Page 14 of The Italian's Bride On Paper

‘You just want to control everything.’

Samuele sketched a thin-lipped smile that he knew didn’t reach his eyes. At that moment he’d settle for controlling his own baser urges, which at that moment... He shook his head slightly and thought,Better not to go there.The main thing was that hewasin control.

‘You really have swallowed Violetta’s fiction hook, line and sinker, haven’t you?’

‘I haven’t swallowed anything!’ she fired back. ‘I’m not some sort of gullible idiot—though I can see that it would suit you if I were!’

He didn’t react immediately to her claim...there seemed little point. As he studied her face it was obvious she believed everything she was saying. His frustration levels threatened to bubble through his enforced calm.

He’d thought that he’d mentally prepared for every scenario he might face to get Mattio back, but in all of those he’d been dealing with Violetta, a known quantity.

This woman was definitelynota known quantity; in fact, she was the biggest unknown quantity that he had encountered—ever. A woman who looked as she did but made no conscious effort to use her allure was a mystery to him. She could bewitch a man with a flutter of her eyelashes if she wanted to, but all she did was try and batter him into submission with her totally flawed logic and stubborn arguments.

If he didn’t have more important things on his mind, he might have been tempted to find out more about her, against his better judgement, though instinct told him that Maya Monk came with serious complications and possibly not the ones that he was armoured against. All the same, she was intriguing and quite incredibly beautiful.

How was it possible to want to taste a woman and at the same time want to...? He shook his head, despairing that anyone could be so wilfully stupid. This would have been a hell of a lot easier if shehadn’tbelieved everything she was saying, and the fact he had not detected the sort of artifice he always expected from a beautiful woman made him uneasy.

His unease deepened when without warning a Eureka smile spread across her face.

‘What about Violetta’s mother? Could she come and look after Mattio until Violetta gets back?’ Maya knew it was a compromise but maybe one that he might accept. ‘What...why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Your mother too, if I’m understanding your relationship correctly.’

‘We’re not in contact. Olivia has her own family.’ Some of it was in her spare bedroom. ‘And I have mine.’ What would she not have given for her mum or sister to be in the same time zone right now?

If they had been, they would be here in this room offering her back-up and some much-needed baby advice.

‘It’s tough being rejected.’

She flinched, really disliking his ability to wander around inside her head. ‘I’m not a victim. I was adopted as a baby, and, I told you, I have my own family now.’

‘Olivia died six months ago.’

CHAPTER THREE

ITWASLIKEwatching the life story of a flower in time-lapse photography on a natural history programme; blooming, fading and shrivelling in mere seconds.

It was irrational, but he felt as guilty as hell for killing her hope.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know that.’

Shewas apologising tohim? ‘There’s no need to be sorry, she was nothing to me.’ From what Samuele had seen Olivia was a vain, selfish woman who had passed on all those delightful qualities to her daughter.

‘Oh...no...me neither, I suppose... I mean, I didn’t really know her either. How—?’ she began and then stopped.

‘She didn’t suffer, did she?’

Samuele only knew the bare clinical facts, namely that Olivia had died after complications from a botched cosmetic surgery. He opened his mouth to share these when he met her anxious eyes and paused.

‘No, she didn’t,’ he heard himself say.

Samuele caught a look of relief on her face before she tipped her head in acknowledgement, and her expression was concealed by her wild mass of dark hair as she lowered her head.

So this was what lying to make someone feel better felt like—a novel experience but not one that he was likely to repeat any time soon.

‘So this was something yoursisterclearly didn’t share with you before she dumped her kid on you.’

Maya sighed. ‘She was upset, and she probably assumed I already knew.’ Even as she gave voice to the excuse Maya was thinking of the occasions that that there had been for her half-sister to tell her that their mother had died. ‘She was desperate.’ She felt ashamed of the doubt that she struggled to conceal but could hear in her own voice.

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