The Italian's Christmas Proposition. CATHY WILLIAMS
won’t be on the scene now you’re spoken for.’ He’d felt it again. A charge of electricity, powerful and disorientating. Primal. She represented everything he steered clear of when it came to women, and yet she was uniquely appealing and he had no idea from where the appeal stemmed.
‘Bertie was never an ex,’ Rosie was obliged to point out. ‘Never even came close! Our families have known each other for ages and, somewhere along the line, he got it into his head that he wanted to ask me out on a date. I was seventeen at the time. I’ve never fancied him but now he’s a big shot in the City somewhere and everyone thinks he could be a suitable match.’ She rolled her eyes.
Matteo didn’t say anything. His dark eyes were lazy and thoughtful. ‘So I’ll be meeting the family,’ he murmured.
‘You don’t have to. I could tell them that you’ve been called away on business. Candice has met you. She’ll understand.’
‘Why will she understand?’
‘Because…’ Rosie thought that, for someone as forbidding as he was, it was oddly easy to talk to him. ‘Because she has two children now, but before that she was a successful lawyer, so she understands the demands of work. She’ll get it if you pay a flying visit and then disappear.’
Rosie frowned and sat forward. ‘That would work,’ she said slowly. ‘If you disappear, then there won’t be the complication of your meeting my parents and the rest of the family. That way, I can gradually warn them that the big romance isn’t actually going as planned. These things happen,’ she thought aloud. ‘People meet and think that they’ve fallen in love but it turns out to be a mistake.’
‘And naturally,’ Matteo said soothingly, ‘That’s exactly what will happen but, for the moment, that solution is off the cards.’
‘Why?’
‘Because my deal hasn’t been finalised. Bob and Margaret are here for another week. Skiing, having fun and making sure the last details of my purchase are drawn up and inspected via email by their lawyers in London. Until signatures are on the dotted line, we’re in love and thinking of building a future together. Once everything’s signed, sealed and delivered, then the hasty unravelling of our relationship can begin.’ He gave an elegant shrug which implied that that was the way forward and there was nothing she could do about it, whether she wanted to or not.
‘It’ll be harder on my parents if they actually meet you face to face.’
‘Tough.’ Matteo didn’t bother beating about the bush. ‘I didn’t ask for this.’
His dark eyes scoured her face. He could read the tension and anxiety there, and of course she had a point. She clearly came from a tight-knit family unit. The less they were hurt by her behaviour, the better, but as far as he was concerned that was not his problem. Matteo didn’t allow sentiment to rule his life. It simply wasn’t in his nature. He had managed to remain focused, to stay on course with his life—unlike many of the kids he had grown up with, who had ended up either in jail or six feet under. That said, a life spent in foster care had toughened him. He had known what it meant to have nothing, to be a face and a name in a system and not much more. He had climbed out of that place and forged his way in the world.
That brief spell of respite at the place he was in the process of buying had shown him that there were alternatives in life. He had held onto that vision and it had seen him through.
He had realised that the only way to escape the predictability of becoming one of the victims of the Social Services system was to educate himself and he had applied himself to the task with monumental dedication. By the time he had hit Cambridge University, he had been an intellectual force to contend with.
He’d known more than his tutors. His aptitude for mathematics was prodigious. He’d been head-hunted by a newly formed investment bank and had swiftly risen to the top before breaking free to become something of a shooting star in the financial firmament. Money had given him the opportunity to diversify. It had allowed him to get whatever he wanted at the snap of a finger. Money had been his passport to freedom and freedom had been his only goal for his entire adult life.
Money had also jaded his palate, made life predictable. Being able to have whatever and whomever you wanted, he had reflected time and again, did not necessarily guarantee excitement.
He hadn’t had a woman in months and he hadn’t been tempted.
Now here he was and, in that instant, Matteo decided that he was going to go with the flow and make the best of the situation into which he had been catapulted. Moreover, he was going to enjoy the experience.
‘I have a suite here, at this hotel,’ he mused. ‘Bob and Margaret are at another location, further down the slopes. If I’m the new man in your life, then I’ll be expected to be at your parents’ chalet with you, I presume?’
‘Wait. What? Now, hang on just a minute…’
‘It’s hardly likely that we’re in the thick of a stormy, passionate affair and I’m bedding down on my own in a hotel room while you’re miles away in a chalet somewhere with nothing but the telly and a good book for company. Is it?’
‘Well, no. but…’
‘But?’
‘But this isn’t a normal situation, is it? I mean, we’re not actually involved with one another, are we?’
‘You need to follow the plot line here,’ Matteo imparted kindly. ‘There will be people we will need to convince and no one, not even traditional and church-going Bob and Margaret, will be persuaded that this is the affair of a lifetime if we’re crossing paths off and on.’
‘Stop being patronising,’ Rosie said absently. What did he mean by being at the chalet with her? Sharing a bedroom? She paled at the thought because suddenly her little white lie had taken on a life of its own and was galloping away at speed.
Matteo burst out laughing and she focused on his handsome face and glared.
‘I hadn’t banked on this,’ she said tightly. ‘You may find the whole thing hilarious but I don’t.’
‘I don’t find anything hilarious about this situation,’ Matteo shot back and, she thought for the millionth time, there was no need for him to remind her that she had brought this mess on herself. ‘But here we are. I’m going to move into your parents’ chalet today.’
‘Candice will know that you haven’t been living with me,’ Rosie pointed out.
‘How?’
‘There would be signs of us sharing a bedroom. You would have left stuff behind. Clothes on the backs of chairs. Shaving foam. Bedroom slippers. Aftershave…’
His eyebrows shot up, his expression halting her in mid-flow.
‘I have never spent a night in any woman’s house and, if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have left anything behind.’
Rosie’s mouth fell open and she gaped at him. ‘You’ve never stayed at a woman’s overnight?’ He was so arrogant, so beautiful, so sophisticated—she found it impossible to credit that he had never spent the night with a woman.
What woman, she guiltily thought, would let him out of her bed? It was an inappropriate thought but it lodged in her head, pounding with the steady force of a drum beat.
Matteo made a dismissive gesture with his hand that was both elegant and strangely exotic and she watched him from under lowered lashes, fascinated and mesmerised by the strong, proud lines of his handsome face.
‘I’m a normal, red-blooded man with a healthy libido,’ Matteo told her wryly. ‘I work hard and I play hard, but I don’t do love, and I never encourage a woman to think, even for a second, that I might.’
‘And if you spent a night with a woman…it would mean that you’re interested in more than just sex?’
‘Forget about