Coercion to Love

Coercion to love

by

Michelle Reid

Since Liz's death Cassandra had raised Terri single handedly, until the moment she had dreaded arrived. Terri's father had found them  and he now wanted his child. Knowing how wealthy Carlo Valenti had treated her sister there was no way that Cass was going to hand Terri over. Then she realised Carlo genuinely loved his little girl and would give her the stable home she needed. Could Cass really leave behind the niece she cherished or risk staying in Italy and be blackmailed into giving Carlo her love?

CHAPTER ONE

'Are we nearly there, Cass?'

Cassandra Marlow sent an encouraging smile to the hot little girl who was dragging heavily on her hand. 'Not far now, poppet,' she said. ‘Just to the top of this hill and around the corner.'

Eyes so dark that they looked black behind their thick sooty lashes stared dolefully up the dusty street baked glaringly white by the hot Italian sun, and a long sigh shook her little body. 'That seems an awful long way to me,' she complained, conveniently forgetting how happily she had skipped down the steep hill that same morning, too eager to get to the beach to think about the long walk back from it. 'I wish we were back home. It isn't so hot in Fulham.'

No, thought Cass. But danger lurked in Fulham. The kind of danger a five-year-old couldn't begin to understand. A danger which had dogged their footsteps for a whole year now. Carlo Valenti was back on the prowl there.

Which was why, on what Cass honestly acknowledged had been a burst of bitter defiance against the dratted man, she had decided that they would spend the next few weeks in his home town! Working on the theory that, with him in London, San Remo must be about the safest place on earth for them to be at the moment!

She only hoped that he remained true to form and stayed put in London for the two weeks he usually put aside when believing himself to be hot on their trail.

'Why couldn't we stay in one of those nice big hotels down by the beach?' Terri wanted to know. "Then we wouldn't have to walk so far every day to play in the sea.'

'Because it needs money to stay in one of those posh places down there, Terri,' Cassandra explained, adding rather drily, 'And money is something we are rather short of, I'm afraid.'

Coming here at all had put a rather nasty hole in the precious nest-egg she had stashed away. To have paid the prices those big hotels down in the bay were asking would probably have seen it off completely!

'We never do have enough, do we?' The child sighed. 'Not since my mummy went away...'

Cass's heart twisted at the simple yearning in the child's voice, her green eyes clouding over on thoughts of her sister. Yes, Liz had earned enough for them all to live on. But she'd had to work like a dog to get it.

God, Liz, she thought sadly, I miss you.

And she did, all the time. Until Tern's arrival on the scene, she and her sister had only had each other. Orphaned at an age not much greater than Terri's now, the five-years-older Liz had been the closest thing Cass had ever known to a mother. But being fostered into different homes had made it difficult for them to see each other, and it wasn't until Cass began her two-year course training to be a nanny that she was able to live permanently with her sister. Liz was already a top photographic model by then, living the kind of glamorous life which was totally alien to her quieter, much younger sister. But she'd taken Cass in without hesitation when she'd learned she was going to train in London, allowing her to share her plush Kensington flat while Cass finished her course.

Not that they had seen much of each other, Cass ruefully recalled, with Liz always seeming to be flying off to some glamorous location or other. And, on qualifying, Cass herself had landed a fantastic job taking care of a film star's two small children, which took her off to Los Angeles for twelve months while he filmed his latest block-buster.

Coming back to England had heralded drastic changes in both their lives. It meant she was suddenly the nanny to her own niece while Liz went back to work. The car crash last year had ended that successful arrangement. And all of a sudden it wasn't Liz, Cass and Terri, but just Cass and Terri, hunted, by a man who hadn't even acknowledged the existence of his own child while Liz had been alive!

God, she despised Carlo Valenti.

'We're here.'

'Oh! Cass blinked, surprised that they had finished the final part of their uphill trek without her being aware of it.

Just across the road stood the peeling white walls of Giuseppe's Garage, where the modern petrol-pumps looked out of place against the aged and crumbling building, in which was the accommodation their two-week holiday had afforded them. The small garage lay just off the busy autostrada that ran right around the Riviera Di Pontente from Genoa to the border with France, and collected a steady amount of customers from those who left the motorway here in San Remo. But it was siesta time now so the road was quiet, and as usual Giuseppe was lazing in his chair beneath the shade of a battered old awning, and he waved and smiled as he noticed their approach. 'You have a nice day?' he enquired genially.

'Lovely, thank you,' Cass called back as they crossed the road towards him.

'The bambina looks hot,' he observed. 'It is a tiring walk back from the beach, is it not?'

'Much easier going down!' Cass returned, sending him a warm smile which died the moment she saw how thoroughly his eyes were exploring her long-legged figure covered only by a thin vest-top and brief shorts.

'You are protecting that delicate skin of yours against our hot sun, I hope, signorina,' he murmured, lazy eyes lifting to take in the purity of her naturally pale skin framed by the rich copper glow of her long loose hair.

'Cass made some coolly polite reply, then excused them both and ushered Terri around the side of the garage to where a flight of concrete steps led up to their small apartment. She didn't want him getting any ideas about her. Being a woman alone with a child made her vulnerable enough. Giuseppe might be in his mid-fifties, fat and balding, but his eyes certainly knew how to roam. The point was, did his hands know how to do the same thing?

'He looked at you funny, Cass,' Terri innocently confirmed her aunt's own cynical thoughts as they mounted the steps.

'Did he?' she murmured absently, pretending not to have noticed. She didn't want her niece feeling insecure here of all places. She'd already experienced enough of that in her young life.

'He looked at me funny too,' the child added ingenuously, bringing Cass's smile back because she was well aware of the odd couple they both made—she with her milk-white skin that had to be caked in sun-block cream if she wasn't to turn the colour of a strawberry, and Terri with the kind of natural dark skin of a native from these parts, when, in truth, neither of them had set foot in Italy until two days ago.

But it was that same rich Mediterranean colouring which sometimes, when Cass was feeling particularly vulnerable, made her heart squeeze in recognition of where it had come from. She had spent long hours worrying about it, swinging between a real fear that she might be doing the child a grave disservice keeping her ignorant of her Italian roots, and a fierce certainty that she was doing the right thing whenever she thought of her sister and how badly Carlo Valenti had treated her.

'Mmm,' Terri sighed in relief as they entered the delicious coolness of their small apartment, the closed shutters having kept out the worst of the afternoon heat.

'Mmm, indeed,' Cass agreed, thrusting her resentful thoughts aside in favour of a long, cool shower to rid  herself and her niece of the salt, sand and sun-cream which was stuck to their skin.

By eight o'clock, Terri was fast asleep in one of the two narrow beds which took up most of the room in the  studio apartment, and Cass had taken herself to the small balcony to watch the sun go down.

One of the advantages of staying so high up was the wonderful view she had of the bay beneath her. The dying sun had turned the rippling ocean into a lake of dancing fire, and the tumble of red-roofed buildings below them glowed warmly against the dying sun, highlighting the complicated maze of winding alley-ways and narrow staircases which made up the delightful Old Town San Remo. Further down, she could just make out the exotic row of canary palm trees lining the famous Delemperatrice, and beyond them was the marina where the private yachts moored side by side, bobbing gently on a lazy sea.

And anchored further out in the bay were several larger yachts, all big and white and luxurious. She had seen the exclusive hotels down the town which must draw the wealthy cruisers in. Big old elegant places built in another era for the kind of wealthy clientele who still frequented them now.

Valenti Grande was just one of those luxury holds.                                                     

'Rolling in it,' she murmured cynically to herself. 'Simply rolling in it.'

'Don't ever let money be your lure, Cass,' Liz had warned her once, the bitterness of disillusionment clear in her voice. 'It means nothing without honour and self-respect. And those greedy for it honour and respect nothing.'

Carlo Valenti had no honour. His affair with her sister had lasted just long enough for him to get her pregnant then he'd left her flat. Cass would never forgive him for that, never!

Her only confrontation with Carlo Valenti had come via the telephone several weeks after her sister's funeral, when she was up to her eyes in packing cases and worrying what she and Terri were going to do without Liz to provide for them. There was little to nothing left in the bank. Living a double life had come expensive for Liz, Cass had soon discovered.

Only the chosen few knew about Terri. It was the way of the advertising business. Babies were bad news, so when it became known to her agents that Liz was pregnant they sent her on a long vacation, and called it exhaustion through overwork. After Terri was born and Liz had exercised her figure back into shape, she went back to work, and Terri was kept firmly in the background. The trappings of such a glamorous job cost money—lots of money— more than a stunned Cass could have dreamed. Their nice Kensington flat was leased, not owned, the furniture along with it.

In short, she and Terri had little to nothing to live on except for the tiny inheritance her sister had had the foresight to put to one side in the eventuality of anything tragic happening to her. But that was only enough for them to live on if they did so frugally. And it was the immediate problem of where they were going to live that was filling Cass's mind the day the telephone rang and that deep, barely accented voice came imperiously down the line.

‘My name is Carlo Valenti, and I wish to see my daughter,' he announced. No preamble, just those words exactly.

Cass felt the first quivers of alarm for Carlo Valenti driver down her spine.

'What daughter?' she replied, not because she was being sarcastic, but because she was stalling for time to think.

Sarcasm or not, he ignored it. 'I am catching the next Bight out of Genoa for London, and should be at your flat by the evening,' he informed her. 'Make sure you there to receive me.'

‘To what purpose?' she demanded.

There was a pause—one which made the fine hairs at back of her neck tingle, then the voice came back slowy and carefully, 'For the purpose of bringing Teresa back here to Italy to live with me, of course.'

They left Kensington that same afternoon, and had been on the move ever since, Cass taking jobs wherever she could to help supplement their small nest-egg, eyes always on the look-out for any suspicious characters who may be watching them. The moment she got an  inkling that they were being observed, or heard of someone asking questions about either of them, she upped sticks and moved on. Their last stop having been Fulham, where, in actual fact, they had managed to stay the longest—a whole month and a half!

Then she'd seen it in the paper—the photograph of his sleekly handsome face and the announcement that Carlo Valenti was in London and planning to stay for some time. Business, they called it, naming some juicy project which would attract a man of his mercenary calibre. But Cass knew better. He'd found out she was in the Fulham area, and was on the prowl again. The man must have been furious that his arrival had been noted by the Press.

Well-----Cass smiled smugly at the steadily darkening sky above her—she'd certainly put one over on him this time! While he sat stewing in his expensive London hotel suite, waiting for his detectives to track her down yet again, she was basking in his very own Mediterranean haven!

Justice, she called it.

By the time their two weeks were up here, they would be boarding a plane which would take herself and Terri up north instead of back to London, and right out of Valenti's reach. She'd got a job. A real job as a full-time nursery assistant in a pre-school nursery attached to the infant school Terri would be attending.

Cass was a Londoner, born and bred. He wouldn't think of looking for her anywhere north of the Watford Gap—just as he wouldn't think of looking for her here! She'd covered her tracks well. No one knew where she had gone to, and neither did anyone know where she meant to go next!