salary she’d been paid for the ball up to this point had enabled her to pay her rent and buy Dom some new clothes. If she received the bonus she would have enough money to keep them going until her year’s leave was up with enough spare for any future legal battle with Alessio Palvetti.
She would then have the difficult decision of whether or not to return to work.
‘You’ve gone quiet,’ Valente said, cutting through her thoughts. ‘Is something on your mind?’
She cast him a quick glance. His attention was fixed on the clean, wide road before them. There was something incredibly reassuring about his command behind the wheel. Not once in their thirty-minute journey from the airport had she pressed an imaginary brake. ‘I’m just thinking.’
‘About what?’
She laughed. ‘What do you think? The guests are due in nine hours. There’s a lot that can go wrong in those nine hours.’
‘Nothing is going to go wrong.’
‘Speaks the voice of experience?’
‘No, speaks the voice of someone who has found much to be impressed with your organisational talents.’
Embarrassed at how ridiculously flattered she felt at the compliment, she turned her face to look back out of the window. The view outside was almost as good as the view beside her. Little wonder this was a city famed for its romanticism. The architecture alone, grandeur and beauty at every turn of the head, was enough to make her catch her breath.
Sitting beside Valente kept making her catch her breath too. The longer she sat beside him, the more aware she became of his scent, the capable fingers controlling the steering wheel and the tensing of the strong thighs whenever he changed gear.
The longer she sat beside him, the more she became aware of him.
She cleared her throat and answered, ‘The proof of the pudding’s in the eating.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That we won’t know how good my organisational skills really are until the ball’s over.’
‘Why are you so nervous?’
‘I’ve never undertaken an event of this magnitude before... Is that the palace?’
They’d turned into an enormous courtyard with a water fountain right in the centre of it. Surrounding the courtyard like a titanic curved horseshoe rose the most beautiful building she had ever seen.
Gleaming white under the rising sun, it was impossible to count the number of windows, all aligned with perfect symmetry over three high storeys, or count the ornate white pillars. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
No wonder it had quickly become famed as the most expensive hotel in Europe.
The same sense of awe enveloped her when, Dom in her arms, she climbed the wide, curved steps and stepped through the main doors.
She thought she knew every inch of the palace’s ground floor from the photos, videos and scale drawings she’d been provided with but nothing could have prepared her for the reality.
If she closed her eyes, she could believe she was an eighteenth-century princess.
If she closed her eyes she could pretend not to be intensely aware of Valente watching her so closely.
‘Let’s get you to your suite,’ he murmured. ‘Dom’s nanny is waiting for you.’
Pulling herself out of her stupor, she followed him through the richly decorated corridors and up a flight of stairs, as wide as her flat, covered in thick royal blue carpet. They took a left at the top and walked to the far end of the mezzanine to her designated room.
She gasped.
‘This can’t be for me.’
Valente had not been kidding when he’d called it a suite.
Dazzling green eyes fixed on her. ‘You have a child. We weren’t going to put you in the servants’ quarters. Your outfit for the ball is hanging on your wardrobe.’
But she could see more than amusement in his gaze and that warm feeling trickled through her again, delving deep through her veins to coil into her bones and right into her core.
The glint in his eyes, the flare of his nostrils...
One of the many doors of the suite opened and a middle-aged woman appeared wearing a navy dress with a white sash tied around the waist.
Beth blinked and breathed a sigh of relief as she hurried over to introduce herself.
There was kindness in the nanny’s eyes and Beth’s nerves over handing Dom into the care of a stranger, however highly qualified and impeccable the references, evaporated.
‘I need to check in with Giselle before we do anything else,’ she told Valente when everything that could be discussed about Dom’s care had been discussed and they were heading back to the ground floor.
Dom was going to be fine. The nanny would take good care of him.
Beth had a job to do and it was time to get going on it.
Giselle was the manager of the palace’s hotel. While she had no involvement with the ball itself, many of the guests were staying there.
Valente pulled his car keys out of his pocket. ‘I will leave you to it.’
‘Are you going somewhere?’ she asked, surprised.
His smile was faint but the gleam in his eyes was vivid. ‘I have an appointment to attend but I will be back by noon. Call me if you need anything.’
And then he strode out of the palace, leaving her feeling something that smacked strangely of disappointment but which she pushed aside.
Beth did not mix business and pleasure. She never had and never would, not even for a man who made her heartbeat go into overdrive as Valente did.
Having committed the ground floor layout to memory, she found the manager’s office easily and entered it, to find a severe-looking, diminutive blonde woman sat behind a huge desk.
‘Giselle?’ she asked.
The woman rose to her feet with a smile. ‘Beth?’
She smiled back. ‘Lovely to finally meet you in person. Any problems since we last spoke?’
‘None. Any problems your end?’
‘Not that I know of. Valente said the caterers have arrived...’
‘Who?’
‘Valente Cortada. I’ve been reporting to him for the ball.’
‘I have never heard this name.’
‘Oh.’ Flummoxed, Beth thought hard, trying to remember if Valente had said he actually worked
