He privately smirked. She was a natural when it came to learning what a wealthy banker offered a woman.
Being wanted for his money didn’t bother him. He knew it was part of the package along with his looks and his position in society. He was secure enough to know his own worth apart from those trappings and, to be honest, was just as superficial when it came to singling out a woman. He liked the beautiful ones and if they possessed a sharp wit, all the better. None had ever made him ache with desire quite the way Lauren did, which unnerved him a little, but he was coming around to accepting it.
Marriage. The more he thought about it, the more determined he was to make it happen. There was something enormously satisfying in the image of her wearing his ring and standing by his side.
He still couldn’t believe she’d thrown a tomato at him though. What a virago! It made him want to laugh even as he recognized he’d have to tame that streak out of her. Who would have guessed so much emotion and passion had been stifled under that curtain of hair she’d been wearing all her life? He was incredibly stimulated by it—dangerously so. He feared it would feed into his own wildness. Stifling it in both of them could pose quite a challenge.#p#????#e#
There would be compensations for tempering it, though. He took care to demonstrate that by saying to the woman who greeted them at the design house, “Lauren will need a page in the Donatelli account.”
“Of course, signore,” the woman said with a subtle shift of heightened respect and closer attention to her new client. “Is the signorina looking for anything in particular today?”
Lauren broke from her absorption of her surroundings to say in Italian, “I’m looking at everything. But, Paolo, don’t be silly. If there’s one place my grandmother would want me to spend her money, it would be here. She worked as a model for this house in the seventies,” Lauren added in an aside to the woman, moving deeper into the room with the awe most people saved for the frescoed ceilings of his country’s renowned cathedrals. “Did you ever hear of Frances Hammond?”
Within moments Paolo’s wealth and name had been trumped by the mysterious quilting of intergenerational female relationships. Their hostess rushed to phone for refreshments while designers emerged from back rooms to coo over their special visitor.
Paolo left Lauren in their capable hands, spending a quiet hour at his office where half the staff had stolen away to Christmas shop. When he returned, he found Lauren so happy he stood arrested for a long moment.
She’d completed her transformation from widowed wife to a confident woman of means. Her yellow-brown eyes were sparkling, set off by a green-and-gold scarf knotted around her slender neck. Her smart tunic dress was straight enough, and loose enough, to disguise that her waist was thickening and she distracted from that area with a pair of chic, four-inch heels.
He realized that it hadn’t been hair weighing down her personality all these years. It had been lack of joie de vivre. Here was her true spirit in all its glory, and she stopped his breath.
Mine, he thought, but restrained himself from a possessive kiss. Everyone was now calling her “Signora Bradley.” The cat had a claw out of the bag.
He made arrangements for delivery of her purchases to the house on Lake Como, subtly signaled that Lauren’s credit card receipt should be torn up and the balance put on his account as he had originally requested, then waited until they were alone in the car to ask, “Did you tell them you’re pregnant?”
“Of course not!” Lauren angled toward Paolo, aware of his gaze flickering to her bare knees. A pleasurable warmth swished through her, making her feel beautiful and confident, something that had been wavering since meeting him again in New York. This visit with women who had subtly reminded her of all the qualities her grandmother had possessed had reinvigorated her toward believing she could get there, too.
With a brush of her wispy bangs to the side, she said, “They kept remarking on my weight though. I finally explained I’d been sick earlier in the year and lost a lot and when I made a point of gaining it back, I went overboard.”
“What is it with women? You’re healthy,” he protested. “But were you genuinely sick? I remember thinking you were too thin when I saw you in Charleston.”
“Depressed. After losing Mamie I didn’t have to make regular meals anymore. I thought Ryan would ask me to jump on a plane any day, so I kept the groceries low. Then I got that woman’s email and the fighting started. My stomach was in knots.”