Visconti's Forgotten Heir(27)

He didn’t even glance up as she spoke, but carried on scribbling with his fine gold pen. ‘That’s why I’m paying you.’

Of course. He was her boss now, and he was pulling no punches in reminding her of that fact.

‘I instructed Mrs Cox to prepare you a light but nutritious lunch,’ he went on, with a more than studied glance in her direction now, as she gathered up various forms and other relevant papers she needed from his desk. ‘Did she do that?’

Still tense, and smarting from his unnecessary comment a moment ago, she said stiffly, ‘Would you rap her over the knuckles and send her packing if I said she didn’t?’

In fact she had been given a poached salmon salad with some freshly baked wholemeal bread, a substantial slice of home-made apple pie and cream, and fresh fruit to follow—all which she had devoured with relish. Except the fresh fruit, which she had kept for later.

‘Unlike you, my housekeeper doesn’t seem to feel the need to oppose me at every given opportunity,’ he remarked, his mouth tugging at one corner. ‘I would have taken you out to lunch, or at the very least joined you, but in the circumstances I didn’t think it would be a good idea.’

He meant because of that moment of weakness which had come over him—over them both—up there in his bedroom earlier. But now he had steeled himself against it—against her—and he couldn’t have appeared more controlled and unaffected by her if he had tried.

‘No it wouldn’t have been,’ she said woodenly, pretending to agree with him although she was hurting inside, tormented by the mental pictures that had been plaguing her ever since her shower. After all, you wouldn’t want to risk your reputation by getting too chummy with someone like me!

He started to say something else, but then the phone on his desk began to ring and he snatched it up.

‘Visconti,’ he answered, with unusual impatience.

It sounded serious, she thought, closing a file and listening to the tone of his voice, his few clipped responses.

‘I’ve got to go out,’ he stated as soon as he had replaced the receiver. Getting up, he grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, so have any calls you can’t deal with personally redirected to my voice mail.’

And with that he was gone.

Left alone, Magenta waited for the sound of the Mercedes engine to die away. Then, with the stealth of a fugitive, glancing back every now and then over her shoulder, she crept swiftly and silently back upstairs to the master suite.

Going across to the bookshelf, she took down the little suede-covered volume of Byron’s poems. Her hand was shaking so much she could hardly turn back the cover. But even before the inscription in that long, flowing hand leaped out at her she knew what it was going to say.





For my Magi—with all my love, Andreas





Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a shuddering gasp. How could she have forgotten that he had given it to her? He had addressed it to Magi too, and she suddenly remembered him saying it, pronouncing the g like the softest j, with all the sensuality of his ancestors’ native tongue. My Magi...

She didn’t know why, but she found she was crying silently. And then all at once she knew the reason for it, and for that sense of loss in those dreams that had been troubling her over the past few nights. It was because of a lost love. Andreas’s love.





CHAPTER FIVE


ANDREAS’S FACE WAS grim as he stepped out of his marketing manager’s office—as grim as it had been when he’d ended that call from her assistant back at the house.

‘She’s had a late reference in for that girl you took on,’ Lana Barleythorne had told him when she had telephoned. ‘Magenta James, wasn’t it? It seems she’s been deliberately holding out on us, and Frances says that there’s something about her you should know. She hasn’t said what it is—has only intimated that it could be something that might make you want to reconsider your decision to have her working for you.’

He hadn’t failed to detect that little note of triumph with which the young woman had said it. He knew Lana had an almost embarrassing crush on him, and he hadn’t forgotten how miffed she had seemed when he’d pulled rank on her and the others at Magenta’s interview the other day and taken matters right out of their hands.

‘She probably hasn’t rung you herself yet because she’s been tied up in a meeting, but I know she wanted to see you as soon as you came in.’

He had driven like a demon up to the office afterwards, wondering what was so serious that his marketing manager couldn’t even share it with her assistant. He’d been wondering about a lot of things. Like the way Magenta had changed. And the way she’d been behaving since their reunion      . Like those bouts of selective amnesia she seemed to fake when their conversation turned a little bit uncomfortable. Like the way she’d casually pointed out that poetry book to him today. She’d acted as though she’d never seen it, let alone had any knowledge of the ugly scene it had caused between them. She’d even commented upon its condition, as though she didn’t remember exactly how it had got into that state. As though she hadn’t a clue!