in reception and guest relations at some quality Melbourne hotels, a step up from her first job of being a housemaid.
Charles had been informed by the man who’d hired her that she was a very good-looking blonde, but seeing Ms Dominique Cooper in the flesh had literally taken his breath away.
She’d been wearing white, he recalled. A calf-length dress with a deep V-neckline which displayed her fabulous figure. Her hair had been up, tiny tendrils kissing her elegantly long neck. Her full lips had been shiny and pink. Pearl drops had dangled from her ears. When he drew closer, his nostrils had been filled with her perfume, an exotic and provocative scent which he now knew was called Casablanca.
He’d asked her out within minutes of being introduced, his desire already at fever pitch. Charles was used to getting his own way with women by then, so he’d been shocked by her refusal, especially when she admitted on further questioning that she wasn’t seeing anyone else at the time. She’d told him politely but firmly that she would never date her boss, no matter how attractive she thought he was.
“So you do think I’m attractive,” he countered, flattered yet frustrated at the same time.
She gave him an oddly nervous look, whirled on her high heels and fled the party.
Smitten and intrigued, he pursued her doggedly over the Christmas and New Year break, ringing her at home every evening and sending flowers to her flat every day—her number and address were in the personnel files at work—till she finally agreed to a dinner date. She still insisted he meet her at the restaurant rather than pick her up. She did not want him taking her home afterwards, which intrigued him further. Clearly, she was afraid to be alone with him. Why?
He didn’t find out why till dessert, when she’d explained with quite touching agitation that she’d been foolish enough to date her last boss, then been even more foolish in becoming his secret mistress. He’d promised her the world, but in the end had dumped her and married some society girl with the right connections. That was why she’d moved to Sydney, to get right away from the awful memories, at the same time deciding that she would never again date her boss. Such men could not be trusted. They used silly girls like her because they were pretty and easily impressed. But they didn’t love them, or marry them. They just screwed them, and screwed up their lives.
Charles set out to prove her wrong, but she was very difficult to convince. She did accept further invitations to dinner with him and showed him in many incredibly sweet ways that she liked him a lot, but she continued to spurn any advances. Charles became even more enamoured, and vowed to show her that his feelings for her were above board.
He could still remember the look on her face when he told her over dinner one night in early March that he loved her more than words could say. But when he asked her to marry him, producing the most beautiful—and the most expensive—diamond ring he’d been able to buy, her shock quickly turned to disgust.
“You don’t mean that,” she retorted. “You’re just saying it to get me into bed. You think you can buy my love, but you’ve wasted your money on that rock because the pathetic truth is I’ve already fallen in love with you. I was going to go to bed with you tonight, anyway.”
He wasn’t able to contain his delight at this announcement. Or his desire. He’d never been so hard.
“Oh, just put the rotten thing on my finger if it makes you feel better,” she swept on irritably. “Then take me to wherever it is you have in mind to take me. But you and I both know you won’t go through with any wedding. After you’ve had what you want, you’ll dump me like my last boss.”
“You’re wrong,” he insisted passionately as he slipped the sparkling rock on her engagement finger.
And he proved her wrong by marrying her a month later without having so much as laid a finger on her. The kiss he gave her after their very small and unostentatious ceremony was their first proper kiss. It had been sheer and utter hell to control himself for so long but he’d managed by focusing on the big picture.
Rico called him insane, marrying a woman he hadn’t been intimate with before. A strange sentiment for a man of Italian heritage. Weren’t they into virgin brides? Not that Dominique was a virgin. She’d never pretended to be.
But there was a touchingly virginal air about her when she came to him on their wedding night, trembling in her white satin nightgown. Clearly, she was nervous, afraid perhaps that she’d made a big mistake herself, marrying a man she’d never been intimate with. For all she knew he could have been the worst lover in the world!
But their wedding night was magic for both of them. Sheer magic. When he witnessed his new bride’s awed joy, his own pleasure and satisfaction was boundless.
“I didn’t know what real love was till this moment,” Dominique had told him as she lay still snuggled up to him somewhere close to dawn. “I love you so much, Charles. I’d die if you ever stopped loving me back.”
Impossible, he’d thought at the time. And he still thought the same. If anything, he was more in love with her than ever. He’d be the one who’d die if she ever stopped loving him.
“I have to go,” he told her gently, feeling slightly guilty for leaving her alone now. “I’ll try not to stay too late, but—”
“Yes, I know,” she broke in with a sigh. “I understand. Rico will try to keep you there till all hours.”
Dominique clenched her teeth at the thought of Charles’s best man doing just that. And it had nothing to do with Rico being a poker addict.
Enrico Mandretti’s scepticism over her love for Charles had been evident from their first meeting. Clearly, he thought her a devious fortune hunter. He didn’t have to spell out his suspicions. They were there in his dark, cynical eyes.
The trouble was…he was right. Yet oh, so wrong.
She did love Charles. More than she’d ever thought herself capable of loving any man. But before she’d met her future husband she’d been exactly what Rico believed she was. A gold-digger. A good-looking girl using her looks and her body to achieve her main goal in life: to acquire a wealthy husband, a gold-plated insurance policy that she would never have to suffer what her mother had suffered.
Dominique was sure that rich men’s wives didn’t go through what her mother had gone through. They were protected from such ignominies. They could at least die with dignity. That was, if they had to die at all.
After her mother’s lingering and very painful death, Dominique had vowed that she would marry money, if it was the last thing she did. Becoming a rich man’s wife, however, proved not such an easy task, not even for a girl with her looks. Rich men married women who moved in their own social circles. Or girls who worked with them; sophisticated, educated creatures with university degrees.
Unfortunately, Dominique’s education had been sadly lacking during her teenage years, her schooling constantly interrupted then totally terminated so that she could stay home and nurse her mother till she passed away. By the time she was eighteen, Dominique knew it would take years before she had the skills which would put her into the immediate vicinity of wealthy businessmen.
But she had youth on her side, and tenacity, and she’d finally achieved her aim a couple of years back, that of being in the right place, working alongside the right kind of boss. Single. Good-looking. And rich.
Unfortunately, her target had been even more ruthless than
