Page 12 of My Fake Italian Marriage

Cleo laughed, mood restored. “There’s a lot of backlog here that needs to be caught up, but I think I can manage a day off.”

After the call, Cleo studied the clothing she’d hung in the closet and wondered what would be suitable to wear to dinner in a house as fancy as this. She settled on a floral halter-neck dress, then headed into the adjacent bathroom for a shower. The bathroom was the biggest perk of this palatial home. At Sarah’s, where the pipes groaned, the tap water sometimes flowed at a trickle, and the water temperature could go from hot to icy cold between one breath and the next, showers were kept short and sweet. But this high-tech shower had temperature control, multiple body sprays and even a rain-shower head. Cleo luxuriated beneath the spray, letting the pulsating warmth of the water soak away her tensions.

By the time she descended to the Blue Salon, she was as composed and ready as she would ever be. This was her super power, after all; she was good at meeting people and winning them over, good at schmoozing and fitting in wherever she went. She could do this.

Luca was alone in the room. He lounged in an armchair, a bright-orange cocktail in one hand, and a book in the other. He still wore his navy tailored pants and collared, white shirt, but he’d removed his jacket and loosened his collar, and from his damp hair she guessed he’d showered too.

He looked up as she entered, eyes crinkling in appreciation as his gaze swept up from her bare legs, over the curves of her bold, blue-green dress, to finally look her in the face. A dimple winked in his cheek as he smiled.

“Would you like a drink?” He unfolded himself from the armchair, his movements easy and graceful.

“What are you drinking?”

“Aperol Spritz. Aperol and Prosecco with a dash of soda.”

Just what the doctor ordered. She nodded and moved to sit on the furthest end of the sofa from where he’d sat.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” he said with another eye-crinkling grin as he brought her a glass. “I don’t bite. Not unless you ask.”

Don’t eye-roll. Don’t eye-roll.“No, you treat women like playthings for your own amusement.” There. She’d done it. She hadn’t eye-rolled.

Luca laughed, and sat on the sofa beside her, thankfully keeping a polite distance between them. “Is that what your friend Sarah told you?”

“Not exactly. She told me you’re a player who doesn’t take women seriously.” Which amounted to the same thing.

“I take womenveryseriously. It’s limiting myself to only one that I don’t take seriously. With so many beautiful and interesting women in the world, why choose just one?” He grinned and the dimple flashed again. It was terribly distracting.

“You’ve got to be … what … almost forty? Doesn’t the Peter Pan act get creepy at that age? Don’t you want someone to grow old with?”

He shrugged. “You sound like my mother. And the answers to your questions are: thirty-seven, no, and no.”

She was saved from having to think of a retort by the opening of the door as Signora Fioravanti wheeled her husband into the room. They were both dressed as if for an evening cocktail party, and in her simple polyester dress, Cleo felt woefully under-dressed.

Luca moved to the cocktail cabinet and poured two more drinks, then returned to sit on the sofa beside Cleo, his arm slung casually along the sofa’s back, close enough for her to feel sparks against her neck. Tempted as she was to shift away, there was nowhere else to go.

They made polite, stilted conversation as they sipped their pre-dinner drinks, the orange liqueur bitter-sweet on her tongue. When Pierina announced that dinner was ready, Cleo welcomed the interruption, but again her relief was short-lived.

Dinner wasn’t served in the intimate private dining room Luca had shown her, but in the formal dining room, at one end of a vast, gleaming wooden table designed to seat at least twenty. The glassware and cutlery looked antique, the plates were the finest porcelain, as if they’d pulled out all the stops to impress, to show her who they were, to remind her that she didn’t fit in here. The déjà vu was overwhelming.

Once before she’d endured a dinner like this, and that evening had certainly not ended well. It had up-ended her entire life.

If she didn’t already know they had invited her under sufferance, it was evident from the fact that neither Signore nor Signora Fioravanti invited her to use their first names, nor did they make much effort to get to know her. Her attempt to talk about the vineyard was repulsed with a frown from Signora Fioravanti and a curt “We do not discuss either business or politics at the dinner table.”

It was left to Luca to keep the conversation flowing between his reluctant parents on one side and an even more reluctant Cleo on his other. She almost felt sorry for him.

At least the food and wine were sublime. A platter of antipasti, then a course of thin minestrone soup, followed by lamb cutlets in a rosemary sauce served with roasted vegetables. No carbs at all, and the rust-red wine that accompanied the meal eased some of her tension.

“This is a Tignanello, an award-winning Super Tuscan wine.” Luca held up his glass, and the wine shone purple in the light. “It is made with the same Sangiovese grapes we grow here. In Latin,sanguis Jovismeans the blood of Jupiter, the king of the gods.”

Had Evan ever likened wine to the blood of the gods, she’d have thought him pretentious, but Luca sounded so earnest and reverential—or maybe it was his delectable Italian accent that made the words sound like poetry.

Signora Fioravanti remained stiff-backed and dignified throughout the meal, but her husband could not hide his increasing tiredness. They remained seated until the after-dinner coffees had been served by the young, uniformed maid who blushed whenever Luca addressed her. He seemed not to notice, no doubt inured to women blushing in his presence. Just like Evan.

It was Luca who finally insisted his father needed to rest, and summoned the male nurse who’d been hovering for some time. Luca earned a withering glance from both his parents but won the battle, and the nurse wheeled Giovanni from the room.

“It is early still. You will show Ms. Arendse the garden,” his father commanded as they exited, pinning Luca with a look that needed no translation. It said:do your thing.

What did his father want him to do? Get her to look the other way while the vineyard plunged into bankruptcy?

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