instant vision of unwed motherhood combined with horrendous poverty. One or two of her schoolfriends had taken that route within a couple of years of leaving school and had lived to regret the choice.

      ‘Do you really? If I’ve knocked you up I’ll be keeping you and the kid for the next twenty years at least!’ Rafaello informed her in outraged conclusion. ‘That’s a bloody high price to pay for your precious virginity. I need a shower!’

      As he strode into the connecting bathroom and the door slammed shut Glory felt gutted. Her happiness had been so short-lived that it now seemed like an illusion she had dreamt up. How could he imagine that she would sink that low? Was there no end to his distrust? What sort of an idiot had she been to think that she could so easily change his opinion of her? And wasn’t she now getting exactly what she deserved for her foolishness?

      Nothing was ever going to change. He was very rich. She was poor. There was no equality and there never would be. Without the equality, maybe respect and trust could not exist, she reasoned wretchedly. She was Glory Little, the gardener’s daughter, the gypsy’s daughter, the factory worker. He was Rafaello Grazzini, an extremely successful businessman and famed for his entrepreneurial skills.

      He was hurting her again. How could she be letting him do that to her a second time? Didn’t she ever learn? She had agreed to be his mistress. He had said he only wanted sex. She had given him what he wanted. End of story. What on earth had she been doing, clinging to him? A textbook case of entrapment? Glory shuddered, nausea stirring in her sensitive stomach. As if she was some greedy, scheming little tramp he had picked up off a street corner!

      She threw herself off the bed and viewed the tangled bed-sheets with shamefaced discomfiture. Well, retribution had come even faster than she had warned. ‘If you don’t value yourself, no man will,’ her mother had once told her harshly. So what had she expected to achieve when she had sold herself? Choking tears of regret clogging her aching throat, Glory knew she needed to get a grip on herself before she risked facing Rafaello again. But her dress was nowhere to be seen. Just as she was wondering if her dress lay beneath the bedspread heaped on the carpet, she heard the shower switch off and panic filled her.

      As her case was still downstairs, she raced over to the sleek built-in units that covered one wall and yanked open a door. Seeing a row of shirts hanging, she trailed one off a hanger and dug her arms into it at frantic speed. Within ten seconds she was out of the bedroom and hurrying down the stairs. Catching a glimpse of Rafaello’s manservant clearing a table in one of the ground-floor rooms, she realised that the only true sanctuary available was the outdoors. As she sped out of the front door, emerging into the bright path of the outside lights, she found herself in the very teeth of a surprisingly strong wind. But she hesitated only a moment before she fled down the path to the beach and into the cover of the tamarisk trees ringing the cove.

      CHAPTER SIX

      GLORY could not credit that she had come out to a fabulous, scenic Greek island in the month of June only to find herself fighting to walk through a howling gale with sand blowing in her face.

      The sea was foaming like a cauldron, mirroring the seething tempest of emotion inside her. Rafaello despised her. He truly did. She had to accept that but she didn’t want to accept that, couldn’t bear to accept that, she discovered. All the messy feelings she had buried five years earlier were escaping their bonds. Taking shelter beneath an overhanging rock in the massive outcrop near the end of the beach, she sat down, closing out the angry surge of the surf. With those painful emotions came the memories …

      Glory had left school at sixteen. She had wanted to stay on but her father had asserted that no Little had ever been academic, and she had found work as an office junior at the local auctioneers. By the time she reached eighteen, sightings of Rafaello had become rare events. After all, the Grazzinis had divided their time between their Italian and English homes and, having completed his business degree, Rafaello had bought a London apartment and only visited Montague Park occasionally.

      Glory had taken a long time to come to terms with their first humiliating encounter when she was sixteen and the horror of having been delivered home to her furious parents like a juvenile delinquent. When, afterwards, Rafaello would drive past Glory and award her a nod or smile of recognition, she would barely raise her head in acknowledgement. Yet, in spite of the lack of encouragement, one week after her eighteenth birthday Rafaello had raked his Ferrari to a halt in the drive and offered her a lift.

      ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Glory had told him through the window he lowered, straining every sinew to play it cool while striving not to overdo it.

      ‘How would you like to go out to dinner tonight?’

      She had got into his passenger seat almost before he finished speaking.

      ‘That was the magic combination, was it?’ Rafaello had murmured with a slanting smile that turned her all-too-vulnerable heart upside-down and left her dizzy.

      ‘Maybe I’m just hungry.’ The truth would have been that she had never been invited out for a meal. The males she met invited her to bars, clubs, sports fixtures and the cinema.

      For the following six weeks Glory had walked on air and her feet hadn’t touched the ground once. True, mixing with his friends had sometimes been a strain. She had discovered entire conversational topics that had previously been unknown to her. Winter skiing, opera, ballet, yachting and the total agony of not being able to locate the latest must-have designer handbag. While warning her that only grief could be coming in her direction, her own friends had pooled their clothes and loaned her outfits to wear. Dating Rafaello had been something of a community effort.

      The talent scout who had sighted her out at a club one evening had tried to get her to sign up with a modelling agency in the north. She had felt terribly flattered but Rafaello had squashed any dreams she might have cherished on that score at source.

      ‘You’re too small to be a fashion model. The guy can’t be legit. Alternatively, you could find yourself fronting a knitting pattern or some such thing.’

      Which Glory had quite understood roughly translated into the news that he did not want her chasing after a modelling career a few hundred miles away. Since the only thing in her life she truly cared about at that time was him, she had thought no more about that offer. Soon after that Rafaello had persuaded her to let him give her a tour of Montague Park, but before they had even completed the circuit of the ground floor his father had interrupted them. Glory had immediately recognised that Benito Grazzini, though he made every effort to hide the fact, was very much shocked to discover that his son was dating his gardener’s daughter.

      ‘He doesn’t like me seeing you,’ she had said to Rafaello afterwards.

      ‘He was just surprised. That’s all. You’re too sensitive,’ Rafaello had told her.

      But that same week Benito Grazzini had called at the cottage on Glory’s afternoon off. Even worse, that same day her own father was upstairs sleeping off his drinking excesses, rather than out working as he should have been. Ironically, Benito Grazzini had looked awful, his eyes sunk in his head as if he hadn’t slept for days and his greyish pallor no more healthy. But he had wasted no time in spelling out his terms.

      As soon as he had told her that her father would be sacked if she did not do as he asked, she had known she had no choice. If she appealed to Rafaello for support she would only be making trouble which would rebound on her family. Rafaello was close to his father but she had only been dating him for a paltry six weeks, and, while she might be in love with him, he had made no such claims. Sobered up, Archie Little had fully supported his daughter’s decision to surrender and leave home.

      Glory had decided that the easiest way out of

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