The Trophy Husband

Her phone was buzzing like an angry wasp. She sat down and answered it.

‘Tasmin Laslo here. I want to speak to Alex,’ a taut female voice demanded.

‘Mr Rossini is in conference. I am so sorry. Would you like me to—?’

The actress said a very rude word. ‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’

Sara had been lying to Alex Rossini’s women for the entire year that she had been employed as his social secretary. Alex Rossini was very rarely available to his lovers during office hours, and when a name was removed from a certain regularly updated list he was never available again. Lying went with the territory, no matter how much Sara despised the necessity.

‘He sent me a diamond bracelet while I was filming in Hungary and I knew it was over!’ Tasmin suddenly spat tempestuously. ‘He’s found someone else, hasn’t he?’

‘You’re better off without him, Miss Laslo,’ Sara heard herself saying. ‘You’re a wonderful actress. You’re wasted on a slick, womanising swine like Alex Rossini!’

Incredulous silence hummed on the line. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Tasmin finally gasped.

Sara looked down dazedly at the receiver and thrust it back on the cradle in shock. She was trembling all over. Dear heaven, had she really said that? She rose unsteadily upright again. Her stomach cramped with sudden, unbearable nausea. She lurched into the cloakroom across the corridor and was horribly sick.

Ten minutes later, still shaking like a leaf, she returned to her office. The phone was buzzing again. She ignored it, walked over to Pete’s desk and withdrew the bottle of brandy that he kept in the bottom drawer. She poured a liberal amount into a cup and slowly drank it down, grimacing at the unfamiliar taste of alcohol. Maybe it would settle her stomach. Brian and Antonia. Their names linked in a ceaseless refrain inside her pounding head, making her want to smash her head against the wall in protest.

She felt as if she was going mad. Sensible, steady Sara, who always kept her head in a crisis. But Sara had never before faced a crisis in which her whole world had fallen apart. Shivering, she helped herself to another nip of brandy, struggling to get a grip on herself. ‘No decent woman…’ A choked and humourless laugh escaped her. She tore the ring off her finger, dropped it in a drawer and rammed the drawer shut. She made herself pick up the phone again.

Unfortunately it was her aunt on the line. Something about the wedding rehearsal. Sara froze while Antonia’s mother talked. Then she sat down, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Aunt Janice?’ She hesitated and then forced herself on. ‘I’m sorry but the wedding’s off. Brian and I have broken up.’ Even to her own ears she sounded unreal, like someone clumsily cracking a joke in the worst possible taste.

‘Don’t be silly, Sara,’ Janice Dalton murmured sharply. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Brian and I have broken up. I’m very sorry…but we’ve decided we can’t get married after all.’

‘If you’ve had some foolish argument with Brian, I suggest you sort it out quickly,’ her aunt told her with icy restraint. ‘Brian had lunch with us yesterday and there was nothing wrong then!’

The line went dead as her aunt cut the connection. Sara trembled. Antonia’s mother…how could she have told her the truth? Janice and Hugh Dalton had given her a home when her own mother had died. How could she possibly tell them the truth? Much better simply to pretend that she and Brian had had a change of heartmuch cleaner, much less embarrassing for all concerned. The two families were neighbours and friends. A giant lump thickened her throat. Did Brian love Antonia?

‘No decent woman…’ Antonia had shed her clothes with alacrity when she had been offered the chance to feature in the famous Rossini calendar. Marco, Alex Rossini’s kid brother, had smoothly offered Sara the same opportunity, unperturbed by her incredulous embarrassment. ‘You’ve got something your long, tall cousin hasn’t got…You’re really sexy…and you have a lot of class.’

Marco had made the invitation in front of a highly amused audience at the staff party and it had become a tormenting, running joke in the months which had followed. The instant that Marco had seen Sara redden he had realised that he had found a real live target. Every time he saw Sara, he offered her an increasingly fantastic sum to bare all. No doubt he saw in her what everyone wanted to see, Sara reflected bitterly: a woman the exact, boring opposite of her exciting, beautiful cousin. Prim, quiet, predictable, ludicrously unlikely ever to set the world…or indeed any man…on fire.

Antonia had had Sara christened Prissy Prude at school, and, having created that image for her, had then delighted in shattering it by sharing the news that Sara was illegitimate, the inconvenient result of her youthful mother’s holiday fling with a Greek waiter. Some of the girls hadn’t laughed at first but they had soon fallen into line and obediently giggled and sneered. After all, Antonia had been the undeniable leader of the pack and peer pressure had been relentless. Sara had duly been persecuted, no other girl daring to stand her ground against Antonia lest she find herself enduring the same ordeal. To escape, Sara had left school at sixteen and taken a secretarial course. And that had not been her dream.

But Brian had been her dream…

Suddenly, with a violence that shook her, Sara hated everything about herself—her body, her personality, her inhibitions, her clothing. She was boring, laughably out of step with other women in her age group. Old-fashioned, sexually ignorant, eager to give up her job and become a housewife and mother at twenty-three. She should have been born a century ago, not in the nineties.

Out of the corner of her eye, she finally noticed that the door was open. Slowly she lifted her head and panic filled her, her cat-green eyes flying wide to accentuate the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Alex Rossini was standing there as silent as a sleek predator on the prowl…and both phones were ringing off the hook, unanswered. He should have been in Rome this afternoon, not here in London, she thought stupidly.

‘Coffee-break?’ Alex murmured in a curiously quiet voice instead of letting fly at her as she had expected. The phones stopped abruptly as if the switchboard had cut them off, plunging them into a sudden, thunderous silence.

In a daze, she looked back at him. Six feet three inches of lithe, rawly virile masculinity. Black hair, hard bronze profile with the deep, dark, flashing eyes of his Italian ancestry. A sexually devastating male with an overwhelmingly physical presence that few men could equal. And Sara hated being near him. She hated the way he looked at her. She hated the way he spoke to her.

If the cost of setting up the first marital home hadn’t been so extortionate, Sara would have sacrificed her excellent salary and taken a lesser position elsewhere within a week of being exposed to Alex Rossini’s sardonic asides and contemptuously amused appraisals. He made her feel so murderously uncomfortable…so self-conscious, so ridiculous. He made her feel like a curious specimen trapped behind museum glass.

‘Finish your coffee.’ A lean, long-fingered brown hand casually closed round the half-full cup of brandy sitting on the edge of her desk and extended it to her.

Didn’t he smell the alcohol, realise that it wasn’t black coffee? Evidently, obviously not. Jerkily, she reached out and accepted the cup and focused on his beautifully polished shoes, every muscle whip-taut. She tossed back the rest of the brandy in a burning surge. It brought tears to her eyes, which she blinked back furiously.

‘Where’s Pete?’

‘Still at the hospital with his wife.’ Sara struggled for some desperate semblance of normality, astonished that he wasn’t cutting her to ribbons with the satirical edge of his tongue. She forced herself upright, bracing both hands on the desk. Involuntarily her gaze collided with shimmering dark golden eyes and it was like falling on an electric fence, shock waves making every raw nerve-ending scream. Deliberately she turned her head away, closing him out again. No, she was not susceptible. She had proved that to her satisfaction over and over again.

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll have to take his place.’

‘His place?’ Nobody could possibly take Pete Hunniford’s place. Pete was Alex’s most devoted gofer. Nothing came between Pete and ambition. He had freely admitted to Sara that his first marriage had fallen apart because he was never at home. And right at this minute, if Alex employed his mobile phone, Pete would be out of the labour ward like a rocket.

‘Nothing too onerous…Relax,’ Alex breathed in that distinctively rich dark voice which rolled down her spine like golden honey, burning wherever it touched. ‘I only want you to take down a couple of letters.’

Her brow furrowed as she automatically lifted a pad and pencils. He was talking very slowly, not with his usual quick impatience. He hadn’t even asked her why she hadn’t answered the phones. He stood back for her to precede him from the room, and in her need to keep as much physical space between them as possible she jerked sideways and skidded off balance.

Strong hands whipped out and closed round her upper arms to steady her. Her head swam, her heartbeat kicking wildly against her breastbone. She quivered, fighting off sudden dizziness, and he drew her back. ‘OK?’ he murmured, still holding her on the threshold.

‘F-fine…Sorry.’ Her nostrils flared in dismay as the warm, definably male scent of him washed over her. Aromatic, intrinsically familiar…intimate. Intimate? What was the matter with her? What the heck was the matter with her? As she stiffened he released her and she walked down the corridor with careful small steps, noticing that the double doors of his office at the end looked peculiarly out of focus. Now near, now far, now skewed. All that brandy. Drunk in charge of a phone. But it felt shamelessly, unbelievably good: a short-term anaesthetic against the enormous pain waiting to jump on her—the pain she could not yet face head-on. As long as she didn’t think, she could protect herself.

‘Sit down, Sara.’ She plotted a course across the thick carpet with immense care and sank down on the nearest seat, suddenly terrified that he would notice the state she was in. Being intoxicated suddenly didn’t feel good any more. In Alex Rossini’s presence, it felt like sheer insanity. Discovery would be unbelievably demeaning.

Disorientatedly, she glanced up and found him standing over her. She flinched. Her hands trembled and she anchored them tightly round the pad. He didn’t sit down. He strolled with silent grace across to the floorlength windows. A stunningly handsome man, he had an innate elegance of movement, his superbly cut mohair and silk-blend charcoal-grey suit the perfect complementary frame to wide shoulders, lean hips and long, powerful thighs.

From beneath luxuriant black lashes he surveyed her. ‘Shall I begin?’

He didn’t normally request permission. Uncertainly she nodded. He dictated with incredibly long pauses that enabled her more or less to keep up but she still missed bits because her mind wouldn’t stay in one place. Shock was giving way to reality, denial giving way to bursts of agonised pain. For how long had Brian been deceiving her with Antonia? Her memory threw up the image of the open bottle of wine in the lounge, the half-filled wineglasses by the bed. No sudden passion there. They had carried the glasses with them into the bedroom. A carefully staged lunchtime encounter when Sara should have been at work.

‘Did you get all that?’

The page currently beneath her fingers was blank. Briefly she simply closed her eyes, willing herself to find calm and control.

‘It’s all right, Sara…the letter isn’t important.’

The softness of the assurance astonished her. Dazedly she glanced up, encountered Alex Rossini’s brilliant dark eyes and was mesmerised by the sincerity she read there. He was resting against the edge of his polished desk, far too close for comfort. He reached down and removed the pad from her nerveless fingers, setting it carelessly aside.

‘Something has upset you…’ he drawled.

Her creamy, perfect skin tightened over her fine facial bones as she focused on his silk tie. ‘No…’

‘You’re not wearing your ring.’

Sara went white. The pencil she was fiddling with snapped in two.

‘You are clearly distressed,’ Alex murmured in the same quiet, disturbingly gentle tone which she had never heard him employ before. ‘I believe you were called home unexpectedly this morning. What happened there?’

She was appalled to discover that she wanted to tell him, spill out the poison building up inside her, but instead she bit down hard on her tongue.

‘Perhaps you would prefer to go home for the rest of the day?’ Alex suggested lethally.