Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

R OCCO LOOKED AROUND the space, he felt an increasing sense of discomfort. There were things everywhere . The decor could best be described as dust catching. He was not amused. Nor was he impressed. The sooner a place like this was torn to the ground, all the better as far as he was concerned. It was the antithesis to everything that he created in his resorts. He strived for clean lines, for minimalism. Modern luxury, with no nonsense.

This place was entirely nonsense. And now, this... Sneezing creature in the nightgown was telling him that he was stuck here?

Then there was...her.

She was not dressed as a reindeer just now. But her red hair remained untamed, and her face was dotted with freckles. Her sweater was chunky and had a snowflake pattern and she had eyeshadow with glitter. She was maximalist, as a human.

And she was beautiful. Like everything he’d never wanted wrapped into an enticing package that should be as off-limits as it was forbidden.

He was not accustomed to that. The lure of the forbidden. His life was controlled. His space was his own and everything in it had been put there specifically by him.

This place was not his. The weather was not his to control.

And the way he felt about her was like all of these things that were so foreign to him wrapped up in lush, soft-looking skin.

What was this? If they were unresolved issues from his childhood come back to haunt him, he’d happily skip them.

It said a lot about him, perhaps, that he was suddenly afraid his childhood torment had manifested in his adult years as a kink for a woman who seemed to represent chaos .

There was a psychological breakthrough.

That which he could not control as a child, he wanted to screw as a man.

He would rather never ponder that again.

“I do not do stuck .”

“Well, maybe not, but that does seem to be the situation. Stuck.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

He went to the front door, and opened it. And saw that outside was nothing but white. It wasn’t just that there was snow on the ground, it was falling thick and hard all around them, and the air was misty.

It was a total whiteout. He turned around to face her. “What do you normally do in a situation like this?”

“Normally?” She wrinkled her nose. “Well, normally, I plow my way out. But the problem is that there is no normal right now, because my snowplow won’t start.”

“Your snowplow won’t start?”

“No—” She heaved back again, and wrenched forward with a giant sneeze. “No,” she said. “My snowplow won’t work. I’ve never had that happen before, I’m not a mechanic.”

“How long do you think this will be?”

“I don’t know. This is going to be part of the reality if you are buying property up here. If you really think that this is going to be where your big, sleek luxury resort is.”

“I was easily able to lure your guests from here to my place.”

“For free,” she said. “And when you told them this place was a mess.”

“This place is a mess. How long do you suppose it will be until you actually find yourself with some sort of insurmountable plumbing issue.”

“I won’t. Because it’s actually in a better state than that.”

A timer went off in the other room.

“Hang on.”

She went through the door, and he followed her. There was a kitchen, large and clean, more modern than the rest of the house, updated he thought, to comply with code. So there was that. Not that it mattered in the grand scheme of things, since this place would not remain standing once he purchased this plot of land, but... Good for him now. Because otherwise he would starve.

She leaned down, and opened up the oven, covering her hand with a cloth, and taking out a sheet with cookies on it.

“What is that?”

“It’s... Breakfast. Of a variety. I was trying to get something on the table as quickly as possible. Since I was out fiddling with the snowplow for so long.”

“Did you make the dough this morning?”

“No,” she said.

“I don’t eat leftovers.”

“You don’t... You don’t eat leftovers?”

He shook his head. “No.”

He wouldn’t explain himself to her. He didn’t have to do that. That was what he chose to do with his money. He chose to make himself into an island. He chose to craft his surroundings into something that worked for him, and he did not have to explain it.

“I don’t know that I have... All that much here.”

He went to the fridge and opened it, and took out a carton of eggs.

“This will suffice.”

She suddenly looked alarmed, then moved away from him, the tray of cookies and the oven, and sneezed again.

“I do not wish for you to prepare the food anyway. I will make some eggs.”

“Do you know how to do that?”

“How hard can it be?”

“You don’t know how to cook eggs?”

“I haven’t done it before, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know how.”

She sneezed again.

“You are unwell. I do not wish to have you sporing around my food.”

She sputtered. “I am not... sporing .”

“You are,” he said. “Sadly. For both of us.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Out,” he said.

She obeyed him but not before grabbing a pot and two cups. But her general obedience was surprising, because she had been nothing but curmudgeonly from the moment they had encountered one another this morning.

She was quite ungrateful for what he was attempting to do.

Most people were happy to take the check. Living in places like this was not easy. There were few rewards for working as hard as people like her were working. There were few rewards for living such a hardscrabble life. In truth, as he expanded his resort empire, resistance was so unusual that he didn’t even have an inbuilt method for dealing with dissenters. Usually, all he had to do was make it clear that he was sincere in the money that he was offering, and people took the check, and gave him the land.

This sort of thing was... Unwell. Mentally unstable behavior, in his opinion. People who were so attached to a specific place or thing that they couldn’t bear to get rid of it... There was something wrong with them.

He looked around the kitchen, uncertain about where he might find a pan. He opened the drawers until he noticed one under the stovetop, and inside found a skillet. He was resourceful. It galled him to have to look up a recipe for eggs.

Surely it was eggs . What else could it entail?

But he did search for a recipe, because if nothing else, he was a perfectionist. And he found there was slightly more to it than he had imagined.

But there was a level of control with food that he required, and at least this would allow him to have that.

He spent longer than he would like to admit looking for a mixing bowl, and a whisk, but then he followed the instructions on the website that he had found on his phone, and set about to the task of scrambling the eggs.

He grimaced as he did so, but before he knew it, he had a dozen eggs scrambled. He portioned them out so that he had the lion’s share, and she had a bit, and then he added a cookie to her plate. Clearly she had been happy enough to eat the cookies.

He walked out of the kitchen, and did not see her. He moved down the hall, both plates in his hands, and finally saw a dining room, where she was sitting at the end of an ornate dining table with a lace tablecloth. Tablecloths made no sense to him. Better to wipe the hard surface of the table than add cloth to the top of it that you would have to launder after.

“Here,” he said, putting a plate in front of her.

“Scrambled eggs and a cookie,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, there’s coffee in this carafe.”

He was reasonably comfortable with that. He liked his coffee black and strong, and this would suffice.

“Why don’t you eat leftovers? Are you too fancy?”

“I am not... Fancy.”

“Then why? It sounded like an incredibly snobbish and wasteful mindset. Anyway, they weren’t leftovers. They were frozen preshaped cookies ready to bake.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“So why don’t you eat leftovers?”

“Does it not bother you if you don’t know the age of food?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“You’ve clearly never eaten anything past its expiration date, then.”

“Um... Well, no. I mean, I’ve definitely found things in the fridge that shouldn’t have been there.”

“Occasionally,” he pressed.

“Yes, a couple of times.”

“Yes. You might feel differently if it were a more frequent occurrence.”

And that was all she would get.

“You aren’t going to convince me to sell. We are at an impasse.”

“Do you really think that’s fair? Your mother is desperate for you to make a different choice.”

“She’s not desperate. She’s grieving, and she’s not doing it very well. She just wants to make it like he wasn’t here. And that’s not fair.”

“Noelle,” he said, her name strange on his lips. “Surely you must realize this is a foolish thing to go up against me.”

“There is no against. I won’t sell to you. And that’s my choice.”

“Surely you must have a price.”

“Build somewhere else. Why does it matter so much to you that you have this?”

“Because I must keep building,” he said. “And this is an excellent way to do that.”

“Why do you have to keep building?”

“To expand my business.”

“Aren’t you like... One of the richest men in the world?”

“You didn’t even know who I was when I introduced myself to you yesterday, and now you’re talking about my status and wealth?”

“I googled you while you were making eggs.”

“All right then. Yes. I am.”

“Then why?”

“I must expand the company every year by two percent or it dissolves. Those are the stipulations of my mother’s will.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You just lose ownership of it if you don’t...do that. Who’s in charge of it?”

“There’s a board. Who of course would love it if I lost control, because it would mean that they could have it. And I will not allow a board of my mother’s enablers to have their way.”

“Do you love the business?”

“Love the business? What does that mean?”

“I love Holiday House. I love it. I can feel the legacy of my family here. Memories of my father. I love this place. It means the world to me. Do you feel that way about Rockmore?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Then why does it matter?”

“Because I refuse to lose.”

“What would you be losing?”

Why not tell her? This was an aberration and he was forced to exist in it, so why not talk to her? This creature he would never have spoken to as part of his normal life. Why not...indulge?

He did not do chaos or indulgence in his real life, and here he was, steeped in both. The snow making a mockery of the idea he’d ever had power over anything of note. It was perhaps more that his life had not encountered an act of God before now.

“The game. I do not cede control, cara .”

She wrinkled her nose, and in spite of himself he found it...charming.

Had he ever been charmed before?

“You do not cede control or eat leftovers. So interesting.”

She sneezed again. And he fought against his own distaste for anything germ related.

“You must go to bed,” he said. “You are unwell.”

“I’ve certainly been more well,” she said, sounding flat.

“What would you do if you had a place full of guests?”

She looked slightly helpless then. “I don’t know.” She squinted. “I refuse to thank you.”

“I do not require your thanks, though it is something to think about.”

“Is there any way that you can... Stop ever?” she asked as she picked up her coffee, as if she was going to take it to bed with her.

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean... Is there any way... Another way that lets you stop the expansion?”

He mulled telling her this truth, as it was...like all things with his mother it was incomprehensible, and he found it humiliating in a strange way. Exposing the ridiculousness of the woman who had birthed him, raised him. But it was also the truth of her, and of his life, so what could be done?

“Yes,” he said. “There is.”

“What’s that?”

“I have to get married. And have a child.”

She blinked. “Your mom was kind of controlling.”

“You have no idea,” he said.

“Well, can you understand that I don’t want my mother controlling me?”

“I can. Except this decision controls her also. As long as you have this place, she is tethered to it. It determines what sort of life she can live. My mother is dead. She is controlling me from the grave. Because she can no longer control everything in life.”

She walked out of the room, and left him there to contemplate his eggs. He could see that he was in an uphill battle. When a person could not be manipulated with money, he simply had no idea how to proceed.

He wasn’t used to being at loose ends. At least, not these days. During his childhood, he had often spent hours alone. Moving about in darkness. Living in tainted luxury where only one space was ever sacred.

His bedroom had been a necessary refuge. One that he had controlled fiercely.

The old manner home had secret passages, and they had allowed him to move through the walls, to access different portions of the house. So that he didn’t have to walk down the cluttered hallways. But still, there were no other spaces in the house that his mother had not claimed with her illness.

He didn’t like being trapped somewhere. It was too reminiscent of that time in his life. It was too reminiscent of days he would rather forget.

How he loathed it.

It was drafty in this house. And it was old.

Even though the manor home he had grown up in had been much more stately than this, it had still been old. And old equaled chill. Damp. Particularly where he had lived in the Italian Alps.

Many people thought of warmth when they thought of Italy. Not so where he had resided.

He could well remember winters where they had been blanketed in a deluge of snow. He had never liked it. It had increased that feeling of being isolated in the walls of their home.

And so it was now.

But he was concerned about his charge.

She had become his charge, somehow.

He did not fear illness, but he had a preoccupation with cleanliness and the control of said cleanliness, because in his childhood home he’d had no control of his surroundings. Still, it had become a fixation on cleanliness, and this was pushing against his comfort level.

But he would simply wash his hands more often.

There was no one else to care for her.

He had never cared for another person before. He had never had occasion to.

He had spent his life caring for himself. As a child it had often felt like a matter of survival. There had been two elderly household employees who worked for his mother, and they handled meals, such as they were.

As an adult, it felt like a luxury. To be able to care for himself, more or less, without the interference of his mother making it more challenging. Because that was how it had been. Ever and always. If he could find a way to ease things for himself, she would often make it more challenging with her impossible demands and needs. She wanted control. Over everything. Including him. When he had stopped being malleable, when he had stopped being a child, she had found all that much more difficult.

He decided that the best way forward would be to build the fire. So, he was going to take charge. And that was how it would be.