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‘If you sit back down I will explain everything.’
Eva inched her way back to her seat, resting her bottom carefully while she kept her gaze fixed on Daniele so he couldn’t pull another rabbit out of a hat that wasn’t even there.
He downed his Scotch, poured another three fingers into the glass and pushed it to her.
She didn’t hesitate, tipping the amber liquid down her throat in one swallow, not caring that his lips had pressed against the same surface just moments before. It was the smoothest Scotch she’d ever tasted and she had no doubt the bottle cost more than her weekly salary.
‘Agree to marry me and this money goes directly to your charity. On the day of our marriage I will transfer another two million into their account and a further three million dollars for every year of our marriage. I will give you a personal allowance of a quarter of a million dollars a month to spend on whatever you wish—you can donate the whole lot for all I care, it won’t matter as I will also give you an unlimited credit card to spend on travel and clothing and whatever else you require for the duration of our marriage.’
Eva’s head spun. Had she slipped into some kind of vortex that distorted reality?
‘Can I have some more of that Scotch?’ she mumbled.
He took a drink himself then passed the glass back.
Drinking it didn’t make his words any more comprehensible.
She shook her head and took a breath. ‘You want to pay me to be your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would you want to marry me?’
‘It’s nothing to do with want. It’s to do with need. I need a wife.’
‘You’ve already said that, but why would you choose me for the role when there are hundreds of women out there who would take the job without having to be bribed into it? Why marry someone who doesn’t even like you?’ There was no point in pretending. She didn’t like him and he damn well knew it.
‘That is the exact reason why I want you to take the role.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
A tight smile played on his lips. ‘I don’t want to marry someone who’s going to fall in love with me.’
CHAPTER THREE (#ud9a1c7ce-ae91-55a7-8593-20efb6e66f41)
HE WAS MAD. He had to be. No sane person could make such a suggestion.
And then she looked into those green-brown eyes and thought them the eyes of a man who was perfectly sane and knew exactly what he was doing. Far from reassuring her, the expression in them frightened her, and Eva was not a woman who scared easily. She’d learned to hide it. She hid it now.
‘There’s no chance of that,’ she said, hoping Daniele couldn’t hear the beats of her hammering heart in her words.
He shrugged and took the glass back, pouring himself another hefty measure. ‘Good. I don’t want a wife with romantic dreams. I’m not marrying for love. I’m marrying to inherit my family estate.’ He must have read her blank expression for he added, ‘My brother died without children. I’m the spare son. I can only inherit if I’m married.’
‘What do you need the estate for? You’re worth a fortune as you are.’
‘To keep it in the family.’ He swirled his Scotch in his glass before drinking it. ‘Duty has finally come calling for me.’
‘You need a wife to inherit?’
‘Sí. The estate is...’ She could see him struggle to find the correct English. ‘It is bound by an old trust that states only a married heir can inherit.’
‘Is that legal?’
He nodded grimly. ‘To unravel the trust and make it fit for the modern age will take years. I don’t have years. I need to act now.’
‘Then find someone else.’
‘I don’t want anyone else. Everyone else is too needy. You’re tough.’
‘You don’t even know me,’ she protested darkly. ‘Twenty minutes ago you thought I was English.’
If she was tough it was because she’d had to be. To turn her back on her family when it had made her heart bleed, then to lose Johann and find that same heart torn apart had put a shell around her. It had been an organic process, not something she had consciously built, a shell she’d only become aware of four years ago, back when she’d been living and working in The Hague and a drunk colleague had accused her of being an unfeeling, ball-breaking bitch. She’d returned home to the small apartment she’d once shared with Johann and looked in the mirror and realised there was truth in what her colleague had said. Not the part about being a ball-breaking bitch. She wasn’t those things, she knew that. But unfeeling...? Yes. That, she had been forced to accept when she’d looked in that mirror and realised she no longer felt anything at all. She was empty inside.
‘I know all I need to know, tesoro,’ he countered. ‘I don’t need to know anything else. I have no interest in your past. I don’t want to exchange pillow talk and hear about your dreams. This will be a partnership, not a romance. I want someone practical and cool under pressure.’
And he thought that person was her?
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Had she become so cold that someone could think she would be agreeable to such an emotionless proposition?
Once she had been warm. She had felt the sun in her heart as well as on her skin.
And what did his proposal say about him? What had made him this way? she wondered. How could someone be so cynical about marriage?
‘Marriage is not a game,’ she said slowly, thinking hard, her eyes continually drawn between the wads of cash and Daniele’s smouldering gaze. That money would make an incredible difference at the camp. The Blue Train Aid Agency was fully dependent on donations and there never seemed to be enough of it to go around all its different projects.
Those eyes...
She pulled her gaze away and stared into the distance at the sea, unable to believe she was even entertaining this ludicrous proposal.
‘I’m not playing games,’ he said, his words soaking through her. ‘Marry me and we all win. Your charity gets a guaranteed income to spend as it sees fit, you get unlimited funds to spend on yourself, my family get the knowledge the family estate is secure for another generation and I get my inheritance. You’re a practical person, Eva. You know what I’m suggesting makes excellent sense.’
She hadn’t always been a practical person. She’d been a dreamer once. She’d had so many hopes but they’d all been flattened into the dust.
‘I don’t know...’ She tightened her ponytail. ‘You say it isn’t a game but then you say everyone’s going to be a winner out of it. Marriage is a commitment by two people who love each other, not two people who don’t even like each other.’
He raised his hefty shoulders and leaned forward. ‘My family’s ancestry goes back as far as there are written records. The most successful marriages were arranged for practical reasons; to build alliances, not for love. I’ve never wished to commit my life to one particular person but I am prepared to commit myself to you. It won’t be a marriage built on love and romance, but I can promise you a marriage built on respect.’
‘How can you respect me if you’re trying to buy me?’
‘I won’t be buying you, tesoro. Consider the cash an inducement.’
‘I won’t be your property.’ She’d never be someone’s property again. She’d run away from her family the moment she’d turned eighteen, the day she’d stopped belonging to her parents, no longer subject to their stringently enforced rules. She flexed her left hand and felt the phantom ache in the tendons of her fingers. The fingers had long since healed but the ache in them remained, a ghost of the past, a reminder of everything she had run from.
‘If I wanted a woman I could own, I wouldn’t choose you.’
Before she could think of a response to this, the butler came in to clear away their soup. Eva was surprised to find her bowl empty. She couldn’t remember eating it.
She waited until their next course was brought in, a beef Wellington that was sliced and plated before them, before asking her next question.
‘If I say yes, what’s to stop me taking the cash you give me and running off with it?’
‘You won’t receive any money for yourself until we’re legally married. Under Italian law, you won’t be allowed to divorce me for three years but that wouldn’t stop you leaving me. I have to trust that you wouldn’t leave without discussing it with me first.’
He would have to trust her. But the question, she supposed, was whether she could trust him.
The beef Wellington really was superb. Having never eaten it before, Eva had always assumed it consisted of an old boot baked to within an inch of its life. Instead she cut into the pinkest beef wrapped in a mushroom pâté, parsley pancakes and delicate layers of puff pastry.
‘If you don’t want a traditional marriage, what kind of marriage do you have in mind for us?’ she asked after she’d taken her second mouth-watering bite. She couldn’t entertain a traditional marriage either, not with Daniele or anyone. But a marriage of convenience where pots of cash were given to the charity she held so close to her heart...that, she found to her surprise, she could entertain.
Daniele Pellegrini was an exceptionally handsome man. He had an innate sex appeal that poor Johann would have given both his skinny arms for. But that was all on the surface. Her body might respond to him but her heart would be safe. She would be safe. Daniele didn’t want romance or pillow talk, the things that drew a couple together and forged intimacy and left a person vulnerable to heartbreak.
She would never put herself in a vulnerable position again. She couldn’t. Her heart had been fractured so many times that the next blow to it could be permanent.
‘The outside world will see us as a couple,’ he replied. A slight breeze had lifted a lock of his thick dark hair on the top of his head so it stuck up and swayed. ‘We will live together. We will visit family and friends as a couple and entertain as a couple.’
‘We will be each other’s primary escorts?’
He nodded. ‘That’s an excellent way of putting it. And one day we may be parents...’
Immediately her food stuck in her throat. Pounding on her chest, Eva coughed loudly then took a long drink straight from the bottle of water.
‘Are you okay?’ Daniele asked. He’d half risen from his seat, ready to go to her aid.
‘No.’ She laughed weakly and coughed again. ‘I thought you said something about us being parents.’
‘I did. If we’re going to marry, then we’re going to share a bed.’
‘You didn’t think to mention that?’
‘I didn’t think it needed spelling out. Married couples sleep together, tesoro, and I will sleep with you.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Sharing a bed with you is the one plus point to us marrying.’
‘I don’t want to have sex with you.’
Instead of offending him, he laughed. ‘That, I think, is the first lie you have told me. You cannot deny your attraction to me.’
‘If I was attracted to you, I wouldn’t have turned your offer of a nightcap down.’
‘If you weren’t attracted to me, you wouldn’t have hesitated before turning it down. You think I don’t know when a woman desires me? I can read body language well and you, my light, show all the signs of a woman fighting her desire. I understand why—it can’t be an easy thing to admit that you desire a man you dislike so much.’
‘Have you always been this egotistical?’
‘It’s taken years of practice but I got there in the end. And you still haven’t denied that you’re attracted to me.’
‘I’m not attracted to you.’
‘Two lies in two minutes? That’s bad form for a woman who’s going to be my wife.’
‘I haven’t agreed to anything.’
‘Not yet. But you will. We both know you will.’
‘Let me make this clear, if I agree to marry you, I will not have sex with you.’
‘And let me make this clear, when we marry, we will share a room and a bed. Whether we have sex in that bed will be up to you.’
‘You won’t insist on your conjugal rights?’
‘I won’t need to insist. Deny it until your face goes blue but there is a chemistry between us and lying under the same bed sheets will only deepen it.’
‘But will you try to force me?’
Distaste flickered over his handsome face. ‘Never. I can’t promise that I won’t try and seduce you—Dio, tesoro, you’re a sexy woman... I’d have to be a saint not to try—but I respect the word no. The moment you say no, I will roll over and go to sleep.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask if he planned to take a mistress. It stood to reason that if she wouldn’t have sex with him he would get it from someone else.
But that was a whole new quagmire that instinct told her to leave alone. She’d been celibate for six years and had never missed sex. She had missed the cuddles but never the sex, which deep in the heart of her she had always found underwhelming. Why people made such a big deal out of it she would never understand, but they did and to expect Daniele to be celibate was like expecting a lion not to eat the lame deer that limped in front of it.
‘If I agree I will want to continue working.’ If he could list his requirements, then she should too.
‘You won’t need to work.’
‘Are you going to quit your job?’
He raised his eyebrows. They were very nice eyebrows, she noted absently.
‘You don’t need to work,’ she pointed out. ‘You could retire right now and never want for anything for the rest of your life.’
‘You want to work?’
‘I love my job.’
Now his brows knitted together in thought before he said slowly, ‘You won’t be able to work at the camp any more.’
Her heart sank. She loved working at the camp. Her job might be listed as administrative but it was so much more than that. She was useful there. She’d learned skills she would never have picked up anywhere else. In her own way, she’d made a difference to many of the people who’d lost so much.
‘I can’t just leave,’ she whispered.
‘Why not? The charity will be losing one employee but gaining three million dollars a year from it. Any loss of salary for you will be more than replaced by the allowance you’ll get from me.’
‘It’s not about the money.’
‘Then what is it about?’
She inhaled deeply. How could she explain that her job in the camp had given her a purpose? In the midst of all the deprivation she’d found hope when she’d been so sure there was no hope left inside her. And even if she could find the words to explain it, what would Daniele care? For him, money ruled everything. Marrying her meant he stood to inherit even more filthy lucre.
That made her mind up for her.
Fixing her eyes on him, she said, ‘Five million a year. That’s what you’ll have to pay the charity for me to marry you. And I’ll want it in writing. A legal document.’
