Hired: Mistress: Wanted: Mistress and Mother / His Private Mistress / The Millionaire's Secret Mistress

The interior of the house was just as impressive as the exterior. Hugh held open the front door then headed off to Matilda’s car to retrieve her bags and the two women stepped inside and walked along the jarrahfloored hallways, Matilda’s sandals echoing on the solid wood as she took in the soft white sofas and dark wooden furnishings, huge mirrors opening up the already vast space, reflecting the ocean at every turn so that wherever you looked the waves seemed to beckon. Or Jasmine smiled down at you! An inordinate number of photos of Dante’s late wife adorned the walls, her gorgeous face captured from every angle, and Matilda felt a quiet discomfort as she gazed around, her cheeks flaming as she recalled the stinging kiss of Dante.

‘My daughter.’ Katrina’s eyes followed Matilda’s and they paused for a moment as they admired her tragic beauty. ‘I had this photo blown up and framed just last week—it’s good for Alex to be able to see her and I know it gives Dante a lot of comfort.’

‘It must…’ Matilda stumbled. ‘She really was very beautiful.’

‘And clever,’ Katrina added. ‘She had it all, brains and beauty. She was amazing, a wonderful mother and wife. None of us will ever get over her loss.’

‘I can’t even begin to imagine…’ Despite the cool breeze from the air-conditioner, despite the high ceilings and vastness of the place, Matilda felt incredibly hot and uncomfortable. Despite her earlier misgivings, she was very keen to meet Dante now—even his savage personality was preferable to the discomfort she felt with Katrina.

‘Dante especially,’ Katrina continued, and Matilda was positive, despite her soft words and pensive smile, that there was a warning note to her voice, an icy message emanating from her cool blue eyes. ‘I’ve never seen a man so broken with grief. He just adored her, adored her,’ Katrina reiterated. ‘Do you know, the day she died he sent flowers to her office. It was a Saturday but she had to pop into work and get some files. She took Alex with her—that was the sort of woman she was. Anyway, Dante must have rung every florist in Melbourne. He wanted to send her some jasmine, her namesake, but it was winter, of course, so it was impossible to find, but Dante being Dante he managed to organise it—he’d have moved heaven and earth for her.’

It was actually a relief to get into the kitchen. After Katrina’s onslaught it was actually a relief to confront the man she’d been so nervous of meeting again. But as she stepped inside it was as if she was seeing him for the very first time. The man she remembered bore little witness to the one she saw now. Everything about him seemed less formal. Of course, she hadn’t expected him to greet her in a suit—it was Sunday after all—but somehow she’d never envisaged him in jeans and a T-shirt, or, if she had, it would have been in dark, starched denim and a crisp white designer label T-shirt, not the faded, scruffy jeans that encased him, not the untucked, unironed white T-shirt that he was wearing. And she certainly hadn’t pictured him at a massive wooden table, kneading bread, with his daughter, Alex’s eyes staring ahead as she rhythmically worked the dough.

‘Dante, Alexandra,’ Katrina called. ‘Matilda has arrived.’

Only one pair of eyes looked up. Alexandra carried on kneading the dough and any thought of witnessing Dante’s softer side was instantly quashed as his black eyes briefly met hers.

‘Good afternoon.’

His greeting was also his dismissal.

His attention turning immediately back to his daughter, picking up a large shaker and sprinkling the dough with more flour as the little girl worked on.

‘Good afternoon.’ Matilda forced a smile to no one in particular. ‘You’re making bread…’

‘No.’ Dante stood up, dusted his floured hands on his jeans ‘We are kneading dough and playing with flour.’

‘Oh!’

‘We’ve been kneading dough and playing with flour since lunchtime, actually!’

Another ‘oh’ was on the tip of her tongue, but Matilda held it back, grateful when Katrina took over this most awkward of conversations.

‘It’s one of Alex’s pastimes,’ Katrina explained as Hugh came back in. ‘She was upset after lunch—you know what children can be like.’ Dante gave a tight smile as Katrina dismissed the slightly weary note to his voice. Something told Matilda that whatever had eventuated had been rather more than the usual childhood tantrum. ‘Hugh, why don’t you go and take Matilda around the garden?’ Katrina said. ‘It seems a shame to break things up when Dante and Alex are having such fun.’

‘Hugh’s supposed to be resting,’ Dante pointed out. ‘I’ll take Matilda around.’

‘Fine,’ Katrina said, though clearly it was anything but! ‘Then I’ll go and check that everything’s in order in the summerhouse for Matilda.’

‘The summerhouse?’ Dante frowned. ‘I had the guest room made up for her. Janet prepared it this morning.’

‘Well, it won’t kill Janet to prepare the summerhouse! She’s the housekeeper,’ Katrina explained to a completely bemused Matilda. ‘I can help her set it up. It will be far nicer for Matilda. She can have some privacy and it might unsettle Alex, having a stranger in the house—no offence meant, Matilda.’

‘None taken.’ Matilda thought her face might crack with the effort of smiling. ‘It really doesn’t matter a scrap where I stay. I’m going to be working long hours, I just need somewhere to sleep and eat…’

‘There’s a lovely little kitchenette in the summerhouse. I’ll have some bacon and eggs and bread put in, that type of thing—you’ll be very comfortable.’

‘It’s your fault.’ Dante broke the appalling silence as they stepped outside.

‘What is?’ Matilda blinked.

‘That you’ve been banished.’ He gave her a glimmer of a dry smile. ‘You’re too good-looking for Katrina.’

‘Oh!’A tiny nervous giggle escaped her lips, embarrassed by what he had said but relieved all the same that he had acknowledged the problem. ‘I don’t think she likes me very much.’

‘She’d have been hoping for a ruddy-faced, gumchewing, crop-haired gardener. I have the ugliest staff in the world—all hand-picked by Katrina.’ Startled by his coarseness, Matilda actually laughed as they walked, amazed to find herself relaxing a touch in his presence.

‘Yesterday’s newspapers can’t have helped matters much,’ she ventured, referring to the string of women he’d dated since his wife’s death, but Dante just shrugged.

‘Ships that pass in the night even Katrina can live with.’

The callousness of his words had Matilda literally stopping in her tracks for a moment, waiting for him to soften it with a smile, to tell her he was joking, but Dante strode on, forcing Matilda to catch him up, and try to continue the conversation. ‘Do your in-laws live here with you?’

‘God, no.’ Dante shuddered. ‘They live a few kilometres away. But we’re interviewing for a new nanny at the moment—preferably one over sixty with a wooden leg if Katrina has her way. That’s why she’s around so much. Like it or not at the moment I do need her help with Alex, but if I decide to stay here in Australia…’ He stopped talking then, just simply stopped in mid-sentence with no apology or explanation, clearly deciding he had said enough. Silence descended again as they walked on the manicured lawn past a massive pool, surrounded by a clear Perspex wall. Matilda gazed at the pool longingly.

‘Use it any time,’ Dante offered.

‘Thanks,’ Matilda replied, knowing full well she wouldn’t. The thought of undressing, of wearing nothing more than a bikini around Dante not exactly soothing.

‘This is the garden,’ Dante said as they came to a gate. ‘It’s in a real mess, very neglected, overgrown with blackberries and bracken, I’ve been meaning to get it cleared, but my gardener is getting old. It takes all his time just to keep up with the regular work, let alone this. Oh, and one other thing…’ His hand paused on the gate. ‘The bill is to come to me.’

‘Hugh employed me,’ Matilda pointed out.

‘Hugh does not need to pay for my renovations—you will send the bill to me, Matilda.’

But she didn’t want to send the bill to him—and it had nothing to do with money. Financially it made not a scrap of difference to Matilda who picked up the bill. Instead, it was the disturbing thought of being answerable somehow to Dante, of him employing her, that made Matilda strangely nervous.

‘Do you need an advance?’

‘An advance?’ Instantly, she regretted her words. Her mind had been utterly elsewhere and now she sounded stupid.

‘An advance of money,’ Dante not too patiently explained. ‘To pay the subcontractors. I don’t know what arrangement you had with Hugh—’

‘Have with Hugh,’ Matilda corrected, watching as Dante’s face darkened. Clearly he was not used to being defied, but even though an advance would be wonderful now, even though she had a hundred and one people that would need to be paid, and very soon, she damn well wasn’t going to give in to him, absolutely refused to let him dictate his terms to her. ‘My business is with Hugh. If you want to settle up with him, that’s your choice.’

Surprisingly he didn’t argue, but as he pushed open the gate she could tell he was far from pleased, but, refusing to back down, refusing to even look at him, she stepped into the garden and as she did all thoughts of money and who was the boss faded in an instant. Despite Dante’s gloomy predictions, all she could see was beauty—the sleeping princess that lay beneath the overgrown bracken and thorns.

Dante’s manicured gardens were wonderful, but, for Matilda, nothing could beat the raw natural beauty of a neglected garden, a blank canvas for her to work on. It was about the size of a suburban block of land, the centrepiece a massive willow, more than a hundred years in the making, one lifetime simply not enough to produce its full majesty. But that was part of the beauty of her work. A new garden was a mere a sketch on the canvas—the colour, the depth was added over the years, seeds sown that would flourish later, shrubs, trees that would develop, blossom and grow long, long after the cheque had been paid and her tools cleared away.

‘Vistas.’ It was the first thing that came to mind and she said it out loud, registering his frown. ‘Lots of walkways all coming from the willow, lined with hedges and each one leading to a different view, a special area for Alex…’

‘You can do something with it?’

She didn’t answer, just gave a distracted nod as she pictured the bosky paths, a water feature at the end of one, a sand pit at the end of the other, and…

‘A castle,’ Matilda breathed. ‘An enchanted castle, like a fairy-tale. I know someone who makes the most beautiful cubby houses…’ Her voice trailed off as she stared down at the ground, her sandals scuffing the earth. ‘We’ll use turf for now, but I’ll plant lots of different things so that each path will be different—clover for one, daisies for another, buttercups…’

‘Will you be able to do it in the time-frame?’