Buying His Bride Of Convenience. Michelle Smart

kissed the cold glass and put the frame back where it had been, pushing the old memories clamouring in her head aside and ignoring the urge to get the duster and vacuum cleaner out. She’d promised Daniele she would only be ten minutes.

      He hadn’t been happy at her insistence he wait in the car. She didn’t want him in her apartment. This was the place she and Johann had made into a home when they’d been little more than children playacting at being grown-ups, neither having any real idea of what it entailed, learning as they went along, right down to when she’d put a nail in the kitchen wall to hang a picture, not having any idea that electric cables were nestled behind it and that she’d drilled right into them until they started receiving electric shocks every time they touched the tap or fridge. The electrician they’d had to scrape all their loose change together to afford had sternly told them they’d had a lucky escape—if either of them had touched the nail they would have been electrocuted. Even today, she couldn’t believe she’d been so lucky. What had been the odds that she could hang the picture without touching that live nail? At the time she’d considered it as evidence of their good luck; vindication that running away with him had been right.

      But their luck had run out.

      With a sigh, she pulled the suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and quickly filled it with her meagre number of warm clothes. Snow was settling on the streets outside, the weather a complete contrast to the glorious sunshine she’d left in Caballeros.

      She didn’t take anything else. She’d known when she’d accepted Daniele’s proposal that what she was agreeing to would not be permanent. But she could manage a few years, of that she was certain.

      * * *

      Daniele’s castello was almost identical to how Eva had imagined it, sitting high in the rolling Tuscan hills. Evening was falling and the few lights on gave it an ethereal, gothic quality. Thinking of how it would look with all the lights blazing in the total darkness, she could easily see where it got its name. Castello Miniato, the illuminated castle, would have shone for miles in medieval times.

      What had once been a castle of majesty and splendour in a bright salmon pink was now on the verge of being a crumbling relic.

      ‘Are you renovating it?’ she asked as she got out of the car, which the driver had brought to a stop in an enormous courtyard. She could just make out scaffolding poles along a far wall.

      ‘My brother started on a renovation programme. He finished the south wing and now I need to think about what I want to do with the rest of it.’ There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in his voice.

      ‘You don’t like it here?’

      He shrugged. ‘I prefer modern architecture. If I could get away with it, I would pull it down and start again.’

      She followed him through a wide solid oak door and found herself standing in a high-ceilinged room that, despite its size and grandeur, had a dank, cold feel to it.

      The temperature change from what she’d been used to in the Caribbean hadn’t bothered her until that point. The cold weather front had engulfed the whole of Europe, with Tuscany expecting its own share of the white stuff over the coming days, but it wasn’t until she stepped into the castello’s reception room that Eva felt the cold in her bones.

      ‘The chef has prepared a meal for us,’ Daniele said, rubbing his hands briskly together. ‘I’ll show you to our living quarters.’

      She trailed him for a good few minutes before he opened a door into a wide corridor lined with high, wide windows.

      ‘This is the family quarters,’ he said, then pointed to a door. ‘That is my room, which will be our room once we’re married.’ He threw the glimmer of a smile. ‘Of course, if you wish for it to be our room before then, you’re welcome to join me in it.’

      She threw back a smile that quite clearly showed hell would freeze over first. ‘Which is my room?’

      ‘Take your pick. Serena, who runs the place, got the staff to put fresh bedding in all the rooms. The only one off limits is Francesca’s.’ He indicated another door, this time his smile indulgent. ‘If you want to make yourself a widow, just tell my sister I let you sleep in her room. She would kill me.’

      ‘Does Francesca live here?’ She’d assumed not but only now she was here did she realise she knew next to nothing about Daniele or his family, not on a personal, familiar level. All her dealings with them had been in Caballeros where medieval castellos and family trees had never cropped up in conversation.