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not care.
Raffaelle tuned in too late to catch anything but the sight of Rachel’s taut back retreating and the uncomfortable silence that followed. Gino was frowning angrily at Daniella. His stepsister had gone very pale. Someone else muttered a soft, ‘Dio.’
And the whole table watched as he came to his feet. Someone touched his hand. It might have been Francesca. He neither knew nor cared.
He strode after Rachel. ‘Where the hell do you think you are going?’ he raked out, catching hold of her wrist to bring her to a standstill between two tables.
It came out of nowhere, the rise in anger, the sudden swing round. Next thing she knew, she had slapped him full in the face.
A camera flashed.
His eyes lit up bright silver. ‘That’s tomorrow’s trash out of the way,’ he gritted, then hauled her up against him and kissed her hard.
The flashes kept on coming. The whole restaurant had fallen into complete silence to witness Raffaelle Villani fight with his future bride. By the time he set her mouth free her lips were burning and her heart was thumping and tears were hot in her eyes.
‘I wish I’d never met you,’ she hissed up at him, then wrenched free of him and walked away.
Outside the air was cool and she shivered. Dino stood leaning against the car in the car park but he straightened the moment he saw Raffaelle appear.
‘Rachel—’
‘Stay away from me.’ She started walking away from both the driver and Raffaelle, her spindly heels clicking on the hard pathway’s surface. Inside she was a mass of muddled feelings, nausea and the pumping, pounding need to just get right away from everything.
She managed about ten metres before the car drew up beside her, at the same time as a figure leapt out of it and a hard hand arrived around her waist.
She tried to pull free; the hand tightened. ‘You know how this works,’ Raffaelle said grimly. ‘You decide which way we do it.’
A camera flashed. They both blinked as it happened. Raffaelle muttered something nasty as his free hand pulled open the car door. Shivering, Rachel stiffened away from him and entered the car under her own steam.
The door closed her in. He walked round the car to get in beside her. With no glass partition in here to give them privacy, they were forced to hold their tongues, so the silence pulsed like a third heartbeat between them.
Anger, hostility, a tight sizzling hatred that ran dangerously close to its unrequited flipside flicked at the muscles in Raffaelle’s face and held Rachel’s frozen in her own private hell.
If he had not drunk so much wine, keeping up with Francesca in his attempt to divert her curious attention away from Rachel, Raffaelle knew he would have kicked Dino out of the car and taken his place, just to give himself something to do and stop himself from wanting to reach out and kill her for making him feel like this.
And—yes, he freely admitted it—he had been happy to give this woman sitting beside him something useful to think about! Did she think she was the only one of them who could play this game of falseness?
Game, falseness; the two words ricocheted around his head as a brutal reminder as to what this relationship was really about.
Rachel sat beside him with her face averted, fingering the ring on her finger and only realising as she felt its duller contours that she was still wearing the daytime fake.
Looking down, she could see that she had forgotten to swap the ring for the real one. So what was that little error trying to tell her?
You can’t live a lie and expect it to spin itself into the truth?
They arrived at his apartment still steeped in thick silence. The journey up in the lift was just as cold and reined in. They entered the apartment. Rachel tossed aside her purse and just kept walking. He followed her into the bedroom and shut the door.
She could feel his anger beating into her. She refused to turn and look at him. ‘If you want a row, then you’re going to have to save it until tomorrow,’ she tossed out coldly. ‘I’m not—feeling too well, so I’m going to take a shower, then I’m going to bed and I would prefer it if you found somewhere else to sleep.’
Kicking off her shoes, she headed for the bathroom.
‘Pleading a headache, cara?’
The drawling tone made her wince. ‘Yes, actually,’ she answered.
‘Perhaps even pining for your Italian heartbreaker—?’
What had made him bring up Alonso now of all times? Rachel stopped walking to turn and look at him. He was standing in front of the closed bedroom door, tall, lean, spectacularly arrogant, with that coldly cynical expression lashed to his handsome features that just said it all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AN ICY chill chased down Rachel’s spine. ‘You know I bumped into Alonso today,’ she murmured.
The tense shape of his top lip twisted. ‘Is this bumped into an English euphemism for recklessly planned to meet with him in broad daylight on a busy street?’
Refusing to take him up on his cold sarcasm, she replied, ‘No, it means bumped into by accident.’
‘And, having spent the afternoon in his company,’ Rafaelle said coldly, ‘how would you prefer to describe that to me?’
Rachel frowned. ‘But I didn’t spend the afternoon with him.’
Shifting out of his taut stance, he walked forward, a long-fingered hand sliding into his inner jacket pocket, then smoothly out again. He halted by the bed, placed a photograph down on it.
Rachel glanced at it briefly. So someone had seen them together. She looked back at him. ‘If you want to say something, Raffaelle,’ she challenged. ‘Then just come out and say it.’
‘You drank coffee with him.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded.
‘You then moved on to his apartment situated above the café.’
‘You have photographic evidence of that too?’
He sliced the air with a hand. ‘It stands to reason.’
‘Does it?’
‘Si—!'he bit out.
Suddenly all the rage he had been holding in all evening burst to the fore. He took a step towards her. Rachel took a step back. The raking flick of contempt in his eyes as she did so tensed up her trembling spine.
‘You can give me a better explanation as to where you did spend the rest of the afternoon before you returned here?’ he demanded.
Refusing to let his anger intimidate her, ‘Can you explain where you spent your afternoon?’ she hit back.
‘Scuzi—?’ He had the gall to look shocked!
‘And then you could go on to explain how you had the rank bad taste to bring your afternoon friend into my company at dinner tonight!’
‘Francesca is—’
‘An ex-lover of yours, I know.’ She said it for him. ‘With darling Daniella around, I do tend to find these things out.’
His angry face hardened. ‘We were discussing what you did with your afternoon, not what I did with mine.’
‘Well, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that we both did the same thing!’ she threw back. ‘As least you were saved the embarrassment of watching me fawn all over Alonso at dinner, whereas I did not warrant that much respect!’
His wide shoulders clenched inside expensive suiting. ‘I did nothing with Francesca this afternoon but spend the