as a piece of unfeeling stone, made her blood quite literally run icily cold in her veins. Shock and then fear crept over her in a painful tide. Prison! She knew that her fear showed in her face, and only her pride stopped her from protesting out loud.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Louise, silent now, her shock as obvious as Alice’s own in her suddenly very youthful, drawn white face.
As she struggled to find something to say a mobile phone started to ring imperiously. Almost as though she were observing the whole scene at a distance, Alice saw the man she now realised must be her once-prospective employer, the aristocratically named Conte di Vincenti, reaching to his pocket and removing his phone, swiftly responding to the call.
With her excellent grasp of Italian, Alice easily translated what he was saying and a fresh surge of anxiety seized her body, not this time for herself, but on behalf of the baby, whose sudden inexplicable and frightening sickness was the cause of the telephone call.
Swiftly instructing that a doctor was to be called, Marco ended the call, his face drawn into lines of harsh anxiety.
The nursemaid Angelina’s mother had hired to look after the baby was not in his opinion a suitable person to have charge of such a young child. Bored and slovenly, she had no proper training for such a job, and so far as he could see no real love for the baby, but she was, apart from himself, the only person who was truly familiar to her and for that reason, until he found a suitable replacement nanny, he had felt unable to terminate her employment and send her back to Rome where he knew she would feel much more at home than in the Tuscan countryside.
It had been left to his housekeeper to telephone him and advise him of baby Angelina’s sickness. The palazzo was over an hour’s fast drive away, and Marco had no time now to waste on a mere car accident in which mercifully no one had been hurt.
On Alice’s CV had been the fact that she had some nursing experience, having done voluntary work in a local hospital, both as teenager and later too, when her employment commitments had allowed. Had it not been for his own too stubborn wariness where Englishwomen were concerned, Marco knew that Alice’s obvious dedication to others would have inclined him towards selecting her as Angelina’s nanny even over more highly qualified applicants.
However, now a new complication had entered the equation. The one thing that Marco had not been prepared for when he had mentally reviewed and tabulated the pros and cons of hiring Alice was that he himself might find her desirable! His reaction to her had caught him off guard. He had believed that he was armoured against any woman who was made in the same mould as the free-living, free-loving girl students he had encountered in England. So what was he saying? he asked himself sardonically, whilst he worried about Angelina.
That he could not control his own libido? No way!
Quickly Marco came to a decision. He would normally have been averse to having his hand forced by events, but now he wasn’t concerned about that. He did not want to examine his decision more analytically—because of his concern for Angelina, he told himself. After all, his physical reaction to Alice was something he could control; baby Angelina’s sickness was not.
‘What time did you say your flight left?’ he demanded.
White-faced with contempt and disbelief, Alice stared at him. What kind of man…what kind of father was he to give something as minor as a small car accident precedence over the health of his baby daughter? In his shoes the last thing she would have done would be to stand here, worrying about a mere car! Instead she would have been making her way as fast as she could to her baby’s side.
So much for the myth that Italian men were wonderful fathers, who adored and protected their children!
Instinctively she felt a surge of desire to protect the baby and to castigate her father for his lack of concern; to show him just how contemptuous she felt of him in every way; as a trained professional, as an innocent victim of a crime she had not committed, and most of all as a woman.
A woman who had foolishly allowed herself to react to him in a way she was determined not to repeat!
Ignoring her throbbing headache, she accused him wildly, ‘That poor baby! How can you be more concerned about your wretched car than her health?’ Emotional tears filled her eyes, which she proudly refused to hide. She was not ashamed to show that she had normal human feelings, no matter how contemptuously that fact made him regard her. ‘I thought that Italian men were supposed to love children,’ she threw at him scornfully, unable to stop herself. ‘But in your case it seems that your love of your car means more to you than the health of the baby.’
Something flickered in his eyes, an expression Alice could not quite catch, almost as though in some way her outburst had pleased him, but then as she focused more closely on him his expression changed, his hooded gaze seeming to deliberately conceal his reaction.
Turning his back on her, he flicked on his mobile and started issuing instructions into it.
When he had finished he turned back to her, and told her coolly, ‘You are coming with me to the palazzo. Your…friend will be escorted to the airport and put on her flight home…’
Alice stared at him, hardly able to credit that she had heard him correctly. He was making her stay here, in Italy, at his home. Why? Shock, panic, fear, and a sharp, breath-snatching feeling she didn’t want to name, but that she was forced to acknowledge came pretty close to a form of dangerous excitement, swirled the blood to her head. Was the heat of the Italian sun somehow affecting her brain?
It must be surely; there was no other acceptable explanation for that sharp, shocking, piercingly wanton feeling burning hotly through her body.
This man possessed none of the virtues she could ever want in a man; none of them, she insisted firmly to herself.
‘You can’t make me stay in Italy.’ she began warningly.
She had already made up her mind that she was glad that she had not had the opportunity to be interviewed by him because there was totally no way she could ever countenance working for him.
His arrogance both infuriated and antagonised her, arousing emotions within her that she was totally unfamiliar with, making her feel, giddy, dizzy, dangerously close to losing her head. It was making her feel very much like a child exposed to danger, immediately wanting to run from it back to safety. She didn’t like him. Not one little bit, but what she had just learned about his attitude towards his baby had aroused within her not just a furious sense of disgust and distaste for him as a man, but also an intense surge of pity for the small baby who was so dependent on him.
All she had been told about her prospective employment had been that she would have virtually sole charge of a six-month-old baby girl whose mother had recently died, and who needed a constant and loving female presence in her life.
That alone had been enough to make her yearn to provide her potential charge with all the protection and love she could give her. Those feelings were still there, intensified if anything by the cold-hearted manner of the little Angelina’s father.
‘You can’t force us to do anything,’ she responded forcefully.
‘No?’ Marco overrode her grimly. ‘You have two choices, Alice Walsingham. Either you come with me now, or both you and your friend face the legal consequences of your crime. And to be honest I should have thought, having read your CV and the reports from your agency, that the decision would have been an easy and an automatic one for you. What was it they said about you? That you possessed an extremely strong
