She had no idea how much she’d get for the jewellery but selling it was necessary. It would also bring enormous satisfaction.
Ida lifted her other bag off the bed and marched to the door.
CHAPTER THREE
Four years later
CESAREFROWNEDASthe limousine turned into a dingy alley. The London downpour was so heavy it should have made everything look cleaner.
Not this place. Even the night failed to soften its squalid edges. Clogged gutters threatened to overflow and, while the road surface glittered slickly, nothing could make these buildings look clean. The neon signs were lurid and the few people on the street reinforced the sleazy atmosphere.
Ida workedhere?
It didn’t make sense. Maybe Calogerohadtold the truth when he said he didn’t know where she was. Cesare hadn’t believed it.
As the old man’s heiress, she had no need to work in this seedy area.
He almost leaned forward to query whether they had the right address, but his staff didn’t make such mistakes. Neither his driver nor security staff. Nor the investigators he’d paid handsomely to locate his errant wife.
Wife.
The word sat in the pit of his belly like a lump of cold lead.
In the years since their wedding Ida had never been a wife. She’d been a resented burden, foisted on him. From the first she’d been a thorn in his side with her almost unconscious sensuality that threatened to seduce him even when he deplored her unscrupulous ways. Only his fury at being forced to marry her had kept him from sleeping with her. Then, with her disappearance four years ago, she’d become a scandal and an embarrassment.
He’d had more important things to do than track her down. Until now.
She was an enemy and an enigma. But only when his investigators reported back had he realised how much of an enigma. Though they’d located her, they hadn’t been able to track all her movements through those years. Not surprising when she’d taken a new name not listed on official databases. Yet it was their information about her early life that had astounded him.
Far from growing up in Calogero’s London home, after she was orphaned she’d lived most of her life on a remote Scottish island so small it didn’t have a regular year-round ferry service. She’d visited London every year, staying with her grandfather for no more than a month each time.
It was bizarre. Almost as bizarre as finding her here.
The car halted. Instantly a woman approached, her red mesh singlet top, vinyl miniskirt and sexualised prowl advertising her profession.
Cesare left it to his bodyguard to send her away while he got out and strode to the club’s narrow entrance. The bouncer, taking in his vehicle and his tailoring, stepped smartly aside.
The dark entry smelled of cigarettes, cheap perfume and alcohol. He strode forward, pushing open a heavy door, and sound hit him. Raucous music and male laughter. Surely the investigators had it wrong. Ida couldn’t work here.
His mouth tightened as he took in the pale gleam of gyrating female flesh on what passed for a stage. The other women, some topless, some in what passed, barely, for dresses, were entertaining men at tables around the room.
He’d been warned but he hadn’t believed it.
Until his gaze alighted on the bar that ran along one wall and he saw a bright head. A gleam of red-gold, a colour he remembered as clearly as if four years’ absence were just four hours. An upright posture, like a dancer’s.
The sounds dimmed, replaced by a jackhammering that he eventually registered as his pulse.
It couldn’t be her, though the slicked-back hair, pulled tight against her scalp, was the same colour as Ida’s. This woman, looking down at the glasses she filled with whisky, wore make-up so bright and heavy she looked like a mannequin. She was all pale skin, scarlet lips and exaggerated eyelashes.
Her black leather lace-up bustier left her shoulders and arms bare and revealed plump breasts on the verge of spilling free.
Even in her translucent-seeming bridal gown Ida hadn’t looked so obvious.
Cesare swallowed as he recalled her on their wedding night. She’d dressed for him in blue silk and nothing else. He’d carried that memory ever since.
That night he’d wanted to forget his vow to have nothing to do with the woman who’d been forced on him. He’d wanted to take what she offered. That wanting had fuelled his anger to combustible levels and for the first time since adolescence he’d truly lost his temper.
The woman behind the bar had Ida’s colouring but wasn’t her. She didn’t have that understated allure. She was blatantly, smack-in-the-groin sexy, with her shiny Cupid’s bow lips, creamy bosom and narrow waist.