MELANIE MILBURNE - Rich and Outrageous - His Poor Little Rich Girl / Deserving of His Diamonds? / Enemies at the Altar

‘Rachel, I need a word with you,’ he said, looking uneasy.

‘Sure,’ she said, putting down her tube of lipstick. ‘What it is, Dad?’

He pulled at the collar of his dress shirt as if it were strangling him. ‘Honey, I need to ask you for a favour, a big one,’ he said.

‘If you want me to dance with that geeky guy Albert from your firm, forget it,’ she said, picking up her lipstick again. ‘I can’t stand his fleshy hands all over me. He did that at the staff Christmas party and I—’

‘Craig has asked for your hand in marriage.’

Rachel looked at her father. ‘Shouldn’t he have asked me first?’

‘I guess he didn’t see the necessity,’ he said. ‘You’ve both always known you would eventually make a go of it. Your mother and I talked of it when you were kids. His parents Kate and Bill wanted it too. They still want it. Now seems the right time to announce it publicly.’

Rachel put a hand to the diamond pendant around her neck that her father had given her only that morning. Her mother had been given it on her twenty-first birthday. She had been wearing it the day she died. ‘Dad, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you—’

‘Craig has invested in my business,’ her father cut her off. ‘He’s really going places, Rachel. He can set you up. He has connections in a modelling agency. They will take you on straight away with just a word from him. You’ll travel the world: Paris, London, New York. You’ll become a household name.’

‘But I’m not in love with him,’ Rachel said. ‘I thought I was once, when we were teenagers, but not now.’

‘Do you think I loved your mother?’ her father said through tight lips. ‘Don’t get me wrong. She was a nice girl but that was the point. I had to marry a nice girl. Not one from the wrong side of the tracks. There are women you sleep with and there are women you marry. It’s the same for young women like you born to wealth. You can have your flings if you must, but you have to marry well. You have to marry your own kind. It’s a fact of life.’

‘But I’m not ready to settle down just yet,’ she said. ‘I need more time to make up my mind.’

Her father frowned blackly. ‘What’s this talk of making up your mind? You’ve always known Craig was the one.’

Rachel swallowed. ‘I’ve just started seeing someone …’

‘Who?’ The word came out like a bullet.

She felt her stomach begin to churn at the dark threatening look in her father’s eyes. ‘Alessandro,’ she said.

Her father’s face turned puce. ‘The yard boy?’

‘He’s not just a yard boy,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s doing a business degree, an MBA in fact. He only continues to work here to pay his university tuition.’

‘He’s trailer trash,’ her father said, spittle forming at the side of his mouth. ‘He’s a mongrel, a crossbreed. For God’s sake, he doesn’t have a penny to his name!’

‘He treats me like a princess,’ Rachel said. ‘He treats me with respect even though I’ve been awful to him in the past. I’m just starting to get to know him and I think he’s one of the nicest—’

‘Are you a complete fool?’ he said, his eyes bulging with disgust and scorn. ‘You’re being used, Rachel, and you’re too stupid to see it. He’s using you to get ahead. By hooking up with you he gets access to the high-flyers. If you were a poor girl from the suburbs he wouldn’t look twice at you.’

Rachel stared at her father open-mouthed. Was it true? Had Alessandro targeted her as his ticket to the big time? They had only been dating a few weeks. She had insisted on keeping their relationship private but he hadn’t had the same misgivings. He had wanted to make it public right from the start, he had said he had nothing to be ashamed of in seeing her, but then why would he if what her father had said was true?

‘He’ll drag you down to the gutter where he came from,’ her father continued. ‘I’m warning you, Rachel. If you don’t accept Craig’s offer of marriage then you will be cut out of my life. I will never speak to you again. Do you hear me?’

Rachel looked at her father in wounded shock. Did he mean it? Did he love her so little that he could cast her from his life without a single slice of regret? Could she risk it? She had already lost her mother. She would have no one if her father cut her off.

‘I am sending Craig upstairs as soon as he arrives,’ her father went on. ‘I want you to come downstairs together as an engaged couple. This is your chance to do something for me, to make me proud. God knows you’ve given me little to be proud of so far. But this will change everything. I will be the proudest father alive to see you settled with Craig Hughson.’

Rachel’s heart sank as her father left the room. The knock on her door a few minutes later made her heart sink even further but, when she opened it, it wasn’t Craig standing there, but Alessandro.

She said the first thing that came into her head. ‘How did you get in? My father has a security team down there to keep out gatecrashers.’

‘I know one of the security guards,’ Alessandro said with a flash of his heart-stopping smile.

She closed the door of her bedroom and leaned back against it for support, her eyes avoiding his. ‘You can’t be here, Alessandro,’ she said. ‘Not tonight.’

‘I wanted to see you on your birthday,’ he said. ‘I have something I want to ask you.’

She looked at the small velvet package he was holding in one hand. ‘I can’t take that.’ She moved past him to stand in front of the dressing table. She gripped the back of the chair until her knuckles looked as if they would break through her skin.

He came over and, turning her gently, took one of her hands and closed her fingers over the package. ‘Rachel,’ he said. ‘I know we’ve only been officially dating a few weeks but we’ve known each other for much longer than that.’

Rachel swallowed as she saw the sincerity in his dark blue gaze as it caught and held hers. ‘Don’t,’ she choked. Please don’t.

His hands squeezed hers gently. ‘I love you,’ he said, smiling down at her. ‘I think I fell in love with you the first day I came to work here and you insulted me about my manners or my hair, or was it my clothes? It doesn’t matter. I love you and I want to marry you. Will you do me the honour of being my wife?’

She tried to get her voice to work but her lips felt as if they were starched. ‘Alessandro … I …’

There was a loud knock on Rachel’s bedroom door and before she could open her mouth Craig Hughson came in as if he had every right to.

He took in the little tableau with a sneering look. ‘What’s he doing here?’ he asked Rachel.

She couldn’t look at Alessandro but she could feel the pressing weight of his gaze. ‘He’s just leaving,’ she said. ‘He just wanted to wish me a happy birthday.’

‘Well, you can congratulate us while you’re at it, Vallini,’ Craig said, slinging an arm around Rachel’s shoulders.

Alessandro’s expression turned to stone. ‘Congratulate you on what?’

‘Rachel and I are engaged,’ Craig said with a smug smile. ‘We’re just going downstairs to announce it now. Aren’t we, babe?’

‘Is that true?’ Alessandro asked, firing the question at Rachel, his eyes like laser beams.

Rachel wanted to deny it. She ached to deny it. She thought of her father waiting downstairs with all the guests, all the celebrities and high-flyers of Melbourne society, all the well-to-do family friends. They were all assembled waiting for her and Craig to appear. Her father had probably primed them all. They probably had champagne glasses filled and ready for the first congratulatory toast. Could she go down there and say she wouldn’t do it, that she wouldn’t accept Craig’s offer of marriage? She had no home but this one. No other relative but her father. How could she cut herself off from all that was familiar to take a chance on a relationship that was only in its infancy? She wasn’t sure if what she felt for Alessandro was love. It felt like it but how could she know for sure? What if he was asking her to marry him to get ahead in life as her father had implied? She would be better marrying the devil she knew than the one she didn’t.