Page 30 of Expecting His Billion-Dollar Scandal
However, any such description wasn’t going to do, he’d acknowledged, because his father truly thought that at long last his hard-nosed son had traded his head for his heart, and Luca had been strangely reluctant to disillusion him on that front.
‘It’s like me and your mother,’ Giovanni Baresi had murmured in a trembling, emotional voice down the end of the phone line. ‘Same part of the world, even. Oh, my dear, dear son...’
Luca had found it astonishing that, after the many conversations they had had over the years on the subject of relationships and Luca’s outspoken disapproval of his father’s antics, his father could still be swept away on a tide of emotion at the unrealistic assumption that his son had somehow managed to dispatch his brain on a long-distance holiday, leaving him vulnerable to the one thing he had always declared he didn’t believe in.
Having allowed his father to think the wildly improbable, he had had to go with the flow. Likewise, for better or for worse, Isabella and her parents also nurtured thoughts of a love match. Isabella should have known better, considering they had discussed the suitability of a marriage of convenience, but there you had it.
Luca sighed and glanced at his watch.
Who believed what didn’t matter anyway, so dwelling on it was a waste of time.
She was late.
He dialled her number and opened, without hesitation, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cordelia responded breathlessly. Sitting in the back seat of Luca’s plush four-wheel drive, she could barely take in the splendid sights bypassing them as his driver whizzed along the deserted roads. Her head was moving left to right, her senses darting frantically so that she didn’t miss a thing. ‘I’m afraid I asked your driver to pull over a couple of times...well, maybe more than a couple, actually...’
‘You were sick? Is there a problem?’ Luca jerked into an upright position and wondered whether to video call her instead of talking down the end of a phone. So much more could be deciphered from looking at someone and Cordelia was certainly one of those people whose faces were as transparent as a sheet of glass. She wasn’t the complaining sort but was there some kind of medical problem happening? He wondered how fast he could get his consultant over to his house.
‘Oh, no,’ Cordelia responded airily. ‘It’s just that the scenery is so breathtaking that I wanted to take some pics on my phone.’
Luca sagged with relief, then he clicked his tongue impatiently.
‘My PA has set up appointments with the couturier,’ he drawled.
‘You never said.’
‘I didn’t think you would waste time stopping on the way for Kodak moments.’
‘I still don’t understand why I have to...have a change of wardrobe, Luca.’
‘You’re marrying me,cara. You will be entering a world that’s far removed from the one you have always been accustomed to. It is just a question of assimilation.’
Cordelia didn’t say anything. She had made her decision and she knew that he had a point. She could no longer hang around in jeans and tee shirts because she was no longer going to be living the life she had always lived. Close to the sea, barefoot on a beach, interacting with people who built lives around the ocean. She had dreamed of faraway adventure and now she had got what she’d always wanted, but that dream came at a price and it was too late to start quibbling about how high or low that price should be.
At least when she had earlier spoken to her dad, he hadn’t sounded as anxious as she’d expected.
Lord knew, his anxiety levels would shoot through the roof when she broke the news to him about the pregnancy, but that was a bridge she was happy to cross a bit later.
She could only hope that Doris would keep quiet, but there was nothing she could do about that.
She resisted the urge to make Luca’s driver stop again when they entered the city because it was so unimaginably beautiful.
The colours of sand and taupe, buildings that seemed to be carved from the earth, ornate, majestic and breathing an ancient history.
It felt as though, literally, she was entering a different world. She wanted to hop out of the car and begin exploring immediately. Instead, she poked her head through the window and tried hard to take it all in.
Regrettably, they were at the designated meeting spot all too soon for Cordelia’s liking.
She tipped into the most amazing open space, a fan-shaped central square ringed by ancient medieval buildings with the occasional modern shop front as a token nod to the twenty-first century. A thin bell tower dominated the vast circle of old buildings and she took a few seconds out to gaze at it.
Luca was sitting outside the café, the name of which he had texted her. He was lounging back in a pair of grey chinos, a white short-sleeved linen shirt and dark designer sunglasses that inconveniently concealed his expression as she walked towards him.
He looked the very essence of sophisticated and laid-back, with an elegance that only money could buy.
No wonder he wanted her out of her uniform of jeans as fast as possible, she thought. He might have found that charming in Cornwall but it was definitely off limits here in his rich life and all that that rich life entailed.
She had a twinge of doubt. Was this really her? She had agreed to marry a guy who didn’t love her. She had signed up to a life the rules of which she didn’t know. Then she thought of the baby inside her and swallowed back all her fears and misgivings. She had to settle in one camp and put the pull-push feelings away. She also had to stop hoping for the impossible.
