by Liz Fielding
It would be two more days before Angelica moved out.
They were going to be two very long days and right now he needed air—fresh, clean, cold air—to blow her out of his head.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘You can’t buy happiness but you can buy ice cream...which is much the same thing.’
—from Rosie’s Little Book of Ice Cream
GELI’S RACING PULSE, pounding heartbeat said, Run—run for your life. Falling in lust with a man who had made it clear not once, not twice but three times that while he might be aroused—and he had certainly been aroused—he was not interested in any kind of relationship was a recipe for disaster.
Sharing an apartment with that man, working with him was never going to work.
She threw open her bedroom window, stuck her head out and filled her lungs with icy air, hoping that it would cool not just her skin but freeze the heat from the inside out.
What was it about Dante Vettori that made her lose her wits? What had started out as a little teasing had ended with his arms around her, his mouth on hers, his hands spread wide over her skin. She shivered and pressed her hand hard against her breast, where his touch had created a shock of pleasure that racketed around her body like a pinball machine, lighting up every sensory receptor she had.
Maybe she should suggest some straightforward recreational sex so they could both get it out of their systems. No strings. Except if he’d been a ‘no strings’ kind of guy he’d have been out there, taking anything on offer in an attempt to obliterate the heartbreak. A man who looked like Dante would not have been short of offers.
If he’d been a ‘no strings’ kind of guy they would have been naked right now.
He needed something more than that. Or maybe something less. Someone who didn’t want anything from him but was just there...
She was good at that. She’d been rescuing broken creatures ever since she’d picked up that injured pheasant. She’d never tried rescuing a broken person before but there was no difference. They were edgy, scared and you had to earn their trust, too. No sudden moves. No demands...
She checked on Rattino, sat on the floor rubbing his tiny domed head, while she sipped iced water, rolled the glass against her mouth to cool her swollen lips and heated libido.
Having stretched the taking her time instruction to the limit, she found a clip and fastened back her hair, straightened her clothes, applied a fresh coat of lipstick. It was time to get back to work...
Dante was standing in the middle of the sitting room. He was wearing his jacket, had a bright red scarf around his neck and in his hands he was holding a battered cardboard box.
For a moment they stared at one another, then he said, ‘I found this on the back doorstep.’
‘On the doorstep?’ What was he doing on the doorstep when he was so busy writing a report...?
‘I needed some fresh air,’ he said.
You and me both, mister, she thought, taking a step closer so that she could see what was in the box.
‘Oh, kittens.’ Two of them, all eyes, huddled together in the corner. ‘Your notice appears to have worked.’
‘I was under the impression that its purpose was to find the owner of Rattino so that we could return him to the bosom of his family,’ he said, unimpressed. ‘Not have the rest of his family dumped on our doorstep.’
She looked up. Our doorstep...
‘In an ideal world,’ she said, returning to the kittens, picking each one up in turn and checking it over for any sign of injury before replacing it in the box. ‘They’re thin but otherwise seem in good shape.’
‘I imagine their mother is a stray who didn’t come back from a hunting trip.’
‘It seems likely. And would explain why Rattino went looking for food. He is the biggest. So what do you think?’
‘What do I think?’
‘Shall we call the black one Mole and the one with stripes Badger? We already have Ratty?’ she prompted. ‘Wind in the Willows? It’s a classic English children’s book,’ she explained when he made no response. ‘Or would you prefer Italian names?’
‘I think...’ He took a breath. ‘I think I’ll go and take down those notices before anyone else decides to leave a box of unwanted kittens on the doorstep.’
‘Right. Good plan. I’ll, um, feed these two,’ she said as he headed for the door. ‘Introduce them to the amenities. Will you keep an eye out for their mother, while you’re out? She wouldn’t have abandoned them.’
‘If she’s been hit by a car—’
‘You’re right. She may be lying hurt somewhere,’ she said. ‘Hang on while I see to these two and I’ll come with you. I know the kind of places she’ll crawl into.’
Geli had no doubt that Dante would rather be on his own but, rather than waste his breath, he said, ‘I’ll go and tell Lisa that she’s going to have to manage without you.’
‘You’ll make her evening.’
‘No doubt.’ His tone left her under no illusion that she wasn’t making his. ‘Wrap up well. It’s freezing out there.’
Twenty minutes later, having fed the kittens, reunited them with their brother and changed her flat working shoes for a pair of sturdy boots, she was walking with Dante along the street where she’d found Rattino.
‘Urban cats have a fairly limited range,’ she explained, stopping every few yards to check doorways and explore the narrow street that had given her a fright the night she’d arrived. ‘They avoid fights by staying out of each other’s way whenever possible. Will you hold this?’
‘Where is your glove?’ he demanded when she handed him her flashlight and began to turn over boxes with her bare hand.
‘In my pocket. I held the kittens so she’d smell them on me but she’s not here—’
She broke off as he took her icy hand and tucked it into his own roomy fleece-lined glove so that their hands were palm to palm. ‘Now we’ll both smell of her kittens.’
She looked up at him. ‘Good thinking.’
‘I’m glad you approve,’ he said and the shadows from the street lights emphasised the creases as, unexpectedly, he smiled.
Oh, boy... She turned away to grab one of the notices from a nearby lamp post and saw the wooden barriers surrounding the construction site where Via Pepone used to be.
‘There,’ she said. ‘If she’s survived, she’ll be in there.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘As certain as I can be. Disturbed ground, displaced rodents, workmen dropping food scraps, lots of places to hide. Perfect for a mother with three hungry kittens. Maybe someone working on the site knew they were there and when he saw the notice brought them to us.’
‘That makes sense.’ He walked across to the site entrance and tried the gate. It did not budge.
‘Is there a night watchman?’ she asked.
‘It’s the twenty-first century.’ He looked up at the cameras mounted on high posts. ‘It’s all high-tech security systems and CCTV monitored from a warm office these days.’
‘Okaaay.’ She reluctantly removed her hand from his glove and fished in her pocket for her own. ‘In that case you’ll have to give me a bunk-up so that I can climb over.’
‘Alarms?’ he reminded her. ‘CCTV.’
‘Which will deal with the problem of how I’d climb back out again with an injured cat. And the local polizia are so helpful. I’m sure they’ll drive me to the vet before they arrest me.’
‘Drive you to the vet, send out for hot chocolate to keep you warm and raise a collection to pay the vet’s bill, I have no doubt. But you’ve had your quota of excitement for this week.’
‘Well, that’s a mean thing to say.’ Their breath mingled in the freezing air and she pulled on her glove before she did something really exciting, like grabbing his collar and pulling him down to warm their freezing lips. ‘Okay, your turn. What do you suggest?’
‘I suppose I could climb over the fence and get arrested.’
‘Your life is that short
of excitement?’
‘Not since you and that wretched kitten arrived.’
‘You can thank me later. Any other ideas?’ She waited. ‘I sensed an or in there somewhere.’
He shrugged, looked somewhere above her head. ‘Or I could make a phone call and get the security people to let us in.’
‘Maybe sooner rather than later,’ she suggested, stamping her feet.
He looked down at her for a long moment, then took out his cellphone, thumbed a number on his fast dial list and walked away down the street as he spoke to whoever answered. The conversation was brief and he wasn’t smiling as he rejoined her.
‘Someone will be here in a few minutes.’
‘Well, that’s impressive.’
‘You think so?’
He looked up at the floodlit boarding high above the fence with an artist’s impression of the office block that would replace Via Pepone. It bore the name of the construction company in huge letters. Beneath, smaller, was the name of the developer.
Vettori SpA.
Oh... ‘That’s not a coincidence, is it?’ she said.
‘My great-grandfather started the business after the war, repairing bomb-damaged buildings, working every hour God gave to save enough money to buy some land and build a small block of flats. My grandfather took over a thriving construction company and continued to expand the business until a heart attack forced him to retire and he handed it over to my father.’
This was his father’s project? ‘Was that who you called just now? Your father?’
Before he could answer, a security patrol van drew up in a spray of dirty snow. The driver leapt out, exchanged a few words with Dante in rapid Italian and then unlocked the small personal door set in the gates.
‘Take care, Angel,’ Dante said, taking her hand as they stepped through after him.
Angel? She turned and looked up at him.
‘A construction site is a hazardous place,’ he said.
‘Yes...’ With the ground frozen, no work had been done in the last couple of days and, as the patrolman shone his flashlight slowly across the site, there were few footprints to mar the pristine snow. Then she saw something... ‘There!’ She snatched her hand away to point to where the light picked up a disturbance in the snow. Not paw prints but a wider trail marked by darker patches of blood where an animal had dragged herself across the ground, desperate to get back to her babies. ‘She’s hurt.’
‘Wait...’
She ignored Dante, running across the yard, using her own small flashlight to follow the trail until she reached the place where the cat had wedged herself under pallets piled with building materials.
‘Let me do this.’ Dante knelt beside her, but she’d already stripped off her gloves and was holding out her hands so that the cat could smell her kittens. Crooning and chirruping, she dragged herself towards the scent until Geli could reach her and lift her gently from her hiding place. ‘Dio... She’s a mess.’
‘We need to keep her warm. Take my scarf,’ she urged, but Dante pulled off his beautiful red cashmere scarf and wrapped it around the poor creature. ‘We need to get her to a vet,’ she said.
Dante looked at this angel, so passionate, so full of compassion.
He called the vet and then asked the security guard to drive them to his office. ‘He’ll meet us there. Come on; it’ll be a squeeze, but it’s not far,’ he said, holding the door so that she could slide into the passenger seat, then squashing in after her, sitting sideways to give her as much room as possible. ‘I’ll breathe in when you breathe out and we should be okay,’ he said, and she laughed. Such a good sound.
The vet was unlocking the door as they arrived, and Dante translated while Geli assisted him until his nurse arrived and they were no longer needed. Then they retired to the freezing waiting room.
‘This is going to take a while,’ she said, her breath a misty cloud. ‘You should get back to your report.’
‘It will keep.’ He settled in the corner of the battered sofa and opened his jacket in invitation but she hesitated. Despite the last hour, she wasn’t likely to forget the appalling way he’d behaved when she came up to his office. Okay, she’d been flirting a little but he should not have risen to it. Should not have kissed her, touched her and, when she’d responded with an eagerness that had wiped everything but need from his mind, he should not have rejected her.
He was a mess, he knew it, but the room was freezing and she wasn’t going anywhere until she knew whether the cat was going to survive.
‘Come on. You’re shivering,’ he said and, after what felt like for ever, she surrendered to the reality of the situation and sat down primly beside him. ‘Snuggle up. You’re letting out all the warmth,’ he said, looping his arm around her and drawing her close, wrapping his coat around her.
She looked at him. ‘Snuggle?’
‘My mother used to say that. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded and relaxed into him. ‘My mother used to say that when we piled on the sofa to watch a movie on the television.’
‘What movies did you watch together?’
‘Beauty and the Beast. Mary Poppins. The Jungle Book. White Fang... We used an entire box of tissues between us when we watched that one.’
‘Did White Fang die?’ he asked, in an attempt to distract himself from the way her body was pressed against his, the tickle of her hair against his cheek.
‘No, it was the scene where the boy had to send the wolf away for its own safety. He pretended he didn’t love it any more. It was heartbreaking.’
‘I can imagine.’ He looked down at her. Or, rather, the top of her head. ‘Is the cat going to make it, do you think?’
‘It’s hard to say. She seems to have taken a glancing blow from a car. There’s a lot of superficial damage, cuts and scrapes and a broken bone or two.’ She turned her head and looked up at him and, despite his best intentions, it took all his strength not to kiss her again. ‘It depends what internal damage has been done.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Look away. Think about the cat. ‘How on earth did she manage to get under the fence and drag herself back across the site?’
‘Cats are amazing and she’s a mother. Her babies needed her.’
‘They survived without her.’
Her face pressed against the collar of Dante’s shirt, his neck, sharing his warmth, Geli heard a world of hurt in those few words.
‘Only because I found Rattino and you put up that notice,’ she said. ‘Do you see your mother, Dante?’
He stared straight ahead and for a moment she didn’t think he was going to answer her, but then he shrugged. ‘Occasionally. She remarried, started a new family.’
‘So you were able to return to Italy.’
‘Just for the holidays. I was at school in England. Then I was away at university.’
‘England or Italy?’
‘Scotland. Then the US.’
Distancing himself from a father who was too busy with the new woman in his life to put him first, she thought. And from a mother who had found someone new to love and made a second family where he probably felt like a spare part...
She felt a bit like that, too, now that her sisters were married. It was no longer the three of them against the world.
‘What did you read? At uni?’ she asked. Anything to take away the bleakness in those dark eyes.
‘Politics, philosophy and economics at St Andrews. Business management at Harvard.’
‘St Andrews,’ she repeated, with a teasing Scottish accent. ‘And Harvard?’
He looked down at her, a smile creating a sunburst of creases around his eyes. ‘Are you suggesting that I’m a little over-qualified to run a café?’
She made a performance of a shrug. ‘What are you going to do with your degree except work as a researcher for a Member of Parliament? But business management at Harvard seems a little over the top. Unless you’re planning world domination in the jazz café market?’
‘Not ice cream and definitely not jazz cafés,’ he said. ‘The plan was that I gain some experience with companies in the United States before joining my father.’
‘The fourth generation to run Vettori SpA?’
‘Until Via Pepone got in the way.’
‘Do you regret taking a stand?’ she asked.
‘Wrong question, Angel. The question is whether, given the same choices, I would do it again.’
‘Would you?’ she asked, shivering against him, not with the cold, where the snow had melted into her skirt and clung wetly to her legs, but at the thought of the boy who’d had his life torn apart, bouncing between adults who thought only of themselves.
‘Maybe I was never meant to be the CEO of a big company,’ he said, taking out his cellphone and thumbing in a text with the hand he didn’t have around her shoulders. ‘I hoped it would bring us closer together, but my father and I are very different. He thinks I’m soft, sentimental, trying to hang onto a past that is long gone. Incapable of holding onto a woman like Valentina Mazzolini.’
‘When what you’re actually trying to do is make a future for a place that you love.’ A place where, sitting in Nonnina Rosa’s kitchen as a boy, watching her cook, he’d been happy. Where he’d spent time as a youth on those long school holidays while his mother and father had been absorbed in new partnerships...
Isola was his home.
‘Local politics seems to be calling me,’ he admitted. ‘There’s no money in it, no A-list parties, just a lot of hard work, but maybe, in twenty or thirty years, if I’ve managed to hold back the march of the skyscraper and secure the spirit of old Isola in a modern world, they’ll elect me mayor.’
‘Tell me about Isola,’ she urged. ‘About your vision.’
‘Vision?’
‘Isn’t that what the report you’re writing is all about? Not just facts and figures, but your vision, your passion. The human scale?’