Millionaires: Rafaello's Mistress / Damiano's Return / Contract Baby. LYNNE GRAHAM

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СКАЧАТЬ awaited her, and although she had small appetite she did her best to eat in the hope that food would give her more energy. But never had Glory felt more miserable. Even in the midst of fretting about her father, she was horribly conscious of the change in Rafaello’s attitude to her. While being concerned, polite and in every way supportive, he was also maintaining a detached and impersonal approach.

      ‘I can manage to get to the hospital on my own,’ Glory said tightly as soon as they arrived in London. ‘Thank you. You’ve been wonderful.’

      ‘I’m coming with you. Try to persuade Sam to take a break. He’s exhausted,’ Rafaello urged. ‘You’ll also find my housekeeper keeping a vigil by your father’s bed—’

      ‘Maud Belper?’ Glory glanced at him in surprise.

      ‘I understand that Archie asked her to marry him last week.’ Registering her astonishment at that information, Rafaello sighed. ‘I gather Sam didn’t keep you up to speed on what was happening on the homefront.’

      He guessed right, but when Glory thought that development over it became less of a surprise to her. Her father and Maud Belper had known each other all their lives. If long-standing friendship had finally warmed into something more, she ought to be happy for them both. After all, her parent had been a widower for a long time, she reasoned, striving not to feel hurt and excluded at the news that her father had decided to remarry without even mentioning his plans to her. But then, why should he have done otherwise? For a long time she had lived only on the periphery of her father’s life.

      She looked at Rafaello but only when he was not looking at her. It struck her that his hard-boned features had fined down since she had last seen him. He was so tense as well. He was obviously hating every moment of their enforced proximity, she thought painfully.

      ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ she muttered as she hurried into the hospital lift in advance of him.

      As the lift doors whirred shut, Rafaello surveyed her with impenetrable dark eyes, his lean, strong face taut. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me when I say that I don’t feel comfortable with your gratitude. You don’t owe me any apologies either. I did what I had to do. It wasn’t much. Let’s leave it at that.’

      Glory lowered her wounded gaze to the floor. She so badly wanted to feel his arms around her again but she knew that that was not going to happen. A gulf the challenging depth and width of an ocean now separated them. Sam was in the waiting room. He rushed to greet her with relief but the whole time he was hugging her his every conversational sally was addressed over her shoulder to Rafaello.

      ‘I can’t believe that you got back here with Glory so fast!’ Sam was saying. ‘I knew you said you would but I thought there would be delays and stuff. Most of the time I’ve just let Maud sit with Dad—’

      ‘I’d like to see him,’ Glory slotted into her brother’s fraught flood of speech.

      ‘Maud will have to come out,’ Sam told her. ‘Only one person is allowed by his bed in the ICU. There just isn’t the space for more.’

      Rafaello vanished from the doorway.

      ‘He’ll sort it,’ Sam muttered, his lanky length sagging into a weary slouch. ‘He’s done everything. Dad would be dead right now if it wasn’t for Rafaello. Did he tell you that the surgeons here said they couldn’t operate on Dad?’

      ‘No …’

      Her brother explained that the only surgical procedure capable of giving their father a fighting chance of survival had not been done in the UK before. Rafaello had had to fly in a top-flight neurosurgeon from New York to perform the operation. This was the same guy who could not stand to be thanked, Glory reflected wretchedly. Rafaello had moved heaven and earth to help her and her family.

      Ushered into the ICU by a kindly nurse, Glory focused on her father and all the machinery surrounding him and then breathed in deep. She stopped thinking about herself and her own problems and started praying instead and willing the older man to come through. Around dawn her father’s vital signs began showing a marked improvement and, revitalised by that information, Glory went in search of her brother.

      But it was Maud Belper who hurried forward when she entered the waiting room, Maud, whose existence Glory had entirely forgotten. In a guilty rush at that awareness, Glory shared the good news. Tears of release from severe stress swam in the older woman’s red-rimmed eyes. She gripped Glory’s hand. ‘Would you mind if I went back in for a while?’

      ‘No, I’ve been very selfish. Go ahead,’ Glory encouraged. ‘Where’s Sam?’

      ‘Mr Grazzini took him back to his city apartment. Sam was out on his feet. Will you phone them?’ Maud begged, her impatience to be back by the side of the man she so obviously loved palpable.

      Lingering only long enough to pass on the phone number, Rafaello’s housekeeper disappeared. Glory called. Rafaello answered almost immediately and agreed that her news was wonderful but he also insisted that Sam should be left to sleep for as long as possible. She was taken aback by that insistence on the score of her own brother but was too drained to argue. Curling up in a corner seat, she waited out what remained of the night hours.

      Mid-morning, Rafaello brought Sam back to the hospital. By then the general prognosis was that Archie Little was on the road to recovery. He had regained consciousness, squeezed Maud’s hand and recognized his daughter with a weak smile. As Sam hurried off to take her place by his father’s side, Rafaello studied Glory. ‘You can come back to my apartment now and sleep—’

      ‘No, thanks,’ she said tightly.

      ‘Don’t make this more difficult than it already is,’ Rafaello told her with a look of reproof. ‘Are you planning to kip on a park bench just to score against me?’

      Glory folded her arms with a jerk. She was so close to tears, she could not trust herself to speak. She felt frankly surplus to everyone’s requirements. From the doorway of the ICU she had watched her father look at Maud’s wan but smiling face and had appreciated that he took much greater strength and comfort from the older woman’s presence than from hers. Then there was Sam, rushing in beside Rafaello, bopping about like a very large, clumsy puppy and then punching Rafaello’s shoulder in that exclusive all-male way to bid him goodbye and barely awarding his sister a second glance.

      Sam seemed to have succumbed to a severe case of hero worship where Rafaello was concerned. Indeed, Glory was amazed to see Sam, who could be so very reserved with strangers, so relaxed in Rafaello’s company. After all, they hardly knew each other. Obviously her father’s illness had brought down barriers but Sam was not behaving in what she considered to be an appropriate way. Rafaello was their father’s boss, for goodness’ sake, not a best mate or a big brother or something!

      ‘I’m not trying to score against a-anybody.’ Glory faltered to a charged halt at the rise of the sob that made her stammer.

      Rafaello banded an arm round her hunched shoulders, swept up the handbag lying on the seat she had vacated and walked her into the lift. Too busy fighting to keep the tears in check, Glory was rigid for fear that she might suddenly succumb and fling herself against his chest and start sobbing all over him. Her family no longer needed her. They had got used to getting by without her. She was the needy one and Rafaello was busy supporting all of them like a positive saint. Yet he didn’t want her thanks and she didn’t want to have to be grateful. If she couldn’t have his love, she wanted nothing to do with him.

      Rafaello СКАЧАТЬ