The Italian's Christmas Secret

And now the trip to Rome, which she’d already been dreading, was going to be a whole lot worse. Bad enough being in the kind of car she’d lusted after during her days as a mechanic—and having it driven by someone else—without the knowledge of how smug Matteo must be feeling. Why, he hadn’t even wanted to spend the night with her! He’d just deposited her in her bed like some unwanted package and behaved as if what had happened had been purely functional. Like somebody scratching an itch. Was that how it had been for him, she wondered bitterly? Had he seen her as a body rather than a person?

‘So, are you going to spend the next twenty-four hours ignoring me?’ Matteo’s voice broke into her rebellious thoughts as they passed a signpost to a pretty-looking place called Civita Castellana.

Keira wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard him but that was hardly the way forward, was it? She mightn’t be happy with the current state of affairs, but that didn’t mean she had to lie down and passively accept it. Unless she was planning on behaving like some sort of victim—allowing the powerful tycoon to pick her up and move her around at will, without her having any say in the matter. It was time she started asserting herself and stopped beating herself up. They’d had sex together as two consenting adults and surely that put them on some kind of equal footing.

So ask him.

Take some of the control back.

She turned her head to look at his profile, trying not to feel affected by that proud Roman nose and the strong curve of his shadowed jaw. His silk shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, offering a tantalising glimpse of olive skin, and he exuded a vitality which made him seem to glow with life. She could feel a trickle of awareness whispering over her body and it made her want to fidget on the plush leather car seat.

She wanted him to touch her all over again. And when he touched her she went to pieces.

Firmly pushing all eroti

c possibilities from her mind, she cleared her throat. ‘So why this trip, Matteo?’

There was a pause. ‘You know why. We’ve discussed this. We’re going to buy you some pretty clothes to wear.’

His words were deeply patronising and she wondered if that had been his intention—reminding her that she fell way short of his ideal of what a woman should be. ‘I’m not talking about your determination to change my appearance,’ she said. ‘I mean, why bring me to Italy in the first place? That’s something we haven’t even discussed. What’s going to happen once you’ve waved your magic wand and turned me into someone different? Are you planning to return me to England in your fancy plane and make like this was all some kind of dream?’

His mouth hardened into a flat and implacable line. ‘That isn’t an option.’

‘Then what are the options?’ she questioned quietly.

Matteo put his foot down on the accelerator and felt the powerful engine respond. It was a reasonable question, though not one he particularly wanted to answer. But he couldn’t keep on putting off a conversation they needed to have because he was wary of all the stuff it might throw up. ‘We need to see whether we can make it work as a couple.’

‘A couple?’

He saw her slap her palms down on her denim-covered thighs in a gesture of frustration.

‘You mean, living in separate parts of the same house? How is that in any way what a couple would do?’ She sucked in a breath. ‘Why, we’ve barely seen one another—and when we have, it isn’t as if we’ve done much talking!’

‘That can be worked on,’ he said carefully.

‘Then let’s start working on it right now. Couples aren’t complete strangers to one another and we are. Or at least, you are. I told you a lot about my circumstances on the night we...’ Her voice wavered as she corrected herself before growing quieter. ‘On that night we spent together in Devon. But I don’t know you, Matteo. I still don’t really know anything about you.’

Matteo stared at the road ahead. Women always asked these kinds of questions and usually he cut them short. With a deceptively airy sense of finality, he’d make it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate any further interrogation because he didn’t want anyone trying to ‘understand’ him. But he recognised that Keira was different and their situation was different. She was the mother of his child and she’d given birth to his heir—not some socially ambitious woman itching to get his ring on her finger. He owed her this.

‘What do you want to know?’ he questioned.

She shrugged. ‘All the usual stuff. About your parents. Whether or not you have any brothers or sisters. That kind of thing.’

‘I have a father and a stepmother. No siblings,’ he said, his voice growing automatically harsher and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop it. ‘But I have a stepbrother who’s married, with a small child.’

He could feel her eyes on him. ‘So your parents are divorced?’

‘No. My mother is dead.’

‘Like mine,’ she said thoughtfully.

He nodded but didn’t say anything, his attention fixed on the road ahead, trying to concentrate on the traffic and not on the bleak landscape of loss.

‘Tell me about your father,’ she said. ‘Do you get on well with him?’

Some of the tension left his body as he overtook a truck and he waited until he had finished the manoeuvre before answering. He wondered if he should give her the official version of his life, thus maintaining the myth that all was well. But if she stayed then she would soon discover the undercurrents which surged beneath the surface of the powerful Valenti clan.

‘We aren’t close, no. We see each other from time to time, more out of duty than anything else.’