Virgin on Her Wedding Night Read Free Page B

office.’
    ‘But why on earth…?’ Her voice faltered to a halt as the connection was cut without warning.
    ‘Let me have that phone, please,’ Joe Hales urged hisdaughter, and she listened while the older man contacted his solicitor to demand the name of the new owner of Hales Transport.
    ‘That Italian boy…’ Isabel Hales wore an expression of furious distaste. ‘I imagine he’s finally found out that you’re a widow. It’s typical of him—why can’t he leave you decently alone?’
    ‘I have no idea.’ Caroline could not even be amused by her mother referring to a six-foot-three-inch male of thirty-one years of age as a boy. Valente had never been a boy, she reckoned painfully. He had always had a maturity way beyond his years. She was no more entertained by her mother’s ludicrous suggestion that Valente might still cherish a romantic interest in her.
    A look of astonishment on his face, her father replaced the phone. ‘Everything that was once ours has been bought up by a very large Italian-based collection of companies known as the Zatto Group,’ he proffered dully.
    Valente had turned the tables on them, reversing the natural order of things in her mother’s opinion. Of all of them, Caroline was the least surprised.

CHAPTER TWO
    F OR the meeting, Caroline had chosen to wear her only suit—a tailored black skirt and jacket teamed with a cream silk shirt. She had bought it to wear for her first sales pitch to the high-end London jewellery store which had been successfully selling her designs for the past year. Since then she had lost weight, and the fit was now more than a little loose on her. With her hair swept up, and a modest smattering of make-up to give her the natural colour she lacked after a stressed-out sleepless night, she looked harried when she climbed out of her hatchback car at Hales Transport the next morning.
    ‘Hello, Mrs Bailey,’ Jill, one of the receptionists, greeted her, with surprising good cheer for a member of a workforce that had been suffering from mass anxiety over the firm’s uncertain future for many weeks. ‘Isn’t this an exciting day?’
    Caroline blinked uncertainly and brushed a straying strand of pale hair back from her too-warm brow. ‘Is it?’
    ‘The new boss is flying in. We’re becoming part of a big business group that’s worth billions. It can only be good news for us,’ Jill opined chirpily.
    ‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ remarked Laura, the seniorreceptionist, looking up from her computer screen to cast a rueful glance at Caroline. ‘Have you never heard of that expression “a new broom”? There’s no guarantee that we’ll all keep our jobs, or even that this business will still exist six months from now.’
    A cold trickle of apprehension rolled down Caroline’s taut spine. She was really worried about what might happen to their former employees at Hales Transport. And that concern ran even deeper as she was guiltily conscious that her late husband had taken financial risks but had neglected the day-to-day running of the firm during the last year of his life.
    Breathing in deep, she took a seat in the waiting area. ‘Let’s all hope for the best,’ she urged Laura.
    ‘I’m sure you could just go up and wait in the office,’ Jill told her innocently. ‘It’s not as if you don’t know your way around.’
    Her colleague frowned at that advice. ‘I think Mrs Bailey will be more comfortable waiting down here.’
    ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Caroline hastened to declare, her face warming in response to the curious glances she received from a group of employees passing by to mount the stairs. The low-pitched buzz of conversation that broke out among them made her skin heat even more as an anguished surge of self-consciousness gripped her.
    Caroline had avoided coming to Hales Transport during the last months of Matthew’s life, and in the time since his sudden death in a car crash. The fear that people were talking about her, even