LITMIR.BIZ

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of her body. She could not stop it—did not even try to these days. Because if she did, it didn’t work, simply hit her again, over and over.

      Getting to her feet again, she reached to pick up her handbag and extract her mobile phone. The number she knew off by heart, and dialled it automatically. When it answered, her words were automatic as well.

      ‘Hello. This is Arlene Graham’s daughter. How is she?’

      She waited while the appropriate records were checked, and the same carefully neutral phrase came back to her. Rachel nodded, murmuring her thanks, and disconnected.

      Stable. No change. As well as can be expected. Comfortable.

      The familiar litany drilled through her head. None of it sufficient to hide the one word that was the truth about her mother.

      Dying.

      Depression sank over her like a heavy weight, pressing down on her so that she felt slow and cumbersome as she moved around the cramped bedsit, carefully proceeding to take off her expensive, extravagant outfit and smooth it carefully inside the curtained-off hanging space which was the closest the accommodation got to providing a wardrobe.

      As she eased the beautiful fabric off another emotion penetrated her cawl of depression. Bitterness that she had wasted so much scarce money on such a pointless expenditure. She might as well have saved it for all the good it had done! Had she really thought that looking the part would help persuade Vito Farneste to accept her ludicrous conditions?

      How could it have? Making her his wife—on whatever terms imaginable—was anathema to him, whatever clothes she was wearing!

      Get real, he had sneered at her, and he was right. She’d been indulging in a pathetic fantasy, thinking the Farneste emeralds might be a sufficient inducement to go along with her absurd plan.

      Again in her mind she heard his contemptuous, angry words cutting her idiotic fantasy into tiny shreds!

      Well, it was an idiotic fantasy…the whole thing—emeralds or not!

      Just how many times does Vito Farneste have to say vile things to you before you learn your lesson about him?

      If she’d been smart, the first insult he’d thrown at her when she was fourteen would have been the last! If she’d been more worldly-wise she’d never have given him the benefit of the doubt again.

      But she hadn’t been smart, she thought savagely. She’d been stupid—criminally, culpably stupid. Indulging herself in an idiotic, ridiculous fairytale.

      She tried to stop herself, but it was no good. Like a sweeping, drowning tide memory rushed through her, taking her shakingly, shudderingly back into the past that was like a curse over her life still, all these years later.

      Eighteen.

      She’d been eighteen.

      Such a dangerous age. An age for dreams.

      For fairytales.

      Her school exams had been over, and the senior class had been allowed two weeks away from school in the summer term as a reward. Her friends Jenny and Zara had whisked her away with them, gleefully informing her that they were going to spend the fortnight in Rome, at Jenny’s father’s company flat. Rachel had been apprehensive—although she’d been one of the oldest girls in her year she’d known that she was the least worldly-wise—but excited as well.

      She hadn’t told her mother—anyway, Arlene was cruising with Enrico in his yacht off the French Riviera, so her last postcard had said.

      After years of being an exemplary pupil at the strict boarding-school restlessness had swept through her, a yearning for something more than studying and sport and music lessons. A longing for excitement. Adventure.

      Romance.

      Cold broke down her spine as memory washed over her.

      Romance?

      She’d been yearning for romance—but what she had found was something quite, quite different…

      She felt her fingers clench.

      If I just hadn’t gone to Rome. If I hadn’t gone to that party the night we arrived. If Vito Farneste hadn’t gone. If, if, if…

      But she had gone. Dressed up in one of Jenny’s evening outfits that showed off so much bare flesh she’d been shocked by it, her face and hair done by Zara so that a golden waterfall had cascaded down her bare back, her eyes huge, her mouth lush.

      A totally different Rachel Vaile from the boring schoolgirl she had always been.

      She’d thought she was so sophisticated, so mature, so grown-up…

      But she’d been like a kid playing games. Games she hadn’t even known she was playing.

      If I just hadn’t gone to that party…

      But she had gone, and so, by malign chance, had Vito Farneste. And he had taken his opportunity, handed to him on a plate by a stupid, gullible eighteen-year-old.

      Such a vulnerable age.

      Against Vito Farneste, at eighteen, she’d had no defences whatsoever.

      Most pitiable of all, she hadn’t even wanted any.

      Her mouth twisted and tightened.

      It had been like taking candy from a baby.

      All he’d had to do was look at her, that beautiful, sinful mouth smiling at her, his dark eyes washing over her, telling her with his sweeping, long-lashed gaze that she was pleasing to him.

      He’d spent that whole party by her side, and he had been the only person in the room for her. Her whole being had focused on him.

      She’d recognised him immediately, and frozen, but miraculously he hadn’t seemed to recognise her. She’d known that four years on she must look very different from that briefly glimpsed, scathingly dismissed gawky fourteen-year-old in a swimsuit. Moreover, she’d still borne her father’s name, not her mother’s—and had he ever even known her first name? She’d wondered whether she should tell him who she was, but as the evening had worn on she’d known she could not. Could not bear to risk him dismissing her as cruelly as he had done four years earlier.

      He had been like a dream come true. A secret fantasy made real.

      He’d whisked her away from the party as it had got rowdier, and driven her around Rome by night in a powerful, open-topped Italian thoroughbred of a car. And she’d sat, gazing round at the beauty and excitement of the Eternal City, entranced by the Spanish Steps—so crowded with tourists, whatever the hour—then the Via Corso and the Pantheon. They’d driven along to the glistening white wedding cake of the Victor Emanuel monument, and then through the ancient Roman Forum to sweep past the sinister mass of the dreaded Coliseum.

      But it hadn’t just been Rome that had captivated her.

      Her hungry gaze had been as much for Vito Farneste, disbelieving that he was fantasy made flesh—here, now, beside her.

      She’d assumed, when he’d finally dropped her off at Jenny’s apartment after midnight, that she would never see him again, but he’d turned up the next day, after breakfast, and whisked her off again to see Rome by day.

      Jenny and Zara, as thrilled for her as she was herself, had done her up to the nines again, and once more she had had the bliss of seeing Vito Farneste smiling down at her, knowing she was pleasing to his eye despite her youth, her Englishness and her obvious lack of worldly-wise sophistication.

      It had been like a fairytale. Two, beautiful, exquisite, wonderful, gorgeous weeks of having Vito all to herself, during which she had basked like a flower beneath the sun. She’d floated three feet off the ground, it seemed, as Vito had showed her Rome and the lovely, rolling summer countryside of Lazio, with its pine forests and cooling lakes, and the coast and the seaside. Everything had been touched with magic—gazing awestruck, neck cricked, at Michelangelo’s Sistine

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