The Italian’s Bride On Paper by Kim Lawrence

CHAPTER FIVE

SHESTRUGGLEDTO shake the feeling that she was there under false pretences as Samuele’s staff deferred to her on every matter to do with the baby on board.

Apart from an interval when he became fretful, which, according to one sympathetic steward who seemed knowledgeable about such things, meant that he was probably teething, he’d been no trouble at all.

‘Look at those hot little cheeks, bless him. We didn’t sleep for a week when our eldest was teething,’ she said, setting out the bottle of formula Maya had not needed to request, but had magically appeared.

As Maya jogged up and down later, Mattio in her arms, she could appreciate how much harder this might have been if there were more than the one other passenger on board. Samuele was certainly not going to complain about the noise of a grizzling baby, but even he had spent most of the flight locked in a private cabin where she presumed he was working, only appearing when they were about to land to ask, in what she felt was a critical way, if she’d had any sleep.

Did she look that bad?

‘He’s teething,’ she said stiffly, nodding to the baby, who had just nodded off himself.

‘Oh.’

Maya quite enjoyed seeing him look out of his depth. She could imagine that it was probably a once-in-a-decade thing, so she didn’t let on that she was too.

Once they disembarked a well-oiled machine seemed to spring into action, making the transfer into a luxury four-wheel-drive painless and swift.

The only blip in this process was when the passenger door was opened by one of the team whose sole purpose in life appeared to be saying ‘sì’ to Samuele. Though to be fair his attitude did not suggest he required deference. He was relaxed with all his staff, who seemed pretty at ease with him too. Maya, whose nervous system was on permanent red-alert mode around him, felt quite envious. She hesitated at the car door. She had intended to sit next to the baby in the back seat, though perhaps there was no such safe distance when it came to Samuele.

‘Is there a problem?’ Samuele sounded impatient. She noticed he had got changed on the flight and the black jeans that greedily clung to his muscular thighs seemed a very valid reason not to sit beside him. God knew when he’d found the time to swap clothes, but then it seemed to Maya that he did everything at a million miles an hour. He was not, she decided, the sort of person to take time out to appreciate a sunset or a view. Did he ever actually relax?

‘I was wondering if we’d see much of Florence. I’ve never been there but I understand it’s very beautiful.’

‘Another day I’ll give you a guided tour.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean—’

‘Get in, Maya.’

She got in rather than make a fuss and any concerns she had about making stilted conversation were unnecessary because they were barely outside the city limits when she fell asleep.

When she woke, confused, her head propped against the padded headrest, a blanket from the back seat thrown over her, she was too muzzy-headed to think about how it had got there. Samuele wasn’t in the car.

She rubbed her eyes, knowing that it was a given that her hair would look as though there were small animals living somewhere in the wild mass of curls. She took in her surroundings. The car was stationary and they were parked at the side of a narrow empty road where the trees lining the road ahead and behind had thinned to reveal what was the most incredible panoramic view she had ever seen in her life. She’d clearly been wrong: Samuele did stop to look at the view.

She gave the peacefully dozing baby in the back seat a quick glance before she unfastened her belt and exited the car. Her nostrils flaring at the pungent scent of pine and the wild thyme that released its sweet scent into the air, she picked a path across to where Samuele stood, his tall figure dark against the backdrop of a deep cerulean-blue sky.

‘Sorry I fell asleep...oh, my, it’s so beautiful.’ She sighed, her eyes drawn to the view that stretched out before them. Against the distant backdrop of the purple hills the undulating fields were a patchwork of colours, gold with wheat and green grazed by animals impossible to identify at this distance. The separate areas were defined by rows of statuesque pine and dotted with sculptural cypresses, and ribbons of water gleamed as they wound their way down the sloping hills that, to her uneducated eyes, seemed to be covered with the regimented neatness of vineyards.

For a long time she said nothing. ‘It’s almost...spiritual.’ The words emerged without any conscious thought and a moment later she gave an embarrassed little laugh and angled a look up at him. Samuele was no longer staring at the landscape, but looking at her, the expression on his face making her insides quiver.

‘That probably sounds stupid.’

‘Not at all. It’s taken some people a lifetime to see that, and some,’ he added heavily, ‘never do.’

He redirected his stare to the vista but there was a brooding quality to his stare now that hadn’t been there before.

‘When do we reach...your home?’

‘We have.’ He opened his hands wide to encompass the land that stretched out before them. ‘We have actually been on the estate for the past twenty minutes, and the village is about five minutes back there. You’ll be able to see the house once we come out on the other side of that copse.’

‘I had no idea that it was so...vast,’ she admitted, making some serious adjustments to her preconceptions of the Agosti heritage. ‘You own an entire village?’

‘My family has cared for this land for years and it has cared for us...and many others in return. Until recently.’

‘Recently?’ she probed warily, wondering if he was alluding to his brother’s death.

‘My father stripped everything of value he could and sold off the rest to keep hiswifein private jets and fuel her main hobby which was—and presumably still is—gambling,’ Samuele said heavily. ‘She went into rehab after my father’s death, where she met her new husband; in a twist of irony, he owns a string of hotel casinos.’

‘When you said his wife, was she not your mother?’

‘My mother is dead. My father’s second wife was Cristiano’s mother. I remember that she adored him as a baby but as soon as he passed the cute baby stage she treated him pretty much like an out-of-date handbag.’

The calming effect of the beauty of the land he loved so much, the land that would never hurt him, evaporated as he dwelt on the destructive emotion his father had called love. Even at the end, when he’d known that the woman he’d worshipped was having affair after affair, he’d still defended her to his eldest son. And then, to Samuele’s despair, exactly the same fate had befallen Cristiano.

‘She didn’t consider she had an addiction problem so my father didn’t either. His duty to the land, his tenants, his family...he sacrificed them all for this insanity of selfishness, which went disguised as love.’

The delivery was flat and even but despite, or maybe because of, his measured neutrality Maya could feel the emotions throbbing in every syllable.

‘But the land—you said this is yours now...?’

‘I started buying it back anonymously as soon as I could afford to, and now it is almost back to what it once was.’ He still had hopes of tracking down the last few elusive classical sculptures that would complete the art collection that had rivalled many museums.

‘Wow, that couldn’t have been cheap...’ She flushed as his eyes swivelled her way. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound nosy.’

‘Yes, it wasn’t...er...cheap, cara.’

To her relief he seemed amused, not offended.

‘I am an investment banker, so raising capital is what I specialise in, and the finance industry pays extremely well.’ He had not drifted into finance, he had deliberately plotted a course, and the rewards, not the job satisfaction, had been his motivation for doing so.

He inhaled, drawing in the sweet clean air as he scanned the horizon. To Maya, it seemed as though he was letting the peace, the sense of continuity over the ages, visibly seep into him.

‘So the estate is a hobby?’

He continued to look into the distance. ‘No, finance is my hobby. The estate is my life.’ He turned to face her. ‘So, are you ready?’

Caught staring at him, she shifted guiltily and began to move towards the four-wheel-drive. ‘I’m sorry I fell asleep...’ she said again, skipping to fall into step beside him.

It was a subject he did not particularly want to think about. He closed it down with a light teasing reply. ‘Relax, you don’t drool.’ But he couldn’t close down the images that stubbornly remained inside his head or the memory of the scent of her hair as it tickled his neck.

After the second time of nudging her head back onto the headrest, he had finally let it stay where it kept falling against his shoulder.

‘Sorry, I wasn’t much company.’

‘A woman who doesn’t talk while I’m driving is my kind of perfect.’

Maya huffed a little as she tried to keep pace with his long-legged stride. ‘Did you take classes in sexist chauvinism?’

He flashed her a look, all white teeth and testosterone.

‘No, I am totally self-taught.’

The exchange had brought them level with the luxury off-roader that stood in the sculpted shade of a cypress tree. ‘Your mother must be so proud of you,’ she muttered, raising herself on tiptoe to look through the back window she had cracked open before she’d left the car. Mattio had not moved an inch.

‘She’s dead, remember.’

She shot him a contrite look. ‘That was a stupid thing for me to say!’

‘Oh, I don’t know, it was quite funny. Relax,’ he said matter-of-factly, opening the passenger door for her. ‘I barely remember her.’ Sometimes a memory would surface, triggered by a scent or a familiar object. ‘And my life did not lack female influence for long,’ he added in a tone hard enough to cut through diamond. ‘She was barely cold in her grave before I had a stepmother and, four months later, a half-brother.’

Her eyes, widened in comprehension, flew to his face. ‘Four months?’

His fingers curved around her elbow to give her a steadying boost into the seat of the high-level vehicle, which brought her face level with his.

‘A married man having an affair...’ he mocked. ‘Who’d have thought?’ Not Maya, clearly, and her naivety made him perversely want to shock her more. ‘When I was going through my father’s papers I found some of my mother’s things.’ Untouched and gathering metaphorical dust, since they’d been consigned to a filing cabinet with the other unimportant items.

‘There were some legal documents dated the day before her death. It turns out he had served her with divorce papers, something that was not revealed in the inquest, I would imagine, seeing as I think they might have had a bearing on their verdict of accidental overdose. Maybe if there had been a suicide note...?’

The way he relayed the details, with a total absence of any emotion, was somehow almost more shocking than the story itself.

It made her wonder just how deep he’d buried the trauma. She never doubted there was trauma because Maya knew from experience that it never, ever went away, not until you faced it.

‘I suppose there are some things you can never know.’ Given the story, his attitude to marriage and women was hardly surprising.

He met her sympathetic gaze with a look that was dark, hard and unforgiving. ‘Oh, I know, I know full well that my mother killed herself because she was being traded in, because she didn’t give a damn about what or who she left behind—namely me.’

He’d thought the words plenty of times, but he’d never actually said them out loud before. The pity he could see shining in her luminous eyes was the reason why.

Samuele looked away from those eyes, asking himself yet again what it was about Maya Monk that made him open himself up this way. He had revealed more about himself in the space of the last few hours than he had told anyone—ever.

‘I don’t need your pity.’

‘Good, because you haven’t got it. There’s a difference between pity and compassion, you know! You’re angry with a parent for leaving you—believe you me, that doesn’t make you unique around here, Samuele. Your mother found it impossible to carry on living but that doesn’t mean she stopped loving you.’

He climbed into the vehicle after her, staring stonily ahead as he reversed out of the clearing at speed.

‘Sorry,’ he said as they hit a particularly bad pothole that almost jolted Maya out of her seat. ‘Resurfacing this road is due to start next month. If we were approaching from the other way, the road is almost civilised.’ He was watching her as he turned the corner; he liked to see people’s reactions as they got their first glimpse of the castello.

Maya’s jaw dropped as she took in the square towers in each corner of the massive sandstone edifice and the teethlike projections high up along the walls between them. It seemed to ramble, if you could use such a word for such a formidable-looking building. ‘You live in a palace!’

‘Castello di Agosti is classified as a castle. My family have lived here since the thirteenth century, apart from a short period when it was used as a hospital during the Second World War.’

‘It’s...’

‘I have never seen a ghost.’

‘I wasn’t going to ask that.’ But, of course, now she was thinking it. ‘Are there many suits of armour?’

‘A few, hopefully not dusty. Relax, the place has been totally renovated with all mod cons. You look more apprehensive than the tenants did when I introduced some new eco-farming methods. We have a long-term strategy here.’

They were driving along a wide, smoothly surfaced driveway now that wound its way through lush parkland. As the road divided she saw a field with horses in.

‘Years ago our stud was world-renowned. We’ve just started building up a breeding programme again in a small way.’

It seemed to Maya that nothing here was built on a small scale.

‘Oh, my!’ She twisted her head to see the gardens that they were passing, stone terrace after stone terrace spilling flowers above a formal walled garden with a series of classical looking fountains.

She settled back into her seat as they drove away from the castle and through an archway into a gravelled area surrounded by low stone buildings.

The car stopped and a small welcoming party appeared: two young men in white shirts and dark trousers, who began to unload their luggage; a woman with no visible waist and a lovely smile and another young man, who were introduced by Samuele as the housekeeper, Gabriella, and his private secretary.

While the housekeeper got tearful over Mattio, Maya watched Samuele and his secretary talking quietly. A few moments later she could almost see him shrugging off his city persona; here he was king of the castle, though a very chilled-out king. In fact, he looked more relaxed than she had imagined possible.

‘I have some things to attend to, so I will see you at dinner. Gabriella will look after you,’ Samuele said, turning to her.

‘I don’t expect you to look after me,’ she blurted.

He tipped his head. ‘You are our guest.’ There was nothing in his words, but the light in his eyes made her stomach muscles quiver.

‘Our...is there a...do you have a...? Are you married or anything?’ She paused awkwardly, the idea he wasn’t single sending panic that was quite out of proportion with the possibility through her body as she stood there kicking herself for not asking earlier.

‘Not even anything at this present moment. It was just a figure of speech.’

At the outset Maya had no idea what her role was classified as being while she was here, and she had half expected to be accommodated in the servants’ quarters. Although if what she had seen was any indication the servants’ quarters would be pretty five star.

There were several gasp-out-loud moments as she was led by the housekeeper, who’d offered to carry the travel seat that Mattio was snuggled in, an offer Maya declined, through the vaulted hallway with its stone walls and up a grand staircase that divided into a gallery at the top.

‘The frescoes are in the west wing,’ Gabriella explained as she led the way along a long corridor that could have easily accommodated a couple of football pitches.

Maya nodded, as though she knew about wings or frescoes.

When they finally reached the suite of rooms she had been allocated it was clear that she was not expected to slum it. She was given the tour of the additional nursery first, which was decorated in lemon and blue and was utterly charming, as was the well-equipped mini kitchen stocked with enough baby formula to feed ten babies.

‘It’s all wired for sound,’ the housekeeper explained as she led her through to her own private sitting room, which was palatial in size and charmingly furnished with antique furniture, but nothing heavy or dark.

The bedroom, with its balcony, was dreamy with a four-poster and the same delightful feminine furniture, but it was her bathroom that stopped her in her tracks. Massive enough to dwarf the double-ended copper tub built for sharing, it boasted a stone fireplace complete with a wood burner, and a walk-in shower that had more touch buttons than a space module and a shower head the size of two dinner plates!

Setting Mattio’s seat down on the marble floor, she sniffed a couple of the oils in the crystal flagons set along the matching marble shelf and turned on a tap in one of the twin sinks.

She could, she decided, picking up a fluffy towel from the top of one of the stacks, quite happily just live in here.

In the meantime, it was time to check out the kitchen for Mattio’s feed.

‘So, kiddo, what do you think of your place...not bad, hey?’