‘No, it’s only the beginning,’ Cesario husked, smouldering golden eyes fringed by dense black lashes roving boldly over her averted face so that when she glanced up, she flinched at that visual connection and hurriedly looked away.
‘This wedding you mentioned,’ Jess remarked hurriedly, keen to move on to a less controversial subject because she was taken aback by the way he was looking at her. She stifled an urge to shiver because she felt cornered. She was not so naïve that she didn’t recognise the force of his desire for her and she could hardly afford to knock the source of her apparent appeal when it was probably the main reason he was offering her a wedding ring and her father’s freedom. ‘When would it take place?’
‘As soon as it can be arranged—it will be a proper wedding,’ Cesario decreed without hesitation. ‘With the dress, the big guest list, the whole bridal show.’
‘Is that really necessary?’ Jess pressed uneasily, wincing at the prospect of having to play the blushing bride for an audience of posh strangers.
‘It won’t look like a normal marriage otherwise,’ he pointed out.
‘Oh, my goodness, what am I going to tell my family?’ she suddenly gasped in an appalled undertone.
‘Not the truth, for that is only for you and I to know,’ Cesario spelt out in a tone of warning.
He had just given her an impossible embargo, but Jess was already reaching the conclusion that it was better not to blurt out unwary comments around Cesario. She knew even then that she would tell her mother the truth, but that she would present it in an edited version to satisfy her father’s curiosity without making the older man feel responsible for her predicament. She breathed in deep and slow, reminding herself firmly of the positive aspects to her situation and repeating them over and over to herself in a soothing mantra. Her father would not pay the price for his stupidity and her family circle would stay intact. She would hopefully end up with the baby she had long dreamt of having and she would even have that all important wedding ring on her finger first, since her mother set great store on a woman being married in advance of the arrival of children.
So what if it was a project rather than a wedding? She could cope with that. She was very realistic and, if he was as good at everything else as he was at kissing, given time she would surely come to terms with the more intimate aspects of their relationship. Women didn’t always marry just for love, she reminded herself doggedly, and neither did men, as Cesario was about to prove. If such a marriage was good enough for him when she was convinced that he could have so many more exciting options, it should be good enough for her as well.
‘Why did you choose me for this?’ she heard herself ask without warning.
His dense lashes swooped low over his brilliant dark gaze. ‘Ask me on our wedding night,’ he advised, a piece of advice that not unnaturally silenced her.
‘I LIKE the dress with the full skirt best,’ Jess repeated doggedly, ignoring the raised brows of Melanie, the hip fashion stylist Cesario had hired to work with her in what bore all the hallmarks of a tip-to-toe makeover.
Jess, however, was determined to at least choose her own wedding gown. ‘It suits me,’ she added.
‘It’s very, very pretty,’ Sharon Martin agreed with unconcealed delight at her daughter’s choice.
‘Well, if you like bling,’ Melanie said drily, encouraging the saleswoman to display the dress so that the pearl-beaded bodice and the scattered crystals on the skirt sparkled in the light, her lack of enthusiasm palpable. ‘It has certainly got buckets of bling.’
Jess had surprised herself with her choice. Although her taste generally ran to the plain, she had fallen head over heels in love with the unashamedly romantic wedding gown. Melanie’s efforts to persuade her client to pick a restrained satin column style instead had fallen on stony ground.
On that score, though, it had to be admitted that Jess had enjoyed a rare victory. She had already had to accept an entire trousseau of new garments for her up-and-coming role as the wife of an international tycoon and her preferences had often been politely ignored. Cesario was a perfectionist who dotted every i and crossed every t, while Jess was someone who never ever sweated the small stuff if she could help it. And arguing on the phone about something as unimportant as clothes with a male as single-minded and accustomed to getting his own way as Cesario was, she had learned, exhausting and ultimately pointless.
It was a fact that Jess had taken virtually no interest in clothes and cosmetics since that traumatic episode in her late teens when she had decided that it was safer and much more comfortable not to dress to attract male attention. Now willing to admit that she was out of date with regard to fashion and the art of self-presentation, she had agreed to accept advice and grooming. As a result, her uncontrollable black waterfall of curls had been shaped and tamed and her brows plucked. While she could see that her appearance had improved and her hair was much more manageable, she was appalled that the time she had already had to spend in the beauty salon was now being extended into the territories of waxing, facials, manicure and pedicure sessions. Was there no end to the vanity sessions she was expected to endure? Her colleagues at the veterinary practice had pulled her leg unmercifully as the ugly duckling—as she saw herself as—was ruthlessly repackaged into a would-be swan.
Although only three weeks had passed since Jess had agreed to marry Cesario di Silvestri, the comfortable groove of her life was fast being erased. The wedding was set for a date only ten days away and Cesario had been abroad on business almost from the day they had agreed to marry. A giant diamond cluster, delivered by special courier, now adorned her ring finger and an announcement about their engagement had appeared in an upscale broadsheet newspaper that nobody Jess knew read. In response to that first public reference to her new position, a photographer had just the day before popped up from behind a hedge to take a ghastly picture of her returning to the surgery after a difficult calving, bedraggled and dirty with her hair like a bird’s nest. The subsequent picture, comically entitled Jet-Set Bride?, had appeared that very morning in a downmarket tabloid. Jess had merely pulled a face when a colleague showed it to her, because getting messed up in her field of work was an occupational hazard. Cesario, however, had requested that she meet him for lunch to discuss the matter.
‘Don’t go falling in love with Cesario,’ Sharon advised her daughter as she was being driven home, shooting Jess a troubled glance. ‘It worries me that you will and then you’ll get hurt…’
‘As it won’t be a real marriage I’m not going to fall for him,’ Jess fielded with a sound of dismissive amusement, wondering if she had made a mistake in telling her mother the truth about Cesario’s proposal of marriage.
‘Don’t you fool yourself. If you have a baby with the man, it’ll be just as real as any other marriage,’ her mother forecast ruefully. ‘And I know you. You have a softer heart than you like to show.’
‘I’m also almost thirty-one years old and I’ve never been in love in my life,’ her daughter reminded her crisply.
‘Only because you let that creep at university put you off men!’ Sharon Martin retorted with an expressive grimace that recognised her daughter’s sudden pallor and tension. ‘Cesario is a very handsome guy and I think it would be easier for you than you think to lose your head over him. You’ll be living together, sharing your lives, for goodness’ sake!’
‘But we won’t be sharing anything but a desire to have a child,’ Jess pronounced flatly, her cheekbones colouring as she made that point. She had told her mother everything and sworn her to silence for her father’s sake. Robert Martin had swallowed the contrived story that Jess had been seeing Cesario on the quiet without telling anyone and he saw no reason why even a billionaire should not be bowled over by his beautiful daughter. ‘Cesario made that quite clear, Mum. He likes his own space. He wants a child but that’s the extent of it. He certainly doesn’t want a wife