Page 13 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

Did that mean he was about to subject himself to the wild fantasy which had been hovering on the edges of his mind ever since? Of Kelly Butler with her hands all wet and gleaming, bending over a bucket of soapy water, those pert buttocks tight and clenched as she moved to and fro with her scrubbing brush.

His throat dried.

Had he been insane?

Very probably.

But the fact remained that he now had a problem and he needed to work out how best to deal with it.

As she walked towards the font behind his sister, he attempted to judge her negatively—not a big ask since she stood out from every other woman in the small church. The handful of Floriana’s friends who had been invited were wearing quietly expensive designer outfits, as befitted a small christening for a member of one of Italy’s premier families. But not Kelly Butler. Her diaphanous dress was splashed with a meadow of flowers—the delicate fabric falling almost to the ground, just above narrow ankles, which were clad in soft-buttoned leather boots. Her jacket was leather, too—nipped in at the waist as if to emphasise the gentle curve of her hips. Her hair was a blaze of fire, tumbling in fiery curls all the way down her back, two waterfalls of silver streaming from her tiny ears. What she wore was completely inappropriate for the occasion and yet…

‘Hello, Romano,’ she said sweetly as she reached him.

‘Kelly,’ he responded curtly, with a brief nod of his head.

‘My last few moments of freedom before I have to start calling you boss,’ she whispered.

Romano’s gaze remained fixed ahead as he deliberately declined to answer and waited for the priest to begin the service. He felt a tug on his jacket and looked down as his nephew, Rocco, held up a tiny toy car—a replica of the one made in Romano’s own factory. The boy fixed him with a gap-toothed grin as he mimed the vehicle travelling at speed along the top of the pew but Romano gave a brief shake of his head, noting the boy’s look of disappointment as he let his hand fall. Had Floriana taught her son nothing? he wondered censoriously. He might wish he were anywhere else but here, but he was a stickler for tradition. Hadn’t the child been instructed never to play inside a church?

And why was Kelly glaring at him like that as she smoothed the ruffled hair of the little boy?

His sister turned to him, cradling the infant in her arms. ‘Would you like to hold Allegra?’ she whispered, but he shook his head, ignoring the faint look of hurt which crossed her dark eyes.

Would it shock her to know that he had never held a baby?

That he had neverwantedto hold a baby.

‘I will,’ said Kelly, with another wordless look in his direction.

Unwillingly Romano’s gaze was captured as she carefully took the infant, who promptly began to whimper. But instead of handing her straight back to her mother, Kelly held out her little finger for Allegra to suck and the baby latched onto it immediately. It was an instinctive gesture—though what did he know?—which somehow didn’t seem to fit well with his racy image of her. At that moment she more resembled a famous painting he had once seen of the Madonna—serene and oh-so-soft rather than an all-night party queen. As the child quietened with an ecstatic little bleat, Romano felt the inexplicable clench of something unfamiliar inside his chest. Suddenly he was finding it difficult to concentrate. To breathe.

And he didn’t know why.

The swell of music momentarily distracted him and he forced himself to join in with the responses, but he was glad when the service ended and he could escape, emerging into the spring dusk and sucking in a lungful of mountain air in an attempt to clear his head. A line of cars was waiting to take them back to thecastello, but he stood back until everyone else had departed, ensuring that he travelled without company. Alone at last in the limousine, he stared out of the window at the pale indigo of the darkening sky—perplexed and irritated to find himself still thinking about Kelly Butler.

Back at the castle, where servants were carrying trays of champagne and canapés to the gathered groups of guests, he saw a temporary escape route. Quickly excusing himself, he went upstairs to his office, citing the need to telephone a colleague in Sydney and ignoring the look of frustration on his half-sister’s face. But the call went on longer than he’d intended. Or maybe he had deliberately prolonged it. Because when he came back downstairs, it was to find everyone standing in small groups, chatting amicably and—much too late now, of course—he wondered if he could have got away with a total no-show.

But he knew what was expected of him and how best to deliver it and the eager expressions which greeted his arrival made it obvious that, in a sense, they had all been waiting for him. He gave a mirthless smile. No surprise there. It happened all the time. It was one of the drawbacks of being a billionaire. Of being a ‘money magnet’, as his good friend Javier Estrada always put it. It was why some of his peers used permanent bodyguards, though he could never have tolerated such an incursion into his privacy. With a skill born of endless practice he was able to adapt, chameleon-like, to any given situation—and at a rare family gathering like this, it was always best to adopt a low-key demeanour and attempt to blend in.

So he moved from group to group, exchanging pleasantries as he sipped from a glass of vintage champagne, graciously receiving compliments about the castle, the garden and the quality of the wine as he batted away the intrusive questions he had already anticipated.

Yet all the time he was aware of one person who dominated the periphery of his vision. Infuriatingly, his sole focus. Kelly Butler was at the far end of the room in her inappropriate dress and bright earrings, yet he was having to work very hard not to turn his head to stare and drink in her beauty. Suddenly he wondered how the hell he was going to get through the next few days, when the thought of being alone with her for an entire week was stretching before him with unendurable provocation.

But he couldn’t keep avoiding her.

There was surely only one way to get her out of his system—and if he couldn’t have sex with her, then the solution was to talk to her as much as possible, because didn’t all women have limitations when it came to conversation? A wry smile curved his lips. In his experience, even highly educated career women were notoriously predictable when they chatted. A few seconds in his company and all they could do was flirt and portray themselves as ideal wife material, which bored the pants off him. There was, of course, one exception to the rule. She may have consistently annoyed the hell out of him but nobody could ever have accused Kelly Butler of being boring.

He walked across the room to where she stood in her floaty dress, nursing a glass of orange juice.

‘Having a good time?’ he enquired conventionally.

The look she directed at him was unfathomable. ‘I was.’

‘Try not to be too combative, Kelly,’ he murmured. ‘It will make lines appear on your forehead.’

‘I suppose all your girlfriends have them Botoxed out?’

He shrugged. ‘I really wouldn’t know.’

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