Page 4 of My Fake Italian Marriage

Cleo craned her neck to see which team had scored. “There are some compromises worth making and some that aren’t,” she said distractedly. “Since I’m already perfectly happy on my own, why would I want to settle for anything less than the full trifecta?”

Unsurprisingly, it was Queen’s Park who’d scored the goal. The other team didn’t stand a chance.

“Maybe you’re just too fussy,” Moira suggested.

Cleo’s mother said that too: if she lowered her standards, she wouldn’t be lonely.

But Cleo wasn’t lonely or unfulfilled or any of those things single women were supposed to be. She had friends, a supportive family, and a great career. Why disturb such a good, contented life for anything less than an improvement on what she already had?

Nope, she didn’t need a man or a second-rate relationship to be happy, and she certainly didn’t think her expectations were too high. Sarah had found her perfect trifecta in Tommaso, so it was possible. Rare, but possible. “Until a man can make me happier than a Belgian waffle topped with fresh strawberries and mascarpone, I’m fine as I am.” Cleo brought her attention back to her friend. “What’s brought on all this talk tonight? I thought you agreed that it was better to be single and free than trapped in a bad relationship?”

Of their little friend group that had stuck together since their uni days, it was Moira who’d had the longest relationship, and it had ended badly enough that she’d been put off dating for years after her divorce. She’d only recently begun to dip her toes back in the dating pool.

“Just thinking…” Moira downed the dregs of her lager-and-lime and set her glass down on the sticky veneer tabletop. “Let’s go home. There’s a tub of Haagen-Dazs in the freezer calling my name.”

ChapterThree

L’abito non fa il monaco.

(The clothes do not make the man.)

Cleo breathed in deeply, then wished she hadn’t. Despite how early it was in the season, the sweet tang of grapes tainted the rich, earthy air. It smelled like home, but with the scent came a rush of bitter-sweet memories, making her feel like an awed schoolgirl again. Or maybe it wasn’t so much the air, as the imposing house rising above her, made all the more imposing by the fact that it summited a hill, crowning a series of terraces with the most manicured gardens she’d ever seen. It must take a team of gardeners to maintain this perfection. The coat of arms on the massive wrought iron gates at the end of the very long drive should have warned her what to expect. She was tempted to ask the taxi driver to put her suitcase back in the car and take her away again.

It would have been less scary if this house was like the crumbling farmhouse where Sarah lived on the neighbouring farm. Had it been, she wouldn’t have been so tempted to run as far and as fast as her navy suede heels could carry her. But this was no homely stone farmhouse—more like one of those grand Florentine villas she’d seen on bus tours, the kind of place where a woman who wore Manolos would feel at home. Cleo was more Next than Manolo.

She looked up. And up. Three elegant and intimidating storeys plastered in buttercup yellow, topped by a low-sloping, terracotta-tiled roof.

She rolled back her shoulders, forced the butterflies in her stomach to quit dancing, and made herself smile. This was irrational. She wasn’t that awkward, barefoot, easily impressed farm girl any more. She was a competent, successful business analyst, a grown woman, here to do a job and nothing more. It was high time she outgrew those old hang-ups.

Abandoning her over-sized suitcase on the bottom-most step, ready for a – hopefully quick – exit, she climbed the stairs to the front entrance. She couldn’t find a doorbell, only a massive bronze knocker shaped like a lion’s head, which echoed, startlingly loud, within the house.

She fully expected the door to be answered by a uniformed butler. The woman who answered the door, however, set her butterflies at ease. She reminded Cleo of her own mother: comfortingly plump, with dark curly hair slowly turning to white.

“Sì?” the woman asked.

“I’m Cleo, from Crown Venture Capital. You’re expecting me?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, as if she’d announced she was a door-to-door cosmetics salesman. Did the woman understand English? Cleo hoped so. Her language lesson app hadn’t prepared her for much more than conjugating verbs and ordering chocolate cake; both valuable skills but ones she hoped never to put to the test. “The investment bank,” she added with a bright smile.Think positively.

The woman cracked the door open wider, and Cleo breathed a sigh of relief.

Taking the open door as an invitation, she stepped into the hallway, a double volume space with a floor of black and white chequered marble and a wide double staircase sweeping upstairs to a gallery. “I’m here to meet with your husband.”

“In soggiorno.” The woman turned away, heading across the vast marble floor to a set of double doors. Cleo followed.

The woman opened one of the doors, and stood aside for Cleo to pass into the room beyond. “Aspetti un momento, per favore.”

Left alone, Cleo wandered the room. Too formal and unlived-in to be called a living room, it had a patterned parquet floor, tall windows overlooking the manicured gardens, and a glittering chandelier overhead. Carved into the marble hearth was the same coat of arms that had been displayed on the imposing gates. The room was decorated in tones of off-white, the only contrast in the sterile room a grand piano at the far end. She suspected its purpose was entirely decorative. Its gleaming ebony lid displayed a dozen framed photographs which looked like the posed portraits found in magazines, rather than family snapshots; a tall, stately man shaking hands with a number of important-looking people, and a few of the same man posed with a beautiful, smartly dressed woman who was most certainly not the motherly woman who’d opened the front door.

Only one photograph stood out from the others, of a dark-haired man hot enough to grace the cover ofGQ. Not that Cleo read many men’s magazines, but she knew the type all too well: good-looking, urbane, moneyed, and entitled. Exactly the kind of man she’d fallen for enough times in the past to have learned her lesson.

It didn’t take much to guess that this was Luca Fioravanti, the son and heir. Cleo had heard enough about him from Sarah to know that she should stay very, very far away from him. Thank heavens this was an in-and-out visit, and she wouldn’t have to put her new-found abstention from men like him to the test.

She was still frowning at Luca’s picture when the door opened. Both doors this time. The posh woman from the photographs entered, pushing a wheelchair. She looked older and haughtier than in the pictures, her thick dark hair styled into an updo with not a hair out of place. It took Cleo a moment to recognise the sallow, gaunt man in the wheelchair as the same tall, stately man in the photographs. Giovanni Fioravanti, owner of the vineyard.

“We did not expect you so soon.” The woman wheeled her husband into the room and shut the doors behind her.

She spoke in English, and Cleo smiled with relief. “I came straight from the airport.”

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