Chapter Two #3
Across London at the same moment, Tore was struggling to handle a situation he had never expected to arise. ‘But it’s a marriage of convenience,’ he reminded his grandfather on the phone. ‘We won’t be having a honeymoon.’
‘Why not?’ Aldo Renzetti enquired mildly.
‘At least getting to know each other as friends will make the next three years more bearable for both of you. And there’s a little kid involved now, a baby, I understand.
You can’t ignore the needs of a child for three years.
You’re a stepfather now, Tore. Surely, I don’t have to tell you that you have a duty to be present for that little one? ’
Tore wanted to tear his hair out, scream, shout, violently disagree but of course, as usual, he forced himself to live up to Aldo’s old-fashioned ideas of family, duty and honour.
‘No, you don’t,’ he murmured as gently as he could when he was furious and fighting to hide the fact.
‘Very well. Violet and I and her little one,’ he voiced with a grimace, ‘will be delighted to accept your generous gift.’
‘You’ve always loved the castello, Tore. We spent many happy summers there with you. Make the most of the opportunity not to turn your wife into an enemy for the future,’ Aldo advised sunnily.
Tore breathed in deep and raw as he tossed his cell phone down.
He wanted to kill someone. He was taking the wife he despised and her child on a honeymoon he didn’t want.
Why? He was too much of a coward to tell his grandfather that he didn’t intend to take his gold-digging wife to the foot of the street if he could help it.
Aldo would consider such feelings cruel and insensitive even though Tore had told the older man about that up-front demand for cash.
But then Aldo was the same man who had stepped up without hesitation to accept the responsibility of raising his late son’s child.
Naturally, Aldo now saw Tore as an acting stepfather.
He was that kind of man, decent, kind and honourable, the same man whom Tore loved like the father he had never known, and the only reason Tore had accepted this marriage of convenience.
Aldo regarded all women as innately fragile and in need of loving, caring support and loyalty.
The fact that Tore had planned to spend his wedding night with a leggy blonde in unashamed adultery would horrify Aldo.
Well, now he wasn’t going to be horrified because Tore would not be spending a single night with a leggy blonde in London.
Evidently, that ring on his finger was cutting him off from sex as well, which for Tore was a truly appalling development.
Of course, he hadn’t ever planned to be faithful! Any more than he had planned to bed his wife! He might be married to an undersized, mouthy single parent but he did not see himself as a married man or a potential stepfather to a young child. Not in this particular marriage, anyway.
Clearly, Aldo and Matilde, his grandparents, had yet to absorb that hard fact.
Yet, as grandparents they were relatively young being only in their fifties, but they were probably hoping for some miracle to occur and provide them with great-grandchildren.
Why else had his grandmother also chimed in during that unwelcome phone call to confess that she couldn’t wait to meet Violet’s baby?
The baby he didn’t even know the name of, which Agnese Renzetti had censured as a glaring omission.
‘You mean you didn’t even ask, Tore?’ she had gasped in dismay. ‘What were you thinking?’
That had long been Tore’s burden in life, he acknowledged. He was in possession of wonderful, unbelievably nice and loving grandparents but they would never ever know—if he had anything to do with it—that their beloved grandson wasn’t remotely nice or loving. Except towards them…
‘You’re the most beautiful little girl ever!’ Violet exclaimed as she planted a noisy raspberry kiss on Belle’s plump little tummy and the baby chortled full of glee, rolling over to move off under her own power. Fed, bathed and into her giraffe jammies, Belle would soon be ready for bed.
Violet massaged her aching back. With her sister’s help she had packed all their belongings and the baby equipment and it had taken the afternoon to bring it all back to Tore’s house.
She had unpacked the necessities with Dora’s assistance, and Belle’s cot was set up in readiness.
Luckily for Violet, Belle was a sociable, easy baby and change didn’t freak her out.
A knock sounded on the door and on her knees, still tidying up all the paraphernalia that went with babies, she swivelled. ‘Come in,’ she called.
Astonishment gripped her when Tore strode into her new sitting room.
Her first thought was, shamefully, that he was off-the-charts hot, particularly when he was more casually clad in light chino pants and a long-sleeved top, his luxuriant white-gold hair a little messy and damp, she surmised, from a shower.
The embarrassment of that thought suffused her cheeks with colour.
‘We’re flying to Italy later this evening,’ he announced.
‘I beg your pardon?’ In disbelief at that declaration of intent, Violet scrambled upright, barefoot in her jeans and no makeup, once again feeling outclassed and caught unprepared.
Tore dealt her a sizzling appraisal. ‘You heard me fine.’
‘Yes, I did but I couldn’t believe you were serious. Why would I travel to Italy with you?’
‘You’re supposed to be my wife.’ His big frame tensed as a baby crawled from behind a chair and moved towards him.
He endeavoured to ignore it. It was tiny, another member of the tiny family with a tousled cloud of brown curls and a huge smile as it crawled over the top of his shoes and hovered looking up at him with big, expectant blue eyes.
It was not a fan of being ignored because it let out a little shout as if it was trying to grab his attention. A little girl, he reckoned.
‘Agreed, but we both know I’m not a real wife.’
‘It felt shockingly real in that church,’ Tore contradicted. ‘In any case, I don’t care how you feel about a trip to Italy because you’re going whether you like it or not.’
Violet’s blue eyes sparkled at his arrogance as he spoke to her as though she were an employee without choices about where and when she went. ‘For how long?’
A broad shoulder shifted in a shrug. ‘A month at most.’
Belle let out another shout that had the edge of a shriek and Tore flinched. He surprised himself then, dropping down into a crouch and saying, ‘And what’s your name?’
‘Belle,’ Violet supplied, watching her daughter stretch up a tiny hand to Tore’s knee.
Tore scanned the huge smile and invitation of the raised arms and leant in to lift the baby up. Belle squealed in delight and kicked her legs. ‘She weighs nothing,’ he commented with a frown. ‘Is she healthy?’
‘Totally, but she’s very like her mother in build—naturally slender and light in weight. Look, Tore, I want to be reasonable but I can’t possibly—’
His ebony brows had pleated. ‘You’re not her mother?’
‘I am but I’m not her birth mother. I started adopting her after my best friend, her mother, died,’ Violet extended. ‘Isabel and her partner nominated me as her guardian in their will.’
Realising that the baby was still dangling, Tore shifted her experimentally closer and like a puppy she pawed her way up his chest and into the crook of his neck, burying her head there and slowly slumping against him.
‘She’s tired. If you give me five minutes, I’ll put her to bed and then we can talk about Italy.
It would be impossible,’ she could not help telling him in advance.
‘My business couldn’t run without me. I work with an assistant but he couldn’t bake or decorate cakes as well as me. He’s not experienced enough yet.’
‘You own a business?’ Tore was disconcerted enough by that news to follow her into the bedroom next door.
‘Yes, but strictly speaking it’s not mine.
The bakery belonged to Isabel and her partner.
They left it to me, which has allowed me to be able to raise Belle, but once she grows up it should go to her because it’s her inheritance from her parents,’ she explained as she tucked Belle into her cot, switched on the glowing sheep toy that played soft music and backed away to close the drapes. ‘Night, night, baby.’
Belle snuggled in, clutching a shabby dinosaur, and simply closed her eyes.
Having been told that he was a challenge to get to sleep as a little boy, Tore was impressed.
And Violet was not at all the feckless, idle, spoiled young woman he had rather unpleasantly assumed she would be as Tomaso Barone’s grandchild.
She ran a bakery and obviously baked as well.
Not for the first time, he cursed the arrogance and the anger that had prevented him from having both sisters fully investigated in advance of the wedding.
He should’ve known something of that nature when he was marrying the woman.
Instead, he had chosen to work off biased assumptions rather than fact, and that oversight infuriated him.
‘I can make arrangements to make the Italian trip possible,’ he asserted, accompanying her back into the sitting room.
Violet dealt him a pained look. ‘It’s not possible. I’ve got cake orders coming in, decorating to do, deliveries to do, payroll, bank visits.’
‘If I’m willing to pay enough I can get it all taken care of for you,’ Tore imparted with unblemished confidence. ‘Experts are always available for hire for the right price…’
‘But why would we even want to go to Italy?’ she prompted. ‘I know it’s your home and I wasn’t being rude but—’
‘My grandfather has signed over to me the property in Calabria where I spent every summer growing up,’ Tore countered. ‘It’s a wedding gift, a big gesture when you consider that this is not the usual marriage and he knows that.’
‘So, if he knows that why is he making the big gesture?’
‘He witnessed our exit from the church,’ he reminded her, with that beautiful mouth of his compressing, emerald eyes narrowing, only making her more aware of the lush curling black lashes he rejoiced in.
‘I would imagine he doesn’t want us to be at each other’s throats for the next three years and he’s done it for our benefit. He’s a kind, thoughtful man.’
‘Something my grandfather doesn’t suffer from,’ Violet remarked helplessly, her eyes clouding with bad memories.
‘He cut off my mother when she was only a teenager and never forgave her for marrying someone he didn’t approve of.
Although history proved that he was totally right to make that judgement, my mother suffered a lot without family support when we were little. ’
‘Some of us find it equally hard to forgive mistakes,’ Tore commented drily, his tone shaking her back out of the past to the present. ‘We’ll be leaving for Italy tonight as soon as my pilot can find us a slot at the airport.’
‘I don’t want to go to Italy,’ Violet reiterated, tilting her chin, standing her ground. ‘Right at this minute it’s out of the question. I have responsibilities.’
‘And what about your responsibilities in this marriage?’ Tore cut in with lethal bite. ‘You’re my wife. We only got married today. I believe I’m owed more than the hour the church ceremony took of your time.’
Violet paled. That word owed reminding her of the enormous sum of money that her sister had demanded from him before she signed on the dotted line of matrimony.
She was equally aware that the agreement they had signed had taken for granted that she would fit in with his life and not the other way around.
That would’ve suited her twin but unfortunately, Violet had less freedom.
‘Yes, you do have some grounds for believing that but—’
Tore slanted her a hard, glittering green glance.
‘No objections. Even if you’re not the original intended bride, you will meet the obligations you agreed to.
It can hardly escape your attention that your business difficulties are nothing to do with me, and my offer to take care of those problems was exceedingly generous of me in the circumstances. ’
Violet sucked in a deep breath. ‘Yes, but this is my livelihood and Belle’s,’ she pointed out uneasily.
‘My staff will nail down a replacement for you and you will fly to Italy.’
Involuntarily, Violet spoke again. ‘But not in the middle of the night, not with a baby in tow. It’ll upset her. Couldn’t we leave in the morning?’
Tore clenched his teeth together on the desire to maintain his schedule as he had already decided.
As a rule, he was not flexible. But while it may not have been his choice, yes, he now had the needs of a baby to consider.
He wasn’t so stubborn that he would punish a baby, too…
Was he? He knew very well what it was for a child to suffer a guardian’s mistaken choices.
That was the life he had lived unhappily with his mother’s kid sister.
He might not want to be a stepfather but he would not make an innocent child pay for Violet’s sins. He was neither that selfish nor cruel.
‘We’ll make it an early departure first thing in the morning,’ Tore decreed, still irritated that he was even making that concession. Violet had chosen to replace her sister and had inherited her commitments and that was definitely not his problem.