Rafaello's Mistress. Lynne Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ crowded city streets. Why was Rafaello doing this to her? Five years ago, they had only been together six weeks. Long enough for her to fall irrevocably in love but not long enough to persuade her to surrender her virginity to a male who had made not the smallest mention of love.

      She could thank her mother for that ingrained caution. Talitha Little had believed that a woman’s most precious possession was purity, for that was exactly how she had been raised. When Glory had first been given that message she had not even properly understood what physical intimacy was. But long before she reached the age of temptation she had absorbed the unnerving impression that her life would go horribly wrong if she broke that rule before she was safely married.

      Rafaello had thought that was hilariously funny until he realised over the space of several weeks that Glory was serious. Then he had suggested it was a little weird and that, with all due respect to her late mother’s convictions, Glory really should not let herself be affected by such superstitious fears.

      Emerging from that recollection, Glory discovered that she was lodged stock-still in front of a shop window and smiling with a silly far-away look fixed to her face. Her smile died. As she crushed out that ruefully amusing recollection of Rafaello’s efforts to persuade her into his bed, her dulled eyes stung with hot tears of regret.

      She walked on, striving to concentrate and find a solution to her family’s predicament. Sam was a minor in the eyes of the law and Rafaello could press charges to his heart’s content, but he had no proof whatsoever that her kid brother had been involved in the theft of that snuff box. The worst that was likely to happen to Sam was…what? A police caution? Sam had never been in trouble before and how would he bear up to that challenge?

      ‘Sam’s different,’ Glory’s mother had once muttered in exasperation. ‘He’s too sensitive and emotional for a boy. He’ll get the life teased out of him if he doesn’t toughen up.’ Happily, Sam’s talent on the sports field had made him popular at school. But he had once shaken Glory with the admission that he hated sport of all kinds. She wondered how many of his friends knew that Sam spent every spare moment sketching people and animals. Or that sometimes Sam listened to depressing items on the news and became deeply upset by them, that he took things too much to heart.

      And what about her father? Might he fall off the wagon and begin drinking again? He was a kind man, a good man, but he was weak, she acknowledged painfully. In times of trouble, he crumpled.

      Her father and her brother were seated at the back of the half-empty café nursing cups of tea. Their eyes flew to her as she drew level with their table. She sat down beside her brother, deeply troubled by the misery that he could not hide.

      ‘What did Mr Grazzini say?’ her father demanded, his lined brow furrowed beneath his greying blond hair, his faded blue eyes red-rimmed with the effects of strain and insufficient sleep. He looked older than his fifty-seven years and drained.

      ‘Dad…’

      ‘It’s bad, isn’t it? If only this had happened before Benito Grazzini retired and handed over the estate to his son,’ Archie Little muttered in a bitter tone of defeat. ‘That Rafaello’s as hard as nails. I don’t know what you ever saw in him, Glory. But nothing I could say would turn you away from him—’

      ‘Sam,’ Glory cut in hurriedly, turning to address her brother before her father could say anything more in a similar vein. There was little resemblance between brother and sister, because Sam was much taller with very dark hair and dark eyes. He had taken after their mother’s side of the family, while she had inherited their father’s fair colouring. But right now, for all his size and athletic breadth, Sam looked very much like a scared ten-year-old kid.

      ‘What happened?’ her brother prompted anxiously.

      ‘Rafaello told me that a very valuable snuff box went missing while you and your friends were partying—’

      ‘Are you saying something was stolen? Well, it couldn’t have been any of us!’ Sam gave his sister a shocked look of reproach. ‘Do you think we’re stupid?’

      ‘You need to pass the word round your friends that that box must be returned, because Rafaello is not going to let it go. It’s worth a great deal of money.’

      ‘I didn’t see any of my mates with a box,’ Sam told her with a perplexed frown.

      ‘Rafaello said it was tiny…small enough to be hidden in a pocket,’ Glory informed him, and she was relieved at the need to make that explanation to her brother, for his ignorance satisfied her that he could have had nothing to do with the theft.

      Listening to that dialogue between his son and daughter, Archie Little had turned a sickly grey shade. ‘Something being stolen finishes us. No wonder you couldn’t get anywhere with Rafaello Grazzini,’ he said heavily. ‘He’ll be furious. Can’t blame him either. Sam had enough cheek even going into the Park, never mind the damage he and his mates caused, and now this…’

      ‘I’m sorry, Dad…’ Sam mumbled chokily. ‘I swear I’ll never do anything like that again—’

      ‘You’re not likely to get the chance, son.’ Rising wearily to his feet, the older man studied his troubled daughter and sighed. ‘We’ll go home now and you go on back to Birmingham. I’m sorry, Glory. I wish I hadn’t dragged you into this mess.’

      ‘Why did you think Rafaello would listen to me?’ Glory could not help asking.

      Her father sighed. ‘Something your mother once said. You know, one of those strange notions she used to take…’

      ‘What did she say?’

      ‘That he would always look after you. Silly,’ he said wryly. ‘It didn’t make sense then and it makes even less now.’

      But those words that she had never heard before sent the oddest shiver down Glory’s spine. Just before they parted outside the café, her brother grabbed her in a sudden bone-crushing hug that let her know just how frantic with worry he was. With tears in her eyes, she watched her brother and father walk away. She hadn’t even been asked what had passed between her and Rafaello. But then, would she have told the truth had she been asked? The minute she had mentioned that stolen snuff box, her father had given up all hope of matters being settled more amicably.

      And how did she feel now? Horribly guilty, she discovered, for protecting herself when she might have helped her father and brother. But at what cost might she have helped? By putting herself in the power of a male who despised her? Two wrongs did not make a right, and Rafaello had wronged her in his big flashy office. She should have told him that too, should have told him that he had had no business treating her like that. And while she was doing that she ought to have told him the unlovely truth about his own father’s treatment of her five years earlier! Benito Grazzini might’ve informed Rafaello that she had taken that cheque for five thousand pounds. But she was darned sure that Rafaello’s father had not also admitted the cruel pressure he had brought to bear on a frightened eighteen-year-old girl, fearful of the consequences to her family if she dared to stand up for herself!

      In a sudden decisive movement, Glory turned in her tracks and headed back in the direction of Grazzini Industries. She was going to tell Rafaello Grazzini what she thought of him! And his lousy, rich, bullying father, that fine upstanding man whom Rafaello had always regarded with such immense respect. She wasn’t the only one with embarrassing and dishonest relatives and it was time he faced that fact!

      By the time Glory arrived on the top floor of Grazzini Industries for the second СКАЧАТЬ