The Italian Billionaire's Christmas Miracle. Catherine Spencer
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THERE you have it. What do you think?” Eyeing Gail, her best friend and travel companion, whom she’d found stretched out on a chaise by the hotel pool, Arlene tried to gauge her reaction to this abrupt change in plans.
“That he’s right.” Gail slathered on another layer of sunscreen. “It’s a heaven-sent opportunity and you can’t afford to turn it down.”
“But it does interfere with our holiday.”
“Not mine,” Gail returned cheerfully. “We came here to unwind and I’m more than happy to spend half the day lazing here or on the beach. In case you haven’t noticed, both are littered with gorgeous men, which is probably a lot more than can be said about what’s-his-name from the vineyard.”
“Domenico Silvaggio d’Avalos.” Arlene let each exotic syllable roll off her tongue like cream, and thought that one glance at his aristocratic face and big, toned body would be enough to change Gail’s mind about which of them had stumbled across the better deal.
“What a mouthful! How do you wrap your tongue around it? Or are you on a first-name basis already?”
“Not at all. He’s very businesslike and quite distant, in fact.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it really matters. Just as long as you leave here knowing a heck of a lot more about running a vineyard than you did when you arrived, he doesn’t have to be witty or charismatic, does he?”
“No.”
Arlene did her best to sound emphatic, but something in her tone must have struck a hollow note because Gail removed her sunglasses, the better to skewer her in a mistrustful gaze. “Uh-oh! What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing,” she insisted, not about to confess that, in the space of three hours, she’d almost fooled herself into believing she might have met Mr. Right. Gail would have laughed herself silly at the idea, and rightly so. There was no such thing as love at first sight, and although a teenager might be forgiven for believing otherwise, a woman pushing thirty was certainly old enough to know better. “I find him a little…unsettling, that’s all.”
“Unsettling how?”
She aimed for a casual shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe ‘intimidating’ is a better word. He’s larger than life somehow, and so confidently in charge of himself and everything around him. I don’t quite know why he’s bothering with an ignoramus like me, and I guess I’m afraid I’ll disappoint him.”
“So what if you do? Why do you care what he thinks?”
Why? Because never before had she felt as alive as she did during the time she’d spent with him. “His mood changed, there at the end,” she said wistfully. “I could hear it in his voice and see it in his expression, as if he suddenly regretted his invitation. He seemed almost angry with me, although I can’t imagine why.”
Gail popped her sunglasses back in place and turned her face up to the sun. “Arlene, do yourself a favor and stop analyzing the guy. Bad-tempered and moody he might be, but as far as you’re concerned, he’s the means to an end, and that’s all that matters. Once we leave here, you’ll never have to see him again.”
She was unquestionably right, Arlene decided, and wished she could find some comfort in that thought. Instead it left her feeling oddly depressed.
That night at dinner in the main house, the reaction of his brothers-in-law to what he’d done was pretty much what he expected. Mock disgust and a host of humorous comments along the lines of, “Where do you find these lame ducks, Dom?” and, “Just what we need at the busiest time of the year—the distraction of a useless extra female body cluttering up the landscape!”
His sisters, though, twittered like drunken sparrows, clamoring for more personal information.
“What’s her name?”
“Is she pretty?”
“Is she single?”
“How old is she?”
“Don’t just sit there looking stony-faced, Domenico! Tell us what makes her so special.”
“What makes her special,” his uncle Bruno declared, stirring up another flurry of over-the-top excitement, “is that she could be The One. Trust me. I have seen her. She is lovely.”
The squeals of delight that comment elicited were enough to make him want to head for the hills. His mother and sisters’ chief mission in life was to see him married, and the last thing they needed was Bruno or anyone else encouraging them. “Don’t be ridiculous, Uncle Bruno,” he snapped. “She’s just an ordinary woman in the extraordinary position of finding herself with a vineyard she hasn’t the first idea how to manage. I’d have made the same offer if she’d been a man.”
But she wasn’t a man, and no one was more conscious of that fact than Domenico. Throughout their extended lunch, he’d been struck by the sharp intelligence in her lovely gray eyes. But it took more than brains to succeed in viticulture, and given her small, delicate bones, he wondered how she’d begin to survive the tough physical demands of working a vineyard.
Not my concern, he’d told himself, more than once. Yet he admired her determination and he’d enjoyed their spirited debate on marriage, enough that he’d been tempted to ask her out to dinner, just for the pleasure of getting to know her better. Until she let slip that she hadn’t come to the island alone, that was—and then he’d felt like a fool for not having figured it out for himself. If she was not a raving beauty, nor was she as plain as he’d first supposed. Rather, she possessed a low-key elegance of form and face that any discerning man would find attractive.
Too bad another had already staked a claim to her, he’d thought at the time, covering his irritation with a brusqueness he now regretted. She’d almost flinched at his tone, as he spelled out what he expected of her when she showed up tomorrow morning. If it weren’t that she was in such dire straits, she’d probably have flung his generous offer of help back in his face. He would have, in her place.
Aware that his family continued to stare at him expectantly, he said, “At the risk of ruining your evening and dashing all hope of marrying me off before the last grape is picked, I feel compelled to point out that this woman is already spoken for. Not only that, she’s here for only two weeks, after which our relationship, such as it is, will come to an end.”
“But a great deal can happen in two weeks,” Renata, his youngest sister, pointed out, ogling her husband. “Our honeymoon lasted only that long, but it was all the time we needed for me to become pregnant.”
“Lucky you,” Domenico replied testily, amid general laughter. “However, my ambitions with this woman run along somewhat different lines, so please don’t start knitting little things on my behalf.”
That gave rise to such hilarity that, so help him, if he’d known at which hotel Arlene Russell was staying, he’d have phoned and left a message saying something had come up and he’d had to cancel their arrangement.
Domenico Silvaggio d’Avalos was already directing operations when Arlene showed up as planned at the back of the winery, the next morning. Stepping away from a crowd of about thirty men and women being loaded into the back of two trucks, he eyed her critically, then gave a brief nod of approval. “You’ll do,” he decided.
“What a relief, signor!”
Either he didn’t pick up on her lightly sugared sarcasm, or he chose to ignore it. “Since we’ll be working closely for the next several days,” he announced briskly, “we’ll dispense with the formality. My name is Domenico.”
“In that case, I’m Arlene.”
“Yes, I remember,” he said, rather cryptically she thought. “And now that we’ve got that settled, let’s get moving. Those people you see in the trucks are extra pickers hired to help bring in the harvest. Stay out of their way. They have a job to do. If you have