The Billionaire's Bridal Bargain(27)

‘Alone?’ Cesare exclaimed.

‘Yes. I like my own company. I had to—I worked alone for years,’ she reminded him doggedly, walking past him on the landing, relieved when she saw the cases being carried upstairs into the master bedroom. ‘I realise once Athene arrives tomorrow it’ll be “game on” or whatever you want to call it...but could we...please not share a bedroom tonight?’

‘Why are you not listening to anything I’m saying?’ Cesare demanded in apparent disbelief. ‘You won’t even look at me!’

Lizzie had only felt free to look at him when he was hers. Now that he wasn’t any more, she didn’t want to fall victim to his essential gorgeousness all over again. Not looking was a form of self-defence, she reasoned wildly.

‘Lizzie...’ he breathed in a driven undertone.

Lizzie stiffened, tears prickling behind her wide eyes. ‘I can’t afford to listen to you. You upset me a lot last night and I really don’t want to talk about that kind of stuff. It’s pointless. I’m not really your wife. I may be living with you—’

‘Expecting my child!’ Cesare slotted in with greater force than seemed necessary.

‘But you didn’t choose to marry me because you cared about me, therefore it’s not a proper marriage,’ Lizzie replied as she reluctantly turned back to face him. ‘And in your own immortal words everything else we’ve shared can be written off as “just sex”.’

Cesare flinched at that reminder, his pallor below his bronzed skin palpable. ‘I care about you now. I want to keep you.’

‘I’m not a pet, Cesare...’ Lizzie stared at him and frowned. ‘Are you feeling all right? You know, you’re acting very oddly.’

Goffredo’s one-word piece of advice returned to haunt Cesare. ‘I’m fine,’ he said brusquely, lying through his teeth.

All of a quiver after that pointless exchange, her nerves jangling, Lizzie vanished into the bedroom, closed the door and opened her case to extract a sun top and shorts. She needed to blow the cobwebs off with a good walk. Cesare was nowhere to be seen when she went downstairs again and she went into the kitchen where Primo reigned supreme and eventually emerged with Primo’s luxury version of a picnic meal and a bottle of water. With a little luck she could stay out until dark, then dive into bed and wake up to a new day and the big show for his poor grandmother’s benefit.

Cesare was furious when he discovered that Lizzie had left the house. He strode down to the beach but there was no sign of her and not even a footprint on the pristine strand to suggest that she had come that way.

Several hours later, sunburned, foot weary and very tired after her jaunt across Lionos, Lizzie returned to discover that Cesare had gone out. Thankful, she settled down to supper as only Primo could make it. Sliding into her comfortable bed, she slept like a log.

Athene arrived mid-afternoon the next day. Cesare decided to be grateful for that because it brought Lizzie out of hiding. It had not once crossed his mind that she could be so intractable that she wouldn’t even give him a hearing and then he thought of all the years she had slaved for her unappreciative and critical father and realised that she would have needed a strong, stubborn backbone.

Relaxed and colourful in a red sundress, Lizzie ushered Athene into her former childhood home. Tears shone in the old lady’s eyes as she stood in the hall, gazing down the slope at the beautiful view. ‘I thought it would all be overgrown and unrecognisable.’

‘You showed me a photo once. I had the trees cut back,’ Cesare told his grandmother softly. ‘Shall I show you around?’

‘Yes, this is your home and Lizzie’s now,’ Athene said a little tearfully and fumbled for a tissue. ‘I have so many memories of my brothers and sisters here and now that they’re all gone...’

Lizzie watched Cesare mop up his grandmother’s tears with a deft touch and the right words and, minutes later, Athene was laughing as she recounted a childhood adventure with her brothers. She accompanied them on the official tour and Primo served afternoon tea out on the terrace, apparently an old tradition that Athene loved.

‘Primo is an absolute treasure,’ Athene told Lizzie as Cesare murmured an apology and withdrew to answer his phone before walking back into the house.

‘And even better he cooks, which I’m not very good at,’ Lizzie admitted, topping up the older woman’s tea.

‘Have you and Cesare had a row?’ her companion asked without warning. ‘I’m not an interfering old woman but I can feel that something’s wrong.’

Lizzie felt that even an award-winning actress would have been challenged to carry off a smile at that point. ‘A hiccup,’ she downplayed studiously, her cheeks burning tomato-red as if the lie might be emblazoned on her forehead.

‘My grandson has a remarkable brain, which serves him well in business. He’s not quite so good at relationships,’ Athene remarked wryly, gentle amusement in her warm brown eyes. ‘There’s bound to be hiccups as you call them. He’s set in his ways and you’ll challenge him. That’s good for him. After all, anyone with eyes can see how deeply attached you are to each other.’

Lizzie’s opinion of Athene’s shrewdness nosedived at that pronouncement but the awkward moment passed over and she managed to relax again. The old lady eventually nodded off in the shade and Lizzie went back indoors.

‘I need to warn you,’ Lizzie almost whispered round the corner of the door of the room Cesare had set up as an office. ‘Athene thinks we’ve had a row but that that’s normal, so not really anything to worry about...but we’ll need to make a real effort to impress.’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier simply to talk to me?’ Cesare suggested, rising from behind his desk, all sleek Italian designer style in his tailored oatmeal-coloured casuals.

Lizzie continued to hover defensively in the doorway. ‘I just don’t think we have anything to talk about.’

‘Do you know what time I went to bed last night?’

Lizzie blinked in confusion. ‘How would I?’

‘I was out tramping round the island looking for you. Primo couldn’t raise a signal on my cell phone until midnight and I only found out then that you had returned to the house hours earlier!’

Lizzie dealt him an astonished look. ‘But why were you looking for me in the first place? I wasn’t lost.’

Cesare studied her as if she were irretrievably dim. ‘There are all kinds of hazards out there. Fast currents in the sea, steep drops, dangerous rocks...’

Definitely behaving oddly, Lizzie labelled as she breathed in deep. ‘Cesare, I’m not some little fluffy woman who can’t look after herself. I’m an outdoors woman, used to working in all weathers and accustomed to constantly considering safety aspects on the farm.’

‘But I was worried about you!’ Cesare shot back at her in furious frustration.

Lizzie tossed her head, platinum-blonde hair shimmering across her slight shoulders in the sunlight, green eyes wide and wary. ‘Well, you didn’t need to be. I should’ve thought you would’ve been more worried about how Serafina is managing while we’re together here when you belong with her.’

‘I do not belong with Serafina!’ Cesare raked at her so loudly, she jumped.

‘No?’

‘Do I strike you as being an idiot? I was a boy when I fell in love with her and full of romantic idealism but I’m all grown-up now,’ he completed grimly.

‘Well, you went rushing over to that palazzo fast enough the other night,’ Lizzie argued in a less aggressive prompt. ‘That was where you went, wasn’t it?’

His stunning gaze widened to smouldering gold eyes of challenge. ‘You think I went over there to be with her?’

‘What else was I supposed to think?’ Lizzie asked tightly. ‘You left me in anger...’

‘I wasn’t angry with you, I was angry with her!’ Cesare exclaimed in full-volume contradiction and Lizzie hastily backed to the door to close it firmly shut. ‘How dare she have the insolence to approach my wife with the tacky details of an affair that happened a decade ago? I’d never heard such rubbish in my life and I was determined to finally have it out with her.’

Tacky details scarcely dovetailed with Serafina’s suggestion that the barn episode had been a very precious memory for them both. Furthermore Lizzie was transfixed by the idea that he had rushed out of the house in a rage because Serafina had dared to approach his wife. Lizzie went pink over her misreading of the situation. ‘And did you have it out with her?’

‘Sì...I said a lot that she will not forget in a hurry. If she wasn’t so vain, she would have accepted a long time ago that I would sooner chew off my own arm than have anything to do with her again. How could you think that of me?’ Cesare raked at her in apparent wonderment. ‘A woman who walked out on me because I wasn’t rich enough? A disloyal, deceitful woman with the morals of a whore... She first offered herself back to me three years after she married Matteo and she did it again last night, which outraged me.’

Lizzie was so astonished by what she was finding out that she was rooted to the floor where she stood. Not only did he no longer care about Serafina, he evidently despised her and her eagerness to get him back. There was nothing fake about the driving derision he exuded. ‘And of course you said no?’