Elizabeth Power - Sins of the Past

Riva frowned. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘You both come and live with me.’

‘Live with you?’ Shock made it come out on a squeak.

‘Si.’

‘As your kept woman?’ Shrugging off his hands, she brought herself round to face him, leaning back on her elbows, her small breasts thrust tantalisingly upwards. ‘What are you proposing, Damiano? A life of luxury for the little upstart …’ she couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice ‘… in exchange for custody of Ben, with the odd sexual favour thrown in?’

His face was a chiselled rock against the hard blue of the sky. ‘May I remind you that he’s my son too?’ He sounded quietly angry. ‘And, no. Santo cielo! That isn’t what I’m proposing.’

‘What, then?’

‘I think we should marry,’ he said.

ELIZABETH POWERwanted to be a writer from a very early age, but it wasn’t until she was nearly thirty that she took to writing seriously. Writing is now her life. Travelling ranks very highly among her pleasures, and so many places she has visited have been recreated in her books. Living in England’s West Country, Elizabeth likes nothing better than taking walks with her husband along the coast or in the adjoining woods, and enjoying all the wonders that nature has to offer.

ELIZABETH POWER

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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FOR ALAN—for everything

S ANTO cielo! It was her!

With his skill at addressing the immediate, whilst keeping abreast of everything else going on around him, Damiano responded to something the woman behind the desk was saying, though his glittering black eyes were trained on the younger woman who had stopped briefly in the corridor beyond the glass partition.

Red hair—not long, as he remembered it, but short and fashionably tousled. She looked, with that natural curve to her mouth and those small pointed features, like some mischievous elf. Yet it was a mischief, he acknowledged through a rising tide of shock, motivated by opportunism and greed.

‘Mr D’Amico?’

Immaculate dark tailoring couldn’t hide the whipcord strength and physical power of a man in the peak of condition, a man of impressionable force and character, whose striking features were hardening now as he brought himself back sharply to the matter in hand.

How could he allow just one glimpse of that redhead to cause his concentration to slide? He had business to attend to. A chain of leisure centres and retail outlets to get up and running. But when he had arranged this meeting to finalise details with the design team who handled all his UK developments, he hadn’t expected to come in and be confronted by a ghost from his past.

‘That girl …’ She hadn’t seen him! He had only an impression now of feathery strands against an elegantly pale neck as she let herself into the office opposite the one in which he was standing and disappeared from view.

‘You mean Miss Singleman?’ His associate’s eyes had followed his, her swept up black hair and dramatically red lips emphasising the hard edge of a successful businesswoman in her fifties. But she knew who had been stealing his attention. ‘Riva?’

‘Riva …’ The word rolled off his tongue as sensually as it was savoured. So she was still unmarried. ‘Sì.’ He was trying to appear calm. Calmer than he felt! he decided, annoyed. His manner, though, demanded more, and the woman smiled, supplying it.

‘One of our newest recruits. She specialises in the domestic environment at present. She’s young, enthusiastic, a bit off-beat sometimes in her approach, but very, very talented.’

As well as untrustworthy and a scheming liar!

For one fleeting moment he fought the urge to walk out and take his future business elsewhere, rather than let a company who could employ the type of questionable character it had obviously employed with Miss Riva Singleman loose with his money. But intrigue as to how such a dubious little drop-out could possibly have come to be working for such a reputable firm of interior designers, along with the memory of how that lying little mouth had felt beneath his, got the better of him. He had never been faint-hearted. So why shouldn’t he get his business sorted out, accept the opportunity that fate had suddenly presented him with, and satisfy his curiosity along the way?

He listened to the matriarch of Redwood Interiors assuring him that everything was going to schedule, with all his wishes being met, and that whatever members of her team were allotted to handle his affairs at any time would give him no less than two hundred per cent satisfaction.

Like hell they would! he resolved, and gave the woman one of his blazing smiles, charming her witless as he had been doing with women for the whole of his thirty-two years, as he settled on his suddenly innovative and calculating plan.

RIVA pulled up outside the stone building on the fringes of what had once been a thriving country estate. She could see the old manor house at the end of the long drive, boarded up, uninhabited. A ‘For Sale’ sign hung haphazardly on one of its rusty gates.

But it was the building in front of her that drew her attention as she stepped out of her car onto the gravelled courtyard. The Old Coach House.

Once a stable-block for the manor, this place looked very much inhabited. A couple of other vehicles—one a gleaming black Porsche—were parked outside.

Her light mood was enhanced by the chirruping birds and the late spring sunlight filtering down through the trees as she locked her small hatchback and tripped eagerly across the gravel. Her first real big job where she was to be given carte blanche! To conceptualise and co-ordinate all the furnishings, colours and textures for a special room inside this wonderful old house. What an opportunity!

Her hand was trembling with excitement as she pressed the gleaming brass doorbell. Her portfolio had obviously impressed someone so much that they had asked for her specifically, and if she could pull off this job to everyone’s satisfaction it could be the making of her career! No more struggling to make ends meet—to keep a very necessary roof over her head. And if she was valued enough to be given the chance to immerse herself in a project like this, perhaps one day her dreams of owning her own studio might turn into a reality, and all the anguish she’d endured over the past few years would be a thing of the past.

‘Madame Duval?’

The chic blonde in the charcoal-grey suit who opened the door to her was assessing Riva’s less conventional attire with a quizzical smile.

‘No. Madame’s not here, but you are expected. Miss Singleman, isn’t it?’

Riva nodded and followed in a slipstream of exotic perfume as she was guided up some stairs into the main body of the house. At only five feet three inches she felt dwarfed by the other girl’s height, and wondered whether she should have worn high heels, or even a jacket, but she hated conformity. Until the other woman had opened the door she had felt smart in the belted black and grey striped tunic she had teamed with a short black skirt, dark leggings and pumps.