‘Tell me about her...’ his employer invited without warning, shutting the file with a decisive snap and thrusting it aside.
Surprised by the instruction, Benito breathed in deep. ‘Darcy Fielding lives in a huge old house which has been in her family for many generations. Her financial situation is dire. The house is heavily mortgaged and she is currently behind with the repayments—’
‘Who holds the mortgage?’ Luca incised softly.
Benito informed him that the mortgage had been taken out a decade earlier with an insurance firm.
‘Buy it,’ Luca told him equally quietly. ‘Continue...’
‘Locally, the lady is well-respected. However, when the investigator went further afield, he found her late godmother’s housekeeper more than willing to dish the dirt.’
Luca’s brilliant eyes narrowed, his sensual mouth twisting with distaste. In an abrupt movement, he reopened the file at the photograph again. He surveyed it with renewed fascination. What he could see of her hair suggested a brutal shearing rather than the attentions of a salon. She looked a mess, a total mess, but the glow of that perfect skin and the bewitching clarity of those eyes were unmistakable.
Emerging from his uncharacteristic loss of attention, Luca discovered that he had also lost the thread of Benito’s report...
‘And if the lady pulls it off, she stands to inherit something in the region of one million pounds sterling,’ Benito concluded impressively.
Luca studied his most trusted aide. ‘Pull what off?’
‘The late Signora Leeward had three god-daughters... possibly the god-daughters from hell.’ Benito labelled them with rueful amusement. ‘When it came to the disposing of her worldly goods, what was there to choose between the three? One living with a married man, one an unmarried mother and the other going the same way—and not a wedding ring or even the prospect of one between the lot of them!’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Luca admitted with controlled impatience.
‘Darcy Fielding’s rich godmother left everything to her three godchildren on condition that each of them find a husband within the year.’
‘And Darcy is one of those women you described.’ Luca finally grasped it, bronzed features freezing into charged stillness. ‘Which?’
‘She’s the unmarried mother,’ Benito volunteered.
Luca froze. ‘When was the child born?’
‘Seven months after her trip to Venice. The kid’s just over two.’
Luca stared into space, rigidly schooling his dark face to impassivity, but it was a challenge to suppress his sheer outrage at the news. Cristo... she had even been pregnant with another man’s child when she slept with him! Well, that was just one more nail in her coffin. Luca swore in disgust. Whatever was most important to her, he would take from her in punishment. He would teach her what it was like to be deceived and cheated and humiliated. As she, most unforgettably, had taught him...
‘As to the identity of the kid’s father...’ Benito continued wryly. ‘The jury’s still out on that one. Apparently the locals believe that the child was fathered by the fiancé, who ditched the lady at the altar. He figures as a rat of the lowest order in their eyes. But the godmother’s housekeeper had a very different version of events. She contends that the fiancé was abroad at the time the kid was conceived, and that he took to his heels because he realised that the baby on the way couldn’t possibly be his!’
Luca absorbed that further information in even stonier silence.
‘I shouldn’t think the lady will remain a single parent for long,’ Benito advanced with conviction. ‘Not with a million pounds up for grabs. And on page six of the file you will see what I believe she is doing to acquire that money...’
Luca leafed through the file. ‘What is this?’ he demanded, studying the tiny print of the enclosed newspaper advertisement and its accompanying box number.
‘I suspect that Darcy Fielding is discreetly advertising for a husband to fulfil the terms of that will.’
‘Advertising?’ Luca echoed in raw disbelief.
Country woman seeks quiet, well-behaved and domesticated single male without close ties, 25-50, for short-term live-in employment. Absolute confidentiality guaranteed. No time-wasters, please.
‘That’s not an advertisement for a husband...it’s an ad for an emasculated household pet!’ Luca launched with incredulous bite.
‘I’m going to have to advertise again,’ Darcy divulged grimly to Karen as she mucked out the stall of the single elderly occupant in the vast and otherwise horse-free stable yard. She wielded the shovel like an aggressive weapon. Back to square one. She could hardly believe it—and that wretched advertisement had cost an arm and a leg!
Standing by and willing to help, but knowing better than to offer, Karen looked in surprise at her friend. ‘But what happened to your shortlist of two possibilities? The gardener and the home handyman?’
Darcy slung the attractive thirty-year-old brunette a weary grimace. ‘Yesterday I phoned one and then the other in an attempt to set up an interview—’
‘In which you planned to finally spill the confidential beans that matrimony was the real employment on offer.’ Karen sighed. ‘Boy, would I like to have been a fly on the wall when you broke that news!’
‘Yes, well...as it turns out, I shan’t need to embarrass myself just yet. One had already found a job elsewhere and the other has moved on without leaving a forwarding address. I shouldn’t have wasted so much time agonising over my choice.’
‘What choice? You only got five replies. Two were obscene and one was weird! The ad was too vague in one way and far too specific in the other. What on earth possessed you to put in “well-behaved and domesticated”? I mean, talk about picky, why don’t you? Still, I can’t really say I’m sorry that you’ve drawn a blank,’ Karen admitted, with the bluntness that made the two women such firm friends.
‘Karen...’ Darcy groaned.
‘Look, the thought of you being alone in this house with some stranger gives me the shivers!’ the brunette confided anxiously. ‘In any case, since you didn’t want to risk admitting in the ad that you were actually looking for a temporary husband, what are the chances that either of those men would have been agreeable to the arrangement you were about to offer?’
Darcy straightened in frustration. ‘If I’d offered enough money, I bet one of them would have agreed. I need my inheritance, Karen. I don’t care what I have to do to get it. I don’t care if I have to marry the Hunchback of Notre Dame to meet the conditions of Nancy’s will!’ Darcy admitted with driven honesty. ‘This house has been in my family for four hundred years—’
‘But it’s crumbling round your ears and eating you up alive, Darcy. Your father had no right to lay such a burden on you. If he hadn’t let Fielding’s Folly get in such a state while he was responsible for it, you wouldn’t be facing the half of what you’re facing right now!’
Darcy tilted her chin, green eyes alight with stubborn determination. ‘Karen...as long as I have breath in my body and two hands to work with, the Folly will survive so that I can pass it on to Zia.’
Pausing to catch her breath from her arduous labour, Darcy glanced at her two-year-old daughter. Seated in a grassy sunlit corner, Zia was grooming one of her dolls with immense care. Her watching mother’s gaze was awash with wondering pride and pleasure.
Zia had been blessed at birth, Darcy conceded gratefully. Mercifully, she hadn’t inherited her mother’s carroty hair, myopic eyesight or her nose.