The Italian Duke's Virgin Mistress

Helplessly Charley watched as the final sample was loaded into the van.

‘Where are they taking them? What you’re doing is theft, you know.’ She tried valiantly to protect the supplier’s goods, but The Duke didn’t deign to answer her, going to speak to the two young men instead. Charley looked at her watch again. She could do nothing about the samples now. But where was her taxi? If it didn’t arrive soon not only would she be responsible for the loss of the samples, she would also miss her flight. She could just imagine how her boss was going to react. Only her fluency in Italian had prevented him from sacking her already, so that he could give his daughter her job.

She reached into her bag for her mobile. She would have to ring the council official who had organised the taxi for her.

The white van was speeding away, and The Duke had come back to her.

‘There are matters we need to discuss,’ he told her peremptorily.

‘I’m waiting for a taxi to pick me up and take me to the airport.’

‘The taxi has been cancelled.’

Cancelled? Charley was feeling sick with anxiety now, but she wasn’t going to let it show—not to this man of all men.

‘Follow me,’ he commanded.

Follow him? Charley opened her mouth to object, and then closed it again as out of nowhere the knowledge came to her that this was a man who had the power to make a woman lose so much sense of herself that following him would be all she wanted to do. But not her, Charley assured herself—and yet wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? Something about him compelled her to obey him, to follow him, as though…as though she was commanded by something outside her own rational control. Her whole body shuddered as immediately and physically as though he had actually touched her, and had found a reaction to that touch that she herself had not wanted to give. What was she thinking?

He was striding towards the car, leaving her with no option than to do as he had instructed her. He was opening the passenger door of the car for her.

He was taking her to the airport? And what had he meant when he had said that he was taking over the project?

She could all too easily picture him in Florence at the time of the Medicis, manipulating politics to suit his own purposes, with the aid of his sword if necessary, claiming whatever he wanted, be it wealth or a woman, and making it his possession. He had that air of darkness and danger about him. She shivered again, but this time not with angry resentment. This time the frisson of sensation that stroked her body was making her aware of him as a man, unnerving and alarming her.

He was not someone who would have any compassion for those weaker than him—especially if they were in his way, or if he had marked them out as his prey, Charley warned herself. Let him do his worst—think the worst of her. She didn’t care. She had far more important things to worry about, like keeping her job and keeping her all-important salary flowing into the family bank account; like doing her bit and following the example of selfless sacrifice her elder sister Lizzie had set. Her sister always managed to make light of all that she had done for them, never revealing that she felt any hint of the shameful misery that Charley sometimes had to fight off because she had been forced to give up her private dreams of working in the world of fine art. Sometimes Charley admitted she felt desperately constricted, her artistic nature cruelly confined by the circumstances of her life.

Raphael slid into the driver’s seat of the car, closing the door and then starting the engine.

The town council had been only too delighted to allow him to finance the restoration work on the garden, and to hand the whole project over to him. Had there been a trace of fear in their response to him as well as delighted gratitude? They knew his family history as well as he did himself. They knew that it involved broken lives and bodies, and the inheritance of blood that belonged to a name that still today caused shudders amongst those who whispered it in secret with fear and loathing. Beccelli! Who, knowing the history of that name, would not shrink from it?

He could not do so, however, Raphael reminded himself as he drove. He was forced every day of his life to face what he was, what he carried within him and its capacity for cruelty and evil. It was an inheritance that tortured and tormented those not strong enough to carry it. Those who, like his mother, had ended up taking their own life out of the despair that knowing they carried such genes had brought. Raphael stiffened against the unwanted emotional intrusion of his own thoughts. He had decided a long time ago that no one would ever be allowed to know how he felt about his blood inheritance or the ghosts of his past. Let others judge him as they wished; he would never allow himself to be vulnerable enough to let them see what he really felt. He would never seek their advice or acknowledge their criticism. He had been left alone to carry the burden of what he was, his father having drowned in a sailing accident and his mother dead by her own hand—both of them gone within a year of one another just as he had entered his teens.

Until he had come of age trustees had managed the complex intricacies of his inheritance and its wealth. A succession of relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—had made room for him under their roofs whilst he was growing up. After all, he was the head of the family whether they liked it or not. Its wealth and status, like its patronage, belonged to him alone.

In the way of such things, his great-aunt’s death and the consequent gathering of the family had given his relatives an opportunity to bring up the subject of his marriage and the subsequent production of the next heir—a favourite subject for all Italian matriarchs with unmarried offspring.

It was no secret to Raphael that his father’s cousin wanted him to marry her daughter, nor that the wife of his only male cousin, Carlo, often wondered if one day her husband or her son might stand in Raphael’s shoes, should he not have a son.

Raphael, though, had no intention of enlightening either of them with regard to his plans. And they knew better than to press him too much.

The Beccelli family had been notorious for their cruelty and their temper. Raphael’s own fear, however, lay not only with what he might have inherited himself but, even more importantly, with the genes that he would pass on, and those who might inherit them. In this modern world it might be possible to screen out those elements that combined to lead to a new life inheriting physical conditions that might damage it, but as yet there was no test that could pinpoint the inheritance of a mental and emotional mindset that would revel in cruelty, or protect a new life from the inner burden that came from knowing one’s history.

They were travelling through the gathering darkness of the spring evening, and it was minutes before Charley caught a glimpse of a road sign that sent her heart thudding with renewed anxiety. She realised that they were going in the opposite direction from her expected destination.

This isn’t the way to the airport,’ she protested

‘No.’

‘Stop this car immediately. I want to get out.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I am not being ridiculous. You have as good as kidnapped me, and my boss is expecting me to be back in England tomorrow.’

‘Not any more,’ Raphael informed her. ‘When I spoke to him earlier he was most anxious that you should remain here—in fact he begged me to keep you and use you for whatever purpose I wished.’

Charley opened her mouth to object to the offensive connotations of his choice of words, and then closed it again when she saw the gleam in his eyes. He wanted to upset and humiliate her. Well, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him think that he had done so.

Instead she said firmly, ‘You said that you have taken over the project?’

‘Yes. I have decided to fund the restoration myself rather than allow my family’s name to be connected with the kind of cheap, tawdry restoration you had in mind.’

‘So you’ll be cancelling our contract, then?’

‘I would certainly like to do so,’ Raphael agreed. ‘But unfortunately it won’t be possible for me to do that and find someone else to complete the work in time for next year’s formal re-opening of the garden. However, I do have some concerns about your suitability to manage the project.’

She was going to be sacked.

‘It seems to me that someone who gave up her Fine Arts degree halfway through to study accountancy instead is not the person to manage this project in the way I wish to have it managed.’

‘My career choices have nothing to do with you,’ Charley defended herself. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him that after the deaths of their parents and the financial problems that had followed she had felt morally obliged to train for something that would enable her to earn enough to help her elder sister provide a home for them all.

‘On the contrary, since I am now in effect employing you they have a very great deal to do with me. From now on you will work directly under my control and you will be answerable directly to me. Should I find that you are not able to satisfy me and meet the standards I set, then you will be dismissed. Your employer has already assured me that he has someone in mind to replace you, should that prove necessary.’

‘His daughter,’ Charley was unable to stop herself from saying furiously, ‘who can’t speak a word of Italian.’

Ignoring her outburst, Raphael continued, ‘It is my intention that the garden will be restored as exactly as possible to its original design.’

Charley stared at him in the darkness of the car, the light from the moon revealing the harsh pride of his profile, etching it with silver instead of charcoal.

‘But that will cost a fortune,’ she protested, ‘and that’s just for starters. Finding craftsmen to undertake the work—’

‘You can leave that to me. I have connections with a committee in Florence that is responsible for much of the work on its heritage buildings; it owes me favours.’

And she could just bet that calling in ‘favours’ was something he was very, very good at doing, Charley recognised.

‘Your work begins tomorrow, when we will visit the site together. I have in my possession the original plans.’

‘Tomorrow? But I was only supposed to be here for the day. I haven’t got anywhere to stay, or…’

‘That will not be a problem. You will stay at the palazzo, so that I can monitor your work and ensure that the garden is restored exactly as I wish. That is where we are going now—unless, of course, it is your wish that I ask your employer to send someone else to take over from you?’

Was that secretly what he was hoping? Well, he was going to be disappointed, Charley decided proudly. She was as equally capable of managing a high-budget project as she was of managing a lowbudget one, and in truth there was nothing she would have enjoyed more than seeing the garden come to life as it had once been, if only he was not involved. More important than any of that, though, was her need to keep on earning the money they all so desperately needed right now. She could not afford the luxury of pride, no matter how much it irked her.

The road began to climb up ahead of them, and on the hilltop, caught in the full beam of the rising moon, Charley could see the vast bulk of an imposing building dominating the landscape.

‘That is the Palazzo Raverno up ahead,’ Raphael informed her.