Leonetti's Housekeeper Bride

Leonetti's Housekeeper Bride
LYNNE GRAHAM

His innocent wife…The last thing Gaetano Leonetti wants is to be shackled in marriage, but his grandfather has decreed that if he’s to become CEO of the family’s bank Gaetano must find a nice, ordinary woman to wed.Convinced his grandfather is mad, Gaetano sets about proving him wrong with housekeeper Poppy Arnold. With her outspoken nature and unusual dress sense, she’s definitely not wife material!But it’s not long before hard-working, self-sacrificing Poppy charms his grandfather, and Gaetano’s stuck with a union he didn’t want and a bride he sinfully craves! Having set her up to fail, can he really take the precious gift of her virginity?

‘Think about what I’m offering you. You can reclaim your life and return to being a carefree student,’ Gaetano pointed out, his persuasion insidious. ‘No more scrubbing floors or serving drinks.’

‘Stop!’ Poppy said, leaping to her feet to walk restively around the room while she battled the tempting possibilities he had placed in front of her.

Gaetano studied her from below heavily lashed eyelids. She would surrender—of course she would. As a teenager she had been ambitious, and he could still see that spirited spark of wanting more than her servant ancestors had ever wanted glowing within her.

‘And of course your ultimate goal is becoming CEO of the Leonetti Bank—and marrying me will deliver that,’ Poppy filled in slowly, her luminous green eyes skimming to his lean darkly handsome features in wonderment. ‘I can’t believe how ambitious you are.’

‘The bank is my life. It always has been,’ Gaetano admitted without apology. ‘Nothing gives me as much of a buzz as a profitable deal.’

‘I’ll give you an answer in the morning.’

Gaetano slid fluidly out of his seat and approached her. ‘But you already know the answer. You like what I do to you,’ he said huskily, with blazing confidence, running a teasing forefinger down over her cheek to stroke it along the soft curve of her full lower lip.

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married to an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog who knocks everything over, a very small terrier who barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Leonetti’s Housekeeper Bride

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Contents

Cover (#u99637037-e48b-50f4-af51-7d162d407095)

Introduction (#u96d45a90-c3b3-5b28-a19f-54e01d4d0fc7)

About the Author (#u332d7bf8-18d3-5d28-9dfd-c9a68b0c76dc)

Title Page (#u6eba0283-dd27-5195-969a-b62673f31919)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_6a655a87-b07e-53c9-bada-46b10f8cf694)

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_39e40028-36a1-5224-a9b2-46d8461f8533)

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_e5fbead3-a940-532f-8614-0693d53a22ca)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_47555b5c-c89e-5096-8012-fe07ebb709f3)

GAETANO LEONETTI WAS having a very bad day. It had started at dawn, when his phone went off and proceeded to show him a series of photos that enraged him but which he knew would enrage his grandfather and the very conservative board of the Leonetti investment bank even more. Regrettably, sacking the woman responsible for the story in the downmarket tabloid was likely to be the sole satisfaction he could hope to receive.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Tom Sandyford, Gaetano’s middle-aged legal adviser and close friend, told him quietly.

‘Of course it’s my fault,’ Gaetano growled. ‘It was my house, my party and the woman in my bed at the time who organised the damned party—’

‘Celia was that soap star with the cocaine habit you didn’t know about,’ Tom reminisced. ‘Wasn’t she sacked from the show soon after you ditched her?’

Gaetano nodded, his even white teeth gritting harder.

‘It’s a case of bad luck...that’s all,’ Tom opined. ‘You can’t ask your guests to post their credentials beforehand, so you had no way of knowing some of them weren’t tickety-boo.’

‘Tickety-boo?’ Gaetano repeated, his lean, darkly handsome features frowning. Although he was born and raised in England, Italian had been the language of his home and he still occasionally came across English words and phrases that were unfamiliar.

‘Decent upstanding citizens,’ Tom rephrased. ‘So, a handful of them were hookers? Well, in the rarefied and very privileged world you move in, how were you supposed to find that out?’

‘The press found it out,’ Gaetano countered flatly.

‘With the usual silly “Orgy at the Manor” big reveal. It’ll be forgotten in five minutes...although that blonde dancing naked in the fountain out front is rather memorable,’ Tom remarked, scanning the newspaper afresh with lascivious intent.

‘I don’t remember seeing her. I left the party early to fly to New York. Everyone still had their clothes on at that stage,’ Gaetano said drily. ‘I really don’t need another scandal like this.’

‘Scandal does rather seem to follow you around. I suppose the old man and the board at the bank are up in arms as usual,’ Tom commented with sympathy.

Gaetano compressed his wide sensual mouth in silent agreement. In the name of family loyalty and respect, he was paying in the blood of his fierce pride and ambition for the latest scandal. Letting his seventy-four-year-old grandfather Rodolfo carpet him like a badly behaved schoolboy had proved to be a truly toxic experience for a billionaire whose investment advice was sought by governments both in the UK and abroad. And when Rodolfo had settled into his favourite preaching session about Gaetano’s womanising lifestyle, Gaetano had had to breathe in deeply several times and resist the urge to point out to the older man that expectations and values had changed since the nineteen forties for both men and women.

Rodolfo Leonetti had married a humble fisherman’s daughter at the age of twenty-one and during his fifty years of devoted marriage he had never looked at another woman. Ironically, his only child, Gaetano’s father, Rocco, had not taken his father’s advice on the benefits of making an early marriage either. Rocco had been a notorious playboy and an incorrigible gambler. He had married a woman young enough to be his daughter when he was in his fifties, had fathered one son and had expired ten years later after over-exerting himself in another woman’s bed. Gaetano reckoned he had been paying for his father’s sins almost from the hour of his birth. At the age of twenty-nine and one of the world’s leading bankers, he was tired of being continually forced to prove his worth and confine his projects to the narrow expectations of the board. He had made millions for the Leonetti Bank; he deserved to be CEO.

Indeed, Rodolfo’s angry ultimatum that very morning had outraged Gaetano.

‘You will never be the chief executive of this bank until you change your way of life and settle down into being a respectable family man!’ his grandfather had sworn angrily. ‘I will not support your leadership with the board and, no matter how brilliant you are, Gaetano, the board always listens to me... They remember too well how your father almost brought the bank down with his risky ventures!’

Yet what, realistically, did Gaetano’s sex life have to do with his acumen and expertise as a banker? Since when were a wife and children the only measure of a man’s judgement and maturity?

Gaetano had not the slightest interest in getting married. In fact he shuddered at the idea of being anchored to one woman for the rest of his life while living in fear of a divorce that could deprive him of half of his financial portfolio. He was a very hard worker. He had earned his academic qualifications with honours in the most prestigious international institutions and his achievements since then had been immense. Why wasn’t that enough? In comparison his father had been an academically slow and spoiled rich boy who, like Peter Pan, had refused to grow up. Such a comparison was grossly unfair.

Tom dealt Gaetano a rueful appraisal. ‘You didn’t get the old “find an ordinary girl” spiel again, did you?’

‘“An ordinary girl, not a party girl, one who takes pleasure in the simple things of life,”’ Gaetano quoted verbatim because his grandfather’s discourses always ran to the same conclusion: marry, settle down, father children with a home-loving female...and the world would then miraculously become Gaetano’s oyster with little happy unicorns dancing on some misty horizon shaped by a rainbow. His lean bronzed features hardened with grim cynicism. He had seen just how well that fantasy had turned out for once-married and now happily divorced friends.