Before Poppy could part her lips Santino was requesting her opinion on the display, and within minutes she was trying a pair on. When she reappeared in her jeans, two women were clustered round Santino admiring Florenza and his deft touch with her. By the sound of the dialogue she could hear, he was showing off like mad. Both shoes and dress were removed from her grasp and paid for with Santino’s credit card without her having any opportunity to speak to him in private.
‘Do you have any idea how much that little lot cost?’ Poppy whispered in total shock as they settled back into the limo.
Santino gave her an enquiring glance. ‘No.’
Poppy told him.
Santino looked surprised. ‘A real steal…’
‘It’s a fortune!’ Poppy gasped.
‘Allow me to let you into a secret,’ Santino teased in the best of good humour. ‘I’m not a poor man.’
Back at the priory, it was a further shock to discover that her possessions and Florenza’s had been moved from the nursery wing to a magnificent guest suite on the first floor. ‘Are you sure I’m supposed to be here?’ she asked the butler, Jenkins.
‘Of course,’ he wheezed.
Poppy urged him to sit down. He looked shifty and muttered, ‘You won’t mention this to Mr Santino, will you?’
‘Well, I…’ Poppy felt the old man really ought not to be working in such a condition.
And then Jenkins explained. He lived alone and he had been in retirement for five years, but he’d missed the priory and his old profession terribly. At his own request, Santino had allowed the old man to come back to the priory and relive what he termed the good old days on occasional weekends and he very much enjoyed that break. Touched by that explanation and by Santino’s understanding, Poppy said no more.
Dinner was not at all the ordeal she had imagined it might be. But then she had always enjoyed meeting new people, and from the instant she entered the drawing room and Santino’s dark and appreciative gaze fell on her she also felt confident that she looked her best. Late evening, Santino came upstairs with her and went into the dressing room off her bedroom to look in on his sleeping baby daughter. His lean, dark face softened, his sensual mouth curving. ‘It’s extraordinary how much I feel for her already,’ he confided.
A discomfiting little pang assailed Poppy and she rammed it down fast. How could she possibly be envious of the hold Florenza already had on her father’s heart? After all, he was marrying her for their daughter’s sake. Keen not to dwell on that painful truth, she said awkwardly, ‘You know, I really can’t see how we can possibly get married this coming week. It takes ages to organise even the smallest wedding.’
‘The arrangements are already well in hand, cara,’ Santino delivered with a slashing grin that made her mouth run dry. ‘Early Monday morning we fly over to Venice where a selection of wedding dresses will await your choice. There is nothing that you need do or worry about. I just want you to relax and enjoy yourself.’
‘It sounds like total bliss,’ Poppy admitted, thinking of the weighty responsibilities and decisions that had burdened her throughout the previous year when she had had nobody to rely on but herself.
‘I have a question I meant to ask you earlier,’ Santino declared then. ‘Exactly when last year did you write to me to tell me that you had conceived our child?’
Her brow furrowing in puzzlement, Poppy told him. His eyes flared gold and then veiled.
‘What?’ she prodded, unable to see the relevance of that information so long after the event.
Santino shrugged, lean, strong face uninformative. ‘It’s not important.’
Ultra-sensitive on that issue, Poppy was taut, and in receipt of that casual dismissal she flushed. She was convinced that he had to believe that there had never been a letter in the first place and that she was merely trying to ease her conscience and fend off his annoyance by lying and pretending that there had been. And how could she prove otherwise?
‘I’m tired,’ she muttered, turning away.
Lost in his own suspicions of what might have happened to that letter and determined to check out that angle as soon as he could, Santino frowned. He could not imagine what he had said to provoke the distinct chill in the air, but caution prevented him probing deeper. Once they were married, caution could take a hike, but he was determined not to risk a misstep in advance of the wedding. Saying goodnight, much as if he had only been seeing an elderly grandparent up to bed, he departed.
Disconcerted, Poppy surveyed the space where he had been and her dismayed and hurt eyes stung with hot tears. The very passionate male, who had sworn she was an irresistible temptation earlier in the day, had not even kissed her. Had that plea just been a judicious piece of flattery aimed at persuading her to marry him so that he could gain total access to Florenza? Or was he just annoyed at the idea that she might be fibbing about that wretched letter? And if that was the problem, how was she ever to convince him that she had written to him?
Made restive by her anxious thoughts, Poppy got little sleep and, after feeding Florenza first thing the following morning, fell back into bed and slept late. Finally awakening again, she went downstairs to find Santino surrounded by his guests. A convivial lunch followed and then the visitors began to make their departures. Only then appreciating that she still had to pack up her possessions at the Brewetts’ home, Poppy slipped away to speak to her former employer and decided that it would be simplest for her to return home with them and see to the matter for herself.
‘I’m catching a lift with the Brewetts to go and collect my stuff,’ Poppy informed Santino at the last minute.
‘I can drive you over there,’ Santino offered in surprise.
‘No, I thought it would be easier if I left Florenza here with you,’ Poppy confided with a challenging sparkle in her gaze, although she rather suspected the female domestic staff would soon help him out with the task.
Santino was merely delighted that he would retain a hostage as it were to Poppy returning again and proud that she felt that he could be trusted. In fact, his keen mind returning to a concern that had been nagging at him all morning since he had called his secretary at her home and spoken to her, he knew exactly what he intended to do during Poppy’s absence.
Three hours later, in a triumphal mode, Santino hauled his office drinks cabinet out from the wall and swept up the still-sealed and dusty envelope that lay on the carpet. He resisted the temptation to tear Poppy’s lost letter open then and there. He would surprise her with it. They would open it together. Maybe that way, he would feel less bitter at the high cost of Craig Belston’s mean and petty act of malice.
‘If it hadn’t been for you being there, I’d have hammered that little jerk,’ Santino informed Florenza, where she sat strapped in her baby carrier watching him with bright, uncritical eyes. ‘Then maybe not,’ he acknowledged for himself in reflective continuance. ‘He was so scared he was… I suppose I have to watch my language around you. But then you don’t know any Italian curse words, do you?’
Florenza was asleep by the time he got her slotted back into the limo. Santino was really pleased with himself. He was naturally good father material, he was convinced of it. She hadn’t cried once, not even when it had taken four attempts to change her and his chauffeur, a long-time parent, had mercifully intervened with a little man-to-man advice on the most effective method. They had tea at the Ritz where she was very much admired. She glugged down her bottle of milk like a trooper and concluded with a very small ladylike burp that he didn’t think anyone but him hear
d.
‘We’re a real team,’ Santino told Florenza on the drive home, and around then it occurred to him to wonder how Poppy planned to get herself back to the priory. With a muttered curse, he rang the Brewetts only to discover that she had already gone.
Right up until Poppy had left the Brewetts’ with her cases in a taxi, she had expected Santino to call and say that he would come and pick her up. Instead she’d had to catch the train. But when she saw him waiting on the station platform to greet her at the other end of her journey, a bright, forgiving smile formed on her lips.
‘I ought to grovel, amore,’ Santino groaned in apology, looking so gorgeous that there was little that she would not have forgiven. ‘It didn’t even cross my mind that you don’t have your own transport.’
‘I expect you were too taken up with Florenza.’
‘We did have quite a busy afternoon,’ Santino admitted with masculine understatement. ‘And when we get back to the priory, I have a surprise for you.’
The very last thing, Poppy expected was to have her own letter set before her like a prize. She was gobsmacked. ‘Where on earth did that come from?’
‘I phoned my secretary this morning. She actually remembered your letter arriving the day before she went off on holiday last year because she noticed your name on the back of the envelope. That week, I was in Italy mending fences with my mother.’ Santino’s strong jawline hardened. ‘And Belston was working his last day at Aragone Systems—’
‘Craig?’ Poppy was still transfixed by the sight of that dusty, unopened letter, and her fingers were twitching to snatch it up and bury it deep somewhere Santino could never find it. At one level, she was at a total loss as to what Craig Belston could have to do with the miraculous recovery of a letter that had gone missing almost a year earlier, but on another level she was already recalling with shrinking, squeamish regret the horribly emotional outpourings of her own heart within that letter. It was wonderful how what could seem right and appropriate in the heat of the moment could then threaten utter humiliation eleven months on…