Santina's Scandalous Princess(39)

      
          



      

All the same, she had to grit her perfectly straight, neat white teeth  very hard to stop herself giving vent to her real feelings. It was none  of his business that she and her mother had never been close, with her  mother always being far more concerned with her next affair or party  than having a conversation with her daughter. In fact she'd been absent  more than present throughout Louise's life. When her mother had  announced she was leaving for Palm Springs and a new life Louise had  honestly felt very little other than a faint relief. Her father, of  course, was rather a different story-his constant presence served as an  endless reminder of her own failings.

It was a moment before she could bring herself to say distantly, ‘I was  in my final year of school in London when my parents divorced, so it  made sense for me to move in with my father. He had taken a service  apartment in London, since the family house was being sold and my mother  was planning to move to Palm Springs.'

His questions were far too intrusive for her liking, but she knew that  to antagonise this man-even if she was coming to resent him more with  every nerve-shattering dagger-slice he made into the protective shield  she had wrapped around her past-would prove to be counterproductive. She  was determined not to do so.

All that mattered about this interview was getting this arrogant,  hateful overlord's agreement to the burial of her grandparents' ashes in  accordance with their wishes. Once that was done she could give vent to  her own feelings. Only then could she finally put the past behind her  and live her own life, in the knowledge that she had discharged the  almost sacred trust that had been left to  her.

Louise swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her mouth. How she had  changed from that turbulent eighteen-year-old who had been so governed  by emotion and who had paid such a savage price.

She still hated even thinking about those stormy years, when she'd  witnessed the breakdown of her parents' marriage and the resulting  fall-out, never mind being forced to talk about it. That fall-out had  seen her passed like an unwanted parcel between her parents' two  separate households, welcome in neither and especially unwelcome where  her father's new girlfriend had been concerned. As a result of which,  according to both her parents and their new partners, she had brought  such shame on them that she had been no longer welcome in the new lives  they were building for themselves.

Looking back, it was no wonder that her parents had considered her to be  such a difficult child. Was it because her father's work had made him  an absent father that she had tried so desperately to win his love? Or  had she known instinctively at some deep atavistic level even then that  her conception and with it his marriage to her mother had always been  bitterly regretted and resented by  him?

A brilliant young academic, with a glowing future ahead of him, the last  thing he had wanted was to be forced into marriage with a girl he had  got pregnant. But pressure had been brought to bear on him by a Senior  Fellow at Cambridge whose family had also been members of London's  Sicilian community. The brilliant young Junior Research Fellow had been  obliged to marry the pretty student who had seen him as an escape from  the strictures of an old-fashioned society or risk having his career  blighted.

Louise didn't consider herself to be Sicilian, but perhaps there was  enough of that blood in her veins for her always to have felt not just  the loss of love but also the public humiliation that came from not  being loved by her father. Italian men-Sicilian men-were usually  protective and proud of the children they fathered. Her father had not  wanted her. She had got in the way of his plans for his life. As a  crying, clingy child and then a rebellious, demanding teenager she had  first irritated and then annoyed him. For her father-a man who had  wanted to travel and make the most of his personal freedom-marriage and  the birth of a child had always been shackles he did not want. Because  of that alone her attempts to command her father's attention and his  love had always been doomed to failure.

Yet she had clung determinedly to the fictional world she had created  for herself-a world in which she was her father's adored daughter. She'd  boasted about their relationship at the exclusive girls' school her  mother had insisted on sending her to, with daughters of the titled, the  rich and the famous, clinging fiercely to the kudos that went with  having such a high-profile and good-looking parent. He'd had a role as  the front man of a hugely popular quasi-academic TV series, which had  meant that her fellow pupils accepted her only because of him.                      
      
          



      

Such a shallow and fiercely competitive environment had brought out the  worst in her, Louise acknowledged. Having learned as a child that ‘bad'  behaviour was more likely to gain her attention than ‘good', she had  continued with that at school, deliberately cultivating her ‘bad girl'  image.

But at least her father had been there in her life, to be claimed as  being her father-until Melinda Lorrimar, his Australian PA, had taken  him from her. Melinda had been twenty-seven to Louise's eighteen when  they had gone public with their relationship, and it had perhaps been  natural that they should compete for her father's attention right from  the start.

How jealous she had been of Melinda, a glamorous Australian divorcee,  who had soon made it clear that she didn't want her around, and whose  two much younger daughters had very quickly taken over the room in her  father's apartment that was supposed to have been hers. She had been so  desperate to win her father's love that she had even gone to the extent  of dying her hair black, because Melinda and her girls had black hair.  Black hair, too much make-up and short, skimpily cut clothes-all an  attempt to find a way to be the daughter she had believed her father  wanted, an attempt to find the magic recipe that would turn her into a  daughter he could love.

Her father had obviously admired and loved his glamorous PA, so Louise  had reasoned that if she were more glamorous, and if men paid her  attention, then her father would be bound to be as proud of her as he  was of Melinda and as he had surely once been of her mother. When that  had failed she'd settled for trying to shock him. Anything was better  than indifference.

At eighteen she had been so desperate for her father's attention that  she'd have done anything to get it-anything to stop that empty, hungry  feeling inside her that had made it so important that she succeed in  becoming her father's most loved and cherished daughter instead of the  unloved failure she had felt she was. Sexually she had been naive, all  her emotional intensity invested in securing her father's love. She'd  believed, of course, that one day she would meet someone and fall in  love, but when she did so it would be as her father's much loved  daughter, someone who could hold her head up high-not a nuisance who was  constantly made to feel that she wasn't wanted.

That had been the fantasy she'd carried around inside her head, never  realising how dangerous and damaging it was, because neither of her  parents had cared enough about her to tell her. To them she had simply  been a reminder of a mistake they had once made that had forced them  into a marriage neither of them had really wanted.

‘But when you started your degree you were living with your grandparents, not your father.'

The sound of Caesar Falconari's voice brought her back to the present.

An unexpected and dangerous thrill of sensation burned through her-an  awareness of him as a man. A man who wore his sexuality as easily and  unmistakably as he wore his expensive clothes. No woman in his presence  could fail to be aware of him as a man, could fail to wonder …

Disbelief exploded inside her, caused by the shock of her treacherous  awareness of him. Where on earth had it come from? It was so unlike her.  So …  Sweat beaded her forehead and her body was turning hot and  sensually tender beneath her clothes. What was happening to her? Panic  rubbed her nerve-endings as raw as though they had been touched with  acid. This wasn't right. It wasn't … wasn't permissible. It wasn't … wasn't  fair.

A stillness like the ominous stillness that came just before the  breaking of a storm gripped her. This should not be happening. She  didn't know why it was. The only awareness of him she could permit  herself to have was an awareness of how dangerous and damaging he could  be to her. She must not let him realise the effect he was having on her.  He would enjoy humiliating her. She knew that.

But she wasn't an emotionally immature eighteen-year-old any more, she  reminded herself as she struggled to free herself from the web of her  own far too vulnerable senses to find safer ground.