by Liz Fielding
If only it was that easy to eradicate Matteo. Delete, expunge, obliterate the memory of a touch, a kiss, a summer afternoon. Eradicate it with one click of the mouse.
She was sitting on her terrace. Below her the great monuments of Rome were lit up and the traffic flowed around them in a hectic, never-ending sparkle of diamond and ruby lights but she was too angry to see any of it.
Savour the moment! If she’d savoured it any more they’d have been in the deep grass, ripping their clothes off.
Her phone bleeped, warning her that she had an incoming text. She reached for it, anticipating yet more silliness from Pippa.
Not Pippa …
‘I’ve only this minute seen your card. Dinner tomorrow? Matteo.’
Bad timing.
A couple of hours ago she would have been all tingling excitement at receiving a text from him. Thrilled to know that the lemon thyme had been a spontaneous gesture and not simply a polite response to her card.
To think that she’d imagined he’d be interested enough to read her blog.
Clearly, the lack of any contact details on his card meant that the gift, charming as it was, had been more in the nature of a polite not interested.
But if he’d only just seen her card, then the one was not connected with the other. And his swift response implied that he was. Interested as hell.
All the delight in knowing that was tempered with the hot edge of anger that had been threatening to boil over ever since she’d discovered that, despite his formal introduction, he had omitted one very important detail.
That he was Conte Matteo di Serrone.
Anger that she’d had to keep tightly under wraps with a careless, ‘I didn’t know Italians did titles,’ until she had managed to get Pippa off the phone.
Angelo, it seemed, hadn’t confused the difference between celebrity and high society—and thank goodness she hadn’t tried to put him straight on that one—but had known exactly who he was.
Her relief did nothing to lessen the ‘idiot’ tag lighting up over her head when Pippa passed on that little nugget of gossip, courtesy of her boyfriend.
It wasn’t even as if he didn’t use the title. She’d checked. Who wouldn’t?
Google had obliged with images of the ‘Conte’ escorting actresses, models, glamorous females with matching titles to parties, galas, first nights.
Stunning in a dinner jacket.
Beyond belief desirable in white tie and tails with an order ribbon across his shoulder, hobnobbing with the great and good at some diplomatic function.
With all that driving her, she didn’t stop to think, but thumbed in her reply: ‘Great. Shall I wear my tiara? Sarah.’
She regretted it the moment she’d hit Send. When had she morphed from Miss Sensible into …
‘I don’t know. Do you usually wear it in the kitchen? M’ came right back at her.
… Miss Idiot?
Before she could think of a face-saving comeback, the phone rang. She put it down quickly, as if it might bite. Swallowed hard. She could ignore it. Leave her voicemail to pick it up.
Except that she was the one who’d regretted running from feelings she couldn’t control. Who had written the note inviting him to call her. Added that suggestive little PS.
She grabbed the phone but, before she could speak, Matteo said, ‘You are angry with me, Sarah?’
‘No …’
‘Do not be nice,’ he warned her. ‘Tell the truth. Teeth, claws …’
‘Idiot,’ she said, choking back laughter as her sense of the ridiculous at the very idea of her having a diva-ish strop overcame her annoyance. ‘Of course I’m angry. You should have told me.’
‘Should I? Does it matter?’
‘The title? Or the fact that you didn’t tell me?’
‘Either. Both.’
‘I don’t care a tuppenny fig about your comic opera title, Matteo. But if I’d known about it I wouldn’t have looked a complete fool in front of a friend who couldn’t wait to call me and tell me that I’d had lunch with Conte Matteo di Serrone. I would never have mentioned I’d met you if I’d known,’ she said.
‘You wish to keep it a secret?’
‘No. But, like you, I’d rather not be the subject of speculation.’
‘Come?’
‘Like your cousin, you appear to be something of a favourite with the gossip magazines, Matteo. And a bunch of photographers filled their boots with pictures of me climbing out of her car on Saturday afternoon. Not that I’m complaining,’ she rushed on. ‘Every woman deserves a paparazzi moment once in her life.’
‘Do they?’ He sounded doubtful. ‘As for the rest, you have been reading old news. I have gone out of my way to avoid speculation for some time.’
She didn’t answer. No one with a title and Isabella di Serrone as a cousin was ever going to be old news.
‘I am sorry, Sarah. Truly. It never occurred to me that you did not know.’
‘How? I arrived in Rome four weeks ago. I’d never been to Italy before, I do not speak Italian and, even if I did, it’s doubtful that I’d have memorised the Italian equivalent of Burke’s Peerage …’ She stopped as her brain finally caught up with her mouth. ‘You assumed I knew because you thought I was a snooping reporter!’
‘I am sorry,’ he repeated in English, then in Italian, over and over, his cobweb-soft voice like a caress against her skin until she finally begged him to stop.
‘Don’t. Please. I understand why you thought that.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t.’
She opened her mouth to protest, then realised that he was right. She didn’t know. ‘Do you want to tell me?’
‘Another time. Right now, the only thing I want to do is kiss you.’ There was a pause while she tried to remember how to breathe. ‘Preferably without your tiara,’ he added.
He’d made that sound positively indecent and a warm flush swept over her body. If this was what a dark-eyed Italian lover could do on the phone …
‘How far away are you?’ she asked.
Was that her? Flirting?
‘Carissima …’
Matteo’s voice caught on the word and she thought she might melt right there on her terrace.
She couldn’t believe she’d said that. That she was talking to a man she scarcely knew like this. She should say something, laugh, but her breath seemed to be caught up in her throat.
The urgent blast of a car horn in the street below jarred her back to sense.
This wasn’t real, she reminded herself. He was responding to her note, playing a game that she had begun. And that was fine. She wasn’t interested in anything long-term. Permanent.
Been there, thrown out that T-shirt, too.
The last thing in the world she needed right now was to confuse hot sex with deep emotion. Lex’s prescription had been for an in-at-the-deep-end, no-commitment affair—something to raise her heartbeat, add a flutter of excitement to her life. Purely medicinal.
This certainly fitted the bill. Her heart rate was off the scale and everything else was fluttering fit to bust.
‘I remember,’ she said, doing her best to sound cool, calm, unfluttery. Miss Gratton of the Upper Fifth. ‘Anticipation is the greater part of the pleasure.’
‘Not, I think, in this case. Rather a case of delayed gratification …’ For a moment the silence was as deep as an echo from space. ‘It is late, cara, and don’t you have a plea to my village’s mayor to write?’
‘I’m going to need help with that,’ she said, and since they both knew that there was not going to be a statue of Lucia, or a plea made, that was definitely her flirting. Something she’d have sworn an oath she didn’t know how to do. It was as if his kiss had jarred loose something in her brain … ‘How long have I got?’
‘There is no rush. We will begin tomorrow. If your invitation still stands?’
Last chance, Sarah Gratton …
‘What time will you be here?’ she asked, through a thro
at that seemed to be stuffed with gravel.
‘Early, I think. There is a great deal to get through. I will pick you up at seven?’
Good job he didn’t wait for an answer but murmured a soft, ‘Buonanotte, Sarah.’ Something else in Italian. Dolce …? Sweet something. Sweet dreams?
She finally managed to squeeze out a husky, ‘Buonanotte, Matteo …’ But she was talking to a dialling tone.
Lessons. She had to ask Pippa about finding someone to give her Italian lessons.
Matteo tossed the phone onto his desk and smiled.
His comic opera title?
Hardly the words of a woman intent on seduction. Very close, in fact, to what he’d been thinking himself before Bella had handed him her card. That it was good for nothing but impressing buyers of the wine produced in Isola del Serrone. And only then if the price was right.
Not true, of course. It went back generations, centuries, tied him to his family, the land. The vines that had been growing there when Rome was a scruffy little town of no importance.
And yet, intentional or not, she had prodded his dormant libido into hot, surging life. He had not been able to get her out of his head and tonight, when she had asked him how far away he was, his cherished detachment had been shown for what it was. A sham.
Carissima …
When had he last used the word to a woman in that way?
It had slipped out, no pretence. No play-acting at being the perfect lover. He had responded without thinking, flirted, teased …
It wasn’t simply that she was a desirable woman. He met them every day of his life. Had spent the evening fending off a woman who once he would not have thought twice about taking to his bed.
Sarah wasn’t just beautiful, she made him laugh. At himself. At her. Touched some part of him that he had buried deep. He not only desired her but he was, he discovered, in serious danger of liking her.
That was a complication he hadn’t anticipated.
There was still the mystery of her interest in Lucia. The certainty that she was hiding something.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS
When I was at school—dread words I know—I learned a poem about some old Roman called Horatius saving Rome pretty much singled-handedly from an invading army. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I remember declaiming this—‘And how can man die better/Than facing fearful odds,/For the ashes of his fathers,/And the temples of his gods?’
I fell a little in love with Horatius and when I went for a run this morning, the mist, pink in the morning sun, lifted to reveal some temple built millennia ago that he would have seen in all its glory.
Honestly, I went all goosebumpy.
SARAH HAD SPENT A disturbed night. A tangle of nervous anticipation and sheets. What-the-heck-am-I-doing? clashing in a what-the-heck-I’m-single muddle of half awake, half asleep dreams.
She didn’t feel single.
She’d had boyfriends before she met Tom but he was her only serious relationship and deep down she still felt that she was Tom’s girl. That kissing Matteo, wanting Matteo was somehow cheating on him.
Except when she was actually kissing Matteo.
When she was with him, talking to him she wasn’t thinking about anyone else. It was as if her entire body was focused on him. What he looked like, how he sounded, how alive her skin felt when he touched her.
It scared her.
Light-hearted wasn’t supposed to be this intense. Was it?
The minute the sky had begun to turn grey in the pre-dawn, she’d pulled on a tank and grey joggers that she hadn’t even looked at since Tom had transferred his affections to Louise.
It had been a while. She was out of condition and the first mile hurt. A lot. Breathing was agony. Then, as the sun turned the sky pink, she found some kind of rhythm, hit her stride. Returning to her apartment slicked with sweat, glowing with satisfaction as she bounded up the stairs, she returned her startled neighbours’
greetings with a cheery, ‘Buongiorno!’ that no longer seemed foreign or strange.
After a quick shower, she deleted the blog she’d posted the night before, just in case anyone saw it, and replaced it with something that would achieve an instant switch off before going to work.
Pippa hunted her down at lunchtime. Looked at her through narrowed eyes, taking in a sleeveless, hip-skimming black linen dress she hadn’t worn before, a peach ribbon-trimmed cashmere cardigan slung over her shoulders. ‘You know something? You’re beginning to look as if you belong here. You’re getting that Roman look.’
‘What’s that?’
‘As if you own the place.’
‘It’s amazing what an early morning run can do for you.’
Running was something that she’d done with Tom, to be with him, part of his life. Today, determined to burn off the midnight twitches, she’d done it for herself. And the only man on her mind had been Matteo.
‘You went for a run?’ Pippa gave a little shudder. ‘And here was me thinking that it was all down to the attention of a good-looking man.’
‘What good-looking man would that be?’ she asked casually.
‘I looked him up on the internet, you know. Good-looking barely begins to state the case.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, Pippa. We had lunch, that’s all. I was home by six.’ It would have been earlier if she hadn’t been hiding out from the paparazzi but she wasn’t telling Pippa that. She was already much too interested in her meeting with a Conte.
‘Lunch followed up with a gift,’ Pippa persisted.
‘You saw it.’ She’d insisted on seeing it, anticipating some floral tribute. ‘A herb that I’d noticed in his garden and which he sent to the school because he didn’t have my address. Or telephone number. He wasn’t interested enough to ask for either,’ she added.
It was the truth. As far as it went. He hadn’t suggested they meet again. She had made all the running with that one.
‘I saw the plant,’ Pippa confirmed, ‘and yet you have the look of a woman with the prospect of something more interesting than a night in with a good book ahead of her.’
‘Have you never heard of the endorphin high produced by exercise? Come with me tomorrow. Try it for yourself.’
‘No, thanks. I can come round this evening though. I talked to Federico, my boyfriend,’ she added, as if Sarah hadn’t heard the name a dozen times, ‘and he offered to check a genealogical website for you. He could research Lucia’s family without stirring up interest in her village.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ Sarah said thoughtfully.
‘Well, it will all be in Italian. A bit beyond me, too. But if you give him all the details you have, he’ll be happy to see what he can dig up.’
The bell rang for morning assembly.
‘Terrific. I can’t do it tonight. I’ve got a staff meeting and then a ton of marking,’ she said, backing away in the direction of her classroom, her fingers crossed behind her back. ‘Why don’t you and Federico come round one evening next week? I’ll cook supper.’
A staff meeting kept Sarah late, she’d had to pick up food on her way home and, as she opened the street door, her ground-floor neighbour called out to her, ‘Signora Gratton!’
‘Buonasera, Signora Priverno,’ she replied as the woman took her by the wrist, talking twenty to the dozen as she led her inside her apartment.
This was not a good moment for a neighbourly get-together, especially one that was incomprehensible to both of them. She had to shower, wash her hair, do a hundred and one other things before Matteo arrived at seven.
Then she saw the box standing on the signora’s hall table. The cream envelope with her name inscribed in a hand she recognised.
Signora Priverno was giving it the full action drama, the gist of it being that someone had brought this for her and she’d taken it in.
‘Molto grazie, signora.’
‘Prego …’ She nodded happily. Then, ‘Go, go …’
Sara
h scooped up the box, practically ran up the stairs with it under one arm, dumping her shopping, school bag, everything on the kitchen table, hands trembling as she pulled off the envelope.
Had Matteo changed his mind? Sent a gift by way of apology? A great deal more than she deserved after her ‘comic opera’ crack about his title.
She pulled out the card.
The message was brief:
It occurs to me that you will have been working all day. We will eat out. Matteo.
She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that she didn’t have to cook, or a bit miffed.
Yes, she had worked all day. She’d also planned a menu, raced around the market on her way home, choosing perfectly ripe pears to go with the tissue-thin prosciutto cut for her by Pietro. Bought steaks and salad leaves. Cheese. A selection of miniature cakes. And now he’d high-handedly decided …
Stop it!
This was nerves giving her a reason to be angry with him. A reason to chicken out and tell him to get lost. Stay safely inside her ‘nice girl’ mould.
Matteo was being thoughtful.
She was being a prize chump.
The steaks would freeze, the rest would keep in the fridge. The cakes would go down well with morning coffee in the staffroom.
That settled, she opened the carton.
Inside, nestled in wood shavings, were two bottles of wine from the Serrone vineyard. No surprise. She’d already guessed that from the swishy shifting of weight as she’d hurried up the stairs.
That wasn’t what had stopped her heart.
It was the bunch of huge black grapes that lay on top, cradled in a nest of the same yellow tissue paper that the plant had arrived in.
She ran the tip of a finger over the ripe curve of the fruit, plucked one from the bunch and put it in her mouth, crushed it with her tongue, letting the juice fill her mouth, reliving the warm-from-the-sun taste of it on Matteo’s fingers.
Lost to desire in the heat, the sweetness, the desire for a man she’d only met an hour or two before.
Drowning in the sweet smell of the grass as he’d kissed her.
That sensation of being in another time, another place, where there were no restraints. Where only the senses mattered. If it happened a third time, in the privacy of her apartment … She swallowed. Matteo was right. Going out was definitely the safest option.