Visconti's Forgotten Heir. Elizabeth Power

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СКАЧАТЬ had known she was beautiful. That was the problem. A part-time receptionist who had been on every model agency’s books, following every lead and promotion she could grasp in a bid to capitalise on her beauty. That was when she hadn’t been at home, trying to shake her mother out of a drunken stupor!

      They had become lovers almost at once, just a few days after they’d started dating, and only a week after he had seen her in his father’s restaurant with a group of women during a lively hen party. Surprisingly, she had been a virgin the first time he had made love to her, and yet he had unleashed a fire in her that he’d been foolish enough to believe burned for him alone.

      They had made love everywhere. In his van. In the flat above the restaurant when his father and grandmother were out. In her surprisingly immaculate, sparsely furnished little bedroom which had seemed like an oasis amidst the clutter and chaos of her mother’s damp and crumbling, sadly neglected Edwardian house.

      It hadn’t mattered one iota that his family hadn’t liked her—although he had wondered, with the gentle memory of his mother, how she might have viewed Magenta if she hadn’t died while he was still very young. His grandmother, though, had been totally out of touch with people of his generation, and his father...

      He slammed his mind shut as a well of excruciating pain and reproach threatened to invade it. Their disapproval, he remembered, had only intensified the excitement of being with her.

      Of course they had known what she was like; they had been able to see through the thin veil of her bewitching beauty when he hadn’t. He had been blinded and totally duped by her impassioned but hollow declarations of love.

      He had been hardworking, loyal to his father, and yet ambitious. And he had at least been able to see and recognise the flaws in the way in which his father had run the restaurant. Giuseppe Visconti had been a far more proficient chef than he had been a businessman, and as proud an Italian as he’d been a dictator of a father, and he had refused to listen to his son’s radical plans for saving and developing the business.

      ‘Over my dead body.’

      Andreas still flinched now from recalling his father’s exact words.

      ‘You will never have a foothold in this business. Dio mio! Never! Not while you are stupid enough to be mixed up with that girl.’

      He had been a blind and naive fool to believe that love could conquer all, that with Magenta James beside him he could overcome his family’s prejudices and his father’s stubbornness. What he hadn’t realised, he reflected coldly, was that the lovely Magenta had only been amusing herself in his bed—that even as he had been drowning in the heat of their mutual passion she had already been sexually entangled with someone else.

      He hadn’t wanted to believe his father’s smug revelations—and wouldn’t have if he hadn’t gone round to her house unexpectedly and seen Rushford’s car parked outside. A huge and expensive black saloon that had stood out like a sore thumb in her rather downmarket neighbourhood, and especially outside her mother’s particularly rundown house.

      He’d driven away on that occasion, still unable to believe his eyes—and indeed what his family had been telling him. But hadn’t he had graphic proof of her infidelity himself?

      ‘Do you really think I was ever serious about you? About this?’ she had scoffed on an almost hysterical little bubble of laughter the last time he had seen her.

      She’d shot a disparaging glance around the deserted and already failing restaurant. That was when she had informed him of all her precious Svengali was doing for her and all that she was intending to achieve.

      He had had a row with Giuseppe Visconti that night. One of many, he reflected. But this one had been different. It had been the squaring up of two male animals intent only on victory over the other. Savage. Almost coming to blows. He’d blamed his father for the outcome of his relationship with Magenta. Giuseppe had called her names, foul names that Andreas had never been able to repeat, and he’d accused his father of being jealous of his youth and his prospects, of depriving him of his right to be his own man.

      His father had died in his arms that night after the angry tirade that had been too much for his unexpectedly weak heart to take. Two months later his grandmother had put the restaurant on the market to pay off the loans the business had been unable to meet, determined to go back to her native Italy.

      Some time afterwards, when Andreas had been in America, someone—he couldn’t remember who—had told him that Magenta was living in the lap of luxury with a big-shot called Marcus Rushford and that she was expecting his baby.

      Yes, he’d behaved badly tonight, Andreas reflected grimly as he swung his car through the electrically operated gates of his Surrey mansion. But at the end of it, looking back, he decided that he hadn’t behaved badly enough!

      CHAPTER TWO

      ALL THE WAY home in the taxi Magenta’s head was throbbing, pulsating with an invasion of jumbled images. When at last she had paid the driver, was staggering towards the privacy of her own bathroom, the kaleidoscope of confusing images started to take some form.

      Meeting Andreas in that restaurant. Laughing with Andreas. Making love with him.... Where, it didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered then. She pressed the heels of her hands against the wells of her eyes, her breath catching as a heated and desperate desire took hold in her mind. Why had it been desperate? She shook her head to try and jolt herself into remembering. She had to remember...

      There was a big man. Sullen. Andreas’s father! And Maria. Maria was his grandmother! Oh, but there had been such ill feeling! She recalled feeling the lowest of the low. There was shouting now. Andreas was shouting at her. Telling her she was shallow-minded and materialistic. Telling her she was no good—just like her mother.

      In a crumpled heap beside the toilet she relieved herself of the nausea that remembering produced and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. For the first time she was glad that Theo was spending part of his school holiday in the country with her great-aunt. It would have distressed her little boy to have seen her in such a state.

      Winding her arms around herself, she ached for him, missing him as much as on the day when she had woken up from that coma to realise she’d lost not only two months of her life, but also the baby she’d remembered carrying. It was the only thing she had remembered. Except that she hadn’t lost him...

      She started sobbing with all the same poignancy with which she’d sobbed that day when her widowed aunt, Josie Ashton, had brought her healthy eight-week-old son into the hospital and laid him against her breast. Dear Great-Aunt Josie, with her abrupt manner and her outspokenness, whom Magenta hadn’t seen for at least ten years. But the woman had had no qualms, she remembered, about answering her mother’s cry for help when a sick daughter and the arrival of a new grandson had been too much for Jeanette James to cope with.

      She was sobbing equally, though, for the way her mind had blanked out her child’s father. How could she have forgotten him? she agonised, feeling the loss for her son, for the lack of a father figure in his life, rather than for herself. What had he done that had driven her subconscious into shut down so completely? What had she done? she wondered, suddenly seized by the frightening possibility that she might somehow deserve his condemnation.

      For heaven’s sake, think! she urged herself, desperate for answers.

      But the floodgates that had started to open refused to budge any further, and by the time she arrived at her interview the following СКАЧАТЬ