A Deal with Di Capua

by Cathy Williams

  Why should Rosie now just lie back and give up? Why should she think that the only way she might be able to make a go of things would be with Angelo pulling strings on her behalf? Why should she allow him to be the empowering hand inside the puppet?

  Three months ago, Rosie would not have considered leaving London, even though Ian was on the scene. She had always assumed that she had bought into the big-city life and there she would remain, struggling to make her way up. Amanda, the friend who had ruined her life, had also perversely now provided her with a choice that could enable her to forge another life for herself. And hadn’t Angelo told her that he would sell up if she lived in the cottage? Of course, at the time, he had been foolish enough to think that the selling up would occur once they had tired of each other.

  Rosie smirked when she thought about the insanity of his assumptions! She wondered whether he had thought that she would go along with what he wanted because he had rescued her from Ian. Had it been a quid pro quo situation?

  If she moved into the cottage, the whole business of the boundary lines could be dealt with at leisure. It paid to be optimistic. If you looked for problems, you would find them, and she wouldn’t let Angelo scare her away by pointing out everything that could go wrong. She wouldn’t give him that power over her. Nor would she let herself be manoeuvred into a position of sleeping with him. He could be devilishly persuasive and he wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of the fact that he had done her a favour in getting rid of Ian.

  She was so buoyed up by her sudden burst of optimism that she couldn’t wait for Angelo to call so that she could set him straight and was unreasonably put out when he failed to get in touch.

  “He probably got the message loud and clear and has decided to back off,” she told Jack, two weeks later as she prepared for her final trip to the cottage, the one that would sever her ties with London.

  She had made various journeys down, taking her possessions with her in stages. It had been a costly exercise, and she had had to dip into her meagre savings, but the light at the end of the tunnel was a terrific motivator. She had also had business cards printed and fliers done. Hundreds of them. She had already begun targeting various companies. Jack had done a website.

  “Or maybe,” Jack pointed out, “he’s found someone else. After all, he’s a free man now. Maybe he’s decided that he’s better off with someone who doesn’t have anything to do with his past.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Rosie realised that that had not occurred to her. Whilst she had been busily hating him and rehearsing her contemptuous, disdainful speeches that would show him just how mistaken he had been in thinking that she might actually fall into bed with him because he wanted to tie up loose ends—while all that had been going on in her head, playing over and over like a stuck record—she actually had not considered the possibility that he had just become bored with the whole proposition and decided to shrug his shoulders and walk away.

  She had not considered the possibility that she actually might not see him again. She really hadn’t thought that he might have decided that pursuing a reluctant ex was more trouble than it was worth.

  She chatted to Jack for a short while longer. He promised to visit once she had settled in. They spent ten minutes rehashing Angelo’s dramatic success in dispatching Ian. All the time, Rosie was aware of a hollowness inside her at the thought of Angelo disappearing without a backward glance, and she told herself that it was simply frustration born from having concocted a wonderfully sarcastic speech in her head and having been denied the opportunity to deliver it.

  She was overjoyed that Angelo had backed off. She couldn’t wait to get started on this new phase of her life and it would be a distinct advantage not having him lurking in the background, bitter and vengeful and a constant hateful reminder of a past she had struggled to put behind her.

  At least, that was what she told herself over the next fortnight, during which she discovered just how inadequate her savings were as she saw them being nibbled away in the purchase of plants, essential kitchen equipment, paint so that she could brighten up some of the walls, and food. There was no money coming in. Her phone remained silent.

  By week three, just as desperation was beginning to take the gloss off her upbeat mood, she received a call for her first job—but not until she had provided a comprehensive list of dishes she had cooked, the restaurant in which she had been an apprentice and her experience of cooking for crowds.

  Rosie was over the moon and she was beaming when, that evening, the doorbell rang and she pulled open the door to see Angelo standing on the doorstep. She hadn’t known whom to expect. She hadn’t wasted a single second wondering if her visitor might be unwelcome, or even wondering who on earth could be ringing her doorbell when she had as yet to make any friends in the area. Swept away by the euphoria of having her first client, she just hadn’t been thinking at all.

  All over again, she was bombarded by conflicting emotions: disappointment, dismay, alarm. None of those featured even though she tried to get her mind into the place she had spent the past few weeks carefully training it to go. Instead, she felt a horrible swoop of dizzying excitement coupled with a charge of high-voltage anticipation that made her feel as though her body had suddenly been plugged into an electric socket.

  “Village life seems to suit you,” Angelo murmured. “Your eyes are gleaming. You look relaxed.”

  His absence for the past month had been intentional. He had put his cards on the table. He would back away, give her time for his proposal to sink in. Hot pursuit was not going to be his style. He had done that once and she hadn’t been worth the effort, as it turned out. No, he intended to have her, and he would make sure that he was in control every step of the way.

  “What are you doing here?” Rosie scrambled to get her wits together.

  “Did you miss me?”

  Rosie went bright red. “No. I did not miss you, Angelo. I’ve been busy settling in. Why are you here?”

  “You’ve painted the walls. Why that colour blue?”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’ve come here,” Rosie said bluntly. “I’m very busy.”

  “Doing what?” Angelo was enjoying himself. He liked the tinge of pink staining her cheeks and the furious downturn of her perfectly shaped mouth. She was wearing a pair of denim-blue overalls. One of the shoulder straps was buckled, the other wasn’t, so that her cream vest, snugly outlining her breasts, was exposed. She had obviously been doing some gardening at some point during the day. The weather was lovely, with blue skies, and there was a cool, pleasant nip in the air.

  “No, don’t answer that,” he drawled. “You’ve been out in the garden.” He reached out to pluck a couple of dried twigs that had been caught on the thick fabric and Rosie stepped back quickly.

  “Just a twig,” he said, holding it up between his fingers. “Proof positive that you’ve been getting down and dirty with Mother Nature. It’s a far cry from the girl I used to go out with.”

  “The girl you used to go out with worked in a cocktail bar,” Rosie retorted, body still humming from where he had casually and briefly touched it.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in? This seems to be the question I’m forced to ask every time I show up on your doorstep.”

  “That probably means that you shouldn’t show up on my doorstep.”

  “Except you weren’t complaining last time, were you, Rosie?” Angelo murmured softly, just in case she conveniently decided to forget his sterling performance as her knight in shining armour. He had done little but think about seeing her again over the past month. His powers of concentration had been lamentably creaky. Now that she was standing in front of him, he intended to use every weapon in his arsenal to get her exactly where he wanted her. He had a powerful flashback to Amanda’s revelations and felt a cold, hard streak of rage and undiluted determination to get Ros
ie back into his bed and begin the process of clearing her out of his system.

  Rosie pulled back the door and stood aside as he once again invaded her space. Her heart was beating like a jackhammer. She struggled to remember the confident way she told Jack that she was relieved that Angelo hadn’t been in touch. He was as graceful and as dangerous as a panther and she couldn’t tear her eyes away from him as he stood in the small flagstoned hall, rocking back slightly on the balls of his feet as he nodded approval at her choice of colour for the walls.

  “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life being grateful to you because you got rid of Ian,” she told him evenly.

  “Eternal gratitude is something I could live without.”

  “But you still think that it’s necessary to remind me of what you did.”

  “Tell me what you’ve been up to while I’ve been away.” Angelo smoothly diverted the conversation. When he looked at her, he made sure to keep his eyes firmly focused on her face, yet he was taking her all in, every delectable inch of her, tallying the reality with the image that had haunted him for the past weeks. Never had he had so many cold showers.

  “Mr Foreman said that the business with the land and the boundary lines could take for ever.” She managed to galvanise her body into some kind of movement and walked past him, through the kitchen and out to the back of the cottage where she had begun working on the garden, dividing the fertile earth into separate plots so that she could cultivate the herbs and vegetables she knew would be useful when more catering jobs hopefully began rolling in.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as he sat on the deck chair she had bought cheap at one of the garden centres. He wasn’t dressed for the great outdoors. His highly polished handmade shoes had already garnered some mud. His jacket looked out of place, as did his white shirt, even though he had removed his tie, probably stuffed it into his trouser pocket, a habit she was familiar with.

  “What are you sniggering at?” Angelo asked, stretching out his long legs and tilting back in the chair so that the spring sun warmed his face.

  “I suppose you’re out of your comfort zone sitting here, aren’t you? Your shoes are going to be muddy. You need to be in an office in those clothes, not out here.” They had only ever enjoyed London when she had been with him, enjoyed all the sophisticated restaurants, expensive theatres and dark, intimate clubs. They hadn’t taken trips out to the countryside. The memory had the fuzzy quality of a dream.

  By way of response, Angelo kicked off his shoes, removed his socks, rolled up the trousers to the knees and tossed his jacket over the handle of the wheelbarrow into which a mound of weeds was steadily accumulating.

  “Better?” he drawled. “Or do I need to remove some more?”

  Rosie furiously dug away at the weeds and tried to ignore that sexy rhetorical question. Their unfinished conversation hung in the air between them and she didn’t know what to do about it. Should she launch into the speech she had spent the past month rehearsing? Should she tell him in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t up for grabs, that she didn’t need him doing her any favours? That whatever attraction she felt for him was just not strong enough for her even to contemplate doing something about it?

  “Your jacket will be ruined,” she pointed out.

  “There are plenty more where that came from.”

  Rosie resentfully brushed her hands clean against her dungarees, neatly folded the jacket and rested it on the other deck chair occupying the patio space.

  “No need for you to do that,” Angelo drawled, tilting his head to watch her as she resumed her weeding. “But then I guess old habits die hard.”

  “I’m disappointed that you’re still a slob.” She was annoyed that he was perfectly right. When they had been together, he had found her annoyance with his sloppy habits amusing. He left things lying around, told her that there was no need to pick them up, that he had a daily housekeeper who did that, and she ignored him and complained that expensive clothes should be treated properly.

  Angelo laughed, relaxed. “I’ve never told you this, but it’s one of the upsides of having made a lot of money. I don’t like tidying up behind myself and I can now afford to pay someone to do it for me.”

  “You’ve always had a lot of money.” Rosie sat back on her haunches and shielded her eyes against the evening sun to look at him narrowly. She knew that it was dangerous, allowing herself to enter into a dialogue with him, but she was curious. Their affair had been fast, furious and blissfully intense. It had never had time to morph into the calmer stage where questions were asked and small personal details were unearthed. It had suited her. The longer he didn’t know about her past—not that she had deliberately tried to conceal it—the better. He had likewise avoided mentioning his and she had simply assumed that his wealth was far-reaching and hereditary. Who cared? It had all been peripheral to everything else: the passion, the fun, the mad, wonderful heady feeling of being on a rollercoaster ride with a guy she had fallen deeply in love with.

  “My mother worked two jobs,” Angelo said drily. “One of which was cleaning. My father wasn’t on the scene. So, you see, maybe there’s a psychological link there? Maybe having the ability to afford to pay someone to tidy up the mess I make is a permanent reminder of how far I’ve come?” Angelo wasn’t sure why he had suddenly decided to share that with her. Hell, did it matter? Yet, sharing confidences had never been his thing. Transported from poverty in Italy to all the trappings of privilege associated with a top private school, he had learnt quickly that the less said the better.

  “You never said.” Rosie furiously uprooted some weeds and rocked back to inspect her handiwork but her mind was one-hundred-percent focused on Angelo. She retired to the deck chair, shifting the neatly folded jacket to the wrought-iron table, recently bought at auction for next to nothing. “When did you come over here?”

  Having initiated the conversation, Angelo was now compelled to prolong it even though he really didn’t want to. Chatting wasn’t the purpose of his visit. He frowned at her and clicked his tongue impatiently when she continued to look at him with that disingenuous, appealing curiosity that he now knew better than to trust.

  “I was thirteen.” He shrugged. “I won a scholarship to come here to board. The local council had initiated a programme of trying to generate interest in education by promising to pay for the top three students in various deprived schools to study in the UK. It was a joint deal with three boarding schools.”

  “And you won.”

  Angelo grinned wryly. “My mother persuaded me that it was a good idea. I think she predicted gloom and doom and a general descent into all sorts of untold horrors if I stayed where I was. At the age of thirteen the doom and gloom prediction held a lot of appeal, but I came over and never looked back.”

  “Could you speak any English?”

  “How much Italian did you speak when you were thirteen?”

  “It must have been terrifying.” It sent a weird frisson through her to think how much they had in common, had they but known it. Two people from disadvantaged backgrounds doing their best to escape, the difference being that his escape was conclusively a million times more successful than hers had been.

  “Do you feel sorry for me?” Angelo murmured, injecting just the right note of cynicism in his voice to deter her from going down the “bleeding heart” road. The route from A to B didn’t include tea and sympathy.

  Rosie stiffened. He was very politely pointing out the chasm between them, warning her to pay attention to it just in case she got it into her silly little head to think that any conversation between them could ever be really and truly amicable. She was reminded that he hadn’t come here to chat. He had come here because he had an agenda and she would have to deal with that.

  “I need to go and have a shower, Angelo.” She stood up and flexed her muscles which had stiffe
ned up. “I take it you’re going to be staying up at your house? Wherever that is?” How she had been tempted to have a wander and take a look but she had fought down the temptation. “So, if you haven’t come here for a reason, then you should leave now.”

  How long, he thought, could they dance round the main event, pretending it wasn’t there?

  He looked at her slowly, taking his time, and when his eyes were back on her face it was to find that her colour was several shades brighter.

  “I’ll just sit here for a short while longer and appreciate the scenery. I’m keen to find out how you’re progressing with your plans.” He knew how she was progressing. In fact, thanks to him, she had just received her first order and he predicted it wouldn’t be the last. Watching her fall flat on her face was no longer his objective, if it ever really had been. How receptive would she be if she was agonising over money and counting ways to avoid the poor house?

  Rosie hesitated. Maybe this was the right time to tell him that she wasn’t interested, that he was crazy to imagine that she would ever, ever go anywhere near a bed with him again.

  In her head, she had a vivid image of a boy of thirteen, speaking no English, arriving at an exclusive boarding school with a suitcase of second-hand clothes and cheap shoes. She had known what it felt like to be stared at by upper class kids her own age. There had been one of those schools on the outskirts of the town where she had lived and the shopping mall had been the meeting ground for all teenagers, rich and poor alike. Every weekend, the boys had ogled and assumed that she would jump at the chance of nabbing one of them. The girls had smirked and looked her up and down because of her striking good looks, clutching shopping bags from stores Rosie could only dream of ever entering. Her heart went out to the kid who had had to fight his way past that to get where he was.