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Bella hadn’t planned on telling Claudia about her engagement until it was official, but she would do almost anything to avoid an account of her mother’s lurid and colourful sex life. ‘I’m getting engaged,’ she said.
‘Engaged?’ Claudia gasped. ‘Oh, dear God, not to Edoardo?’
Bella frowned as she tried to imagine Edoardo putting a ring on her finger—or any woman’s finger, when it came to that. She couldn’t quite see it. He would never be one to declare his feelings if he had any. He would never admit to needing someone.
He certainly would never admit to needing her.
He wanted her, but that was different. He didn’t need her in an emotional sense. He didn’t need anyone. He was like a wolf that had separated himself from the pack. No one would ever see what he felt on the inside. ‘No, not to Edoardo,’ she said. ‘To Julian Bellamy.’
‘Have I met him?’
‘No, we’ve only been dating for three months.’
‘Is he rich?’
‘That has nothing to do with anything,’ Bella said. ‘I love him.’
‘When did you not love a boyfriend?’ Claudia asked. ‘You fall in and out of love all the time. You’ve been doing it since you were thirteen. What if he’s only after your money?’
Bella rolled her eyes. ‘You sound just like Edoardo.’
‘Yes, well, he might not be from the right side of the tracks but he’s certainly street smart,’ Claudia said. ‘Your father wouldn’t have a bad word said about him.
I think he secretly hoped you would make a match of it with him.’
‘What?’ Bella asked, her stomach doing a little free fall. ‘With Edoardo?’
‘Why else would he have written his will the way he did?’ Claudia asked. ‘I bet he put Edoardo in control so you would have to see him regularly. He was hoping you’d fall in love with each other over time.’
‘I am not going to fall in love with Edoardo,’ Bella said.
‘You’d be the icing on the cake for a man like him,’ Claudia continued. ‘It would make his rags-to-riches tale complete, wouldn’t it? The well-born trophy bride to produce some blue-blooded heirs to dilute the bad blood flowing in his veins.’
Bella felt a strange tingle deep in the pit of her belly when she thought of her body swelling with Edoardo’s child. She put a shaky hand over her abdomen, trying to quell the sensation. ‘Mum, I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ll send you some money as soon as I can. I’m … in the middle of something right now.’
‘I suppose you’ll have to ask Edoardo for permission,’ Claudia said sourly. ‘Don’t let him come between us, Bella. I’m your mother. Don’t ever forget that.’
‘I won’t,’ Bella said, thinking of the day, all those years ago, when her mother had left with her lover without even bothering to wave goodbye.
Edoardo found Bella almost buried in a ditch fifty metres from the front gate to the manor. She wound down the window as he stepped off the tractor. ‘If you’re going to say I told you so, then please don’t waste your breath,’ she said.
‘You don’t do things by halves, do you?’ he asked.
‘Can you get me out?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Stay in the car and keep the wheels straight while I tow you out.’
She sat and glowered at him from behind the steering wheel as he hitched the towrope to the bumper bar. He towed the car out, and once it was out of the ditch, he got her to join him on the tractor for the journey back to the house. ‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked as he made room for her beside him on the seat. ‘You can have my jacket.’
‘I’m f-fine,’ she said through chattering teeth.
He shrugged himself out of his jacket and wrapped it around her slim shoulders. ‘You don’t have to fight me just for the heck of it, Bella,’ he said.
She bit her lip and looked away. ‘It’s a habit, I guess.’
‘Habits can be broken.’
Edoardo drove the tractor with the car towed behind all the way back to the manor. The snow kept falling but even more heavily now. It cloaked everything as far as the eye could see in a thick white blanket.
The air was tight with cold.
Every breath he or Bella exhaled came out in a foggy mist in front of their faces. He glanced at her and saw her huddled inside his coat, her hands gripping the edges together across her chest. She looked small, defenceless and vulnerable. ‘Hey,’ he said gently, bumping her shoulder with his.
She blinked and looked at him. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’
‘Penny for them.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your thoughts,’ he said.
‘Oh …’
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’ She looked away again and huddled further into his jacket.
Edoardo brought the tractor to a stop and helped her down. She hesitated before she placed her hand in his. ‘You’re freezing,’ he said, keeping her hand within the shelter of his.
‘I forgot to bring my gloves,’ she said.
He released her hand. ‘Go inside,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort your car out. Go get warm. I’ll be in in a minute.’
‘Edoardo?’
He straightened from where he was untying the tow-rope from the bumper bar and looked at her. ‘Yes?’
She chewed at her lower lip for a moment. ‘I need some extra money,’ she said. ‘Would you be able to transfer five thousand into my account?’
He frowned. ‘You don’t have a gambling problem, do you?’
Her eyes widened in affront. ‘Of course not!’
‘What do you want it for?’
Her expression became haughty. ‘I don’t see why I have to tell you what I spend my money on,’ she said.
‘You do while I’m still in control of it,’ he said.
‘My mother thinks you’re skimming off the profits to fund your own nest egg,’ she said with a hard little look.
‘And what do you think, Bella?’ he asked. ‘Do you think I’d stoop so low as to betray the trust your father placed in me?’
She turned to go to the house. ‘I need the money as soon as possible.’
‘For your mother, I presume?’
Her back stiffened, and after a tiny pause she turned back around to face him. ‘If it was your mother, what would you do?’ she asked.
‘You’re not helping her by propping her up all the time,’ he said. ‘She’s become dependent on you. You’ll have to wean her off or she’ll eventually drain you dry. It’s one of the reasons your father orchestrated things the way he did. He knew you would be too soft and generous. At least I can say no when it needs to be said.’
‘Did she ask you for money when she came the other day?’
‘Amongst other things.’
Her brows moved together. ‘What other things?’
‘I’m not going to badmouth your mother to you,’ he said. ‘Suffice to say I’m not her favourite person in the world.’
She nibbled at her lower lip. ‘I’m sorry if she offended you.’
‘I’ve got a thick skin,’ he said. ‘Now, go inside before yours is frozen solid.’
She met his gaze again. ‘I didn’t mean what I said earlier, you know. I think you’re one of the most decent men I’ve ever met.’
‘The cold has got to you, hasn’t it?’ Edoardo said with a teasing half-smile.
Her gaze fell away from his and he rolled up the tow-rope as he watched her walk towards the manor, her slim figure still encased in his jacket. It was so big on her it almost came to her knees. She looked like a child who had been playing in the dress-up box. He felt a funny tug inside his chest, as if a tiny stitch was being pulled against his heart.
Once the door had closed behind her, he let out a breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding. ‘Don’t even go there,’ he muttered under his breath and strode towards the barn.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u284e518f-c973-5813-8e12-e33ca15a7b9f)
EDOARDO came into the kitchen an hour later to find Bella poring over a cookbook that belonged to Mrs Baker. She had an apron on over her clothes and there was a swipe of flour across her left cheek. She looked up as he came in. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m cooking dinner,’ she said. ‘I thought I should start to pull my weight around here since I can’t leave right now.’
He hitched up one brow. ‘Can you cook?’
She gave him a quelling look. ‘I’ve been taking lessons from one of my flatmates,’ she said. ‘She’s a sous chef in a restaurant in Soho.’
‘The one your ex-boyfriend owned?’
She gave a little sigh as she looked at the ingredients in front of her. ‘I only went out with him a couple of times,’ she said. ‘The press made it out to be much more than it was. They always do that.’
‘I guess everyone wants to know what Britain’s most eligible girl is up to,’ he said.
‘I sometimes wish I didn’t come from such a wealthy background,’ she said with a little frown.
Edoardo leaned against the counter. ‘You don’t mean that, surely?’ he said. ‘You lap it up. You always have. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you didn’t have loads of money.’
‘My friends’ mothers give them money or buy them stuff or take them shopping,’ she said, still frowning. ‘I’m tired of feeling responsible for my mother’s bills.’
‘You gave her the money?’
‘Yes, and she hasn’t even sent a text or called me to thank me.’ She let out a dispirited sigh. ‘She’s probably spent it all by now.’
‘I’ve been thinking about what I said earlier,’ he said. ‘It’s really none of my business who you give your money to. She’s your mother. I guess you can’t turn your back on her.’
After a little silence she looked up at him with those big brown eyes of hers. ‘I wish I could be sure people liked me for me. How can I know if they like me because of who I am as a person? I don’t even know if my mother loves me or simply sees me as a meal ticket.’
He reached forwards to brush the flour off her cheek with the end of his index finger. ‘Sorting out the friends from the hangers-on is always a challenge, even for a person without wealth. You just have to trust your gut feeling, I suppose.’
Her shoulders went down as she sighed again. ‘I think what you said before was right: I want to be loved so much that it clouds my judgement.’
‘It’s not wrong to want to be loved,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.’
She looked up at him again, her eyes soft and luminous. ‘Do you want to be loved?’
Edoardo gave an off-hand shrug. Loving was something he didn’t do any more. He suspected he had forgotten how. He certainly wasn’t booking in any time soon for a refresher course either. ‘I can take it or leave it.’
A little frown creased her forehead. ‘You can’t really mean that,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want to be let down again or abandoned.’
He curled his lip, threatened by how close to the truth she was. He refused to let anyone close to him. Godfrey had been an exception, but it had taken years, and even then he hadn’t told him everything about his past. ‘Got me all figured out, have you, Bella?’
‘I think you push people away because you’re frightened of becoming too attached,’ she said. ‘You like to be in total control of your life. If you had feelings for someone else, they could take advantage of you. They could leave you just like your parents did.’
Edoardo felt a ridge of steel ripple through his jaw until his teeth were locked so tightly together he wondered if he’d be left with nothing but powder.
He thought of the first home he had been sent to after the authorities had stepped in when he’d been ten years old. He had already had five years of his stepfather’s capricious and cruel treatment. Five years of living in dread, quaking with fear night and day in case things turned nasty.
The hands that had fed and clothed him, and at times even been kind to him, could turn within a blink of an eye into vicious weapons. It didn’t matter how well-behaved he was. Sometimes the anticipation of the brutality was so torturous he would deliberately play up just to get it over with. But even then he could never prepare himself. He’d had no way of knowing when his stepfather would strike. His body had run solely on adrenalin. The ‘flight or fight’ mode had been jammed on.
He hadn’t stood a hope of settling in anywhere.
Looking back now, he could see the foster parents he had been sent to had done their best. Some had been better than others; they had tried to offer him shelter and support but he had sabotaged their every attempt to get close to him. Then Godfrey Haverton had taken him in and, in his quiet and unobtrusive way, shown him that it was up to him to make something of his life. Under Godfrey’s steady but sure tutelage, he had learned how to become a man, a man with self-control and self-respect—a man who was the agent of his own destiny, not at the mercy of others.
But he wasn’t going to parade his past to Bella, of all people. He had locked it away and it was staying there.
‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘I think I do,’ she said in a quiet and assured voice that was far more threatening than if she had shouted the words at him. ‘I think you want what everyone else wants. But deep down you feel you don’t deserve it.’
He gave her a mocking look. ‘Did you read that in a self-help book, or is it something you just made up on the spot?’
She drew in a breath and slowly released it. ‘I didn’t read it anywhere,’ she said. ‘I just sense it—the same way my father sensed it. I think he understood you from the word go. He didn’t push you or force affection on you. He waited for you to come to him when you trusted him enough to do so.’
Edoardo gave a disparaging laugh but the sound grated even on his own ears. ‘You’re making me sound like an ill-treated dog,’ he said.
Her eyes meshed with his, soft and yet all-seeing—knowing.
