Buch lesen: «The Italian Demands His Heirs»

CHAPTER ONE

STAMBOULAS FOTAKIS WAS in a grim mood as he surveyed the dossier sited squarely in front of him on his desk. To the side of it sat the much thinner file containing an investigative report on his quarry, Raffaele di Mancini.

Raffaele di Mancini, his granddaughter Vivi’s bête noire, the man who had wronged her without reason.

Another good-looking bastard, he thought irritably, flipping the folder open to scan his victim’s perfectly chiselled profile, which would have done justice to any male supermodel. Obviously, his three granddaughters liked handsome men. Well, he had settled his eldest granddaughter Winnie’s problems, even if that hadn’t quite turned out as he had planned when she had elected to stay married to the father of her son.

Vivi, however...bright, hot-tempered Vivi...would be a much tougher nut to crack than the more biddable Winnie. He had had a huge argument with Vivi at his seventy-fifth birthday party, something of a novelty for a man who generally only met with fear and flattery. Being very rich and very influential, Stam was more accustomed to those who did exactly as he told them to do. But not Vivi, he reminisced fondly, Vivi who had no fear of him and spoke her mind without hesitation and, surprisingly, he respected her the more for her inner strength and conviction.

Fortunately for him, however, Vivi utterly loathed Raffaele di Mancini for the way he had wrecked her life. Two years earlier he had ruined her reputation to ensure that his flighty little sister came out of the same scandal whiter than white. Vivi had been accused, not only of being a prostitute, but also of having lured Arianna into stripping off for the camera and signing up as an escort with a sleazy business masquerading as a legitimate modelling agency. No, there was little chance of Vivi falling in love with Mancini, Stam conceded with an amused smile. But of the three potential husbands he had originally lined up to rescue his granddaughters’ reputations, Raffaele di Mancini was undeniably the most dangerous as well as being the biggest mystery.

Raffaele, billionaire banker and noted philanthropist, was the descendant of an extravagantly long and blue-blooded family line that could trace its beginnings back to the tenth century. By repute, he was a genius in the financial field and he led a remarkably discreet and conservative life, never ever seeking publicity. That made it all the harder for Stam to understand why Mancini had broken the discretion of a lifetime and labelled poor Vivi an escort on the back of the slenderest evidence. Had he somehow imagined it would shield his kid sister, Arianna, from being associated with the sleazy operation both young women had innocently become embroiled with?

But what did that matter now when the damage had been done? Stam ruminated. His problem was that Mancini was too clever by far to be entrapped by the usual ploys and too rich and virtuous to be bribed. That had meant that Stam was forced to stoop to a means of persuasion that he disliked intensely, particularly when that file revealed that Mancini had spent his adult life struggling to protect his wayward sister from her mistakes and their consequences. It was commendable that he had gone to so much trouble for a girl who was only a half-sister and the daughter of the drug-addled stepmother he could only have despised.

Mancini, however, deserved everything he had coming to him for what he had done to poor Vivi’s self-esteem, Stam reflected with harsh finality.

* * *

Raffaele di Mancini was uneasy.

And he didn’t know why, which nagged at him because he always trusted his gut. Yet there was nothing wrong in his world. His life ran with machine-like efficiency from the instant he arose at six in the morning to a perfectly cooked breakfast to the moment he retired to a bed made up with the very finest bed linen available.

All was quiet within his family circle as well. His younger sister, Arianna, for a long time a source of concern, was finally settled and on the brink of marrying a suitable man, with whom she was currently sharing a home in Florence. He had neither worries nor any thorny problems to tackle.

In London to speak at a banking conference, he had been surprised to be invited to a meeting with the notoriously reclusive Stamboulas Fotakis at his palatial and multi-storeyed London apartment. Fotakis was one of the richest men in the world but Raffaele had never met him and naturally he was curious to discover what had prompted such an invitation. He was also curious about the man himself, he acknowledged wryly. Over the years, reams had been written about Stam Fotakis and even if half of the stories could be discounted as nonsense, what remained was the stuff of legend.

Raffaele raked impatient fingers through his cropped black hair and checked his designer watch. Being kept waiting was a new experience for him. Raised to believe that good manners were integral to good business practice, Raffaele frowned, dark-as-charcoal eyes flaring with irritation. Clearly, Fotakis was running late but Raffaele was keen to get back to his town house and unwind after a very long day spent answering stupid questions and being sociable. Raffaele had a very low tolerance threshold for fools. Labelled a genius at school, he was impatient, extremely organised and only happy when following a precise schedule.

A PA, a beautiful blonde, entered the reception room and ushered him into a lift, where she tried to strike up a conversation and flirt with him. Stiffening in exasperation at her hair-tossing, fluttering eyelashes and lingering glances, Raffaele behaved much like a man swatting off a fly. Women came on to him all the time and it often irritated him. It got in the way of normal dialogue and tainted the professional atmosphere of an office environment. If she had been working for Raffaele, he would have instantly sacked her for such a display.

Women had their place in his life, of course they did. Raffaele had a high sex drive, as with many other thirty-year-old men. But he was infinitely more discreet than most. He chose his lovers with care and none of his affairs lasted longer than a few weeks. There was even a good reason for that brief timescale. Raffaele had eventually worked out that the longer he spent with a woman, the more attached and ambitious and indiscreet she became. As he had no intention of getting married until he was in his forties and mature enough to make a wise choice, he enjoyed sex only as long as it came without strings.

Raffaele was shown into a wood-panelled office of almost Victorian magnificence. Another door opened and a small white-haired, bearded man appeared. He immediately lifted the fat file on the desk and extended it to Raffaele. ‘Mr di Mancini,’ Stam Fotakis murmured flatly.

‘Mr Fotakis.’ Somewhat disconcerted by the lack of social chit-chat even though he had very little time for such time-wasting pursuits, Raffaele accepted the file and took the seat his host indicated.

‘Give me your thoughts on that,’ Stam invited smoothly.

As Raffaele leafed ever more slowly through the incredibly detailed file with a rare sense of growing horror, he breathed in slow and deep to steady himself. Arianna’s every mistake seemed to be included in that file and there were one or two that not even Raffaele had known about. He swallowed hard on his shock at being presented with such a shady dossier on his little sister’s past activities.

‘What are you planning to do with this information?’ Raffaele enquired in as civil a tone as he could manage because he was angry, seriously angry, and that was an emotion he rarely experienced but instinctively knew had to be controlled.

His host surveyed him steadily. ‘That very much depends on you. It will be released to the tabloid press only if you disappoint me,’ he revealed quietly.

‘That is an unthinkable threat,’ Raffaele breathed tautly. ‘I cannot believe that my sister has ever done you any harm.’

‘Let me explain the connection,’ Stam urged him stonily. ‘It’s the tale of two young women, one born into rank and privilege and great wealth...your sister.’

‘And the other?’ Raffaele prompted impatiently.

‘Born into poor circumstances and raised without any advantages but nonetheless a hard-working, educated and respectable young woman...and my granddaughter.’

‘Your granddaughter,’ Raffaele repeated blankly, still trying to fathom at top speed what Stam Fotakis could possibly want from him to warrant such a threat.

‘Vivien Mardas, better known as Vivi,’ Stam supplied. ‘For a little while she was a friend of your sister’s.’

Raffaele went rigid, the link established and comprehension now possible. ‘I remember her,’ he said stiffly. ‘She is a member of your family?’

‘Yes,’ Stam said, equally stiffly. ‘And I am as protective of her as you are of your sister and determined to rectify any injustices she has suffered.’

Raffaele remained diplomatically silent, for a slow, deep anger was burning like hellfire inside him as he joined the dots and hit pay dirt. When he had known her, Vivi had definitely been unaware that she had a very rich and powerful grandfather. Evidently, having discovered that no doubt welcome reality, she had lied about the less presentable parts of her past in an effort to cover them up.

‘Injustices?’ he prompted flatly.

‘You ruined her reputation by referring to her as a prostitute. As that ludicrous designation and the story is still available online to anyone who cares to look her up, Vivi found it impossible to find a job commensurate with her abilities,’ Stam revealed. ‘She suffered a great deal for someone who was innocent of fault. Her friends dropped her, her name was bandied about. She was laughed at, despised and she was obliged to leave jobs until she was finally forced to legally take another surname to hide that embarrassing past. She is now known as Vivien Fox.’

Raffaele nodded, that little sob story of Vivi’s woes touching him not at all. Of course, he wasn’t an elderly man, keen to believe only the best of his grandchild, he reasoned without hesitation. He was cool, logical, innately critical and suspicious, particularly when it came to labelling a woman an innocent. He had yet to meet a genuinely innocent woman.

He remembered Vivi very well. Hair that glittered like copper wire in the sunlight but which felt like spun silk. A tall, beautiful redhead, who could look impossibly elegant in anything she wore, even jeans. Skin like translucent porcelain and eyes as brilliant a blue as the Italian summer sky. He also remembered how very close he had come to succumbing to her wiles, even though she didn’t fit his preferred expectations of a woman in any field. He had had a narrow escape there and he was still grateful for it and not one bit regretful for anything he had said that could have offended Stam Fotakis.

Unless his misfortune in offending Stam was to lead to his kid sister being harmed, he adjusted grudgingly. And harmed Arianna very definitely would be, if that dossier of her past foolishness was ever to be released to the press, because her fiancé’s family were very conventional, and he would come under a lot of pressure to ditch her. That would send Arianna reeling and straight back into the erratic behaviour she had left behind her after falling in love with Tomas.

‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ Raffaele intoned levelly. ‘But I cannot believe that you genuinely want to injure another naive young woman like my sister. Arianna was born with problems.’

Stam lifted a silencing hand. ‘I know she was born addicted to drugs and suffers from poor impulse control. I know she’s not particularly bright and is far too trusting of strangers, but she’s not my responsibility, she’s yours,’ he pointed out calmly. ‘To make restitution, I want you to marry Vivi and give her your illustrious name.’

‘Marry her?’ Raffaele exclaimed in angry disbelief before he clenched his jaw shut and bit back any unwise comments as to the likelihood of Vivi’s much-vaunted innocence.

‘Only for the ceremony, suitably publicised to give her proper standing in society,’ Stam continued in the same mild tone, much as though he were discussing the weather. ‘I want nothing more. You will part on your wedding day and a divorce will duly follow. No financial settlement will be required on her behalf either. It is a modest request.’

‘Modest?’ Raffaele queried with incredulous emphasis.

‘Yes. I have no doubt that you think yourself very much above my granddaughter in terms of background and breeding,’ Stam conceded drily. ‘I won’t hold that against you. But you should be grateful that the temporary use of your good name is all that I require from you in return for that dossier, which would have a catastrophic effect on your sister’s marital plans.’

Fotakis knew it all, Raffaele acknowledged grittily, and, no matter how outrageous Stam’s demand that he marry Vivi, he knew he would have to consider it to protect Arianna’s future stability and security. Tomas was charmed by his sister’s giggly immaturity and impulsiveness where many men would have run a mile, and he didn’t want her only because she was an heiress either. Tomas, as sensible and stable as Arianna was not, was his sister’s perfect match and, what was more, Arianna loved him.

How could he stand by in silence while she lost all that over matters as trivial as a naked bathing episode in a famous fountain and being mistakenly arrested as a shoplifter? Unhappily, there were other murkier episodes involved and included in that file, he conceded grudgingly, such as the time she had spent the night with two men because her so-called friends had dared her to do so.

‘I hated it,’ she had muttered guiltily, appalled that he had picked up on that unsavoury rumour. ‘But everyone else had done stuff like that and I wanted to fit in... I wanted them to like me.’

After that affair, Raffaele had begun vetting her friends as well, recognising that his sister was too vulnerable to be left at the mercy of those ready to take advantage of her gullible nature to entertain themselves at her expense.

‘Presumably you have already discussed this idea with Vivi,’ Raffaele remarked curtly. ‘And she, of course, will be keen.’

‘Keen?’ Stam surprised him by laughing out loud. ‘Vivi hates you and she definitely doesn’t want to marry you! I’m afraid that persuading Vivi to the altar is your personal challenge.’

‘You’re seriously expecting me to believe that she isn’t involved in this proposition?’ Raffaele incised in disbelief.

‘Of course, she isn’t involved. Vivi doesn’t work off logic, she works off emotion. My...er...suggestion that she marry you made her very angry but I’m sure a high achiever of your calibre will know exactly how to transform her view of you,’ Stam completed with wry amusement brightening his snapping dark eyes. ‘If you want that dossier to stay private, you have to get Vivi to the church.’

‘That’s to be my penance, is it?’ Raffaele pronounced between gritted teeth.

‘If you like to think of it in those terms, do so. It’s immaterial to me. You give her a wedding ring but you keep your hands off her,’ Stam Fotakis warned him bluntly. ‘I want her back as untouched and unharmed as she is now. Is that understood?’

Dark colour edged the smooth planes of Raffaele’s high cheekbones, accentuating his taut bone structure. He could not credit the warning he was being given. ‘I have never touched an unwilling woman in my life,’ he countered with icy hauteur.

‘Well, you will find my granddaughter very unwilling,’ Stam forecast with satisfaction. ‘I dare say you’re accustomed to a different response from women...although you didn’t rise to the bait of my PA giving you a come-on in the lift.’

‘That was a set-up?’ Raffaele breathed in thundering disbelief, momentarily betrayed into speech.

‘I like to know the nature of the men I deal with and you passed the test. You’re not a womaniser,’ Stam retorted crisply. ‘I am very protective of Vivi.’

It was on the tip of Raffaele’s tongue to say that on the one occasion he had had Vivi in his arms, the very last thing she had been was unwilling, but he swallowed back that unwise admission, choosing instead to be grateful that there were, after all, some things that Vivi’s grandfather did not know.

And now, Raffaele reflected as he travelled back to his London town house in the comfort of his limo, he had to decide what to do next. It was ironic that he had always had the comfortable belief that being very, very rich protected you, he conceded, stunned into shock and an unfamiliar sense of powerlessness by the situation he found himself in. But wealth hadn’t, after all, protected Arianna from her misfortunes from conception, nor was it sufficient to hold at bay an old man determined to claim restitution for a sin that Raffaele had not actually committed.

He had not called Vivi a prostitute. For a start, she had been an escort rather than a prostitute and he knew the difference, having met women of both persuasions in even the most exclusive circles and learned how to detect and avoid them. That Vivi had almost slipped past his guard still infuriated him. The prostitution designation, however, had been manufactured by the press to provide an attention-grabbing headline.

Unfortunately, that truth would not remove that dangerous dossier on his sister from Stam Fotakis’s calculating and vengeful hands...

* * *

An upsetting memory was playing through Vivi’s mind as she put on her make-up for her date with her boyfriend, Jude. She had had a blazing row with her grandfather during his birthday party at her sister and brother-in-law’s home in Greece and she hadn’t let off steam by telling her sisters about it because she had known it would upset them when they preferred to play happy families.

‘Once Mancini marries you, you will never have cause to fear that scandal again because naturally the man who referred to you in those terms would scarcely be marrying you if you were a...er...woman of ill repute.’ Her grandfather selected the phrase with distaste. ‘Obviously, a rich, extremely successful man from his aristocratic background would never consider such a wife.’

‘I’d sooner marry a toad than Raffaele di Mancini!’ Vivi flung back at the older man in furious disbelief. ‘But the real truth is that I don’t want to marry anyone!’

‘Winnie is happy,’ he reminded her doggedly.

‘My sister’s a people pleaser and I’m not!’ Vivi countered with spirit. ‘I love her to death but what’s all right for her isn’t all right for me. When I get married, I want it to be real, not some phoney cobbled-together arrangement for the sake of appearances and status!’

‘I can’t believe you’d want to keep Mancini!’ Stam sniped, refusing to get the point or listen and hanging onto his mindset with the tenacity of a bulldog gnawing at a particularly tough bone.

Refusing to rise to that bait, Vivi tossed her head. ‘I can’t believe you’re such a miser that you couldn’t save my foster parents’ home for them without attaching unreasonable conditions to your generosity! We’re supposed to be family but you don’t behave like family are supposed to behave. But then what would I know about that, never really having had that experience?’ she muttered, falling into an awkward silence.

‘You are my family and I will always look after you,’ Stam intoned stubbornly.

‘Looking after me is not marrying me off...however briefly...to that Mancini rat! And how could you possibly persuade him to marry me anyway?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘I suspect he would sooner go to his grave than agree to marry a woman he believes to have been a prostitute.’

In his old-fashioned way, Stam winced and sighed, ‘I have what you could call an irresistible proposition to lay before Mancini, which will persuade him.’

‘I don’t care if you’re offering him the moon as an inducement. Well, actually I do,’ Vivi admitted on a fresh gust of anger that made her almost violet eyes shimmer as bright as polar stars against her porcelain skin. ‘Having anything to do with him at all, never mind marrying him, would be humiliating!’

‘No,’ Stam had argued equally strongly. ‘This time around, all the power will be in your hands, Vivi. Don’t you want that experience? Don’t you want to see the man who insulted you forced to eat his own words?’

No, Vivi could live without revenge, she conceded as she emerged from the memory of that argument. As long as she never saw Raffaele di Mancini again in this lifetime, she would be happy. He was a reminder of too much that she wanted to forget and leave buried. She had become very fond of Arianna and, no doubt at Raffaele’s behest, Arianna had immediately dumped their friendship as well. And then there had been her seemingly growing relationship with Raffaele himself at the time. She closed off that train of thought angrily. Just a stupid kiss, just one stupid kiss, even a teenager would have known not to get unduly excited by something that trivial, she castigated herself.

But then Vivi knew that she tended to be more vulnerable with men than other more experienced and emotionally secure women. Vivi had not known security until she was fourteen and living with her final set of foster parents, the kindly John and Liz, who had reunited the three sisters within their home. Before John and Liz, there had been a series of unsuitable foster homes where Vivi had been bullied, verbally abused and, on several occasions, sexually threatened.

Winnie, Vivi and Zoe had lost their parents in a car accident. At the age of twenty-three, Vivi barely remembered them. Their father, however, had been Stam’s youngest son, who had been estranged from him for years. Stam had not even known his grandchildren existed until they had contacted him as adults, seeking his financial help when their foster parents were facing the repossession of their home where they were still caring for troubled children. He had welcomed them into his life with great enthusiasm but had set outrageous terms for giving them his help, demanding that they all marry men of his choice to raise their status.

Vivi had still to make up her mind about what she thought of her grandfather. Was he, simply, an incredible snob? Or crazy? Or, more worryingly, the kind of personality who had to get revenge on anyone who wronged a member of his family? Well, Winnie and Vivi had been wronged but their youngest sister, Zoe, had only been wronged by unfortunate foster care. Vivi knew she had to stand up to her grandfather for Zoe’s sake because Zoe was frail and emotionally vulnerable, subject to extreme shyness and panic attacks. Zoe would never manage to fight with the older man; indeed Zoe was so self-effacing that the very idea of her confronting anyone struck the bolder Vivi as ridiculous.

For that reason, Vivi knew that she had to stand strong. She tried not to be bitter about the past, for bitterness achieved nothing. At present she and Zoe were living in a small, luxurious town house owned by their grandfather and offered to them rent-free. But the house felt empty without Winnie’s toddler son, Teddy, running about and Vivi was too distrustful of her grandfather to spend the money she wasn’t currently forking out on rent. Instead she was saving that money, waiting anxiously for the day when he might tire of her defiance and throw them back out into the cold.

That meant that she still couldn’t afford to get her awful hair straightened again, she thought ruefully, picking up a corkscrew copper curl and dropping it again with antipathy. It was the hair from hell and she had been born with it and she was only content with her appearance when she could transform it into a smooth straight fall. Right now it was rioting across her shoulders, round her face and down her back like a rag doll’s wig, she thought irritably. Not that Jude, her current boyfriend, seemed to mind.

But then Jude didn’t really seem to mind much about anything. She had met him at her gym where he worked as a martial arts teacher. He was blond and laid-back, and he had a good body but she had yet to experience a desire to see that body naked. Possibly their casual relationship came down to being mates more than anything else, she reflected ruefully. If she hadn’t met Raffaele and been immediately attracted to him, she would’ve believed that she was really not that bothered about sex. Men usually came and went in Vivi’s life without her ever particularly caring. Only Raffaele had hurt her and that had come along with a whole lot of other damage so she tried not to dwell on his rejection.

It was thanks to Raffaele that she had been forced to work in a succession of menial jobs before finally surrendering to the very effective changing of her surname. Only then had she contrived to shed the scandal that had seen her hounded out of two good jobs. And all because she had taken a first job straight after graduating with her marketing degree as a receptionist in a business that had ultimately turned out to be functioning as a modelling and an undercover escort agency, with many of the models working as escorts on the side. And as if that hadn’t proved bad enough a pop-up brothel had been operating in the back of the building as well, and it had been the police raid of that facility that had exploded the agency’s cover and led to her being captured on camera running down the street to escape the whole explosive mess. That photo and her name had been splashed over a notorious tabloid newspaper and in that photo she had looked ridiculously glamorous, because Arianna had cleared out her wardrobe and had given her a pile of her discarded but still gorgeous outfits to wear.