Jennifer Faye - Italian Mavericks - In The Italian's Bed - Leonetti's Housekeeper Bride / Inherited by Ferranti / Best Man for the Bridesmaid

Gaetano grimaced and flung his dark head back against the pillows. She didn’t understand. How could she? He could hardly tell her that she was supposed to bomb as a fiancée so that her disappearance from his life again would be more worthy of celebration than disappointment. Time would take care of that problem. After all, she had most likely been on her very best behaviour at her first meeting with his grandfather and sooner rather than later she would probably let herself down.

‘You used to swear a lot,’ he remarked out of the blue.

‘I picked it up at school because everyone used bad language. For a while I did it deliberately because I was being bullied and I was desperate to fit in,’ she confided.

‘Did it make a difference?’

‘No,’ she admitted with a wry laugh. ‘Nothing I wore or did or said could make me cool. Being plump with red hair and living at Woodfield Hall with “those posh bastards” was a supreme provocation to the other pupils.’

‘What did the bullies do?’

Thinking of her getting bullied, Gaetano was experiencing an extraordinary desire to pull her into his arms and comfort her. But he didn’t do comforting. Indeed he was downright unnerved by that perverse impulse and he actually shifted as far away from her as he could get and still be in the same bed.

‘All the usual. Name calling, tripping me up, nasty rumours and messages and texts,’ she recited wearily. ‘I hated school, couldn’t wait to get out of there. Once I was out, I stopped swearing as soon as I realised it offended people.’

He was tempted to tell her that she had never been plump. She had simply developed her womanly curves before she shot up in height. But right then he didn’t want to talk and he didn’t want to think about curves, womanly or otherwise. His hunger for her was making him uncomfortable and that infuriated him because Gaetano had never hungered that much for one particular woman. Beautiful women had always been pretty much interchangeable for him. It was the challenge, he told himself impatiently. He only wanted her because she was saying no. But that simplistic belief didn’t ease his tension in the slightest. It was, he decided grimly, likely to feel like a very long engagement.

* * *

First thing in the morning, Poppy looked amazing, Gaetano conceded hours later, studying her from across the bedroom. Her red hair streamed like a banner across the pale bedding, framing her delicate face and the rosebud pout of her lips. A narrow shoulder protruded from below his slipped tee shirt and the sheet was pushed back to bare one leg from knee to slender ankle. And that easily, that quickly, Gaetano had a hard-on again and gritted his teeth in annoyance. What the hell was it about her? He felt like a man trying to fight an invisible illness!

‘Poppy...?’

She shifted in the bed, lashes fluttering up on luminous green eyes. ‘Gaetano...?’ she whispered drowsily.

‘I left that prompt sheet I meant you to study last night on the desk in my home office. I’ll see you at Rodolfo’s party at three.’

Poppy sat up in a panic. ‘What will I wear?’

‘Your usual clothes. Be yourself,’ he reminded her as he vanished out of the door.

Poppy scrambled out of bed to follow him. ‘Where are you going?’

Gaetano swung round and sent her a pained appraisal. ‘Work...the bank.’

‘Oh...’ Having asked what appeared to be a stupid question, Poppy ducked hastily back into the bedroom and went for a shower while planning her own day.

First of all she had to go and buy the ingredients for her present for Rodolfo’s seventy-fifth. She could only hope that she wasn’t getting it wrong in the gift department. After that she had a rather more pressing need to attend to: finding work for herself. She had just about enough money in her purse to make Rodolfo’s cake but she had nothing more and no savings to fall back on.

The sleek granite-topped kitchen had a fridge packed with food and a very large selection of chocolate cereals that made her smile. Gaetano had remembered her preference. She ate while she studied the prompt sheets he had mentioned. It was like a CV written for a job: qualifications listed, sports pursuits outlined, not a single reference to any memorable moments. He just had no idea of the sort of things that a woman in love would want to know about him, Poppy reflected ruefully. When was his birthday? What was his favourite colour?

She texted him to ask.

Gaetano suppressed a groan when his phone buzzed yet again and lifted it to see what the latest irrelevant question was.

Who was the first woman you fell in love with?

He had never been in love and he was proud of it.

What do you value most in a woman?

Independence, he texted back.

As Poppy walked round the supermarket with her shopping list she raised her brows. If he liked independent women why did he always date clingy airheads? So, she asked that too and they began to argue by text until she was laughing. Gaetano had an image of himself that did not always match reality. She could have told him that he dated clingy airheads because they did as they were told, accepted his workaholic schedule and made few demands.

Noticing a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window of a café she called in, enjoyed an interview on the spot and was hired to work a shift that very evening. Relieved to have solved the problem of being broke, she returned to the town house by the separate entrance at the side and proceeded to mess up Gaetano’s basically unused kitchen with her baking session. She settled the cake into the cake carrier she had bought for the purpose and set the birthday card on top of it before going to get changed.

She wore a tartan skirt with black lace stockings and high heels. Gaetano wolf-whistled the instant he saw her. ‘Wow...’ he breathed with quiet masculine appreciation. ‘Your legs are to die for...’

‘Really?’ Poppy grinned and then frowned doubtfully. ‘Is this phase one of the Italian seduction routine?’

‘You’re very suspicious.’

‘I don’t trust you,’ Poppy told him truthfully. ‘I think being sneaky would come naturally to you.’

‘I’ve never had to be sneaky with women,’ Gaetano told her truthfully.

* * *

The drawing room was crowded with guests when they arrived. The instant Poppy saw the fancy cocktail-type frocks and delicate jewellery that the other women sported and the stares that her informal outfit attracted, she paled in dismay. She stuck out like a sore thumb and hated the feeling, squirming discomfiture taking her by storm and reminding her of her days at school when no matter how hard she’d tried she had always failed to fit in. Remembering that Gaetano had urged her to be herself was not a consolation because her unconventional appearance had to be an embarrassment to him. How could it be anything else?

Gaetano’s grandfather made a major production out of welcoming them and announcing their engagement. Poppy’s guilt over their deception sent colour flying into her cheeks but she saw only satisfaction in Gaetano’s brilliant smile and from it she deduced that everything was going the way he had planned.

But Poppy was wrong in that assumption. She served Rodolfo with the strawberry layer cake with mascarpone-cheese icing that was his favourite and which she had learned to bake at his wife’s side. His eyes went all watery and he gave her an almost boyish grin as he took up the cake knife she passed him and cut himself a large helping.

‘So, when’s the big day?’ he asked Poppy within Gaetano’s hearing.

Gaetano tensed. ‘We haven’t set a date as yet...’

‘You don’t want to risk a treasure like Poppy getting away,’ his grandfather warned him softly, shrewd eyes resting on his grandson’s lean, darkly handsome face. ‘I don’t believe in long engagements.’