The Italian Billionaire's Christmas Miracle

by Spencer, Catherine

  “But you’re still single.”

  “Not because I have anything against marriage. My father’s health isn’t the best and I took over the running of this company sooner than I might otherwise have done, which has kept me fully occupied and left little time for serious romance. But I’ll know the right woman when she comes along and I will commit to her for the rest of my life, regardless of whatever difficulties we might encounter—and they will be few, I assure. I’ll make certain of that before putting a ring on her finger.”

  “You have a list of requirements she must meet, in order to qualify as your wife, do you?”

  “Of course,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Happiness, like sexual compatibility and physical attraction, will run secondary to suitability.”

  “You make it sound as if you believe in arranged marriages.”

  “I don’t disbelieve in them.”

  “Then I pity the woman who becomes your wife.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “Pity yourself, signorina,” he declared, tossing down his napkin. “You’re the one willing to sell her soul to a lost cause.”

  “On the contrary, signor. I’m doing exactly as you claim you will, when you take a wife. I’m sticking with my decision, regardless of the difficulties I’m facing. The only difference is, I’m taking on a vineyard instead of a husband.”

  He regarded her for an interminably long, silent minute. Finally he said, “Well then, since you refuse to let me deter you, I suppose I must do all I can to assist you.”

  “I think you’ve already done that.” She indicated her notebook. “You’ve given me some very valuable pointers.”

  “Theory is all very well in its place, signorina, but it in no way replaces hands-on experience. That being the case, I have a proposition which you might find interesting. One, I’d go so far as to say, you can’t afford to refuse. I’ll take you on as a short-term apprentice during your time here—say from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. It will mean you spend a good portion of the day working instead of enjoying the usual tourist activities, but if you’re as determined as you say you are—”

  “Oh, I am!” she exclaimed, her attention split evenly between the purely practical benefits of his offer, and the thrilling prospect of spending more time with him.

  “Then here is what I suggest we do.”

  He proceeded to outline a course of instruction geared to get her started. That he was showing extraordinary generosity to a total stranger did not, of course, escape her notice, but Arlene couldn’t help noticing not just what he said, but how he said it; on his finely carved lips as they shaped his words, and his precise enunciation.

  Nor was that her only thought. He spoke with the passion of a true professional about the wine industry. Would he prove an equally passionate lover, she wondered.

  “Signora?” His voice, deep and faintly amused, snapped her attention back to where it properly belonged. “Are we done for now, or is there something else you’d like to know?”

  Nothing to do with viticulture, certainly!

  “No, thank you.” Flustered, she’d stuffed her notebook into her bag and pushed away from the table. A quick glance at her watch showed it was almost four o’clock. The two-hour lunch he’d promised her had lasted well into the afternoon. “My goodness, look at the time! I had no idea it was so late, and I do apologize. I’m afraid I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

  “Not at all,” he replied smoothly, rising also.

  She was tall, but he was taller. Well over six feet. Slim and toughly built, with a midriff as unyielding as a flatiron. A tailor’s dream of a body, narrow in all the right places; broad and powerful where it should be.

  Escorting her back to the Jeep, he inquired, “You have other plans for the rest of the day, do you?”

  “Nothing specific. We arrived only yesterday and are still getting our bearings, but I should head back to the hotel.”

  “You did not come to Sardinia alone?”

  “No.”

  “Then I am the one who must apologize for monopolizing so much of your time.” He slammed her door shut, and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Tomorrow the grape harvest begins, which means we’ll be out in the fields all day. Wear sturdier shoes than those you presently have on. Also, choose clothing that’ll give you some protection from the sun. You have very fair skin.”

  Fair? Beside him, she felt colorless. Insignificant. But that he’d noticed her at all would have left her glowing had he not concluded with, “In particular, make sure you wear a hat. Neither I nor anyone else working the vines needs the distraction of your fainting from heatstroke.”

  His obvious and sudden impatience to be rid of her had quashed her romantic fantasies more effectively than a bucket of cold water thrown in her face. “Understood. You won’t even know I’m there.”

  “You may be sure that I will, signorina,” he replied with unflinching candor. “I shall be keeping a very close eye on you. You will learn as much as I can teach you in the short time at our disposal, but it will not be at the expense of my crop.”

  Chapter 2

  “So there you have it. What do you think?” Eyeing Gail, her best friend and travel companion, whom she’d found stretched out on a chaise by the hotel pool, Arlene tried to gauge her reaction to this abrupt change in plans.

  “That he’s right.” Gail slathered on another layer of sunscreen. “It’s a heaven-sent opportunity and you can’t afford to turn it down.”

  “But it does interfere with our holiday.”

  “Not mine,” Gail returned cheerfully. “We came here to unwind and I’m more than happy to spend half the day lazing here or on the beach. In case you haven’t noticed, both are littered with gorgeous men, which is probably a lot more than can be said about what’s-his-name from the vineyard.”

  “Domenico Silvaggio d’Avalos.” Arlene let each exotic syllable roll off her tongue like cream, and thought that one glance at his aristocratic face and big, toned body would be enough to change Gail’s mind about which of them had stumbled across the better deal.

  “What a mouthful! How do you wrap your tongue around it? Or are you on a first-name basis already?”

  “Not at all. He’s very businesslike and quite distant, in fact.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose it really matters. Just as long as you leave here knowing a heck of a lot more about running a vineyard than you did when you arrived, he doesn’t have to be witty or charismatic, does he?”

  “No.”

  Arlene did her best to sound emphatic, but something in her tone must have struck a hollow note because Gail removed her sunglasses, the better to skewer her in a mistrustful gaze. “Uh-oh! What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing,” she insisted, not about to confess that, in the space of three hours, she’d almost fooled herself into believing she might have met Mr. Right. Gail would have laughed herself silly at the idea, and rightly so. There was no such thing as love at first sight, and although a teenager might be forgiven for believing otherwise, a woman pushing thirty was certainly old enough to know better. “I find him a little…unsettling, that’s all.”

  “Unsettling how?”

  She aimed for a casual shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe ‘intimidating’ is a better word. He’s larger than life somehow, and so confidently in charge of himself and everything around him. I don’t quite know why he’s bothering with an ignoramus like me, and I guess I’m afraid I’ll disappoint him.”

  “So what if you do? Why do you care what he thinks?”

  Why? Because never before had she felt as alive as she did during the time she’d spent with him. “His mood changed, there at the end,” she said wistfully. “I could hear it in his voice and see it in his expression, as if he suddenly regretted his invitation. He seemed almost angry with me, although I can’t imagine why.”

  Gail popped her sunglasses back in place and turned her face up to the sun. “Arlene, do yours
elf a favor and stop analyzing the guy. Bad-tempered and moody he might be, but as far as you’re concerned, he’s the means to an end, and that’s all that matters. Once we leave here, you’ll never have to see him again.”

  She was unquestionably right, Arlene decided, and wished she could find some comfort in that thought. Instead it left her feeling oddly depressed.

  That night at dinner in the main house, the reaction of his brothers-in-law to what he’d done was pretty much what he expected. Mock disgust and a host of humorous comments along the lines of, “Where do you find these lame ducks, Dom?” and, “Just what we need at the busiest time of the year—the distraction of a useless extra female body cluttering up the landscape!”

  His sisters, though, twittered like drunken sparrows, clamoring for more personal information.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Is she single?”

  “How old is she?”

  “Don’t just sit there looking stony-faced, Domenico! Tell us what makes her so special.”

  “What makes her special,” his uncle Bruno declared, stirring up another flurry of over-the-top excitement, “is that she could be The One. Trust me. I have seen her. She is lovely.”

  The squeals of delight that comment elicited were enough to make him want to head for the hills. His mother and sisters’ chief mission in life was to see him married, and the last thing they needed was Bruno or anyone else encouraging them. “Don’t be ridiculous, Uncle Bruno,” he snapped. “She’s just an ordinary woman in the extraordinary position of finding herself with a vineyard she hasn’t the first idea how to manage. I’d have made the same offer if she’d been a man.”

  But she wasn’t a man, and no one was more conscious of that fact than Domenico. Throughout their extended lunch, he’d been struck by the sharp intelligence in her lovely gray eyes. But it took more than brains to succeed in viticulture, and given her small, delicate bones, he wondered how she’d begin to survive the tough physical demands of working a vineyard.

  Not my concern, he’d told himself, more than once. Yet he admired her determination and he’d enjoyed their spirited debate on marriage, enough that he’d been tempted to ask her out to dinner, just for the pleasure of getting to know her better. Until she let slip that she hadn’t come to the island alone, that was—and then he’d felt like a fool for not having figured it out for himself. If she was not a raving beauty, nor was she as plain as he’d first supposed. Rather, she possessed a low-key elegance of form and face that any discerning man would find attractive.

  Too bad another had already staked a claim to her, he’d thought at the time, covering his irritation with a brusqueness he now regretted. She’d almost flinched at his tone, as he spelled out what he expected of her when she showed up tomorrow morning. If it weren’t that she was in such dire straits, she’d probably have flung his generous offer of help back in his face. He would have, in her place.

  Aware that his family continued to stare at him expectantly, he said, “At the risk of ruining your evening and dashing all hope of marrying me off before the last grape is picked, I feel compelled to point out that this woman is already spoken for. Not only that, she’s here for only two weeks, after which our relationship, such as it is, will come to an end.”

  “But a great deal can happen in two weeks,” Renata, his youngest sister, pointed out, ogling her husband. “Our honeymoon lasted only that long, but it was all the time we needed for me to become pregnant.”

  “Lucky you,” Domenico replied testily, amid general laughter. “However, my ambitions with this woman run along somewhat different lines, so please don’t start knitting little things on my behalf.”

  That gave rise to such hilarity that, so help him, if he’d known at which hotel Arlene Russell was staying, he’d have phoned and left a message saying something had come up and he’d had to cancel their arrangement. Domenico Silvaggio d’Avalos was already directing operations when Arlene showed up as planned at the back of the winery, the next morning. Stepping away from a crowd of about thirty men and women being loaded into the back of two trucks, he eyed her critically, then gave a brief nod of approval. “You’ll do,” he decided.

  “What a relief, signor!”

  Either he didn’t pick up on her lightly sugared sarcasm, or he chose to ignore it. “Since we’ll be working closely for the next several days,” he announced briskly, “we’ll dispense with the formality. My name is Domenico.”

  “In that case, I’m Arlene.”

  “Yes, I remember,” he said, rather cryptically she thought. “And now that we’ve got that settled, let’s get moving. Those people you see in the trucks are extra pickers hired to help bring in the harvest. Stay out of their way. They have a job to do. If you have questions, ask me or my uncle.”

  She’d have saluted and barked, Yes, sir! if he’d given her half a chance. But he herded her into the Jeep and followed the two trucks up the hill to the fields, talking on his cell phone the entire time. When they arrived, his uncle was already assigning the extra laborers to their designated picking areas under the leadership of one of the full-time employees, but he stopped long enough to welcome Arlene with a big smile. “Watch and learn, then you go home the expert,” he shouted cheerfully.

  Hardly that, she thought. But hopefully not a complete nincompoop, either.

  “Although some cultivators bring in machinery to get the job done quickly, we handpick our grapes,” Domenico began, wasting no time launching into his first lecture.

  “So I see. Why is that?”

  “Because mechanical harvesters shake the fruit from the vines, often damaging it. This can result in oxidization and microbial activity which, in turn, causes disease. Not only that, it’s virtually impossible to prevent other material also being collected, especially leaves.”

  Oxidization? Microbial? Whatever happened to plain, uncomplicated English?

  Covering her dismay at already finding herself at a loss, she said, “But isn’t handpicking labor intensive, and therefore more expensive?”

  He cast her a lofty glance. “Vigna Silvaggio d’Avalos prides itself on the superiority of its wines. Cost is not a factor.”

  “Oh, I see!” she replied weakly, and properly chastised, wondered how she’d ever manage to redeem herself for such an unforgivable oversight.

  Unfortunately her woes increased as the morning progressed. Although recognizing that she’d had the extreme good fortune to find herself involved in a world-class operation, what struck her most forcibly as the hours dragged by was that her back ached and the sun was enough to roast a person alive.

  Under Domenico’s tutelage, she picked clusters of grapes using a pair of shears shaped like pointed scissors. She learned to recognize unripe or diseased fruit, and to reject it. Because bruised grapes spoil easily, she handled the crop carefully, laying the collected clusters in one of many small buckets placed at intervals along each row.

  Not that she’d have understood them anyway, but none of the migrant workers had much to say for themselves. They bent to their task with dogged persistence, seldom sparing her so much as a glance. Once assured that she wasn’t about to lay devastation to his precious crop, Domenico essentially ignored her, too, and Bruno was too far away to offer her a word of encouragement. Over the course of the morning, however, four women found occasion to stop by separately, each offering a friendly greeting and, at the same time, subjecting her to a thorough and somewhat amused inspection. Even if they hadn’t introduced themselves as his sisters, she’d have had to be blind not to see their resemblance to her mentor.

  “Don’t let my brother wear you out,” Lara, the first to pay a visit, counseled, her English almost as flawless as Domenico’s. “He’s a slave driver, especially at harvest time. Tell him when you’ve had enough.”

  Not a chance! Arlene knew from the way Domenico periodically came to check on her that he was just waiting for her to throw in the towel—which sh
e would have done, if her pride had permitted it. But despite a dull, persistent ache above her left eye which grew steadily worse as the morning passed, she refused to give him the satisfaction.

  The sun was high when a van rolled to a stop on a dusty patch of rocky ground some distance away from the fields. At once, the sisters converged on it and started unloading its contents onto a long table set up under a canvas awning supported by a steel frame.

  As everyone else working the fields downed tools, Domenico approached Arlene. “Time for a break and something to eat,” he declared, in that lordly take-it-or-leave-it manner of his.

  By then, the pain in her head was so severe, starbursts of flashing light were exploding before her eyes and she wasn’t sure she could crawl to where the women were laying out baskets of bread and platters laden with cheese, thinly sliced smoked meat and olives. But either he was blessed with second sight, or the stabbing agony showed on her face because, just when she feared she’d pass out, he grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet. “Still want to run a vineyard?” he inquired smoothly.

  “You bet,” she managed, and disengaging herself from his hold, managed to totter off and collapse in the shade of the awning.

  Following, he eyed her critically. “How much water have you drunk since you got here?”

  “Not enough, I guess.” She squinted against the painfully bright glare of the sun beyond the awning. “I did bring a bottle with me, but I finished it hours ago.”

  “You didn’t notice the coolers at the end of each row of vines? You didn’t think to ask what they were for?”

  “No.” She swallowed, the smell of warm yeasty bread, olives and sharp cheese suddenly causing her stomach to churn unpleasantly.

  He let fly with an impatient curse and strode to the table, returning a moment later to thrust at her another bottle of water, this one well chilled. “It didn’t occur to me you’d need to be told to keep yourself properly hydrated. I assumed you had enough sense to reach that conclusion unaided.”