Page 3 of Fiancée for the Cameras

He leaned back in the car, gritting his teeth, and found his mind drifting to Ms. D’Souza. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like such a chore to rescue her from the clutches of the rogue. At least with her, Andrea knew there was no honeyed trap, no sweet nudges toward the altar. Nothing but painfully naive honesty packaged in a goddess’s body.

Monica flipped through the few contacts on her phone, holding up the train of her dress high off the ground, even as she felt a slow, relentless burning across the skin of her upper back.

After calling Francesco a few more times and finding it going straight to voice mail, she’d just been standing there feeling lost. Unraveled. Facing the very real truth of her situation—she had nowhere to go.

After plucking her water bottle out of her bag, she took the last sip and pressed the cool metal to her cheek. She wanted to rip the dress off her skin and jump into the fountain herself. Drench herself from head to foot in the cool water. Wash off this nasty day. Would anyone stop her? Was the last event on this crazy day to be arrested for public indecency in Milan of all places?

Letting the hem fall to the ground, she peeked over her shoulder to see why the skin on her back felt like someone had lit up a matchstick and pressed it unrelentingly against it.

She couldn’t see much. Blinking, feeling a strange nausea well up at the back of her throat, she frowned. It was summer in Milan, so yes, it was hot. But she’d never felt this...scorching sensation on her skin before, nor this lightheadedness. Something was wrong.

There was only one person she could call, only one person who had been unflinchingly kind to her for close to four years now. Mrs. Valentini would welcome her with open arms, and yet, Monica felt the strangest reluctance. Everything Flora knew, her older son would be made aware of. The thought of Andrea Valentini finding out what a pathetic mess she was made the scorching burn on her back feel like a cool glaze.

Suddenly, a very familiar Bugatti with tinted windows came into view at the end of the street and Monica stiffened. Any doubt she might have had turned into dust when the chauffeur parked the car right in front of the huge steps leading to the Palazzo Reale, uncaring of whom he was blocking.

As if his boss belonged there.

Because he did.

And Monica knew that her nightmare had one last cringeworthy humiliation to deliver. Her day wasn’t over yet.

CHAPTER TWO

SHESHOULDHAVElooked pathetic.

If Andrea was honest with himself, she did, a little. But standing on those steps, with people watching her and mocking her, in that ghastly overpuffed, overlaced, frothy concoction that someone like Chiara wouldn’t let a staff member wear in her household, Ms. D’Souza also looked brave. As if she’d entered a battle and lost it spectacularly, and yet somehow remained full of that fierce little heart he had never seen in anyone else.

He should have sent his chauffeur, Pascale, to pick her up, throw her over his shoulder if she offered her useless, prideful resistance and dump her inside the car and speed off, so that he could leave her piteous...situation in Mama’s capable, caring hands.

But a little something went off track—a little blip in the fold of the universe, as his brother was fond of saying—and Andrea decided to get out of the car and pick up the wretched baggage himself.

That little lift of her chin as Monica’s catlike golden eyes met his when he lowered the tinted window—even as her hands trembled at her sides, even as her face looked like it was made of myriad shades of red and brown and gold with a little green around her mouth thrown in for good measure, even as she looked like a jilted bride who had crawled out of some haunted mansion in a cheap gothic novel—was the thing that provoked some base instinct that Andrea had never known existed in him.

He raised a hand to his chauffeur to turn the car around on the busy junction, aware that they were already attracting attention. Usually, he hated spectacles like this. He was a well-known figure in Milan and his face was the one that had turned a small leather goods company into his current billion-dollar machine that had resuscitated a sinking economy on its last breath. Flexing his power and prestige and connections in this way had never been his style.

But something egged him on and he didn’t even calculate the risk like he usually did when he encountered such a situation.

He finally reached his assistant and felt a sharp spike of awareness as she looked down at him from a few steps above. Whatever hairstyle she’d started the day with had unraveled, leaving her silky brown waterfall of hair falling to her waist. Her skin was flushed and blotched at the same time, as if she’d been trekking in the sun without water for too long. Her lips were chapped and she kept licking them.

Even with the overdone lace puffs at her shoulders and too much lace fluttering at her neckline, the bodice paid homage to her high breasts and then nipped tightly at her tiny waist. How she had managed to find a dress that fell too far to the ground when she was so tall, Andrea would never know. His leisurely traversing revealed a tear at the hem and one at the waistline, as if she had pulled and torn at the dress to get it away from her body.

But what alarmed Andrea when he would have otherwise found the whole thing comically tragic was the reddish flush to her cheeks, her neck and the skin beneath. And the way she couldn’t seem to stop trembling.

She looked like she was unraveling, providing a spectacle for bored tourists and Milanese alike.

The stubborn tilt of her chin was gone. Had he imagined it, the little flicker of bravery? Was she that same lost little lamb who gave foolishly and generously of herself to one and all?

“Come, let’s go,” he said when he reached her, employing his usual brisk tone, hoping to devolve whatever emotionaloutburst was building inside the woman like a damn geyser. The last thing he wanted was to be near her when it erupted.

Have a little care, Andrea. She’s twenty-three years old, years younger than you in age and experience and she just got dumped.

Suitably chastened, as if Papa were standing next to him and speaking those words, Andrea extended a hand toward her. “There is no point in lingering here, Ms. D’Souza.”

“I can’t, Mr. Valentini,” she said, her usually husky voice paper-thin. “At least not until I get this thing off me.”

Andrea frowned. He tried,tried his best, to modulate his tone but he was now regretting the impulse of getting out of his car at all. This had disaster written all over it, for her and him. “You’re very well aware of how much I loathe public scenes, Ms. D’Souza. It is bad enough that Mama wouldn’t leave me alone until I picked you up here and delivered you to her care. Bad enough that I had to come here all the way from Mr. Brunetti’s estate at the outskirts of the city. You’re also well aware how busy this week has been at work and how much your leave today has inconvenienced me already. Enough with your—”

“All I need is that Swiss blade you keep on yourself all the time,” she said, eyes not only watering but also shedding tears, which were running tracks down her cheeks and into the grooves of her delicate clavicle.

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