of his presence, Sara wandered back into the hugely impressive London headquarters of Rossini Industries. When the receptionist on the penultimate floor addressed her, Sara didn’t hear her. Blind and deaf, she was moving on automatic pilot. She entered the spacious office which she shared with Pete Hunniford. It was empty. Pete’s wife had gone into labour mid-morning, she recalled then. It was like remembering something that had happened a lifetime ago.
Her phone was buzzing like an angry wasp. She sat down and answered it.
‘Tasmin Laslo here. I want to speak to Alex,’ a taut female voice demanded.
‘Mr Rossini is in conference. I am so sorry. Would you like me to—?’
The actress said a very rude word. ‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’
Sara had been lying to Alex Rossini’s women for the entire year that she had been employed as his social secretary. Alex Rossini was very rarely available to his lovers during office hours, and when a name was removed from a certain regularly updated list he was never available again. Lying went with the territory, no matter how much Sara despised the necessity.
‘He sent me a diamond bracelet while I was filming in Hungary and I knew it was over!’ Tasmin suddenly spat tempestuously. ‘He’s found someone else, hasn’t he?’
‘You’re better off without him, Miss Laslo,’ Sara heard herself saying. ‘You’re a wonderful actress. You’re wasted on a slick, womanising swine like Alex Rossini!’
Incredulous silence hummed on the line. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Tasmin finally gasped.
Sara looked down dazedly at the receiver and thrust it back on the cradle in shock. She was trembling all over. Dear heaven, had she really said that? She rose unsteadily upright again. Her stomach cramped with sudden, unbearable nausea. She lurched into the cloakroom across the corridor and was horribly sick.
Ten minutes later, still shaking like a leaf, she returned to her office. The phone was buzzing again. She ignored it, walked over to Pete’s desk and withdrew the bottle of brandy that he kept in the bottom drawer. She poured a liberal amount into a cup and slowly drank it down, grimacing at the unfamiliar taste of alcohol. Maybe it would settle her stomach. Brian and Antonia. Their names linked in a ceaseless refrain inside her pounding head, making her want to smash her head against the wall in protest.
She felt as if she was going mad. Sensible, steady Sara, who always kept her head in a crisis. But Sara had never before faced a crisis in which her whole world had fallen apart. Shivering, she helped herself to another nip of brandy, struggling to get a grip on herself. ‘No decent woman…’ A choked and humourless laugh escaped her. She tore the ring off her finger, dropped it in a drawer and rammed the drawer shut. She made herself pick up the phone again.
Unfortunately it was her aunt on the line. Something about the wedding rehearsal. Sara froze while Antonia’s mother talked. Then she sat down, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Aunt Janice?’ She hesitated and then forced herself on. ‘I’m sorry but the wedding’s off. Brian and I have broken up.’ Even to her own ears she sounded unreal, like someone clumsily cracking a joke in the worst possible taste.
‘Don’t be silly, Sara,’ Janice Dalton murmured sharply. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Brian and I have broken up. I’m very sorry…but we’ve decided we can’t get married after all.’
‘If you’ve had some foolish argument with Brian, I suggest you sort it out quickly,’ her aunt told her with icy restraint. ‘Brian had lunch with us yesterday and there was nothing wrong then!’
The line went dead as her aunt cut the connection. Sara trembled. Antonia’s mother…how could she have told her the truth? Janice and Hugh Dalton had given her a home when her own mother had died. How could she possibly tell them the truth? Much better simply to pretend that she and Brian had had a change of heartmuch cleaner, much less embarrassing for all concerned. The two families were neighbours and friends. A giant lump thickened her throat. Did Brian love Antonia?
‘No decent woman…’ Antonia had shed her clothes with alacrity when she had been offered the chance to feature in the famous Rossini calendar. Marco, Alex Rossini’s kid brother, had smoothly offered Sara the same opportunity, unperturbed by her incredulous embarrassment. ‘You’ve got something your long, tall cousin hasn’t got…You’re really sexy…and you have a lot of class.’
Marco had made the invitation in front of a highly amused audience at the staff party and it had become a tormenting, running joke in the months which had followed. The instant that Marco had seen Sara redden he had realised that he had found a real live target. Every time he saw Sara, he offered her an increasingly fantastic sum to bare all. No doubt he saw in her what everyone wanted to see, Sara reflected bitterly: a woman the exact, boring opposite of her exciting, beautiful cousin. Prim, quiet, predictable, ludicrously unlikely ever to set the world…or indeed any man…on fire.
Antonia had had Sara christened Prissy Prude at school, and, having created that image for her, had then delighted in shattering it by sharing the news that Sara was illegitimate, the inconvenient result of her youthful mother’s holiday fling with a Greek waiter. Some of the girls hadn’t laughed at first but they had soon fallen into line and obediently giggled and sneered. After all, Antonia had been the undeniable leader of the pack and peer pressure had been relentless. Sara had duly been persecuted, no other girl daring to stand her ground against Antonia lest she find herself enduring the same ordeal. To escape, Sara had left school at sixteen and taken a secretarial course. And that had not been her dream.
But Brian had been her dream…
Suddenly, with a violence that shook her, Sara hated everything about herself—her body, her personality, her inhibitions, her clothing. She was boring, laughably out of step with other women in her age group. Old-fashioned, sexually ignorant, eager to give up her job and become a housewife and mother at twenty-three. She should have been born a century ago, not in the nineties.
Out of the corner of her eye, she finally noticed that the door was open. Slowly she lifted her head and panic filled her, her cat-green eyes flying wide to accentuate the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Alex Rossini was standing there as silent as a sleek predator on the prowl…and both phones were ringing off the hook, unanswered. He should have been in Rome this afternoon, not here in London, she thought stupidly.
‘Coffee-break?’ Alex murmured in a curiously quiet voice instead of letting fly at her as she had expected. The phones stopped abruptly as if the switchboard had cut them off, plunging them into a sudden, thunderous silence.
In a daze, she looked back at him. Six feet three inches of lithe, rawly virile masculinity. Black hair, hard bronze profile with the deep, dark, flashing eyes of his Italian ancestry. A sexually devastating male with an overwhelmingly physical presence that few men could equal. And Sara hated being near him. She hated the way he looked at her. She hated the way he spoke to her.
If the cost of setting up the first marital home hadn’t been so extortionate, Sara would have sacrificed her excellent salary and taken a lesser position elsewhere within a week of being exposed to Alex Rossini’s sardonic asides and contemptuously amused appraisals. He made her feel so murderously uncomfortable…so self-conscious, so ridiculous. He made her feel like a curious specimen trapped behind museum glass.
‘Finish your coffee.’ A lean, long-fingered brown hand casually closed round the half-full cup of brandy sitting on the edge of her desk and extended it to her.
Didn’t he smell the alcohol, realise that it wasn’t black coffee? Evidently, obviously not. Jerkily, she reached out and accepted the cup and focused on his beautifully polished shoes, every muscle whip-taut. She tossed back the rest of the brandy in a burning surge. It brought tears to her eyes, which she blinked back furiously.
‘Where’s Pete?’
‘Still at the hospital with his wife.’ Sara struggled for some desperate semblance of normality, astonished that he wasn’t cutting her