Visconti's Forgotten Heir(46)

‘It isn’t enough for me,’ she had said, when he had asked her to marry him and told her about his future plans for his family’s business.

But they could make a success of their lives together, he had insisted, before going on to show her just how persuasive he could be as, like always after one of their heated arguments, they both wound up in his bed.

Their rows had been tempestuous affairs, she remembered. And always over the same things. Her mother. His family. What Andreas had referred to as her ‘hankering’ after a career. She’d even accused him of trying to hold her back. Yet she hadn’t been able to resist him, and they had both known it, but she had crushed her feelings for him by convincing herself that they were generated purely by sex and that she would probably respond in the same way to any attractive man she happened to fancy.

When Marcus Rushford had discovered her at the studio where she’d been getting some new photographs done for her portfolio she’d been flattered by his interest and attention. Older, worldly and debonair, with a lot of very important and influential contacts throughout the modelling profession, he had singled her out as the new face of contemporary chic—and she, like a fool, had been seduced by all his promises to make her famous.

Well, what girl wouldn’t have been? she thought, striving for some justification for the way she had behaved. Living with poverty and her mother’s drinking problems hadn’t been easy. Neither had the stigma of those two words on her birth certificate: Father Unknown.

Just like on Theo’s, she reflected, with a crushing feeling in her chest that made it almost difficult to breathe. Or at least a blank space where Andreas’s name should have been. She tried reminding herself that Theo’s had stayed blank for a totally different reason than hers, but that didn’t help at all.

She had been taunted at school because of it, and because of her mother’s reputation and the situation they had been living in. Was it any wonder she’d craved a better life? The big time? At the very least some kind of identity? she thought, harrowed.

At some point Andreas had rolled away from her and was now breathing deeply and regularly beside her. Pushing back the duvet, she slid quietly out of bed, so as not to wake him, and carried her anguishing burden of memories into the bathroom.

Finding his towelling robe hanging behind the door, she slipped it on and, huddled inside it, sank onto the luxurious mat beside the sunken Jacuzzi.

She had had her head turned by Marcus Rushford, she recalled, shamed by the memories that continued to rush back at her. Nothing else had counted but this new excitement in her life. For a girl who had had nothing, the older man’s promises of having everything suddenly within her grasp had been too much to resist.

When she had been breaking up with Andreas and he had coldly challenged her to deny her feelings for him she had laughed in his face, fearful that he would use his irresistible and persuasive sexual powers to try and change her mind. ‘You didn’t really think I was serious about you? About this?’ she had taunted, with regard to the restaurant and all that he had been offering. ‘Did you really think I wanted to spend my life dishing up pizza in a cheap little café? And one I’d rather be seen dead than stuck in!’

She had been offensive and heartless. But she had been panicking inside because she had wanted to be free. Free to pursue her dreams of becoming a top model.

A few days later, guilty over how much Andreas must have spent on that special edition of Byron’s poems, she’d gone to see him to return it, but done nothing to hide the evidence of another man’s passion on her neck. She groaned at how sick it made her feel to remember how she had flaunted it like some prized trophy. Cruelly. Shamelessly. To the man who had wanted to marry her and whose bed she had left so recently she must have seemed contemptible. So cheap.

When she’d given him back that book he had hurled it across the room, telling her she was no good, just like her mother.

She hadn’t cared. Nor had she given him any inkling that she had. Her one driving ambition had been to get on.

Selling herself to the highest bidder...

Inside the thick robe she shivered violently, fully aware of exactly what Andreas had meant. With her mother going into rehab and wanting to give up the house, Magenta had already been living in Marcus Rushford’s smart, upmarket apartment.

Her big break had come only weeks after that shaming scene with Andreas, in a lucrative, high-profile contract with a hair products company. It was all she had been hoping for but she had had to turn it down, having just received the biggest shock of her life. She was pregnant—with what she knew was Andreas’s child.