Шэрон Кендрик: The Italian's Christmas Housekeeper

‘No need for that. I’ll wait here,’ he said.

She wanted to tell him he was making her feel awkward by standing there, like some kind of brooding, dark statue—just staring at her. As if he had read her thoughts, he strolled over towards the window and she became aware of an almost imperceptible limp in his right leg. Had he injured himself when out running and should she ask him whether he needed a bandage or something? Perhaps not. Someone with his confidence would be bound to ask for one.

She could feel a stray strand of hair tickling the back of her neck and wished she’d had time to fix it. Or had been sitting reading some novel which might have made her look interesting, instead of scoffing cake and emphasising the fact that she was heavy and ungainly.

‘I’ll try to be as quick as I can,’ she said, reaching up into one of the cupboards for a clean glass.

‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said lazily.

Because that much was true. Salvio had decided that he was enjoying himself though he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was the novelty factor of being with the kind of woman he didn’t come across very often—at least, not any more. Not since he’d left behind the backstreets of Naples, along with those women whose curves defined fecundity and into whose generous flesh a man could sink after a long, hard day. Women like this one, who blushed alluringly if they caught you looking at them.

He had waited for a moment to see if she would recognise him. If she knew who he was—or, rather, who he had been. But no. He was familiar with recognition in all its forms—from greedy delight right through to feigned ignorance—but there had been no trace of any of those on her face. And why should there be? She was much younger than him and from a different country. How would she have known that in his native Italy he had once been famous?

He watched her busying herself, her curvy silhouette reminding him of the bottles of Verdicchio which used to line the shelves of the city bar he’d swept as a boy, before the talent scouts had discovered him and ended his childhood. She turned to switch on the coffee maker and a sudden dryness turned his throat to dust because...her breasts. He swallowed. Madonna mia —what breasts! He was glad when she turned away to open the fridge door because his erection was pressing uncomfortably against his shorts, though, when she did, he then became mesmerised by her shapely bottom. He was just fantasising about what her shiny brown hair would look like loose when she turned around and surveyed him with eyes as grey as the Santissima Annunziata Maggiore—that beautiful church in Naples, which had once been an orphanage.

Their gazes clashed and mingled and something unspoken fizzled in the air as Salvio felt a leap of something he couldn’t define. The hardness in his groin was familiar but the sudden clench of his heart was not. Was it lust? His mouth twisted. Of course it was lust—for what else could it be? It just happened to be more powerful than usual because it had taken him by surprise.

Yet there was no answering hunger in her quiet, grey gaze—something which perplexed him, for when didn’t a woman look at him with desire in her eyes? She was wary, he found himself thinking, with a flicker of amusement. Almost as if she were silently reproaching him for his insolent appraisal—and maybe that sentiment was richly deserved. What was he doing surveying her curvy body, like a boy from a single-sex school who was meeting a beautiful woman for the first time?

‘You’re the cook?’ he questioned, trying to redeem himself with a safe, if rather banal question.

She nodded. ‘Sort of. Officially, I’m the housekeeper but I do a bit of everything. Answer the door to guests and make sure their rooms are serviced, that sort of thing.’ She pushed the coffee towards him. ‘Will there be anything else, Signor De Gennaro?’

He smiled. ‘Salvio. And you are?’

She looked taken aback, as if people didn’t ask her name very often. ‘It’s Molly,’ she answered shyly, in a voice so soft it felt like silk lingerie brushing against his skin. ‘Molly Miller.’

Molly Miller. He found himself wanting to repeat it, but the conversation—such as it was—was terminated by the sudden sweep of car headlights arcing powerfully across the room. As he heard the sound of a large car swishing over gravel, Salvio saw the way she flinched and automatically tugged at her drab dress so that it hung more uniformly over her wide hips.

‘That’s the Averys.’

‘I thought it must be.’

‘You’d better... You’d better go,’ she said, unable to keep the waver of urgency from her voice. ‘I’m supposed to be preparing dinner and Lady Avery won’t like finding a guest in the kitchen.’

Salvio was tempted to tell her that he didn’t give a damn what Lady Avery would or wouldn’t like but he could see the fear which had darkened her soft grey eyes. With a flicker of irritation he picked up his espresso and water and headed for the door. ‘Grazie mille,’ he said, leaving the warm and steamy kitchen and walking rapidly towards the staircase, reluctant to be around when the Averys burst into the hallway.

But once back in his own room, he was irritated to discover that the low burn of desire was refusing to leave him. So that instead of the hot shower he’d promised himself, Salvio found himself standing beneath jets of punishingly cold water as he tried to push the curves of the sweet little housekeeper from the forefront of his mind and to quell the exquisite hardness which throbbed at his groin.

CHAPTER TWO

‘MOLLY, THESE POTATOES are frightful. We can’t possibly ask Signor De Gennaro to eat them. Have they even seen an oven? They’re like rocks!’

Molly could feel herself flushing to the roots of her hair as she met Lady Avery’s accusing stare. Were they? She blinked. Surely she’d blasted them for the required time, carefully basting them with goose fat to make them all golden and crispy? But no. Now she stopped to look at them properly—they were definitely on the anaemic side.

She could feel her cheeks growing even pinker as she reached towards the table to pick up the dish. ‘I’m so sorry, Lady Avery. I’ll pop them back in the—’

‘Don’t bother!’ snapped her employer. ‘It will be midnight before they’re fit to eat and I don’t intend going to bed on a full stomach. And I’m sure Salvio won’t want to either.’

Was it Molly’s imagination, or did Lady Avery shoot the Italian a complicit smile from the other side of the table? The way she said his name sounded unmistakably predatory and the look she was giving him was enough to make Molly’s stomach turn. Surely the aristocrat wasn’t hinting that she intended ending up in bed with him, not with her husband sitting only a few feet away?

Yet it had struck her as odd when Sarah Avery had come down for dinner wearing the tightest and lowest-cut dress imaginable, so that the priceless blaze of the Avery diamonds dazzled like stars against her aging skin. She’d been flirting outrageously with the Italian businessman ever since Molly had served pre-dinner drinks and showed no sign of stopping. And meanwhile, her husband—two decades older and already a quarter of the way through his second bottle of burgundy—seemed oblivious to the undercurrents which had been swirling around the dinner table ever since they’d sat down.

The meal had been a disaster from the moment she’d put the starters on the table and Molly couldn’t understand why. She was a good cook. She knew that. Hadn’t she spent years cooking for her mother and little brother, trying to produce tasty food on a shoestring budget? And hadn’t part of her job interview for Lady Avery consisted of producing a full afternoon tea—including a rich and rather heavy fruit cake—within the space of just two hours...a feat she had managed with ease? A simple meal for just three people should have been a breeze, but Molly hadn’t factored in Salvio De Gennaro, or the effect his brooding presence would have on her employer. Or, if she was being honest, on her.