The Blackmailed Bridegroom. Miranda Lee
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‘No, thank you, Conrad. The contract will do. I wouldn’t want to live here.’ Even if he could tolerate the space, he didn’t want to be surrounded by Conrad’s extra ears.
Conrad smiled. ‘I had a feeling you’d say that. Shall we expect you around seven-thirty, then?’
‘Are you sure Paige will still be here?’ Antonio commented caustically.
‘I should think so. Her latest boyfriend gave her quite a scare.’
‘Oh?’
‘He hit her.’
Antonio was surprised at how angry this news made him. There again, violence against women had always pushed savage buttons in him. ‘I gather you know this charmer’s name and address?’ he ground out.
‘Actually, no, I don’t.’
‘But you always know where Paige is living and who with!’
Conrad sighed. ‘I stopped putting Lew on the job this past year. I just couldn’t take it any more. I have no idea what she’s been up to since January. Paige rang me out of the blue last night around one, and asked if Jim could come and pick her up at Central Station. She sounded scared, which, as you know, isn’t like Paige at all. But the penny dropped once I saw the big bruise on her face. She wouldn’t tell me anything when I asked her last night. But maybe she’ll tell you.’
‘Maybe.’ If she did, Antonio was going to teach the creep a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry!
Still, it had only been a question of time before Paige became mixed up with a really unsavoury type. The girl never could see the risks she was taking in living with men she didn’t really know. She had no common sense, and no appreciation of the consequences of her actions. She’d be the perfect victim for the likes of Brock Masters!
Possibly there were excuses for her many and potentially dangerous relationships—Antonio was beginning to appreciate there’d been little enough warmth and affection here at home—but one would have thought she’d have learned by now. Almost twenty-three, and she was still looking for love in all the wrong places!
Well, she certainly won’t find it with you, either, came the coldly cynical thought.
‘You know, Conrad,’ he said with a sardonic twist of his mouth. ‘Has it occurred to you that Paige might say no to marriage, whether she falls in love with me or not?’
‘It did cross my mind. If needs be, I suggest you use a method as old as time.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Get her pregnant.’
Antonio’s eyes widened.
‘I’m sure you won’t find such a task beyond you,’ his boss drawled. ‘I gather the Wilding girl had to have a little operation before she could become engaged to the Jansen millions. Which was understandable. She couldn’t risk a black-eyed baby born to a blond, blue-eyed father, could she?’
Antonio momentarily went white. Lauren had been pregnant when she’d run home to Daddy? She’d aborted his child, just to marry money?
‘You really know how to strike below the belt, Conrad,’ he said bitterly. ‘How long have you known about my relationship with Lauren?’
‘From the start. Do you honestly think I would employ a man to be my personal assistant and to live in my home if I hadn’t had him thoroughly checked out? Forget the Wilding girl, Antonio. She was a fool, and so was her father. I know a good man when I see one. Marry my daughter, and you’ll never regret it.’
Now that, Antonio conceded ruefully, was a matter of opinion.
Rising from his chair, he set a cool black gaze upon his future father-in-law and stretched out his hand. ‘It’s a deal.’
Conrad took, then pumped his hand. ‘Splendid, my boy. Splendid. I knew you’d make the right decision. See you tonight, around seven-thirty. We’ll have a celebratory drink together before dinner.’
Antonio said nothing to that, just spun on his heels and strode towards the doorway.
Evelyn barely had time to retreat hastily from where she’d been listening to every single word.
CHAPTER TWO
PAIGE woke mid-afternoon and just lay there for a while, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, thinking.
Home again.
If you could call this wretched house a home, that was.
The word home normally conjured up feelings of peace and warmth. It was where you could be yourself; where you were most relaxed; where you felt loved and accepted.
But home had never been like that for Paige. Fortune Hall was a cold, heartless place which evoked nothing in her but feelings of failure and inadequacy, of being unwanted and unloved, of being unsure of who she was or what she wanted out of life.
Only once had Paige momentarily been happy in this house: the year when Antonio Scarlatti had first come to Fortune Hall to live.
The memory of their first meeting was indelibly imprinted on her brain. It had been her last year in high school, and she’d caught the train home for the Easter break, feeling miserable when her father had said he couldn’t possibly meet her at Central.
‘Just catch a taxi home, Paige,’ had been his offhand and impatient words on the telephone the night before. ‘It’s not as though it’s far. I can’t leave an important meeting for such a silly little thing.’
Such a silly little thing! That was what she was to him. A silly little thing. It was what she’d always been to him. A nuisance. An inconvenience. He’d never loved her, or made time for her. Not once.
Paige had stepped off the train at Central, no longer expecting to be met, so she’d been startled when a dark-haired, dashingly handsome young man had approached her and introduced himself as her father’s new personal assistant, Antonio Scarlatti. She vaguely remembered thinking he didn’t have an Italian accent at all, but that he had the most riveting eyes. Black and penetrating and incredibly sexy.
‘Your father mentioned your arrival by train today,’ he’d added, while those eyes held hers. ‘I didn’t think it right for you to make your way home all by yourself, so I told him it would be my pleasure to meet you. Come…’ And he’d cupped her elbow with a gallant hand.
She’d been captivated from that moment.
Captivated and completely infatuated.
By the time he’d driven her through the gates of Fortune Hall, her racing heart had succumbed to a hero worship which had banished every other male idol whom her love-starved teenage heart had gathered over the previous few years. Her favourite music and movie stars were nothing compared to Antonio Scarlatti.
By the end of the two-week break she’d centred a thousand romantic hopes and dreams around him, crying her devastation when the holiday had ended all too swiftly. During the next term at school she’d spent long hours every day, imagining and fantasising all sorts of exciting scenarios with her handsome Italian at centre stage, till she’d begun to believe her own fantasies, turning each simple smile he’d given her into evidence that he was as secretly enamoured with her as she was with him.
Her schoolwork had suffered for her daydreaming, and the comments on her report card had been none too impressive to bring home at the end of term: Paige would do a lot better if only she would concentrate! Paige is an intelligent girl but her mind doesn’t seem to be on her work!
Which it hadn’t been. Yet what a wonderful term it had been! What secret pleasures she’d hugged to herself, thinking about her beautiful Antonio all the time, weaving all sorts of fanciful dreams around him.
Her next holiday at home had seemed to cement all those dreams. The things he carefully hadn’t said. Those