LITMIR.BIZ

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Francesca flushed, and Beatrice was quick to comfort her.

      ‘Please don’t be embarrassed. We know that you come from a very different and far grander background than ours.’

      ‘My mother says that the formality insisted upon by my grandfather is no longer necessary, but nothing anyone can say will make him change his ways. My mother says he takes pride in them. He is very arrogant.’

      ‘And you both love him and resent him,’ Beatrice guessed. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, to constantly strive for the approval and affection of someone who only seems to notice you’re there when you do the wrong things?’

      ‘Very,’ Francesca agreed bleakly. ‘So… if I cannot help with the meal, perhaps I could take charge of the children.’

      ‘No. What you can do is to make yourself so alluringly beautiful that none of my male guests will be able to take their eyes off you, and with their wives watching them watching you, I shan’t have to worry if my food isn’t up to scratch, shall I?’ Beatrice teased her, calmly accepting the change of subject and its implications. She had no intentions of putting any pressure on Francesca to discuss the past or her family with her; she simply wanted the Italian girl to feel at home with them. Sometimes she had such a look of taut constraint that Beatrice ached to tell her that what she was enduring would eventually pass, but she sensed that Francesca was too proud to welcome any intrusion into her personal pain, however well-meant.

      ‘Could you help us?’ Lucia had begged her in that unexpected telephone call four weeks ago. ‘We have a god-daughter, a charming, beautiful girl, who is simply fading away before our eyes. She needs a change of scene, a change of life-style…” And she had gone on to explain to Beatrice exactly what had happened.

      ‘It is not in her heart that she is hurt, but in her pride, in her belief in herself, and these can be even harder wounds to bear. But I think they will heal more easily if she is away from Italy, and more especially if she is away from her grandfather.’

      And so Beatrice had readily agreed to invite Francesca to stay. And not just because of the debt she herself owed the Fioris.

      It had been Lucia who had counselled her so wisely when she had thought her own love for Elliott to be hopeless—she had believed that it must be impossible for him to love her. But even without that debt she would still have wanted to help.

      Elliott arrived home an hour before their dinner guests were due.

      ‘I take it Oliver’s still included in the guest list?’ he asked her, after mixing them both a drink, bringing them up to the bedroom, and telling her to sit down for five minutes and relax.

      ‘Yes.’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘Elliott, I’m not trying to matchmake, but it occurred to me that Chessie might be the ideal solution to Oliver’s research problem. You know he’s desperate to find someone to take over the Italian research on his latest book, and that he can’t get away himself. Chessie has a history degree.’

      ‘She also has a stunning figure, a beautiful face, and the kind of vulnerability that will make Oliver tear her to shreds if he gets the mood on him, and you and I both know it,’ Elliott warned her grimly, interrupting her, and then adding, ‘I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea… on the face of it. But Oliver’s lethal. He’s also a man and very human…’

      ‘Meaning?’ Beatrice questioned him uncertainly.

      ‘Meaning that to you, my dear wife, he may behave like a perfect gentleman, but where women less wrapped up in their husbands are concerned, he can be… well, let’s just say that he has all the usual male appetites and that he’s quite capable of satisfying them and then ejecting the woman concerned from his life with rather brutal efficiency.’

      ‘You think he’d try to seduce Chessie?’ Beatrice asked uneasily.

      ‘I don’t know. He’s one of those men who’s a law unto himself, and I wouldn’t like to predict what he might do.’

      Beatrice’s eyes rounded in astonishment. Her husband was an astute judge of character and normally very crisp and to the point in giving his opinion of his fellow men.

      ‘Well, I only thought that tonight we could see how they get on, and then…’

      ‘Liar,’ Elliott interrupted her ruthlessly. ‘You intended to dangle Chessie in front of him like a very tempting piece of bait, in the hope that her expertise in Italian history will prove so irresistible that it will outweigh his legendary dislike of working with women.’

      ‘And do you think it will?’ Beatrice asked him slyly.

      Elliott looked at her in their bedroom mirror and eventually said grimly, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

      ‘Unfortunately for Oliver or for Chessie?’

      ‘Potentially, for them both!’

      In her own bedroom, Chessie too was looking into a mirror, but she was alone with her reflection, unlike Beatrice and Elliott.

      ‘Nothing too formal,’ Beatrice had advised her when she had asked her what she should wear, and she only hoped that what she had chosen would be suitable.

      Her grandfather had set great store by the correct appearance, and Chessie was not sure where on the scale of formality her scarlet Valentino wool crêpe dress would stand.

      True, it was very plain, the soft fabric draped subtly to reveal her curves… true it had a high, round neck, and long, all-covering sleeves… but it was also short, just above the knee, and the colour itself was so eye-catching that it scarcely needed any further adornment.

      She had left her hair down, catching it back with a gilt bow. She was wearing matching gold bow earrings from which a pearl was suspended, and a collection of fine gold bangles which made a soft musical sound when she moved.

      Sheer black tights, high-heeled suede pumps, the Chamade perfume she had switched to only months ago, and which she still wasn’t completely sure about. It was so different from the cool, fresh fragrance she had worn before. A fragrance chosen by her grandfather as being ‘suitable’ for a young woman of his house.

      The dining-room of the Cotswold house was barely a fifth of the size of that in her grandfather’s palazzo but it had a welcoming warmth that Francesca infinitely preferred.

      The problem was, as one of her aunts had austerely told her, when as a teenager she had dared to complain that the vast, echoing rooms of the seventeenth-century palazzo had no warmth about them, that she and her mother had been ridiculously indulged by her father, who had broken the tradition of centuries in refusing to move his new bride into the family home, but who had instead bought a pretty little villa on the outskirts of the city with its own private garden and an informal courtyard that Francesca remembered with nostalgic longing.

      When her grandfather’s health had started to fail, though, her father had given in to family pressure to move himself and his family into the family home.

      The palazzo was a vast, echoing place with marble floors, and a quantity of rococo gilt mirrors. It cost a fortune to maintain, and it was only by judicious marriages and deploying their resources into commerce that the family had been able to retain a home that was really more a museum-piece than suitable for modern-day living.

      Francesca knew that her mother had never felt wholly comfortable living there. For one thing, she was no longer really in charge of her own household, the palazzo being run by a maiden aunt of the family, who refused to allow anyone to take over from her.

      The palazzo possessed a vast warren of higgledy-piggledy rooms on the floors above the grand reception-rooms, more than enough to house all the aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived there.

      It must be rather nice to be like Beatrice and to have to share this lovely home with only one’s husband and children. Had she married Paolo, her home would have been in a palazzo even more enormous than her grandfather’s. Francesca frowned thoughtfully. If she had never really

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