by Liz Fielding
‘I can manage,’ she said, as he reached out to help her down.
‘I don’t think you should risk it in your enfeebled state.’
‘I’m not in the least bit feeble …’ He put his hands on her waist and her words died on a little gasp. Nicely done. ‘You might want to hold on,’ he encouraged.
She was lovely and trying so hard. It would be a shame not to make the most of the moment.
After the briefest pause she placed her palms on his shoulders. Her touch was light, her arms fully extended to keep a ladylike distance between them and yet the contact was like a lightning conductor, focusing everything primitive, ancient, instinctive into a single point of heat low in his belly.
And he was the one struggling for breath as he said, ‘Ready?’
‘Ready,’ she said, poised, as cucumber-cool as if she were sitting on a bench in her own garden.
‘Hang on,’ he said, and she clutched at him, her fingers digging into his shoulders as he lifted her clear of the wall and she slid down his body until her feet touched the ground.
He held on to her, making sure she was steady. Then just held on as he was immersed in her scent. Not the kind sprayed out of a bottle, but something more personal. Warm skin, silky hair, the scent of a woman held in the arms of a man she desired.
For a moment it was not Sarah clinging to him for support. He was the one hanging on to her, weak with the longing to bury his face in her hair, her neck. In the creamy softness of the breasts he’d glimpsed as she’d leaned forward, bombarding his senses with everything female.
‘I’ve got it, thanks,’ she said, her hands sliding to his elbows, steadying him in return for just a moment before she stepped back to pick up her hat.
What colour were they? Her eyes. He should have noticed …
‘Sorry. I’m heavier than I look,’ she said.
She was a lot more of many things, but ‘heavier than she looked’ was nowhere near top of the list.
She glanced away, towards the house. ‘I take it we’re not going to use your brother’s shortcut?’ she said, laying her hand beside the telltale footprint on the wall. A good hand, with nails buffed to a shine. No rings. Nothing showy or obvious. Nothing of the femme fatale.
An innocent English rose taking a walk in the Italian countryside and if he hadn’t been warned, hadn’t been expecting something like this, he would have fallen for it.
‘He’s young, in a hurry,’ he said, a little too sharply, and she turned to look up at him, a tiny frown plucking at the wide space between her eyes. ‘There’s a girl waiting for him in Rome.’
‘Oh?’ Her brows rose a notch. ‘Well, he really is very beautiful.’
‘We have different fathers,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘My mother remarried after my father was killed.’
He wasn’t telling her anything that anyone with a computer couldn’t have discovered in thirty seconds. Always assuming she didn’t already know his family history by rote.
‘I see that I must add self-deprecation to the other gifts from your nanny.’
‘Must you?’ he countered lightly.
‘It’s such a very English trait.’
‘Possibly.’
The only useful lesson his nanny had taught him was that everyone had their price. Never to trust a smiling face. Never to let anyone close. He’d forgotten it only once and he wasn’t about to forget it again.
He took her arm—the path was uneven—as he turned up the hill. She didn’t object, but then he hadn’t expected her to.
‘Age helps. And, being older than my beautiful brother, I’ve learned patience. The value of taking time to enjoy the journey.’
It was definitely time to slow things down.
He had lived like a monk for the past couple of years, concentrating on his vines, staying away from the kind of women who were drawn to celebrity. Who fed off it. Yearned for it. That had all been a game. A cat playing with a mouse. Until Katerina, he had thought he was the cat. He should have known better. Well, this time he was ready.
Almost ready. His head might understand that this was not real, but his body appeared to have other ideas.
‘You’re saying we should stop and smell the roses,’ Sarah suggested.
‘Why not? There’s no rush. Is there?’
‘I used to think not …’ She shook her head, but she was smiling.
‘What?’ he asked, obligingly picking up the cue she’d dangled so temptingly.
‘Nothing.’ He waited, sure it was not ‘nothing’. ‘I was simply wondering if you’re the kind of man who undoes the knots rather than grabbing the scissors. When you’re given a present,’ she added, in case he didn’t understand.
He understood all too well and an impatient hormonal jig urged him to go for the scissors, but he reined it in.
This was definitely a moment for the careful unpicking of knots.
‘I find that anticipation is often the greater part of the pleasure,’ he assured her. ‘Which is why we are taking the scenic route.’
‘Oh? Should I be worried? About lunch.’
Inevitably the destination was going to disappoint her, but that was for him to know and her to find out. But lunch was merely the first stop on the journey.
‘Graziella is an excellent cook. You can rest assured that expectations will be fully met, if not exceeded.’
The path wound up the hill for a hundred yards or so to a point where the countryside was spread out in all directions below them. The village, vineyards, his laboratory and nursery for the vines, scattered farms.
Sarah lifted her hand to shade her eyes as she looked into the far distance.
‘Are there bears in the mountains?’ she asked.
‘Bears?’ It was the last question he’d been expecting. ‘There are a few brown bears, mostly in the national park. And wolves are on the increase. What makes you ask?’
‘I thought Lex might have been teasing me.’ She let her hand drop, looked down. ‘The trees completely hide the house from up here.’
‘It’s tucked in a dip in the landscape. The winters can be hard.’
The only vulnerable spot was the broken wall. That, and a boy who happened to be in the right place, at the right time, to open the gate. Whether by accident or design he had yet to discover.
‘Does the scenery live up to the recommendation?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely. Lex told me it was beautiful but actually it’s breathtaking.’ She looked around. ‘Where’s the river?’
‘It’s over there.’ His chin was level with her shoulder as he bent to point out to her a glint of water on the far side of the village. Breathing again the scent of her sun-warmed skin. Something faintly spicy. Vanilla. Cinnamon. Good enough to eat. ‘To the left of those trees,’ he added as she searched for it.
‘I have it,’ she said. Then, as she spotted the motorcycles of the paparazzi who’d followed the limousine from Rome, ‘Who are all those people down there on the road?’
Well, she could hardly ignore them.
‘They’re paparazzi. They followed Bella from Rome this morning.’
She turned to stare at him. ‘Your cousin is here? No wonder you were so edgy.’
‘It has been an interesting morning,’ he admitted.
‘And yet you were willing to let me take a photograph of your house?’
‘I don’t think the lens in your mobile phone would give you much of a photograph,’ he said. ‘But I’ll let you into a secret. Bella wasn’t in the car they followed.’
‘So they’re waiting down there while she’s …?’
‘Somewhere else.’
‘Good for her,’ she said, smart enough not to push it. ‘Is it okay if I take a photograph?’
‘Of the paparazzi? Or the view?’
‘Sneak pictures of the photographers?’ The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘They’d just be a smudge in the distance. I simply wanted a shot of the view. Lex will be interested to see what it looks like now.�
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‘Will he?’ he said, forcing himself to curb a snag of irritation that, while he was going out of his way to make life easy for her, charm her, she kept talking about some other man.
He waited while she took her pictures then asked the name of a town, its red roofs spread over the top of a distant hill.
‘That is Arpino. Cicero was born there.’
‘The man who wrote that a room without books is like a body without a soul.’ She caught him looking at her and with a wry smile said, ‘It’s on a fridge magnet at home.’
‘Then it must be true.’ Forcing himself to look away, he said, ‘It’s an interesting place. They’ve recently excavated a well-preserved Roman pavement beneath the town square and there’s a bell tower that has to be climbed by anyone who really wants to see a view.’ Then, aware that he sounded rather like a guidebook, ‘After a shaky start, I’m attempting to make a rare visitor feel welcome.’
‘And doing an excellent job.’ Then, with a sigh, ‘Everything is so ancient here. We have old buildings, monuments at home, but in Italian history isn’t a visitor attraction, it’s embedded into the very fabric of life.’
‘We’ve been here a long time,’ he said. ‘And while you were building in wood and straw, we were constructing in stone, which is more enduring.’
‘You built in stone in Britain, too, but the Saxons were the original recyclers.’
It occurred to him that he should be grateful to whoever had sent her for having the wit to choose someone with intelligence as well as beauty.
The journey, wherever it took them, certainly wouldn’t be boring.
‘Shall we go?’ He took her elbow. ‘The path down through the olive grove is steep.’
‘An olive grove? Hold on …’ Now that she’d started, there was no stopping her and she made him wait while she took photographs of the olives. ‘Sorry. I’m being a total tourist.’
She was certainly giving a great impression of one. But, then again, maybe she had never seen olives growing before.
‘Don’t apologise. Like life, we tend to take our surroundings for granted. It’s refreshing to see the familiar through new eyes,’ he said, opening the gate to the garden.
‘Wow.’ Sarah had stopped on the top terrace. ‘Just … wow.’
Below them the vineyards swept away down the valley, but she wasn’t looking at that. She was looking at the kitchen garden and in a moment had abandoned him to snap close-ups of zucchini flowers, artichokes, was stooping to rub her fingers against the herbs billowing over the path. They were swarming with Nonna’s bees, but she seemed oblivious, as intoxicated by the scent as they were.
‘You are a gardener?’ he asked.
‘No. That’s my mother. She gardens, keeps hens and we’ve always had bees. What is this?’ she asked.
He lifted her long, slender fingers to his face. He didn’t need the scent to identify the plant but he was the advocate of taking time, in this case to smell not roses, but herbs.
‘It is Thymus citriodoros “Aureus”. The golden variety of lemon thyme.’
‘The Latin name. That’s impressive,’ she said, laughing.
‘But I am a Roman,’ he reminded her. ‘Between Monday and Friday, anyway.’
Her hand was soft to the touch and his reluctance to release it was not entirely an act. It might be a game, but this wasn’t the Garden of Eden and he wouldn’t go to hell for picking the fruit.
‘Of course it helps that I am a botanist.’
‘Oh.’
‘We don’t do souvenirs of Isola del Serrone,’ he said, bending to break off a piece of the herb, ‘but put this in your bag and you’ll remember us whenever you open it.’
Remember me, was the subtext. It had been a while, but he still remembered the moves.
She responded with every appearance of delight to this small gesture and he found himself wishing he could see her eyes so that he could be sure the smile reached them.
What colour were they?
Her hair was a warm chestnut, which suggested her eyes would be brown. But there were endless variations. Would they be shot through with green and topaz? Or dark and golden, the colour of the honey from Nonna’s bees?
The sun was shining through the curved brim of her hat, throwing a lattice of shade across flawless skin, spattering sunlight across full, soft lips.
It would be silky to the touch, he thought. Her eyelids would be translucent, almost violet, her breasts, her thighs milk-white …
He took a step back before his imagination scrambled his brain, led the way around the house to the shaded terrace visible from the path. Calling out to Graziella to let her know they had arrived.
He turned to Sarah, who was regarding him with the tiniest of frowns. The look of someone attempting to listen to a foreign language, catch the gist of what was being said. And he wondered how much Italian she really understood.
‘Lunch won’t be long,’ he said. ‘What can I get you to drink?’
There were bottles of water and wine, both bedewed with moisture, waiting for them.
‘Water, please,’ she said, abandoning her hat and her phone. ‘Is there somewhere I could wash my hands?’
‘You’ll find a cloakroom along the corridor on the left. It should have everything you need.’
He watched her walk away. Her hair, twisted into a loose knot at her neck, had worked loose and she retrieved a pin as she walked, tucking it back into place as if it was something she’d done a thousand times before.
The movement raised her T-shirt, exposing a thin band of pale skin. He was right. She was no sunbather.
The minute she was out of sight, he picked up her phone, found the photograph he’d taken of her sitting on the wall.
She was leaning towards him, her smiling mouth full of promise. The scooped neck of her T-shirt had fallen away to reveal a hint of breast. She really was very good, he thought, but then it would take someone very special to fool him a second time.
His temper had been stretched to the limit this morning. First by the uproar of Bella’s arrival. Then the discovery that Stephano, armed with trophies for some girl who would no doubt be enthusiastic in her gratitude, had made his escape without waiting for Nonna to return from the village.
Matteo supposed he should be grateful that his brother had bothered to call and warn him that there was an intruder on the path that led past the house. Or had it been to ensure that he was in the right place at the right time?
His brother certainly hadn’t mentioned that he’d held the gate for her.
He hoped it was simply because Sarah had smiled at Stephano. She had the kind of smile that would light up a cold day, if not a cold heart. The kind of smile that could make a boy—a man—forget, if only for a moment, what the gate was for.
She was not at all what Matteo had expected when he set off to intercept her. There was nothing obvious about her. Casually dressed, utterly natural, she’d been sitting on the old wall, face lifted to the sun, her full mouth smiling as if the day had been made just for her. Nothing to suggest that she was waiting for him.
The last time the trap had been baited, he’d taken the honey to the last drop, only discovering the betrayal when photographs of the private family celebrations of Bella and Nico’s wedding had been splashed across the worst kind of gossip magazine.
He hadn’t felt clean for months afterwards.
Now rumours that the marriage was in trouble, of affairs on both sides, were stirring up the same frenzy, the same tactics. Ironically, it was the woman who had betrayed him two years ago who’d sent a note warning him to be on his guard.
He’d ripped it up. But he’d taken heed.
This was a clever move, though.
Bella was a star in her own country, but nowhere else, and English language gossip magazines had no interest in her. Why would he be suspicious of an English woman out for a day in the country? Taking a look at a village ‘someone’ had told her about.
She had the
figure, a mouth that promised heaven in a smile and delivered it in a kiss that would tempt even the most world-weary of men out to play. Add to that a rare touch of the innocent English rose guaranteed to arouse the dark side that lurked in every man and who could resist?
Her apology for trespassing had exactly the right touch of confusion and her indignation at the way he’d rifled through her handbag was utterly believable. Well, she probably hadn’t expected that and the outrage was not an act. But the opportunity to flirt he’d fed her had been picked up with the confident assurance of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
He’d nearly lost it for a moment when he’d let his lips touch hers, drawn in by a rush of heat that had momentarily bypassed his brain.
Innocents did not kiss like that.
It had been a timely reminder that nothing quite so irresistible fell into a man’s lap by chance.
Not that he planned on resistance.
If he sent Miss Sarah Gratton packing it would be only a matter of days before someone else would be on the case. He’d had it drummed into him from an early age by his mother, by Nonna, that with a big enough bribe, no one was immune from temptation. Including the nanny who’d been with him since birth. Who’d taught him to speak such good English.
No. He would take the bait Sarah Gratton was trailing so temptingly before him, play the foolish Italian lover to her cool English beauty. Let tiny snippets of gossip slip. Give her enough to keep her attention focused on him while his cousin and her husband sorted out their private lives.
And how long would that take? A week? A month? Longer?
Looking at the photograph on the phone again, the thought was not as unappealing as it might have been. In the meantime, he needed to know who he was dealing with and he sent the photograph to himself, to be followed up at his leisure, before replacing the phone where she’d left it.
He stood up as she returned, pulled out a chair for her, poured sparkling water into two glasses, handed one to her and raised his in a toast.
‘Salute. To golden girls and glad-foot lads …’
‘I don’t …’
Grey. Her eyes were a clear silvery grey. Totally unexpected and yet perfect in a face that had been tinted a pale apricot by the warmth of the sun, rather than frazzled in its heat. Sarah, if that really was her name, very sensibly protected her peaches-and-cream skin from the sun.