Italian Boss, Housekeeper Bride. Sharon Kendrick
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you concern. That really would be stepping over the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Natasha shrugged, remembering the anxious phone call he had taken from Elisabetta’s psychiatrist a couple of weeks ago, which had resulted in him sitting in his study until darkness had fallen. It had been left to Natasha to wander in unnoticed and gently wonder if he wanted to put the light on, to remind him that he had a dinner engagement that evening.
‘Just a hunch that all wasn’t well.’
‘Well, don’t have hunches!’ he flared. ‘I don’t pay you to have hunches!’
She stared at him, and his words felt as if they had lanced through her heart. ‘No, of course you don’t. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.’
But Raffaele saw the faint tremble of her lips, which she’d tried and failed to hide, and relented with a sigh. ‘No, I am the one who should be sorry, cara. I should not have spoken to you that way.’
But he had—and maybe he would continue to do so—and could she bear that? Natasha pinned her shoulders back as once more she felt the distant beat of apprehension—and this time it wasn’t about Raffaele, but about her.
Didn’t they say that familiarity bred contempt—was that why he thought he could talk to her any old way and she would just take it? Oh, yes, sometimes he called her cara—but that was more a term of endearment. He certainly didn’t mean it in the romantic ‘darling’ sense.
Was she blinding herself to the fact that her position here was slowly being eroded? Was she going to wait until it became untenable before she had the courage to walk away from him?
She was beginning to recognise that as Sam grew older he would begin to notice the things which made him different from his schoolfriends. That the sumptuous home in which he lived was not really his home, but belonged to his mother’s billionaire employer. How long before that started to matter and his friends started making fun of him for being different?
‘I’d better go and get on,’ she said stiffly. ‘I want to make a cake—Sam’s bringing a friend home for tea.’ And she turned away before he could see the stupid tears which were threatening to prick at the corners of her eyes.
But Raffaele saw the rigid set of her shoulders and, for once, he realised he had hurt her. He knew that whatever else happened, Natasha didn’t deserve that. Maybe it was time that he told someone other than his attorney. Troy saw things only in black-and-white, in the way that lawyers did. That was what they were paid to do—to deal with practicalities, not emotion.
But, even for a man who had spent his life running from emotion and all its messy consequences, sometimes, like now, facing it seemed unavoidable. And Natasha was a woman—they seemed to do emotion better than men. Certainly, better than this man. Wouldn’t a feminine perspective from an impartial party be useful? What possible harm could there be to run it past her?
Maybe it was true what they said—that if you spoke the words out loud it made you see them differently.
Raffaele had spent most of his thirty-four years pressing all the right buttons and had achieved huge international success, but what he liked best was the control that success gave him and the power which came with it. But these past weeks he had felt it slipping away from him—and the sensation made him uneasy.
‘Natasha?’
‘What?’ she answered, but she didn’t turn back; she was too busy blinking away the last of her tears.
Natasha would tell him the truth, even if he didn’t want to hear it. ‘Elisabetta’s in a clinic,’ he said bluntly. ‘She has been secretly flown to England, and I’m terrified the press are going to find her.’
NATASHA froze, her own fears crumbling to unimportant dust as she tried to take in what Raffaele had just told her—a lightning bolt from the blue. ‘What?’
‘My sister has been admitted to a private clinic in the south of England, with an acute anxiety attack,’ Raffaele said, as if he were reading from a charge sheet.
Natasha blinked away her thoughtlessly self-indulgent tears and turned round to face him, her hands automatically reaching out towards him in an instinctive gesture of comfort. But she saw him flinch and stare at them as if they were something untoward—which she guessed they were—and they dropped to her sides like stones.
‘We’ve been trying to keep it out of the papers,’ he said, still in that same, flat voice.
‘We?’
‘Me. Troy. The doctors in charge. They’re worried that it will add to her stress. If the papers get hold of it, then she’ll be harassed when they discharge her—and it’ll drag her right back down. The security at the clinic is tight, but there are always photographers loitering around in the hope of sniffing out a new story. And you know how everyone loves this particular modern fairytale—“the girl who has everything suddenly fighting for her sanity”.’
‘Oh, Raffaele,’ she breathed, her blue eyes growing worried as she heard the cynicism which made his voice sound so harsh. ‘Poor Elisabetta! What’s happened?’
He tried to make sense of it. He wanted to tell Natasha not to look at him like that, or to say his name in that sweet, soft way, that her sympathy was making him feel all kinds of stuff that he didn’t need to feel right now. Like he wanted to go straight into her arms and put his head against her pure pale skin and just hold her. But he shook the thought away with a corresponding shake of his head.
He was supposed to be taking control—not sleepwalking into disaster by looking vulnerable in front of his damned housekeeper! He forced his mind back to the unpalatable facts.
‘You know that she never had a particularly stable upbringing,’ he said, swallowing down the bitter taste in his mouth. ‘She was born when my mother was trying desperately hard to please her new husband. She knew that he wanted a child—and even though she was in her early forties by then she moved heaven and earth to get pregnant.’ Raffaele had been a teenager at the time, and he remembered feeling pushed aside by his mother’s new obsession. But he had been protective of the baby girl when she’d arrived—though, shortly after that, he had been relieved to leave for university.
His eyes narrowed as he remembered. ‘Elisabetta once told me that they were disappointed she wasn’t a boy. Her father wanted someone to take over the business, and this artistic, fey girl was the antithesis of what he’d needed. Maybe that attitude sowed the seeds for her anxiety—or maybe it would have happened anyway.’ He shrugged, and his face darkened—for analysis was not in his nature unless it concerned a column full of figures. ‘Who knows what caused it? All I know is that it exists.’
‘But has something happened?’ Natasha questioned quietly. ‘To bring matters to a head?’
Raffaele’s black eyes pierced through her like dark lasers. ‘How did you guess?’
Because that was the way of the world, thought Natasha. ‘Was it a man?’
‘How perceptive of you, Tasha,’ he said softly, and then his mouth hardened. That wasn’t the word she would use to describe him. ‘A relationship,’ he corrected acidly. ‘Someone Elisabetta thought had fallen in love with her—but, of course, it was her enormous wealth which had seduced him. Damn the money!’ he exclaimed bitterly. ‘Damn it!’
Natasha bit her lip. Sometimes working for a man as powerful as Raffaele meant telling him things that they didn’t really want to hear—because no one else dared to. Except maybe for Troy, Raffaele’s lawyer. He never shied away from the facts.
‘That isn’t really fair, is it, Raffaele? I mean, you’re enormously wealthy and it doesn’t impact negatively on your life, does it? You enjoy your money,’ she pointed out, softening the home-truth with a smile. ‘So you can’t always say that money is the root of