The Italian’s Bride On Paper by Kim Lawrence

CHAPTER FOUR

MATTIOHADDOZED off in his little chair. Coming into the living room behind her, Samuele watched as Maya tenderly tucked a light blanket around him and began to pick up the baby items strewn around.

Feeling a stab of self-disgust that even in a time like this he could appreciate, actually more than appreciate, the tightness of her behind under the snugly fitting denim, he cleared his throat.

‘I have been thinking.’

One hand on her thigh, the other outstretched to scoop up a soft toy that had found its way under a side table, she lifted her head and looked up at him from under the frame of curling lashes. She was oblivious to the fact the action made her square-necked cobalt-blue sweater gape, giving him a tantalising glimpse of her lacy bra and the suggestive creamy swell of her smooth cleavage. The shadow of her nipples under the lace might have been his imagination which was, to his own annoyance, clearly working overtime.

‘Come with us.’ The offer was made not because of his recent testosterone rush but despite it—it was a purely practical suggestion, he told himself, devoid of any personal feelings.

Purely practical would have been putting an ocean or three between this woman and you, pointed out the voice in his head.

He ignored it and the insulting implication he was not totally in control. For someone who had been born with a hot temper and a tendency to act before his brain was in gear, he was conscious of the need to maintain control at all times. Allowing their emotions and appetites full rein had been the downfall of both his father and brother, so Samuele’s life was ruled by his determination to ruthlessly suppress any similar tendencies when and if they ever surfaced in himself.

Maya dropped the toy and came upright with a jerk that made her hair bounce angrily before settling in a silky tumble down her back. ‘Is that some sort of joke?’

‘No, it’s... Have you been crying?’ he asked, observing the dampness on her cheeks with a tightening in his chest.

Maya was always alert and very defensive about anyone assuming that, just because she looked delicate, she was delicate. There was something patronising in people thinking she needed to be given special treatment.

So she had zero qualms about lying.

‘No, I have not.’

It was crazy! This time yesterday she had not even known this baby boy existed. Maybe it was the fact they had both been abandoned that had brought out these painfully intense protective feelings in her?

‘Well, you look—’

‘I have not been crying—though God knows the way this day is going, it would be small wonder if I had!’

He lifted his hands in an open-palmed pacific gesture. ‘Fine, you have not been crying.’ He shrugged. ‘I have a flight home arranged.’

She had been prepared to hear him out in stony silence, but her curiosity won that battle. ‘Where is home?’ Where would she imagine Samuele living? She wouldn’t be imagining him at all, she reminded herself, but who knew if his voice might continue to seep into her dreams...?

She gave a little shiver. On any measurement scale their first chance encounter had not exactly been a cosmic event and yet it had lingered in her mind. More than lingered, if she was honest, thinking of that voice in her dreams, the touch she woke up remembering, which was an invention of her subconscious, because he had never touched her. Did that merest whisper of a kiss even count?

Now fate, or whatever you liked to call it, had thrown them together once more. Not just a nudge this time, but a full-on red-light collision, and they were connected for ever by Mattio.

He still hadn’t touched her.

‘Tuscany, outside Florence. The estate has been in our family for generations.’ And very briefly large sections temporarily not. The realisation that his father had been selling off piecemeal vast tracts of the estate and splitting up the world-renowned Agosti art collection, just to keep his second wife, Samuele’s stepmother, in private jets, luxury yachts and jewels to wear when she lost yet another fortune at the gaming tables, had caused Samuele to abandon his medical degree course midway through.

Medicine might provide status, respect and job satisfaction, but if he wanted to succeed in his determination to restore his family’s heritage he needed money, the sort of money that the financial services sector could provide for someone who was successful. And Samuele was hugely successful, his rise had been meteoric and he had never regretted his decision, not once.

Before his father’s death he had discreetly, through a series of anonymous holding companies, managed to reacquire seventy per cent of the estate that his father had sold. After his death there had been no need for discretion and the restoration of the Agosti villa in Florence had been completed the previous year.

He had expected success to feel more...victorious? He pushed the thought away. The truth was, it was hard to be enthused about anything since Cristiano’s death. And now he had someone to hand the reclaimed heritage on to. He had Mattio.

He would always put Mattio’s needs ahead of every other consideration, including his own conscience.

‘I have a private plane waiting.’ He said it in the casual way that, in Maya’s experience, only people with a lot of money spoke about such things. ‘I’ll need a nanny for Mattio.’

‘I’m not a nanny!’

‘Dio, I wasn’t offering you the job.’

He was secure in his self-control, but inviting this woman to live under the same roof as him on any sort of permanent basis, given the chemistry that existed between them, would break too many of his self-imposed boundaries when it came to allowing women into his life. And if ever he’d met a woman who was incapable of recognising a boundary, let alone staying the right side of one, Maya Monk was it.

He didn’t need a woman like her in his life—actually he didn’t need any woman. Of course, there were women he had sex with occasionally—he needed sex, the same as any man—but they never threatened his inner peace.

Another word for loneliness, mocked his inner voice, but he didn’t care if it was true. Isolation was preferable to the option both his father and brother had embraced: marrying wives who’d taken them for every penny and made them smile while they did it.

Embarrassed heat stung Maya’s cheeks. There was nothing like refusing a job you hadn’t been offered to make a girl feel stupid. ‘Oh, well...my mistake.’ Her firm little chin lifted, defiance exuding from every pore as she added mutinously, ‘But it sounded to me like you were.’

His gaze drifted from her narrowed eyes to her sensuous mouth that couldn’t look thin and mean, even though she was clearly trying. When it came to a live-in nanny, he would definitely not choose one that looked like Maya Monk. A world where she was a permanent feature in his life without her sharing his bed was an absolute non-starter... No, the person he had in mind was sturdy and no-nonsense, radiating a comforting, calm, kind vibe. Would it be sexist to put any of those things in the ad?

‘I travel light, and I have no experience of babies,’ he admitted, thinking he had even less experience of women who made him laugh. ‘Let alone travelling with one.’ Logic told him there had to be more to that endeavour than there appeared. ‘And it’s going to take me a little time to find a suitable nanny. In the interim, I was thinking that you could...help out with Mattio. I’ve watched you with him—you’re good with him, he knows you and you seem like a...safe pair of hands.’ With a soft heart, which of course was what he was counting on.

‘So you don’t want a nanny, you just want an unqualified, unpaid dogsbody!’

‘Are there qualifications for doing someone a favour?’ he asked with a shrug. ‘And payment isn’t an issue—name your price.’

She reacted huffily to the suggestion that she could be bought. ‘I can’t be bought.’

He fought the impulse to share his cynical view that that fact alone made her unusual, if not unique.

‘Not a very practical response, but fine, if that’s what you want, I won’t pay you.’

She threw him a narrow-eyed look of dislike. ‘I suppose you assume that just because I’m female I know about babies.’

Female... Yes, she was... The provocative blood-heating image of her slim, smooth, naked body, very female naked body, floated into his head, making it hard to stick to his point. ‘You really could do with some lessons in selling yourself.’

‘I’m not trying to sell myself,’ she said, her voice barely audible beyond the sound of her low shallow breaths, which made the subsequent decibel rise all the more apparent as she suddenly added, ‘And I really don’t care what you or anyone else thinks about me. I care what I think about me.’ To his ears it had all the hallmarks of a classic she protests way too much denial.

She was too busy trying to inject some much-needed neutrality into her voice to notice the thoughtful expression that slid across his face. ‘And I’ve already said no.’

‘Yes, you did.’

You didn’t have to do much reading between the lines to work out that once she had cared about what someone thought, and that someone had done some serious damage to her self-confidence.

She had recovered because she was obviously a strong woman, but there were always scars...even if they weren’t visible. He’d come across men like that; ones who made themselves feel big to disguise the fact they were hollow and weak. He would have liked to get his hands on—

He forced himself to de-escalate his growing antagonism towards this faceless creation of his imagination, the man who’d probably tapped into the passion he sensed in Maya, who had maybe made it harder for her to enjoy it with the next man who came along.

But he was not that man.

‘You wouldn’t be doing it for me,’ he emphasised. ‘You’d be doing it for Mattio. What’s a few weeks out of your life? The poor kid hasn’t had much continuity in his so far.’

Even a compulsive liar had to speak the truth occasionally, Maya thought sardonically as her half-sister’s words floated through her head. You don’t know what Samuele is capable of.

Well, she now knew one thing he was capable of after this breathtakingly blatant attempt to play on her feelings for Mattio.

‘For future reference,’ she told him crisply, ‘I don’t respond well to moral blackmail. Not that there will be—a future, I mean,’ she tacked on, wincing, because the only thing she’d managed to do was make it sound as though they had a past.

They didn’t have a past, present or future. She had spent more time in the company of the woman at the checkout till at her local supermarket than this man, and she actually knew more about her!

It was just the entire off-the-scale hothouse weirdness of everything about the last few hours that had fed this strange feeling of intimacy between them, utterly misplaced intimacy, she told herself.

‘Sorry, that was below the belt.’

She suddenly caught an expression in his face and wondered if he felt guilty. If he did, it couldn’t be that guilty. It wasn’t in his nature to give up, and when one tactic failed you tried an alternative one. He didn’t disappoint her.

‘I need your help and if you can put aside your dislike of me... I mean, you don’t have to like me or trust me, and any practical inconvenience I will sort out with your employer or whatever. Will you promise to think about it?’

She struggled not to feel disarmed by his sincerity, but knew she was losing the battle as she felt her antagonism melting away. ‘How long before you need to know?’

He glanced at the thin metal banded watch on his wrist. ‘Five...no, make that four minutes.’ He looked at her, one dark brow arched, and produced a white grin that would have given the devil a run for his money—a very attractive devil.

She gave a small laugh of disbelief.

‘And I would really appreciate your input into the recruitment of the nanny too,’ he said, dangling the suggestion like a carrot of temptation.

She breathed out heavily. ‘I just can’t...’ Her voice trailed away as the exhaustion she’d been holding at bay with sheer willpower suddenly hit her, like walking into a wall, and bone-deep weariness came flooding in.

‘Are you all right?’ He stood braced, looking as though he was fully prepared to catch her if she fell, which was a good thing because she really felt as if she might go down.

She pulled herself to her full height, but she still had to tip her head back a long way to look him in the face.

‘I’m fine,’ she grouched irritably, wishing she could throw something more than his concern back in his face, then sighed as she felt impelled to add, ‘Thank you.’

‘You need to sit down. You’re having a vasovagal attack.’

‘A what?’

‘You’re going to faint.’ Taking matters into his own hands, he took her by the shoulders and manoeuvred her onto the nearest sofa. One finger pressed into the middle of her chest sent her backwards while he lifted her legs onto the cushions.

‘I don’t faint.’ In her head it was a firm, calm statement, but sadly it emerged as a weak little whisper. Maybe she would just lie there until the world stopped spinning. Things were a bit vague and hazy, and she couldn’t even work up the enthusiasm to react when she felt cool fingers taking the pulse on her wrist. ‘Who made you the expert on fainting anyhow?’

Eyes closed, she missed the look that crossed his face.

‘I suppose you’ve been making girls swoon all your life,’ she observed waspishly as she experimentally opened her eyes to discover the world had stopped spinning.

‘Take it slowly,’ he cautioned as she lifted herself up onto an elbow.

A massive surprise when she ignored him and sat up, swinging her legs to the floor. ‘Did you get much sleep last night?’

It seemed like a century ago since she had opened her door to her half-sister, and the memories were already meshed into a kaleidoscope of intertwined images.

It had been one hit on top of another. The exhaustion she was feeling was not just about sleep deprivation; it was emotional.

‘Take this.’ She curled her fingers around the warm teacup. ‘You can sleep on the plane.’

She flung him a look and grimaced as, cradling the cup between her two hands, she lifted it to her lips and drank. ‘I don’t take sugar.’ She took another sip anyway. ‘I can’t just drop everything...my job...’ Her voice trailed away. She was expecting her redundancy notice to arrive any day now, not that that made any difference.

‘Where do you work?’

She named the department store. ‘I’m a window dresser.’

‘But I saw the sketches...’

Her glance went to the folders stacked behind the folded architect’s table, which she’d intended to put away in the spare room. ‘My sister and I had plans to start a small fashion label, but she got back together with her husband, and start-up businesses need some serious capital and time investing in them... In the meantime, I do actually like my job.’

‘Don’t married women work?’

‘It would be a long commute. Beatrice lives in San Macizo.’

His mobile black brows lifted. ‘Yes, I can see that would be pushing it...’ He paused, a frown corrugating his brow. ‘Beatrice? As in the—’

She cut him off. ‘Yeah, I have royal connections.’

‘Who could surely give you the capital you need to start up your business?’

At the hint of criticism in his voice she fired back angrily, ‘They have offered and I refused.’

‘Interesting.’ She didn’t ask what was so interesting and he didn’t elaborate. ‘So you have a niece, and now you have a nephew too.’ He watched closely as the shock of recognition flickered in her eyes.

‘Yes.’

‘I imagine that you’d do anything for your niece?’

‘Obviously,’ she responded, indignant that there could be any doubt about that before she saw the point he was making.

It was true she would do anything for little Sabina, who had an adoring mother and father, who would never ever be abandoned or made to feel she was not worthy of love. She looked up at Samuele over the rim of her teacup, feeling lighter as she shrugged off the invisible but very real weight of indecision.

Why would she do any less for her nephew, who was so much worse off than her niece?

‘I’ll do it.’

It would be fine, she told herself. All she had to do was remember that she could not fall too deeply in love with her nephew because, in reality, parting was inevitable.

The uncle...well, there was no danger of love being involved there, but she would have to keep some sort of check on the surges of attraction that might put her in danger of doing something stupid.

Like flying off to Italy with a man you barely know where your lack of childcare skills is going to be outed very quickly.