‘Of course, it will be nice to see you…’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Don’t lie, Isobel. Your face is too transparent.’
She flushed angrily. ‘What do you want me to say? You walk back into town after four years and announce that you plan on settling here, but there’s nothing pleasant about the announcement, is there? You’re not planning on settling here for the good of the community. You’re planning on settling here because you have a chance to settle old scores.’ She looked at him bitterly. ‘Aren’t we both too old for this?’
He banged his fist on the table with such force that Isobel jumped and looked at him warily. He wasn’t going to get violent, was he? Then she laughed nervously to herself. Of course not. How could he in such a public place? Besides, she knew Lorenzo. He had never been a man given to displays of violence.
You don’t know him now, though, a little voice warned. People change. The face she was staring at with apprehension was the face of a stranger, a dark, menacing stranger.
‘Too old?’ he sneered. ‘Too old to forget the past, Isobel?’
‘What happened happened a long time ago…’ She glanced at the door and he followed the line of her eyes with a cold smile.
‘Mr Clark has been told to wait until I am ready.’
‘What?’
‘I informed him that there were things I wanted to discuss with you in private.’
‘The sale of my father’s business isn’t a private matter,’ she began, but that wasn’t the object of his discussion, was it? ‘Can’t we put the past behind us? We can be friends…’
‘Friends?’ He almost laughed at that, his eyebrows shooting up in an expression of contempt that made her burn. ‘I’m sure you’d like nothing better, Isobel.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Oh, only that I’m here, rich and successful—the two prerequisites, if I remember correctly, for any man to be worthwhile in your eyes.’
‘That’s not true!’ More memories flooded back and she felt faint.
‘No?’ He relaxed back in the swivel chair and folded his hands on his lap. ‘Then pray tell me why you married Jeremy, and why you stayed married to him for four long years? Your precious status quo. You needed it so badly that you sacrificed your life for it.’
Isobel stood up, trembling, white. ‘I don’t have to remain here and listen to this,’ she said curtly, turning towards the door.
‘Sit back down!’
She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘You don’t give me orders, Lorenzo Cicolla!’
‘Sit back down!’ he roared, and she hastily sat back down, wondering whether his bellow wouldn’t bring Mr Clark scurrying back into his office. But no one came.
‘Now you listen to me,’ he said, and his voice was the voice of a man with steel running through his veins. He leaned forward. ‘Your father’s company needs a buyer if it’s to survive in one piece.’
‘I can choose my buyer,’ she said coldly, and he laughed under his breath.
‘Really?’
‘Mr Clark told me that there are several offers in the pipeline.’
‘No offers, Isobel.’
‘But…’
‘I am the only bidder. Without me, your father’s company will quickly fall into ruin. It’s a wonder that it hasn’t before now. If it falls into ruin, my darling, it will be sold off in bits and pieces to the highest bidders and you will watch your father’s handiwork go down the drain. Do you want that?’
Isobel looked at him with dislike. He was enjoying this. He was enjoying her discomfort, enjoying watching her in a position of helpless subservience. How could she ever have felt love for this man? He was a sadist.
She could, she knew, explain, after all these years, why she had married Jeremy, but if he was hell-bent on revenge, then might not that confession give him the ammunition he needed? It was a chance she could not take. Her father was dead. He was beyond pain. But her mother was still alive, ill, vulnerable, and already buffeted by enough misfortune.
Besides, and she might as well face it, the Lorenzo Cicolla she had known, the man who had once, so long ago that she could scarcely recall, made love to her, laughed with her, was gone. This was someone else. Someone she no longer understood.
‘What do you gain from all this, Lorenzo?’ she asked with quiet desperation.
‘Passing satisfaction,’ he said, his lips twisting, and she clenched her fists uselessly at her sides.
‘At my expense.’
‘Is that so difficult to understand?’ He smiled with sarcasm.
‘Why fight when we can——?’
‘Make love?’
Colour swept into her face. She could feel it burning through her, making her perspire lightly, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
‘When we can be friends…’ she whispered.
He was looking at her, his eyes roving insolently over her body. ‘A tempting thought,’ he said silkily. ‘You’re still a beautiful woman. More so. Time has put character into your face. But no, I think I can resist you.’ He was smiling again, that cool smile that made her want to hit him. ‘I don’t think I could stomach the thought that your friendship had only been offered because I am now rich enough to pay the right price.’
‘You’re despicable.’
That brought an angry flush to his face. ‘Your marriage to Jeremy Baker was hardly what I would call a noble gesture, Isobel. Or perhaps it’s simply my peasant mind that persists in thinking in such inconvenient black and white terms.’
Isobel looked at him from under her lashes. Peasant? Hardly. He might have come from the wrong side of the tracks, as Jeremy had been fond of saying whenever his name cropped up, but no one looking at him would ever have guessed that. Sitting there, in his expensive tailored suit, he looked what he was: wealthy, sophisticated, ruthless.
‘Why didn’t you stay in America?’ It was more the agonised voicing of a private thought than a question demanding an answer.
‘I told you. I lost interest in the bright lights.’
She doubted that. He had not ‘lost interest’ in the bright lights. He had merely decided that there was a bigger, more fulfilling challenge waiting for him here.
He would initially have been drawn to her father’s company because it probably fell into the realms of what he was accustomed to dealing with. The actual ownership was, she suspected, added spice.
‘How did you find out about…?’
‘It was reported in the financial news,’ Lorenzo answered. ‘Bob Squires, my man in London, faxed me the article. He thought that I might find the coincidence amusing as well as a possibility for take-over. Of course, he doesn’t know a great deal about my personal life, but he did know where I had lived in my youth.’
‘I see. And does anyone know much about your personal life, Lorenzo?’ she asked bitterly, and was rewarded with a look of angry discomfort. It only lasted seconds but in that time she had a fleeting glimpse of something lying beneath the cold, arrogant exterior.
‘I dislike people who try to pry into what’s no business of theirs.’ He stood up abruptly and gazed out of the window, his back to her.
‘What a lonely life you must have led all these years? she murmured, and he spun around to face her, his eyes savage and mocking.
‘I hardly think