that distorted reality?
‘Can I have some more of that Scotch?’ she mumbled.
He took a drink himself then passed the glass back.
Drinking it didn’t make his words any more comprehensible.
She shook her head and took a breath. ‘You want to pay me to be your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would you want to marry me?’
‘It’s nothing to do with want. It’s to do with need. I need a wife.’
‘You’ve already said that, but why would you choose me for the role when there are hundreds of women out there who would take the job without having to be bribed into it? Why marry someone who doesn’t even like you?’ There was no point in pretending. She didn’t like him and he damn well knew it.
‘That is the exact reason why I want you to take the role.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
A tight smile played on his lips. ‘I don’t want to marry someone who’s going to fall in love with me.’
HE WAS MAD. He had to be. No sane person could make such a suggestion.
And then she looked into those green-brown eyes and thought them the eyes of a man who was perfectly sane and knew exactly what he was doing. Far from reassuring her, the expression in them frightened her, and Eva was not a woman who scared easily. She’d learned to hide it. She hid it now.
‘There’s no chance of that,’ she said, hoping Daniele couldn’t hear the beats of her hammering heart in her words.
He shrugged and took the glass back, pouring himself another hefty measure. ‘Good. I don’t want a wife with romantic dreams. I’m not marrying for love. I’m marrying to inherit my family estate.’ He must have read her blank expression for he added, ‘My brother died without children. I’m the spare son. I can only inherit if I’m married.’
‘What do you need the estate for? You’re worth a fortune as you are.’
‘To keep it in the family.’ He swirled his Scotch in his glass before drinking it. ‘Duty has finally come calling for me.’
‘You need a wife to inherit?’
‘Sí. The estate is...’ She could see him struggle to find the correct English. ‘It is bound by an old trust that states only a married heir can inherit.’
‘Is that legal?’
He nodded grimly. ‘To unravel the trust and make it fit for the modern age will take years. I don’t have years. I need to act now.’
‘Then find someone else.’
‘I don’t want anyone else. Everyone else is too needy. You’re tough.’
‘You don’t even know me,’ she protested darkly. ‘Twenty minutes ago you thought I was English.’
If she was tough it was because she’d had to be. To turn her back on her family when it had made her heart bleed, then to lose Johann and find that same heart torn apart had put a shell around her. It had been an organic process, not something she had consciously built, a shell she’d only become aware of four years ago, back when she’d been living and working in The Hague and a drunk colleague had accused her of being an unfeeling, ball-breaking bitch. She’d returned home to the small apartment she’d once shared with Johann and looked in the mirror and realised there was truth in what her colleague had said. Not the part about being a ball-breaking bitch. She wasn’t those things, she knew that. But unfeeling...? Yes. That, she had been forced to accept when she’d looked in that mirror and realised she no longer felt anything at all. She was empty inside.
‘I know all I need to know, tesoro,’ he countered. ‘I don’t need to know anything else. I have no interest in your past. I don’t want to exchange pillow talk and hear about your dreams. This will be a partnership, not a romance. I want someone practical and cool under pressure.’
And he thought that person was her?
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Had she become so cold that someone could think she would be agreeable to such an emotionless proposition?
Once she had been warm. She had felt the sun in her heart as well as on her skin.
And what did his proposal say about him? What had made him this way? she wondered. How could someone be so cynical about marriage?
‘Marriage is not a game,’ she said slowly, thinking hard, her eyes continually drawn between the wads of cash and Daniele’s smouldering gaze. That money would make an incredible difference at the camp. The Blue Train Aid Agency was fully dependent on donations and there never seemed to be enough of it to go around all its different projects.
Those eyes...
She pulled her gaze away and stared into the distance at the sea, unable to believe she was even entertaining this ludicrous proposal.
‘I’m not playing games,’ he said, his words soaking through her. ‘Marry me and we all win. Your charity gets a guaranteed income to spend as it sees fit, you get unlimited funds to spend on yourself, my family get the knowledge the family estate is secure for another generation and I get my inheritance. You’re a practical person, Eva. You know what I’m suggesting makes excellent sense.’
She hadn’t always been a practical person. She’d been a dreamer once. She’d had so many hopes but they’d all been flattened into the dust.
‘I don’t know...’ She tightened her ponytail. ‘You say it isn’t a game but then you say everyone’s going to be a winner out of it. Marriage is a commitment by two people who love each other, not two people who don’t even like each other.’
He raised his hefty shoulders and leaned forward. ‘My family’s ancestry goes back as far as there are written records. The most successful marriages were arranged for practical reasons; to build alliances, not for love. I’ve never wished to commit my life to one particular person but I am prepared to commit myself to you. It won’t be a marriage built on love and romance, but I can promise you a marriage built on respect.’
‘How can you respect me if you’re trying to buy me?’
‘I won’t be buying you, tesoro. Consider the cash an inducement.’
‘I won’t be your property.’ She’d never be someone’s property again. She’d run away from her family the moment she’d turned eighteen, the day she’d stopped belonging to her parents, no longer subject to their stringently enforced rules. She flexed her left hand and felt the phantom ache in the tendons of her fingers. The fingers had long since healed but the ache in them remained, a ghost of the past, a reminder of everything she had run from.
‘If I wanted a woman I could own, I wouldn’t choose you.’
Before she could think
