sunglasses-wearing bodyguards and a crowd of giggling flirtatious blondes who, as she soon learnt, seemed to appear out of nowhere to engulf him wherever he went.
He had startled her by springing upright as she was passing his table and had insisted on acknowledging her when she would’ve passed on by without a word. Stiff with discomfiture, Chrissie had been cool, inordinately aware of the heat in his dark gaze and the jealous scrutiny of his female companions.
Back then Chrissie had been working two part-time jobs to survive at university because her family could not afford to help her out. One of Chrissie’s jobs during term time had been stacking shelves in the library, the other waitressing at a local restaurant, but she had still found it a major challenge to meet her bills. Her father had still been a tenant farmer, whose ill-health had forced him into retirement while her older sister, Lizzie, had worked night and day to keep the farm going, while Chrissie continued her studies, but the knowledge that, without her, her family was having an even tougher struggle to survive had filled her with guilt.
But even as a child Chrissie had recognised that her late mother Francesca’s chaotic life might have been less dysfunctional had she had a career to fall back on when her affairs with unsuitable men fell apart. A woman needed more than a basic education to survive and Chrissie had always been determined to build her life round a career rather than a man. Her mother’s marriage to her father had been short-lived and the relationships that Francesca had got involved in afterwards had been destructive ones in which alcohol, infidelity, physical violence and other evils had prevailed. Shorn of her innocence at a very young age, Chrissie knew just how low a woman could be forced to sink to keep food on the table and it was a lesson she would never forget. No, Chrissie would never willingly put herself in a position where she had to depend on a man to keep her.
When Jaul had approached her in the library where she was stacking shelves one day a few weeks after their first meeting to ask for her help in finding a book, she had been polite and helpful as befitted a humble employee keen to keep her job.
‘I’d like to take you out to dinner some evening,’ he had murmured after she’d slotted the book into his lean brown hand.
He had the most stunning dark eyes, pure lustrous jet enticement in his lean, darkly handsome face. In his presence her mouth had run dry and her breathing had fractured while she’d marvelled at the weird way she’d kept on wanting to look at him, an urge so powerful it had almost qualified as a need. Infuriated by the dizzy way she was reacting, she’d thought instead of how he had treated Nessa. Jaul had chased sexual conquest, nothing more complex. Once the chase was over and he had got what he wanted he’d lost interest and casual sex with young women as uninhibited and adventurous as Nessa had suited him perfectly. He hadn’t been looking for a relationship with all the limits that would have involved. He hadn’t been offering friendship or caring or fidelity.
‘I’m sorry, no,’ Chrissie had said woodenly.
‘Why not?’ Jaul had asked without hesitation.
‘Between my studies and my two part-time jobs, I have very little free time,’ Chrissie had told him. ‘And when I do have it, I tend to go home and visit my family.’
‘Lunch, then,’ Jaul had suggested smoothly. ‘Surely you could lunch with me some day?’
‘But I don’t want to,’ Chrissie had confessed abruptly, backing off a step, feeling cornered and slightly intimidated by the sheer height and size of him in the narrow space between the book stacks.
A fine ebony brow had quirked. ‘I have offended you in some way?’
‘We just wouldn’t suit,’ Chrissie had countered between gritted teeth, her irritation rising at his refusal to simply accept her negative response.
‘In what way?’
‘You’re everything I don’t like,’ Chrissie had framed in a sudden burst of frustration. ‘You don’t study, you party. You run around with a lot of different women. I’m not your type. I don’t want to go to Paris for dinner! I don’t want diamonds! I haven’t the slightest intention of going to bed with you!’
‘And if I didn’t offer you Paris, diamonds or sex?’
‘I’d probably end up trying to kill you because you’re so blasted full of yourself!’ Chrissie had shot at him in a rage. ‘Why can’t you just take no for an answer?’
Jaul had suddenly grinned, a shockingly charismatic grin that had made her tummy somersault. ‘I wasn’t brought up to take no for an answer.’
‘With me, no means no!’ Chrissie had told him angrily. ‘Persistence only annoys me—’
‘And I am very persistent as well as full of myself,’ Jaul had acknowledged softly. ‘It seems we are at an impasse—’
Chrissie had stabbed a finger to indicate the directional arrow pointing down to the nearest study area. ‘You have your book—go study.’
And without another word she had walked away with her trolley, heading for the lift that would let her escape to the floor above.
CARRYING A TWIN in each arm, Chrissie was greeted by Sally at the front door of Cesare and Lizzie’s home. Her nephew and niece, Max and Giana, clustered round the two women eager to see their cousins. Tarif whooped with excitement when he saw Max and opened his arms to the older boy.
‘He knows me!’ Max carolled in amazement.
‘Once Tarif’s walking, he’ll plague the life out of you,’ Chrissie quipped, passing over Tarif while Sally took charge of Soraya because Giana was too young to manage her.
An elegant and visibly pregnant blonde with green eyes and a ready smile came out of one of the rooms leading off the spacious hall. ‘Chrissie...lovely. I wasn’t expecting you until later,’ Lizzie confided warmly.
The tears still burning behind Chrissie’s eyes suddenly spilled over without warning. As she saw her big sister look at her in astonishment Chrissie swallowed back a sob and blundered into her sibling’s outspread arms. ‘Sorry.’
‘You don’t need to apologise if something’s upset you,’ Lizzie insisted. ‘What on earth has happened? You never cry—’
Fortunately Lizzie had not been exposed to Chrissie’s grief two years earlier once it had finally dawned on her that Jaul was not returning to the UK. It had been a matter of pride to Chrissie that she should not distress her otherwise happy sister with the sad tale of how she had screwed up her own life. She had put a brave face on her abandonment and subsequent pregnancy, talking lightly and always unemotionally of a relationship that had broken down and a young man unwilling to acknowledge responsibility for the babies she’d carried.
‘You don’t need the creep...you don’t need anyone but Cesare and me!’ Lizzie had told her comfortingly and she had asked no further questions.
Now as Chrissie bit back the sobs clogging her throat she was faced with the reality that as she had never told her sister about Jaul, she had to do it now. Emotional turmoil had been building up inside her from the very moment Jaul had appeared at her front door. Her past had pierced the present and most painfully, for all the gloriously happy
