Authors: Lynne Graham
‘Why wasn’t this contract mentioned sooner?’
Harriet asked tightly. ‘I think it’s inexcusable that I am only learning about it now.’
‘Mr Flynn was apparently willing to overlook the contract’s existence if you sold the property to him.’
‘He offers a very generous tip for a man whose stately home appears to be falling down round him!’
‘Mr Flynn only gained access to Flynn Court after his father, Valente Cavaliere, died some weeks ago. I believe that an extensive renovation project is being planned,’ the solicitor explained, unaware of the bombshell that he was dropping.
Harriet stared at the solicitor with steadily rounding blue eyes of disbelief. ‘Cavaliere? He’s…Are you telling me that Rafael Flynn is actually Rafael
Cavaliere
?’ she pressed, in a voice that was fading and breathless with shock. ‘The first time I met him I thought there was something familiar about him, but I would never have made that connection in a hundred years!’
‘My advice—and it’s off the record—would be to sell to him and buy elsewhere in the area,’ the older man suggested uncomfortably. ‘He’s a hard man if you cross him, but he has been extremely generous to this community and he has considerable local support. He’s offering you a very fair price. You can’t fight that amount of money and power—’
‘Watch me, Mr McNally,’ Harriet advised with
fighting fervour. The craven suggestion that she simply accept defeat filled her with raging resentment and a fierce determination to do exactly the opposite. ‘Just watch me!’
She swept back out to her car in high dudgeon. Rafael rotten Cavaliere! What was an Italian tycoon doing in a tiny Irish village? And calling himself Flynn, of all things! It was like finding a barracuda in a goldfish bowl. She could not believe it was true. She could not credit that once again Rafael Cavaliere had contrived to cast the long dark shadow of misfortune across her path. She stopped her car in the lay-by next to the church because she was shaking with reaction. But the momentum of anger soon impelled her on to swing left through the crumbling stone entrance of Flynn Court. The long stately drive was full of potholes, but bounded on both sides by magnificent cypress trees, which gave occasional glimpses of the stunning view down to the bay and the sea. She brought her car to a halt right outside the imposing front door.
Tolly appeared in answer to the ancient bell she had pulled. ‘Miss Carmichael…how may I assist you?’ he enquired gravely.
In any other mood Harriet would have been tickled pink by the solemn manner which Joseph evidently assumed to carry out his official duties as butler. ‘I’m here to see your boss.’
‘I’ll see if Mr Flynn is available. Please take a seat.’
Harriet preferred to stand. The hall was a vast semi-circular space, with walls ornamented with fantastic elaborate plasterwork. Even dirty and in need of decoration, it was a spectacular space.
‘Miss Carmichael…bad news travels fast,’ a lazy masculine drawl commented from behind her.
Her heart-shaped face tightening as though she was sucking on a lemon, Harriet spun round. Her tormentor was sheathed in a sleek black designer business suit. Staggeringly tall and vibrantly handsome, he also looked horribly intimidating. Every nerve in her tense body seemed to jump and her tummy flipped in concert. ‘Allow me to tell you that you do business like a gangster.’
His lean, bronzed features remained impassive. ‘My late father would be proud of me.’
‘I’m not selling to you…I don’t care what you do. I have a great dislike of being forced to do anything, Mr Cavaliere. But most of all I have a great dislike, not to mention complete contempt, for your methods. Why do you call yourself Flynn? To mislead people?’ Harriet condemned with a heated sense of injustice. ‘I mean, who the heck would expect to find an Italian billionaire slumming somewhere like this?’
‘Let me answer you point by point,’ Rafael murmured levelly. ‘On my birth certificate it says Rafael Cavaliere Flynn, and I was born here. My mother named me. I am not concerned by the name that the press have allotted to me. Nor do I consider myself to be “slumming” in the house where many generations of Flynns have lived and died. I am proud of my ancestry.’
His immense self-assurance infuriated Harriet beyond bearing. All worked up as she was, she was already conscious that her face was hot with temper. Being rebuked for her bad manners was the last straw. She could have screamed for, ironically, she had never before dared to be that rude to anyone. ‘Are you aware that you have blighted my life like the plague since I was fifteen?’ she suddenly launched at him, half an octave higher.
Rafael quirked a mobile black brow.
‘No, I haven’t gone crazy. In the nineties you took over Benson Pharmaceuticals where my stepfather worked in the research lab and he lost his job. He was just one employee among four thousand. You shut the company down and sold off everything. The whole town died—’
‘A business has to be in profit to be sustainable.’
‘My stepfather had a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t get another job, and he had to sell our house
and just about everything we owned by the end of the year. Men like you destroy lives,’ Harriet framed shakily.
‘Benson Pharmaceuticals lost a major contract to an Asian company and crashed. I was in no way responsible for its demise.’ Rafael watched her brow furrow in surprise.
He was standing below the cupola. The fall of light through the glass dome in the roof played over his superb bone structure and glinted in the dense black of his hair.
Registering that she was inadvertently staring, she tore her attention from him again, her cheeks burning. ‘That may be so, but you make nothing. You simply tear things apart to make the most money you can.’
‘You’re wrong. In the case of Bensons, I refused a highly profitable offer to buy the site and redevelop it as a shopping outlet. I knew that the town would regenerate faster if the buildings became a base for an industrial estate where other businesses could be set up.’
Harriet had stiffened with discomfiture. ‘I wasn’t aware of those facts, and if I’ve misjudged you—’
‘You have.’
‘Then I’m sorry,’ she framed between visibly clenched teeth. ‘But I imagine that you usually put profit first.’
‘Money is power. It can also be a great force for good as well as evil. I don’t apologise for what I am. Did you think I would?’
‘Two months ago you presided over the fall of Zenco. I was an account manager in charge of the Zenco marketing budget for my firm. The knock on effect of the Zenco crash was that the agency I worked for folded. Once again, you acted as a malign influence on my life. Please excuse me for not being one of your fans,’ Harriet completed curtly.
‘That is indeed quite a trail of curious coincidence. I’m not a superstitious man…’ All his attention nailed to her, Rafael was conceding that he had never seen such flawless skin as hers and wondering if she was that pale creamy colour all over. ‘But I do think you should take immediate action to avoid colliding with my influence a third time.’
‘Is that really all you have to say?’ Harriet shot at him wrathfully.
Rafael spread wide the door to one side of him. ‘Let me show you something…’
Harriet stayed where she was, and folded her arms for good measure. He just left her standing there. The seconds ticked past until a sense of foolishness and the secret fear that she might be behaving childishly made her follow him into the room he had entered.
‘This is the drawing room. Look out of the windows,’ Rafael urged.
Arms still tightly folded, Harriet trod forward on stiff legs. His poise seemed to mock her awkwardness. Her gaze widened when she saw the ugly line of tumbledown buildings at the foot of the hill that destroyed what should have been a lovely view. The dilapidated sheds were the ones she had been planning to renovate as additional stables. He moved an eloquent lean brown hand, spreading his long fingers, and she saw his Italian genes in his fluid ability to express himself without speech. It struck her as an incredibly attractive trait that was fascinatingly at odds with the cool front he wore to the world. When he began speaking, she had to fight to regain her concentration.
‘The house that you’re living in was built as a cottage orne in the eighteenth century.’
Harriet could not hide her surprise. ‘It’s that old?’
‘It was built as a folly, not as a house to be lived in. My great-great-great grandfather, Randal Flynn, planted the arboretum around it. You are, in effect, living in what used to be part of the garden belonging to the Court.’
Harriet lifted her chin. ‘I didn’t appreciate that.’
‘The folly and the land surrounding it were sold out of financial necessity more than half a century
ago, and were bought by your cousin’s parents. But the folly is an historic building and, as such, should be conserved and reunited with the estate.’
‘You can’t have it,’ Harriet told him succinctly, her fierce tension expressing the strength of her feelings on that subject.
Brilliant dark eyes shimmered in tawny challenge. ‘I never lose.’
‘You can’t always have what you want. Yes, you can wheel and deal, and make things very difficult for me, but you can’t force me to sell.’ Harriet dealt him a truculent appraisal. ‘My word, were you planning to break the news of this outrageous loan over dinner?’
‘I’m not that crude.’ His intonation was as even, calm and crisp as hers was argumentative. ‘We could still discuss this over dinner, and reach a mutually beneficial resolution.’
Her eyes fired as bright a blue as gentians. ‘When your only proposition is that I sell my home to you, we have nothing to discuss. I suggest you think in terms of a compromise.’
‘There’s room for negotiation, but not compromise.’
‘OK…gloves off, then.’ Harriet drew in a stark, sudden breath and dragged her gaze from the gleaming mesmeric hold of his, scolding herself for that
momentary loss of focus. ‘The contract my cousin signed with your company could be used in the public domain, to cause you considerable embarrassment. Before you assure me that public opinion means nothing to you, think of the local dimension.’
Rafael regarded her with cool impassivity. ‘Is it possible that you are threatening me?’
‘I’m merely telling you that I will fight back with whatever weapons I can muster.’ Harriet was rigid. ‘Do you want it said that you used your power, your cash and your cunning lawyers to hoodwink a woman of pensionable age into signing an unfair contract? And that you then used it to deprive me of my inheritance?’
‘That would be a very false representation of the facts. Miss Gallagher made the first approach to Flynn Enterprises, and she was astute enough to use my desire to acquire her property as a bargaining tool to win preferential treatment. In addition, a solicitor was engaged at my company’s expense to advise her.’
As he finished speaking a slow tide of guilty pink blossomed below Harriet’s skin; she was painfully aware of the blackmail tactics she was utilising to fight her corner. Quite deliberately, however, she suppressed her finer sensibilities—which, she was convinced, were a distinct handicap in Rafael Cavaliere Flynn’s radius.
‘I take your point, but can you prove those facts?’ she enquired, slamming the door fully shut on her sense of fair play and on her conscience. ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, newspaper stories do have a sad habit of concentrating only on the more scandalous angles. Even if a retraction is printed afterwards, people tend to remember what went before better.’
‘And you say
I
do business like a gangster?’ Rafael murmured in a silken tone of dark appreciation, for this confrontation was developing along lines that he could never have foreseen. She was neither crying nor pleading nor appealing to his better nature.
It was rare for someone to surprise Rafael’s expectations, but Harriet Carmichael had succeeded. There she stood, all five foot four inches of her: her conservative black wool jacket and knee-length skirt were the last word in old-fashioned clothing to a male who had spent several weeks with a woman who displayed as much naked flesh as possible at every opportunity. Black lashes screening his reflective gaze, he viewed her with interest tinged with reluctant amusement, for he could barely credit that she had the nerve to threaten him. He wondered how long he would wait before he called her bluff. She thought the very worst of him and made no bones about that reality. Since he had few illusions about himself, and minimal concern about how the rest of
the world viewed him that should not have bothered him. Yet, inexplicably, her automatic assumption that he would naturally sink to meet her lowest expectations annoyed the hell out of Rafael.
‘I’m not giving up my home…I love it,’ Harriet told him defiantly. ‘I changed my whole way of life to come to Ireland and I’m staying put.’
‘Then you’re planning to repay the loan in full?’ Rafael decided that it was time to bring her down to ground level again.
Harriet turned very pale. ‘I presume I can have some time to explore my options?’
‘Four weeks maximum—and that’s a gift.’ His response was swift. ‘Try to be realistic. With what I’m prepared to pay for your inheritance you can pick a site, bring in an architect and rebuild a replica of your current home somewhere else in the neighbourhood.’
‘But I treasure the family connection, and I very much doubt that I could hope to find anything that would equal the beauty of my present surroundings. I’ll be in touch, Mr Cavaliere Flynn.’
Her slender back stiff, Harriet walked away.
‘It’s Rafael.’
‘Fake bonhomie just irritates me.’
His beautiful mouth took on a ruthless curve as he strode past her to pull open the door for her exit. ‘Bad manners do it for me.’
Her face flamed to her hairline; there was no denying that he excelled in the courtesy department. She tipped her head back and collided unwarily with glittering dark eyes that had enough of a charge to make her heart skip a startled beat. ‘As you’re planning to bankrupt me or make me homeless, the civilities seem rather superfluous.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being a touch melodramatic about this?’ Rafael slowed his long powerful stride to her pace as he accompanied her through the echoing entrance hall.