His Convenient Wife

However much he had despised the insulting smallness of his holding in the Italian business he had never sold those shares. And now, according to the healthy state of his bank balance, they were paying huge dividends.

‘You didn’t think family was important when you upped and left Italy and broke off all contact,’ Cat reminded him gently when she guessed by his continuing silence he had run out of things to say.

‘That was pride. The pride of a man is stiff, unyielding.’ He lifted his shoulders in a fatalistic shrug, but defended, ‘I kept contact through our sister Silvana. She told me of Marcantonio’s success in expanding the business, of the birth of his son, my nephew Astorre. Of my brother’s death ten years after Astorre’s marriage into a super-wealthy Roman family and the arrival of my great-nephew Aldo. Through her I know that Astorre has retired to Amalfi with his grand Roman wife and that Aldo now holds the business reins and has expanded into luxury holiday villas and apartments.’

Cat could almost feel sorry for him. A seventy-nine-year-old man indulging in pipedreams. She saw the relevance of that ‘closing the circle’ bit now. Sweep past resentments and quarrels aside, marry his granddaughter to his great-nephew and make everything right and whole again.

In his dreams!

‘And through the photographs Silvana sent me—’ a slow pause, a smile that might, if she were to be uncharitable, be described as sly ‘—I know that Aldo is a fine figure of Italian manhood—at thirty years of age he has a truly astute business brain and is the owner of a villa in Tuscany, a town house in Florence and an apartment in Portofino—che bello! You could do far worse! That I know all that is important to know about my lost family I explained to Aldo when I spoke to him on the phone a fortnight ago and suggested that a marriage between you two young things might be arranged to reunite the family.’

A beat of appalled silence. Cat felt her face colour hotly. ‘You did what? I do not believe this!’ Then the cool and welcome slide of common sense effectively stopped her exploding with outrage. ‘And he quite rightly told you where to put your interfering “suggestion”. Right?’

‘Far from it. He accepted my invitation to come and meet you. To discuss the matter further. As I said, he has an astute brain. Which brings us to my shares.’ He held out his cup and saucer. ‘Would you?’

Rising, Cat poured his second cup of tea, her hands shaking. She would not let her temper rip. Her grandfather was seventy-nine years old; he was grieving for his Alice. His sister was also, sadly, gone. He couldn’t make his peace with his older brother—he had died many years ago. He wanted to heal the family rift through his granddaughter and his great-nephew. She had to keep reminding herself of the facts to stop herself throttling him!

So she wouldn’t storm out of here as every instinct urged her to. She really didn’t want to upset him. Besides, no one on this earth could make her marry a man she didn’t know, quite possibly wouldn’t even like and certainly wouldn’t love.

Reassured, she handed him his tea and asked, ‘So when does this paragon arrive?’

‘Any time now. I didn’t tell you what I had in mind earlier. You would have suddenly expressed the wish to take a walking holiday in Scotland or go climbing in the Andes!’

Cat dipped her head, acknowledging his correct reading of her character. She recalled a note appended to one of her end-of-term reports. ‘Caterina is stubborn and headstrong. She won’t be led and she won’t be pushed.’

Bolshie, in other words.

She preferred to think of herself as strong-minded. She knew what she wanted and that wasn’t having to endure being looked over by some Italian big shot like a heifer at market!

‘Why aren’t you shouting at me, Caterina?’

The thread of amusement in his voice brought her attention back to her grandfather. She gave a slight, dismissive shrug and walked to the window to look out at the tail end of the afternoon. The days were shortening and the turning leaves of the damson tree mimicked the promise of hazy sunshine breaking through the warm and heavy early-autumn mist.

‘The timing of Aldo’s arrival is irrelevant. He is wasting his time coming here at all.’ She turned back to face him, the russet colour of the heavy-duty smock she usually wore when she was working emphasising the burnished glow of her chestnut hair, making her skin look paler, her eyes a deeper emerald. She spread her long-fingered artist’s hands expressively. ‘I can’t understand why he’s bothering. The guy’s obviously loaded and unless he looks like a cross between Quasimodo and a pot-bellied pig he could take his own pick of women.’

‘As no doubt he has,’ Domenico remarked drily. ‘But when it comes to taking a wife there is much to be considered. Family honour demands that a man marries wisely and well and not merely because he has lustful desires for a particular pretty woman.’

‘Your shares in his business,’ Cat deduced in a flat voice. This Aldo creep was obviously the pits. Popular culture marked the Italian male as being passionate, hot-blooded and fiery but this distant relative of hers had to be anything but if he could contemplate, even for one moment, marrying a woman he had yet to meet for the sake of clawing back a parcel of shares.

Verifying that conclusion, Domenico dipped his head. ‘My thirty-per-cent holding in his business, plus everything that is mine will one day come to you.’ He stirred his tea reflectively. ‘You are young, you are beautiful and when I am gone you will be all alone. If you were safely married to a man such as Aldo your future would be secure. You would be part of a family, cared for and pampered. I do not make this suggestion because I am crazy but because I love you and worry about your future.’

‘There’s no need,’ Cat said gruffly, her throat thickening. On the one hand she wanted to give him a verbal lashing. He was like something out of the ark! In his outdated opinion women couldn’t stand on their own feet; they needed a member of that superior race—a man—to look after them. And when he was no longer around to perform that duty he wanted to pass her over to someone he thought he could trust! He was living back in the nineteenth century—and, what was worse, an Italian nineteenth century!

On the other hand, she knew he loved her, cared about her, and that made her want to fling her arms around him and tell him she loved him, too.

She did neither. She said, relatively calmly, ‘I’m a big girl; I can look after myself. And if we really must have to anticipate events—which is not what I want to do—then I have a business of my own, remember. I could sell those shares to invest in it,’ she pointed out. ‘I could buy more and better equipment, hire staff, open a proper high-street shop instead of trading from a craft centre. I have no intention of tying myself to a cold-fish business brain for the sake of a life of idle luxury!’ She turned to the door, telling him, ‘You’d better start thinking of how to apologise to the guy for bringing him over here on a wild-goose chase.’

‘Wait.’ Domenico’s voice was smooth as cream. ‘Marriage is by no means certain. Though I know Aldo wouldn’t have agreed to this meeting if he hadn’t thought the idea viable. And I warn you, if he does propose and you turn him down for no good reason but pigheadedness—going against my wishes and your own best interests—then the shares, everything I have, will go to him.’

For several long seconds Cat couldn’t move. A heavy ache balled in her chest and her eyes flooded with tears. Gramps had said he loved her but he was quite happy to blackmail her. It hurt more than he would ever know.

The loss of her inheritance paled into insignificance. It would be tough, but she’d manage. When the time came she would have to find new living and working premises to rent, work all hours in order to keep her tiny business viable, and maybe not make it.

But that was nothing beside the knowledge that he was prepared to disinherit her if she didn’t toe the line. He couldn’t care for her at all, or not as much as he cared for what he called family honour.

When she could get her feet to move she walked out of the room and exactly one hour later she saw Aldo Patrucco arrive from the vantage point of her kitchen window above the cobbled stack yard.

He exited from the back of a dark saloon. He was tall, wearing a beautiful dark grey overcoat and a white silk scarf, and that was all she could see because the mist that had been hanging around all day had thickened in the autumn evening.

The uniformed chauffeur took a single leather suitcase from the boot and moments later drove away. So the big shot must have hired the package, Cat deduced as the main door was opened by Bonnie to admit the Italian.

Cat shuddered, her mouth clamped decisively shut. Only ten minutes ago Bonnie had called from the bottom of the stairs that led up from her work-room, telling her that her grandfather expected her to take dinner with him and his guest. Eight o’clock sharp.

She could refuse to put in an appearance. Or she could turn up in her shabbiest work clothes, display disgraceful table manners and vile personal habits, and put the guy off the idea of having anything at all to do with her.

The latter idea was tempting but she had too much pride to let herself act with such immaturity. She would go. She would be dignified. Not speak until spoken to. And spend her time trying to calculate if the amount in her bank balance would fund the renting of new premises if her grandfather threw her out as soon as Aldo Patrucco had left England, his proposal of marriage—if he made it—rejected with the scorn it deserved.

CHAPTER ONE

MARRYING Aldo Patrucco had been the biggest mistake of her life, Cat told herself for the millionth time as she stood in front of the tall window at the top of the villa, staring out at the rolling Tuscan hills shimmering in the haze of afternoon heat.

The panoramic view might once have entranced her. But the gentle purple hills, silver olive groves and scattered ochre-coloured farmhouses, the ubiquitous punctuation marks of the cypress trees merely emphasised her isolation, her frustration and misery.

The villa—every luxury provided…well, that went without saying in a Patrucco residence—reputedly built for the Medici family way back in the middle ages, had been her prison for two long months, since shortly after her miscarriage back in June.

Apart from his twice-weekly dutiful phone calls she’d had no contact with Aldo; he’d used his excuse of ‘Rest and Recuperation’ to get her away from the house in Florence, out of his sight, masking his disappointment in her failure to carry his heir to full term with an unconvincing display of polite concern for her well-being.

Leaving him free to be with his mistress.

He was cold. Heartless. Unreachable. Except…

Except she’d once been so sure he hadn’t been like that at all, that she could somehow reach his heart.

But he hadn’t got a heart, had he? Just an efficient machine, like a calculator.

As it too often did, her mind slid back with humiliating ease to that fatal night when she’d first met him. Only eleven months ago but it seemed like a lifetime now.

Dinner at eight. True to her intention to grit her teeth and make an appearance, to present a dignified front, she’d dressed in the soberest garment she owned. A peacock-green crêpe shift that skimmed her generously curved body and left her arms bare. Her make-up discreet, her unmanageable hair somehow tamed, drawn back from her face and painstakingly secured with a black velvet bow at her nape.

‘Caterina—’ There’d been such a note of pride in her grandfather’s voice as he’d risen from a leather club chair in the study as she’d walked into the room with her head high, but his introduction was lost on her as Aldo Patrucco got to his feet.

Over six feet of superbly dressed Italian male, a strong, harshly handsome face, his features shimmering out of focus because it was the look in those bitter-chocolate eyes that entrapped her.

She’d seen that look in men’s eyes before and had uninterestedly ignored it. Her one and only short-lived affair with Josh, a fellow student, in her final year at college had fizzled out with no regret on either side, and since then she hadn’t been remotely tempted.

But this hot, sultry branding held her as she’d never been held before, and her lips parted on a breathless gasp as his hard mouth curved in a slight, lazy smile just before he greeted her with easy Italian panache, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders, a light kiss on her forehead, another just above the corner of her mouth.

Just the softest brush of his lips against her skin, but it was enough to make her shake, make her breathless, disorientated.