Table Of ContentLana Whittaker had been clueless about her husband's affair. Until
his tragic death— leaving his mistress clinging to life, their unborn
child's future hanging in the balance. And the most shocking: Lana
was left penniless, homeless and the guardian of the baby. So when a
stranger, a darkly handsome millionaire businessman, offered help,
she had to accept. Raffaele Rossellini blamed Lana, that ice-cold
blonde, for the loss of his beloved sister. But he'd see to it that she
lost, too—everything she held dear. Including the man she'd come to
love—himself.
Rossellini's Revenge Affair
By
Yvonne Lyndsay
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
YVONNE LINDSAY
ROSSELLINI’S REVENGE AFFAIR
This one is for Louise, my special first reader, in deep appreciation for your
honesty and your friendship.
I would also like to express my thanks to Sarah Glass for her information on
the care of a comatose pregnant mum and her unborn child.
Any mistakes in the story are mine entirely.
Chapter One
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He despised and loathed her with every breath in his body.
She was there, a woman apart. Alone. Widowed.
Widowed when she should have been divorced.
Tall, elegant, unnaturally composed. Had she even loved her dead husband?
He doubted it. If she’d loved him, she would have let him go. Let him go to
Maria instead of clinging to a marriage long dead.
Oblivious to the biting wind that drove unrelenting sheets of rain against his
skin, Raffaele Rossellini stood some distance from the scattering graveside
mourners.
He fed the anger that rose within him as if fuelling a log-filled fire with dry
kindling. Would his treasured sister be lying in a hospital bed now, supported
only by life-giving machinery, if the cool blonde in black had given in to her
husband’s repeated requests to be set free? Set free before the birth of a child
who would now never know its father or its mother.
Grief rent him anew, dragging an unwilling groan of loss from deep inside his
chest.
He had done his duty and come today out of respect for the man his sister had
loved. A man he himself had done business with and considered a friend. Soon
Raffeale would be back at his sister’s side. Whether she knew he was there or
not.
Her life support would be terminated after the birth of the child. A birth
doctors hoped to delay as long as possible to give the infant a chance at a
stronger start to life. While Raffaele warred with the barbaric reasoning that
another life should not be unnecessarily lost, it contradicted every measure of
decency and grace his vibrant younger sister had possessed to keep her in
suspension until the safe delivery of her child.
He tried to tell himself it was what she would have wanted—she’d loved the
baby so very much and looked forward to its birth—but knowing she would
have given her life for her child did little to assuage the devastating loss of
knowing she was already gone. There but not there. Living, yet not alive.
Raffaele narrowed his eyes against the rain as he focussed on the golden head
of the woman he knew only from hearsay. The widow of the man whose lifeless
form had been laid to rest in the yawning grave before her. She stood in frozen
isolation at the graveside without so much as a tear gracing her smooth pale
complexion. Not even now, long after the last of her fellow mourners had gone,
did she even have the decency to show any sense of loss.
Bitterness warred with the rage that billowed inside him. He’d failed in his
promise to his dying mother many years ago that he would protect his sister with
everything in his power. Now it was too late to mend the irrevocable damage his
indulgence in Maria’s whims had wreaked.
When he’d discovered her affair with a married man he should have stepped in
earlier, even though trying to stop his headstrong sister would have undoubtedly
been impossible. Yet he should have done something to see her achieve her
dream of marriage to the father of her child. He should have wrangled an
introduction to Lana Whittaker and somehow, some way, used his considerable
power to coerce her into agreeing to her husband’s request for dissolution.
Too late. He was too late.
The vivid image of his sister’s body, inert in her hospital bed yet swollen with
the advent of new life, burned like a brand in his mind. Yes, he’d failed to
protect Maria but he wouldnot fail her unborn child.
Raffaele Rossellini never made the same mistake twice.
The child would grow up as his own; that was now his promise to Maria. Her
son or daughter would be totally loved and, in time, would know all about his or
her mother so she would not fade away as a distant memory.
