into the bowl provided. Ignoring the milk on offer, she began to eat the cereal dry with her fingers the way she always ate it. For a split second, Gaetano stared but said nothing. For that same split second she had felt slightly afraid that he might give her a slap across the knuckles for what he deemed to be poor table manners and she flushed pink with chagrin, determined not to alter her behaviour to kowtow to his different expectations. The rich were definitely different, she conceded ruefully.
‘I will eat chocolate any way I can get it,’ she confided nonetheless in partial apology. ‘I don’t like my cereal soggy. Now this proposition you mentioned...’
‘My grandfather wants me to get married before I can become Chief Executive of the Leonetti Bank. As I don’t want to get married, I believe a fake engagement would keep him happy in the short term. It will convince Rodolfo that I am moving in the right direction and assuage his fear that I’m incapable of settling down.’
‘So, why are you telling me this?’ Poppy asked him blankly.
‘I want you to partner me in the fake engagement.’ Gaetano lounged lithely back in his seat to study her reaction.
‘You and me?’ A peal of startled laughter erupted from Poppy’s lush pink mouth beneath Gaetano’s disconcerted gaze. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. No one, but no one, would credit you and me as a couple!’
‘Funny, you didn’t see it as being that amusing when you were a teenager,’ Gaetano derided softly.
‘You are such a bastard!’ Poppy sprang out of her chair, all pretence of cool abandoned as she stalked away from the table. She had never quite contrived to lose that tender, stinging sense of rejection and humiliation even though she knew she was being ridiculous. After all, she had been far too young and naïve for him as well as being the daughter of an employee, and for him to respond in any way, even had he wanted to, would have been inappropriate. But while her brain assured her of those facts, her visceral reaction was at another level.
A few weeks after his rebuff, the annual hall summer picnic had been held and Gaetano had put in his appearance with a girlfriend. Poppy had felt sick when she’d seen that shiny, beautifully dressed and classy girl who might have stepped straight out of a glossy modelling advertisement. She had seen how pathetic it had been to harbour even the smallest hope of ever attracting Gaetano’s interest and as a result of that distress, that horrid feeling of unworthiness and mortification, she had plunged herself into a very unwise situation.
‘Poppy...’ Gaetano murmured wryly, wishing he had left that reminder of the past decently buried.
Poppy spun back to him, eyes wide and accusing. ‘I was sixteen years old, for goodness’ sake, and you were the only fanciable guy in my radius, so it’s hardly surprising that I got a crush on you. It was hormones, nothing else. I wasn’t mature enough to recognise that you were totally the wrong kind of guy for me—’
‘Why?’ Gaetano heard himself demand baldly, although no sooner had he asked than he was questioning why he had.
Poppy was equally surprised by that question. Her colour high, she stared at him, her clear green eyes luminescent in the sunlight. ‘Why? Well, I’ve no doubt you’re a great catch, being both rich and ridiculously good-looking,’ she told him bluntly. ‘You’re a fiercely ambitious high achiever but you don’t have heart. You’re deadly serious and conventional too. We’re complete opposites. People would only pair the two of us together in a comic book. Sorry, I hope I haven’t insulted you in any way. That wasn’t my intention.’
An almost imperceptible line of colour had fired along the exotic slant of Gaetano’s spectacular cheekbones. He felt oddly as though he had been cut down to size and yet he couldn’t fault what she had said because it was all true. There was an electric little silence. He glanced up from below his lashes and saw her standing there in the bright sunshine, her hair a blazing nimbus of red, bronze and gold in the light to give her the look of a fiery angel. Or in that severe black dress, a gothic angel of death? But it didn’t matter because in that strange little instant when time stopped dead, Gaetano, rigid with raw arousal, wanted Poppy Arnold more than he had ever wanted any woman in his life and it gave him the chills like the scent of a good deal going bad. He breathed in slow and deep and looked away from her, battling to regain his logic and cool.
‘I still want you to take on the role of playing my fake fiancée,’ he breathed in a roughened undertone because just looking at her, drinking in that clear creamy skin, those luminous green eyes and that pink succulent mouth, was only making him harder than ever. ‘Rodolfo always wanted me to choose an ordinary girl and you are the only one I know likely to fit the bill.’
Something in the way he was studying her made Poppy’s mouth run dry and her breath hitch in her throat. She was suddenly aware of her body in a way she hadn’t been aware of it in years. In fact, her physical reactions were knocking her right back to the discomfiting level of the infatuated teenager she had once been and that galled her, but the tight, prickling sensation in her breasts and the dampness between her thighs were uniquely memorable testaments to the temptation Gaetano provided. Falling for a very good-looking guy at sixteen and comparing every other man she had met afterwards to his detriment was not to be recommended as a life plan for any sensible woman, she reflected ruefully, ashamed of the fact that she couldn’t treat Gaetano as casually as she treated other men.
‘An ordinary girl?’ she questioned with pleated brows, returning to the table to succumb to the allure of the melted marshmallows topping her hot chocolate. While she sipped, Gaetano filled her in on his grandfather’s fond hopes for his future.
Poppy almost found herself laughing again. Gaetano would never genuinely want an ordinary girl and no ordinary girl would be able to cope with his essentially cold heart.
‘So, why me?’ she pressed.
‘You’re beautiful enough to convince him that I could be tempted by you—’
Guileless green eyes assailed his. ‘Am I?’
‘Yes, you’re beautiful but, no, I’m not tempted,’ Gaetano declared with stubborn conviction. ‘When I say fake engagement I mean fake in every way. I will not be touching you.’
Poppy rolled her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t let you. I’m very, very picky, Gaetano.’
Gaetano resisted the urge to toss up the name of that young estate worker she had entertained in the shrubbery. Odd how he had never forgotten those details, he conceded, while recognising that such a crack would be cruelly inappropriate because she was as entitled to have enjoyed sex as any other woman. His perfect white teeth clenched together. He loathed the way Poppy somehow knocked him off-balance, tripping his mind into random thoughts, persuading his usually controlled tongue into making ill-advised remarks, turning him on when he didn’t want to be turned on. Each and every one of those reactions offended Gaetano’s pride in his strength of will.
‘You’ve got to be wondering what would be in this arrangement for you,’ Gaetano intoned quietly. ‘Everything you want and need at present. Rehabilitation treatment for your mother, a fresh start somewhere, a new home for you all as security. I’ll cover the cost of it all if you do this for me, bella mia.’
Straight off, Poppy saw that he was throwing her and her family a lifebelt when they were drowning and for that reason she didn’t voice the refusal already brimming on her lips. Treatment for her mother. You couldn’t put a price on such an offer. It was what she had dreamt about but knew she would never be able to afford.
‘You’ve got to have a selfish bone
