kept them in exclusive boarding kennels in the very lap of luxury. He visited his brother’s pets religiously once a month. It wasn’t quite the same as taking the dogs home with him, but it was the best he felt able to offer dogs who had never been treated as dogs and who probably didn’t even know that they were dogs. Tito and Carina expected to share beds, sleep on laps and be hand-fed from plates.
Belle breathed in deeply. ‘Do you think maybe you’re having to hire a girlfriend because you’re so rude, heartless and authoritarian?’
‘I can’t remember when a woman last insulted me,’ Dante confided in receipt of that refreshing question and gloriously untouched by the condemnation. A lifetime of criticism from his parents had ensured that he had developed a very tough hide.
‘You must meet an awful lot of uncritical women.’
‘Very rich men rarely meet with anything else,’ Dante imparted with cynical conviction, pausing beside the small rusting campervan below the trees to marvel that anyone could actually be living in the battered vehicle full-time. ‘I’ll meet you in the bar tomorrow at eleven.’
IN THE CONFINEMENT of her bunk bed, Belle lay awake well into the early hours, pondering her choices, which only got fewer the more she thought about them. As always, she made lists. A long list of important questions that she should have asked but which Dante might not have answered. A list of pros and cons, again full of blanks, owing to her lack of facts on his situation.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Charlie ruefully as he cuddled up to her. ‘We don’t like or trust people who dislike dogs, do we? Do you think that’s being too judgemental? Unfair? I mean, Steve’s a lovely person and he’s friends with Dante, which says something in his favour.’
Armed with her lists and clad in denim shorts and a light floral top, she walked up to the bar in the morning sunshine. The restaurant was being cleaned and it was time to prepare the tables for lunch. Hips twitching to the beat of the music playing, Belle set out place mats and glasses while she wondered if Dante was even capable of understanding how she felt about her dog.
Charlie hadn’t started out as hers, but necessity had made him hers and they had been together since shortly after her arrival in France. She didn’t have any family. She couldn’t count the father she had only met once in her life or Tracy, who hadn’t stayed in touch once her own parents were both gone. Charlie, silly and scruffy as he was, had become Belle’s family. He wasn’t the brightest of dogs, but he was always cheerful and loving and a wonderful comfort when the world seemed dark and she felt alone.
Dante, fresh from a late breakfast of kids and toddler tantrums, was in the mood to be charmed and the first thing he saw as he mounted the steps was Belle’s bottom swaying in rhythmic time to the music. She had a gorgeous derrière, curvy and firm, and when she was dancing it was a work of art in the making, exactly what the average male wanted to see and take advantage of. Even so, he didn’t intend to take advantage, Dante reminded himself doggedly, because as her potential employer, he would naturally be immune to her appeal. Sex didn’t come into his dealings with employees. No matter how tempted he was, he would never ever make that mistake, he assured himself squarely.
‘Sit down with me,’ he told Belle as he strode past her.
‘I can’t. This is work time,’ she pointed out, her gaze locking on him as though magnetised. ‘I should’ve told you that last night.’
‘I arranged it with your boss. You’ve got an hour off to be with me,’ Dante informed her smoothly.
‘But this is one of the busiest times of the day!’ she exclaimed.
‘I’m paying for your time off the clock,’ Dante told her without hesitation.
Her face burned, hot as hellfire as she settled down at the table he had chosen. Money talked, she knew that, had long accepted it as an unpleasant fact of life. When people paid, they got to break the rules and call the shots. It turned normal into abnormal and deprived her of personal choice. She sat down opposite but her chin came up in challenge. ‘I thought you’d come in earlier than this.’
‘I slept in,’ Dante declared without embarrassment. ‘I travelled all day yesterday to get here.’
Belle was tempted to remark that he had undoubtedly travelled in luxury and could have no idea of the exhausting rigours of cheaper modes of travel, but she swallowed back the cheeky comment, accepting that she wasn’t in a strong enough position to make it. She knew how to keep her lips sealed when she had to, knew all about serving in respectful silence regardless of how rude or provocative people were. That was one advantage of lowly labour, she acknowledged ruefully: it taught humility.
‘I assume that you’re considering taking the job?’ Dante lifted his level black brows in question as Belle’s colleague delivered coffee to the table.
‘Yes,’ Belle confirmed, throwing sugar into the espresso because there was no milk available, and stirring it in haste. ‘But you have to explain it first.’
Dante dragged in a deep breath and his T-shirt stretched taut as the strong muscles beneath the fine cotton flexed. Determined not to stare at his muscular chest, Belle looked at his face instead for the first time since they had sat down. Dazzling dark golden eyes gripped hers and her tummy lurched as if she had been plunged downward on a fairground ride. ‘In two weeks’ time I have a married couple coming to stay at my home for the weekend—Eddie and Krystal Shriner. I have a very important business deal that I hope to make with Eddie. The fly in the ointment is Krystal, whom I was fleetingly involved with four years ago. She’s been trying to get back with me ever since,’ he admitted stonily. ‘And I don’t want her flirting with me in front of her husband because that would destroy any hope I have of making a deal with him. He’s a possessive man.’
Involuntarily, Belle’s interest was caught. ‘Is Krystal the stage-five clinger you mentioned last night?’
Dante nodded grim confirmation. ‘Another woman living in my home with me would be a safeguard and the only possible precaution I can take. Your presence would infuriate her, but I will seem a much less attractive option if I appear to have already found a woman to settle down with. Krystal won’t risk losing Eddie until she has a viable replacement in her sights.’
Belle grimaced at such calculation and settled back less tensely into her seat. ‘Am I allowed to ask how long you were with this woman when you were involved with her?’ she asked curiously.
His black brows pleated and his shapely mouth compressed into a flat hard line. ‘One weekend...’
‘One weekend?’ Belle gasped in disbelief. ‘And you’ve had all this trouble with her after that?’
‘I didn’t say she was normal,’ Dante fielded drily.
‘And they’re going to be staying with you in London?’
‘No, not in London,’ Dante cut in. ‘They’ll be staying in my home in Italy.’
Belle was nonplussed. ‘But I thought you were offering to take me back to
