The Billionaire's Bridal Bargain(7)

Women liked money and he liked women: it was a fair exchange in which neither of them need feel used or abused. Hadn’t he learned that a long time ago? Athene would be able to return to her childhood home for a visit at the very least. Was Lizzie Whitaker planning to meet the full terms of the will? Raw anticipation of an entirely different kind infiltrated Cesare and he frowned, bewildered by the flood of undisciplined hormones smashing his self-control to pieces. He was thinking about Lizzie Whitaker, only thinking about her and he was as aroused as a teenager contemplating sex for the first time.

‘You seem distracted,’ Celine remarked tentatively.

Cesare studied her without an iota of his usual lust, exasperated by the games his body was playing with his usually very well-disciplined brain. ‘A business deal,’ he proffered truthfully.

Goffredo would be overjoyed at the news of the upcoming wedding while Cesare was simply stunned at the prospect of getting married, whether it was a business arrangement or not. Married! The delicious food on his plate ebbed in appeal. Dense black lashes screened his gaze. It was rare for him to take a night off and somehow Lizzie Whitaker had contrived to kill any notion he had had of relaxing with Celine. What was it about her that unsettled him? After all she was a pretty standard gold-digger, willing to do virtually anything to enrich herself, and how could he criticise her for that reality when he had baited the hook?





CHAPTER THREE

‘I DON’T KNOW what the arrangements are likely to be,’ Lizzie told her father while she paced the kitchen, a slim figure clad in jeans and a sweater and workmanlike boots. ‘Look, I’ve got a few things to check outside. I might as well keep busy until Cesare arrives.’

‘What sort of a name is that he has?’ Brian Whitaker scoffed.

Lizzie dealt the older man an impatient glance as she put on her jacket because he had no excuse to be needling her or disparaging Cesare. But everything, she told herself in an urgent little pep talk, was good in her world. Chrissie had returned to university and soon she and her father would no longer need to worry about rent rises and bank debts they couldn’t cover. ‘It’s an Italian name, just like mine and Chrissie’s and Mum’s and it’s completely normal. Let’s not forget that Cesare is about to wave a magic wand over our lives.’

‘Even the Garden of Eden had the serpent,’ her father countered with a curl of his lip and his usual determination to have the last word.

Lizzie drank in the fresh air with relief and walked to the stone wall bounding the yard to check the sheep in the field. Lambing hadn’t started yet but it wouldn’t be long before it did. If she had to leave home before then, Andrew would probably take the ewes, she was reasoning in the detached state of mind she had forged to keep herself calm since she had sent that text to Cesare. There were no successes without losses, no gains without costs and consequences. In the middle of that sobering reflection while she watched the lane for a car arriving, she heard a noise in the sky and she flung her head back in the fading light to look up.

A helicopter was coming in over the valley. As she watched it circled the top of the hill and swooped down low to come closer and then noisily hover. For a split second, Lizzie was frozen to the spot, unable to believe that the helicopter was actually planning to land in a field with stock in it. The craft’s powerful lights splayed over the flock of fast-scattering sheep, which ran in a total panic down the hill. Lizzie ran for the gate, Archie at her heels, and flew over it like a high jumper while shouting instructions to her dog to retrieve the flock.

Heart pounding, she ran down the hill at breakneck speed but was still not fast enough to prevent the sheep from scrambling in a frantic escape over the wall at the foot and streaming across the next field towards the river. Sick with apprehension, she clambered over the wall and ran even faster while watching as Archie herded the frightened ewes away from the water’s edge. The noise from the helicopter unluckily intensified at that point because the pilot was taking off again and the sheep herded close together and then took off terrified again in all directions.

Someone shouted her name and she was relieved to see Andrew Brook racing down the hill to join her. Struggling desperately to catch her breath, while wondering anxiously where Archie had disappeared to, she hurried on towards the riverbank to see if any of the animals had gone into the water. Andrew got there first and she saw him stooping down in the mud over something, whistling for his sheepdog. One of the sheep had got hurt in the commotion, she assumed, hurrying down to join him.

‘I’m so sorry, Lizzie. He’s hurt. He was too little to handle them in a panic like that,’ Andrew told her.

Lizzie looked down in horror at the small prone body lying in the mud: it was Archie and he was whimpering. She knelt in the mud. ‘Oh, no...’

‘I think it’s only his leg that’s broken but there could be internal injuries. He was trodden on,’ Andrew, a stocky dark-haired man in his late twenties, reminded her.

‘That crazy helicopter pilot! Are people insane?’ Lizzie gasped, stricken, while Andrew, always resourceful, broke a small branch off a nearby tree, cut it to size with the knife in his pocket and splinted it to Archie’s leg, wrapping it in place with twine.

‘Nobody should land in a field with animals in it,’ Andrew agreed. As Lizzie comforted her pet with a trembling hand he unfurled his mobile phone. ‘We’d better get him to the vet. I’ll ring ahead to warn Danny.’

Andrew’s dog had retrieved the sheep and on the walk back uphill they were returned to the field from which they had fled. Lizzie was in shock and wildly dishevelled by the breakneck pace of her downhill marathon, sweat breaking on her brow, tears trickling down her cheeks as she held Archie’s small, shivering body as gently as she could to her chest. Back in the yard, Lizzie went straight to the Land Rover and settled Archie on the front passenger seat.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Andrew announced. ‘I know how you feel about that daft dog.’

‘Thanks but I can manage,’ Lizzie assured him with a warm smile that acknowledged how comfortable she could still feel with her former boyfriend.

‘That’s the ex-fiancé—Andrew Brook, our neighbour,’ Brian Whitaker informed Cesare, who was stationed beside him outside the back door of the cottage. ‘They grew up together. I always thought they’d make a match of it but then he met Esther and married her instead.’

Cesare told himself that he had no desire for that information. He was already irritated that Lizzie hadn’t been waiting to greet him—didn’t she appreciate what a busy man he was? Now watching her smile beguilingly up at her ex-boyfriend, who was an attractive, stalwart six-footer, he was even less impressed. When she looked at the other man like that and squeezed his arm with easy intimacy it made him wonder why they had broken up and that dart of inappropriate curiosity set his even white teeth on edge, sending another wave of annoyance crashing through him.

‘Lizzie!’ her father called as Andrew strode back home across the couple of fields that separated their properties.

Lizzie turned her head and focused in bewilderment on the tall, darkly handsome male poised by her father’s side. Her heartbeat suddenly thudded like a crack of doom in her ears and her throat tightened. Sheathed in an immaculate grey pinstripe business suit worn with a white shirt and scarlet tie, Cesare looked very much at odds with his surroundings but he still contrived to take her breath away and leave her mind briefly as blank as white paper. ‘Good grief, when did you arrive? I didn’t see a car.’

‘I came in a helicopter...’

Lizzie, the Land Rover keys clenched tightly in one hand, froze. She blinked in fleeting bewilderment and then headed towards Cesare in a sudden movement, rage boiling up through the cracks of anxiety and concern for her dog and her flock. ‘You’re the bloody idiot who let a helicopter land in a field full of stock?’ she raked at him incredulously.

In all his life, nobody had ever addressed Cesare with such insolence. A faint frown line etched between his ebony brows, he stared at her as if he couldn’t quite believe his ears. Indeed he was much more concerned with the reality that, in spite of her awareness of his visit, his bride-to-be still looked as though she had strayed in from a hostel for the homeless. A streak of dirt marred one cheekbone and her clothes were caked in mud and displaying damp patches. But when he glanced higher and saw the luminous colour in her cheeks that accentuated her hazel-green eyes and the contrast of that tumbling mane of admittedly messy white-blonde hair, he registered in some astonishment that even had she been wearing a bin liner it would not have dampened her physical appeal on his terms. His usual high standards, it seemed, were slipping.

‘What’s the problem?’ Cesare enquired with perfect cool, reasoning that some sort of cultural misunderstanding could have provoked her sudden aggressive outburst.

‘The problem is...’

‘Don’t shout at me,’ Cesare sliced in softly. ‘I am not hard of hearing.’

‘Your pilot landed that helicopter in a field full of sheep...and he should be shot for it!’ Lizzie framed rawly. ‘They were so terrified they fled. All of them are pregnant, only days off lambing. If any of them miscarry after that crazed stampede, I’ll be holding you responsible!’