now she had to think of another plan. She couldn’t show up at that restaurant and meekly agree to his ‘proposal’. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. He was the last man she would ever consider marrying. For it was marriage he wanted, of that she was sure. She could see the ruthless determination in his eyes.
She was desperate, but not that desperate.
‘Oh, I’ll show up.’ She gave him a smile so sugar-sweet it would have made any decent dentist reach for fluoride. ‘I quite fancy a free dinner. You did say just dinner, right?’
His eyes smouldered with incendiary heat, making her insides coil and twist and tighten with need. A need she didn’t want to feel. A need she had strictly forbidden herself to feel. ‘Just dinner.’
Izzy turned and walked back along the street towards the antiques shop where she worked. She was conscious of Andrea’s gaze following her but didn’t turn back to look at him. She was quite proud of her willpower—it had made a remarkable recovery, although it had been touch and go there for a minute. But when she got to the front door of her workplace and glanced back, Andrea’s tall figure had disappeared into the crowd. Why she should be feeling disappointed she didn’t know. And nor should she care.
But somehow—annoyingly—she did.
‘GOSH. DO YOU need a bodyguard with you when you’re wearing that dress?’ Izzy’s flatmate, Jess, asked later that evening when she poked her head around Izzy’s bedroom door.
Izzy smoothed her hands down the front of her shimmery silver mini dress that sparkled like Christmas tinsel. ‘How do I look?’
‘Seriously, Izzy, you have amazing legs. You should give up your job selling those dusty old antiques and be a model instead.’ Jess tilted her head to one side. ‘So who’s your date? Anyone I know?’
‘Just an acquaintance.’
Jess’s eyebrows rose. ‘That’s a pretty impressive show of thigh for a mere acquaintance.’
Izzy picked up a tube of blood-red lipstick and smeared it over her lips and pressed them together to set it in place. She knew she would be risking press attention by being seen with Andrea dressed in such a way but this time she didn’t care. It would be worth it to show him she wasn’t playing by his rules. He was known for dating elegant and sophisticated women. She would be the antithesis of elegant and sophisticated dressed in this get-up. This outfit screamed party girl out for a wild time. ‘I’m teaching my...date a lesson.’
‘A lesson in what? How to look but not touch?’
Izzy recalled the firm press of Andrea’s hand with a delicate shiver. She was still trying not to think about him pinning her to a bed with his body doing all sorts of wicked things to her. ‘I’m teaching him not to be so arrogant.’ She pulled out the large Velcro rollers she’d put in her hair to give it extra volume, and finger-combed it into a cloud of curling tresses around her shoulders.
Jess sat on the edge of Izzy’s bed. ‘So, who is this guy?’
Izzy glanced at her flatmate in her dressing table mirror. She had only known Jess a few months and didn’t want to go into the details of her complicated relationship with Andrea. She picked up a pair of cheap dangly earrings and inserted them into her earlobes, then adjusted the front of her dress to boost her cleavage. ‘Just someone my father used to know.’
Jess got off the bed and came to stand next to the dressing table mirror so she could face her. ‘But isn’t this the last day before the deadline on your father’s will?’
Izzy wished she hadn’t let slip about the will in an unguarded moment a couple of nights ago over a takeout curry and a bottle of wine. It was a little lowering to admit to her friend and flatmate that her father had wanted to punish her from the grave. Her father had known how against the institution of marriage she was. She had witnessed him over-controlling her mother like a bullying tyrant until her mother hadn’t been able to decide what clothes to wear without asking him first. No way was Izzy going to allow any man that sort of power over her and especially not Andrea Vaccaro. ‘Yes, but he’s not a candidate.’
‘Are you going to forfeit your inheritance, then?’
Izzy slipped on a collection of jangling bracelets. ‘I don’t want to, but what else can I do? I can’t just walk out on the street and pick up someone to be my husband.’
Jess’s gaze drifted over Izzy’s outfit again. ‘You probably could wearing that get-up.’ She frowned again. ‘But this guy you’re meeting tonight. Why isn’t he a candidate? Has he actually said no?’
Izzy picked up a slimline evening purse and popped the lipstick tube inside and snapped it shut. ‘I haven’t asked him. And I never will. I know what I’m doing, Jess. I know how to handle men like Andrea Vaccaro.’
Jess’s eyes went as wide as the make-up compact on the dressing table. ‘You’re going on a date with Andrea Vaccaro? The hotel king Andrea Vaccaro? And you think he’s not a candidate? Are you out of your mind? That man is the world’s most eligible bachelor.’
Izzy scooped up a leather biker jacket from the bed and fed her arms through the sleeves, pulling her hair out of the back of the collar and settling it back around her shoulders. ‘He might be considered a prize catch but I don’t want him. I would rather rummage through rubbish bins and sleep under cardboard for the rest of my life than marry that arrogant, up-himself jerk.’
Jess’s brows disappeared under her fringe. ‘Wow. I’ve never seen so you...so worked up. Did something happen between you two in the past?’
Izzy did a final adjustment of her outfit. ‘He thinks he can have anyone he wants but he can’t have me.’ She smiled a confident smile. ‘Don’t worry. I know exactly how to handle him.’
* * *
Andrea hadn’t planned on being late for his dinner date with Isabella but he got caught up in traffic after a minor accident in central London. He’d sent her a text to tell her he would be a few minutes late but she hadn’t replied. Her attitude towards him was exactly the reason he was going to offer her a temporary marriage. He needed a wife. A temporary wife who wouldn’t make a fuss when he called it quits. No love-you-for-ever promises. No happy-ever-after. What he wanted was a six-month contract that would conveniently solve two problems with one brief, impersonal ceremony.
The teenage stepdaughter of an important business colleague was making things difficult for him by making no secret of her crush on him. The hotel merger he was working on would be jeopardised if he didn’t take preventative action. And because Andrea had been asked to be best man at the businessman’s upcoming wedding in a few weeks, he had to do something, and do it fast.
If it had been any other business deal he would have walked away without a qualm. There were plenty of other hotels he could buy. But this one was the one he wanted the most. Buying the hotel he’d once hung outside of as a homeless teenager looking for scraps of food made it too important to walk away. Buying that hotel in Florence—more than any other he’d bought or would buy in the future—would signify he had moved on from his difficult past.
Moved on and triumphed.
A
