‘Oh, come on!’ Vivi flashed back at him, animation brightening her formerly still and shuttered face, bright blue eyes taking on a violet hue as she glanced back at him less warily than before. ‘You know that you don’t really believe that, Raffaele. You believed that I was flogging my body for money to anyone who offered sufficient inducement and you acted accordingly and treated me like dirt!’ she condemned.
‘I did not treat you like dirt,’ Raffaele intoned grittily.
‘You blamed me for the risky decisions your sister made. I didn’t ask her to take off her clothes for that modelling portfolio she was so set on having done!’ she argued angrily, wishing that recollection still didn’t hurt enough to make her angry. ‘She did that all on her own. And when she was approached to do escort work because nobody at the agency knew that she was independently wealthy....how was that anything to do with me? I was only the receptionist on the front desk, a humble employee. I didn’t know what was going on at that place. I wasn’t one of the models doing escort work on the side!’
‘So you say,’ Raffaele responded between gritted teeth because he didn’t believe a word of what she was telling him. A receptionist? Did she think he was stupid? A receptionist with that beauty and that figure? Of course she had been one of the models and the receptionist job had merely been a safe cover story for his benefit, and Arianna’s. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that the average humble receptionist couldn’t afford the red-soled shoes she had been captured in print wearing the day the brothel had been raided, but in the circumstances it would be stupid to wind her up more. The newspaper concerned had made much of the very expensive designer apparel she had been wearing, implying that she was a very exclusive prostitute.
Vivi compressed her lips, totally aware that he didn’t believe her. He was such a snob, she thought sourly, so ready to credit nasty stuff about her simply because she had been downright poor in comparison to his sister and himself. What other reason could he have for being so suspicious? It wasn’t as if she had acted all alluring with him, was it? Vivi didn’t know how, didn’t have sufficient experience or the desire to act alluring with any man. She wasn’t even very good at flirting because generally the men she met were bolder and cruder than flirting required.
‘I’m not going to apologise for the fact that I dislike you,’ Vivi fired at him.
‘I don’t need you to like me to marry me in the kind of paper marriage your grandfather requires,’ Raffaele shot back in exasperation.
‘Well, there would be nothing in it for me,’ Vivi fielded, struggling not to think about her duty in John and Liz’s situation of unsettled debts. For yes, there would be something in it for her, she reflected guiltily. In fact, there would be more than one advantage to marrying him. It would help John and Liz, it would please her grandfather and leave her blessedly free to get on with the rest of her life as she saw fit with nobody to please but herself. It would release all her worries but...it would also put poor Zoe in the hot seat in her place and how could she allow that?
‘If I offered money, diamonds...’ Raffaele murmured silkily, seeking her weakness, for he was convinced there had to be one.
‘Stop right there!’ Vivi cut in angrily. ‘How could you bribe me into doing it? My grandfather would give me almost anything I wanted...’
Except the one thing she needed, which was John and Liz’s mortgage debt paid off, she completed inwardly.
Resentment darted through her at the reality that her grandfather was holding what was a ridiculously small amount of money on his terms over his granddaughters’ heads in an attempt to force them into doing his bidding. Winnie’s husband, Eros, might have been trying to find a way of getting around that fact and spiking her grandfather’s big guns but he had not, so far, contrived to do so. She needed to phone her sister, though, and check out the latest news on that front.
‘Then we would appear to have reached an impasse, for the moment,’ Raffaele tacked on because he refused to credit that he wouldn’t find a means to achieve her agreement. He never failed at anything he set out to do and saw this situation as no different. Given sufficient time and attention, he would solve the riddle of her reluctance and come up with the magic winning combination. One way or another, he told himself grimly, he would lock her down to protect Arianna.
‘We’ll have dinner tonight,’ he told her flatly.
Vivi tossed her head back, curling ringlets of copper dancing back from her triangular face, bright dark blue eyes defiant. ‘No, we won’t.’
‘Tomorrow night, then.’
The soft full pink lips he couldn’t take his eyes off tightened into a surprisingly hard line. ‘No.’
‘I think you’re forgetting about that redundancy list,’ Raffaele reminded her silkily, ready to use any weapon he had to force her into doing his bidding.
Vivi leapt out of her chair and called him a very rude word, colour streaming across her cheekbones, eyes violet-tinged again with sheer fury.
‘If not by birth, certainly by nature,’ Raffaele countered with hard amusement, thoroughly satisfied to have got a very telling reaction out of her. Temper, temper, he chanted inwardly because she had one hell of a temper.
On the other hand—and who would ever have guessed it? he marvelled—Vivi Fox cared about her work colleagues. She wasn’t quite the hard-nosed, solely mercenary beauty he had assumed, willing to use anything she had got to better herself in society. Of course, she didn’t need to be like that now, he reminded himself impatiently, not with a very rich grandfather behind her.
‘I hate you!’ she flung at him.
‘Dinner at eight tomorrow night. I want you to have time to think over this meeting. A car will pick you up,’ Raffaele stated, not batting an eyelash in receipt of her angry attack.
Vivi’s fingers turned into claws, biting into her palms. No man had ever filled her with such rage that she felt violent, only him. But she would not run the risk of calling Raffaele’s bluff. He was a banker, he was innately ruthless and if redundancies could make her dance to his tune he was unlikely to make an empty threat, she reflected wretchedly. How could she risk that happening? How could she challenge him when her fellow employees’ livelihoods could be at stake? For goodness’ sake, what on earth had Grandad offered him to make him so desperate to win her agreement?
‘Eight.’ She bit out the word as if it physically hurt her and in a way it did because giving even an inch to Raffaele di Mancini felt like a self-betrayal of pride and good judgement.
‘I shall look forward to it,’ Raffaele dared with purring satisfaction and if there had been anything within reach to throw at him, Vivi would’ve thrown it.
She went back down to the marketing department in the lift, her brain in a daze after all the emotions she had worked through. Hatred, rage and resentment assailed her in heady waves around Raffaele and it made it hard for her to think straight, to think smart, she recognised, finding another stick to beat herself with. If she was cooler, calmer, would she have found a way out? But how could she be cool and calm when he so enraged her?
Her memory went back to the day she had met Arianna with her high heel caught in a grating down the street from the modelling agency. She had only been a week into her first job there and heading out to grab lunch. She had stopped to help Arianna, who was comically trying to drag her shoe out of the grating while standing on one
