Matteo looked at her, at a loss for a suitable response.
‘I can tell from your stunned expression that no one’s ever broken up with you before, am I right? None of those women you refuse to spend the night with, just in case they get ideas, has ever broken up with you…?’
‘Fate has smiled on me in that respect.’
‘Well,’ Rosie countered drily, ‘Either smiled on you or else made you incredibly arrogant.’
Matteo grinned and then he burst out laughing. ‘You’re the most unexpected woman I’ve ever met,’ he murmured. His eyes were lazy and shuttered and feathered over her like a caress. ‘I’ve never met anyone as honest and outspoken. You contradict your background. So…you want to break up with me. I don’t see why not. Maybe it’s high time I suffered from a broken heart, and it works for you, doesn’t it?’
Rosie nodded slowly. ‘I’m tired of my family feeling ever so slightly sorry for me.’
‘So you dump the eligible guy and you instantly gain their respect. Well, we’ll have to make sure that I’m the very besotted boyfriend, won’t we? Now, why don’t I check out of my suite here and we can both go to your chalet and begin this game…?’
His suite was breath-taking. Huge, with several rooms, including an open-plan kitchen, fully equipped but, she imagined, seldom used.
‘You want this to be a convincing act?’ he had put to her as they had emerged from the private room where they had been ensconced for ages. ‘You come with me to my suite while I pack my things. Then we check out together. I was here on business when we met. Now that your family are coming over, it’s only natural I shift base so that we can be together and meet them as a couple.’
Rosie looked at him as he efficiently gathered his belongings. While he packed, he conducted a series of calls in Italian, phone to his ear as he wandered from bedroom to living area, from bathroom to office, picking things up and tossing them in a case he had dumped on the glass table in the living area.
She got the feeling that he had forgotten about her completely.
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ was the first thing she said when he was finally off the phone and the last of his things had been flung into the suitcase.
Here, in his suite, nerves assailed her. There was something so sleek and so innately dangerous about him that she found it impossible to think that they could convince her very perceptive and inquisitive family that they were really an item. Up close and personal, the force of his personality was more powerful, not less. She’d told herself that she wasn’t going to be browbeaten by their curiosity and their questions, but how on earth were they going to believe that she, Rosie, bubbly, extrovert and carefree, had lost her heart to someone like Matteo?
Add to that the fact that he really was a stranger and the uphill task of convincing anyone seemed insurmountable.
In the act of zipping his suitcase, Matteo paused and looked at her for a few seconds.
She hadn’t moved from her position by the door. She looked nervous and he marvelled that a lifetime of privilege—which had clearly been her background, judging from what she had told him—had managed to leave her unscathed. He hadn’t been kidding when he had told her that she was unexpected. He met a lot of privileged people. Young and old, and even the most charming—they all had a very similar veneer of confidence borne from the assumption that the world was theirs for the asking. They all spoke loudly and with booming confidence. Most drew distinct lines between the people who served them and the people on their own level.
Rosie was as skittish as a kitten, open, guileless and honest to a fault, and that surprised and charmed him.
Now, looking at her, Matteo wondered whether he hadn’t agreed to this charade because a part of him found her intriguing.
Rosie took a few hesitant steps forward and peered at the half-shut suitcase.
‘You haven’t brought any ski wear? Or have you stored it somewhere else?’
Matteo strolled to the small kitchen and withdrew a bottle of water from the fridge, which he held out to her. When she declined, he unscrewed the cap and drank.
‘I don’t ski,’ he admitted. He dumped the empty bottle on the counter and hesitated momentarily, then he moved to the sofa and sat down, watching as she followed suit to sit facing him. ‘And stop looking so nervous. I’m not going to pounce on you.’
‘I know you’re not.’ She stifled a wave of nerves brought on by him telling her to stop looking nervous. ‘We’re not in public now. You know a lot about me, but I don’t know anything about you, and I’m going to have to if our story is going to be credible. I’m surprised you don’t ski,’ she admitted.
‘There’s a time for learning to ski,’ Matteo said wryly. ‘It’s fair to say I missed the slot.’
‘Those obligatory school trips to the slopes can be a bore,’ Rosie reminisced. ‘I guess I’m lucky my parents were crazy about skiing. I can remember staring down fields of snow with little skis on when I was about three.’ She laughed, throwing her head back, catching some of her hair in her hand and twisting it into a pony tail before releasing it.
Matteo smiled. ‘Tell me more about your family. Your sister is married with two children and was a lawyer before she settled on motherhood…’
Rosie was transfixed by that smile. It was so genuinely curious that she felt her nerves begin to abate. She told him about Emily, sister number two and a chartered surveyor. Also married. Pregnant with her first. She chatted about her parents. Her mother had been a lecturer and her father a high-ranking diplomat before they’d retired three years ago.
‘And they didn’t approve of past boyfriends,’ he encouraged. ‘Hence Bertie…’
Rosie grimaced. ‘Hence Bertie. Not at all my type.’
‘No? And what is your type, Rosie?’
Rosie opened her mouth to recite what she had always taken for granted—that she, free-spirited unlike her sisters, was attracted to other free spirited souls, unlike her brothers-in-law. Except, was she really?
He saved her from having to stumble through an answer by saying gently, ‘You’re very lucky. Riding lessons…skiing holidays from the age of three…house in the country and pied à terre in London. I’m guessing you dated guys your family didn’t approve of as a form of quiet rebellion.’
‘That’s not true,’ she countered but she could feel his observations too close to the bone. ‘I’ve always been adventurous,’ she concluded unconvincingly.
Matteo shrugged, ready to let it go and surprised that he had been lured into psychoanalysing her when he rarely felt inclined to plumb the depths of any woman.
‘You wanted to know about me,’ he said indifferently. ‘Think of an upbringing as far from yours as it is possible to be.’
Rosie frowned. When she looked around her, all she could see was the trappings of wealth. He was clearly far, far richer than her parents or indeed anyone that she had ever known. He was in a league of his own and she didn’t understand where he was going with that enigmatic remark.
He was sophisticated, polished and, if there was something of the street fighter about him, then she presumed that the richer you were the more ruthless you had to be.
‘Did you grow up here? In Italy? I heard you on the phone, speaking in Italian…’
‘I was born here but my parents went to England in search of a better life when I was a baby.’ Matteo paused, uncomfortable with sharing details of his past but knowing that she was entitled to information up to a point. ‘There