Excerpt of At the Italian's Command by Cathy Williams

EIGHT-THIRTY on a Sunday evening. Rafe heard the phone

ring next to where he was sitting, in the room that had once been a library and was now his office away from the office. Global deals had no respect for English working hours, and Sundays were never days of rest for him. They were simply time when he could catch up with whatever needed doing, make calls to Australia, make sure, in essence, that everything was ticking over nicely.

Furthermore, he knew who would be on the other end of the line.

With a little sigh of half pleasure, half frustration, he picked up the receiver and as he'd predicted heard his mother's voice on the other end of the line.

"You're working, Rafael. Aren't you? You're in that office of yours working. You shouldn't be working on a Sunday. How many times have I told you that?"

"Hullo, Mother." He smiled into the telephone, pushed his leather chair away from the desk and swivelled round, bringing the phone with him, so that he could stare out of the window. In the depths of winter, there wasn't much to see outside, just the vague shapes of his back garden, which was large for a London house but small in comparison to the acres of land on which he had grown up. "How are you?"

"I, Rafael, am fine. You, on the other hand, are heading for high blood pressure and an early grave."

"Thank you for that." He grinned and ran his fingers through his short, dark hair. "Never let it be said that a businessman's life isn't fraught with danger."

He listened abstractedly as Claudia Loro continued more or less in the same vein for a few minutes, lecturing to him about his lifestyle, asking him about his health and punctuating his answers with pointed clucking and elaborate sighs. It was a familiar routine and one that he accepted with good-natured tolerance. He would never have allowed any other woman to preach to him about his life, and some had made the mistake of trying in the past, but his mother was different. He listened, even if he chose to ignore most of her advice.

She had now moved on to the topic of her week, bringing him up to date with what she had been doing, filling him in on what was happening in the little village where she lived and which had been his home until he'd moved down to London fourteen years previously. Already his mind was drifting off to Paul Glebe on the other side of the world, whose phone call had raised one or two problems that needed sorting out if his latest acquisition was to go ahead.

"Anyway," he heard his mother say in a rounding-up tone of voice, "I haven't called to witter on about my social life…"

"Exciting though it may be." 'Certainly a great deal jollier than yours, my darling." 'My life, dearest Mama, is deeply exciting." He stretched out his long legs, resting them on the broad ledge of the window, and thought fleetingly of the current piece of excitement in his life. Five foot ten, legs up to her armpits and hair down to her waist. Intellectually undemanding but physically stunning. Just the way he liked them. What man needed a high IQ in his woman when all he wanted to do when he wasn't working was give his fiercely active brain a well-deserved rest? In short, she was just the sort of girl his mother would heartily disapprove of. He wondered whether to stoke the fire by mentioning this particular fun element of his life, and decided against it.

"But lacking in challenge, Rafael. Which is why I have a little surprise up my sleeve for you…"

The pleasant image of Angela Street and her very long legs evaporated and he grunted discouragingly, frowning at the sudden change in his mother voice. A surprise from his mother usually heralded an invitation to some informal get- together involving as many of her local friends as she could rustle up, along with their assorted offspring, in one huge, unwelcome matchmaking fest.

"I can't come," he said bluntly. Claudia Loro ignored him.

"Do you remember Grace Frey? My very dear friend?" 'Hard not to," Rafe said dryly. The pleasing image of his long- haired beauty was replaced by that of a woman in her late forties, small, energetic and very post-hippie.

"Then you'll surely remember her daughter. Sophie." Rafe all but groaned. Like her mother, Sophie Frey stuck in a person's head like a burr under the skin. She, too, was small and distinctly unfeminine. Undisciplined hair, freckles, clothes that looked as though they had been yanked out of a junk shop and then just thrown together in a random fashion with the sole objective of making their wearer as unappealing as possible. The last time he had seen her had been at his mother's summer barbecue. Sandals of the sort worn by the determined rambler, long, flowing skirt clashing horribly with a cardigan that looked as though it had been borrowed from someone's grandfather. He had studiously managed to avoid her.

"Where is this leading, Mother?" 'Straight to your office, as a matter of fact."

While Rafe was trying to puzzle this one out, Claudia jumped into the breach to explain.

"She's just changed jobs, darling. Left that dreadful office place where she's been working and managed to land herself a job at a publishing house. Anyway, to cut a long story short, she's been thrown in at the deep end. One of their publications includes a business magazine, which isn't, I gather, doing terribly well. They're trying to revamp it into something more user friendly, which basically means incorporating more human interest stories with the usual boring financial news."

"You're losing me here." He swivelled back round to face his desk and brought his computer back to life with a click of a mouse. The report he had been reading before the telephone had rung was once more flickering in front of him, waiting to be checked.

"Am I, darling? And you with that sharp brain of yours?" She laughed delightedly. "Let me explain, in that case. Sophie has to do a feature on someone big in the business world."

"Ah." A one-hour interview was distinctly better than an evening with the local gang. "If she phones my secretary, I'm sure I can squeeze her in for an interview."

"Not so much an interview, Rafael, as…" Her voice trailed off into thoughtful silence and Rafe began scrolling down the report, scanning the important points raised and already calculating what needed to be done.

"As what?" he prompted. "As, well, something more detailed." 'What could be more detailed than an interview? She sits in my office for half an hour, she asks questions, she writes my answers down in her little notepad, she goes away and writes her article or whatever it is she has to do. Of course, I would have to proofread anything she's written. Facts have a sinister way of becoming distorted when they're in the hands of a journalist."

"When I say more detailed, darling, I mean it. Her brief is to shadow you for a fortnight, really absorb what you do and how you do it, and then write an article about the man behind the empire…"

Rafe's attention shot away from the report and focused fully on what his mother had just said.

"That's out of the question." 'Naturally, it would be a huge scoop for their very first special feature to be about you," Claudia Loro said calmly. "You're wealthy, you're powerful and you lead a seemingly colourful life —"

"I said no, Mother, and you can relay that simple message to her."

"She starts tomorrow. I've promised Grace that I would help Sophie out and you are not going to let me down, Rafael."

With anyone else, Rafe Loro would have turned on that side of his personality that could make grown men quake in fear, that contemptuously cold side that brooked no argument and silenced all opposition.

Respect and love for his mother controlled the urge, but he was in no better frame of mind the following morning as he let himself into his office two hours before his secretary was due to arrive. In fact, as he settled behind his desk his mood was filthy. It wasn't often that Rafael Loro was rendered impotent and it was a sensation he didn't care for. He had no intention of resigning himself to the inevitable and making the best of it. He didn't want the girl tagging around behind him like an annoying, yapping dog and he fully intended to tell her that. If she didn't like his attitude, then she could find herself someone else to follow.

He also didn't like the idea of someone traipsing along with him to his meetings. Did she expect him to hold her hand and make sure that she was all right? He sincerely hoped not because if she did, then her awakening to reality would be brutal. Unfortunate but inevitable.

He was still seething when the building began to come alive with people arriving at normal working hours.

Sophie, who had spent a long time working out what she should wear, was aware of his mood before she actually made it to his office.

It seemed to her that everyone on the director's floor was somehow tuned into the big boss's moods. His secretary, Patricia, who met her in Reception, warned her that she was in for a hard time.

"Poor you," she said sympathetically. "He can be pretty scary anyway, but in a bad mood he's positively terrifying. Especially when you're not used to it."

Patricia Clark looked as though she was used to it. She was small, in her fifties, neatly attired, but under the warm expression was a glint of steel. Sophie guessed that you would need that working with someone like Rafael Loro, and she shuddered.

This was a situation she had not wanted, had not courted, but had somehow found herself steered into by their respective parents and their joint good intentions. Yes, she had certainly scored a hit with her company, but the very thought of having to be in the man's presence over a two-week period made her feel sick inside.

She glanced anxiously down at herself, wondering not for the first time whether she had worn the right clothes. Not a suit, but as close to it as she could manage without having to go out and spend her hard-earned cash on pointless clothing. Her long skirt was at least dark, as was the long-sleeved stretchy top and her coat. She had pinned back her unruly red hair as best she could, using about a thousand clips in the process, and her briefcase was small, neat and very businesslike.

"Fantastic offices," she said politely, trying not to gape as she was led along the plushly carpeted corridor, which was buzzing on both sides with brisk-looking people. The open area was sensibly planned out, with partitions dividing certain sections, and all the furniture was of the same type — rich wood and chrome that looked wildly expensive.

Her fragile nerves took another giddy nosedive. She could picture Rafe Loro striding through this domain, his domain, giving orders and smiling with gratification as everyone scurried around him in a flurry of panic. At eight, she had followed him around whenever she had gone with her mother to visit their massive country house. At fourteen she had adored him from a distance, that compelling young man with his entourage of adoring friends, whom he had seemed to treat with languid amusement and a certain amount of detachment, never quite letting himself go. He had always had that kind of personality. The kind that attracted a following. Returning every holiday from his boarding-school, he had always been received like royalty by all the members of his peer group, the offspring of the rich and privileged, most of whom boarded as well before flying off to universities or finishing schools in exotic European capitals. Five years his junior, she had been in awe of him and very smitten by what she had glimpsed intermittently from a distance, because their mothers were so close to one another.

Only when he had politely told her that she was making a spectacle of herself staring at him in front of his friends, had she wised up to the fact that he really didn't like her at all. Her background was grammar-school ordinary, her house was vicarage dull, her looks were crashingly nondescript and her infatuation was comically unwelcome.

She had avoided him ever since. When she had seen him, usually at one of his mother's Christmas parties, which she was obliged to attend, she had made sure to keep out of his way. Not difficult, as Claudia Loro's parties were not small affairs.

She couldn't imagine what her mother had been thinking, getting her involved in this exercise, but then Grace had always seen him as a nice young man who had made something of himself and not rested on the laurels of that golden spoon that had been firmly wedged in his mouth the day he had been born.

She watched the busy hum of people working fade behind her as she followed Patricia towards the directors' muted, tasteful offices. The building was short and squat, interestingly fashioned around a central courtyard. The sheer size of the place made it a goodish distance to where Rafe had his office, because the directors' quarters were located on the same level but another wing.