Page 13 of My Fake Italian Marriage

Luca rubbed his face before looking up with a smile. “Shall we take a walk, then?”

“Do you do everything your parents tell you to?” She couldn’t keep the derisive note from her voice.

“I try.” He grinned. “I find it much easier to go along with them than to fight.”

Like that other man long ago, who’d gone along with whatever his parents told him to do, including dumping the girl he’d asked to marry him. She drained the last of the wine from her glass. “I could do with a walk.” She held up a hand in warning. “But not because I want to do what your father says.”Or spend any more time than I have to with you.But she could use fresh air to clear her head and exercise to walk off the indulgent meal.

Luca rose and held her chair for her as she stood. That was one good thing she could say for men who came from old money: they had beautiful manners.

He led her out into the marble-floored hallway, which was low-lit now and echoed eerily, and down a wide corridor to the back of the house, where a pair of glass-paned wooden doors opened onto a terrace. Muted garden lanterns illuminated the narrow stretch of lawn edged by a balustrade of mellow grey stone. Below them, the hillside fell away in a series of tiered gardens, each landscaped in a different style. They walked side-by-side down a set of stone stairs into a formal parterre garden, an intricate pattern of gravel paths and low hedges around beds of fragrant lavender. Dotted at odd intervals were carefully shaped topiary, discreetly lit by yet more lanterns. Luca’s long legs easily matched the fast-paced stride she set, and he made no attempt to force a conversation.

Beneath that level lay another formal garden, in which statues of centaurs and satyrs, nymphs and harpies loomed out of the shadows of towering, clipped hedges. A stone arch led from the hedge maze to another set of stairs and a wide, neat lawn with a magnificent fountain at its centre, this terrace edged with fragrant lemon trees.

Beyond the line of trees, the moonlight picked out rows and rows of vines. Cleo paused, closing her eyes as she breathed in the cool night air. The heady lavender and lemon scents added a foreign element to the night, but she’d recognise the aroma of a vineyard anywhere. She closed her eyes against a sudden flood of memories, of hot sun on her shoulders, of running barefoot between the vines with her brothers and cousins, of working alongside the labourers at harvest time, of following her father as he pruned, planted, tasted, mulched the vines. He’d loved that vineyard as if it were his own, even though he’d been nothing more than the hired help.

And she’d cost him that. When she’d left for university in England, she’d left behind a ripple effect of unease that eventually led to her family moving to England too. These days, even though he now owned the land he worked, her father grew prosaic vegetables. It was a job, not a passion. He’d left his heart behind in the soil of Africa, just as she had.

She didn’t usually dwell on the past, tended to live in the moment, but here the memories crowded in on her.

“What do you smell?” Luca’s soft voice made her jump.

Home, she wanted to say. And family. Instead, she faced him and said, “Hard work.”

He grinned and nodded. “You won’t smell this clean air in the big city. Do you still visit the wine farm where you grew up?”

She avoided answering his question by resuming her fast-paced walk along a paved pathway so that Luca had to hurry to catch her up. She cast a sideways glance at him. “Your parents don’t like me much.”

“It’s not that they don’t like you. They’re afraid of you.”

She laughed. “I’m not scary.”

“They’re afraid that your bank will sell this farm out from under them. This estate has been in our family for generations, and we have grown wine here since before Napoleon’s time.”

“You can thank my friend Sarah that we haven’t already sold up.”

He smiled, his teeth flashing white and perfectly even in the darkness. “I will remember to do so.”

At the far end of the terrace, beyond the row of lemon trees, lay a less formal garden. They passed through another stone arch into a rose garden, again laid out in beds separated by neat gravel paths, but these rose bushes were less tamed than the manicured box hedges of the more formal garden. There were no lanterns here, only bright white moonlight. Many of the bushes reached shoulder height, and they were in bud, their sweet scent delicately perfuming the air.

“This is my mother’s garden.” Luca’s voice perfectly matched his face, husky and seductive. He picked a pale pink rose from a bush and held it out to her. The gesture would have been romantic if it hadn’t echoed another long-ago gesture, the memory of which pulled Cleo’s stomach tight.

But she took the flower and breathed in its cloyingly sweet scent.

“She grows them for the scent.” His gaze fixed on her face. “None of those pretty but bland flowers the florist shops sell in bulk.”

They reached the end of the garden, where a fountain was hewn into the rocky hillside. Beside it, an arbour, barely bigger than the bench it sheltered, was overgrown with wild yellow roses.

“The Lovers’ Grotto,” Luca said.

She didn’t need to ask how the fountain had earned its name. Water splashed out of the rockface around a life-size marble statue of a man and a woman, gleaming white in the moonlight, their naked forms entwined in a kiss.

“The statue pre-dates the house by about a hundred years,” Luca explained. “It dates from the seventeenth century.”

She’d flirted with European history over the years, and read enough to know the basics. “That was the time of the Medicis, right? Has your family really been here that long?”

“The statue was brought here from Florence in the eighteenth century, when the Habsburg rulers who replaced the Medicis granted this land to one of my ancestors in gratitude for his service.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but Cleo swallowed. Wow. Even without a connection to the famed Medicis, his privilege and entitlement extended very far back.

In the seventeenth century, when his ancestors had no doubt been jockeying for power and influence at the Florentine court, her ancestors had been nothing more than a mongrel mix of Dutch settlers and Malayan slaves imported to work the land. They couldn’t be any more different if they tried.

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