The Temporary Mrs. Marchetti (Mills & Boon Modern)

by MELANIE MILBURNE

  His mouth turned up at one side in a rueful angle. ‘What a pity my grandmother meddled with your life. You’ll have to put your baby plans on hold for another six months.’

  Alice shifted her gaze. ‘Yes, well, I’m only twenty-eight. I don’t have to panic just yet.’

  There was an odd little silence.

  Alice wondered if he was thinking of the irony of their situation. He had desperately wanted a family seven years ago while she had wanted her freedom. Now he wanted his freedom while she was peering into every pram that went past.

  What if she didn’t find a man she could love enough to father her children? But who else could she want but Cristiano? Her feelings for him had been on slow burn in her heart. Banked down out of bitterness because he hadn’t fought for her in the past. But the more she thought about her future, she couldn’t imagine sharing it with anyone other than him. She would rather be alone than be with someone else.

  Maybe that was why she had panicked and pushed him away. She had seen him as the one man who could make her sacrifice the dream of owning her own business. It had been too confronting for her as a twenty-one-year-old on the threshold of her life. Too threatening in case he hadn’t loved her enough to give her the freedom to pursue her own goals instead of subsuming her life into the powerful engine of his.

  But now...now she had established her business. She knew who she was and what she wanted for her life. And that included the things he no longer wanted. Marriage. A family. To love and be loved.

  But Cristiano no longer loved her, if he ever had. The only reason he was with her now was because of the shares that hung in the balance. If it hadn’t been for his grandmother’s will she would never have heard from him again. She had to remember that. He was only marrying her to get what he wanted. He might still desire her but he was a full-blooded man with a healthy appetite for sex.

  This thing they had going on was for now, not for ever.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CRISTIANO LED ALICE through the villa but his mind was preoccupied.

  She wanted a family.

  After all those heated arguments in the past over not wanting kids. It had been a sticking point in their relationship. He had thought her selfish for putting her career above having a family. Selfish and unnatural. But now he was the one who was career focussed. He had made himself so busy he couldn’t find time for a steady relationship, let alone a family that would need nurturing day by day, week by week, year by year. He didn’t want it because the thought of losing it was too terrifying. Too awful to even contemplate.

  He knew all too well how it felt to have his world ripped out from under him. Once was enough. More than enough. Loving someone meant you could lose them. You could lose part of yourself and never get it back.

  ‘May I see the garden now?’ Alice said, breaking through his reverie.

  ‘Sure.’ Cristiano took her hand and led her to the French doors leading out to the terrace. ‘This was one of my grandmother’s favourite places. She would sit out here for hours watching the birdlife in the garden.’

  ‘It’s such a beautiful place.’ Alice’s voice had a reverent note to it. ‘Around every corner is another surprise. It’s like a story unfolding.’

  Cristiano waited on the terrace while she wandered about the garden. She stopped to smell the roses his grandmother had planted as a young bride, her fingers softly touching the fragrant petals. The sun caught her hair and turned it into a skein of shining silver, and she brushed some strands away from her face that the light breeze had toyed with and tucked them back behind her ear. She caught him looking at her and gave him a smile that made something inside his chest ache.

  ‘This would make a great wedding venue, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘The wisteria walk would be a gorgeous place for the bride to walk towards the groom.’

  ‘Would you like to get married here?’ Cristiano asked.

  A slight frown creased her smooth brow. ‘But I thought you wanted a church wedding?’

  He shrugged. ‘As long as it’s legal who cares where it’s conducted?’

  She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth and turned slightly to look at the angel fountain his grandmother had installed after the stillborn birth of her first child the year before Cristiano’s father had been born. So much of his family’s history was embedded in this place. There wasn’t a shrub or tree or yew hedge that hadn’t witnessed a Marchetti triumph or tragedy.

  After a moment Alice turned to look at him. ‘To be honest, I’d rather be married here than in a church. It would make it less...’ She seemed to be searching for the right word and bit into her lip again.

  ‘Binding?’ Cristiano said.

  Her mouth went into a flat line. ‘Don’t you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable about all this? Marriage is a big deal. As the words of the ceremony say: it’s not to be entered into lightly.’

  Was she having second thoughts? His guts churned. If she didn’t marry him he would lose the shares and the villa. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  ‘Look at it this way. We’re fulfilling an old lady’s dying wishes by getting married. It’s not about us. It’s about Nonna. And I think she would be thrilled if we had the ceremony here. I’ll get working on it straight away.’ He held his hand out for hers, drawing her against his side. ‘Now, let’s make the most of the day here in Stresa.’

  It was a lovely day in spite of Alice’s misgivings about where things were heading in their relationship. Cristiano organised a private tour of the islands and a gorgeous lunch at a restaurant by the lake. They drove back to Milan late in the afternoon and, after a quick shower and freshen up, he took her to one of the city’s premier restaurants, where the maître d’ welcomed Cristiano by name and showered them with effusive congratulations and a bottle of champagne on the house.

  Alice sat opposite him sipping her champagne and wondered if he was thinking about that other restaurant only a few streets from here where he had proposed to her while the rest of the diners looked on. With the benefit of hindsight, she wished she’d handled it a little better than she had. But the shock of his sudden proposal after only a few weeks of dating had thrown her into a panic.

  Surely she could have let him down without publicly humiliating him. Why had she been so crass and immature? How must he have felt to be left in that restaurant with everyone staring at him open-mouthed? The ring he’d chosen thrown onto the table as if it were a cheap fairground trinket. She hadn’t even gone back to his villa, because her passport had been in her tote bag, and she’d caught a taxi straight to the airport and got on the first flight she could.

  ‘More champagne?’ Cristiano asked into the silence.

  Alice put her hand over the top of her glass. ‘Better not. I’ve had too much already.’

  ‘You’re not driving so if you want another I don’t mind.’

  She waited a couple of beats. ‘Did you ever meet the person who—?’

  ‘No.’ The word was delivered with such finality it sounded like a gavel falling.

  Alice moistened her lips. ‘Did they express any remorse? Make any effort to contact you or your grandparents?’

  His mouth was twisted in an embittered line. ‘No. He was the sort of person who blamed everyone but himself for his wrongdoing. He didn’t even get jail time. The judge overseeing the case had connections with his influential father. But karma got him in the end. He was killed in a bar fight. A drug deal gone sour.’ He shifted his water glass half a centimetre and then did a slow tap of his fingers on the tablecloth. ‘I thought it would help to know he’d got his comeuppance, but strangely it didn’t.’

  Alice reached across the table and grasped his hand. ‘That’s because you’re not at heart a vengeful man.’

  His half-smile was a little crooked. ‘Am I not?’ His fingers toyed with her engagement ring. ‘You would not have liked what I was thinking when you stormed out of that restaurant seven years ago.’

  She looked at their j
oined hands rather than meet his gaze. ‘I’m sorry I reacted the way I did back then. It was so...so petulant and immature of me to behave like that.’

  He gave her hand a quick squeeze before he released it to sit back in his chair. ‘I shouldn’t have put you under so much pressure. I was in too much of a rush after my grandfather died.’ He did that slow tapping thing again next to his glass, his forehead creasing in a frown. ‘Funerals can do that to you. Make you realise how fragile life is.’

  Alice thought about him attending his family’s funerals, the weight of grief he’d had to shoulder so bravely as a child, and then as an adult saying goodbye to each of his grandparents in turn. She had only been to one funeral—an elderly client who had passed away after a short illness. It had been sad but not tragic. Her family had celebrated her long life and sent her off with a party that had gone on until the early hours of the morning. What did Alice know of how it must feel to say that final goodbye to someone so beloved as a parent, grandparent or sibling?

  ‘All the same, I wish I’d been a little kinder to you.’ She let out a tiny sigh. ‘I guess that’s why you didn’t contact me.’

  Something flickered in his gaze. Surprise? Alarm? Regret? It was hard to distinguish which. ‘Did you want me to?’

  Alice wasn’t sure it served any purpose to admit to how much she’d hoped he would. What was done was done. It was in the past and best left there. ‘No. We were over as far as I was concerned.’

  His eyes held hers for a long beat or two. ‘How soon did you date someone else?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t know...six or so months maybe.’ She flashed him a brittle glance before she could stop herself. ‘Certainly longer than it took you.’

  There was a small silence.

  ‘I made sure I was seen with other women within days of us breaking up,’ he said. ‘But it was eight months before I could bring myself to sleep with anyone.’

  Alice flickered her eyelids in shock. He’d waited that long? ‘Eight months? Really?’

  He gave a grim nod. ‘It just didn’t feel right rushing into another intense relationship.’

  ‘It was pretty intense, wasn’t it?’

  He gave that sexy half-smile again and reached for her hand. ‘It still is.’

  * * *

  The door was barely closed behind them when they returned to Cristiano’s villa when he reached for her. The drive home from the restaurant had been a form of foreplay. His looks, his touch on her thigh when he changed the gears, the throb and roar of the engine that reminded Alice of the potent hormones surging through his body. His mouth came down on hers in a scorching kiss, his tongue tangling with hers in a provocative duel that made her tingle with anticipation.

  She tore at his clothes with desperate hands, sliding her palms over the warm hard flesh of his chest and abdomen. He shrugged off his shirt and set to work on her dress, ripping down the zipper at the back and sliding his hand down the length of her spine, holding her against his pulsing heat. He brought his mouth to her neck and décolletage, his lips and tongue lighting spot fires beneath her skin. His hands cupped her breasts from below, pushing them upwards for the descent of his mouth.

  She gasped out her pleasure when his mouth closed over one tightly budded nipple, his tongue swirling around the sensitive areola until she was sagging at the knees.

  Alice sent her hands lower to free him from his trousers and underwear, taking him in her hand and stroking and squeezing him the way she knew he liked. He groaned his approval against her breast, creating a buzzing sensation that made the hairs on her scalp lift in a Mexican wave.

  He lifted his mouth from her breast, his voice low and deep and gravelly with desire. ‘Ti desidero.’

  ‘I want you too.’

  He lifted her in one effortless swoop and carried her upstairs to his bedroom. He laid her on the mattress and, after dispensing with the rest of his clothes, dealt with the rest of hers. But somewhere along the way he slowed down the mad pace of his lovemaking and subjected her to an exquisite worship of her body from head to foot that made every cell throb and vibrate with need. His lips, his tongue, his hands, even his breath skating over her skin built her desire to fever pitch until she was all but begging for mercy.

  ‘How much do you want me?’ he said against her belly, his stubble grazing her skin.

  ‘So much. Oh, please...please...’ She writhed and twisted, aching for that final push.

  He sheathed himself with a condom and entered her in a thick thrust that set off an explosion in her swollen flesh. She arched her spine to keep the contact where she needed it, the rioting sensations shooting through her like fireworks. She had barely recovered from that first orgasm when another one followed, a deeper one that rolled through her in tumultuous waves.

  The contractions of her body must have triggered his own for he tensed all over and then surged deeper into her and shuddered and spilled.

  Alice flung her head back against the pillows with a blissful sigh. ‘Wow. Double wow.’

  He propped himself up on his elbows and traced a fingertip down between her breasts. ‘Not many women can orgasm like that without direct stimulation.’

  She smiled and stroked a hand down his muscled arm. ‘So I’m special, am I?’

  His gaze intensified. ‘You’re the most responsive lover I’ve ever had.’

  Alice tiptoed her fingers over his bicep. ‘That’s really saying something since you’ve had so many and all.’

  He frowned at her tone and moved away to deal with the condom. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press. If I’d bedded even half the women the press said I had, I wouldn’t have had time to run my business.’

  Alice sat up and reached for the throw on the end of the bed, wrapping it around her body. She was annoyed for broadcasting her jealousy again. How would she be able to walk away from their relationship with any dignity once it was time to go if she kept yammering on about his playboy lifestyle? He had a perfect right to have lovers. Numerous lovers.

  No one had stopped her doing the same. No one but her, that was. She should be feeling happy he had at least refrained from bringing anyone back to his villa since her. That was huge. And the fact he had waited eight months surely should make her feel a little mollified, but sadly it didn’t. He might not have moved on as quickly as the press had reported but neither had he come after her. He had kept his distance and seven long years had gone past. Seven years they could have had together...

  She stood from the bed. ‘I’m going to take off my make-up.’

  He came to stand in front of her, his expression softening. ‘I thought we agreed not to take cheap shots at each other.’

  Alice rolled her lips together and then sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He lifted her chin, brushing his thumb over her lower lip. ‘I want us to be friends when this is over. It’s what my grandmother would’ve wanted.’

  ‘You don’t think she wanted us to...to make a go of it?’

  His hand fell away from her face. ‘If she did then that’s too bad because it’s not going to happen.’

  But it could if he wanted it to.

  Alice tried to ignore the tight spasm of her heart. He was ruling out any possibility of them being a proper couple. Refusing to contemplate a future with her. A future with all the things she longed for now. What a cruel quirk of fate to have their roles reversed.

  ‘Did I say I wanted it to? I’m just saying she probably had it in mind when she conjured up this scheme. At the very least she would’ve wanted us to settle our differences.’

  Cristiano ran a hand through his hair. ‘We’ve done that.’

  ‘Have we?’

  He let out a long breath and stepped close to her again, cupping her cheek in one broad hand, his dark chocolate eyes holding hers. ‘You no longer hate me, do you, cara?’

  I never hated you.

  Alice gave him a wobbly smile. ‘Do you still hate me?’

  H
e brought his mouth down to within a millimetre of hers. ‘Does this feel like hate to you?’ And covered her mouth with his.

  It felt like heaven.

  * * *

  When Alice got back to work on Monday it was like stepping into controlled chaos.

  Meghan greeted her with a beaming smile from behind the reception counter. ‘You would not believe the number of clients who want to see you. You’re fully booked for months and months. Years probably. Your engagement to Cristiano Marchetti has opened doors. Big doors. Guess which Hollywood superstar wants you to do their make-up for their wedding in November? You’ll never ever guess.’

  She pulled out a chair and pushed it towards Alice.

  ‘Here, you’d better sit down before I tell you.’

  Alice ignored the chair. ‘It’s all right—I won’t faint. Who is it?’

  Meghan named a rising-star female actor who was the current toast of Hollywood.

  ‘And that’s not all,’ she continued in a rush of excitement. ‘She’s going to fly you, all expenses paid, to the wedding location. It’s top secret so as to keep the press away so you won’t be told until the very last moment. You’ll have to sign a confidentiality agreement. I bet it’s going to be in Bora Bora or maybe at Richard Branson’s place, you know, Necker Island. Or maybe St Bart’s. Oh, God, imagine if it was in St Bart’s. You’ll need an assistant, won’t you?’ She clasped her hands as if in prayer. ‘Take me with you? Please, please, please?’

  Alice laughed at the exuberant puppy-like look on her young employee’s face. ‘I’ll have to see if the booking comes off first. No point getting too excited. You know what some of those Hollywood celebrities are like. Their weddings are cancelled at a moment’s notice.’

  Some of Meghan’s enthusiasm sagged. ‘True, but if it goes ahead things will never be the same around here. You’ll be the wedding make-up artist to the stars.’

  I have to get through my own ‘wedding’ first.