Mistress To A Millionaire. HELEN BROOKS

was rushed. ‘I did eat on the plane.’

      ‘Cardboard rubbish.’ He dismissed the truly delicious meal she had enjoyed in the opulent surroundings of the first-class luxury with a disparaging flick of one hand. ‘Besides which I haven’t had lunch and I’m peckish. That is a wonderful English word, yes? Peckish? Like kicking the bucket and coming a cropper? I have found it difficult to translate such words and phrases into Italian.’

      He was trying to put her at her ease. Daisy knew it but it actually made her all the more tense. She opened her mouth to make some sort of response but he continued seamlessly, ‘I want Francesco to have an understanding of such things. You will find he speaks very good English and he likes the language, which is a bonus, but it is the little things—the colloquialisms—that are so important. I do not want textbook correctness.’

      ‘Right.’ Daisy nodded in what she hoped was a brisk fashion.

      ‘Your name—where did Daisy come from?’ he asked suddenly.

      ‘What?’ He had startled her.

      ‘I said, why Daisy? Isn’t that an unusual name these days?’ Slade asked quietly, his eyes on the road ahead.

      ‘I suppose so.’ She didn’t want to discuss her name with him; she didn’t want anything of even a remotely personal nature between herself and this big, dark frighteningly attractive man, but in the circumstances maybe that was a little ridiculous, Daisy acknowledged weakly as she forced herself to continue. ‘My mother’s name is Lily and when she had me my father thought it would be fun to have another flower name.’

      She had never liked her name and something in her voice indicated this as she continued, ‘And then my sister was born four years later—she’s Rose—and then Violet arrived two years after that. My father—’ She stopped abruptly and then forced herself to go on. ‘My father used to call us his precious bunch of flowers,’ she finished tightly.

      ‘Used to?’ He glanced at her quickly for a moment.

      ‘He died just over sixteen months ago.’ Exactly twenty-four hours after the miscarriage.

      ‘I’m sorry.’ And somehow he sounded as though he was.

      Daisy swallowed hard and then shrugged quickly. ‘These things happen.’ But it didn’t make them fair, she added silently. She had been ill after losing the baby—a nasty post-natal haemorrhage which had been followed by further complications and an infection—and she had been unable to make the journey to America for her father’s funeral. And because of her father dying so unexpectedly from a massive heart attack her mother and sisters had been tied to their home base when she had needed her mother most. Two separate tragedies intrinsically linked, the after-effects of which had rippled on in an ever increasing circle.

      Even now she sometimes woke in the middle of the night after a bad dream unable to believe her father was really gone. If she could have seen him—attended the funeral—shared the outward display of grief—something—it would have been a means of coming to terms with her loss—or so the doctor had said. But then doctors didn’t know everything…