Meghan pushed away from him and stumbled into the grass where she retched helplessly. She’d never felt so low, so utterly humiliated, and that was saying something.
That was saying quite a lot.
She stood up, wiping her mouth, her hair falling about her face, while Alessandro watched impassively. He handed her a starched white linen handkerchief, and Meghan dabbed at her lips uselessly. She didn’t want to sully it.
‘It’s to be used,’ he said, his voice tart, and Meghan managed a weak smile.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’m the one who should be sorry. I should have remembered how shock can be delayed. Here.’ He handed her a bottle of water and Meghan opened it, drinking gratefully.
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you ready?’ he asked after a moment, and Meghan was suddenly aware of how dark it was. A car hadn’t passed them since he’d pulled over, and nothing but meadows and clusters of elm trees surrounded them, the hills no more than shadowed mounds in the distance.
She could hear the whisper of the wind through the grass and the bare branches of the trees. She could hear her own breathing. They were very much alone.
‘Yes, I’m ready.’
Alessandro opened the door for her, and Meghan slipped inside.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said again, once they were on the road, and Alessandro shrugged.
‘Don’t apologise.’
The car climbed higher into the Umbrian hills, and they spent the rest of the short drive in silence. Soon a high stone wall appeared, running parallel to the road.
Alessandro swung the car through an opened pair of ornate iron gates, and then up a long, twisting drive, the hills steep on either side.
Automated outdoor lights flashed on as the car approached the portico, and Meghan glimpsed a long, rambling villa of mellow stone and terracotta roof tiles. Several large pots lined the entrance, spilling a riot of begonias onto the tiled steps.
Alessandro stopped the engine and went around to open Meghan’s door. She stepped out with murmured thanks. She smelled the fresh tang of pine, and the air was sharper, colder. She wrapped her arms around herself.
The front door opened, and a stout woman with a shiny black bun of hair, a spotless apron and a forbidding expression stood there. Meghan quailed under her heavy-browed, frowning gaze.
‘Meghan, this is Ana,’ Alessandro said, ‘the housekeeper and guardian of Tre Querce.’
He spoke rapid Italian to Ana, too fast for Meghan’s basic grasp of the language, and the woman gave an obviously disgruntled response.
‘Ana will show you to a room,’ he continued in English. ‘You can freshen up and meet me in the lounge for dinner.’
Meghan turned to look at him in surprise. It almost sounded as if she were a guest rather than a waitress. ‘Shouldn’t I be in the kitchen?’ she suggested hesitantly, and Alessandro gave her a knowing look.
‘You are not the cook.’
‘I’m a waitress,’ she threw back at him, and his smile was far too understanding.
‘Yes. I know. So you’ve told me.’
With jerky, unnatural steps Meghan followed Ana through a cool tiled hallway and up a wide staircase, her hand clutching the smooth wrought-iron banister.
Silently Ana led her down the upstairs hall, passing a row of closed doors, before ushering her into a bedroom spare and clean in its elemental luxury.
A large double bed dominated the room, the duvet and pillows encased in pure white linen. An oak dresser with iron fixtures stood against the wall, a strip of mirror above.
Disapproval radiated from every stiff line of the older woman, from her thinly pressed lips to the tightly clasped hands at her ample waist. Meghan couldn’t blame her. What did she think she was? How had Alessandro explained her presence?
Why was she here?
Ana left without a word, and Meghan sank down on the bed, enjoying the softness, relieved to be alone even though her nerves felt as if they were jangling and jumping throughout her taut body.
Why was she here?
She looked in the mirror. Her hair had come undone, her face was pale and tense, her eyes as wide and frightened as a doe’s.
Why was she here?
It wasn’t for the money. She could have left Spoleto without it, Meghan acknowledged. Admittedly, it would come in handy, but still …
She didn’t need it. Didn’t even want it, perhaps.
She owed nothing to Alessandro di Agnio, nothing to anyone.
Yet she’d agreed. Willingly.
What did that make her? Meghan wondered. To agree to come to a strange man’s house, despite the desire in his eyes, the assessment of his gaze, the innuendo in his tone.
He knew what she was.
Everyone knows what you are.
The voices from her past clamoured inside her head—a knowing hiss, a contemptuous snarl.
Had she come here to prove Alessandro di Agnio wrong … or right?
Or to prove something to herself? And to Stephen.
She stood up, filled with a sudden restless energy, and moved to the French doors that looked out on the villa’s gardens. She saw a swimming pool set in resplendent grounds, closed now, and beyond that terraced gardens, shadowed and bare.
Meghan shivered. The night air in the mountains was cool, and her simple white shirt didn’t give her much warmth or protection. She took in a shaky breath and set about repairing herself.
A few minutes later, her hair neat and her face clean, she stepped outside. The villa was quiet. She couldn’t hear the murmur of voices or the clank of pans from the kitchen. Nothing.
Carefully she walked down the front stairs. A single light flickered in the foyer, and a pair of double doors had been left slightly open, leading to what looked like the lounge.
Meghan’s heart thudded in fresh anxiety and she wiped her palms along the sides of the skirt.
She supposed she should go in there, search out Alessandro and his weasely friend. Do what she was being paid to do. Pass out hors d’oeuvres. Make conversation, smile. Flirt.
Except, quite suddenly, she couldn’t. The thought made her ill; she was sickened by the very fact that Alessandro had asked and she’d agreed.
She couldn’t do this.
She was doing this.
She shook her head, biting her lips, and half slunk down the hallway in search of the kitchen.
Ana looked up in frowning surprise as Meghan entered the spacious room. Gleaming chrome appliances and granite worktops gave way to a breakfast nook and more French doors that led out to the terrace and swimming pool. Although it was in darkness, Meghan could imagine the stunning view of hills Tre Querce possessed.
‘I’m here to help,’ she began awkwardly in Italian. ‘I mean … to serve. You know?’
Ana stared at her. A pot bubbled on the stove, emitting a wonderful spicy scent. A green salad was in the process of being made on the worktop, next to fat red tomatoes and yellow peppers in a basket.
‘Signor di Agnio doesn’t want you here,’ Ana said after a moment, choosing her words with care. ‘He wants you in the lounge. Now.’
Meghan shook her head. Her nerves were taut as wire, threatening to snap. She couldn’t face it … them.
‘Perhaps,’ she finally said, speaking slowly as she searched for the right words. ‘But I came here to serve the food, and this is where the food is.’
‘No.’ Ana shook her head.
Meghan clenched her fists at her sides but kept her smile in place. ‘Why don’t I just put an apron on?’ she suggested, and, spying one hanging on a hook by the door, slipped it on before Ana could protest.
The housekeeper shrugged, and turned away with a grunt.
Meghan scanned the worktop, wishing she could make herself useful. She wondered about the men waiting for her. What did they really expect? Would Alessandro come and find her?
She shivered. It was stupid to have come here, to have thought she could exorcise her perso
nal demons by seeing this little arrangement through. She didn’t have the strength, the power.
The control.
All she wanted to do now was run away. Hide. But where? She suddenly appreciated how isolated Villa Tre Querce was, how isolated she was.
How alone.
Vulnerable.
‘I thought you’d be hiding in here.’
She turned to see Alessandro standing in the kitchen doorway, one shoulder leaning against the frame. He’d changed out of his suit and now wore a casual white button-down shirt, open at the neck to expose the tanned column of his throat. He wore faded jeans with a leather belt, casual yet expensive, and fitting him far too wonderfully.
It was not, Meghan thought, an outfit a man wore to a business dinner. He looked too relaxed, too comfortable in his own skin for her liking. He looked ready to be entertained, amused, enjoyed.
She wanted business suits, papers and briefcases, laptops and mobiles. A business dinner, with both men too involved in their work to spare her a glance.
Except that was not how it was going to be … how Alessandro would let it be. She could tell that right now, in the way his lips curled upwards in a predatory smile, his eyes taking in her appearance, resting on her face with a flare of hunger, desire.
She was not making that up, she knew, nor the answering flicker in her own core.
She swallowed. ‘Where else would I be? And I’m not hiding.’
‘Of course not.’ Humour lurked in those steely eyes, in the twitching of his moulded lips. He took a step into the kitchen. ‘I thought I told you to meet me in the lounge.’
‘Is your dinner companion in there?’ She hated the fact that her voice wavered. ‘Has he arrived already?’
‘You’ll see.’ He twitched the apron from around her neck, balling it in his fist before tossing it aside. ‘You don’t need that.’
One more piece of her armour taken away. One more layer stripped bare.
‘I didn’t want to get my uniform dirty.’
He raised one eyebrow. ‘Uniform?’ he asked with obvious scepticism, before turning to leave the kitchen, clearly expecting her to follow. And, wordlessly, she did.
She followed him to the lounge, its double doors opening to a room scattered with comfortable sofas upholstered in varying shades of cream. The few pieces of artwork on the walls were vivid splashes of colour, still-lifes of flowers, scenes of Umbria in bold strokes, that made Meghan pause to admire their sheer vivacity.
Then she looked around. The room was empty.
‘Where is your guests?’ she began, but something in Alessandro’s satisfied look as he stood in the doorway made the question die on her lips. She had a bad feeling about this.
‘ You are my guest, Meghan,’ he said softly. ‘There is no one else.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘NO.’ MEGHAN said the first word that came to mind, desperately wanting it to be true. ‘No, no, no.’
‘Yes.’ Alessandro smiled. He seemed pleased. Far too pleased. As if he’d given her a gift, a pleasant surprise. A treat.
‘You hired me to be a waitress,’ Meghan pointed out in what she hoped was a reasonable tone. ‘For a dinner party. That’s why I’m here.’
‘I hired you,’ he agreed, ‘but, as you remember, it was for a quiet dinner for two. There are two of us in this room right now.’
His words drenched her in icy shock. Meghan stared incredulously. ‘You never even intended for someone else to come? What about the man you ate lunch with?’
Alessandro’s expression hardened. ‘He has other plans for the evening. He is a business acquaintance, nothing more.’
‘And what am I?’ Her voice rose shrilly, and she pressed a fist to her lips. She moved around the room restlessly, seeking escape, but there was none. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t even know where the villa was. She had no place to go in Spoleto. And Alessandro was blocking the door.
She’d walked straight into a trap. She’d agreed to it willingly. Who wouldn’t think she deserved this, that she wanted this? Disgust roiled through her, washed over in sickening waves. Terror followed on its heels. She closed her eyes, struggling for composure. Control.
She opened them, saw Alessandro regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and compassion. She took a deep, shuddering breath. There was always Ana in the kitchen. She could handle this. She had to handle this.
‘Whatever you thought about me, it’s wrong. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to have dinner with you. Take me back to Spoleto now or I’ll press charges.’
Alessandro raised his eyebrows, taking in her words with a thoughtful nod. ‘You’re scared,’ he said after a moment.
Meghan laughed shrilly. ‘Of course I’m scared! A strange man—a powerful man—has trapped me in his house, alone! Under false pretences! Now, let me go.’
He continued watching her, his expression assessing but not without compassion. Meghan didn’t care. Couldn’t think. She paced the room, caged and desperate.
‘Why weren’t you frightened,’ he asked after a moment, ‘when you believed I’d hired you to serve my lunch guest and me? Then there would have been two men here with you. Shouldn’t that have been twice as alarming?’
Meghan whirled around and glared at him, fear replaced momentarily by anger. ‘It was a business arrangement.’
He shrugged. ‘Then consider this such an arrangement as well. I’ll pay you the same rates. I just want to have dinner with you.’
‘I don’t want to be paid!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not a whore!’
Alessandro stilled, his expression chilling. ‘I don’t remember calling you that.’
She closed her eyes, pressed a hand to her chest as if she could still the frantic racing of her heart. ‘If you wanted to have dinner with me,’ she said after a few seconds of silence, her breathing ragged, uneven, ‘then there are more normal ways to have gone about it. You could have asked me straight out. It’s called a date.’
‘Admittedly I’ve used unconventional means.’ He shrugged, unperturbed. ‘I had to.’
‘Oh? And why is that?’
‘I’m a powerful man, Meghan. You remember that power can be abused? It works both ways.’ He smiled softly. ‘Picture this. A man is charmed by a pretty young waitress when he sees her in a restaurant. He likes her smile, and the way her eyes remind him of sunlight. He wants to get to know her better, but he also understands that his position and wealth either frighten women off or attract the wrong kind. So he makes up a little pretence to bring this woman he desires to his house. Nothing far-fetched, nothing sordid. And when she arrives, he intends to surprise her with a quiet, romantic dinner. A chance to know her, and for her to know him. And then he drives her home.’
Meghan stared at him, arrested. Her lips parted, but no words came out. Her mind whirled, thoughts twisting away before she could snatch them, drag them to clarity. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ Alessandro’s quiet, sad little smile made her heart ache with regret and wonder.
It wasn’t like that.
She shook her head. She couldn’t believe. Couldn’t let herself. ‘You can romance it up all you want now, because you think I want to hear those silly pretty words. But you as good as admitted what you really want … what you really think of me. We both know that.’
‘What I want to know,’ Alessandro said softly, ‘is why you think so little of yourself.’
‘I don’t,’ Meghan snapped—a matter of instinct, yet her words sounded hollow. She turned away. ‘Why can’t you just take me home?’
‘Because I don’t want to.’ Alessandro sat in an armchair, ivory silk striped with gold, his legs elegantly crossed, his body relaxed. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Why have you been travelling around Europe? Waitressing to pay your way, I presume?’
‘Stop it.’ She shook her head. ‘This is a farce. I’m not sitting here talking with you, discussing my life with you.’
&
nbsp; ‘It would perhaps make things more pleasant.’
‘I don’t want things to be pleasant,’ she snapped. ‘I want to leave here. Now.’
‘Then answer my questions. Ask some of your own. It’s called making conversation, you know.’
‘All right.’ She dropped her hands, took a deep breath. ‘Here’s a question … Alessandro. If I have dinner with you, will you drive me back to Spoleto afterwards?’
‘If that’s what you want.’ The implication was obvious. Dinner would be enough to make her change her mind. He smiled; it felt like a caress. ‘I like the way you say my name.’
Meghan stared at him, watched as the heat in his eyes flared, turning them from steely-blue to indigo, and she wondered helplessly, hopelessly, if dinner would indeed be enough.
‘You do not need to be frightened,’ Alessandro said quietly. ‘That was never my intention. You can trust me.’
‘You told me not to,’ Meghan snapped, and Alessandro’s expression hardened for a moment.
‘I told you there was no reason to. Now there is.’
‘Oh, and what is that?’
He smiled, although his eyes remained flinty. ‘Because I said so.’
She opened her mouth to utter some scathing reply, the words not yet formed in her head, but then something left her. Her energy, perhaps, or at least her self-righteousness. Her ability to continue a verbal battle with this impossible iron-willed man. And her fear.
She sank onto a cream leather sofa and leaned her head against its soft back. ‘You speak English very well,’ she said after a moment.
‘Thank you. I should. I spent most of my boyhood in England.’
‘Why?’
‘I went to boarding school at seven, in Winchester,’ he explained. ‘All of my siblings did.’
‘You have brothers and sisters?’
‘One sister.’ He opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it abruptly. Meghan almost asked what he’d been going to say, but the shuttered look in his eyes made her realise that topic was now off limits. All of his siblings had gone to boarding school, yet he only had one sister? Something didn’t make sense.
‘Who are the di Agnios, anyway?’ she asked. ‘Something big, obviously, but what do you do?’ She sat up straight, the thought of the Mafia suddenly shooting through her. Surely not …
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