mobile features tensed. ‘I guessed how you’d react.’
‘I bet you said nothing, you lily-livered swine!’ Kelda hissed across the table at him. ‘You don’t care if Tomaso runs around with other women behind her back!’
Tim had gone red. ‘I don’t think it’s any of my business.’
‘Oh, I’m all right, Jack!’
Tim grimaced. ‘How much of the way you feel has to do with Angelo?’
Kelda froze. ‘It’s got nothing to do with him!’
Tim gave her an unimpressed glance.
‘I can’t stand him...that’s true.’ Her restive hands snapped a carrot stick in two but she held his gaze fiercely. ‘But it’s Mum’s best interests that concern me.’
‘You’re terrified of Angelo.’ Tim looked almost amused.
‘Don’t be ridiculous...I loathe and despise him... I’m certainly not afraid of him!’
Tim sipped his wine. ‘Exactly what did happen the night of your eighteenth birthday bash? You know, I never did find out why Angelo had disappeared, Tomaso looked like thunder and Mum was on the brink of hysterics over breakfast the next morning...’
Every scrap of natural colour had drained from her complexion. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said tightly.
Her stomach was churning sickly. She broke out in a cold sweat. If she lived to be a hundred, she would still relive that evening in her nightmares. Angelo had humiliated her. Angelo had destroyed her. At a most sensitive age, he had instilled in her an aversion to sexual intimacy that she had still to overcome. The Iceberg was dead from the neck down, she reflected with raw shame and bitterness. She couldn’t bear a man to come too close. Her skin crawled when men got seductive and expectant. It made her feel soiled, cheap. Angelo had done that to her...with his scorn and revulsion.
‘You’re a promiscuous little tramp. It doesn’t matter how much money my father spends on you...you will never climb out of the gutter!’
Kelda swallowed back nausea with difficulty. She was lost in the past, savaged by an indictment that had merely heightened the intense vulnerability she concealed from the world.
‘Angelo seems to be encouraging Mum and Tomaso,’ Tim remarked. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t stick a spoke in his wheels.’
‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’ Kelda demanded.
Tim didn’t meet her eyes. ‘He called into the office one day last week.’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Actually, he’s offered to fix me up with a better job...’
‘I can see I’m on my own,’ Kelda breathed flatly.
Tim searched her vibrantly beautiful face anxiously. ‘He’s a vicious bastard when he’s crossed, Kelda. Stay out of it. Mum’s a big girl now. Let her make her own mistakes. And if Angelo’s prepared to bury the hatchet—’
‘I’ll lift it out of the ground and bury it in his back,’ Kelda slotted in with grim emphasis. ‘I have no intention of interfering between Mum and Tomaso but neither have I any intention of being roped in to play happy families. I’m not eighteen any more. I have a life of my own.’
Tim groaned. ‘You’re not half as tough as you like to act. If you annoy him, Angelo won’t just rock your boat, Kelda. He’ll blow you out of the water.’
Her hand shook slightly as she raised her glass. Tim’s imagery sent a chill snaking down her backbone.
‘Any recovery on the career front?’ Tim prompted abruptly.
She pulled a face. ‘I’m trying to sell my apartment.’
‘As bad as that?’ Tim looked shaken.
‘When the Fantasy campaign dropped me, I lost half my income...and other cancellations followed,’ she spelt out tautly.
‘But you’ll make it up again...you’re famous!’
‘Notorious,’ Kelda corrected with unconcealed bitterness. ‘And that’s not the sort of image that sells exclusive cosmetics and perfume. My contract with the agency is up in two months’ time. I don’t think it’ll be renewed.’
Tim said something unrepeatable about Danny Philips. Then he smiled. ‘You should marry Jeff. He’s stood by you and he’s got all his Daddy’s hotels coming to him—’
Kelda concealed her distaste. She knew she would miss the luxuries her high earnings had brought her but she had no intention of marrying to maintain that lifestyle.
‘I should have stopped seeing Jeff weeks ago,’ she confided wryly,.
‘I liked Jeff.’ Tim frowned at her. ‘Let him down gently.’
As she dressed for her dinner date that evening, she grimaced. She had already tried and failed twice to let Jeff down lightly. So much for her heartless bitch image! She liked Jeff but he was getting serious. He wasn’t the Mr Right her daft mother liked to talk about. Kelda had decided a long time ago that Mr Right didn’t exist. Not for her, anyway. She attracted all the wrong types.
The poseurs, the predators. To most men, she was a trophy to show off, a glorified sex object, whose greatest gift was the envious reactions she stirred up among their friends. Five feet nine in her bare feet, Kelda had the sleek slender lines of an elegant thoroughbred and a face that every camera loved. She had flawless skin, gorgeous hair and beautiful eyes. At sixteen she had suddenly blossomed from a gawky, flat-chested late developer into an eye-catching young woman, who turned heads wherever she went. The attention had been balm to a self-esteem continuously battered by Angelo’s cruel tongue.
He had so very nearly prevented her from becoming a model. If it hadn’t been for the divorce, she would have ended up resitting the final exams she had failed.
‘You let her go to London, she’ll go wild,’ Angelo had forecast. ‘She’s too immature, too undisciplined and too volatile.’
Angelo had always taken great pleasure in ensuring that whatever she most wanted she didn’t get and whatever she least wanted, she got in spades. But she hadn’t gone wild, had she? She had clawed her way up the ladder to success and exulted in her first Vogue cover. Rather childishly, she recalled reluctantly, she had sent a copy of that edition to Angelo, desperately afraid that he mightn’t have seen it. Very childish, she acknowledged. Then, Angelo had always brought out the worst in her character.
Jeff arrived with a massive bunch of red roses and her heart sank. Dinner at a candlelit restaurant followed. No matter how often she tried to tactfully change the subject, Jeff brought it back to marriage. He was like a terrier chasing a bone.
Her conscience smote her. Jeff had staunchly stood by her throughout the tabloid attacks. Other friends had deserted her like rats escaping a sinking ship. Jeff had had touching faith in her innocence. What a shame it was that you couldn’t love to order, she thought ruefully. She valued Jeff’s friendship but she was beginning to realise that no matter what she did, she was going to lose that as well.
‘I’m really very fond of you,’ Kelda stressed carefully.
‘I don’t want you to be bloody fond of me!’ he muttered with unexpected heat. ‘I want you to marry me.’
‘I can’t.’
For the remainder of the meal, he swung between arguing and a monolithic attack of the sulks. Kelda managed to charm him out of the worst of his mood but he was drinking too much. Unfortunately she had already agreed to join friends of his at a nightclub. Her attempt to pull out of the arrangement was badly received. Fearful of a public scene, she steeled herself to face what remained of a difficult evening. If it was at all possible, she didn’t want to hurt Jeff’s feelings.
Belatedly she realised that she had made the wrong decision. In the foyer of the club,