The Commanding Italian's Challenge

‘Coffee?’ he offered smoothly.

‘Tea, please. Thank you,’ she tagged on, determined to wrestle some civility into this meeting.

A butler glided forward, poured her tea and then, after offering a platter of fruit and an assortment of breakfast meats, melted away.

Silence throbbed between them. Maceo was seemingly content to devour one cup of espresso after another while perusing his paper. At last, with perfect timing, just before she gave in to the urge to fill the silence, he spoke.

‘You’ve spent a few weeks now at Casa di Fiorenti. What’s your verdict? Do you still consider it the very heartbeat of the monster that deprived you of your stepfather or have you revised your opinion?’ His voice dripped cynicism.

Despite the unfair assessment, she found herself flushing, because there was a kernel of truth in his words. Luigi had been in her life for only two years, but they’d been formative years that had given her a glimpse of what a family could be like. Maybe she would have got over his leaving them if she hadn’t been confronted with Casa di Fiorenti confectionery and the memory of his desertion with every supermarket she’d walked into. That ever-present evidence had done nothing to heal the hurt of her loss, but she’d tried to cope with it. Until Matt.

She tried for a diplomatic answer not steeped in anguish. ‘I never considered it monstrous. I just—’

‘Wanted so very much to dislike it?’

She shrugged, sipped her tea to delay answering. ‘Maybe.’

‘And now?’

She couldn’t hold back the truth. ‘So far as I can tell...it’s not so bad.’

‘Damned with faint praise,’ he said drily. ‘Tell me what you really think, Faye.’

Again her name on his lips sent a frisson down her belly, and then shamelessly between her thighs. ‘Why? What does it matter?’

He didn’t answer for a long spell, drawing her attention to his face in a vain attempt to see behind his enigmatic façade. ‘Because I made a promise.’

The answer was unexpected enough to widen her eyes. ‘You did?’

He gave a brusque nod. ‘Si.’

‘To who?’ she demanded, her heart beating for a different reason.

‘Who do you think?’

‘Your...your wife?’ Why did that word continue to lodge a dart of unease inside her? What did it matter to her one way or the other that he’d been married?

Because thinking of him belonging to someone else unsettles you.

And not because of Carlotta’s connection to Luigi.

He shrugged. ‘For some reason she seemed to want you to form a good impression of the things she cared about.’

That surprised Faye. ‘She said that?’

His eyes speared into hers before they flicked away. ‘She said many things. I’m yet to conclude if they were the result of facing her own mortality or what she truly believed.’

She gasped. ‘How can you say that? Who are you to decide?’

‘If not someone in a unique position to sort fact from fiction without the inconvenience of frothy emotion, then who?’ he bit out.

‘And you would dishonour her by discarding her wishes as you please?’

His face hardened, his eyes growing flat and hard. ‘She trusted me to do the right thing because she knew I wouldn’t be swayed by...what do you English call it?...flights of fancy. And that trust is what I will honour.’

She bit her lip to stop another hot, condemning retort from slipping out. She even tried to eat, despite her throat threatening to clog. After a few bits of toast and scrambled egg, she set her cutlery down. ‘If you want me to form a good impression then why instruct your staff to stop talking to me?’

Faye wasn’t aware of quite how much his edict had hurt until she blurted the question. He froze, his eyes turning that unique tawny shade and filling with an icy fury that sent shivers down her spine.