Modern Romance Collection February 2025, #5-8

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

R OMANO STOOD BY the font at the altar, his back ramrod straight as he waited for the christening party to arrive. The church was cool, with the light muted by the approaching dusk, and the powerful scent of lilies pervaded his nostrils with a cloying intensity. He didn’t like churches at the best of times but this one pressed all the wrong buttons. It had hosted Castelliari weddings, and baptisms—including his own—but for him it symbolised only one thing. He felt the ice of his skin and the cold clench of his gut. He had worked hard not to think about those earlier times and for the most part had been successful, but the rainbow light bleeding through these particular stained-glass windows onto the faded flagstones was enough to drag them up from the recesses of his mind.

He swallowed.

The funeral.

He remembered how obscenely small his mother’s coffin had looked as he had walked into the church behind it.

The memories shot back with painful clarity.

The congregation turning to regard the solemn five-year-old with pity pouring from their eyes. Had they been expecting tears? Hysterics? Had they been surprised—maybe even disappointed—by his total lack of reaction? By an expression he had overheard someone whispering: ‘Freddo come il marmo.’

As cold as marble.

He hadn’t felt a flicker of sorrow. Why would he?

Even now he could recall how empowering it had felt to defy the expectations of those adults around him. To show them that he could be strong. That he didn’t need their damned pity.

His gaze flickered around the waiting congregation. There was nobody here who would remember that day. Most of them were dead—certainly the ones of his father’s generation, or older—and the others he had deliberately lost touch with. His stepmother hadn’t even met his father at that point and, though she must have known the story, she’d been wise enough never to broach the subject with him, and he knew for a fact that Floriana had never been told the story about what his mother had done to him. They had shielded her from the sordid tales of drugs and sex. They had wanted to protect his young half-sister, in a way they had never been able to protect him…

The opening of the church doors was welcome distraction from the ugly stream of his thoughts but, instead of a moment’s respite, he was awarded with the loud hammer of his heart as he saw the woman following his half-sister into the church. Floriana was carrying the baby, with Max beside her, holding onto young Rocco’s hand. But the only person Romano could see was the redhead who accompanied them, her frame so tiny and petite—her hair the brightest thing in the entire place.

He expelled an unsteady breath as she sashayed into view, her nubile grace as electrifying as ever. He had managed to avoid her since that excruciating lunch earlier, when… He shook his head very slightly for he still couldn’t believe what had happened.

When he had been railroaded into giving her a spurious kind of employment.

As his cleaner.

Did that mean he was about to subject himself to the wild fantasy which had been hovering on the edges of his mind ever since? Of Kelly Butler with her hands all wet and gleaming, bending over a bucket of soapy water, those pert buttocks tight and clenched as she moved to and fro with her scrubbing brush.

His throat dried.

Had he been insane?

Very probably.

But the fact remained that he now had a problem and he needed to work out how best to deal with it.

As she walked towards the font behind his sister, he attempted to judge her negatively—not a big ask since she stood out from every other woman in the small church. The handful of Floriana’s friends who had been invited were wearing quietly expensive designer outfits, as befitted a small christening for a member of one of Italy’s premier families. But not Kelly Butler. Her diaphanous dress was splashed with a meadow of flowers—the delicate fabric falling almost to the ground, just above narrow ankles, which were clad in soft-buttoned leather boots. Her jacket was leather, too—nipped in at the waist as if to emphasise the gentle curve of her hips. Her hair was a blaze of fire, tumbling in fiery curls all the way down her back, two waterfalls of silver streaming from her tiny ears. What she wore was completely inappropriate for the occasion and yet…

‘Hello, Romano,’ she said sweetly as she reached him.

‘Kelly,’ he responded curtly, with a brief nod of his head.

‘My last few moments of freedom before I have to start calling you boss,’ she whispered.

Romano’s gaze remained fixed ahead as he deliberately declined to answer and waited for the priest to begin the service. He felt a tug on his jacket and looked down as his nephew, Rocco, held up a tiny toy car—a replica of the one made in Romano’s own factory. The boy fixed him with a gap-toothed grin as he mimed the vehicle travelling at speed along the top of the pew but Romano gave a brief shake of his head, noting the boy’s look of disappointment as he let his hand fall. Had Floriana taught her son nothing? he wondered censoriously. He might wish he were anywhere else but here, but he was a stickler for tradition. Hadn’t the child been instructed never to play inside a church?

And why was Kelly glaring at him like that as she smoothed the ruffled hair of the little boy?

His sister turned to him, cradling the infant in her arms. ‘Would you like to hold Allegra?’ she whispered, but he shook his head, ignoring the faint look of hurt which crossed her dark eyes.

Would it shock her to know that he had never held a baby?

That he had never wanted to hold a baby.

‘I will,’ said Kelly, with another wordless look in his direction.

Unwillingly Romano’s gaze was captured as she carefully took the infant, who promptly began to whimper. But instead of handing her straight back to her mother, Kelly held out her little finger for Allegra to suck and the baby latched onto it immediately. It was an instinctive gesture—though what did he know?—which somehow didn’t seem to fit well with his racy image of her. At that moment she more resembled a famous painting he had once seen of the Madonna—serene and oh-so-soft rather than an all-night party queen. As the child quietened with an ecstatic little bleat, Romano felt the inexplicable clench of something unfamiliar inside his chest. Suddenly he was finding it difficult to concentrate. To breathe.

And he didn’t know why.

The swell of music momentarily distracted him and he forced himself to join in with the responses, but he was glad when the service ended and he could escape, emerging into the spring dusk and sucking in a lungful of mountain air in an attempt to clear his head. A line of cars was waiting to take them back to the castello , but he stood back until everyone else had departed, ensuring that he travelled without company. Alone at last in the limousine, he stared out of the window at the pale indigo of the darkening sky—perplexed and irritated to find himself still thinking about Kelly Butler.

Back at the castle, where servants were carrying trays of champagne and canapés to the gathered groups of guests, he saw a temporary escape route. Quickly excusing himself, he went upstairs to his office, citing the need to telephone a colleague in Sydney and ignoring the look of frustration on his half-sister’s face. But the call went on longer than he’d intended. Or maybe he had deliberately prolonged it. Because when he came back downstairs, it was to find everyone standing in small groups, chatting amicably and—much too late now, of course—he wondered if he could have got away with a total no-show.

But he knew what was expected of him and how best to deliver it and the eager expressions which greeted his arrival made it obvious that, in a sense, they had all been waiting for him. He gave a mirthless smile. No surprise there. It happened all the time. It was one of the drawbacks of being a billionaire. Of being a ‘money magnet’, as his good friend Javier Estrada always put it. It was why some of his peers used permanent bodyguards, though he could never have tolerated such an incursion into his privacy. With a skill born of endless practice he was able to adapt, chameleon-like, to any given situation—and at a rare family gathering like this, it was always best to adopt a low-key demeanour and attempt to blend in.

So he moved from group to group, exchanging pleasantries as he sipped from a glass of vintage champagne, graciously receiving compliments about the castle, the garden and the quality of the wine as he batted away the intrusive questions he had already anticipated.

Yet all the time he was aware of one person who dominated the periphery of his vision. Infuriatingly, his sole focus. Kelly Butler was at the far end of the room in her inappropriate dress and bright earrings, yet he was having to work very hard not to turn his head to stare and drink in her beauty. Suddenly he wondered how the hell he was going to get through the next few days, when the thought of being alone with her for an entire week was stretching before him with unendurable provocation.

But he couldn’t keep avoiding her.

There was surely only one way to get her out of his system—and if he couldn’t have sex with her, then the solution was to talk to her as much as possible, because didn’t all women have limitations when it came to conversation? A wry smile curved his lips. In his experience, even highly educated career women were notoriously predictable when they chatted. A few seconds in his company and all they could do was flirt and portray themselves as ideal wife material, which bored the pants off him. There was, of course, one exception to the rule. She may have consistently annoyed the hell out of him but nobody could ever have accused Kelly Butler of being boring.

He walked across the room to where she stood in her floaty dress, nursing a glass of orange juice.

‘Having a good time?’ he enquired conventionally.

The look she directed at him was unfathomable. ‘I was.’

‘Try not to be too combative, Kelly,’ he murmured. ‘It will make lines appear on your forehead.’

‘I suppose all your girlfriends have them Botoxed out?’

He shrugged. ‘I really wouldn’t know.’

Kelly clutched her glass a little tighter. No, she bet he had no idea about what his girlfriends did with their lives, unless it involved fawning over him. No wonder his ego was so colossal. She’d observed the way all the other guests had practically prostrated themselves in front of him, and his admittedly gracious response had made her blood boil. Smug, or what ?

And in the meantime she was stuck.

Stuck here, with him.

No, not just stuck with him.

Working for him.

She knew Floriana had been acting out of the goodness of her heart but how Kelly wished she’d kept her impetuous question to herself. She felt embarrassed colour rising in her cheeks. She knew Romano had always looked down his nose at her. That he saw her as the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Was he quietly laughing to himself at this latest development? Maybe he thought that cleaning for him would make her accept her place and that this new, servile role might reinforce her real Cinderella status in the lives of the Castelliari family once and for all.

But it was a done deal and there was no point being ungracious and sulking about it. So embrace it, she told herself fiercely. Show him you’re not too proud to earn an honest buck. Concentrate on the positives, not the negatives. And not the kind of positives which involved drooling over the charcoal suit he was wearing, which hugged his muscular frame to perfection.

She forced the words out. ‘It’s very kind of you to give me work.’

‘A kindness I would have preferred to forgo,’ he commented acidly.

‘I kind of worked that out for myself from the look of horror on your face.’

‘I had no idea I made my feelings so transparent,’ he said, frowning a little as he loosened his silk tie.

And annoyingly, Kelly found herself transfixed by that simple movement, especially when he undid the top button of his shirt to reveal a tantalising glimpse of chest hair, dark against the olive gleam of his skin. ‘Do you want me to give you a get-out clause, Romano?’ she enquired hoarsely, desperately trying not to stare. ‘Because it really won’t be a problem if you do. I’m well aware that you were railroaded into it.’

‘I do not renege on promises.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘And besides, how else will you pay your rent?’

‘Like you care!’

He gave a short laugh. ‘Even I am not hard-hearted enough to see my sister’s friend being kicked out onto the street.’

‘Bad for your image, I suppose?’

‘I don’t spend my whole life trying to enhance my image, Kelly.’

‘Perhaps you should.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Or perhaps you’re attempting to exasperate me so much that I’ll just tell you to go to hell?’

She sucked in a deep breath, hating his shrewdness. Hating the fact that she was depending on his benevolence and that only a fool would flounce out of the room in a huff, which was what she felt like doing. And hating most of all the way he made her feel like no man had ever done before. Weak and strong and invincible yet vulnerable, all at the same time. ‘No,’ she said, wondering why her voice sounded so squeaky. ‘I don’t want that.’

‘Then we’ll just have to make it work, won’t we?’ He slanted her a steady look, which was underpinned with warning. ‘You can easily keep out of my way. It’s a big castle.’

‘Our paths need never cross,’ she agreed readily. ‘I’ll look on it as a personal challenge to stay as far away from you as possible, Romano—as well as eradicating every cobweb in the building, of course.’

But he didn’t smile at her flimsy joke. His black eyes were narrowed with curiosity. ‘You seem to know my nephew very well,’ he observed.

‘I make video calls as often as I can—and Rocco loves to chat.’

He didn’t seem satisfied with her response.

‘And do you often visit them in France?’

She opened her mouth to skate over the question, when something stopped her. Because the best thing about this weird situation—possibly the only good thing—was that she didn’t have to pretend to be anything she wasn’t. He might not like her or approve of her forming a close bond with his nephew, but she didn’t have a single thing to lose. And surely that gave her the freedom to speak the truth to him.

‘Hardly ever,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford it. Unlike you, who can, but never does.’

‘Excuse me?’ His words were discharged in a disbelieving hiss.

‘You know very well what I’m talking about,’ she said, swallowing a little as she thought whether or not it was wise to proceed, because the expression on his stony features was more than a little forbidding. But so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. ‘You never go and see them, do you? Floriana said you’d been once—that you zoomed in by helicopter and zoomed straight out again, without even staying for dinner.’

There was a pause.

‘I have a busy lifestyle,’ he answered repressively. ‘I happen to run a giant organisation. You don’t think that eats into my time?’

‘I’m sure it does. But that’s not the real reason why you don’t go, is it, Romano?’ she challenged. ‘You manage to find time in your packed diary for all those fancy Premio Mondo car races, and the parties, and gallery openings and—’

‘How dare you take me to task in this way?’

‘I dare because there’s a gorgeous little boy who would love to get to know his zio , but never gets the chance. And time is marching on, Romano. He’ll be a sulky teenager before you know it and—’

‘That is enough,’ he snapped, before sucking in a deep breath, as if to temper his icy retort with something a little more reasonable. ‘If only my sister would allow herself to see sense, she could base her family here, which is far more accessible than their current location—’

‘I didn’t find it that accessible,’ she objected, remembering her journey.

He glared at the interruption. ‘But she stubbornly refuses to accept my offer.’

Kelly opened her mouth to suggest why that might be, but hadn’t she already said enough? What was the point of accusing him of being a total control freak? He was an intelligent man. He must know that and even if he didn’t… Did she really think he was going to radically change his personality, on her say-so? What did she think might happen—that he would nod and smile and thank her for her insight? At the moment his face was so granite-grim, she couldn’t imagine him ever smiling again. ‘Oh, look,’ she said, her words tempered with relief. ‘Here comes Floriana. Let’s try and act normally, shall we?’

‘I don’t think I know what normal is, around you,’ he snapped.

‘You and me both,’ she shot back, yet as Floriana made her way towards them, Kelly was aware that, in some weird kind of way, it almost felt as if she was colluding with him.