‘Hmm. If you turn out to be another Jeremy—’ Sheena warned.
‘Hardly,’ Orlando cut in gently. Then he grimaced. ‘Oh, hell. When I left Naples, even the flower market wasn’t open, let alone the shops. And I was so focused on catching my flight, getting here to see her, I didn’t— Look, is there somewhere in the hospital I can buy flowers? Chocolates? Anything?’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘Porca miseria! I have no English money either—I paid for my train ticket by credit card. And hospital shops don’t take credit cards, do they?’ He looked beseechingly at her. ‘Dio. The only thing I can offer her right now is an apology and my heart. And that’s …’ He shook his head in misery. ‘That might not be enough.’
Sheena patted his shoulder. ‘All right. Go into cubicle three and wait. I’ll have a word with her. See if she wants to talk to you.’
‘Next?’ Eleanor asked when she’d finished writing up the set of notes and put them on the trolley for filing.
‘Cubicle three,’ Sheena directed. ‘Fracture.’
‘OK.’ Eleanor smiled, and walked over to the cubicle. When she twitched the curtain back and saw who was sitting on the bed, panic flared through her and she grabbed the end of the bed to steady herself. ‘Orlando? What are you doing here? Is it Bartolomeo? Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine,’ Orlando reassured her.
She felt her eyes narrow. ‘So why are you here?’
‘For emergency treatment.’
She frowned. ‘I’m not with you.’
‘I require emergency treatment,’ he said.
He had dark shadows under his eyes and looked a bit rough around the edges, but that was as far as it went. She couldn’t see anything that looked like a fracture or a wound that needed dressing. ‘For what, precisely?’ she asked crisply.
‘A broken heart.’
‘A what?’ She stared at him.
‘And, as a doctor, I already know the cure,’ he said softly. ‘You.’
She shook her head. ‘You’re the man who doesn’t believe in love. Who thinks it’s all a myth.’
‘And I was wrong. I admit it freely. It’s not a myth. I love you, Eleanor.’
She wasn’t sure she was hearing this. ‘How did you get here?’
‘I caught an early flight from Naples this morning.’
Her frown deepened. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Bartolomeo told me where you worked. He lost your mother—and I don’t want that to happen to me. To us. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t have the courage to tell you how I feel.’ He raised a hand to forestall her protest. ‘No, hear me out. The minute I walked into the apartment and realised you’d gone, it was as if someone had switched off the sun. And it was—oh, so empty. Without you, it wasn’t my home any more, it was just a place to live. That’s when I realised how wrong I’ve been.’ He swallowed hard. ‘So I came to find you. To tell you what’s been under my nose since the minute I met you—what you told me and told me and told me but I was too stupid and stubborn to take in. That there is just one special person for me—and that’s you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
‘You want to spend the rest of your life with me,’ she echoed, looking stunned.
He coughed. ‘I’ve been eating a fair bit of humble pie. Serafina has been having a fine time at my expense.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, lord—the surgery. Your patients!’
‘They’re being looked after by my very capable partners. Who are also enjoying themselves hugely, making me eat my words,’ he said dryly. ‘In fact, they made me say it several times, pretending they couldn’t hear me. Serafina even suggested that I put it in writing.’
To his relief, a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. So it amused her, too. Good. At least the idea of him loving her hadn’t sent her screaming for cover. Maybe he had a chance. ‘I want to be with you, Eleanor. I love you.’
‘You love me.’ She looked as if she didn’t quite believe him.
Hardly surprising, in the circumstances. ‘I admit I’ve been very stupid. I’ve made you wait and wait and wait. And I wouldn’t blame you for telling me to get lost because I’m too late. But the minute I found your note and realised you’d walked out on me, it hit me. Without you, my life doesn’t feel right. There’s an empty space, like a black hole, right where my heart should be. Your letter …’ He dragged in a breath. ‘You said you wished me a long and happy life. Without you, it’ll be long—every second will last a lifetime—but it won’t be happy. Because, without you, the better part of me is missing. I love you.’
‘You love me,’ she repeated, still looking stunned.
‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘And I’m going to keep telling you that until you realise it’s true.’
‘How can I be sure?’ she demanded. ‘How do I know you’re not going to change your mind and it’s all going to end in tears?’
He smiled wryly. ‘I think that was my line. Or it used to be, until I knew better. Because you taught me to believe.’
‘Believe?’ she echoed, frowning. ‘Believe in what?’
‘Believe in love. Believe in you. Believe in us.’ He swallowed hard. ‘You’re right. I’m not my mother. I don’t want you to change, to live up to some impossible ideal in my head—because you’re already what I want. You’re funny and you’re clever and you’re kind—and you’re so damn sexy I have a hard time keeping my hands off you.’
‘You managed it in your flat,’ she pointed out.
‘I was trying to be honourable.’ He moistened his lower lip. ‘Though if this means I need to make it up to you, we’d better go to a desert island for our honeymoon.’
‘What honeymoon?’
‘Our honeymoon. We’re getting married.’ She coughed. ‘I don’t remember you asking me.’ He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘That’s a tiny detail.’
‘It’s a big deal,’ she corrected.
‘Eleanor, I flew out from Naples at stupid o’clock when all the shops were closed. I’ve got no English money on me, so right at this second I can’t give you a proposal with flowers and chocolates and a big sparkling diamond. If that’s what you want, I’ll meet you for lunch. I’ll set up the champagne and the violin-player and the ring under a silver platter instead of your pudding. Whatever you want, I’ll do it.’ He looked at her. ‘But right now, all I can give you is an apology. And my heart.’ ‘You’re giving me your heart.’
‘Yes. Ti amo. Voglio passare il resto della mia vita con te.’
‘I love you,’ she translated. ‘I want to spend … the rest of my life?’ At his nod, she continued, ‘With you.’
He smiled. ‘Good. I hoped you felt the same way.’
‘I was transla—’ She shook her head and sat on the bed next to him. ‘You’re impossible, Orlando. You’ve spent weeks keeping me at a distance. I’ve been so miserable about it. And now you’re telling me you love me after all.’
‘I do. It just took me time to get my head around it.’
‘Time.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘I did warn you I needed time. And I could point out that you were the one who decided not to wait.’
‘How much longer did you need, Orlando?’
He grimaced. ‘I admit, you were right. It was when you weren’t there that I realised what life would be like without you—what it was like without you. And I hated it. I want to be with you. I don’t care whether it’s here or Italy. The only place that feels home to me is where you are. So I’m telling you what I should have told you a long time ago. I love you, Eleanor Forrest.’ It was time to take the risk. He slid off the bed and dropped to one knee. ‘I meant what I said—in Italian as well as in English. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you do me the honour of marrying me—being my love, my life, my one and only for the rest of my days?’
She didn’t answer, and he felt himself freezing from the inside out.
He’d left i
t too late.
She wasn’t going to give him the chance to make it up to her.
He was about to haul himself to his feet and leave when she spoke, her voice so soft that he could barely hear her. ‘Are you saying, Orlando, that I am The One?’
‘Yes. You were right. The One exists—and you are that person, for me.’ His voice was equally soft. ‘And this is a temporary proposal—until lunchtime, when I can do it with the flowers and the champagne and all the rest of it.’
‘No.’
He’d thought it had hurt before. But this—this was as if his heart was being ground into the finest sand. She wasn’t going to marry him.
‘Then I apologise, Dottoressa Forrest,’ he said formally. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’
Before he could get up and leave, she took his hand. ‘I meant no to the temporary proposal. Like you said, that stuff’s just trappings. It doesn’t last. Champagne goes flat, cut flowers wither, and diamonds … well, hit one in the right place with the right pressure and you’ll fracture it.’
Hope began to flicker. ‘So you’ll marry me?’
‘You’re offering marriage. Which means … what?’
This was a test, he knew. The most important one of his life. If he failed, he wouldn’t get another chance—because this was already his second chance. His last chance.
‘It means a family,’ he said carefully. ‘Someone to belong to. You and me. And, in time, bambini—our children, who’ll grow up secure and happy and knowing right from the start what I didn’t … What you had to teach me. That love exists. That it’s real. That it’s good.’
‘Then ask me again.’ Her eyes glittered. ‘Not a temporary proposal.’
‘I love you, Eleanor. My one and only. Will you marry me—make my life whole?’
She smiled and tugged him to his feet. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you, my one and only. And I’ll love you for the rest of our days.’
The Italian’s
Defiant Mistress
India Grey
About the Author
A self-confessed romance junkie, INDIA GREY was just thirteen years old when she first sent off for the Mills & Boon® Writers’ Guidelines. She can still recall the thrill of getting the large brown envelope with its distinctive logo through the letterbox, and subsequently whiled away many a dull school-day staring out of the window and dreaming of the perfect hero. She kept those guidelines with her for the next ten years, tucking them carefully inside the cover of each new diary in January, and beginning every list of New Year’s Resolutions with the words Start Novel. In the meantime she also gained a degree in English Literature from Manchester University, and, in a stroke of genius on the part of the gods of romance, met her gorgeous future husband on the very last night of their three years there. The last fifteen years have been spent blissfully buried in domesticity and heaps of pink washing generated by three small daughters, but she has never really stopped daydreaming about romance. She’s just profoundly grateful to have finally got an excuse to do it legitimately!
This is India’s glitteringly emotional first book!
For Penny, a real-life fairy godmother,
who showed me how to make the
dream come true
CHAPTER ONE
‘I CAN’T do this.’
Eve’s voice was little more than a whisper as the icy hand of fear gripped her throat and trailed its chilly fingers down her spine. She wanted to run, but was suddenly too panic-stricken to move. Besides, in the stiletto-heeled thigh-length boots she probably wouldn’t get very far.
On the other side of the curtains the ballroom of Florence’s grandest palazzo was packed with five hundred of the world’s most wealthy and beautiful, who had come to pay homage to the man who had been dressing them for half a century. Only the cream of Antonio di Lazaro’s client list had been invited to attend this exclusive fiftieth anniversary retrospective, and any celebrities not sitting out there in the glittering ballroom waiting for the show to begin were backstage, getting ready to model some of the legendary Lazaro label’s most iconic designs.
Sienna Swift, current supermodel darling of the international fashion scene, looked up briefly from the magazine she was reading and gave Eve her famously dazzling smile.
‘Course you can. You’ll be fine.’
‘But I’m a … a journalist.’ The dishonesty of the statement made Eve falter as she said it. ‘My friend Lou was supposed to be doing this article—she’d have been fantastic, but I’ve never done anything like this in my life. I don’t know the first thing about modelling!’
Sienna turned the page. ‘Well, babe, you’ve got the legs for it. And better boobs than the rest of us put together. What’s to know? It’s hardly rocket science.’ She paused to scrutinise a photograph of one of her closest rivals before adding, ‘It’s all about sex, I suppose.’
‘Sex?’ Eve wailed, her spirits sinking even further. ‘Why sex? Where I come from sex is not something you do in front of five hundred people and photographers from every major publication around the globe.’
Apparently. She couldn’t very well say she didn’t know the first thing about that either.
Sienna sighed and put the magazine down.
‘OK, we haven’t got long, so let’s make this as simple as possible. All you have to do is find someone to focus on. You’re up there on the catwalk, right? And you just fix your eyes on some bloke and forget everyone else. Watch.’
The model took a couple of steps back, thrusting her hips forward in classic catwalk style and placing her hands on them. Looking around for a likely candidate, she fixed her smoky gaze on the singer from Italy’s hottest new boy band, who’d just come offstage.
‘You walk towards him and you never take your eyes off him,’ she murmured through sultry, pouted lips. ‘Not for a second. This is lust at first sight. You’re looking at him as if he’s the sexiest man alive and you’re going to go right up to him and strip his clothes off and there and then.’ She swung back to Eve with a wicked smile. ‘That’s all there is to it!’ And to the obvious dismay of the blushing singer she picked up the magazine again and resumed her study of it.
Eve squirmed uncomfortably in the transparent PVC mini-dress, and tugged it down over her bottom. It would be a lot easier to follow Sienna’s advice if she was allowed to wear her glasses, without which she wasn’t going to be able to focus on anything more than half a metre away from her face, and if she wasn’t dressed in an upmarket plastic bag. She seemed to have drawn the short straw in the clothes lottery, and had been allocated one of Lazaro’s more bizarre creations from his avant-garde phase in the 1960s. Strategically positioned fluorescent flowers stopped the dress being absolutely X-rated, but she still felt horribly exposed.
All around her some of the most beautiful women in the world were sipping mineral water from miniature bottles and dropping the kind of names that would have sent a real journalist into a frenzy of excitement. Among them Eve felt lonely, disorientated, and about as glamorous as a transit van in a garage full of sportscars.
She didn’t belong here.
She closed her eyes against the sudden wave of homesickness that threatened to knock her for six as she thought of her messy desk by the window in Professor Swanson’s office. At this time of year her view of the college quadrangle was almost entirely obliterated by the wisteria rampaging across the window, casting a murky underwater light over the clutter of teacups and student essays and piles of scribbled notes in the dusty book-lined room.
That was her world, and she had been crazy to think for a second that she could cut it in Lou’s. Fashion journalists—especially those who were successful enough to shadow supermodels for exclusive behind-the-scenes articles on the A-list events of the year—were generally not shy, shortsighted academics. There was just no way she could pull it off.
‘I think I’d better go and get changed,’ she muttered, trying to squeeze through the crush at the steps to the catwalk.
The p
lan had failed before it had even begun, and it was better that she face that fact now. Lou had taken a huge risk in faking illness at the last minute and putting Eve forward for this article, and if either of them had stopped to think about it they would have realised how outrageous the whole scheme was. She was going to let Lou down, but that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was letting her twin sister Ellie down. And letting Raphael Di Lazaro slip through her fingers again.
Without looking up from the horoscope page, Sienna grabbed her arm and pulled her back. ‘No time,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We’re on in a second. Look, it says here that Scorpios should exercise caution in financial matters. Do you think that means I shouldn’t buy that Prada clutch bag, then?’
Eve’s teeth were chattering violently as she replied, ‘I shouldn’t think so. Look, it doesn’t by any chance say that on Thursday Aquarians should avoid public displays of nudity and stay at home eating chocolate instead, does it?’
Sienna laughed. ‘Let’s see. Aquarius. “Due to Mercury moving into the pinnacle of your chart, Thursday will see a spectacular reawakening of your love-life. Your destiny awaits you in a most unexpected place.” Excellent! You’d better stick around after all!’
Eve grimaced. Even if she could persuade herself to believe in astrology—or destiny, for that matter—she’d have to draw the line at reincarnation. Her love-life wasn’t just sleeping, it was dead and buried.
No. If she was going to stick around it would be nothing to do with love or destiny, for pity’s sake, and everything to do with revenge.
She gave Sienna a watery smile. ‘Just my luck the man of my dreams is going to appear in my life the day I’m dressed as Porn Star Barbie.’
The grand ballroom of the Palazzo Salarino glittered in the light from its famous antique crystal chandeliers as the floor-length windows darkened from the blue of late afternoon to the deep mauve of evening. The body of the room was filled with row upon row of gilded chairs, seating the fashion world’s premier figures, and the perfection of the scene was reflected in the numerous Venetian mirrors that lined the walls.
Latin Lovers: Italian Playboys Page 34