CATHY WILLIAMS - The Italian's Christmas Proposition

Matteo burst out laughing and she focused on his handsome face and glared.

‘I hadn’t banked on this,’ she said tightly. ‘You may find the whole thing hilarious but I don’t.’

‘I don’t find anything hilarious about this situation,’ Matteo shot back and, she thought for the millionth time, there was no need for him to remind her that she had brought this mess on herself. ‘But here we are. I’m going to move into your parents’ chalet today.’

‘Candice will know that you haven’t been living with me,’ Rosie pointed out.

‘How?’

‘There would be signs of us sharing a bedroom. You would have left stuff behind. Clothes on the backs of chairs. Shaving foam. Bedroom slippers. Aftershave…’

His eyebrows shot up, his expression halting her in mid-flow.

‘I have never spent a night in any woman’s house and, if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have left anything behind.’

Rosie’s mouth fell open and she gaped at him. ‘You’ve never stayed at a woman’s overnight?’ He was so arrogant, so beautiful, so sophisticated—she found it impossible to credit that he had never spent the night with a woman.

What woman, she guiltily thought, would let him out of her bed? It was an inappropriate thought but it lodged in her head, pounding with the steady force of a drum beat.

Matteo made a dismissive gesture with his hand that was both elegant and strangely exotic and she watched him from under lowered lashes, fascinated and mesmerised by the strong, proud lines of his handsome face.

‘I’m a normal, red-blooded man with a healthy libido,’ Matteo told her wryly. ‘I work hard and I play hard, but I don’t do love, and I never encourage a woman to think, even for a second, that I might.’

‘And if you spent a night with a woman…it would mean that you’re interested in more than just sex ?’

‘Forget about me,’ Matteo drawled. ‘The danger would lie in her believing that there might be more to it than sex.’

‘And yet you’re okay with spending time in the chalet with me?’

‘Oh, but you’re not my woman,’ Matteo purred silkily. ‘And this isn’t about sex. This is a little pretend game that’ll be over just as soon as I get what I’m after…’

ROSIE THOUGHT THAT it was one thing to produce Matteo as a boyfriend, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat then yanking him off stage before anyone had time to suss that it was all sleight of hand. It was something else to hold him up to scrutiny, which was what she would be doing by having him in the chalet with her. He would be spun around for inspection, asked questions, quizzed about his intentions. How was she going to deal with all that without cracking? How was he ?

Her sisters, in particular, had all made it their mission to make Rosie keep them posted on her love life and she had always obliged. They had met a couple of her fleeting boyfriends and had not held back from making their opinions known, politely but firmly. She was so much younger than them and they had never really stopped treating her like the baby of the family.

Hence, Rosie thought with uncharacteristic bitterness, the reason why she was where she was now.

She had bolted from the prospect of having their idea of a suitable partner presented to her instead of standing her ground—but why on earth had it occurred to them that they could actually match her up with someone of their choosing in the first place?

This time, she was going to deal with the situation calmly. If there were too many questions, she would just stop answering. If the quizzing from Candice and Emily went too far, she would tell them to back off.

Matteo was a perfect stranger, but some of his remarks had been a little too perceptive for comfort. They had made her see herself in a different and more critical light than she had ever done before.

She wasn’t silly and she didn’t feel entitled but she was a trust-fund baby in the truest sense of the word and she had felt embarrassed to acknowledge the fact.

‘You’re going to be held up to the spotlight,’ she warned. ‘Five minutes with Candice is quite different to several days with my entire family.’

‘I can take the heat,’ Matteo drawled. ‘Can you?’

Rosie looked at him steadily. ‘I know what you think of me,’ she said, matching him for self-composure and liking the way she felt empowered by it. ‘That I live off my parents, and float from one thing to the next and allow my entire family to have a say in my life, but this time round I am definitely going to take the heat.’ She grinned suddenly. ‘They’ll be shocked.’

‘Good,’ Matteo murmured approvingly. ‘Sometimes it’s worthwhile to shock.’

‘I just have one condition.’

‘I’m all ears,’ Matteo said wryly.

‘I’m the one to do the breaking up.’

Matteo looked at her, at a loss for a suitable response.

‘I can tell from your stunned expression that no one’s ever broken up with you before, am I right? None of those women you refuse to spend the night with, just in case they get ideas, has ever broken up with you…?’

‘Fate has smiled on me in that respect.’

‘Well,’ Rosie countered drily, ‘Either smiled on you or else made you incredibly arrogant.’

Matteo grinned and then he burst out laughing. ‘You’re the most unexpected woman I’ve ever met,’ he murmured. His eyes were lazy and shuttered and feathered over her like a caress. ‘I’ve never met anyone as honest and outspoken. You contradict your background. So…you want to break up with me. I don’t see why not. Maybe it’s high time I suffered from a broken heart, and it works for you, doesn’t it?’

Rosie nodded slowly. ‘I’m tired of my family feeling ever so slightly sorry for me.’

‘So you dump the eligible guy and you instantly gain their respect. Well, we’ll have to make sure that I’m the very besotted boyfriend, won’t we? Now, why don’t I check out of my suite here and we can both go to your chalet and begin this game…?’

His suite was breath-taking. Huge, with several rooms, including an open-plan kitchen, fully equipped but, she imagined, seldom used.

‘You want this to be a convincing act?’ he had put to her as they had emerged from the private room where they had been ensconced for ages. ‘You come with me to my suite while I pack my things. Then we check out together. I was here on business when we met. Now that your family are coming over, it’s only natural I shift base so that we can be together and meet them as a couple.’

Rosie looked at him as he efficiently gathered his belongings. While he packed, he conducted a series of calls in Italian, phone to his ear as he wandered from bedroom to living area, from bathroom to office, picking things up and tossing them in a case he had dumped on the glass table in the living area.

She got the feeling that he had forgotten about her completely.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ was the first thing she said when he was finally off the phone and the last of his things had been flung into the suitcase.

Here, in his suite, nerves assailed her. There was something so sleek and so innately dangerous about him that she found it impossible to think that they could convince her very perceptive and inquisitive family that they were really an item. Up close and personal, the force of his personality was more powerful, not less. She’d told herself that she wasn’t going to be browbeaten by their curiosity and their questions, but how on earth were they going to believe that she, Rosie, bubbly, extrovert and carefree, had lost her heart to someone like Matteo?

Add to that the fact that he really was a stranger and the uphill task of convincing anyone seemed insurmountable.