CATHY WILLIAMS - The Italian's One-Night Love-Child

‘SO…TELL me about yourself…’

It was an inevitable question but it still made Bethany’s nerves jangle because after the initial crazy euphoria of wondering what it would be like to step into someone else’s shoes for a night had come the shattering reality that she was, in actual fact, going to spend a few hours in the company of a sex god under false pretences. Between Cristiano’s departure from the apartment and the sound of his voice four hours later on the intercom when he arrived to collect her, she had had ample time to concede that a man like him—sleek, sophisticated, extraordinarily handsome—would never have looked at a girl like her under normal circumstances. In fact, they would never even have met under normal circumstances.

Bethany, who had managed to fall back on most of her own clothes because leaving the house in someone else’s wardrobe seemed a bit rich, all things considered, wondered how best to answer his question.

She finally settled on a vague, nonsensical answer along the lines of being a free spirit.

‘What does that mean?’ Cristiano looked across at her. She intrigued him and he had found himself looking forward to their dinner more than he had looked forward to any date with a woman in a long time. Nor had she disappointed. When the elevator doors had pinged open and she had walked across the marbled foyer towards him, he had literally been stopped in his tracks. She might have had all the money she wanted at her disposal, but she had foregone the diamonds and pearls, the little black dress that screamed designer and the killer stilettos, and instead had dressed down in a pair of jeans and some flat tan loafers with a pale blue wrap over her shoulders. Cristiano liked it. It took a confident woman to go for comfort and it took a sexy one to pull it off.

‘What does that mean ?’ Bethany’s natural warmth came out in her smile. Now that she was talking and not just gawping like a star-struck teenager, she could begin to relax a little and to enjoy the stolen moment in time. ‘You sound like someone who’s spent a lifetime living in a bubble.’

‘Living in a bubble…’ Cristiano looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I suppose I did grow up in a bubble of sorts. Coming from a privileged background can have that effect. You’re naturally supposed to do certain things…’

Bethany could only imagine. ‘Like what?’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t experienced the same sort of thing. A certain lifestyle to which you conform, more or less, from an early age.’

Bethany thought of her own riotous Irish upbringing, the house always full of friends and family, boyfriends in and out, their two dogs and three cats and the general happy chaos that had made up her formative years. Conforming to anything from an early age was an alien concept.

‘I’m more of a non-conformist,’ she said truthfully. ‘I mean, I’m not a wild child or anything like that, but I was never told that I had to be a certain way or do certain things.’

‘Perhaps things work a little differently in your part of the world,’ Cristiano murmured. ‘Here, in Italy, I have always known what my future held in store for me.’ They had drifted outside into a balmy summer evening.

‘That must have been tough.’

‘Tough? Why?’ He was fascinated by the thought of any woman who could apply the adjective tough to any aspect of his life. Even the richest of women he had dated in the past had been impressed to death by the breadth of his power and privilege. ‘Since when is it tough to have the world at your disposal?’

‘No one has the world at their disposal!’ Bethany laughed, as they began walking slowly towards his car, which he had parked, he had explained, in the only free space at the very end of the long road.

‘You’d be surprised.’

Underneath the lazy, sexy timbre of his voice, she could detect the ruthless patina of a man accustomed to getting exactly what he wanted and she shivered. ‘You just think you have the world at your disposal because everyone around you is primed to agree with everything you say,’ she felt compelled to point out. ‘I think it must be one of the downfalls of having too much money…’

‘ Too much money? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that expression cross a woman’s lips.’ He was privately amused that someone of presumably substantial private means could wax lyrical about the pitfalls of wealth but it was refreshing, for once, to find himself in the company of a woman who seemed to have a social conscience.

Bethany decided that if he was a learning curve for her, then why shouldn’t she be a learning curve for him? What did she have to lose? She guessed instinctively that he wasn’t a man who had much experience when it came to having his opinions questioned. The way he had asked her out to dinner, refused to concede that she might turn him down, indicated someone whose belief in the whole world being at his disposal was absolute.

‘What type of women do you mix with?’ Bethany asked, fascinated beyond belief by the wildly exotic creature looking lazily at her. His eyes were as dark as molasses, fringed by the most ridiculously long lashes imaginable, and the way his dark hair curled against the collar of his shirt, a little too long to be entirely conventional but not so long that he looked unkempt, brought her out in goosebumps.

Cristiano laughed and reached out to curl one finger into a strand of her copper hair. ‘Always brunettes,’ he murmured, ‘although I’m beginning to wonder why. Is this the real colour of your hair?’

‘Of course it is!’ Excitement leapt inside her at his casual touch and her green eyes widened. ‘Not everyone gets their hair colour from a bottle!’

‘But quite a few do.’ Her hair felt like silk between his fingers.

‘So, in other words, you only go out with brunettes who dye their hair?’

‘They tend to have other characteristics aside from the dyed hair.’ He had an insane desire to yank her towards him and do what came naturally. Very unlike him. He reluctantly released the strands of hair and stood back just in case primitive instinct got the better of him. ‘Long legs. Exquisite faces. Right background.’

‘Right background?’

Cristiano shrugged. ‘It’s important,’ he admitted. ‘Life can be stressful enough without the added hassle of wondering whether the woman sharing your bed is more interested in your bank balance than in your company.’

Bethany’s stomach gave a nervous flutter but she was reassured by the fact that she knew she definitely wasn’t after his money. ‘Maybe you’re a little insecure.’

‘A little insecure?’ Cristiano looked at her with rampant incredulity. ‘No. Insecurity has never been a problem for me,’ he told her with satisfaction. ‘And please tell me that you aren’t going to spend the evening trying to analyse me.’

‘Where are we going to eat?’ Bethany changed the subject and when he named a restaurant which was as famous for its inflated prices as it was for the quality of its fare she gazed down at her jeans with dismay. Lesson one in how the super-rich operate. With a complete disregard for social convention. Cristiano clearly couldn’t care less whether she was dressed for an expensive night out or not. He, himself, was casually attired in a pair of dark trousers and a white shirt which would have looked average on any other man on the planet but which looked ridiculously sexy on him.

‘I’d rather not go there in a pair of jeans, flat shoes and a wrap,’ Bethany told him tersely. She also suspected that walking into a place like that on the arm of a man like him would make her the cynosure of all eyes and she had never enjoyed basking in the limelight, particularly now, when the limelight would have a very dubious tinge. And what if he introduced her to someone? The rarefied world of the rich and famous was notoriously small. In Rome, it was probably the size of a tennis ball. She would be revealed for the imposter she was in seconds flat.

‘You look…charming.’

‘Not charming enough to go to that particular restaurant.’ Bethany was feverishly cursing herself, yet again, for having succumbed to his invitation to dinner.

‘Don’t worry. I know the owner. Believe me when I tell you that he won’t mind if I bring along a woman dressed in a bin bag.’

‘Because you can get away with something doesn’t give you the right to go ahead and do it,’ Bethany said, making sense to herself though not to him if his expression of bemusement was anything to go by.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s important to have respect for other people,’ she told him, repeating the oft held mantra with which she and her sisters had grown up.

Cristiano was looking at her as though she was slowly mutating into a being from another planet and Bethany blushed uncomfortably. She was well aware that she was probably in the process of contravening yet another unspoken dictum of the unbelievably rich, namely that she shouldn’t be blushing like a kid.

‘A socialite with principles,’ he murmured with a slashing smile that made her breath catch in her throat and put paid to all her niggling qualms about what she was doing. ‘I like it. It’s rare in my world to meet a woman who’s prepared to be vocal about her beliefs…’ In truth, the women he went out with generally didn’t give a hoot about what happened outside their own orbits. They were rich, had led, for the most part, pampered lives and their birthright was to accept the adulation of males and the subservience of everyone else.

Not that they would ever have dreamt of setting one foot into Chez Nico unless they were dressed to kill. In actual fact, he doubted whether very many would have dreamt of going anywhere unless dressed to kill because appearance was all.

‘I’m not a socialite,’ Bethany said uncomfortably.

‘No? You just own a monstrously big apartment in the centre of Rome which you use as a holiday pad. You do fundraisers. You’re under thirty. Hate to tell you this, but that pretty much qualifies you as a socialite.’

‘I told you, things don’t work quite that way in…um…where I come from.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of it,’ Bethany told him truthfully. ‘It’s a little place in Ireland…um…in the middle of nowhere…’

‘A little place with a large ancestral manor house, by any chance?’

‘Yes, there’s a large ancestral manor house…’Years ago, she could remember her mother doing a cleaning stint there to get some extra cash for Christmas. It was a great grey mansion with turrets and a forbidding, desolate appearance.

‘So you must be half Italian…Which half?’

Bethany gave a self-conscious laugh. ‘Are you always so interested in dinner companions you ask out on the spur of the moment?’

‘No. But, then again, I don’t usually have to drag information out of my dinner companions. It’s a fact that most women love nothing more than talking about themselves.’

‘You mean they try to impress you.’

‘Do you want the truth or shall I treat you to a phoney spectacle of false modesty?’

‘You have a very big ego, don’t you?’

‘I prefer to call it a keen sense of reality.’ Cristiano was enjoying this banter. He had had to work to get her to this place, on a date with him and, having got her here, was discovering her to be skittish and unpredictable company. It made a change from the doe-eyed beauties who were always eager to oblige his every whim. ‘Don’t you feel the need to impress me?’ he murmured, his words cloaked in a languorous, sexy intimacy that sent shivers racing up and down her spine.