Interview with a Playboy Read Free Page B

abruptly.
    ‘There you go.’ He pushed the door open for her and looked over at her with a raised eyebrow. ‘Are the press rattling you?’
    ‘No, of course not.’ The truth of the matter was that the paparazzi weren’t bothering her half as much as he was.
    ‘After you, then.’
    ‘Thanks.’ What on earth was wrong with her? Isobel wondered angrily as she stepped past him into the hallway. It was as if her senses were all on heightened alert around him.
    And she had never felt more nervous in all her life as he followed her up the stairs to her first-floor flat.
    She supposed it was just the strangeness of the situation. She’d disliked this man for so long from a distance, and now here he was stepping into her sitting room, acting as if he had every right to be here. In fact, his presence seemed to dominate the small flat.
    Isobel watched as his gaze moved slowly over his surroundings, and for some reason she found herself looking at the place through his eyes.
    The rooms weren’t what you would call spacious, and her second-hand furniture looked shabby in the cold grey light of the afternoon. She was willing to bet that Marco’s designer Italian suit had cost more money than all her possessions lumped together.
    The thought brought her back to reality. OK, she didn’t have a lot of money, but that was no reason to feel embarrassed or ashamed. She’d had no helping hand in life—she’dcome from a poverty-stricken background and worked hard to get to where she was now. What was more, she had always treated people fairly along the way—which was more than Marco could say.
    He’d practically bankrupted her grandfather’s business, until the old man had been forced to sell out to him because he just couldn’t afford to compete with him. And then as soon as Marco had taken over the firm he’d lost no time in restructuring—which had basically meant firing most of the staff. Isobel’s father had been amongst the people in the first wave of redundancies.
    She could still remember the shock in her father’s eyes when he’d come home to tell them. She remembered how he’d sat at the kitchen table and buried his head in his hands. He’d kept saying that there had been no need to make people redundant—that the company was very profitable. And her grandfather had said the same.
    ‘It’s greed, Isobel,’ he had said. ‘Some people aren’t content with making a healthy profit. They’re only happy when they are making an obscene profit.’
    Isobel remembered those words as she looked over at Marco. He’d been a couple of years older than she was now—about twenty-four—when he’d bought her grandfather’s firm and sacked half the workforce. And then he’d gone on to sell the business twelve months later for a
very
obscene profit, as far as Isobel was concerned.
    And it seemed Marco had repeated this move in other businesses time and time again, making him a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty.
    She wondered if he ever had pangs of conscience about the way he made his money.
    As soon as the thought crossed her mind she dismissed it as absurd. Marco wasn’t the type to think deeply about other people’s feelings. As demonstrated by the way he’d walked out on his wife after just eighteen months of marriage, andthe way he changed the women in his life faster than some people changed the sheets on the bed.
    Something he had in common with her father, as it turned out.
    She turned away from him. ‘I’ll just throw a few things in a bag, I won’t be long.’
    ‘See that you’re not,’ he said laconically. ‘I meant it when I said you’d got five minutes.’
    Hurriedly she moved through to her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. What on earth should she pack for a night in the South of France? she wondered. She didn’t have a lot of summer gear, but then it probably wouldn’t be that hot as it was only May.
    She glanced around as there was a knock on the door and it opened behind her.