The Italian's One-Night Love-Child

‘You mean you’re not flattered?’

‘I mean I don’t know you…’

‘So dinner would be the perfect opportunity to rectify that situation!’ He noticed that he had somehow been manoeuvred towards the front door and her small, pale hand was very firmly round the door handle. He watched in disbelief as she began turning the knob. He had, literally, been shown the door!

‘I don’t think so, but thanks for the invitation anyway. And…for the plant as well. I’ll make sure that I look after it, although I’ve never been very good with plants.’

‘Funny. Nor have I.’ He leaned indolently against the door, making it impossible for her to open it. ‘Already we have one thing in common.’

‘Do you do this a lot?’ Bethany asked, heart beating like a hammer inside her because something about him was sending her nervous system into overdrive. ‘Pop in to random strangers’ houses and ask them out to dinner? Okay, so it’s not rude as such, but you have to admit that it’s a bit strange. I mean…’ she tested the water ‘…you don’t know me from Adam. Goodness, I could be anyone!’

‘Yes,’ Cristiano said thoughtfully, ‘you could be anyone. Axe-murderer, psychopath…’ He shot her a curling smile that made her catch her breath. ‘Worse than that, scheming gold-digger after my money…However, you do have certain credentials, namely your connection with my mother and…’ he looked briefly around him, then back to her ‘…the fact that you own a place like this. Axe-murderers, psychopaths and gold-diggers probably wouldn’t be into charity fundraising or have holiday apartments in one of the best postcodes in Rome. So my fears are put to rest.’

Bethany was beginning to feel giddy from the torrent of misconceptions swimming around her. Credentials? Knowing his mother? Owning the apartment?

‘And, admit it, you have to eat.’

‘I…I actually don’t like eating out. I prefer eating in. Cooking. So many wonderful fresh ingredients over here. It’s fun to experiment.’

‘Fine. I’ll come here.’

‘But you can’t.’ She stared up at the dangerously good-looking face gazing right back down at her and was overcome with the unusual sensation of walking on the very edge of a precipice. The view was tremendous, but falling was a real possibility.

‘Of course I can.’ Cristiano shrugged. Blessed with a lethal combination of looks, brains and wealth, he had yet to come across a member of the opposite sex who could resist him, and he refused to credit that the woman standing in front of him would prove to be the exception. ‘I can either come here or I can pick you up at eight.’

‘Why? Why do you want to take me out to dinner? Did your mother ask you to?’

‘Why should she do that?’ Cristiano’s brows knitted into a perplexed frown. ‘My mother has no involvement in my personal life and, in fact, she’ll be very firmly ensconced in the country by the time I come over here later.’ He pushed himself away from the door, not taking his eyes off her face. She really had the most marvellous skin. Translucent. Even without make-up. Not at all like the sultry brunettes he normally favoured. His mother had said very little about her but, then again, why should she have? It would seem that the woman was merely a friend of a friend of a friend who had been sequestered to help out for the charity bash, hence the orchid, which was an expensive but fairly impersonal way of demonstrating appreciation. Anyway, it was a good thing that nothing had been said because it would have been a surefire way of turning him off.

‘All mothers have involvement in their children’s lives,’ Bethany was distracted enough to point out, thinking of her own mother who clucked and fussed and still sent food parcels in the post from Ireland just to make sure that she wasn’t on the brink of starvation.

‘When it comes to women, I keep things strictly to myself.’ He opened the door, not allowing her the chance to become embroiled in a debate on a non-subject which would give her the opportunity to remember that she was busily trying to turn him down. He’d never been turned down. Furthermore, he had highly sensitised antennae and they were picking up her interest in him. He couldn’t understand why she would try and fight something as innocent as a dinner date but, whatever her reasons, that wide-eyed way she kept backing away intrigued him. Of course, she could just be playing hard to get, but he seriously doubted that. She had a face that spoke volumes. In fact, he hadn’t seen such an openly expressive face since…frankly, he couldn’t remember. ‘I should warn you that I usually get what I want,’ he inserted without vanity.

‘And you want dinner with me. Before you leave tomorrow.’

‘Finally!’ He gave her another of those amazing, toe-curling smiles. ‘We have lift-off.’ He took her hand, catching her by surprise, and turned it palm up so that he could press a brief kiss against her soft skin in a gesture that seemed purely, wickedly Italian and thrilled her to the bone.

‘I suppose so. But…but it’ll have to be an early night…’ she said anxiously.

‘You mean back home before the stroke of midnight when you revert to being a pumpkin?’

Bethany went bright red. She honestly couldn’t say what had propelled her to accept the dinner invitation, but there was a trail of treacherous excitement curling inside her, starting at the tips of her toes, going right through her body to her dazed green eyes, which were locked onto his face with nervous fascination. Not even his quip about the pumpkin and midnight could wrench her from her foolhardy fascination and she was still feeling shell-shocked after he had gone.

It was only when she caught sight of herself in the floor to ceiling mirror in the bedroom that reality assaulted her with merciless clarity and she dialled Amy on her mobile phone.

She had to contain an impatient moan of pure frustration as Amy’s excitable voice greeted her on the other end of the line with an enthusiastic rundown of her latest conquest and the fabulous Florentine sights, which they had yet to see because the bed was proving too alluring.

Bethany waited until she had run out of steam and then said hesitantly, ‘Little problem on this end.’ The floaty dress was still in evidence, witness to her moment of madness.

‘Oh, God! Tell me the apartment hasn’t burnt down!’

‘Still in one piece. But there’s been a visitor…and here’s the thing…’ The dress, which had seemed so temptingly beautiful, now stared balefully back at her from the mirror as she proceeded to tell her friend what had recently transpired. She kept getting muddled up because, in her head, all she could see was the stranger’s lean, dark, outrageously sexy face looking at her in a way that was both intrusive and scarily exciting and nothing at all like the way other boys back home had ever looked at her.

‘So you’re going out with him for dinner…Oh, God, let me think…okay, okay…might be for the best…’

‘Because…?’

Half an hour later, Bethany removed the offending dress, laid it on the bed because it would have to be dry-cleaned in the morning, and thought that there was a lot of truth about webs and lies and getting entangled. Catrina, the original house-sitter and cherished godchild of the hapless Amelia Doni, who was on a cruise a thousand miles away from Rome, was in London. In rehab. Very hush-hush, and all hell would break loose should loaded and doting godmother find out. So the task of house-sitting had fallen to Amy, with a code red level of secrecy but, Amy being Amy, Love had reared its head and her house-sitting mission had fallen quickly by the wayside. Thankfully, Bethany had been there, ever reliable and immune to being led astray. The sort of girl who enjoyed reading Italian books at night and thought that three glasses of wine qualified as a binge-drinking fest.

Now, as she stared down at the dress on the bed, Bethany wondered what had happened to Little Miss Reliability. The most daring thing she had done in ages had been to try that wretched dress on because yes, she really did enjoy curling up with a good book most nights and sometimes she even fulfilled that dreariest of clichеs by curling up with a good book and a mug of hot chocolate.

But now she had accepted a dinner invitation from a guy who was sinfully sexy and ultra-sophisticated. Moreover, it was just going to be a one-night affair, and if, for once, she acted out of character, if she behaved like the kind of person who might conceivably have a holiday apartment dripping with designer clothes, the kind of woman who thought nothing of hanging around in a dress that cost a small fortune, then why not? She would be helping Amy out because no one, but no one, could get a whiff of Catrina drying out in a clinic in the UK and the last thing anyone needed was for some connected Italian guy to start asking questions.

Bethany felt a kick of excitement stir inside her. Of course, whatever she wore that night she would have dry-cleaned. She wasn’t that irresponsible. She was just going to have a couple of hours of fun…no harm there…

Chapter Two

‘SO…TELL me about yourself…’

It was an inevitable question but it still made Bethany’s nerves jangle because after the initial crazy euphoria of wondering what it would be like to step into someone else’s shoes for a night had come the shattering reality that she was, in actual fact, going to spend a few hours in the company of a sex god under false pretences. Between Cristiano’s departure from the apartment and the sound of his voice four hours later on the intercom when he arrived to collect her, she had had ample time to concede that a man like him—sleek, sophisticated, extraordinarily handsome—would never have looked at a girl like her under normal circumstances. In fact, they would never even have met under normal circumstances.

Bethany, who had managed to fall back on most of her own clothes because leaving the house in someone else’s wardrobe seemed a bit rich, all things considered, wondered how best to answer his question.

She finally settled on a vague, nonsensical answer along the lines of being a free spirit.

‘What does that mean?’ Cristiano looked across at her. She intrigued him and he had found himself looking forward to their dinner more than he had looked forward to any date with a woman in a long time. Nor had she disappointed. When the elevator doors had pinged open and she had walked across the marbled foyer towards him, he had literally been stopped in his tracks. She might have had all the money she wanted at her disposal, but she had foregone the diamonds and pearls, the little black dress that screamed designer and the killer stilettos, and instead had dressed down in a pair of jeans and some flat tan loafers with a pale blue wrap over her shoulders. Cristiano liked it. It took a confident woman to go for comfort and it took a sexy one to pull it off.

‘What does that mean?’ Bethany’s natural warmth came out in her smile. Now that she was talking and not just gawping like a star-struck teenager, she could begin to relax a little and to enjoy the stolen moment in time. ‘You sound like someone who’s spent a lifetime living in a bubble.’

‘Living in a bubble…’ Cristiano looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I suppose I did grow up in a bubble of sorts. Coming from a privileged background can have that effect. You’re naturally supposed to do certain things…’

Bethany could only imagine. ‘Like what?’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t experienced the same sort of thing. A certain lifestyle to which you conform, more or less, from an early age.’

Bethany thought of her own riotous Irish upbringing, the house always full of friends and family, boyfriends in and out, their two dogs and three cats and the general happy chaos that had made up her formative years. Conforming to anything from an early age was an alien concept.

‘I’m more of a non-conformist,’ she said truthfully. ‘I mean, I’m not a wild child or anything like that, but I was never told that I had to be a certain way or do certain things.’

‘Perhaps things work a little differently in your part of the world,’ Cristiano murmured. ‘Here, in Italy, I have always known what my future held in store for me.’ They had drifted outside into a balmy summer evening.

‘That must have been tough.’

‘Tough? Why?’ He was fascinated by the thought of any woman who could apply the adjective tough to any aspect of his life. Even the richest of women he had dated in the past had been impressed to death by the breadth of his power and privilege. ‘Since when is it tough to have the world at your disposal?’

‘No one has the world at their disposal!’ Bethany laughed, as they began walking slowly towards his car, which he had parked, he had explained, in the only free space at the very end of the long road.

‘You’d be surprised.’