Sharon Kendrick - Italian Boss, Housekeeper Bride

Troy nodded. ‘You don’t have to actually go through with it—just make the gestures. You know—you buy a whopping engagement ring and then you pose with your fiancée for the papers and she gives them a few interviews telling them where the wedding will be, where she’s going to buy her dress. They love all that kind of stuff.’

‘You seem remarkably well informed on the subject,’ remarked Raffaele, with a sardonic elevation of his black brows.

‘I try,’ said Troy modestly.

‘And even if I were to entertain such a bizarre remedy, aren’t you forgetting one thing?’

‘Like what?’

Raffaele’s black eyes were like hard, cold jet. ‘That there isn’t a candidate.’

Did he hear Natasha’s pent-up sigh of relief? Was that why he turned his head and fixed her with an impenetrable stare. ‘Didn’t you say you had a cake to make?’

Natasha blinked. Of all the times to prove that he had actually been listening to something she had to say he had to choose this one! ‘Er…yes.’

‘Well, then, run along, cara,’ he said softly.

‘Right.’ Reluctantly, Natasha headed for the door, while they just carried on with their conversation as if she was invisible. Which I might as well be, she thought furiously.

‘You just need someone who is prepared to go along with it,’ Troy was saying.

‘Like who? Oh, I can see your reasoning. It’s a good idea, Troy—but there’s just one problem, and it’s the nightmare scenario.’ Raffaele’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. ‘Most women I know would be only to happy to go through with it—the difficulty would be getting them off my back afterwards.’

Troy laughed. ‘Which is why we choose someone who wouldn’t dare try to hang around.’

‘Again, I say—who?’

Fascinating as she found the subject, Natasha knew that she really couldn’t justify hanging around any longer, and she was almost out of the door when her eagle eye spotted a rogue little yellow plastic brick lying underneath one of the two wing chairs by the bookcase.

Now, how the hell had that gotten in here—especially when Sam wasn’t even supposed to go into Raffaele’s study? She was so fastidious about keeping all signs of young children carefully hidden away. Raffaele might be tolerant, and kinder to her son than his position warranted, but he certainly didn’t want to be tripping up over model soldiers every time he came home.

She made a little exclamation of annoyance as she leaned over to retrieve the brick, and as the sound diverted his attention Raffaele found his eyes drawn to her bent figure.

Nobody could accuse Natasha of vanity—indeed, the garments she wore for work wouldn’t have been out of place in a boot-camp and they’d never have been Raffaele’s choice for a woman—never in a million years. He’d often used to think that here was a woman who would never distract him as she went about her work.

Maybe it was something to do with the fact that his nerves were on edge, or that it had been a long time since he’d had someone in his bed. Or maybe it was just something as simple as the fact that the moment had caught her with the material of her dress stretched tight across her derrière. Raffaele swallowed. And a very attractive derrière it was, too.

He narrowed his eyes and became aware of Troy’s gaze following exactly the same path as his.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Troy softly. ‘Yes. That is perfect.’

Why was it that Raffaele found himself looking at his lawyer with cold distaste, wanting to tell him not to dare look at Natasha in that way—that she deserved his respect, not his predatory gaze? He shook himself. Predatory? Over Natasha?

She was straightening up now, with a piece of yellow plastic held between her fingers, and the fabric fell loose away from where it had been moulded to the tight, high curve of her buttocks. And all Raffaele could think was why the hell had he never noticed that before?

‘You wouldn’t have wanted to have stepped on that with bare feet!’ she said triumphantly, and put it in her pocket as she marched out without a backwards glance.

Raffaele watched as she shut the door behind her, and suddenly there was Troy, sitting with some dumb, expectant grin on his face, looking at him as if he had found the key to the universe.

‘Well? What do you think, Raffaele? Isn’t this the answer to our predicament? Wouldn’t Natasha do?’

‘NO!’ RAFFAELE snapped back, in an icy voice. ‘Natasha would not do! She’s my housekeeper, for Dio’s sake!’

Outside the study door, the sound of her name halted Natasha right in her tracks and presented her with an age-old moral dilemma. Should she stay or should she go? Should she listen or not? But, surely, if they were talking about her didn’t she have every right to listen?

Heart thumping, and with misgivings which were making her forehead ice into a cold sweat, she put her head close to the door. Their voices were muffled, but she could make out certain words like unsuitable, inappropriate. And then something else, which ended with Raffaele saying, quite loudly and quite forcefully, ‘No one would ever believe it!’

And Troy’s response. ‘Why not ask her?’

She heard the sound of a chair being scraped back, and instinct made her move quickly away from her giveaway position. She hurried down to the kitchen, realising that time was tight if she wanted to have the cake made before she went out to collect Sam.

The radio was blaring as she changed her mind about lemon drizzle and instead made cupcakes, which she iced in lurid shades of green and blue, especially designed to appeal to small boys—and to hell with the additives!

Despite the apron she’d put on, she’d still managed to get splodges of cake mixture over her dress—and she was going to have to leave in a minute. She ran upstairs and changed into something warmer—because the autumn afternoons were beginning to bite.

She put on a pale blue sweater, which brought out the colour in her eyes, and a pair of old jeans Then she brushed her hair and wove it into its habitual French plait. Her fingers hesitated over the little tub of lipgloss which had been on special offer at the chemist back in the summer, and which some impulse had made her buy. She’d only used it a couple of times, and it didn’t really seem to be her, so she’d put the top back on and had never used it again.

So what was it that made her pick it up today? Did it have something to do with the way the two men had looked at her in the study—or rather the way they’d not looked at her? As if she was some old piece of furniture—reliably comfortable, but not something you’d want to show off to a guest.

Defiantly, she opened it and stroked on some of the strawberry-scented gloss. Perhaps some of her reluctance to dress up had come from knowing that she could never compete with the other mothers, who arrived at the school looking as if they’d stepped out of the pages of a glossy magazine. Maybe that was why she was always being mistaken for one of the nannies—though she had to admit that most of them made more of an effort than she did.

Outside, the late-afternoon sky was a clear blue and the trees were etched against it in startling relief. All the leaves were turning rich shades of bronze and toffee and gold and, in the distance, she thought she could smell the faint drift of smoke, which was unusual in London, though this area was exclusive enough to have gardens big enough to cope with bonfires.

Natasha was suddenly overcome with the sense of nostalgia which autumn always provoked. The end of the summer and the start of winter and soon Sam beginning full-time school. During no other season was she quite so aware of the passing of time as this, when the leaves began their dizzy spiralling dance to the ground below.