remained her best friend through thick and thin. Why hadn’t she called him instead of Angelo? Even though he was all loved up with his partner, Brian, a doctor at one of the big London hospitals, he would have jumped in his little car without hesitation and stayed with her until she had talked herself out of her anxiousness.
As things stood, she spent a wakeful night, listening out for noises, wondering how Ian had managed to infiltrate her haven. He didn’t have a key. She had gone out with the man once. But he must have followed her at some point to know where she lived. She shuddered thinking about it. She wondered whether there was any point contacting the police. Would they be able to do anything? Or would they say, again, that no crime had been committed? They might even doubt her when she told them that there was no way that Ian could have a key to her house.
During the course of her restless night, the idea of fleeing to the countryside seemed to make more and more sense. She would have to give notice at the restaurant, but there was a chance that they would release her if she explained the situation. she was on good terms with the head chef who ran the show.
The following morning, she rang James Foreman as early as she thought acceptable and told him that she had decided to take a look at the cottage as soon as possible.
“Today if I can,” she said, walking through the house and flinging bits and pieces of clothing into her holdall. “I know it’s very last minute, and I should have called you earlier, but I just decided on the spur of the moment.”
Excellent idea, the lawyer told her. She could come to his house for the keys, although of course Angelo had a set of his own.
“I’ll come to you,” Rosie said hastily. “I promised Mr Di Capua that I would let him know if I intended visiting the cottage and I have. I spoke to him yesterday. Of course, you might want to confirm that with him yourself. No rush there, though,” she continued vaguely. “I gather that he’s a very busy man. I’m sure he wouldn’t be interested in dashing down to Cornwall on a weekend.”
By the time the phone call had ended, a time had been arranged for her to collect the key. Having made her mind up, she couldn’t wait to go.
“I’m going to do it.” She called Jack on her mobile to tell him as she locked the front door behind her and stuck out her hand for a cab. “Long story, but I don’t feel safe in the house any more. I know Ian’s harmless, but it’s still a little scary to think…well…”
Jack did as she expected him to, spoke to her in that soothing voice of his, told her that it was a good idea and that she shouldn’t feel guilty about accepting Mandy’s gift because it was the least she could have done.
“She wrecked your life,” he said, indignant, and as always fiercely loyal.
“Or else made me see Angelo for what he really was. Just a ship passing in the night. He never loved me, Jack, or else he wouldn’t have been unfaithful behind my back with my best friend.” Yet, seeing him again, he still got to her, still fired her up and made every pore and nerve-ending in her body rush into immediate red-alert mode.
There was nothing Jack could say to that, nothing that he had ever been able to say to that. They had talked about it endlessly in the weeks after the relationship had crashed and burned, until Rosie had become aware that she was boring her friend to death. At which point she stopped, and the only conversations she had on the subject were in her head.
“She did me a favour.” Rosie thought of the glittering hatred in Angelo’s eyes, those fabulous moss-green eyes that were so sexy and so unusual in someone of his exotically dark colouring.
“He should have heard you out about those pawn tickets, Rosie baby.”
“Why would he? He didn’t care enough to hear my side of the story. He was already moving on. No, he had already moved on.” She was ashamed when she remembered how willing she would have been to force Angelo to hear her out, how happily she would have sacrificed her self-respect and begged for him to believe her. But in the end there had been no point, because he had married Amanda.
She felt drained and exhausted just thinking about it. She couldn’t believe that he was now back in her life, determined to make her suffer in whatever way he could.
Forty minutes later, with the key to the cottage in her purse, Rosie wondered whether she had the strength to fight Angelo for a cottage she hadn’t even seen and might well hate on sight. Of the three of them, Mandy had always been the one most determined to blank out the past and recreate it as something it had never been. The second she had met Angelo and sussed his wealth, she had hissed to Rosie that she should keep their background under wraps.
“A guy like that who could have anyone, literally anyone, would dump you in a heartbeat if he ever found out that you, me and Jack are refugees from a disgusting council estate up north. Can you imagine what he’d think if he knew that your dad died a drunk? That your best friend’s mum was a junkie doing time? You wouldn’t see him for dust.”
Rosie had laughed. She wasn’t ashamed of her background, even though she had wanted to escape it as badly as the other two. But, in all events, Angelo hadn’t been the sort of guy who had wanted to quiz her about where she had grown up, nor had he confided in her about his own background, save to say that he had no brothers or sisters and came from a little village in Italy. They had laughed and made love and lived purely for the moment, and she had forgotten that they came from two different worlds because he had made her feel like a princess.
She splashed out on her train ticket and felt the thud of excitement as the train slowly lurched out of Paddington station. She’d had to wait a couple of hours at the station, not having booked her ticket in advance, but she hadn’t minded. She had enjoyed sitting in one of the cafés, sipping coffee and watching the world go by.
The key in her bag felt like a good-luck charm and she had to resist the temptation to wrap her fingers around it.
She had to stop herself from grinning. She didn’t care if Angelo loathed her and wanted to buy her out of this inheritance. This was her wonderful adventure and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. She would grab it with both hands. Jack was right—why shouldn’t she? Amanda had taken a shotgun to her life and blown it apart so maybe James Foreman was right. Maybe this was her way of making amends.
She felt a shadow of apprehension when she remembered that Angelo owned the grounds alongside it, but she would just have to work out how that might affect her. They had nothing to say to one another. Once he had accepted that he couldn’t fling her off her own premises or buy her off, he would wash his hands of her. Hadn’t he said something about wanting to develop the place anyway? He could develop his own land, turn it into whatever he wanted, and when that happened he would once again disappear from her life. It wasn’t as though he would be finding excuses to show up on her doorstep. The opposite.
She sat back, closed her eyes and did her utmost to block the image of Angelo burning into her retina, tall, dark, dangerous and seeking some sort of revenge.
CHAPTER THREE
NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared Rosie for the picture-postcard cottage she walked into.
She had alternately dozed on the journey and speculated on what would be waiting for her at the end of it. She hadn’t realised how stressed out she had been for the past few months, how accustomed she had become to looking over her shoulder, but the more distance she put between herself and London the more relaxed she became.
Her hours at the restaurant were insane. Eager to pack in as much experience as she possibly could, she worked like a demon and, on weekends, would obsessively try out variations on some of the dishes she had been taught to prepare, always trying to tweak them into something else, something that would give her the confidence to break away and do her own thing.
Her social life was practically nonexistent. She had become so used to it that it was only as she was travelling away from it that she could see how unhealthy a lifestyle it had become.
And then there was Ian, always hovering in the background