For several long seconds Cat couldn’t move. A heavy ache balled in her chest and her eyes flooded with tears. Gramps had said he loved her but he was quite happy to blackmail her. It hurt more than he would ever know.
The loss of her inheritance paled into insignificance. It would be tough, but she’d manage. When the time came she would have to find new living and working premises to rent, work all hours in order to keep her tiny business viable, and maybe not make it.
But that was nothing beside the knowledge that he was prepared to disinherit her if she didn’t toe the line. He couldn’t care for her at all, or not as much as he cared for what he called family honour.
When she could get her feet to move she walked out of the room and exactly one hour later she saw Aldo Patrucco arrive from the vantage point of her kitchen window above the cobbled stack yard.
He exited from the back of a dark saloon. He was tall, wearing a beautiful dark grey overcoat and a white silk scarf, and that was all she could see because the mist that had been hanging around all day had thickened in the autumn evening.
The uniformed chauffeur took a single leather suitcase from the boot and moments later drove away. So the big shot must have hired the package, Cat deduced as the main door was opened by Bonnie to admit the Italian.
Cat shuddered, her mouth clamped decisively shut. Only ten minutes ago Bonnie had called from the bottom of the stairs that led up from her work-room, telling her that her grandfather expected her to take dinner with him and his guest. Eight o’clock sharp.
She could refuse to put in an appearance. Or she could turn up in her shabbiest work clothes, display disgraceful table manners and vile personal habits, and put the guy off the idea of having anything at all to do with her.
The latter idea was tempting but she had too much pride to let herself act with such immaturity. She would go. She would be dignified. Not speak until spoken to. And spend her time trying to calculate if the amount in her bank balance would fund the renting of new premises if her grandfather threw her out as soon as Aldo Patrucco had left England, his proposal of marriage—if he made it—rejected with the scorn it deserved.
CHAPTER ONE
MARRYING Aldo Patrucco had been the biggest mistake of her life, Cat told herself for the millionth time as she stood in front of the tall window at the top of the villa, staring out at the rolling Tuscan hills shimmering in the haze of afternoon heat.
The panoramic view might once have entranced her. But the gentle purple hills, silver olive groves and scattered ochre-coloured farmhouses, the ubiquitous punctuation marks of the cypress trees merely emphasised her isolation, her frustration and misery.
The villa—every luxury provided…well, that went without saying in a Patrucco residence—reputedly built for the Medici family way back in the middle ages, had been her prison for two long months, since shortly after her miscarriage back in June.
Apart from his twice-weekly dutiful phone calls she’d had no contact with Aldo; he’d used his excuse of ‘Rest and Recuperation’ to get her away from the house in Florence, out of his sight, masking his disappointment in her failure to carry his heir to full term with an unconvincing display of polite concern for her well-being.
Leaving him free to be with his mistress.
He was cold. Heartless. Unreachable. Except…
Except she’d once been so sure he hadn’t been like that at all, that she could somehow reach his heart.
But he hadn’t got a heart, had he? Just an efficient machine, like a calculator.
As it too often did, her mind slid back with humiliating ease to that fatal night when she’d first met him. Only eleven months ago but it seemed like a lifetime now.
Dinner at eight. True to her intention to grit her teeth and make an appearance, to present a dignified front, she’d dressed in the soberest garment she owned. A peacock-green crêpe shift that skimmed her generously curved body and left her arms bare. Her make-up discreet, her unmanageable hair somehow tamed, drawn back from her face and painstakingly secured with a black velvet bow at her nape.
‘Caterina—’ There’d been such a note of pride in her grandfather’s voice as he’d risen from a leather club chair in the study as she’d walked into the room with her head high, but his introduction was lost on her as Aldo Patrucco got to his feet.
Over six feet of superbly dressed Italian male, a strong, harshly handsome face, his features shimmering out of focus because it was the look in those bitter-chocolate eyes that entrapped her.
She’d seen that look in men’s eyes before and had uninterestedly ignored it. Her one and only short-lived affair with Josh, a fellow student, in her final year at college had fizzled out with no regret on either side, and since then she hadn’t been remotely tempted.
But this hot, sultry branding held her as she’d never been held before, and her lips parted on a breathless gasp as his hard mouth curved in a slight, lazy smile just before he greeted her with easy Italian panache, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders, a light kiss on her forehead, another just above the corner of her mouth.
Just the softest brush of his lips against her skin, but it was enough to make her shake, make her breathless, disorientated.
‘Ciao, Caterina.’ His voice slid over her like warm dark honey. She mumbled something and turned away to hide the heat that suddenly flared over her face. She preferred to be called Cat—it sounded sharper, definite, more like the self she knew herself to be—but Caterina, on his lips, sounded like magic.
Charm, she told herself, making no attempt to join in the ensuing conversation, which was being conducted in part Italian, part English. He could turn charm on like a tap. Obviously. So why was she feeling hot and bothered, overpowered, when she had to know that the way he had looked at her, as if he wanted to bed her right here and now, was just the stock-in-trade of a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it? A man who was fully aware of his power over other people and used it.
The physical presence of the man filled the book-lined room with a dangerous sexual threat. A combination of a lean, powerful six-foot frame clothed in sheer Italian elegance, and that closely cropped black hair framing hard tanned features, that tough jawline and a mouth that could soften into a wicked, explicit promise whenever he looked her way made a tense, fluttery excitement curl in the pit of her stomach.
Cat rose with a sense of relief when Bonnie poked her head round the door to announce that dinner was ready, a relief that quickly turned into deep trepidation when Aldo rose to escort her, the palm of his long, lean hand hot against the small of her back, burning her. Burning her up with a sheet of wildfire that sizzled through her veins and made her feel light-headed.
No other man had ever affected her this way. She’d sort of fallen into her brief affair with Josh because he fancied her, was easy on the eye, and had been amusing company. And it had seemed to her that she was the only girl in her peer group not in a relationship. But this feeling was entirely different. It was immediate, insistent. Shattering.
Seated opposite him, Cat didn’t know where to put herself, and Bonnie’s meal, beautifully cooked and presented as usual, was untouched on her plate. But the champagne Gramps had insisted on eventually loosened her tongue and Aldo’s dark eyes locked on to her soft mouth as he murmured, ‘You speak fluent Italian.’
‘I was brought up on it—my grandparents insisted.’ She drained her glass, feeling reckless, feeling more like herself. The situation was weird, like something out of an old and rather silly novel, but undoubtedly exciting. What woman wouldn’t be feeling as if she were permanently plugged into a conduit for live electricity when face to face with such