The Italian's Future Bride

Raffaelle made the introductions with brusque, cool formality that made both her and Gino Rossi’s responses wary and brief. After a moment Raffaelle then turned away and centred his attention on the rest of his friends, determined to get through this damn evening before he decided what he was going to do about what he had witnessed today.

In the inside pocket of his jacket, a photograph of Rachel with her lover being cosy across a café table was trying its best to burn a hole into his chest. The fact that she had been too engrossed to notice the paparazzo who took it only fed his simmering rage. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was close friends with the newspaper owner to whom the freelance reporter had offered to sell the photograph.

He was now assured that the picture of his betrothed being intimate with another man would not appear in the tabloids, but at a cost to his dignity as well as his wallet, plus an invitation to this evening’s dinner party, along with a promised exclusive interview about his wonderful life to date.

A life that included details about the lying, cheating, two-timing blonde wearing his ring right now.

He allowed himself a glance at her, standing there looking paler than usual with an oddly fragile look to her slender stance. A frown cut a dark crease across his brow. Why fragile? Was her conscience pricking her? Did she possess one? Had she spent the afternoon comparing her old lover with her new lover?

Which of them had won the contest?

A curse rattled its way around his throat and he looked away again, wondering when the hell she had got to him so badly that he even considered that damn question?

Dio.Rachel was bad for him. She had been bad for him from the moment he’d set eyes on her. Her type, herkind, were poison to a guy like him and maybe it was time that he got himself the cure.

The owner of the newspaper arrived then, like the perfect answer to his thoughts. Tall, blonde, and beautiful, and dressed in rich, dark purple that moulded her long, slender curves, Francesca de Baggio was the kind of woman who answered most men’s desires.

Raffaelle went to meet her. They embraced with murmured greetings to each other that showed the intimacy of lovers from eons ago. As his lips brushed her cheeks he smelled her sensuous perfume, felt the smoothness of her skin at her shoulders beneath his palms. As her red lips lingered at the corner of his mouth he waited for the expected tingle to light him up from the inside.

It did not happen.

‘Ciao, mi amore,’ she moved those red lips to whisper softly in his ear. ‘The betrothed does not look happy. Have you beaten her soundly?’

Almond-shaped eyes that matched the colour of her dress gleamed up at him with a conspiratorial smile. Anger erupted inside him, fresh anger—newanger—leaping on a desire to jump to Rachel’s defence.

‘You know better than I do how a photograph can misrepresent the truth.’

The almond eyes widened and filled with amusement. How was it he had forgotten that Francesca was in the tabloid business because she loved the trouble it allowed her to cause?

/> ‘His name is Alonso Leopardi,’ she informed him softly. ‘He sells cars for a living and loves them as much as he loves women. He also rents an apartment above the café they were sitting at being so…cosy. Convenient, hmm?’

Raffaelle was hooked like a fish and he knew it. It was perhaps fortunate that Gino and Daniella came up to greet Francesca then, because it saved him from making a bloody fool of himself by letting Francesca see that she’d reeled him in.

Looking round for Rachel, he could see her nowhere. For a tight, thick, blood-curdling second he thought she must have walked out. For a blinding, sickening, sense-drowning moment he actually saw her in his head, making a run for it, grabbing a cab and heading for her heartbreaker in a white-faced urgent adrenalin rush of need.

A clammy sweat broke out all over him. He took a step away from the group of his friends now gathering around Francesca to welcome her into their fold.

Common sense was telling him not to be so stupid. Rachel would not just walk out on him—even if the way he had been behaving tonight was enough in itself to justify her walking out.

He saw her then, right over on the other side of the busy restaurant. She was just stepping into the ladies’ room with her blonde head bowed slightly and a slender white hand pushed up against her mouth.

She’d looked pale all evening, he remembered. His mind flipped from hating her to worrying about her. How could he have forgotten the baby they could have made, which might be making its presence felt as she made a quick dash into the Ladies’?

Concern wanted to send his feet in her direction. Only common sense warned him not to make a scene here. Turning back to Francesca, he saw her watching him with an eyebrow arched curiously. Dragging on his social cloak, he forced himself to smile as he walked back to her.

Rachel was fighting the need to be sick in the toilet. The clammy sweat of nausea had flooded over her the moment she’d seen the way Raffaelle had walked into the arms of the beautiful blonde.

‘Ex-lovers,’ Daniella had whispered to her. ‘Don’t they look amazing together? He adored her once but she left him for her now ex-husband. We thought he would never get over it—maybe he didn’t. He spent the afternoon with her,’ she confided with relish. ‘I know because Gino told me Raffaelle cancelled a meeting with him to go to her. Now she’s here. An interesting development, don’t you think?’

Was it? Rachel discovered that she no longer knew anything. Her head was thumping too thickly to think. A month—a month in which she had lived and slept with him, had trailed around Europe with him as his pretend future bride. But what did she really know about Raffaelle, other than he was a fantastic lover and was willing to go to any lengths to protect himself from getting a negative press?

By the time she felt able to rejoin the party, everyone was gathered around a long wooden table. Still fighting down nausea, Rachel found herself having to take the only seat left available between Daniella and another male friend of Raffaelle’s, whose name she couldn’t recall right now.

Raffaelle was sitting at the other end of the table. The beautiful Francesca was next to him. She had arrived here on her own and Rachel supposed that, given the odd number of men to women, the dinner placements had become muddled.

But it was the first time that Raffaelle was not occupying the seat beside her like a statement of possession.

Had he even noticed that she was not sitting on his other side?