Kitabı oku: «The Temporary Mrs Marchetti»

CHAPTER ONE

THE FIRST THING Alice noticed when she came to work that morning was the letter on her desk. Something about the officious-looking envelope with its gold embossed insignia made her skin shrink against her skeleton. Letters from lawyers always made her feel a little uneasy. But then she looked closer at the name of the firm. Why would a firm of Italian lawyers be contacting her?

She picked the letter up and her breath came to a juddering halt when she saw it was postmarked Milan.

Cristiano Marchetti lived in Milan.

Alice’s fingers shook as if she had some sort of movement disorder. Surely he hadn’t...died? A sharp pain sliced through her, her breath coming in short, erratic bursts, making not just her fingers tremble but her whole body.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.

How had she missed that in the press? Surely there would have been an announcement for someone with Cristiano’s public profile? They reported every other thing he did. The glamorous women he dated. The fading hotels he bought and rebuilt into stunning boutique accommodation all over the Mediterranean. The charity events he attended. The parties. The nightclubs. Cristiano couldn’t change his shirt or shoes or socks without someone reporting it in the press.

Alice peeled open the envelope, her eyes scanning the brief cover letter, but she couldn’t make any sense of it...or maybe that was because her brain was scrambled with a host of unbidden memories. Memories she had locked away for the last seven years. Memories she refused to acknowledge—even in a weak moment—because that was the pathway to regret and that was one journey she was determined never to travel. Her legs were so unsteady she reached blindly for her chair and sat down, holding the document in front of her blurry gaze.

But wait...

It wasn’t Cristiano who had died. It was his grandmother, Volante Marchetti, the woman who, along with his late grandfather Enzo, had raised him since he was orphaned at the age of eleven when his parents and older brother had been killed in an accident.

Alice frowned and cast her gaze over the thick document that had come with the cover letter that named her as a beneficiary of the old woman’s will. But why had his grandmother mentioned her in her will? Why on earth would the old lady do that? Alice had only met Cristiano’s grandmother a handful of times. Volante Marchetti had been a feisty old bird with black raisins for eyes and a sharp intellect and an even sharper sense of humour. She had instantly warmed to the old lady, thinking at the time of how lucky Cristiano was to have a grandmother so spritely and fun, and had often thought of her since.

Maybe his grandmother had left her a trinket or two—a keepsake to mark their brief friendship. A piece of jewellery or one of the small watercolour paintings Alice remembered admiring at the old lady’s villa in Stresa. She began to read through the legalese with her heart doing funny little skips. So many words... Why did lawyers have to sound as if they’d swallowed a dictionary?

‘Someone here to see you, Alice,’ Meghan, her junior beauty therapist, said from the door.

Alice glanced at the time on her computer screen next to her appointment diary and frowned. ‘But my first client isn’t until ten. Clara Overton cancelled her facial. One of her kids is sick.’

Meghan waggled her eyebrows meaningfully and, lowering her voice to a stage whisper, said, ‘It’s a man.’

Alice had several male clients who came to her for waxing and other treatments but something told her the man waiting to see her wasn’t one of them. She could feel it in her body. In her bones. In her blood. In her heartbeat. The awareness of imminent danger making a prickling sensation pass all over her flesh, as if her nerves were radar picking up a faint but unmistakable signal. A signal she had forced herself to forget. To wipe from her memory in case it caused her to regret the decision she had made back then. She pushed back her chair and stood but then decided it was better to remain seated. She didn’t trust her legs. Not if she was going to come face to face with Cristiano Marchetti after all this time. ‘Tell him I’ll be ten minutes.’

‘You can tell me yourself.’

Alice looked up to see Cristiano framed in the door, his chocolate-brown eyes as hard as two black bolts. All she could think of was how different it was seeing him in the flesh instead of a photograph in a gossip magazine or newspaper. Shockingly different. Heart-stoppingly different. I’m-not-sure-I-can-handle-this different.

For a moment she couldn’t locate her voice. With him standing there, with his towering frame and commanding air, her office seemed to shrink to the size of a tissue box. Shoulders so broad he looked as if he’d been bench-pressing bulldozers—two at a time. An abdomen so hard and toned you could tap dance on it wearing stilettos and not leave a dent. Jet-black hair, thick and currently brushed back from his forehead in loose finger-groomed waves.

‘Hello, Cristiano, what brings you to Alice’s Wonderland of Beauty? An eyebrow-shape? Back and leg wax? Personality makeover?’

Alice knew it was crazy of her to goad him but she did it anyway. It was her defence mechanism. Sarcasm instead of emotion. Better to be cutting and mocking than to show how much his brooding presence disturbed her. It more than disturbed her. It unbalanced her. Her neatly controlled world felt as if it had been picked up and rattled like a maraca held by a maniac. The walls of her office were closing in on her. The floor was shifting beneath her feet like a sailboat pitching in a wild squall. The air was pulsing with crackling electricity that made her aware of every inch of her skin and every hit-and-miss beat of her heart.

His bottomless eyes roved her face as if he was looking for something he had lost and never thought to find again. His brow was etched in a deep frown that gave him a much more intimidating air than the way he had looked at her in the past. Back then he had looked at her with tenderness, with gentleness. With love.

A love she had thrown back in his face.

‘Did you put her up to it?’ he asked with a searing look that made the backs of her knees fizz as if sand were being trickled through her veins.

Alice placed her hands on the tops of her thighs below her desk so he wouldn’t see their traitorous shaking. ‘I presume you’re referring to your grandmother?’

Something flashed in his gaze. Bitterness. Anger. Something else she wasn’t ready to acknowledge, but she felt it all the same. It breathed scorching hot fire all over her body, stirring up memories. Erotic memories that made the blood in her veins pick up speed. ‘Have you been in contact with her over the last seven years?’ he asked in that same terse don’t-mess-with-me tone.

‘No. Why would I?’ Alice gave him a pointed look. ‘I rejected your proposal, remember?’

His jaw tensed so hard she could see the white tips of his clenched muscles showing through his olive tan. ‘Then why has she mentioned you in her will?’

So he hadn’t known about the terms of his grandmother’s will until recently? Had the old lady not told him of her plans? Interesting. ‘No idea,’ Alice said. ‘I only met her a couple of times when we were...back then. I’ve had zero contact since.’

He glanced at the will lying in front of her on her desk. ‘Have you read it?’

Alice gave him another speaking look. ‘I was getting to that when you rudely barged into my office.’

His eyes nailed hers. Hard eyes. Eyes that could melt a month’s supply of salon wax with a single glare. ‘Let me summarise it for you. You stand to inherit a half share of my grandmother’s villa in Stresa in Italy if you agree to be my wife and live with me for a minimum of six months. You will also receive a lump sum on the announcement of our engagement, which is to last no longer than one month.’

Shock hit Alice like a blow to the chest. His...wife?

She fumbled for the document, the sound of the pages rustling overly loud in the silence.

Engaged to him for a month? Married for six?

She cast her gaze over the words again, her breath coming in such short spark bursts it felt as if she were having an asthma attack. Her heart was beating so heavily it felt as if someone were punching it from behind. She hadn’t seen any mention of marriage in her quick appraisal earlier. She’d barely had time to read any of it before he had gatecrashed into her day. Why hadn’t she put on her make-up before work? Why hadn’t she worn her brand-new uniform instead of this one with the eyebrow-tint stain on the right breast? Why hadn’t she done her own eyebrows, for God’s sake?

But there it was in black and white.

Alice was to co-inherit Volante Marchetti’s summer retreat on the shores of Lake Maggiore if, and only if, she married and stayed married to Cristiano for six months. Six months? Six seconds would be too long. And there was the other clause. They must be engaged for no more than a month before the wedding. What sort of weird time frame was that? It shamed her that Cristiano saw the pages of the document shaking before she put it back down on the desk. But at least he couldn’t see the tumult going on inside her stomach.

His wife?

Live with him?

She had been to his grandmother’s villa one memorable weekend with Cristiano. Memorable because it was the first time he’d told her he loved her. Apart from her mother, no one had ever said that to her before. She hadn’t said the words back because she hadn’t trusted her feelings. But then, she had always been a step behind him in their relationship. She’d thought they were having a fling while she was on a brief working holiday in Europe. He’d decided it was a relationship. She’d thought it was temporary because she’d planned to go back to England and set up her own beauty spa, but he had wanted it to be permanent.

Permanent as in marriage and kids.

For as long as she could remember Alice had been against marriage—or at least for herself. After witnessing her mother go through three of them with exactly the same result: misery, subjugation, humiliation and financial ruin. She had told Cristiano a little about her background, not much, but more than she had told anyone, which made her all the more annoyed he had still gone ahead and asked her to marry him. In a crowded public place to boot, which had added a whole other layer of pressure she resented him for.

His arrogance made her furiously angry. Had he really thought she would fall upon him with a grateful squeal of Yes! just because he was super-rich and said he loved her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her? How long would that love have lasted? They’d had a passionate if a little volatile relationship. How could she be sure his desire/love for her wouldn’t burn out as fast as it had been ignited?

If he had truly loved her he would have accepted her no as final and settled for a less formal arrangement. People lived together for years and years without needing the formality of marriage. Why be so damn nineteen-fifties about it? A marriage certificate didn’t make a relationship any more secure. In fact, it could do the very opposite, forcing women into a subservient role once kids came along from which they could never escape.

But Cristiano at heart was a traditionalist. For all of his modern male sophistication, deep down he wanted a wife and family to come home to while he built his empire. So he had given her an ultimatum. Tried to control her. Tried to manipulate her into doing what he wanted.

Marriage or nothing.

Alice had called his bluff and ended their relationship then and there, and flown back to England, never expecting to hear from him again. Well, maybe that wasn’t quite true. She had expected to hear from him with a big apology and ‘let’s try again’ but it hadn’t happened. Showed how much he’d ‘loved’ her. Not enough to fight for her. Not enough to compromise.

Not that she had offered to compromise, but still.

Alice brought her gaze back up to his glittering one. ‘You’re surely not going to go through with this...are you?’

A smile that wasn’t quite a smile courted with the edges of his mouth. ‘But of course. It is what Nonna wanted. Who am I to disregard her last wishes?’

Alice frowned so hard she could have frightened off fifty units of Botox. ‘What happens if I don’t agree?’

‘To me?’ He gave a careless shrug. ‘Nothing other than a few shares in the company which will pass to a relative if I don’t comply with the terms of the will.’

Alice wondered how important those shares were to him. Was his easy-come, easy-go shrug disguising deeper, far more urgent motivations? Enough to marry someone he now hated? What about the villa? It was his grandmother’s home, the place where he had spent much of his childhood being raised by his grandparents. Wouldn’t he want to contest such an outrageous will? Surely he wouldn’t want to share it with anyone, much less her? Why would he agree to such unusual conditions? She sent her tongue out over lips so dry it felt as if she were licking talcum powder. ‘So...why would you want to marry someone who clearly doesn’t want to marry you?’

His dark as night gaze gleamed, making the floor of Alice’s belly shudder. ‘You know why.’

Alice arched one of her brows, trying to ignore the pulsing heat his words evoked deep in her feminine core. ‘Revenge, Cristiano? I thought you were a civilised man.’

‘I am prepared to be reasonable.’

Alice affected a laugh. That was not a word she readily associated with him. He saw the world in black and white. He didn’t know the meaning of the word compromise. What he wanted he got and woe betide anyone who got in his way. Not that she could talk. Compromise wasn’t her favourite word in the dictionary, either. ‘Reasonable in what way?’

He held her look with one she couldn’t read. ‘The marriage won’t be consummated.’

Not...? Alice hoped she wasn’t showing any sign of the numb shock she was feeling. Not just shock. Hurt. Humiliation. Their affair had been so wildly passionate. She had never had a lover before or since who made her feel the things he had made her feel. She had all but given up dating because of it. His touch was indelibly branded on her body. No one else’s touch made her flesh sing—the opposite, in fact. Her flesh crawled when someone else touched her. The last time she slept with a date, well over a year ago, she came home and showered for an hour.

‘You speak as if this...this preposterous marriage is a fait accompli,’ she said. ‘I said it seven years ago and I’ll say it again now. I am not going to marry you.’

‘Six months is not a long time. At the end of it you get joint ownership of a luxury villa to do with as you please. You can sell your half or keep it. The choice is yours.’

The choice wasn’t hers. How could it be? She was being forced into a marriage with a man who no longer loved her—if he ever had. What he had wanted to do back then was control her. It was what he wanted to do now. What better way to punish her for having the gall to say no to him than to chain her to him in a loveless union?

Alice wouldn’t do it. No. No. No.

She wouldn’t subject herself to the humiliation of being his trophy wife while he continued to sleep with whomever he liked. He knew...he knew how much she’d hated seeing her mother cheated on by each of her husbands. It had been one of the things that had impressed her about him. He believed in monogamy—or so he’d said.

But what about your business plan?

Alice had somehow become the go-to girl for wedding make-up. The girl who had sworn against marriage was preparing brides all over London for theirs. Go figure. Her appointment diary was booked out for months ahead for the wedding season. It was becoming the biggest source of her income, especially high-profile weddings. She had plans to buy another salon—a larger place so she could extend her business because her Chelsea salon was getting too small to handle the burgeoning wedding market.

It had been a dream of hers for months. Years, actually. The only thing holding her back was the thought of taking on a load of property debt. Debt was something that terrified her. The mere thought of it kept her awake at night. She remembered too well how it had felt as a child to have not enough money for food, for clothes, for electricity when her mother had been between relationships.

She knew she could always rent another property like this one in Chelsea, but that left her at the mercy of landlords, something she had seen too many times during her childhood. Rents could be put up and buildings suddenly sold. The business she had worked so hard to establish would be jeopardised if she didn’t own the property herself.

You could sell the villa after six months and be debt-free for the rest of your life.

Alice allowed the thought a little traction. The business she had sacrificed so much for was her baby, her mission, her purpose in life. Seeing it grow and develop over the last few years had been enormously satisfying. She had built it up from just a handful of clients to now one of the busiest salons in the area. She had celebrities and minor royalty on her books. People came to her because of the standards of excellence she maintained. To achieve her dream of setting up a luxury wedding spa would finally prove she had made it.

Failing wasn’t an option.

Not after using her career as the excuse for not wanting to marry Cristiano. The career she put before everything else. Relationships. Holidays. Fun. Even friendships. All of it had been sacrificed for work.

But she couldn’t marry Cristiano to solve that problem for it would throw her in the middle of an even bigger one.

Alice rose from her chair with her spine steeled with resolve. ‘I’ve made my choice. Now, if you’ve finished catching up on old times, I have a business to run.’

His eyes continued to tether hers as if he were waiting for her cool composure to crack. ‘Are you involved with someone? Is that why you’re saying no?’

Was he still so arrogant? Yes. Arrogance was hardwired into his DNA. A man in his privileged position had no concept of why a woman wouldn’t want to thrust her hand out for him to put a ring on it. He had it all: the money, the looks, the luxury lifestyle, the fast cars and exotic holiday destinations. Alice wished she had a lover to fling in his face. She considered inventing one but knew it wouldn’t take him long to call her out on her lie. He wouldn’t have to hunt around too far to find her social life was practically non-existent. Her work was her social life.

‘I know you find it hard to believe you’re irresistible because of your wealth and other...erm...assets, but I am not going to prostitute myself for the sake of an inheritance I neither asked for nor need.’

His expression gave nothing away. ‘I meant what I said, Alice. It will be a marriage in name only.’

No one said her name quite the way he did. His Italian accent gave it a completely different emphasis. Aleece. The sound of it was like an erotic caress. It made the base of her spine shiver as if he had touched her with a brush of his warm male hand. Thinking of his hands made her want to look at them.

Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

But in spite of her rational brain’s pleas, she looked. Those broad-spanned hands had travelled over every inch of her flesh. Those long tanned fingers had coaxed her into her first proper orgasm. They had discovered all of her erogenous zones, tortured them with such intense pleasure it had shaken her to the core of her being. She could feel the echo of it even now, as if just being in the same room as him, breathing the same air as him, made her body recognise him as her only pleasure giver.

Alice dragged her gaze upwards and collided with his. He knew. Damn it, he knew how much sensual power he had over her. She could see it in the knowing glint in his pitch-black eyes. She felt it when he sent his gaze over her body as if he too were remembering what it had felt like to hold her in his arms as she splintered into a thousand pieces of shivering, quivering ecstasy.

He lifted a hand to his jacket pocket and took out a business card and placed it on the desk next to the copy of his grandmother’s will. ‘My contact details should you change your mind. I’ll be in London for the next week while I sort out some business affairs.’

Alice wilfully ignored the card. ‘I’m not going to change my mind, Cristiano.’

I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.

A cynical smile lifted one side of his mouth. ‘We’ll see.’

We’ll see?

What did he mean, ‘We’ll see’? Alice didn’t get the chance to ask him for he turned and left her office, leaving her with the lingering fragrance of his aftershave, the lemon and lime with a base note of leather that made her nostrils tingle...not to mention the rest of her body.

Meghan was bug-eyed when she came back. ‘Oh, my God! You didn’t tell me you knew Cristiano Marchetti. I didn’t recognise him at first. He’s much more gorgeous in the flesh than he is in photographs in the press. I nearly fainted when he walked past me just then and smiled at me. What did he want? Is he going to come here for treatments? Please let me do him. Can I do him? Please, please, please?’

Alice wasn’t going to explain her past relationship with her employee even if Meghan was turning out to be one of the best she’d ever had. And as for Meghan ‘doing him’, if anyone was going to ‘do him’ it was going to be her. She would like nothing better than to get a pot of hot wax and strip that supercilious smile off his too-handsome face. ‘He’s not a client. I met him a few years ago. He just dropped in to say hi.’

‘Met him as in met him and dated him?’

Alice didn’t respond other than to purse her mouth. Meghan blushed and bit her lower lip. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. I know you insist on absolute confidentiality with celebrity clients. It’s just he’s so handsome and you never seem to date anyone and I wondered if it was because—’

‘Can you get my treatment room ready for my next client?’ Alice said. ‘I have some urgent paperwork to see to.’

Alice blew out a breath once Meghan scuttled away. For seven years she had told herself she’d made the right decision. She had chosen her career over commitment. Freedom over having a family. She had stood firm on her decision, not once wavering on it. Now, within her grasp was a way to finally achieve the success and financial security she had thus far only dreamt about.

Six months of marriage.

In name only.

She glanced at his business card. It seemed to taunt her with its presence.

Do it. Do it. Do it.

Alice snatched it up and tore it into as many pieces as she could and tossed them in the bin. It was kind of weird how they floated down just like a handful of confetti.

She hoped to God it wasn’t an omen.

* * *

Cristiano would have had a stiff drink if he’d been a drinking man, but the death of his parents and his older brother to a drunk driver when he was eleven made him wary of using alcohol other than in strict moderation. Seeing Alice Piper again was like having his guts slashed wide open. And stomped on. The mere sight of her reopened the wound of his bitterness until he wondered how he had stood there without showing it.

He’d felt it, though. God in heaven, how he’d felt it. The blood rush. The pulse race. The adrenalin surge. The kick and punch of lust.

He had stood there and drunk in her features like a dehydrated man standing in front of a long cool glass of water. Her indifferent poise, her cornflower-blue gaze that could freeze mercury, the way she looked down her aristocratic nose at him as if he had crept in from a primeval swamp with his knuckles dragging. Her body was as lissom and gorgeous as ever—perhaps even more so. Her unusual silver-blonde hair with her naturally dark eyebrows and the creamy, ageless perfection of her skin gave her a striking appearance that never failed to snatch his breath.

Her rejection of him stung and burned and churned even after all this time. He had thought what they’d had was for ever. A once in a lifetime love. Their passionate affair had been unlike anything he’d experienced before. He’d wanted to build a future with her. A family. He’d believed it to be like the love his parents had had for each other. Like the love his grandparents had before his grandfather died. The death of his grandfather a couple of months before he met Alice had made him acutely aware of how important family was. It had been all he had thought about—having a family to replace the one he had lost so young. He’d felt ready. More than ready. He’d been twenty-seven and well established in the hotel business he had inherited from his parents. He was ready for the next phase of his life.

But Alice hadn’t loved him. She had never said the words but he’d fooled himself into thinking she’d been showing it instead. How gullible he had been. How stupid to be so naively romantic when all she’d wanted was a quick fling with a foreigner to boast about with her friends.

What had his nonna been thinking? She had only met Alice a couple of times. Why bequeath her a share in a property worth millions and with such odd conditions attached? Six months of marriage? What sort of nonsense was this?

He hoped to God it wasn’t some sneaky matchmaking ploy from the grave. His grandmother knew he had changed his mind about settling down. He had laughed off the suggestion every time she asked him when he was going to provide her with a great-grandchild. Nonna had expressed her disapproval of his playboy lifestyle on numerous occasions but he had always dismissed her concerns because no one was going to tell him how to run his life.