‘What do you mean?’ For a second there, Bethany had almost forgotten the charade she was meant to be playing. She was reminded of it soon enough when he began to expound.
‘Well, it’s easy to relish the role of the free spirit, not tied to the shallow world of the rich and privileged, when you must know, at the back of your mind, that you could move between the two any time you wanted to. Yes, you come to pizzerias like this but, if you get a little bored, then it’s well within your means to jump into a taxi and head for the nearest Michelin starred restaurant. And let’s not forget the little matter of your apartment. Money can buy you the luxury of pretending to be one of the normal little people without any of the reality that goes with it.’
Bethany opened her mouth to contradict him and closed it just as fast. She could understand the irony of his observation and was powerless to refute it given the circumstances, so she made do with saying lamely, ‘I’m not a left wing radical. Believe me.’
‘And I’m not a snob. Believe me.’ He gave her one of those toe-curling smiles that made her tummy flip over. ‘Good food.’ He raised his fork in appreciative acknowledgement. ‘I might very well come back here again.’
‘Are you sure the type of women you date would be up for this sort of place?’ She found that she didn’t care for the thought of him returning to her favourite haunt in the company of another woman. One of the leggy, glamorous brunettes with the dyed hair which he had previously mentioned. In fact, one of those women to whom he was much more suited, if only he knew it.
‘Maybe not,’ Cristiano conceded. ‘Which makes you so unique.’
‘Hardly. You should see this place some evenings. There’s a queue a mile long to get inside. If I’m unique, then so are the hundreds of people who flock here every day of the year.’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’
She did. ‘You say that you’re not a snob,’ she heard herself say, ‘but would you be sitting here opposite me if I weren’t unique?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Let’s just say that I was…um…the genuine article. A pretty average girl from a working class background, just like all the girls in here…would you still be sitting where you are?’
It seemed a strange hypothesis but Cristiano was willing to go along for the ride because he had, quite frankly, never met anyone like her before. She was amazingly untouched by her wealth and if her conversation was unpredictable then it was just something else about her that he found so impossibly alluring.
Also, no one had ever raised the issue with him before and he frowned, giving her question thought.
‘Probably not, if I’m to be honest.’
‘Because…?’
‘Because, like I said, a wealthy man can’t be too careful. I would never allow myself to get tied up with a woman who wasn’t financially independent in her own right. Marry in haste and repent at leisure and if you don’t fancy doing the repentance bit, then you might just find yourself dragged through the courts and parting with a sizeable chunk of cash you’ve spent years working hard to attain. But hell, why waste valuable time talking about a situation that’s not relevant?’
‘I can’t agree more,’ Bethany agreed fervently because she had stepped into a princess’s shoes and she wasn’t going to spoil this one glittering night getting embroiled in an argument that was never going to go anywhere. She was Cinderella at the ball and why start beckoning to the pumpkin to come fetch her when it wasn’t yet midnight?
He was entitled to his own opinions and he was entitled to protect his wealth however he saw fit, even if he was cutting himself off from so many experiences.
‘So…’ he kept his eyes on her while he beckoned to a waiter for the bill ‘…are we finished with the soul-searching conversations? Can we move on to something a little lighter? Or, failing that, why don’t we just move on…?’
‘To what? I don’t know any clubs in Rome.’ And probably wouldn’t have the cash to fund a visit even if I did.
‘I was thinking of somewhere a little…cosier. My place is less than ten minutes away.’
His scrutiny was hot and hungry and left her in no doubt that the outcome of the evening would finish in bed. A one-night stand. Her sisters would be shocked. Her parents would be mortified. Her friends would think that she had been taken over by an alien being who looked like her, spoke like her, but lived life in a different lane. Everything she took for granted about herself would be shattered and yet the pull to surrender to this new being was almost irresistible.
He made her feel sexy. Was making her feel sexy now, the way he was staring at her as if she were the only woman on the face of the planet. Her nipples nudged the white lace of her bra.
‘Of course, I can just get Enrico to deliver you back to your apartment,’ Cristiano told her, because he wasn’t into forcing himself upon a reluctant woman, even if all the signals had been in place from the moment he’d picked her up from her apartment.
‘Would you be very angry?’
‘I would be in need of a very cold shower.’
Bethany had an image of him showering, his big, muscular body naked under the fine spray, his beautiful face raised, eyes closed, to the running water. It was an effort to keep her breathing even just thinking about it.
‘Don’t you want to get an early night?’ she ventured tentatively and Cristiano laughed.
‘I don’t do early nights. I need very little sleep, as it happens.’
And that, in turn, made her think of them making love over and over, languishing on some great king-sized bed which probably had sheets of the finest, coolest Egyptian cotton and not the bargain basement stuff she was accustomed to. From calmly standing on the sidelines, she seemed to have morphed into a sexual creature in the space of a few hours. She had never had to fight off urges when it came to the opposite sex so it had been easy to put her celibacy down to her high-minded principles.
‘Well…there’s just one small thing…’
Cristiano could smell polite rejection in the making and, while he acknowledged that it would hardly be the end of the world, he was still surprised to find that his disappointment was much sharper than he had expected. But, then again, the evening had been much more pleasurable than he had anticipated. Usually, female conversation was a dullish background noise to which he paid lip service but essentially little in-depth attention. Tonight, he had found himself taking the time to really talk to her, to enjoy the unexpected pleasure of having a sparring partner who could make him laugh and pepper him with questions which had made him think.
‘I’m all ears.’ He settled the bill, brushing aside her offer to go Dutch, and sat back in the chair, giving her his full, undivided attention. The evening seemed to have been full of firsts, starting with the bizarre way he had invited her to dinner. Being turned down would also be a first.
‘I…I’m not the most…um…you know…experienced person in the world…’
Cristiano sat forward, bewildered by this deviation from what he had been expecting. ‘I don’t get you.’
‘What don’t you get?’ Bethany bristled defensively.
‘I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.’
‘That’s because you’re not listening hard enough.’ Embarrassment gave a sharp edge to her voice and she sighed. ‘Okay. I know you have a certain idea of the person you think I am…’ expensive apartment in Rome, country house in Ireland, a string of drivers who presumably do nothing else but wait around in fancy cars for me to snap my fingers ‘…but I’m not like all those other women you dated.’ She took a deep breath and for a few seconds contemplated telling him the whole truth. The mix-up with the clothes, the silly little white lie…Would he laugh? Forgive her? No. The answer came before she could voice what was in her head. He would be horrified. He didn’t go near girls like her, girls who didn’t inhabit the same privileged background that he did. And she didn’t want this moment with him to pass her by. She wasn’t sure why she felt
so strongly about it, but she did and she wasn’t going to mess up her one snatched night with this guy. He had managed to crawl under her skin and she wanted him there.
‘Here’s the thing,’ she said, spelling it out in black and white. ‘I’m a virgin.’
Chapter Three
‘I’M A virgin…’
Possibly the only three truthful words she had uttered to him as she had played him for a complete and utter fool.
Cristiano, parked in a dark green Land Rover he had rented in Limerick, coldly surveyed his quarry, which was a picture postcard thatched cottage at the end of the road.
It was five months since she had walked out on him without warning and five weeks since he had discovered that she had strung him along with a pack of lies. Amelia Doni was no fresh-faced, copper-haired girl with green eyes and a knack for teasing him that had proved so addictive that he had cancelled his return to London and ended up whisking her off in his private jet to Barbados for two weeks. Amelia Doni, when he’d accidentally bumped into her over Christmas at his mother’s house, was a blonde in her forties who, she’d told him in mind-numbing detail, had been on an extended cruise because she was recovering from a broken heart. She was the epitome of the wealthy owner of a slice of Rome’s most prestigious apartment block and had bored him to death within two minutes. She had also stoked the fires of his simmering anger into a conflagration when he’d learned about her house-sitting arrangement with her darkly beautiful Italian god-daughter and realised the woman he had met had been an imposter. Not only had he been summarily dumped, he had also been well and truly taken on a scenic route up a very winding garden path.
It had taken him a mere week to track down the address of one Bethany Maguire, and a couple more had passed as he sat on the information, telling himself to let it go before finally realising that he wouldn’t rest until he had confronted the woman and given voice to his consuming rage.
He had no idea what he hoped to gain by confronting her and it went absolutely and utterly against the grain of the person he was, a man who had always been able to keep his emotions in check with ease, a man who prided himself on his ferocious self-control. A man, it had to be said, who had never found himself in the position of being left high and dry by any woman or, for that matter, being told barefaced lies and gullibly eating them up.
Without the engine running, it was beginning to get cold in the car and the January light was beginning to fade. Give it ten more minutes and the line of picturesque thatched houses that jostled for space along the broad road with colourfully painted cottages and shop fronts would fade into an indistinct grey blur. There was still time, he knew, to drive right back to the hotel, grab a meal and head back to London first thing in the morning. On the other hand, would that put paid to the bitter, toxic knot that sat in the pit of his stomach like a tumour?
He stepped out of the car and began walking along the pavement, cursorily taking in the fairy tale village setting. Not to his taste. The place looked as though it had been designed by a kid who had been given a blank canvas and told to go mad. He almost expected to bump into a gingerbread house at any moment.
The house at the end of the road was no exception. The trees were bare of leaves and the front garden lacked colour, but he imagined that in summer it would be filled with all the stereotypical stuff straight out of a children’s book. Apple trees out back, flowers running rampant everywhere, the prerequisite stone wall over which neighbours would chat while, presumably, hanging out their washing and whistling a merry tune. He scowled and banked down the rise of bile in his throat as he ignored the doorbell to bang heavily on the front door instead.
Bethany, in the middle of foraging in the fridge for ingredients to make a meal for her parents which she had enthusiastically promised three hours earlier, cursed under her breath because she had left everything to the absolute last minute and couldn’t afford to take time out for a chat. Having spent the past two years in London, she had forgotten how life worked in the small village where she had lived all her life. People stopped by. They chatted. They drank interminable cups of tea. It had been worse in the first couple of months after she had arrived back but, even now, old neighbours would drop in and would be offended if she didn’t sit and chat over tea and biscuits.
She wondered if she could pretend to be out, perhaps duck down under the kitchen table and wait until the coast was clear, but then dismissed the idea because half the village would know that her parents were at the village fund-raiser and would also know that she had skipped it because she had felt ill that morning. That was just life around here, and she was going to have to make the best of it for the foreseeable future.
She dumped her handful of random ingredients on the kitchen counter and raced to the front door to intercept another bang.
In her head, she played over the possibilities of who it could be. Several of her old school friends, ones who had never left the little village in which they had grown up, who had settled down at ridiculously young ages to marry and have families, had looked her up. She had been grateful for their support and had tried very hard not to feel hemmed in and claustrophobic. She missed Shania and Melanie, who had both returned to their respective lives in Dublin after a two week family break over Christmas. Perhaps it was old Mrs Kelly a few houses along, who had become a frequent visitor and was prone to extended visits.
Bethany stifled a groan of near despair as she pulled open the front door and then stared at her visitor in frozen, nauseating disbelief.
She blinked, thinking that she must be hallucinating, but when she opened her eyes he was still there and this was no crazy illusion.
‘You!’ she squeaked in a high-pitched voice which she hardly recognised as her own. ‘What are you doing here?’ She clutched her mouth and swayed.
‘No way are you going to faint on me,’ Cristiano said through gritted teeth. He insinuated his foot over the threshold and pushed the door open wide, letting himself in while she was still gasping in shock and as pliable as a rag doll. Her eyes were as wide as saucers and she looked as though she was on the verge of collapse. Good.
Bethany heard the slam of the front door as he closed it and it resonated with the sound of the executioner’s blade. She was busy trying to get her thoughts together but the sight of him, all six foot two of cold aggression towering in the hallway, had slowed her thought processes down to an unhelpful standstill.
‘Cristiano,’ she finally threaded unevenly. ‘What a surprise.’ Only the wall, against which she had pressed herself, was keeping her from sinking to the ground in an unlovely heap.
‘Life is full of them. As I’ve discovered for myself, firsthand.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she stammered, choosing not to pursue that particular avenue of conversation.
‘Oh, I was just driving by and I thought I’d take time out to pass the time of day with you…Amelia. But it’s not Amelia, is it, Bethany?’
‘I feel faint. I honestly do.’ She put her hand to her head and took a few deep breaths. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Feel free. I’ll be waiting right here for you when you’ve recovered.’ He closed the gap between them and with each passing step Bethany felt her heart rate rocket.
‘How did…did you f…find me?’
‘Now, now,’ Cristiano said with sibilant menace, ‘isn’t it a little rude for you not to have offered me a cup of coffee? For us to be standing here in a hallway playing catch up when we could be chatting over old times somewhere a little more comfortable…? And after I’ve travelled all this way to see you…’
The man was in no hurry to go. And he was stifling her by standing so close, sending her frayed nervous system into even more acute disarray.
Belatedly, she remembered that she might be in the house on her own at the moment but her parents would be returning in under an hour, by which time he would need to have disappeared. The longer she remained in a state of shock, the longer he would be aroun
d, and she just couldn’t afford to have him meet her parents.
Another wave of nausea threatened to have her rushing to the bathroom, but she quelled it and cleared her throat.
‘Okay. I’ll get you a cup of coffee, but if you’ve come to bludgeon me into saying sorry then I’ll spare you the effort. I’m sorry. Satisfied?’
‘Not by a long chalk. So why don’t we start with the coffee and then we can have a really good chat about everything. By the way, did you know that impersonating someone can be prosecuted as a criminal offence?’
Bethany paled and Cristiano, who had only thought of that on the spur of the moment, shot her a smile of pure threat.
‘What else did you get up to while you were staying at the Doni apartment? Aside from shamelessly raiding her wardrobe? How light were your fingers? If I recall, the place was stuffed full of valuables.’
‘How dare you?’
‘I know. Nasty of me, isn’t it? But I’d think twice before I start reaching for the moral high ground if I were you.’ He had expected her to be taken aback by his appearance on her doorstep. No, he thought, scratch that. He had expected her to be shocked and defensive, but he hadn’t bargained on the panicky apprehension in her eyes. Then again, she was a lady of unexpected responses and definitely not one whose words and actions could be taken at face value.
Bethany felt like a mouse pinned to the ground by a predator whose aim was to smack her around for a while before ripping her to shreds. When she had walked away from him, admittedly with a finality which stemmed more from cowardice than anything else, the last thing she had expected was to be hunted down. She hadn’t taken him for a man who would lower himself to chasing after a woman who had dumped him without explanation. His pride would have seen to that. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought ahead to what he might do if he discovered that the woman who had dumped him had also been as genuine as a three pound note. At least as far as outward appearances went. Now she knew. He went on the attack.
The Italian's One-Night Love-Child Page 4