Champagne Summer: At the Argentinean Billionaire's Bidding / Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper

‘OK. Don’t panic. Let’s be rational about this. First you have to take everything out of the bag.’

‘Everything out,’ repeated Tamsin desperately, pulling out armfuls of cashmere and wool and trying not to cry. ‘OK. Now wh—?’

She stopped suddenly as she heard the sound of a car engine in the mews below.

He wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes yet, and surely he wouldn’t be so inconsiderate as to—?

A door slammed. Footsteps echoed on the frosty pavement.

‘Oh, Serena. He’s here,’ she whimpered into the phone as the doorbell rang. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘OK,’ said Serena urgently. ‘You’re going to be cool and professional. You’re going to bear in mind at all times that he is absolutely not to be trusted, and most importantly of all—’ the doorbell rang again ‘—you are not going to sleep with him.’ She sighed. ‘But first, you’re going to let him in.’

‘Finally.’ Alejandro walked past her into the narrow hallway and looked around with barely concealed impatience. ‘I was just about to leave. I assumed you’d had second thoughts.’

‘About such a—what was it?—generous opportunity to prove myself?’ Tamsin said sweetly. ‘Now why would I do that?’

‘You tell me,’ he replied with heavy irony. ‘Are you ready?’

She was halfway up the narrow stairs. ‘Nope. Come up.’

Gritting his teeth in irritation, Alejandro followed her, trying not to look at her rear in the skinny black jeans she wore.

‘This better not take long. My driver’s waiting.’

‘Really?’ she said lightly. ‘Can you drive to Argentina? I thought we’d be going by plane.’

He found himself in a large living space with windows all along one wall and warm old pine floorboards. There was a kitchen area at one end with peacock-blue cupboards and an enormous French baker’s rack groaning under the weight of china and pans. The other end was taken up with a huge sofa upholstered in shocking pink brocade and a white furry rug. The whole space was painted in a creamy off-white, and even on the greyest winter morning it was airy and bright.

It was also incredibly messy.

‘Have you been burgled, or is it always like this?’ he asked, looking around. On the table beside the telephone was a pile of unopened brown envelopes, many of them printed in red and marked ‘urgent’.

Stepping over piles of clothes, magazines, discarded shoes and scraps of fabric, he made his way to the door through which Tamsin had just disappeared and felt a dart of heat as he realised it was her bedroom.

‘No, and no,’ she said haughtily, picking up an armful of bulky winter clothes and shoving them into the bottom drawer of an enormous old armoire. ‘It’s like this because some annoying person forced me to travel halfway across the world at a moment’s notice, and then arrived early to pick me up.’

Alejandro glanced at his watch. ‘Ten minutes. That’s hardly early. I assumed you would have packed last night.’

‘Oh, did you?’ she snapped. ‘Well, I think that’s one of the many things I find annoying about you, Alejandro. You have no right to assume anything. How do you know that I didn’t have other plans last night? Why should I turn my life upside down and cancel everything when you snap your fingers?’

Without letting a flicker of the emotion that suddenly licked up through him at the thought of what her ‘other plans’ for last night had been, Alejandro bent down and picked up a scrap of fuchsia-pink silk from the floor beside the bed and held it up. It was a suspender belt.

‘It doesn’t look as if you cancelled anything last night,’ he said sardonically, feeling a twist of grim satisfaction as he watched her eyes widen in outrage. For a moment she stared mutely at him as he turned the delicate band of silk and lace around in his hands before tossing it casually onto the bed.

‘If you must know I spent last night in my design studio, alone, getting together all the stuff I need to bring with me for work. That’s why I haven’t had time to tidy up, or pack, because that’s why I thought you’d hired me—to design your rugby strip for you. If you’d wanted someone with the domestic skills of Snow White, you should have gone to Disneyland.’

She had a point. Maybe he should have, because from what he’d found out last night it seemed likely that Snow White would be about as capable of designing sportswear as Lady Tamsin Calthorpe, and would probably be a lot less scared of hard work.

Leaning against the doorframe, Alejandro shoved his hands into his pockets and watched her thoughtfully. He knew from the press conference yesterday when she had so convincingly denied that there had been any problems with the production of the shirts that she was a virtuoso liar. In fact, identifying when she was telling the truth and when she was making it up was going to be very entertaining. The flight to Buenos Aires was fifteen hours. A challenge like that would pass the time nicely.

He sighed impatiently, letting his gaze wander around the room. The bed was an old Edwardian brass one, piled high with lace pillows and silk cushions, both its head- and-foot-boards draped with sequined scarves, bead necklaces and bras. The intimate femininity of the place made him uncomfortable. It reminded him of things that he’d resolved to forget. A bottle of perfume on the antique dressing-table instantly brought back the warm, fresh scent of her body; a lidless lipstick beside it conjured an image in his mind of her lips, plump and pink in the moments before he’d kissed her, engorged with desire and scarlet with his own blood as he’d pulled away.

Levering himself away from the doorway in one sharp, aggressive movement, he crossed impatiently to the window. ‘I suppose it’s pointless telling you to hurry up.’

Tamsin gritted her teeth and very deliberately carried on folding the long linen shirt on the bed. ‘If you helped it would be quicker,’ she said with exaggerated patience. ‘Or is helping anyone an entirely alien concept?’

Alejandro turned round. ‘It depends,’ he said slowly in a voice that dripped acid, ‘whether the person you help is then going to claim they did it all themselves.’

The barb found its mark with cruel accuracy. Tamsin bit back a small gasp of pain and grabbed another plain-white linen shirt from the wardrobe, followed by a faded pair of cutoff jeans and an Indian-print tunic top. ‘Forget it,’ she muttered through clenched teeth. ‘Just don’t bother.’

‘Don’t forget this.’ Alejandro picked up the suspender belt from where he’d thrown it on the bed and held it out to her. His eyes glittered with malicious amusement. Tamsin snatched it and shoved it viciously back in the drawer.

‘I don’t think I’ll be needing that,’ she said icily, gathering up a pale-blue satin bra and another one in pink candy-striped silk and throwing them in on top of the suspender belt. ‘Or these. It’s work, remember, Alejandro. I thought we made that perfectly clear.’

Ostentatiously she pulled out three pairs of plain-white cotton knickers, and a white cotton bra and, casting a defiant glance at Alejandro, threw them into the bag. Then she zipped it up.

‘There. I’m done.’

‘That’s all you’re taking?’

She saw him glance incredulously down at the bag, and shrugged nonchalantly to cover up her own sense of unease. Half an hour earlier it had been bursting at the seams, now it was half empty. But having Mr Disapproving there had really cramped her style. There was no way she was going to let him watch her pack anything that could remotely be considered frivolous or alluring.

‘I think it’s enough, since I don’t intend to stay long, and I certainly don’t intend to—’

He laughed. ‘Enjoy yourself?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t want to change your mind—add anything?’

‘No. Let’s just go.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘SOME wine, Lady Calthorpe?’

Tamsin gave a stiff nod of assent. Squashing down a leap of annoyance at the use of her title, she watched Alberto, the uniformed steward, pour pale-gold wine into two long-stemmed glasses.

They’d been airborne for just over an hour, but in spite of the exceptional luxury of Alejandro’s private jet she felt nervous and jittery. She’d spent all of the time so far gazing vacantly at a magazine, but couldn’t remember a single detail of anything in it. She did, however, seem to have become oddly familiar with the cover of the share report which Alejandro was reading opposite her.

Alberto gave a courteous murmur and melted away, and Tamsin picked up her glass.

‘Could you please inform your staff that there’s absolutely no need to bother with the whole “Lady Calthorpe” thing?’ she said brusquely. ‘I never use the title myself, and I prefer it if other people just address me by my name.’

Alejandro looked up from the share report. ‘Of course. If that’s what you prefer, I’ll pass it on.’

His face didn’t betray a flicker of emotion, so why did Tamsin get the distinct impression that he was laughing at her? The irritation that had been simmering inside her for the last hour now came bubbling up, like milk coming to the boil.

‘Do you have a problem with that?’

He leaned back in his seat, apparently totally relaxed, but his hooded gaze stayed fixed to her face with a sharpness that belied his laid-back body language. ‘Not at all,’ he said smoothly, throwing the report onto the seat beside him and unfolding a snowy-white linen napkin. ‘I just find it slightly … ironic that you’re suddenly so keen to play down your aristocratic connections.’

‘Ironic?’ she snapped. ‘In what way ironic?’

Alejandro took an unhurried mouthful of wine. ‘Well, you clearly have no problem with using them when it suits you, to get what you want.’

Alberto appeared again, carrying two white plates as big as satellite dishes, each bearing a delicate arrangement of pale-pink lobster and emerald-green salad leaves in its centre. He set these down on the table with elaborate care, giving Tamsin the chance to beat back the fury that instantly flamed inside her. She waited until Alberto had retreated again before answering.

‘Let’s get this straight from the outset, shall we? I love my family. I’m proud of who I am and where I come from, but I have never used it in any way to open doors for me in my professional life.’

Toying lazily with a rocket leaf, Alejandro reflected that that wasn’t what the guy he’d had dinner with last night had said. A board member of the RFU, he had confided over an extremely good port that there had been no other contenders for the England-strip commission, that the design brief from the chairman’s daughter had been the only one under consideration.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

He smiled. ‘Not really. I’m prepared to believe that you might think that because you have a flat and a job that your life is just like everyone else’s. But your family background—’

She cut him off with an incredulous gasp. ‘You hypocrite! We’re having this conversation on board your private jet, for God’s sake! What do you know about living like everyone else?’

He felt himself tense, giving a small indrawn hiss of warning. ‘The difference is,’ he said with quiet venom, ‘I’ve worked for this. For everything I have. I came from nothing, remember.’

He expected her to back down then, to understand that she—the pampered heiress who had never known what it was like to be without anything, particularly not an identity—was on very, very dangerous ground here. But she didn’t. Instead she laid down her fork and looked at him through narrowed eyes.

‘OK,’ she said softly, pausing to suck mayonnaise off her thumb. ‘You had it tough. So that made you need to prove yourself, didn’t it?’

Her words were like a punch in the solar plexus. A very hard, accurate and unexpected punch.

‘Which I’d say,’ she went on in the same quiet, even tone, ‘means that you’re just as much shaped by your family background as I am.’

‘Wrong. I have no “family background”.’

His voice was like gravel, and the warning in it was blatant. She ignored it. A small frown creased her forehead beneath her sleek platinum hair, but other than that her expression was completely calm as she said, ‘Of course you do. Everyone does.’

He gave an icy smile. ‘Maybe in your world, but my family background was wiped out when I was five years old, when I came to England.’

Her frown deepened. ‘Why did you come?’

The pressurised, climate-controlled air seemed suddenly to be charged with tension. Tapping one finger against the polished table top, Alejandro looked out at the blue infinity beyond the window of the plane. He wanted to tell her to back off, that she had strayed into territory that he kept locked, barred and guarded with razor wire, but somehow to do so felt like a denial of who he was and where he’d come from; a betrayal of his father.

And hadn’t his mother betrayed Ignacio D’Arienzo enough for both of them?

He kept his tone neutral and his explanation brief. ‘Argentina was a troubled country at the time that I was born. There was a military dictatorship. My father and uncles were taken for their involvement with a trade union, and my mother was afraid that we might be next. She was half English, on her father’s side, and she booked us on a flight to London the next day. We took nothing with us.’

‘What happened to your father?’

The pure, clear sunlight filtering in through the moisture-beaded window of the plane lit up Tamsin’s face, turning her skin to translucent gold. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and propping her chin upon them. Her eyes were the cool, shady green of an English woodland in summertime, and they seemed to draw him into their quiet depths.

‘Who knows? He’s one of thousands of los desaparecidos: the disappeared. Neither living nor dead.’

‘That’s an awful thing to have had to live with,’ Tamsin said softly. ‘Not knowing …’

He shrugged. ‘It allowed me to believe that he was alive.’ His smile was brutal. ‘Unfortunately my mother didn’t share that view. She remarried quite quickly—the man she worked for as a housekeeper in Oxfordshire.’

‘Oh,’ Tamsin said, and it was more of a whispered sigh than a word. She hesitated, biting her lip. ‘But it can’t have been easy for her.’

Alejandro rubbed a hand across his forehead. Of course, he should have realised that Tamsin Calthorpe would see it from his mother’s side. They were two of a kind. Loyalty and faithfulness weren’t on the program. It was all about expedience.

‘Oh, I think it was,’ he said with brittle, flinty nonchalance. ‘I think it was very easy, in the end, to completely reinvent herself and behave as though the past had never happened. The only thing that was difficult was living with the reminder of where she’d come from. Which was where my long incarceration in the British public-school system began.’

While he was speaking she’d been playing absently with the stem of her wine glass, but suddenly she wasn’t doing that any more, and her hand was covering his. Her touch seemed to burn him, to sear flesh that already felt exposed and flayed raw.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a quiet voice.

He’d waited six years for that, and the irony of the circumstances in which he was finally hearing it took his breath away. What was she sorry about—his mother’s betrayal, or her own?

He moved his hand from beneath hers.

‘I doubt it,’ he said getting up and giving her a twisted smile. ‘Yet.’

Well, actually, he was wrong. She was sorry. Very sorry.

Sorry she’d agreed to come with him, sorry she’d ever set eyes on him, sorry she’d made the mistake of responding to him like he was a decent, well-adjusted human being. It wouldn’t happen again any time soon.

She was only trying to break down the awkwardness that seemed to exist perpetually between them. She was trying to be nice. She couldn’t help it if he was bitter, emotionally arrested and had major trust issues.

Tamsin sighed and looked out of the window into nothingness. Major and perfectly understandable trust issues, she thought miserably. His revelations had touched her deeply, and she’d seen his pain behind the hard, cynical façade. She understood why he had so fiercely maintained his Argentine identity during his time in England, even though it had infuriated the management of the England team and had ultimately cost him his place on it. But it was all he had left of his father, and of his old life. He had been trying to stop himself disappearing too.

Beyond the window the light was fading, and the sky was the same leaden grey as the Atlantic Ocean far beneath them. With infinite weariness, Tamsin looked down at the magazine on her knee and read the same paragraph for the hundredth time. ‘Next season’s key trend will be camouflage’, it said.

How appropriate, she thought, stifling a yawn with her hand.

‘You’re tired.’

She jumped as Alejandro’s voice broke the thick silence that had lain between them for ages now. ‘Get some sleep,’ he said coolly. ‘You know where the bedroom is.’

He had shown her when they had first boarded the jet, and she’d been utterly taken aback by such insane luxury. She’d like nothing more than to curl up now on the large bed—which was ridiculously out of proportion with the scaled-down proportions of the plane—and go to sleep, but Alejandro’s faintly scornful tone made it impossible to admit that.

Straightening her spine, she blinked rapidly. ‘I’m fine. It’s your bed, you have it.’

‘I have reading to catch up on. Business.’

His cold superiority made invisible hackles rise on the back of her neck. ‘Yep. Me too,’ she said briskly, picking up her laptop and flipping it open. ‘Lots to be getting on with.’ The sideways glance she shot him was filled with loathing, but her voice was deliberately sweet. ‘After all, the sooner I make a start on this, the sooner I can go home again, and I think we’d agree that would be best all round.’

At least there was one thing they could agree on, Alejandro thought sourly, leaning forward to lower the blind on the window and block out the reflection of her face in the glass. As the darkness had deepened outside her reflection had gradually come to life, like a Polaroid photograph developing, and he had found his eyes were constantly drawn to it, noticing the way she chewed her bottom lip when she was reading, and how her fingers stroked the hair behind her ears.

All of which was completely irrelevant to the company he was currently thinking of buying, he thought scathingly, returning his attention to the share report.

Business was a game like any other, Alejandro had discovered. You had to observe the tactics of your opponents, recognise their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. You had to know when to hold back, and when to surge forward and press your advantage home. And you had to be able to do it without emotion.

He was good at all that.

Unconsciously now he found himself turning towards Tamsin, and felt an instant dropping sensation in his chest. She was sitting perfectly straight, her legs tucked up to one side of her on the wide leather seat, the laptop balanced on her thigh. The screen was blank, and her head was bent forward slightly so her long fringe fell down over her face.

She was asleep.

In one fluid movement Alejandro got out of his seat and crossed the narrow space between them, removing the computer from her knee and putting it on the table in front of her. Then, slipping one arm behind her neck, he slid the other beneath her knees and scooped her up, holding her against his chest.

Her head fell back, rolling against his arm and giving him a perfect view of her small face with its wide cheekbones and full, generous mouth. His heart gave a painful kick as he looked down at her. For six years he had painted her in his mind as a sort of cross between Lolita and Lady Macbeth, but it was impossible to reconcile that image with the soft, fragile girl in his arms. As he watched, her lips parted slightly and she gave a small, breathy sigh of contentment, and then tucked her head into his body.

With a low curse he turned abruptly and carried her to the back of the plane, kicking the door to the bedroom open and depositing her quickly on the bed. A cashmere blanket lay folded neatly at its foot, and he shook it out and laid it over her, briskly, his hands not making any contact with her body at all.

And then he left, as swiftly and as brutally as he had come, slamming the door shut behind him.

Tamsin’s eyes snapped open the moment he was out of the small room.

A few seconds ago she’d been so tired she’d felt as if her eyelids had lead weights attached to them, but now she was wide, wide awake. Her heart was thumping against her ribs like a caged animal, and every cell of her body seemed to vibrate and thrum with painfully heightened awareness. It was as if someone had just injected her with concentrated caffeine.

Being in his arms for those few moments had done that to her.

She pushed back the blanket he had laid over her so perfunctorily and sat up, running her tongue over her dry lips and looking around her in something like desperation. When she’d felt his arms around her, felt the hardness of his broad chest against her, she’d thought for a dizzy, disorientated moment that she was dreaming and had given herself up to the bliss of being close to him …

Oh, no. She’d sighed, hadn’t she? She’d actually sort of moaned with pleasure.

Springing up from the bed, she paced restlessly around it. She’d known it was going to be difficult, being thrown into such close contact with him, but she hadn’t even come close to realising how hard. They were only halfway there, for crying out loud, and already she’d managed to make an almighty fool of herself—not once but twice.

Panic rose within her as she thought of the hours that stretched ahead, but there was no escape, and nothing to be done except try to keep her mind off Alejandro D’Arienzo altogether. Work was the answer, but her laptop was in the cabin, and there was no way she was going back out there to get it—although if she could just find some paper and a pen she could make a start on some sketches now. Her gaze fell on a little drawer set into the sleek cabinetry beside the bed, and she ran her fingers along it, trying to locate the concealed catch.

It sprang open, immediately revealing a blank notepad. Tamsin gave a little hiss of triumph as she took it out, looking underneath to see if she could see a pen.

There was one. Right there in the bottom of the drawer, half-buried beneath a lot of small, silver packets.

With a trembling hand she reached out and scooped them up, staring at them as a sick feeling spread through the pit of her stomach and an assortment of unwelcome images filled her head: Alejandro, his skin dark against the white sheets, his hair falling over his face as he lifted his mouth from the pouting, scarlet lips of a sultry beauty and reached over to the drawer for condoms.

The door handle turned with a muffled click. Tamsin gave a gasp of horror and slammed the drawer shut, stuffing the condoms into the back pocket of her jeans and spinning around as the door opened and Alejandro appeared.

‘I thought I heard something. So, you’re awake.’

‘Of course,’ she said as casually as possible, holding up the pad. ‘As I said before, I’ve got work to do. I haven’t got time to sleep.’ She ran her shaking hands through her hair in the manner of someone who was perfectly relaxed and didn’t have her pockets stuffed with condoms.

Alejandro advanced into the room. Apart from the fractional lift of his eyebrows his face was as expressionless as ever, but his eyes glittered with sardonic amusement. ‘I see,’ he said quietly. ‘You were doing a pretty good impression of it before.’

‘That wasn’t sleep. That was a power nap.’ Even to Tamsin’s own ears her voice sounded ridiculously shaky, but she couldn’t help it. It was the effect of being in this small space with him. This small, intimate space, with the huge bed stretching between them like a taunt, and the images conjured up by her own pitifully overactive brain refusing to go quietly. She turned away, hoping that it would help her keep her composure. ‘I won’t need proper sleep for ages now,’ she said airily.