at him. Thrown into shadow, his face was all menacing angles and planes.
“Amanda and I were not divorced at the time of her death. I will fight you through the courts if you try and get your greedy little paws on so much as a square inch of that place.”
“I never said that I was going to…” But a cottage, out in the country, away from the daily grind of the city; away from Ian, a man she had met once six months previously when she had decided that enough was enough, that it was time to try and join the ranks of the living…A man who had refused to take no for an answer, who had tried to force himself on her, who had become a silent, scary stalker.
A bolt hole away from it all suddenly presented itself to her like manna from heaven.
“Then why don’t you try and justify your sudden decision to check it out?”
“Maybe I think it might be the place to say goodbye to Mandy,” Rosie told him painfully, and he burst out laughing again, just as he had when they had been standing inside the chapel at the crematorium.
“So suddenly you’re all bleeding heart and flowers?”
“Why does it matter so much to you whether I go to that cottage or not? Why does it matter if I decide that it might be somewhere I could live?” Rosie asked.
“It sits on my grounds.”
“Mr Foreman said that it had some land, that Mandy had been cultivating it.”
“Ah, so your little ears had already pricked up even while you were mouthing all the right platitudes about wanting nothing from Amanda.” What else could he expect? The woman looked like an angel and spoke in a soft voice that reeked of milk and honey, and all things good, and yet didn’t he know better? He let his eyes rove over her body. Her coat was open and he could make out a stretchy black dress underneath. He had instant recall of the length of her limbs, entwined with his, as pale as his were brown; her small breasts which she’d used to complain about laughingly but which were perfect, the perfect handful, the perfect mouthful…
He yanked himself back from the brink of memories that had no place whatsoever in his life.
“If Mandy left me that cottage with the land, then why shouldn’t I take it?” Rosie was spurred into demanding.
“At last. A bit of honesty. I can deal with that. It’s so much healthier than the sad face and the honeyed words. If that will is as watertight as Foreman implies, then you’ll be amply recompensed for letting it go. And, as we both know, money talks as far as you are concerned.” He delivered a chilling smile.
What would he say if she decided to retaliate? Rosie wondered. But she knew that she would never do that. Maybe there was just that part of her that wouldn’t be able to deal with the ugliness of the truth, with the fact that, whilst he had been seeing her, he had also been seeing Mandy. Maybe that was something she would never, ever want him to confirm. There was such a thing as too much truth.
“It’s why I told him about all that stuff you flogged,” Mandy had said when challenged. “He was looking for an excuse to break up with you so I gave him one and he took it. Didn’t think twice, in fact! More fool you for thinking that he was your knight in shining armour. People like us don’t get knights in shining armour, Rosie. People like me and you and Jack live off the scraps. Angelo was just another guy stringing you along while giving me the come-on behind your back. You should thank me for getting rid of him for you. You’d never have been tough enough to handle him.”
And how could Rosie not believe her when, a month later, there had been a wedding? She had heard it on the grapevine.
So did she want to start a tit-for-tat fight now? Did she want to hear him tell her exactly how little she had meant to him? The past was the past and re-opening old wounds was only going to hurt her. Angelo would be just fine.
And, if he never knew where that money had gone, then so be it. That too was a story wrapped up in guilt and not one she wanted to discuss.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll pay you off,” Angelo intoned harshly. For a few seconds he had lost her. When they had been lovers, he had interpreted those fleeting moments of withdrawal when her eyes had clouded over as flashes of vulnerability. He had made it his mission to wait them out until she could tell him for herself where she had gone. Now he knew the answer. She hadn’t been so much dealing with some internal tussle, which she’d had yet to confide, as calculating how much she could screw him for. Doing the maths in her head. Indulging in a bit of mental arithmetic involving his money and all those expensive items of jewellery he had lavished on her.
Angelo didn’t come from money. He’d got there the hard way, working like a beast at school, a small backwater school in Italy where it wasn’t cool to get good grades. He’d lucked out when, at the age of sixteen, he had managed to win a scholarship to study abroad.
His mother had urged him to take it. He was her only son and she had wanted nothing more than for him to succeed. She’d worked in a shop and as a cleaner on two evenings a week. Did he want to end up scraping the barrel like her? He had grabbed the opportunity with both hands and had challenged any one of those rich, private-school kids to look down on him. He had made sure to stay focused and had realised that to get on he had to do one better than everyone else. He had to go the extra mile. He had. And he had at university. The price had been steep, for during that period his mother had died and he had not been there for her.
He had reasoned that life’s experiences made you tough. He was a rock, alone in the world and determined to master it as a legacy to his mother. He wasn’t one of those gullible kids born with a silver spoon in their mouth. He couldn’t be taken in by a pretty face. Except he had been, and just thinking about it made him see red. Rosie Tom had got to him in a way no other woman ever had. Hell, she had made him start revising his priorities.
“I can have people in tomorrow evaluating its worth and I can get a cheque to you the day after.”
“Is it because it’s of sentimental value?” Rosie hazarded.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Do you feel attached to the place because it was somewhere she loved? I know that sometimes a person can feel helpless when dealing with someone who has a drinking problem.”
“Three years away and you really and truly imagine yourself as an amateur psychologist. Stick to the catering, Rosie, or the cooking, or whatever else it is you do.” Did she really think that he would ever fall for that sympathetic, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth routine again?
Rosie flushed. “I don’t imagine myself as anything of the sort. I was just curious as to…”
“As to what happened once you exited the stage and the curtain fell?” He looked at her narrowly. “I really wouldn’t bother trying to fish for information. Just tell me when you intend to go to the cottage.”
“Why do you ask?” So there weren’t going to be any confidences. This was the tenor of whatever remained between them: bitterness and dislike. Well, that would make things easier, she told herself, but it still hurt to think how far they had both come from where they had once been.
“Because I intend to make sure that I’m there at the same time.”
“What for?” Rosie’s mouth dropped
