His Poor Little Rich Girl Read Free

Compared to the brightness of the rest of the villa this room seemed dark and brooding, not unlike the man who sat behind the leather-top desk.
    Rachel met his eyes across the distance of the room and her heart gave a little involuntary stumble. His eyes were as blue and as deep and as unfathomable as the ocean she had walked past this morning—a startling, incongruous blue given his olive-skinned Italian colouring and jet-black hair.
    The silence was like a wall of thick glass dividing the room in two. All Rachel could hear was the sound of her thudding heartbeats. The noiseless air contained a hint of something faintly disturbing. It made her heart beat all the faster and her breathing stalled as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs.
    He had an interesting face. Not handsome in a classical sense but certainly arresting. The Roman nose gave him an aristocratic air, so too did his sharply honed uncompromising jaw.
    His mouth was unsmiling.
    An errant thought slipped into her head as she wondered when he had last smiled and who had been the recipient of it. A lover perhaps? She had done a little research and found out he had ended a relationship with a cosmetic model a couple of months ago. But there was nothing unusual about that. The same research had turned up that none of his relationships ever lasted more than a month or two. There was nothing else she could find out about his private life other than he was now one of Italy’s richest and most eligible men.
    ‘It was very good of you to agree to see me,’ she said with forced politeness.
    He leaned back in his chair and quietly assessed her with his gaze. It annoyed her that he hadn’t even had the decency to rise when she entered the room. Was he doing it deliberately? Of course he was. He wanted to demonstrate his contempt of her and what she had done. But she was not going to be treated like trailer trash. She might have lost just about everything else, but she still had her pride.
    ‘Sit.’
    One word.
    A command.
    An order.
    An insult.
    Rachel remained standing. ‘I won’t take up too much of your time,’ she said, working hard to control the thread of resentment in her voice.
    A corner of his mouth went up in undisguised derision. ‘No, indeed you will not,’ he said. He flicked his gaze to his expensive-looking watch. ‘You had better say what you came here to say and say it quickly, for you have just under four minutes left. I have another commitment straight after this and it has a much higher priority.’
    Rachel felt a tremor of anger rumble through her. So this was how he wanted to play it, was it? Sitting on his high horse, deigning to meet with her, only to play cat and mouse with her until he was satisfied he had got his revenge. It had to be about revenge. What else could it be? How he must be gloating about how the tables had turned. The once lowly gardener had made good while the little rich girl was now penniless. ‘I want to know if you are the one who sabotaged my attempt to raise finance for my fashion label,’ she said, eyeballing him.
    His dark eyes held hers steadily. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he said.
    Rachel was incensed. ‘Don’t play me for a fool. I know you did it. The executive all but gave me your name.’
    He continued to look at her as if she were a small out-of-control child in the middle of a temper tantrum. ‘You have your wires crossed, Rachel,’ he said in an annoyingly calm voice. ‘I have not advised anyone in regards to your label.’
    Rachel chewed at the inside of her mouth, fighting for patience. ‘I came over to Italy specifically to sign a contract for finance for my label. But as soon as I walked into the office Iwas told they were no longer going to back me because of the advice they had been given by an expert in business analysis. A highly respected expert.’
    He gave a semblance of a smile, a fractional movement of his lips that didn’t reveal his teeth. ‘I