She smiled at him.
‘How?’ she asked.
‘I’ll tell you.’
CHAPTER NINE
PRIMO stayed at the party as long as he could endure it, partly for his mother’s sake and partly because he was afraid of what he might do if he followed Luke and Olympia. In the early hours he departed and drove around the city disconsolately until at last he turned the car to the place he had always intended to go.
As he drew up outside the Vallini he saw that the lights of her suite were still on. So she hadn’t carried out her threat to leave. He let out a long breath of relief, discovering that his whole body was aching with tension.
The young man on the desk smiled, recognising him from a few days earlier. ‘I’ll just let her know.’
But Primo stopped him reaching for the phone. ‘I want to surprise her.’
‘I’m really supposed to call ahead, signore.’
A note changed hands.
‘I guess you forgot,’ Primo said with a conspiratorial smile.
‘Si, signore.’
She took so long to answer the door that he wondered if she’d left after all. But at last she opened it. Her face set when she saw him but he was ready for this and put his foot in the door before she could slam it. With a swift movement he was inside, facing her fury.
‘Get out of here!’ she flashed.
‘Not until we’ve had a talk.’
‘We’ve had it. It’s over.’
‘You didn’t let me say anything.’
‘I let you say all that I was interested in hearing. Which was zilch. Just what do you imagine there is to say? I trusted you and all the time you were setting me up. I don’t know what pleasure you got out of it, but whatever it was you should be ashamed.’
‘I am. I never meant it to go so far. Please, Olympia, it was just a joke that got out of hand.’
‘You kept it going a lot longer than that.’
‘Things happened unexpectedly. It all ran out of control.’
‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing. It ran out of your control? Primo Rinucci, the big boss, the man in charge, who snaps his fingers and people jump-’
‘Cut that out,’ he raged. ‘You created a tailor’s dummy and told yourself a load of stories about him, but he’s not me. He never was.’
‘Why didn’t you stop me?’
‘Because I was enjoying myself,’ he said rashly.
‘Ah, now we have it. You loved making a fool of me-’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant-’
Somewhere there were the words that would tell her of the delight he’d known during those few days when he’d teased and incited her while falling under her spell. There must be words for the sweetness that had engulfed him, the sense of a miracle, so long awaited, that must be treated with care, lest it vanish. And more words for the fear that overcame him whenever he thought of telling the truth and risking everything.
Yes, there were words. If only he could find them.
‘Well?’ she demanded remorselessly.
‘I didn’t mean it to turn out the way it did,’ was the best he could manage.
‘No, you didn’t mean to get caught out.’
‘That wasn’t what I-’
‘Just how did you plan to tell me? Or didn’t you?’
‘Of course I was going to tell you, but it was hard. I knew you’d misunderstand.’
‘Surely not?’ she said caustically. ‘How could anyone misunderstand a man who gives a false name and lures a woman into making a fool of herself just so that he can have a cheap laugh? Men do it every day, and women put up with it.’
‘And what about what women do every day?’ he demanded, stung to anger. ‘You were planning a good laugh yourself, weren’t you? When Rinucci turned up you were going to take him for a ride. You had it all worked out, down to the last detail, fluttering your eyelashes, plus the old hair trick culled from a hundred corny films.
‘You even enlisted me to give you “inside information”-your own words-to weaken his defences, and never mind what a fool you’d be making of him when he turned up and I watched you bringing him down. I may have behaved badly, but that’s nothing to the derision you piled on him-I mean me. Oh, hell!’
‘You can’t even sort out which of you is which,’ she snapped.
‘That’s true,’ he said wryly.
‘What do you think it was like for me to find out the truth the way I did?’
‘How could I have anticipated that? I didn’t know you were going to be at my mother’s.’
‘I wouldn’t have been if I’d known you were coming back. You kept very quiet about it.’
‘I wanted to surprise you.’
‘You sure as hell did that.’
‘Olympia, please, I know I did wrong, but it wasn’t for a laugh.’
‘You’ll never get me to believe that in a million years, so don’t try.’
She turned and stormed away from him. She’d changed out of her glamorous red dress into serviceable trousers and sweater. Her face was free of make-up and her hair was dishevelled. It looked as if she’d torn down the elaborate arrangement then scragged it back any old how. A few wisps hung down over her face, softening the austere lines.
Despite her rage it was her misery that reached him most poignantly. Without the glitz she was pale and slightly wan, and even more beautiful in his eyes. He longed to reach out to her but he knew it wasn’t the right time. She wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say.
She was walking up and down the room now, brooding bitterly. ‘All those things I said. I trusted you.’
The injustice of this made his temper rise again.
‘Yes, you trusted me with a blow-by-blow account of the unscrupulous methods a woman adopts to bring a man to heel. A real eye-opener! I should write a book about it. Men beware! This is what they get up to. You turned me into a fellow conspirator with myself as the intended victim. I don’t know who to feel sorrier for-me or me!’
‘I warned you I wasn’t a nice person,’ she told him. ‘Remember that day I said that I was up front about what I wanted and what I’d do to get it? You should have believed me.’
‘I did believe you,’ he shouted. ‘How could I not when I was getting a demonstration every moment? You did a great job. Up front with me, not with him, although of course you couldn’t have afforded to be. That’s what you’re really angry about, isn’t it? You showed your weapons to the wrong man and now they’re dead in your hands.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not planning to use them on you.’
‘But you did use them on me, and to hell with me and my feelings! Did you ever think of your victim? Suppose I’d fallen in love with you?’
‘Be honest! You were in no danger of that.’
‘Luckily for me I wasn’t. I’m safe against your kind-’
‘And just what is my “kind”?’
‘Heartless, scheming, manipulative, calculating-take your pick. Yes, I’m safe, but you didn’t know that. If I’d fallen in love with you that wouldn’t have mattered, would it? Just a casualty of the war, only it wasn’t my war, you heartless woman!’
In despair she stared at him. All the things that had seemed so simple before, when she had prided herself on being immune to feelings, now presented themselves in stark, livid colours, shocking in the light he turned on them.
When she spoke her voice shook. ‘Then it’s fortunate for both of us that you’re so armoured-almost as armoured as I am.’
‘Yes, I noticed that,’ he said softly. ‘When I held you, trembling in my arms, I thought how cold and indifferent you were.’
Her eyes glittered in a way he knew. ‘I do it very well, don’t I?’ she said softly. ‘I know all the right buttons to press, and I can press them in the right order.’
He paled. ‘Are you telling me it was all an act?’