Fiancée For The Cameras (Mills & Boon Modern)

CHAPTER FIVE

O NE LOOK . O NE EXCHANGE between him and Romeo in which Andrea tried to keep his expression vacant—not completely successfully—was enough to know his brother’s heart. Conversely, Andrea had no doubt that Romeo now knew what was in his heart, too. Or to be precise, what was swimming like lazy wine in his blood a lot farther south of his heart.

“I was just asking Monica if she is the reason you have neglected us for three weeks,” Romeo said, grinning. “Quite the precedent you’re setting, Andrea.”

Standing by his brother, her gaze landing on and quickly skidding away from Andrea’s face, Monica looked like she wanted to run.

“I could be a gentleman like you,” Andrea said, unable to stop himself from ruffling Romeo’s hair, “and lie, but I’m not. Monica is indeed the reason I couldn’t visit. There’s a media scandal in the making with her in the middle of it and I have been trying my best to thwart it before it muddies the Valentini name beyond repair.”

Monica stiffened and finally, finally, met his gaze. “I called you several times since I found out two days ago, Mr. Valentini. You didn’t pick up.”

Andrea felt that same lazy thrum again. His gaze traversed her length, greedy, and all-consuming.

In four years, he had never seen her dressed so casually. In denim shorts that showed off her legs that went on forever and a tiny, tight V-neck crop top that bared her shoulders and a strip of her midriff, she looked like the gelato he used to be eager for on a hot summer day. Her hair was tied in a high ponytail, highlighting the angular gauntness of her features.

“I know it looks bad but—”

He finally responded to her. “It’s not just that someone recorded the entirety of me undressing you and carrying you to my car or that the short clip has been edited with salacious commentary. Today, some investigative reporter decided to inquire after your well-being at Valentini headquarters and she was told that you’d not only been sent off somewhere no one knew by me, but she’s now also saying that I abused my power and then when I got bored, fired you.”

Monica pressed her fingers to her mouth. “That’s...awful.”

“The best version is where they speculate that we’ve been sleeping with each other for a while and that day, I came to sweep you off your feet at the city hall and that you’re now a very satisfied but secretive bride. There are memes being made about me.”

“This is my fault,” Monica said, rubbing her temple.

“I’m not arguing that point,” Andrea said dryly, more than irritated by how she leaned automatically toward Romeo, when he was the one who had actually come to her rescue.

“Andrea!” Romeo said, a quick flash of anger in his eyes. “You can’t blame Monica for this. She was unwell. Where was your head?”

“No, Romeo. He’s right.” She moved toward Andrea like a doe walking into the lion’s den, shoulders painfully rigid. “I’ll do whatever you need to fix it.”

Andrea extended his arm, and she licked her lips, considering it as if it were a snake. “Come. I have a plan in mind.”

“Why can’t we discuss it here?”

“There is the very real danger of my own family coming after me with pitchforks, if I put one step wrong with you, Ms. D’Souza. I did not think you so much of a coward that you would hide behind them.”

“I’m not hiding behind anyone,” she said, rushing around Romeo, cheeks red, ponytail flying around, gloriously indignant. “You ordered that I stay here, transferred me to a different department and...don’t even answer my calls. You decided I was a headache, a pathetic loser, and shuffled me off.”

Andrea stilled, watching the finger she poked into his chest. Hurt and something more flashed in her beautiful eyes. “And if I admit that I had more reasons than your so-called flaws—all your words, by the way—to have you transferred?”

“Did you?”

“Si.”

“Oh,” she said, color rising to her cheeks. “But you think I can help fix this...mess?”

“Si.”

“Fine. Tell me what I need to do.”

A surge of desire wrapped its fingers around Andrea’s muscles. “Go wait for me in my suite. I need a moment with my brother.”

She nodded, squeezed Romeo’s hand one more time and then left.

“Do you know that Mama wishes you were together?” he said to his brother, once Monica was out of earshot.

Romeo’s face tightened. “Mama has many wishes, Andrea. Pity we can’t make them all true, si ?”

Feeling as powerless as he did years ago, Andrea shook his head. “Romeo—”

“You’re not stealing my chance with her.”

“She makes you laugh, like before,” Andrea said, repeating his mother’s words, knowing the precious truth of them.

“She does. She has reminded me of all the things I’m still capable of. She’s been a wonderful friend to have in my life. But neither of us is drawn to the other in that way. In the way you’re drawn to her.”

“That’s not what I want to discuss.”

“And yet you interfere in my life? Keep track of all the waitresses I hook up with? I’m not some fragile princess whose virginity you’ve been tasked to protect, Andrea.”

Andrea’s cheeks crested with guilty heat while his heart jumped with joy that his brother had... scored , as tasteless as that sounded. It meant Romeo’s heart was also healing.

“While I appreciate the grand sacrifice you were about to make on my behalf,” Romeo said dryly, “it is unnecessary.”

“Don’t be so sure that I would make the sacrifice ,” Andrea said, still feeling the pinch of acute selfishness. “I simply would have said may the best man win.”

A flicker of shock passed through his brother’s eyes before he scoffed. “Just what Monica would like, no? You and me fighting over her like she was a bone.” Then his gaze searched Andrea’s, as if it had only now dawned on him what his brother had unwittingly betrayed. “You’re thinking at less than your usual capacity if you think Monica will be easy to bend to your...strategies. Mama, like the world, only sees part of her.”

“ Cristo , my own family thinks I’m some kind of...twisted monster, getting ready to prey on the innocent lamb.”

Romeo laughed, grooves forming around his mouth. “I understand the bind you’re in, even if Mama doesn’t. I know you need to take aggressive action. Against the scandal and against Brunetti.”

“And?”

“I know the tack you’re going to take. Probably the only one available to you. And I know where it will lead.”

“Romeo—”

“I have seen the way you looked at her just now, Andrea, when she was laughing in my lap. I will even admit that I once felt what you feel—the selfish want that takes you out at your knees, when you as a Valentini man should be the one in control. The one to whom everything should bend and bow.”

“And you’re going to warn me off?”

“ Cristo , no. Mama does you a grave injustice by behaving as if I was the only one who lost something in that accident. Why would I warn my brother against something he desperately wants, something that makes him look like he’s gloriously alive for the first time in a decade?”

Andrea thrust a hand through his hair, shaken by his brother’s depth of perception. Shaken by how his deepest desire sounded so...stark and all-consuming when put into simple words.

“What of your little friend?”

“My little friend has more courage in her pinky finger than the rest of the world. You know the biggest gift she’s given me in the last four years, Andrea? She showed me what a glorious, wild, wonderful world is out there and how much I still crave to experience it. She just needs to come to that realization, too. And if something does happen to her once she sets her tremendous will to it—” Romeo’s gaze, so much like their father’s, pinned Andrea to the spot “—then she has me on her side. But I cannot bubble wrap her, just like you can’t do to me.”

Andrea bent and kissed his brother’s rough cheek, feeling a wellspring of gratitude for the woman who had shown his brother who he could be with the simple, expansive, unconditional gift of her friendship.

“You got all the wisdom from Papa. All I got were his good looks,” he said, blinking away the tears that rose to his eyes.

Romeo thumped him on his shoulder, his serrated laughter music to Andrea’s ears, and wheeled himself along the path back to the house by Andrea’s side. “You’re not alone in this either, Andrea. If this merger falls through, I mean.”

Andrea nodded, feeling like his world might finally be settling into a new place after being shattered a decade ago. It would never be the same without Papa, but it wasn’t as horrible as he had let it get over the past few years.

It was like entering a treasure vault, if the treasure was the inside of Andrea Valentini’s intensely private mind and life. With each step she’d taken up the stairs, Monica felt as if she was embarking on some momentous journey that she could not turn back from.

The odd day or two she’d stayed here in the past, and even the past three weeks, she’d always stayed in the guest suite, close to Flora’s own. She’d never even been up here.

His suite on the first floor was a paradise made for solitude, different from his steel-and-chrome office. Here it was all glass and wood, with minimum decor, while sunlight poured in, bathing everything in a warm, golden glow. And yet, the space was also innately masculine, sober and serious like the man himself.

One entire wall was taken up with bookshelves, which on further scrutiny revealed to be on racing cars and other extreme sports as well as some business tomes. There were even a few glittering trophies, but Monica’s attention was quickly commandeered by the other wall.

By a large portrait of Andrea and Romeo and their father, Giovanni. His arms around his sons’ shoulders, Giovanni was clearly full of pride and joy. Tall and distinguished, he had been a handsome man, like his sons, but the thing that radiated from him was an easy kindness that Monica had found in few people in her life. Even with him gone for so many years—in the same accident that had hurt Romeo’s legs, Flora had told her —she could sense the older man’s legacy in his sons and in the company ethics Andrea so staunchly upheld. To have known such love as they did... That sweet ache for something she’d never known came back to her chest.

Monica lingered in the cool foyer until Andrea swept past her to the massive desk in the adjoining study. For a moment, she wondered if he’d forgotten that he’d invited her up here. Then, his gaze was potent on her back, like a physical caress.

“You were supposed to recover here. Not lose weight.”

The chastisement was the last thing she’d expected. She wrapped her arms around her belly self-consciously, her skin feeling far too tight to hold the sensations quivering through her. If she’d known he would be visiting, she’d have covered herself up from head to toe. “I’m sorry my body doesn’t perform automatically to your wishes and desires,” she said, shocked at her own daring.

His laughter at her back felt like a reward. “Your spirit seems to have more than recovered.” The tiny hairs at the nape of her neck prickled with awareness as his gaze moved over her back, mostly left bare by threads of fabric holding the crop top together. Going without a bra suddenly seemed liked the worst idea she’d ever had.

“No pain anymore?”

“None at all.”

“I’m glad.”

He was not a man to make pageantry of anything, and yet this felt like that. As if something big was looming on the horizon, something she hadn’t foreseen in her wildest dreams. Or nightmares.

She needed to take control of this conversation as much as she needed to take control of her life. Turning around, she blurted the first thing that came to her lips. “If you’re going to fire me to do damage control, Mr. Valentini, I’d rather—”

“Mr. Valentini? And, Cristo , I’m not firing you. Where is that faith of yours?” His gray gaze flashed with a thread of...hurt?

No, she was seeing things again, apparently a condition she suffered when it came to only him. “Of course, I have faith in you. But I realize how bad this is.”

“So the solution is to get rid of the one person who’s innocent and powerless in all this?”

She jerked her chin up, a defense mechanism, hating that that was how he saw her. Though it wasn’t far from the hard truth, like the dog with the broken leg Romeo had nursed to health a year ago. “No, it isn’t. But I also know that you wouldn’t just cast me out on the streets or hide me away like some taint upon your name. I was just thinking of the company and your reputation. I...misspoke out of fear and urgency.”

“Monica... Whatever else the future holds...with the company, with this scandal, with us, I need you to understand that I would never abuse my power in any way.”

“I know that, Andrea,” she said, letting him hear the conviction she held deep in her bones. His name on her lips, this time when she wasn’t delirious with pain, landed between them like an invocation. To what, she had no idea. But she didn’t scuttle her gaze away from his.

It was the one truth she’d always known, even if she hadn’t understood anything else about her reaction to him. But uncertainty about the current problem was another beast. She addressed the thing that was bothering her, trying her best not to look like a startled hare. “Why are we having this discussion in your suite?”

He sighed. “It’s the only place Mama won’t try to send some staff member to spy on us. And I need a shower before I can deal with the—”

“—mess I created,” she automatically finished for him, wondering why Flora would involve herself in this when she usually stayed outside of Valentini company concerns.

“That was unfortunate phrasing on my part,” he said, rubbing a hand over his temple. Was that regret that laced his words? That would have been strange enough to capture her focus, but something else stole and held her attention.

He leaned against the massive desk, stretching his long legs out in front of him. Custom-stitched Italian trousers pulled tight, displaying the hard lengths of his thighs. With that economy that imbued his every action, he undid the cuffs of his white dress shirt and slowly rolled each one back. The sight of his corded forearms, liberally sprinkled with hair, made Monica compulsively run her fingers over her own smooth forearms. Then his fingers went to his shirt and he unbuttoned a couple. Her pulse sped up, in direct proportion to each strip of olive-toned flesh that came into view.

His gaze snapped to hers and something else snapped into place between them. “It’s not like you forced me to strip you in the middle of the piazza,” he said, easily cutting through the growing tension. “Or made me carry you or begged to be transferred to a different department. I didn’t handle that whole day well.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you so...angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you.”

“You seem it. It’s fair in a way, because I’ve brought your professional reputation into question. But it feels somehow...personal.”

One hand thrusting through his hair, he stilled at her question. And while he only continued to stare at her thoughtfully, Monica realized his silence was assent.

It was personal. And then it came to her. “Is Mrs. Rossi upset by all this talk about our supposed affair?” How could she doubt a man like Andrea? “I’ll talk to her and explain it all. Make it clear that there was never anything other than work between us. That all you’ve done is show me kindness, that you pitied me, that Flora forced you to—”

“Basta!” he said, looking even more disgruntled than before. “You’re not some charity case. As to why I reacted badly, that’s neither here nor there. Believe me, if Chiara was to be my fiancée, she would not doubt me.”

“So she’s not going to be your fiancée?”

“I have no interest in her, or in her father’s deal when it comes with such strings. Especially when it’s nothing but manipulation.”

“You were never interested in marrying her?”

A soft, swift smile broke his serious expression, stealing Monica’s breath. She flushed, reacting to that knowing glint in his eyes. Though she had no idea what the knowing was of. And then the other, bigger truth slammed into her.

“So all the hard work we put in for the merger is going to waste? All those jobs, that new manufacturing plant in Vienna...”

“Brunetti has always put his business before personal life and family. It was the reason Papa never liked him. But that could be to our advantage right now. Chiara has always been a spoiled child and if she had told him that she and I were a sure thing, he would have attached her as an addendum clause, happy about the extra level of connection it would bring us. He would think nothing of abandoning her now, when he realizes I have no interest or intention of taking her on. Except it’s become a...”

“A matter of pride that you have said no to his daughter. He wants the merger to go through but wants to save face as well,” Monica finished his thought process.

“Exactly!”

She frowned. “I don’t understand Mrs. Rossi’s thinking. Why risk losing you by playing all these games? Why not be straightforward with you about her affections?”

He chuckled, though not quite to mock her. “You and Mama are peas in a pod.”

Monica had no idea what he meant but she knew what she had to do. “I’ll make a statement to the press immediately that the whole incident has been twisted and that I’ve been simply recovering at your mother’s—”

“I thought you were terrified of talking to the press?”

“I am, but your reputation is not something I take lightly. I...”

“I have a different solution. One that would address both problems.”

And here was the thing he’d clearly been reluctant to bring up, even as he’d made up his mind. Monica braced herself for anything, even though her heart ached at the thought of being sent away from Flora or Romeo or even...him.

Three weeks ago, as distressing as it had been, her transfer to a different department had felt necessary. To keep at bay all the feelings she’d discovered in her near delirious state.

But now, hearing this confirmation that Andrea had no interest in Mrs. Rossi, knowing that he cared about her , albeit in his own autocratic way, she didn’t want to go away. She didn’t want to stop working for him, or being near him. Which was really the pinnacle of the kind of foolish, clingy attachment she couldn’t afford in a million years.

It wasn’t as if anything could happen between them. So what was she doing feeling like this? Was she simply attaching herself to him because he was the most stable, genuine man she’d known in a long while? Why didn’t she feel like this with Romeo, who was not only more handsome but also warm and open and approachable?

Something about him consumed her, as if finally, she had tuned in to the right frequency of her own heart and body. “What’s the solution?”

“We will pretend that the story the tabloid press made up is true. That we’ve been in a relationship for months and that day, we had planned to elope to city hall but realized that Mama would be heartbroken at not being able to throw us a wedding. At the last minute, it became necessary to cancel it anyway because you were sick and had to be hospitalized. In two days, we’ll arrive at a charity gala together. That will be enough of an announcement that we are together.”

Try as she might, Monica couldn’t muster up a response. Shock enveloped her so fully that all she could do was freeze and stare and...

Pretend they were together, that they’d been in a relationship for months. Go to a party with him. Pretend like she had the right to touch him, and kiss him, and want him...

Suddenly, she felt feverish all over again.