Caroline’s troubled gaze rested on her mother’s slight figure as she braced her weight on her walking stick and walked slowly away. The older woman looked horribly small and vulnerable to her daughter. Her parents were already sleeping in a room on the ground floor because of their health problems. Joe was on the waiting list for a coronary bypass. The house really was no longer suitable for them, Caroline conceded ruefully, searching for a silver lining to their situation. But for her parents to be forced out of their home of forty-odd years was a very different matter from making that decision themselves on the grounds of health and common sense.
Koko coiled round Caroline’s ankles, loudly crying for attention, and she talked indulgently to her pet while serving breakfast. She skipped eating in her eagerness to write down the urgent list of things to be done that was already unfolding inside her head. But the first list only led into the making of a second. Time, cost and location were crucial factors. At their time of life her parents would not want to move out of the area. It would take ages to track down the right property and save up enough money for a standard rental deposit.
It was fortunate that Caroline adored her adoptive parents. Whilst on one fundamental issue they had once given her what turned out to be very bad advice, they had always sincerely believed that they were putting her best interests first. And now that the elder Haleses were reliant on her financial help, she was happy to repay the debt that she felt she owed them in any way that she could.
The phone rang while she was washing the dishes. ‘Can you get that?’ she called to her father, who was reading his newspaper in the room next door.
The phone was answered. An instant later Caroline heard an urgent low-voiced exchange between her parents that she couldn’t follow and, recognising that they sounded upset, she dried her hands to go and join them
‘Caro…will you come here for a moment?’ her mother asked stiffly.
The phone was extended to her almost as though it was an offensive weapon. ‘Valente Lorenzatto,’ the older woman pronounced between tremulous lips.
Caroline froze like a wax dummy, her face wiped clean of expression. It was a name she had not heard spoken in all the months since she had become a widow, but it still had the power to make her lose colour and shiver as though a cold wind was cutting through her clothes. Valente, whom she had once loved beyond bearing; Valente, whom she had contrived to wrong beyond all possibility of forgiveness. She could not credit that he would have any reason to contact her. Gripping the cordless phone in a damp palm, she walked out into the hall and turned in an aimless circle.
‘Hello?’ she said, her voice a mere whisper of sound.
‘I want to arrange a meeting with you,’ Valente breathed in his dark, deep-accented drawl which danced teasing fingers down her taut spinal cord. ‘As the new owner of Hales Transport and your family home, I have our mutual interests to discuss.’
It was too shattering a claim for Caroline to accept all at once. ‘You own Hales…and the house?’ she questioned in stark disbelief.
‘It’s staggering, isn’t it? I made my fortune, as I said I would,’ Valente murmured with a surreal cool that mocked her quivering tension. ‘Sadly, you backed the wrong horse five years ago.’
Caroline almost laughed out loud-for she had found that out the hard way, and not for reasons he would ever comprehend. What snatched her out of the mesmeric hold of the past was the sight of her parents, staring at her across the hall, evidently having heard what she’d said. Their faces betrayed their profound shock and dismay. The merest mention of Valente Lorenzatto put them on edge, never mind a personal phone call and the suggestion that he might be the new possessor of what had so recently been theirs.
‘It can’t be true!’ Isabel Hales protested in a jagged cry of disbelief.
Caroline very much hoped that it was not true. But she had once, long ago, read about Valente’s first big business deal, which had netted him millions on the stock exchange. She had paid a high price for that knowledge, too, when Matthew had found out that she had done a Google search for Valente on their home computer. She had never allowed herself to succumb to that unhealthy streak of curiosity again-not even after she’d become a widow. The past, she believed, was more safely left where it belonged.
‘He was only a lorry driver…it’s impossible that he could have made so much money!’ Joe Hales proclaimed loudly.
‘It ought to be impossible,’ his wife agreed, tight-mouthed.
Caroline kept the phone crammed hard up against her ear to prevent Valente from overhearing these embarrassing comments. The fact that her father’s father had also been a lorry driver, a self-made man who’d built up his business from nothing by dint of hard work, was never ever mentioned in her home. The older Haleses were ashamed of the humble beginnings of their families and had hugely admired Matthew’s parents, who had enjoyed private education and were distantly related to titled people. Joe and Isabel Hales were snobs, had always been snobs and would probably be buried as unrepentant snobs, Caroline thought sadly. Valente had never stood on a level playing field with them. He had been judged for what he did and where he came from rather than as the highly intelligent and motivated individual that he was.
Caroline wandered into another room to gain privacy. ‘Why do you want to see me?’ she asked half under her breath.
‘You’ll find out when we meet,’ Valente delivered with impatience. ‘Eleven tomorrow morning, in what used to be your husband’s 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 his daughter, 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
FOR 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 senior receptionist, 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
