gaunt and wretched—and she was not going to cry! she told herself furiously. She just was not going—
‘He is not a man to neglect like this, cara,’ her mother persisted. ‘She wants him back. And you have just got to face it!’
I won’t faint if you say her name, you know,’ she drawled.
It was like a red rag to a bull. Her mother’s response was incensed. ‘Sometimes I find it difficult to believe that you’re my child at all! Do you have any of my Sicilian blood? Marisia—yes—that is her name, and you did not faint! Your cousin Marisia was in love with your husband long before you came on the scene, and by the way she is behaving I would say that she is still in love with him—yet you stand here looking as if you could not care less that they are conducting a very public affair!’
‘So you want me to do—what?’ Nina swung round, blue eyes offering up their first flash of real emotion since this whole horrible scene began. ‘Am I supposed to jump on the next flight to London and face them with what you’ve told me? Then what?’ she challenged, moving back to the table to glare at her mother across it. ‘You tell me, Mamma, how my half-Sicilian blood is supposed to respond once I’ve dragged it all out in the open—do I draw out my dagger and plunge it into both their chests with true Sicilian vendetta passion?’
‘Now you are being fanciful just to annoy me,’ Louisa said crossly. ‘But, having asked me the question—si!’ she retorted. ‘Some drama from you would be a lot healthier than looking as if you don’t give a damn!’
CHAPTER TWO
MAYBE I don’t give a damn, Nina thought later, when she was alone in her bedroom. She didn’t know if she cared one way or another what Rafael was doing.
And that was her problem—not knowing how she felt about anything.
A sigh slipped from her. Her mother’s final volley before she’d left in a huff was still ringing in her ears.
‘I suppose you will manage to drag yourself down from the hilltop to be present at your grandfather’s birthday party tonight?’
Her weary, ‘Of course I’ll be there,’ had made Louisa’s lovely mouth pinch.
‘There is no of course about it. You are in danger of becoming a hermit, Nina. For goodness’ sake, snap out of it!’
‘I had lunch three days ago in Syracuse with Fredo,’ she’d retaliated. ‘Hermits don’t do that!’
‘Hmph.’ Louisa hadn’t been impressed. ‘That man is about as much use to you as the plethora of kind words and sympathy he will have dished out. You need to be pulled out of it, not encouraged to sink further in your wretched misery!’
Stopping what she was doing, Nina stood for a moment, blue eyes lost in a bleak little world of their own. Inside she could feel her heart beating normally. She breathed when she needed to and blinked her eyes. Her brain was functioning, feeding in information, and she was able to get information out, but when it came to her emotions, everything was just blank—nothing there, nothing happening. It was like living in a vacuum, with a defence space around her as big as a field.
‘Oh, what’s happened to me?’ she breathed, looking around at the bedroom she’d used to share but now had to herself. Even in here the only sign that life was still going on was the black dress hanging up, which she was going to wear tonight.
Snap out of it, her mother had said, and Nina truly agreed with her. But—into what?
The sound of a car coming up the driveway stopped her thoughts and sent her over to the bedroom window. The prospect of yet another unexpected visitor dragged a groan from her throat that was cut short when she recognised the sleek, dark limousine.
It was Rafael.
Her heart gave a sudden tight little flutter—not with pleasure, but with a sinking sense of dismay. He wasn’t due back from London for days, so what had brought him back here sooner than he’d intended?
Had someone told him about her mother’s visit? Could he know what that visit had been about?
No, don’t be stupid, she told the second sharp flutter that now had her freezing to the spot. He might be equipped to throw power around like thunderbolts, but even Rafael couldn’t get from London to Sicily in the space of two short hours.
The car slowed to take a sweep around the circular courtyard, then came to a stop at the bottom of the shallow steps that led up to the house. Rafael didn’t wait for Gino, his personal bodyguard and chauffeur, to climb out and open his door for him. With a brisk impatience that was his nature he pushed open the door and uncoiled his long frame from the back of the car. The top of his dark head caught the light from a golden sunset, then slid down to enrich the warm olive skin of his face as he paused to look at the house.
He was tall, he was dark, he was arrestingly handsome—a perfect example of a man in his prime. Black hair, golden skin, hard, chiselled features, straight, thin nose, and a firm and unsmiling and yet deeply, deeply sensual mouth.
Nina traced each detail as she stood there, despising herself for doing it yet unable to stop. Everything about him was so physically striking—the way he looked, the way he moved, the way he frowned with a restless impatience that was inherent in him. His dark silk suit was a statement in design architecture, tailored to a body built to carry clothes well—the wide shoulders, long arms and legs made up of steely muscle, wide chest and tight torso behind a white shirt.
But the really important things about Rafael had nothing to do with his physical appearance. He was frighteningly intelligent, razor-sharp, and ruthless to the core. The kind of man who had come from nothing and made himself into something in spite of all the odds stacked against him, amassing his wealth with a gritty determination that came from his fear of having nothing—again.
He was, Nina thought as she watched him turn to speak to Gino, a very suave, very sophisticated—mongrel. And she used the word quite deliberately. Rafael did not know where he had come from, so he’d spent most of his adult life hiding what he feared he might be by surrounding himself with status symbols of the kind of person he wanted to be.
Rejected by his mother before she had even bothered to register his birth, he had lived his childhood in a Sicilian state orphanage. The only thing that faceless creature had given him to cling to when she’d dumped his helpless newly born body on some unsuspecting stranger’s doorstep had been a note pinned to the blanket he had been wrapped in.
‘His name is Rafael,’ the note had said, and he had gone through the latter stages of his childhood fighting to hell and back for the right to use that name.
The orphanage had called him Marco Smith, or Jones, or some Sicilian equivalent. For the first ten years of his life he had truly believed it to be his name, until the day something—an inbuilt instinct to be someone, probably—had sent him sneaking into the principal’s office to steal a look at his personal file.
From that day on he had answered only to Rafael. Sheer guts and determination had brought him fighting and clawing to the age of sixteen, with his name legally changed to Rafael Monteleone—the Monteleone stolen from the man on whose doorstep he had been dumped.
But tenacity should be Rafael’s middle name—or the one Nina would add in if she could. From the minute he’d left state care he had set out like a man with a single mission in life—which was to trace the mother who had abandoned him.
To finance his search he’d worked hard and long at anything, and for anyone who had paid a fair wage, until he had accumulated enough money to risk some of it on a little speculation—thereby discovering his true mission in life: to make money—pots of it—bank vaults of it—Etna-sized mountains of it in fact.
Strangely, though, as the money mountain had grown so his need to know his roots had diminished. Rafael had succeeded in becoming his own man. If you did not count some deeply buried fears that lurked beneath the surface of his iron-hard shell, which forced him to struggle