His phone was ringing—the call was from New York and he needed to take it. At his side, his new bride turned her head, gazing out of the tinted window as they drove into the city. Salvatore left her to it, busy with his call, yet conscious that he would rather have gone on gazing at Lana’s perfect profile...
Well, there would be time for that—he would make sure of it—but, alas, not right now.
With a mental shake of his head, he switched to business matters.
Lana looked about her appreciatively. Salvatore’s apartment in the centro storico—the historic heart of central Rome—was huge: two floors at least of an elegant eighteenth-century townhouse set around a spacious interior courtyard. Inside the apartment, beyond the entrance hall, a double aspect drawing room stretched from end to end, overlooking the internal courtyard to one side and a peaceful-looking piazza on the other.
It was opulently but beautifully styled, Lana thought as she glanced in, with a mix of antique and more modern pieces. She had no time to take much in, though, as Salvatore was leading her towards another flight of stairs, less imposing than the external ones.
‘The bedrooms are one floor above,’ he said, as he headed purposefully ahead of her. Gaining the landing, her turned at the door immediately in front of him, which he then opened, flicking on the light. ‘This is mine,’ he informed her. ‘Yours,’ he went on, ‘is next door. For obvious reasons that has to be so. There is a communicating door between the two.’
He headed for a door inset into the wall, opening it and gesturing for Lana to step through. She paused a moment to cast her eyes around the bedroom of the man whose wife she now was. It felt odd to do so. It was the first personal space of his she’d been into—a very masculine space, with huge pieces of antique furniture in heavy wood, dominated by a vast wood-framed bed with an intricate carved headboard.
Salvatore’s bed—the bed he sleeps in...
Almost she could visualise him there...
Hurriedly, she withdrew her gaze, walking across to the open communicating door into the bedroom beyond. She stopped short, giving an exclamation of pleasure.
‘Oh, how beautiful!’
She gazed around. It could not have been more different from the heavily masculine bedroom that belonged to Salvatore. Though just as large as his, this was a feminine space, the colour scheme of soft blue and silvery grey, the antique furniture light and graceful.
‘It was my mother’s room,’ came the clipped reply to her exclamation.
She glanced at Salvatore, but his face was expressionless. Was it good that it had been his mother’s room, or bad? She had no idea. And it was not her place to ask.
‘What was once the powder room—in the eighteenth-century hair powder was applied in a separate room,’ he was saying now, ‘has been turned into an en suite bathroom.’
He strode to a door inset into the far wall, opening it slightly. Lana got a glimpse of a luxuriously appointed bathroom and abruptly felt the need to take off her shoes, and her constricting outfit, and stand under a refreshing shower after her long day.
My wedding day.
But the thought was impossible to compute. Okay, they’d said words, signed a register, but that hadn’t been a wedding. Not a real one. Not one that actually meant anything.
Yes, well it does mean something, actually! It means I can get myself free of the crushing burden of debt that bloody Mal dumped on me! That’s what it means!
Salvatore was speaking again, as cool and brisk as ever, saying that dinner would be served in forty-five minutes, and she should change into something more relaxed for the evening. He left her to it as a maid entered with her luggage, and Lana headed for the en suite bathroom to freshen up.
An air of complete bemusement took her over. She was here, in Rome, with a man she had married for a year and for four hundred thousand pounds—and it felt completely and utterly unreal.
Salvatore stood at his bedroom window, conscious of the ever-present hum of traffic in the ancient city coming from beyond the quiet piazza even at this midnight hour. Conscious, even more, of the woman in the bedroom next to his—separated from him only by a communicating door.
He was not sure what he was feeling. It was...complicated.
That same sense of the enormity of what he’d done that had struck him on the flight came again. Had he really done what he just had? Married?
He had the legal proof of it in the marriage licence now sitting on his tallboy, waiting to be filed under ‘Personal’ in his study. But was it personal?
The marriage bit was not—that was simply a means to an end in his business affairs. Separating Luchesi SpA from any involvement with Roberto Fabrizzi now that the latter had made a nuisance of himself.
But his bride?
She was ‘personal’—definitely!
His mouth tightened. Except he would far rather, he knew perfectly well, she had remained ‘personal’ simply as the current woman he was interested in, the way her predecessors—and inevitable successors—had been or would be.
Not as my bride.