moment thought it could all be taken away. But it had been, and, although she had worked hard to rebuild her life over the last couple of years, now she was reduced to begging at the gates of the man she had walked away from five years ago. Was this karma? Was this how fate had decided to play things? She closed her eyes and prayed for the pain in her head to ease. Then she would get up and try again and again until Alessandro finally agreed to see her.
‘Is she still there?’ Alessandro asked his housekeeper Lucia.
‘Sì, signor,’ Lucia said, turning from the window. ‘It has been over an hour. It is very hot out there.’
Alessandro rubbed at the tense spot in his jaw as he fought with his conscience. He was locked away in his tower while Rachel was down there in the boiling heat but his gut clenched with the dread of her seeing him like this. He hadn’t expected her to arrive unannounced. He had already had his secretary refuse her an appointment. He had hoped that would be enough to put her off. How long until she gave up and went away? Why wasn’t she getting the message? He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to see anyone.
‘Mon Dio, I think she is going to faint!’ Lucia said grabbing at the window sill with both hands.
‘It is probably an act,’ Alessandro said calmly, turning back to the papers on his desk, doing his best to ignore the two flick knives of guilt and anguish inside his stomach.
Lucia frowned as she stepped away from the window. ‘Perhaps I should take her some water to see if she is all right.’
‘Do what you like,’ he said, flipping a page of the document he had lost interest in half an hour ago. ‘Just keep her away from me.’
‘Sì, signor,’
Rachel opened her eyes to see an Italian woman in her mid to late fifties holding a glass of water in one hand and a jug with ice cubes and a slice of lemon in the other.
‘Would you like a drink before you move on?’ she asked, passing the frosted glass through the bars of the gate.
‘Thank you.’ Rachel took the water and drank thirstily. ‘I have the most appalling headache.’
‘It is the heat,’ the woman said refilling the glass Rachel had passed back. ‘August is always like this. You are probably dehydrated.’
Rachel drank another glass and another before she gave the woman a grateful smile as she handed back the glass. ‘Grazie. That literally saved my life.’
‘Where are you staying?’ the woman asked. ‘In Positano or somewhere else?’
Rachel dragged herself to her feet, using the bars of the gate as leverage. ‘I haven’t got a place to stay,’ she said. ‘I’ve got no money to pay for anywhere. And now my luggage has gone missing.’
‘You can’t stay here,’ the woman said. ‘Signor Vallini insists on no—’
‘I just want five minutes with him,’ Rachel said, brushing her damp hair off her face with a weary hand. ‘Please? Can you organise that for me? I promise I won’t keep him long. Just five minutes of his time is all I’m asking of him.’
The woman set her mouth. ‘I could lose my job over this.’
‘Please?’ Rachel couldn’t keep the pleading note out of her voice.
The Italian woman let out a long-winded breath as she put the jug and glass down on the flagstones. ‘Five minutes but that is all,’ she said as she unlocked the gate.
Rachel picked up her handbag and stepped through before the woman changed her mind. The gate was closed and locked behind her with a resounding click that was strangely eerie in the hot still summer air.
The gardens on either side of the entrance to the villa were magnificent. Roses of every colour imaginable bloomed in abundance from behind neatly trimmed ankle-high hedges, their heady sweet fragrance intensified by the sun. There was a huge fountain in the middle of the driveway, the cascading water as Rachel walked past throwing off a fine mist that was deliciously cool and refreshing. She wished she could just stand there and let the soothing spray ease all the tension out of her muscles.
The housekeeper set aside the jug and glass as she opened the front door of the villa. The cooler air of indoors was like a fan as soon as Rachel stepped in. The floor of the foyer was highly polished marble, as was the grand staircase that swept upwards in a two-sided arc that met on the massive landing above. Crystal chandeliers hung above her in glittering elegance, and priceless works of art hung from the walls, the stately windows in between allowing the sunlight to come in via golden shafts that gilded everything it touched.
The villa was breathtaking and so far from the background Alessandro had come from. How had he done it? How had a man who had once been a runaway street kid from the outer suburbs of Melbourne achieved so much in so little time? After working in a variety of jobs after leaving school, at around twenty-four he had started his own one-person landscaping-gardening business while studying part time for a business degree. He had later sold his business as a franchise offering landscaping and gardening services for the top end of the market. Now at thirty-three he owned and operated a business analysis and management empire that had gone global. Had it been her rejection that had fuelled his determination to succeed or had he always been destined to achieve?
‘If you will wait here while I speak to Signor Vallini,’ the woman said, indicating an antique chair next to a table in the foyer.
Rachel ignored the chair in order to look around. The villa was better than any of the five-star hotels she had ever stayed in and she had stayed in plenty over the years. She had thought her family mansion had been magnificent and certainly compared to many it had been. But this was on another level entirely. This place felt like a palace with its priceless art works and sophisticated decor. She went to a French table with an intricate gold inlay on the top where a vase of roses sat. She touched one of the fragrant blood-red petals and it fell to the table’s surface in a velvet silence.
Footsteps sounded behind her and the Italian woman appeared. ‘He has agreed to give you five minutes,’ she said.
Rachel let out the breath she had been holding and followed the woman up the marble staircase. It was only as she passed a mirror on the second landing that she wished she had asked for a moment or two to freshen up. Her hair was sticky about her too-pink face and the end of her nose looked as if it had caught the sun. Her sleeveless top had damp patches in between her breasts and her shoulder blades, and the crisp white linen trousers she had put on this morning now looked as if they had been worn for a week on an archaeological dig. She didn’t look anything like a fashion designer. She looked like a sunburnt, down-on-her-luck vagrant.
The housekeeper knocked on a door on the second level, and, stepping to one side, opened the door for Rachel to go through.
The door closed behind her as Rachel stepped into the room. It was a library—study with three walls of bookshelves and a huge desk set in front of long, heavily curtained windows. Compared to the brightness of the rest of the villa this room seemed dark and brooding, not unlike the man who sat behind the leather-top desk.
Rachel met his eyes across the distance of the room and her heart gave a little involuntary stumble. His eyes were as blue and as deep and as unfathomable as the ocean she had walked past this morning—a startling, incongruous blue given his olive-skinned Italian colouring and jet-black hair.
The silence was like a wall of thick glass dividing the room in two. All Rachel could hear was the sound of her thudding heartbeats. The noiseless air contained a hint of something faintly disturbing. It made her heart beat all the faster and her breathing stalled as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs.
He had an interesting face. Not handsome in a classical sense but certainly arresting. The Roman nose gave him an aristocratic air, so too did his sharply honed uncompromising jaw.
His mouth was unsmiling.
An errant thought slipped into her head as she wondered