India Grey - Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper

‘I’m happy on my own,’ Sarah said stubbornly. It wasn’t exactly a lie; she was happy enough. But she only had to think back to the dark, compelling Italian who had kissed her at Angelica’s hen party to know that she was also only half-alive. Briskly she moved around the table, stacking crockery, keeping her hands busy. ‘You’re just missing Guy. You always get ridiculously sentimental when he’s not here.’

Guy and Hugh and all his friends weren’t arriving until tomorrow, so tonight it was just ‘the girls’, as Angelica called them. Martha shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I’m just an old romantic. But I don’t want you to miss your chance at love because you’re determined to look the other way, that’s all.’

Fat chance of that , thought Sarah, carrying the plates back to the kitchen. Her love life was a vast, deserted plain. If anything ever did chance to appear on the horizon she’d be certain to see it. Whether it would stop or not was another matter altogether.

Looming ahead of her through the Tuscan night, the farmhouse was a jumble of uneven buildings and gently sloping roofs. The kitchen was at one end, a low-ceilinged single-storey addition that Angelica said had once been a dairy. Sarah went in and switched the light on, tiredly setting down the pile of plates on the un-rustic shiny marble countertop. Despite being utterly uninterested in cooking, Angelica and Hugh had spared no expense in the creation of the kitchen, and Sarah couldn’t quite stamp out a hot little flare of envy as she looked around, mentally comparing it with the tiny, grim galley kitchen in her flat in London.

Crossly she turned on the cold tap and let the water run over her wrists. Heat, tiredness and a glass of Chianti had lowered her defences tonight, making it harder than usual to hold back all kinds of forbidden thoughts. She turned off the tap and went back out into the humid evening, pressing her cool, damp hands against her hot neck, beneath her hair. As she returned to the table Angelica was running through the catalogue of disasters that had beset the renovations.

‘…it seems he’s absolutely fanatical about having everything as natural and authentic as possible. He confronted our architect with this obscure bit of Tuscan planning law that meant we weren’t allowed to put a glass roof on the kitchen, but had to reuse the old tiles. Something to do with maintaining the original character of the building.’

Fenella rolled her eyes. ‘That’s all very well for him to say, since he lives in a sixteenth-century palazzo. Does he expect you to live like peasants just because you bought a farmhouse?’

Martha looked up with a smile as Sarah sat down again. ‘Hugh and Angelica have fallen foul of the local aristocracy,’ she explained. ‘From Palazzo Castellaccio, further up the lane.’

‘Aristocracy?’ Angelica snorted. ‘I wouldn’t mind if he was, but he’s definitely new money. A film director. Lorenzo Cavalleri, he’s called. He’s married to that stunning Italian actress, Tia de Luca.’

Fenella was visibly excited. Dropping a celebrity name in front of her had roughly the same effect as dropping a biscuit in front of a dog. ‘Tia de Luca? Not any more apparently.’ She sat up straighter, practically pricking up her ears and panting. ‘There’s an interview with her in that magazine I bought at the airport yesterday. Apparently she left her husband for Ricardo Marcello, and she’s pregnant.’

‘Ooh, how exciting,’ said Angelica avidly. ‘Ricardo Marcello’s gorgeous. Is the baby his, then?’

You’d think they were talking about intimate acquaintances, thought Sarah, stifling another yawn. She knew who Tia de Luca was, of course—everyone did—but couldn’t get excited about the complicated love life of someone she would never meet and with whom she had nothing in common. Fenella was clearly untroubled by such details.

‘Not sure—from what she said, I think the baby might be the husband’s, you know, Lorenzo Whatshisname.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Have you met him?’

Across the table, Lottie was lolling on her grandmother’s knee, her thumb in her mouth. She was obviously exhausted, and Sarah’s own eyelids felt as if they had lead weights attached to them; leaning back in her chair, she tipped up her head and allowed herself the momentary luxury of closing them while the conversation ebbed around her.

‘No,’ Angelica said. ‘Hugh has. Says he’s difficult. Typical Italian alpha male, all arrogant and stand-offish and superior. We have to keep on the right side of him though, because the church where we’re getting married is actually on part of his land.’

‘Mmm…’ Fenella’s voice was warm and throaty. ‘He sounds delish. I wouldn’t mind getting on the right side of an Italian alpha male…’

Sarah opened her eyes, dragging herself ruthlessly back from the edge of that tempting abyss.

‘Come on, Lottie. It’s time you were in bed.’

At the mention of her name Lottie struggled sleepily upright, reluctant as ever to leave a party. ‘I’m not, Mummy,’ she protested. ‘Really…’

‘Uh-uh.’ Lottie had the persuasive powers of a politician, and usually Sarah’s resistance in the face of her killer combination of sweetness and logic was pitifully low. But not tonight. A mixture of exhaustion and an odd, restless feeling of dissatisfaction sharpened her tone. ‘Bed. Now.’

Lottie blinked up at the sky over Sarah’s shoulder. Her forehead was creased up with worry. ‘There’s no moon,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t they have the moon in Italy?’

In an instant Sarah’s edgy frustration melted away. The moon was Lottie’s touchstone, her security blanket. ‘Yes, they do,’ she said softly, ‘but tonight it must be tucked up safely behind all the clouds. Look, there are no stars either.’

Lottie’s frown eased a little. ‘If there are clouds, does that mean it’s going to rain?’

‘Oh, gosh, don’t say that,’ laughed Angelica, getting up and coming over to give Lottie a goodnight kiss. ‘It better not. The whole point of having the wedding here was the weather. It never rains in Tuscany!’

It was going to rain.

Standing at the open window of the study, Lorenzo breathed in the scent of dry earth and looked up into a sky of starless black. Down here the night was hot and heavy, but a sudden breeze stirred the tops of the cypress trees along the drive, making them shiver and whisper that a change was on the way.

Grazie a Dio. The dry spell had lasted for months now, and the ground was cracking and turning to dust. In the garden Alfredo had almost used up his barrels of hoarded rainwater, laboriously filling watering cans to douse the plants wilting in the limonaia , and in daylight the view of the hillside below Palazzo Castellaccio was as uniformally brown as a faded sepia print.

Suddenly from behind him in the room there came a low gasp of sensual pleasure, and Lorenzo turned round just in time to see his ex-wife’s lover bend over her naked body, circling her rosy nipple with his tongue.

Expertly done, he thought acidly as the huge plasma screen above the fireplace was filled with a close shot of Tia’s parted lips. Ricardo Marcello was about as good at acting as your average plank of wood but he certainly came to life in the sex scenes, with the result that the completed film—a big-budget blockbuster about the early life of the sixteenth-century Italian scientist Galileo—contained rather more of them than Lorenzo had originally planned. Audiences across the world were likely to leave the cinema with little notion of Galileo as the father of modern science but with a lingering impression of him as a three-times-a-night man who was prodigiously gifted in a Kama Sutra of sexual positions.