The Italian’s Bride On Paper by Kim Lawrence

Eighteen months previously, Zurich

MAYAAND BEATRICE had set out early, not alone, as the minibus ferrying tourists from the small ski resort to the airport in Zurich had been full of fellow travellers. They had all been stranded by the severe storm front that had resulted in the ski slopes being closed for the previous four days.

The storm was over now but early as a strategy had not worked—the minibus had been diverted before they’d even reached the terminal. The update texts the sisters had received so far from the airline had not been particularly encouraging or helpful and the details of the airportsecurity issue mentioned in news reports remained worryingly vague.

There were rumours floating around on the Internet and also in the hotel bar situated within a short taxi drive of the airport where Maya and Beatrice had decided to wait out the delay.

They were not the only stranded travellers to take this option; the place was full of easy-to-spot tense, grumpy and frustrated airline passengers, who were waiting to be given news.

‘A response some time this side of Christmas would be good.’ Beatrice’s remark was not leavened with any of her normal humour. Her smooth brow was creased in a frown as she acquired a spare bar stool and sat down, arranging her long legs with casual elegance before turning her gaze back to the screen of her phone, as if willing their airline’s promised update to appear.

‘I might just go and check—’

‘Fine,’ Bea snapped, tight-lipped, without looking up.

Maya sighed. No sign of a full thaw just yet. They’d had the biggest row ever back at the ski resort, and, although they’d made up, the atmosphere was all a bit frigid. Some of the things her sister had said to her... Maya just couldn’t get them out of her head; they kept playing on a loop.

‘Really, Maya, relationship advice from you—what a joke! You’ve never even had a relationship. As soon as any half-decent guy gets within ten feet of you, you push him away,’ Beatrice had said accusingly.

Maya had been stung. ‘I dated Rob for months!’

‘And you sabotaged that one just like all the others—and there have hardly been any others, have there? So you’ve never had your heart broken, for the simple fact that you won’t take a risk—’

‘You took a risk and look where it left you!’ Maya had regretted the hasty words the moment they’d left her lips, and her swift efforts to de-escalate the situation had not exactly been a success. ‘Sorry, Bea, but I hate to see you so unhappy. I know you chose to leave Dante, but he is clearly still messing with your—’

‘Do not badmouth Dante to me...’ her sister, who had spent the last few days doing just that herself, had growled back. ‘Yes, I left him, Maya, but people do sometimes leave! And people die, we both know that too. It’s called real life—and at least I have one.’ Tears suddenly filled Beatrice’s blue eyes. ‘Sorry...I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

After that final riposte, they had hugged and made up but Maya knew her sister had meant everything she’d said, and it was probably all true.

She considered saying something bright and cheery to lift the mood but decided that optimism would go down like a lead balloon. There was nothing she could say to make Beatrice feel any better, so it was probably better not to say anything at all.

She hitched in a little sigh and wished she’d remembered that saying nothing was an option last night. As she drifted away to stretch her legs, she threw the occasional glance over her shoulder at her sister, feeling the heavy weight of her total helplessness on her slender shoulders in the face of Beatrice’s overwhelming unhappiness.

It was hard to watch someone you loved hurting.

She loved Beatrice, and no matter how often they squabbled or disagreed she knew that they had an unbreakable bond and that Beatrice would always be there for her.

The connection could not have been stronger if they had been biological sisters instead of Maya having been adopted by Beatrice’s parents. Actually, Maya believed that it was stronger because she had a real sister out there and she had no connection with her. Her sister—actually, half-sister to be accurate—remained only a name and a face in a photo...Violetta. Her half-sister was clearly someone who, like their shared birth mother, apparently did not want to know Maya, did not want to be embarrassed by Maya’s existence.

Searching out her birth mother was one of the few things she’d done that Maya had never shared with Beatrice or her adoptive mother, her real mother. When she had reached out to Olivia Ramsey, she had not been sure what to expect. And when the response had been an invitation to meet up for lunch, Maya had almost confided her very mixed feelings about the prospect of finally putting a face to the name of the stranger who had given her life and then immediately given her away. But she hadn’t told Beatrice or their mother, and now eighteen months had passed, and so, she told herself, had the moment for sharing the secret.

Maya eased the vague sense of guilt she still felt for keeping that particular secret by convincing herself that this way there was no risk of Mum or Beatrice thinking that they were not enough of a family for her. Because they were her everything.

If she was being totally honest with herself, her reluctance to confide in them ran side by side with her reluctance to relive in the telling Olivia Ramsey’s rejection all over again. Once had been more than enough to have it spelt out that the well-dressed, clearly well-off woman who had given birth to you only wanted to meet up with you years later to tell you, categorically, that there was no place in her life for the daughter she had given away. Showing Maya a photo of the daughter she had chosen to keep—Violetta—had been the last nail in the coffin of Maya’s hopes of building any kind of relationship with her.

Maya couldn’t remember exactly how she’d responded to Olivia’s deliberately calm statements of fact...something along the lines of, No problem, but I’d be grateful for any family medical history that might be relevant to me, which her birth mother, who had not seemed overburdened with empathy, had accepted at face value.

So she hadn’t inherited her own empathy from her biological mother—but what about her father? Well, when she had finally worked herself up to asking the question of his identity the answer hadn’t left her any the wiser. Apparently her mother hadn’t known his name—but he’d been good-looking, very good-looking. Normally, Olivia had drawled, she didn’t date men under six feet.

The other woman had volunteered her reason for giving Maya up without any prompting in the same emotionally tone-deaf style: she’d admitted she would almost definitely have kept Maya if her married wealthy lover at the time had accepted her story that the baby was his. Only how was she to know he’d had a vasectomy? And surely Maya had to agree that saying you are single mother is a total turn-off for a real man?

‘Ouch.’

The person wielding the trolley bag like a lethal weapon didn’t even acknowledge the collision—of course they didn’t, she thought darkly as she took refuge behind a potted palm. It turned out to be a perfect vantage point to watch the progress of an enterprising young artist who was based in the hotel foyer banging out a production line of cartoon portraits of new arrivals.

She rubbed her bruised shin and sighed. This last-minute skiing break had been doomed pretty much from the get-go; it had started badly and gone steadily downhill from there.

They had not even reached the chalet that had held so many good memories of long-ago childhood holidays when Maya had felt a migraine coming on.

It had definitely been a sign of things to come and proved, she reflected grimly, that it was a fatal mistake to try and recapture the past. But when the owner, an old family friend, had offered her and Beatrice the place for a song after a last-minute cancellation it had seemed too good an offer to pass up. So they’d eased their consciences by calling it a working holiday; after all, what better place, Beatrice had said, for Maya to get some inspiration for the winter collection she was trying to put together for the long-delayed launch of their fashion label.

But they had got very little actual work done, not due to Maya’s migraine, or the lure of the ski slopes or even the après-ski fun, but solely thanks to the arrival of Beatrice’s nearly ex-husband, Dante, who had turned up without the royal fanfare befitting his status as the Crown Prince of San Macizo and thrown her sister’s life into chaos yet again.

Maya could forgive him for being the reason that their fashion label had not got off the ground first time around, but she couldn’t forgive him for making her sister—who, until she’d fallen in love with Dante, had been the most optimistic and glass-half-full person Maya knew—so damned miserable. These days, even when Beatrice did smile, it was obviously an act; the shadow of misery visibly remained in her eyes.

From her vantage point beside the potted palm, Maya pushed away the thoughts of her sister’s doomed marriage and watched in fascination as the young artist’s hand moved across the paper managing in a few bold confident lines to pick out the essential features of his victims and magnifying them to comical proportions.

Maya had once thought she had artistic talent, but her youthful confidence in her ability had not withstood the campaign of mockery and humiliation waged by her stepfather.

The man was no longer in their lives and Maya had recovered most of the self-belief he had systematically destroyed, but never regained her uncomplicated joy of expressing herself in charcoal or paint.

In retrospect she could see that the dreadful Edward had probably unintentionally done her a favour—goodness, but he’d hate to know that—because there were so many artists far more talented than her who never made the grade and she didn’t want to be one of the ranks of nearly good enough.

But this guy, she decided, was pretty good. Though to her amusement it was obvious that not everyone was happy with the frequently unflattering though always amusing portraits. But he was doing brisk business and he took the few knockbacks he received in his stride.

‘Quantity over quality.’ The youthful artist threw the comment towards her over his shoulder, making her start guiltily.

‘I think you’re very talented,’ Maya said with a smile. She came out from behind the spiky palm fronds and moved in closer as the young man scrunched up his last rejected creation and attacked a fresh sheet.

‘It pays the bills, or at least some of them, and beats starving in an attic. That is so last century or maybe the one before. God, not again!’ He groaned as the hotel lights flickered and went out.

‘Is it a power cut?’ There had been a moment of total silence but now the place was filled with a jabber of voices, most saying much the same as she just had.

‘Who knows? It’s been doing it all morning. Ah, and now we have light.’

His clever hand was flying over the paper again, the caricature coming to life like magic. With a few brief strokes a face began to appear along with, and this was the most magical part, a personality.

Head tilted, she studied the face that was taking form. A razor-sharp blade of a masterful nose made for looking down on the rest of humanity bisected a face with impossibly high cheekbones; a mouth with an overtly full, sensual upper lip contrasting with a firm, slightly cruel-looking lower, a deep chin cleft and a squared-off jaw that looked as though it were carved from granite completed the strikingly austere effect.

If the owner of those heavy-lidded eyes with exaggeratedly long curling eyelashes had in the flesh a fraction of the arrogance, self-belief and authority that was looking back at Maya from the paper, he was surely not going to be a potential customer of the artist.

In her private estimation, the subject of the cruel, clever portrait did not look like someone who could laugh at themselves.

Her warm dark brown eyes lifted, sparkling with amused speculative curiosity as she searched the room for the real-life inspiration, but the half-smile curling her lips quickly faded as she recognised the model for the unsolicited portrait.

It wasn’t hard to spot him and that wasn’t just because he stood inches above most people in the place. An imposingly tall, athletic figure in a long black wool trench coat that moulded to broad shoulders. His jet-black wavy hair was pushed back from a broad brow, nearly touching the snow-crusted collar of the coat as he moved through the press of bodies with a seemingly inbuilt exclusion zone. He was not, she mused, someone who could easily fade into the background.

Maya was conscious, not just of the uncomfortable in-your-face aura of alpha-male authority that he projected even from this distance, but the skin-tightening prickle of antagonism it produced in her. She chose to focus on that aspect while trying to ignore the pelvic flutter of awareness she felt as she watched him. He really was the living, breathing definition of compulsive viewing.

Love him or loathe him—there was no in between, she suspected. What was not in dispute was that there was something totally riveting about the man. Maya found herself both repelled and fascinated in equal measure, but then beauty always was fascinating—even if you were only trying to find a flaw in it—and he was prettyaesthetically pleasing!

The artist was good, but the closer his subject got, the more the limitations to his technique became apparent, though to be fair no amount of exaggeration could turn this subject into a joke. Everything about him, from the sense of restrained power in his panther-like fluid stride to his perfectly chiselled profile that combined strength and sensuality in equal measures, suggested he was more in every sense of the word.

The artist moving forward, sketch pad in hand to waylay his quarry, re-awoke Maya to her surroundings. She blinked and shook her head. The noise of the crowded space gradually filtering back, she was disturbed and embarrassed to realise just how hard she must have been staring at the man, as though she were... She lowered her eyes and felt the heat climbing to her cheeks as the mocking term sex-starved popped into her head.

It was not a description she could dispute in the literal sense, but the phrase somehow implied that the situation was a bad thing. Maybe it was for some people, but in her own personal situation celibacy was a conscious choice and not bad luck or, as Beatrice suggested, because she was frightened... She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to think about what Beatrice had said. Her sister was hurting badly, and was just lashing out.

Beatrice had passion, and Maya, well, she had...caution, and what she suspected was a pretty low sex drive, so she didn’t envy poor Bea in the slightest.

She sometimes wondered if her sister had thought she had found with Dante the rare thing their parents had enjoyed before their father had been snatched away from them.

How would you even know if you found it? It seemed to Maya it was much more likely that—always supposing that special someone even existed in the first place—you would walk straight past your soulmate in the street. Maybe it was why most people, or so it seemed to her, either settled or, like Beatrice, imagined that they had found their soulmate, only to end up miserable and alone when things went wrong.

Or maybe Bea was right? Perhaps Maya was just scared—scared of offering her love to a man only to have it rejected, or loving and losing him as Bea had... Pushing away the unhelpful thoughts before they could set up home in her head, she allowed herself to be further distracted by the advancing tall, powerful subject of the caricature.

No chance of mistaking him for a soulmate, she mused, rubbing her hands hard against her upper arms to ease the dark prickle she felt under her skin even through the layers, a sensation she had only previously experienced in the prelude to an electric storm.

She decided not to over-analyse this unexpected physical response to a total stranger, because though some people, her sister included, might suggest that choice was not involved where attraction was concerned, Maya firmly believed that you always had a choice. So as far as she was concerned, her head would always rule her heart and her hormones, not the other way around.

And there was also the purely practical side to consider. At this point in her life, romance or sex—what was the difference?—would have been a complication too far.

She and Bea were trying to start up a fashion business and one of them had to stay focused. Her sister was going through the trauma of a divorce and Maya needed to take up the slack. Her eyes slid briefly to where Bea sat, her death-ray stare glued to her phone, but Maya saw the sheer misery underneath the anger and her tender heart ached. Bea really wasn’t the best advert for love right now, but, if it ever crept up on her, Maya was determined she was not going to allow her happiness to depend on a man—not any man.

She couldn’t conceive of feeling that way, ever, she was not that person, but if a man made her unhappy there would be no looking back for her. She’d vowed to herself that she wouldn’t be weighed down by someone else’s baggage.

The heat, the crush of people, in here was unbearable and Samuele almost turned around and walked straight back through the revolving glass doors and into the street where the snow that was melting on his hair and overcoat had started to fall in earnest. But he had two hours to kill if his cautiously optimistic contact with inside information on the unfolding situation in the airport was to be believed, and suffering from hypothermia was not going to help the situation.

Was anything?

It deepened his sense of grinding frustration to know that there was a private flight ready for him on the runway—so near and yet so far—but waiting here remained his best bet of getting back to Rome in time to be with his brother before Cristiano went in for his scheduled surgery.

His fingers curled around the phone in his pocket as he thought about ringing Cristiano again, but on reflection he decided to wait until his revised travel plans were confirmed; he didn’t want to make promises to his brother that he could not keep.

His facial muscles tightened in response to an explosion of laughter off to his right, and the sound of happiness grated on his nerve endings. He didn’t want to hear it, he didn’t want to be here, he wanted, no, he needed to be with his brother.

Cristiano was in the worst kind of trouble, trouble not of his making, and he was alone going through this ordeal, because the wife he adored had a problem with hospitals. Violetta did not do the ugly things in life, or, it seemed, do supporting the man she had married while someone cut into his brain to biopsy the reason for the blinding headaches and other assorted symptoms he had suffered in silence for the past six months.

‘She cried when I told her,’ Cristiano had said.

Female tears did not affect Samuele; well, not all female tears. Even now, after all these years, the memory of his mother’s tears, mostly silent, still made his gut tighten in an echo of the remembered helplessness he had felt as a child. But tears that were purely cosmetic or used to manipulate left him cold, and Violetta’s were both. Sadly, his brother was not as immune.

Samuele embraced the anger and contempt he felt towards Violetta even as it deepened the frown line that was threatening to become permanent between his thick slanted brows.

His hand came away wet as he dragged it across his dark hair, before clenching it into a fist. Dio, what was it with the men in his family and their bad choices in wives?

He supposed that he was just lucky he had never found the so-called love of his life. One thing was certain, if he ever saw her coming he’d sprint in the opposite direction. Samuele gave a thin cynical smile that left his dark eyes cold. He was reasonably confident he would not need his running shoes any time soon, because love was a complete work of fiction, and he was not living in the final scene of a Hollywood romantic comedy.

As he made his way over to the bar thoughts of what his brother was going through alone crowded in, dominating his thoughts, so it took a few seconds for the question being directed at him to penetrate.

Samuele glanced at the face of the young man, then looked down at the sketch being held out to him. He flinched inside. It was good, too good, for on the paper he saw a man who was clearly too unapproachable for even his own brother to confide in.

The anger he felt at himself, the frustration he felt at being unable first to save Cristiano from a toxic marriage and now from this disease that had sunk its claws into him, surged up inside him. The release after the past hours of enforced calm was volcanic, though it erupted not as fire but ice.

‘Is that really the best you can do?’ He allowed his blighting stare to rest on the caricature before he trained his hooded gaze back on the artist. ‘The future is not looking bright for you, is it? I sincerely hope you have a plan B.’ For a split second he felt a surge of satisfaction but then the kick of guilt came fast on its heels.

Talk about finding a soft target, he derided himself, contempt curling his lip, but this time it was aimed purely at himself. The only thing the guy had done was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and to have a future for him to mock, unlike his brother, who might not.

Bleakness settled over him like a storm cloud, sucking away any form of hope.

‘No problem.’

Instead of releasing the sketch to the young man who was backing away, Samuele held onto it, reaching in his pocket for his wallet with his free hand.

Always easier to throw money at a problem than say sorry, Samuele thought cynically, but before any conscience-easing exchange could be quietly made a small figure appeared, her dark hair a riot of flying Pre-Raphaelite curls, her sweater beneath a padded coat a flash of hot orange. She virtually flung herself between him and the young artist, who let go of his sketch and took a step back to avoid a collision.

She had moved so fast that Samuele had no idea where she had come from as she stood there, glaring up at him, her hands on the slim supple curves of her hips.

With a sinuous little spin that rather unexpectedly sent a slither of sexual heat through his body, she directed a warm look at the boy before turning sharply again and continuing to vibrate scorn towards Sam. ‘He, he has more talent in his little finger than you...you...do in your whole body!’

She didn’t raise her voice but every scathing syllable reached its intended target—him.

To say Samuele was taken aback by the sudden attack would have been an understatement. On another occasion he would have liked to have listened further to her voice, which, in contrast to her delicate build, was low and husky.

He could imagine it having a rich earthy tone, he could imagine it whispering private things for his ears only...which said a lot for his state of mind, considering that at that moment it shook with the emotions that were rolling off her—emotions that were neither warm nor intimate.

Samuele found his initial shock melting into something else equally intense, as enormous brown eyes flecked with angry golden lights narrowed on his face. The further kick of attraction he felt was suddenly so strong that the pain was actually physical as it settled hot in his groin. There were not many inches involved here—she did not even reach his shoulder—but every single one packed a perfect sensual punch.

She was so gorgeous that she couldn’t have faded into the background if she’d tried, but she wasn’t trying.

He really liked that.

He took in the details in one swift head-to-toe sweep. Her outfit appeared to be a glorious clash of colours; the only subdued element was her fur-cuffed snow boots, the velvet-looking close-fitting jeans tucked into them a deep rich burgundy, her sweater orange, the padded jacket that hung open turquoise.

She was either colour-blind or making a point; either way it worked, though, having reached her face again, he lost interest in colour coordination because the face occupied by those fire-spitting eyes was beautiful—heart-shaped, surrounded by long dark drifting tendrils of glossy hair that had not been confined in the messy topknot of curls pinned high on her head.

Her delicate bone structure and warm colouring conveyed a sense of both fragility and sensuality. The glowing flawlessness of her skin stretched across smooth, rounded high cheeks projected youth and vitality, the slight tilt of her neat nose gave it character and cuteness. Her mouth, however, was not cute at all; it was full and plump and at that moment pursed as she scowled at him.

He found his eyes lingering overlong on their pink softness, unaware that the hunger he was feeling was reflected in his hooded stare; he couldn’t remember ever having experienced such an instant, intense visceral response to a woman before.

The way this man was looking at her... It was only her angry defiance that stopped Maya turning and running, letting him see that she was only brave on the outside.

If she was really brave it would not have crossed her mind even for a split second to remain a silent observer to this public display of cruel bullying, to pretend she hadn’t seen.

The knowledge that she had been tempted to do just that made her almost as mad with herself as she was with the target of her wrath as her eyes were met and held by the piercing stare of the man in front of her, who was towering over her. She embraced her anger as well as the rush of blood to her head, only now she was experiencing another rush of blood, pounding all around her body, because the way he was looking at her made her feel totally exposed and shaky inside.

With a sharp blink of her eyes, she pushed back at the sensation of vulnerability, clenching her jaw as she gathered herself, deliberately focusing on what had triggered such an intense reaction.

As she opened her eyes again and met his stare head-on she was relieved that the raw expression she had just seen in his gaze was gone. She lifted her chin; she wasn’t the kind of woman who melted into a puddle because a man looked as if he wanted her.

She focused instead on the soul-destroying contempt she had seen in his eyes as he’d spoken to the artist, the dismissive curl of his lips...every contemptuous syllable an eerie echo of ones she had heard so often from her stepfather. The situation had varied but the meaning was always the same: you are useless, worthless, don’t even try.

She was no longer a child sitting there with her head bowed taking it, having her self-belief stripped away by her stepfather, and she wasn’t about to watch it happen to someone else. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t call out that sort of bullying.

‘Everyone’s a critic,’ she said hotly. ‘Especially those who are incapable of understanding artistic talent. You wouldn’t recognise quality if it bit you on the—’ She felt her focus slipping away like wet rope through her fingers as one of the lights that had lagged behind the others suddenly burst back into life, shining like a stage spotlight directly at the object of her contempt. He was under the spotlight but she was the one who dried.

He sighed and stamped the last of the snow off his boots. ‘This has not been the best of days for me.’

His voice was deep and edged with gravel, the slightest of accents only upping the fascination factor he held for her.

Her chin jerked upwards. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘How much?’ He tossed the question to the youth over her head.

‘You think you can buy your way out of anything, I suppose,’ she muttered bitterly. Everything about him screamed money and exclusivity, she decided, as her glance lingered on the breadth of his shoulders.

But the realisation that anger was no longer solely responsible for the dizzying adrenaline rush coursing through her body hit her.

He was objectionable and a bully, but she was ashamed to admit she was a long way from being immune to the waves of male magnetism he exuded.

Taking a deep sustaining breath, she broke the spell of those eyes and felt a trickle of moisture snake down her back. She was not about to fall in lust with some random stranger. ‘You have talent.’ She threw the words over her shoulder at the artist. ‘And you,’she added, killing her smile, ‘won’t destroy anyone’s confidence or fill them with self-doubt.’ She lifted her chin a defiant notch and thought, Not on my watch!

Samuele had been on the receiving end of a few unfriendly looks in his time, but nothing that came close to the sheer loathing that he was being regarded with by this total stranger.

He found himself wondering what it would take to make her smile at him... Possibly seeing you lying dead at her feet, suggested the sarcastic voice in his head.

‘And never,’ she ground out through clenched pearly teeth to the young man, ‘let anyone tell you otherwise.’

‘I’m fine—’ began the artist.

She cut across him unapologetically. ‘Never apologise for someone else’s rudeness, and don’t let anyone gaslight you. You have to believe in yourself.’

Samuele was caught between annoyance and amusement. She clearly had issues, but they were none of his business. ‘What are you, his girlfriend or his life coach?’

‘Just someone who doesn’t like bullies,’ she sneered. ‘What do you do for an encore, show kittens who’s boss?’ She widened her eyes in mock admiration. ‘A big tough man like you, what inadequacy are you compensating for?’ she wondered. ‘Dumped by the girlfriend?’

‘Wondering if there’s a vacancy?’ he shot back.

He couldn’t help his satisfaction as she flushed bright red. ‘In your dreams.’

‘Oh, I have very interesting dreams,’ he drawled in a voice like warm honey.

‘I am not interested in your dreams, thank you,’ she retorted haughtily. ‘Or your suggestive comments.’

The lights went out again with no warning flicker and in the blackness there was the sound of a glass breaking and several giggles and shouts.

In the darkness Maya felt a whisper of sensation on her lips, light as a butterfly’s wings. She sighed and shivered, and began to stretch upwards towards the touch, but just as suddenly it was gone, making her wonder if she’d imagined it.

The lights came back on.

He’d disappeared.

She blinked as the young artist handed her the sketch he had done with an admiring look. ‘Man, you are fierce!’

‘You bet you she is!’

It was Beatrice who’d rushed over and enfolded her in a hug. ‘I am so, so sorry what I said before. I know you were only trying to help me and I was a monster.’

‘No...no...’

‘Utter and total. Really, Maya, I think you have it right; you never want to feel as rotten as this. So, who was that hunk you were just yelling at?’

‘I have no idea.’