by Kim Lawrence
Poppy tossed him an amused look over her shoulder. ‘Anyone would think you were jealous,’ she teased.
His brows lifted. ‘Well, I’d ask you to choose but I know I’d lose out.’ The day had come when he was jealous of a cat! Or at least the stroking attention it was receiving.
‘It’ll have to come upstairs with us.’
‘That revolting thing?’ he exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘It probably has fleas.’
Poppy sent him a look of reproach and touched a finger to her lips. ‘Hush, she’ll hear you.’
‘You are afraid I’ll hurt its feelings? That cat is not coming upstairs, Poppy. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not asking you to throw her back out—the kitchen is warm.’ And it was the place for animals.
One look at the tilt of her chin and it was an argument he was resigned to lose.
He did.
Ten minutes later Luca found himself carrying the cat wrapped in a blanket up the stairs.
The purring animal got settled beside the fire and was fussed over by Poppy until Luca growled.
‘You’re pushing it!’ And he picked Poppy up.
She complained loudly as she was dumped on the bed, but in reality she was only mildly indignant at the treatment.
‘You’re a hard man!’ she accused, thinking, And in all the right places.
She put a pillow behind her head and watched as he threw some more logs on the fire, loving the way he moved, loving everything about him.
God, I really am living my fantasy!
Please let the storm last!
The wish made her feel instantly guilty. While the storm lasted her family had no way of knowing where she was and if she was safe—they’d be worried sick and she hadn’t given them a thought.
She shook her head. ‘He’ll be frantic.’
Luca, in the act of lighting the candles in the window, turned his head. ‘Who?’
‘My dad. He’ll feel guilty because he let me come here alone.’
‘Why did he?’
‘He and Gran …’
Luca gave a murmur of amazement; he recalled the family rift but not the reason for it. ‘Surely he and your grandmother have resolved their differences by now?’
Poppy threw up her hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘You assumed, Luca, that they’ve got a grain of sense between them. Big mistake. He’s as stubborn as Gran is and neither of them will give an inch. Since he remarried he and Gran have hardly spoken. She doesn’t approve of Millie.’
‘But you still get on with your stepmother?’
Poppy’s expression softened. ‘She’s a darling and she makes Dad so happy.’
‘But not Isabel?’
Poppy expelled a rueful sigh and shook her head. ‘It’s so silly. Millie is great but, according to Gran, a housekeeper is not good enough for Dad.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Her uncle’s not an earl.’
‘Not many people have uncles who are earls.’
‘Mum did.’
‘Ah …’ Gianluca was seeing the light.
‘The fact is Millie is the best thing that could have happened to Dad after—Mum. It’s totally crazy but even after everything Mum did—does—as far as Gran is concerned her blue blood makes her a tough act to follow … I’m afraid she’s a terrible snob,’ Poppy confided ruefully. ‘And so stubborn once she’d dug her heels in, and she did. She said he had to choose, so obviously he chose Millie, and I think Gran regrets laying down an ultimatum but she won’t back down …’
‘And you are stuck in the middle.’
Poppy nodded. ‘I hate it,’ she confided. ‘God, I’m sorry—this family stuff must be boring you to death.’ She slanted an uneasy look towards Luca.
‘I will tell you if I’m bored.’
A little laugh was drawn from Poppy’s throat. ‘I suppose you would.’
For a nerve-splitting moment their eyes connected. The sardonic amusement in Gianluca’s faded, leaving in its place a fierce driven expression that made Poppy’s traitorous heart skip a beat.
He has to love me!
‘S-sometimes …’ She paused, cleared her throat and started again, wrenching her eyes free of his as she began to speak. ‘Sometimes I think I should just invite them both to my flat and lock them in until they sort out their differences …’
A laugh drew her questioning eyes back to his face. ‘A bit like this?’
‘Not at all like this! This is a castle—there’s plenty of room to escape if we wanted to.’
‘But we don’t want to?’
She nodded her head in agreement. ‘And we have nothing to resolve …’ Poppy swallowed her disappointment when he didn’t respond to her unspoken question—maybe she was being too subtle. ‘The irony is if Gran got to know Millie she’d love her. Everyone does—she’s sweet and loyal and kind, the total opposite of my mother.’
‘Do you ever see her, your mother?’ Lady Maria Cunningham was a woman that the terms ‘sweet’ and ‘loyal’ were never going to be used in connection with, Gianluca mused wryly.
Millie shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she admitted.
Despite this lack of contact, the news that she was that Lady Maria’s daughter had somehow got out at the girls’ school she had attended. After that there was rarely a week when a picture of her mother torn out of a tabloid or celebrity magazine wouldn’t appear on the notice board with the word ‘Slag’ written across it in red felt pen. She could always hear the giggles when she ripped them down, knowing as she did so that they would appear somewhere else in the school.
Defending her mum’s honour had earned her detention on more than one occasion.
‘I get birthday presents and she usually invites me …’ She stopped, adding with a self-conscious grimace, ‘To her weddings.’ Millie did a quick mental calculation. ‘Five to date.’
‘Did you go to any?’ Gianluca asked. He could not recall seeing her at either of the two he had attended, the last being to her present husband, an Italian industrialist that his family had links with.
Poppy shook her head. ‘She was only being polite. When I was little I might have got her dress dirty, when I got older I was not … as you know, cute-looking and now—’
‘You’d be competition,’ he completed.
Maria was far too media savvy to risk being photographed next to her beautiful daughter, having people remark on the contrast between Poppy’s fresh-faced, vibrant beauty and her own more mature appearance. Not that Poppy’s mother was not still a beautiful woman—though in Gianluca’s mind she would have looked better had her search for perpetual youth not led her to smooth out any suggestion of a character line on her face—but she was not the type who liked competition.
‘Hardly!’ She laughed. ‘She’s beautiful.’ While Poppy knew she was perfectly OK to look at she knew she was not, and never would be, in her mother’s league.
‘You actually look a lot like her.’
Poppy was startled by his assessment and uncomfortable by his prolonged scrutiny.
‘Without the hard edges.’ And with an innate sensuality that even with all the cosmetic procedures in the world her parent would never have. He would previously have laughed at anyone who used the phrase inner glow … but it was true and Poppy was the living, breathing proof.
‘I look nothing like her!’ Poppy protested, while in the back of her head a voice said, He thinks you’re beautiful. ‘She’s—’
‘A hard, selfish self-publicist with zero maternal instincts.’
Poppy’s chin lifted. ‘That’s my mother you’re talking about.’
‘I know—tough gig,’ he drawled sympathetically.
Poppy levelled a rebellious look at him as he joined her on the bed. ‘I know people think a woman who leaves her child is terrible … and, all right, it’s something I don’t really understand.’ The thought of deserting a child—any child, but her own flesh and blood … The concept was one that Poppy struggled with. She knew she would fight like a tigress if anyone tried
to take her child from her.
‘But I think it was a good thing for me she left … If she’d stayed she’d have been unhappy and resented, but she left and I got Millie.’ Poppy had kept track of her mother’s progress along with every other reader of gossip columns. The public had an apparently endless appetite for tales of the wild exploits of the titled English rose and her succession of rich husbands and lovers.
Occasionally when her husbands were listed she and George got mentioned as the children of marriages number one and three. Except on the memorable occasion when their mother, who was not good with names, had called them her two little accidents during a TV interview.
A sudden awful thought occurred to her. ‘God, you haven’t slept with her, have you?’
‘Slept with who?’
‘My mother.’
A choking sound left Luca’s throat. ‘No, I have not slept with your mother!’ He had been propositioned on one occasion but he saw no need to share this information.
‘I just thought … you are exactly the sort of man she likes and Jack, number three, was actually younger than you. I’ve not offended you, have I?’
‘No, you have not offended me.’
‘I used to think that it was my fault Mum left,’ she heard herself admit. ‘George felt the same.’
Gianluca’s dark brows twitched into a line above his masterful nose. ‘George?’
‘My half-brother. His dad was the film director so George had therapy and I had Millie. We both grew up relatively normal.’
‘You do know that you are almost too balanced to be true …?’
Poppy gave an embarrassed shrug and tucked her feet under the quilt. ‘Twenty-five-year-old virgin, remember …?’
An expression she struggled to interpret moved at the back of his eyes. ‘I have not forgotten. You must have had boyfriends …?’ He saw her expression and said, ‘One particular boyfriend?’ The theory that someone had hurt her had not gone away.
‘I’ve had a lot of boyfriends but none that I …’ She stopped and thought, None that were you. ‘The last one was actually a bit of a disaster.’
He arched a brow. ‘How so?’
‘You’ll laugh, I know, but it turned out that he dated me for a bet. There were actually odds on whether I was a virgin and if I was who would be first to … you know.’
Gianluca did not laugh.
With a sudden explosive motion he surged to his feet, causing the cat to scuttle under a dressing table.
He stood there looking impossibly tall, imposing and terrifying and loosed a volley of violent-sounding oaths in his native tongue.
‘You don’t have to say it. I know I was stupid.’
He dragged a hand through his dark hair and laughed. ‘You were stupid?’
With no physical outlet for the outrage that pounded through his veins, short of battering a hole through the stone wall with his fists, it was a while before Gianluca trusted himself to speak.
‘And you found out about this … bet how?’
Poppy couldn’t take her eyes off the muscle that throbbed in his lean cheek, slowly clenching and unclenching. His entire body was vibrating with anger; he looked pretty magnificent mad, and also quite scary.
‘Rupert sent an email. It was meant for a few of his mates only the entire building received it, including me.’
She paused and swallowed. It had not been the best day of her life. ‘It pretty much said that he was about to win his bet and be the first to …’ Unable to repeat the crude phrase he had used, she shook her head and said, ‘You know?’
Gianluca did know.
He knew that if the pathetic loser had been within choking distance at that moment he would have taken great satisfaction from throttling him.
‘I am assuming these men were disciplined?’ If it had been his firm they would have been out on their ears.
‘Rupert got his wrists slapped.’
‘Wrists slapped?’ he echoed incredulously.
‘It didn’t really matter because I had handed in my notice by then.’
Actually they had not made her work it, and she had taken advantage of the generosity but not the offer of the very healthy severance cheque, explaining to the startled-looking man in Human Resources that she didn’t need money to keep her mouth closed because the last thing she wanted was this story making it outside the building.
He had almost fallen over himself assuring her that the severance cheque came with no strings, it was simply an acknowledgement of the excellent work she had done.
Poppy tilted her head back and made herself meet Gianluca’s eyes.
‘I know you think I overreacted, and maybe I could have handled it better, just kept my head down and waited for the dust to settle. But I never really felt comfortable there—it was all a bit … anonymous for me. I was much happier in my previous job where I knew everyone … but when they folded …’ She gave a shrug. At the time she had been excited at getting the job in the high-powered firm. In an economic climate when there were so many well-qualified candidates scrabbling for a limited number of vacancies, Poppy had thought herself one of the lucky ones.
‘So essentially you are the victim of this workplace harassment and you end up without a job …’ He shook his dark head and thundered, ‘This is insupportable!’
‘But it all worked out for the best because Phil—’
She blinked as he bit out another violent-sounding oath. Icily outraged now, he pinned her with a stare like a surgical blade. ‘You are missing the point.’
‘No, I’m not missing the point, Gianluca!’ she yelled back. ‘Do you really think I don’t know what should have happened? The point is it didn’t and it never was going to, and, yes, maybe if I was a braver person I would have stayed and defended a principle, but I’m not brave—
‘I ran because even if I’d got Rupert suspended—which, for the record, was never going to happen as his uncle is the CEO—I would always be the virgin!’ Her narrow shoulders slumped. ‘The joke. It’s the noticeboard thing all over again,’ she concluded dully.
The permanent groove above his masterful nose deepened. ‘Notice board …?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said wearily. ‘It was a school thing … at least this is not going to happen again.’
‘You think the attitude will change at this place you worked?’
Poppy knew she should care for the sake of other women, but she didn’t. This was personal and it was time she took some positive action and thought about number one.
‘No, I’ve changed. I’m not a …’
His expression froze. ‘And that was the plan, was it …? Is that what this is about?’ His stabbing gesture took in the tumbled bed sheets.
‘What this?’
‘Is that why you slept with me?’
CHAPTER TEN
‘WHAT?’ Poppy shook her head, confused by his accusing manner and the sudden hostility he was vibrating with.
‘You heard me,’ he gritted grimly. ‘You used me!’ Luca stopped dead, recognising the utter absurdity of the accusation the moment it left his lips … Used …? He was the user the taker … Poppy had given him a gift. The problem was he wasn’t worthy of it.
Poppy’s jaw dropped at this take on the situation. ‘I …’ She began laughing. ‘I suppose I did.’
Luca clenched his teeth, the dark lines of mortified colour scoring his cheekbones deepening.
‘What do you want me to say, Luca—that I slept with you because I am madly in love with you?’
Luca, in the act of pacing to the window, stopped dead.
‘Oh, I forgot, that isn’t allowed either, is it? What—do you think I arranged for the storm? I arranged for you to get yourself shipwrecked …? It wasn’t planned, it just happened and, yes, I did want to lose my virginity … Why is that suddenly a crime? Or is this about your high moral standards?’ she continued in the same reasonable voice. ‘You only have one-night stands with women who are not screwed-up virgins?<
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‘But actually I’m not—if anyone is screwed up here, it’s you!’
Gianluca glared at her. My God, she was right!
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, panic in her voice as he began to stride towards the door. ‘Are you leaving …?’ He didn’t reply, but the sound of the door slamming was pretty eloquent.
Poppy flopped back on the bed. ‘Well, at least there are plenty of spare rooms for him to choose from.’
Nursing her anger, and the cat that crept onto the bed, Poppy held out until three in the morning—according to Luca’s watch.
She sat up in bed and pushed her tumbled curls from her face. ‘What are you doing, Poppy?’ They might only have a few more hours and she was wasting those precious moments waiting for him to apologise—as if it mattered!
‘Idiot! No, not you, puss,’ she said, scooping the cat off the bed and returning her to the makeshift bed by the fire. ‘Sorry, but that place is already taken.’
She took a deep breath, lifted her chin and, candle in hand, she crept along the cold corridor, heading towards the light at the bottom of the stairs.
He was considering leaving his chair when he heard the sound of muffled footsteps. Struggling to locate the direction, he glanced at the clock on the wall, an item like many in the room that would have been labelled fifties kitsch nowadays and cost a fortune.
As he registered that it was three a.m. the door swung inwards with a creak and Poppy, her glorious hair tousled, her eyes heavy and blurry with sleep, or the lack of it, walked into the room. The thick woollen socks on her small feet explained the muffled sound of her approach.
‘Luca …?’ She had hardly said his name when he was there in front of her, towering over her.
Her heart thudding, her gaze made a slow journey up the length of his body, her head tilting backwards to look into his face. The febrile glow in his deep set dark eyes made her dizzy and set the butterflies in her belly into a painful frenzy of activity.
‘Will you come back to bed?’
‘Will I …?’ He gave a strange laugh. ‘You have no idea at all,’ he slurred, framing her face with the long brown fingers of one hand while he planted the thumb of the free hand under her chin.