filly named Flame of Gold.
Before that day, Rico had only known of his lady co-owner’s existence on paper. He’d no idea that she was also Renée, the owner of Renée’s modeling agency and the widow of Joseph Selinsky, a very wealthy banker who’d been almost forty years his second wife’s senior, and who’d passed away the previous year. He did know she was a rich widow, but he’d pictured an overweight, over-groomed madam in her sixties or seventies with more money than she could spend in the beauty salon, and a penchant for gambling.
Nothing had prepared Rico for the sleekly sophisticated, super-stylish and super-intelligent thirty-year-old which Mrs Selinsky had proved to be. And certainly nothing had prepared Rico for her instantly negative reaction to him. He was used to being fawned over by the opposite sex, not the exact opposite.
Looking back, he’d been attracted to her right from first sight, despite his having another woman on his arm that day. His fiancée, in fact. Jasmine. The bright, bubbly, beautifully blonde Jasmine. He’d thought himself in love with Jasmine, and he’d married her a month later.
It was a marriage which had been doomed from the start. God, if he’d only known then what he knew now.
But would that have changed anything? he pondered as he revved up the Ferrari’s engine in anticipation of these lights turning green. What if he’d realised Jasmine was an unfeeling fortune-hunter before their wedding? Or that his so-called love for her was the result of his being cleverly conned and constantly flattered? What if he’d broken up with his faking fiancée and pursued the enigmatic and striking Renée instead?
Renée’s reaction to him might have been very different if he’d been single and available five years ago, instead of engaged and supposedly besotted with his fiancée.
After all, he was Rico Mandretti, the producer and star of A Passion for Pasta, the most successful cooking show on television. The merry widow—as he’d soon nicknamed Renée—obviously knew the value of a dollar, given she’d already married once for money. Rico could not imagine a woman of her youth and beauty marrying a man in his sixties for love.
Whilst Rico hadn’t had as many dollars in the bank as Renée’s late husband at that stage, he’d still been well-heeled, with the potential for earning more in the years to come, which had since proven correct. His little cooking show—as Renée mockingly liked to call it—was now syndicated to over twenty countries and the money was rolling in, with more business ventures popping up each year, from cookbooks to product endorsements to his more recent idea of franchising A Passion for Pasta restaurants in every major city in Australia.
Aside from his earning potential, he’d also only been twenty-nine back then, brimming with macho confidence and testosterone. In his sexual prime, so to speak.
Rico liked to think Renée would have fallen into his arms, but he knew he was just kidding himself. He’d been split up from Jasmine for two years now, his divorce signed and sealed over a year ago, and Renée’s negative attitude to him hadn’t changed one bit. If anything, she’d grown more hostile to him whilst his desire for her had become unbearably acute.
It pained Rico to think that she found nothing attractive in him whatsoever. In fact, she obviously despised him. Why? What had he ever done to her to cause such antagonism? Was it his Italian background? She sometimes sounded off about his being a Latin-lover type, all hormones and no brains.
Rico knew there was more to himself than that. But not when he was around her these days, he accepted ruefully. Lately, whenever she turned those slanting green eyes on him and made one of her biting comments, he turned into the kind of mindless macho animal she obviously thought him. His ability to play poker suffered. Hell, his ability to do anything well suffered! The charm he was famous for disappeared, along with his capacity to think.
Aah, but he could still feel. Even as his blood boiled with the blackest of resentments, his body would burn with a white-hot need. That was why he was avoiding his nemesis this weekend. Because Rico suspected he was nearing spontaneous combustion where she was concerned. Who knew what he would do or say the next time she goaded him the way she had last night?
‘Now, if you’d married someone like Dominique, Rico,’ Renée had remarked after Charles announced his wife was expecting, ‘you’d have a baby or two of your own by now. If you’re really as keen on the idea of a traditional marriage and family as you claim, then for pity’s sake stop dilly-dallying with the Leannes of this world and find yourself a nice girl who’ll give you what you supposedly want.’
Rico had literally had to bite his tongue to stop himself from retorting that he took women like Leanne to bed in a vain attempt to burn out the frustration he experienced from not being able to have her.
Somehow, he’d managed an enigmatic little smile, and experienced some satisfaction in seeing her green eyes darken with a frustration of her own.
Mark one up for Rico for a change!
But for how long could he manage such iron self-control? Not too much longer, he suspected.
Charles and Ali wouldn’t know what hit them if and when he exploded. Rico might have been born and brought up here in Sydney, but he was Italian through and through, with an Italian’s volatile temperament.
A peasant, Renée had once labelled him. Which was quite true. He did come from peasant stock. And was proud of it!
Rico’s other two Friday-night poker-playing partners were blue-blood gentlemen by comparison. His best friend, Charles, was Charles Brandon, a few years older than Rico and the owner of Brandon Beer, Australia’s premier boutique brewery. Ali was Prince Ali of Dubar, the youngest son of an oil-rich sheikh, dispatched to Australia a decade before to run the royal Arab family’s thoroughbred interests down under.
Both men had been born into money, but neither was anything like the lazy, spoilt, silver-spoon variety of human being whom Rico despised.
Charles had spent years dragging his family firm back from the brink of bankruptcy after his profligate father died, leaving Brandon Beer in a right old mess.
That achievement had taken grit, determination and vision, all qualities Rico admired.
Ali didn’t act like some pampered prince, either. He worked very hard, running the thoroughbred stud which occupied over a thousand acres of prime horse land in the Hunter Valley. Rico had seen with his own eyes how hands-on Ali was with running and managing that complex and extremely large establishment.
It had been Ali, actually, who’d brought the four poker-players together. He was the breeder of Flame of Gold. After she’d won the Silver Slipper Stakes, the three ecstatic owners and one highly elated breeder had had a celebratory dinner together. Over a seafood banquet down at the quay, they’d discovered a mutual love, not just of racehorses but also of playing cards. Gambling of various kinds, it seemed, was in all their blood. They’d played their first game of poker together later that night and made a pact to play together every Friday night after that.
Being ill or overseas were the only excuses not to show up at the presidential suite at Sydney’s five-star Regency Hotel every Friday night at eight. That was where Ali stayed each weekend, flying in from his country property by helicopter late on a Friday and returning on the Sunday.
Rico smiled wryly when he thought of how, when he’d been hospitalised with an injured knee after a skiing mishap last year, he’d insisted that the others come to his hospital room for their Friday-night poker session. The evening had not been a great success, however, with Ali having a couple
