by Lynne Graham
‘I get really annoyed with you when you talk like that,’ Karen said truthfully. ‘If you would only buy some decent clothes and take a little more interest in—’
‘Why bother when I’m quite happy as I am?’ Visibly agitated by the turn the conversation had taken, Darcy glanced hurriedly at her watch and added with a relief she couldn’t hide, ‘It’s time I picked up Zia from the play-group.’
As Darcy left the gate lodge, however, that final dialogue travelled with her. Demeaning memories had been roused to fill her thoughts and unsettle her stomach. All over again she saw her one-time fiancé, Richard, gawping at her chief bridesmaid like a moonsick calf and finally admitting at the eleventh hour that he couldn’t go through with the wedding because he had fallen in love with Maxie. And the ultimate insult had to be that her former friend, Maxie, who was so beautiful she could stop traffic, hadn’t even wanted Richard!
That devastatingly public rejection had been followed by the Venetian episode, Darcy recalled wretchedly. That, too, had ended in severe humiliation. She had got to play Cinderella for a night. And then she had got to stand on the Ponte della Guerra and be stood up like a dumb teenager the following day. She had waited for ages too, and had hit complete rock-bottom when she finally appreciated that Prince Charming was not going to turn up.
Of course another woman, a more experienced and less credulous woman, would have known that that so casually voiced yet so romantic suggestion had been the equivalent of a guy saying he would phone you when he hadn’t the slightest intention of doing so, only she hadn’t recognised the reality. No, Darcy reflected with a stark shudder of remembrance, she had been much happier since she had given up on all that ghastly embarrassing and confusing man-woman stuff.
And if Luca, whoever he was, decided to go ahead and accept her proposition, she would soon be able to tune him and his macho motorbike leathers out entirely...
Perspiration beading her brow, Darcy wielded the heavy power-saw with the driven energy of necessity. The ancient kitchen range had an insatiable appetite for wood. Breathing heavily, she stopped to take a break. Even after switching off the saw, her ears still rang with the shattering roar of the petrol-driven motor. With a weary sigh, she bent and began laboriously stacking the logs into the waiting wheelbarrow.
‘Darcy...?’
At the sound of that purring, accented drawl, Darcy almost leapt out of her skin, and she jerked round with a muttered exclamation. Luca stood several feet away. Her startled green eyes clung to his tall, outrageously masculine physique. Wide shoulders, sleek hips, long, long legs. And he had shaved.
One look at the to-die-for features now revealed in all their glory struck Darcy dumb. She wasn’t even capable of controlling that reaction. In full daylight, he was so staggeringly handsome. High, chiselled cheekbones, sharp as blades, were dissected by an arrogant but classic nose and embellished by a wide, perfect mouth. Even his skin had that wonderful golden glowing vibrancy of warmer climes...
‘Is there something wrong?’ An equally shapely ebony brow had now quirked enquiringly.
‘You startled me...’ Heated colour drenching her skin as she realised that she had been staring, Darcy dragged her attention from him with considerable difficulty. As her dazed eyes dropped down, she blinked in disbelief at the sight of her cocker spaniels seated silently at his feet like the well trained dogs they unfortunately weren’t. Strangers usually provoked Humpf and Bert into a positive frenzy of uncontrolled barking. Instead, her lovable but noisy animals were welded to the spot and throwing Luca upward pleading doggy glances as if he had cast some weird sort of hypnotic spell over them.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Darcy said abruptly.
‘I did try the front entrance first...’ His deep-pitched sexy drawl petered out as he studied the sizeable stack of wood. ‘Surely you haven’t cut all that on your own?’
Threading an even more self-conscious hand through the damp and wildly curling tendrils of hair clinging to her forehead, she nodded, aware of the incredulity in those piercing dark eyes.
‘Are there no men around here?’
‘No, I’m the next best thing...but then that’s nothing new,’ Darcy muttered half under her breath, writhing at her own undeniable awkwardness around men and hating him for surprising her when she wasn’t psyched up to deal with him.
Forgivably thrown by that odd response, Luca frowned.
Darcy leapt straight back into speech. ‘I assumed you would phone—’
‘Nobody ever answers your phone.’
‘I’m outdoors a lot of the time.’ Stripping off her heavy gloves, Darcy flexed small and painfully stiff fingers and averted her scrutiny from him, her unease in his presence pronounced. What on earth was the matter with her? She was behaving like a silly teenager with a crush. ‘You’d better come inside.’
Hurriedly grabbing up an armful of logs, Darcy led the way. The long, cobbled passageway that provided a far from convenient rear entrance to her home was dark and gloomy and flanked by a multitude of closed doors. Innumerable rooms which had once enjoyed specific functions as part of the kitchen quarters now lay unused. But not for much longer, she reminded herself. When she achieved her dream of opening up the house to the public all those rooms full of their ancient labour intensive equipment would fascinate children.
And she was going to achieve her dream, she told herself feverishly. Surely Luca wouldn’t take the trouble to make a second personal appearance if he intended to say no?
She trod into the vast echoing kitchen and knelt down by the big range at the far end. Opening the door, she thrust a sizeable log into the fuel bed. ‘Did you come all the way from London again?’
‘No, I stayed in Penzance last night.’
Darcy was so rigid with nervous tension, she couldn’t bring herself to look at him as she breathed tautly, ‘So what’s your answer?’
‘Yes. My answer is yes,’ he murmured with.quiet emphasis.
Her strained eyes prickled with sudden tears and she blinked rapidly before slamming shut the door on the range. The relief was so immense she felt quite dizzy for a few seconds. Feeling as if a huge weight had dropped from her shoulders, Darcy scrambled upright and turned, a grateful smile on her now softened face. ‘That’s great...that’s really great. Would you like some coffee?’
Lounging back against the edge of the giant scrubbed pine table, Luca stared back at her, not a muscle moving in his strong dark face. It was a rather daunting reaction and she swallowed hard, unaware that that shy and spontaneous air of sudden friendliness had disconcerted him.
‘OK...why not?’ he agreed, without any expression at all.
Darcy put on the kettle and stole an uneasy glance at him in the taut silence. She didn’t know where the tension was coming from, and then she wondered if his brooding silence was a kind of male ego thing. ‘I suppose this isn’t quite the sort of work you were hoping to get,’ she conceded awkwardly. ‘But I promise you that you won’t regret it. How long have you been unemployed?’
‘Unemployed?’ he echoed, strong features stiffening.
‘Sorry, I just assumed—’
‘I have never been employed in the UK.’
‘Oh...’ Darcy nodded slowly. ‘So how long have you been over here?’
‘Long enough...’
Darcy scrutinised that slightly downbent dark glossy head, taking in the faint darkening of colour over his sculpted cheekbones. He was embarrassed at his lack of success in the job market, she gathered, and she wished she had been a little less blunt in her questioning. But then tact had never been her strong point. And when she had interviewed him she had been so wrapped up in her own problems that it hadn’t occurred to her that Luca must have been desperate to find a job to come so far out of London in answer to one small ad. Furthermore, now that she took a closer look at those leathers of his, she couldn’t help but notice that they were pretty worn.
Sudden sympathy swept Darcy. She knew all about being bro
ke and trying to keep up appearances. She had looked down on him for wearing motorbike gear to an interview, but maybe the poor guy didn’t have much else to wear. If he hadn’t worked since he had arrived in the UK, he certainly couldn’t have financed much of a wardrobe. Smart suits cost money.
‘I’ll give you half your first month’s salary in advance,’ Darcy heard herself say. ‘As a sort of retainer...’
This time he looked frankly startled.
‘You probably think that’s very trusting of me, but I tend to take people as I find them. In any case, I don’t have a lot of choice but to trust you. If you were to get the chance of another job and decide to back out on me, I’d be in trouble,’ she said honestly. ‘How do you like your coffee?’
‘Black...two sugars.’
Darcy put a pile of biscuits on a rather chipped plate. Setting the two beakers of coffee down on the table, she sat down and reached for the jotter and pencil lying there. ‘I’d better get some details from you, hadn’t I? What is your surname?’
There was a pause, a distinct pause as he sank lithely down opposite her.
‘Raffacani...’ he breathed.
‘You’ll need to spell that for me.’
He obliged.
Darcy bent industriously over the jotter. ‘And Luca—is that your first and only other name? You see, I have to get this right for the vicar.’
‘Gianluca...Gianluca Fabrizio.’
‘I think you’d better spell all of it.’ She took down his birthdate. Raffacani, she was thinking. Why did she have the curious sense that she had come across that name somewhere before? She shook her head. For all she knew Raffacani was as common a name in Italy as Smith was in England.
‘Right,’ she said then. ‘I’ll contact my solicitor, Mr Stevens. He’s based in Penzance, so you can sign the prenuptial contract as soon as you like. Those references you offered...?’
From the inside of his jacket he withdrew a somewhat creased envelope. Struggling to keep up a businesslike attitude when she really just wanted to sing and dance round the kitchen with relief, Darcy withdrew the documents. There were two, one with a very impressive letterhead, but both were written in Italian. ‘I’ll hang onto these and study them,’ she told him, thinking of the old set of foreign language dictionaries in the library. ‘But I’m sure they’ll be fire.’
‘How soon do you envisage the marriage ceremony taking place?’ Luca Raffacani enquired.
‘Hopefully in about three weeks. It’ll be a very quiet wedding,’ Darcy explained rather stiffly, fixing her attention to the scarred surface of the table, her face turning pale and set. ‘But as my father died this year that won’t surprise anyone. It wouldn’t be quite the thing to have a big splash.’
‘You’re not inviting many guests?’
‘Actually...’ Darcy breathed in deep, plunged into dismal recall of the huge misfired wedding which her father had insisted on staging three years earlier. ‘Well, actually, I wasn’t planning on inviting anybody,’ she admitted tightly as she rose restively to her feet again. ‘I’ll show you where you’ll be staying when you move in, shall I?’
At an infinitely more graceful and leisurely pace, Luca slid upright and straightened. Darcy watched in helpless fascination. His every movement had such... such style, an unhurried cool that caught the eye. He was so self-possessed, so contained. He was also very reserved. He gave nothing away. Well, would she have preferred a garrulous extrovert who asked a lot of awkward questions? Irritated by her own growing curiosity, Darcy left him to follow her out of the kitchen and tried to concentrate on more important things.
‘What did you mean when you said you were the next best thing to a man around here?’ Luca enquired on the way up the grand oak staircase.
‘My father wanted a son, not a daughter—at least...not the kind of daughter I turned out to be.’ As she spoke, Darcy was comparing herself to her stepsister. Morton Fielding had been utterly charmed by his second wife’s beautiful daughter, Nina. Darcy had looked on in amazement as Nina twisted her cold and censorious parent round her little finger with ease.
‘Your mother?’
‘She died when I was six. I hardly remember her,’ Darcy confided ruefully. ‘My father remarried a few years later. He was desperate to have a male heir but I’m afraid it didn’t happen.’
She cast open the door of a big dark oak-panelled bedroom, dominated by a giant Elizabethan four-poster. ‘This will be your room. The bathroom’s through that door. I’m afraid we’ll have to share it. There isn’t another one on this side of the house.’
As he glanced round the sparsely furnished and decidedly dusty room, which might have figured in a Tudor time warp, Darcy found herself studying him again. That stunningly male profile, the hard, sleek lines of his muscular length. A tiny frisson of sexual heat tightened her stomach muscles. He strolled with the grace of a leopard over to the high casement window to look out. Sunlight gleamed over his luxuriant black hair. Unexpectedly he turned, dark eyes with the dramatic impact of gold resting on her in cool enquiry.
Caught watching him again, Darcy blushed as hotly as an embarrassed schoolgirl. She was appalled by her own outrageous physical awareness of him, could not comprehend what madness was dredging such responses from her. Whirling round, she walked swiftly back into the corridor.
As he drew level with her she snatched in a deep, sustaining breath and started towards the stairs again. ‘I’m afraid there are very few modern comforts in the Folly, and locally, well, there’s even fewer social outlets...’ She hesitated uneasily before continuing, ‘What I’m really trying to say is that if you feel the need to take off for the odd day in search of amusement, I’ll understand—’
‘Amusement?’ Luca prompted grimly, as if such a concept had never come his way before.
Darcy nodded, staring stonily ahead. ‘I’m one of these people who always says exactly what’s on their mind. I live very quietly but I can’t reasonably expect you to do the same thing for an entire six months. I’m sure you’ll maybe want to go up to London occasionally and—’
‘Amuse myself?’ Luca slotted in very drily.
In spite of her discomfiture, Darcy uttered a strained little laugh. ‘You can hardly bring a girlfriend here—’
‘I do not have a woman in my life,’ he interrupted, with a strong suggestion of gritted teeth.
‘Possibly not at present,’ Darcy allowed, wondering what on earth was the matter with him. He was reacting as if she had grossly insulted him in some way. ‘But I’m being realistic. You’re bound to get bored down here. City slickers do...’
Brilliant eyes black as jet stabbed into her. A line of dark colour now lay over his taut cheekbones. ‘There will not be a woman nor any need for such behaviour on my part, I assure you,’ he imparted icily.
They were descending the stairs when a tiny figure clad in bright red leggings and a yellow T-shirt appeared in the Great Hall below. ‘Mummy!’ Zia carrolled with exuberance.
As her daughter flashed over to eagerly show off a much creased painting, Luca fell still. Interpreting his silence as astonishment, Darcy flung him an apologetic glance as she lifted her daughter up into her arms. ‘My daughter, Zia...I hadn’t got around to mentioning her yet,’ she conceded rather defensively.
Luca slid up a broad shoulder in an infinitesimal shrug of innate elegance. The advent of a stray cat might have inspired as much interest. Not a male who had any time for children, Darcy gathered, resolving to ensure that her playful and chatty toddler was kept well out of his path.
‘Is there anything else you wish to discuss?’ Luca prompted with faint impatience.
Darcy stiffened. Minutes later, she had written and passed him the cheque she had promised. He folded the item and tucked it into his inside pocket with complete cool. ‘I’ll drop you a note as soon as I get the date of the ceremony organised. I won’t need to see you again before that,’ she told him.
Luca printed a phone number on the front of t
he jotter she had left lying. ‘If you need to contact me for any other reason, leave a message on that line.’
A fortnight later, Darcy unbolted the huge front door of the Folly and dragged it open, only to freeze in dismay.
‘About time too,’ Margo Fielding complained sharply as she swept past, reeking of expensive perfume and irritation, closely followed by her daughter, Nina.
Aghast at the unforewarned descent of her stepmother and her stepsister, Darcy watched with a sinking heart as the tall, beautiful blonde duo stalked ahead of her into the drawing room.
She hadn’t laid eyes on either woman since they had moved out after her father’s funeral, eager to leave the privations of country life behind them and return to city life. The discovery that Darcy could not be forced to sell the Folly and share the proceeds with them had led to a strained parting of the ways. Although Morton Fielding had generously provided for his widow, and Margo was a wealthy woman in her own right, her stepmother had been far from satisfied.
Margo cast her an outraged look. ‘Don’t you think you should’ve told me that you were getting married?’ she demanded as she took up a painfully familiar bullying stance at the fireplace. ‘Can you imagine how I felt when a friend called me to ask who you were marrying and I had to confess my ignorance? How dare you embarrass me like that?’
Darcy was very tense, her tummy muscles knotting up while she wondered how on earth the older woman had discovered her plans. The vicar’s wife could be a bit of a gossip, she conceded, and Margo still had friends locally. No doubt that was how word had travelled farther afield at such speed. ‘I’m sorry...I would’ve informed you after the wedding—’