existence.
She wanted to run. Bolt. Get away as fast and as far as she could. She wanted to go home, be home—the only home she had ever known, the only home she wanted. She wanted nothing, nothing of what was here.
She stared about her. That strange pang came again, very deep within. If the man who had fathered her hadn’t been the complete bastard that he had, she might have known this place. Might have been brought here for holidays. Might have run laughing through the gardens as a child. Her mother might have been here too—alive and happy with the man she loved…
But Stefano Viale had not been interested in love, or marriage, or his own daughter. He had made that very, very plain.
Inside her head, she heard again her grandmother’s stricken voice.
‘He never wrote, not once. Never answered any of your mother’s letters. She was heartbroken—just heartbroken. Not a single letter, not a single kind word to her. He’d taken her innocence, used her and thrown her away!’
Laura’s expression hardened. That had been the reality she had grown up with.
Father? She didn’t have one. She never had.
And she didn’t have a grandfather either. Whatever the man waiting for her inside wanted to call himself.
‘This way.’
The terse, impersonal tones of Allesandro di Vincenzo interrupted her baleful thoughts. She was being directed indoors, and with an increasing sense of oppression she walked inside into a vast marble-floored entrance hall.
Allesandro strode past her, towards a pair of double doors beyond. He threw them open and walked in. Tomaso was there, at his desk by the window. He looked up immediately. There was a taut expression on his face. Tense. Expectant.
Suddenly, for all that the old man had manipulated him shamelessly, Allesandro felt he could not do this to him. He should go in first, warn the old man what he was about to get by way of a granddaughter. Then he crushed his compunction. Tomaso was playing hardball—deliberately using Allesandro’s desire for control of Viale-Vincenzo in order to make him do what he wanted. And if what he wanted was his deeply unpleasant granddaughter, he could have her.
Behind him Allesandro could hear the heavy plod of unfeminine feet shod in flat clumpy shoes that no Italian woman this side of a lunatic asylum would even have possessed, let alone worn.
The old man was getting to his feet.
‘Tomaso—your granddaughter,’ announced Allesandro, his voice studiously expressionless. ‘Laura Stowe.’
But Tomaso was not looking at him. He was staring past the younger man to the female figure that had walked in behind him. Allesandro watched his face as the old man’s expression changed.
It became bland, unreadable.
‘Laura—’ said Tomaso, and held his hand towards her.
The girl was standing there, ignoring the hand that stretched out to her. Her face was shuttered, the way it had been the entire journey. The lack of expression made the girl look like a pudding—one of those stodgy English ones, with suet in them.
‘I am your grandfather,’ said Tomaso. The face might be bland, Allesandro thought, eyes narrowing minutely, but the voice was not. It was audibly suppressing emotion.
Something flickered angrily in the girl’s face.
‘My grandfather is dead. You are merely the father of the man who ruined my mother’s life.’
The aggression in her tone was unequivocal. For a moment Allesandro saw new emotion in Tomaso’s face. Shock. Naked and raw.
The girl held her pitiless gaze.
‘The only reason I’m here,’ she told him, ‘is because that man—’ she nodded curtly in Allesandro’s direction, and he felt a spurt of vicious anger both at her manner, and at what he knew was coming next ‘—bribed me to come.’
‘He bribed you?’ The old man’s voice was a disbelieving echo.
‘Yes.’ Allesandro watched, aghast, as the girl spoke bluntly. ‘I don’t want anything to do with you, or anyone connected with the man who treated my mother so unforgivably! I can’t imagine why you thought I would have the slightest desire or interest in meeting you—any more than the man who fathered me had the slightest desire or interest in my existence, or in what he’d done to my mother!’ A sharp, tight breath made her pause, and then she went on. ‘I’m sorry your son is dead—but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing. Because your son wasn’t anything to do with me. He made that totally clear even before I was born!’
Shock edged Tomaso’s face. ‘This is not how I—This is not—’ He faltered. He looked across at the girl, half turned away. ‘I thought—I thought you would be glad—glad that I had sought you out…’
His face greyed, and then suddenly his hand was clutching at his heart. Allesandro started forward, catching him as he fell.
The next hour was endless. Allesandro had immediately summoned an ambulance, and Tomaso had been rushed to hospital. To Allesandro’s relief he was soon pronounced out of danger, even though he was being kept in overnight for monitoring.
Whatever kind of seizure Tomaso had had, Allesandro knew only one thing. That harpy, with her venomous tirade, had been responsible. His eyes darkened now, as he glared at the girl sitting stony-faced in the car taking them back to Tomaso’s villa. Her hands were clenched in her lap. She’d sat just like that in the hospital lobby while Allesandro had accompanied Tomaso into the ward.
‘Is he going to be all right?’ she asked suddenly.
‘You care?’ Allesandro derided.
‘I told you—I’m sorry his son is dead, and I’m sorry he collapsed. I wouldn’t want him to die. I wouldn’t want anyone to die.’ Her voice was terse and jerky.
‘Big of you,’ he replied. ‘But if you really want to be big, you’d better do what he wants and stay at the villa until he’s well enough to see you. God knows why he should want to, but he said he did before I left him.’
He got no answer from her, only a shoulder turning away from him, maximising the distance between them. The movement irritated him. If there was a female in the world less likely to engage his interest, she was beyond imagining.
CHAPTER THREE
LAURA sat on the bed in the bedroom she’d been shown to by one of the household staff, and stared out of the window. The view was beautiful. Formal Italianate gardens, just like in a guidebook, and then a vista of olive groves, narrow dark cypresses and rolling hills.
She turned away. She didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to be in Italy, in her grandfather’s villa—
He’s not your grandfather—don’t think of him that way!
Genes didn’t make you family. She had half her father’s genes, but that didn’t make her his daughter. It certainly hadn’t in his eyes, anyway.
