Italian Boss, Housekeeper Bride

DEAR READER LETTER

By Sharon Kendrick

Dear Reader,

One hundred. Doesn’t matter how many times I say it, I still can’t believe that’s how many books I’ve written. It’s a fabulous feeling but more fabulous still is the news that Mills & Boon are issuing every single one of my backlist as digital titles. Wow. I can’t wait to share all my stories with you - which are as vivid to me now as when I wrote them.

There’s BOUGHT FOR HER HUSBAND, with its outrageously macho Greek hero and A SCANDAL, A SECRET AND A BABY featuring a very sexy Tuscan. THE SHEIKH’S HEIR proved so popular with readers that it spent two weeks on the USA Today charts and…well, I could go on, but I’ll leave you to discover them for yourselves.

I remember the first line of my very first book: “So you’ve come to Australia looking for a husband?” Actually, the heroine had gone to Australia escape men, but guess what? She found a husband all the same! The man who inspired that book rang me up recently and when I told him I was beginning my 100th story and couldn’t decide what to write, he said, “Why don’t you go back to where it all started?”

So I did. And that’s how A ROYAL VOW OF CONVENIENCE was born. It opens in beautiful Queensland and moves to England and New York. It’s about a runaway princess and the enigmatic billionaire who is infuriated by her, yet who winds up rescuing her. But then, she goes and rescues him… Wouldn’t you know it?

I’ll end by saying how very grateful I am to have a career I love, and to thank each and every one of you who has supported me along the way. You really are very dear readers.

Love,

Sharon xxx

Mills & Boon are proud to present a thrilling digital collection of all Sharon Kendrick’s novels and novellas for us to celebrate the publication of her amazing and awesome 100th book! Sharon is known worldwide for her likeable, spirited heroines and her gorgeous, utterly masculine heroes.

SHARON KENDRICK once won a national writing competition, describing her ideal date: being flown to an exotic island by a gorgeous and powerful man. Little did she realise that she’d just wandered into her dream job! Today she writes for Mills & Boon, featuring her often stubborn but always to-die-for heroes and the women who bring them to their knees. She believes that the best books are those you never want to end. Just like life…

To Bryony Green, the best editor in the world!

Italian Boss, Housekeeper Bride

Sharon Kendrick

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cover

Dear Reader

About the Author

Dedication

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

NATASHA didn’t have to see his face to know something was wrong.

She could tell from the slamming of the door and the heavy footfalls in the hall. From the momentary hesitation which was not like Raffaele at all. The barely muffled curse; some Italian expletive, she thought. She listened while he hung his suit jacket up in the hall and heard him go into his study. Then silence—and something very much like fear stirred within her and she didn’t understand why.

He had been away to America—where he owned real-estate on both the east and west coast—and whenever he returned from a trip he always came to find her. To ask her how she’d been. How Sam was.

Sometimes, if he was flying by commercial rather than private jet, he would even remember to bring the child some soft toy or game that he’d bought at the airport. Once she had seen him remove a shiny gold box of perfume from his briefcase, and her heart had begun to thud with a ridiculous excitement. But she had never seen it again.

The scent had not been destined for Natasha. Presumably it had gone to the leggy supermodel he had been seeing at the time—the one who’d always used to leave a stocking or a scarf behind in the bathroom, like some territorial trophy, marking out her pitch.

The study was still ominously silent, and Natasha began making a pot of mega-strong coffee—just as Raffaele had taught her to when she’d first gone to work for him. Wasn’t it crazy how memories could stay stuck fast in your head, even though they meant nothing? Natasha could still remember the shiver she’d felt as he’d bent close to her, too close for her comfort—though, not, it had seemed, for his. He had been too intent on showing her what to do to notice the mousy-looking woman at his side.

His voice had dipped, like soft velvet underpinned with steel. ‘In Italy we say that the coffee should look like ink and taste like heaven. Very strong and very dark—like the best kind of man. You understand? Capisci?’ And the black eyes had glittered at her in mocking question, as if it amused him that a woman should need to be taught how to make coffee.

But she had. Oh, she had. Back then she had needed teaching about pretty much everything that someone like Raffaele took for granted. While he was used to only the very best, she’d always been the kind of person who usually spooned instant out of a jar—until the time had come when she’d had barely enough money to buy any. Just thinking about the mess she had found herself in still had the power to make her tremble with apprehension. She never wanted to go back there—to those days of hunger and uncertainty and real fear—to before Raffaele had stepped in to save her.

Was that why she’d put him on a pedestal ever since?

Natasha placed the coffee and cup on the tray, along with two of the small almond biscuits which were Raffaele’s favourites. She had learnt how to make those, too, from the Italian cookbook he had bought her one Christmas.

Then she checked her appearance in the kitchen mirror, just as any employee would do before going in to see their boss—even if they didn’t happen to live in the same house, as Natasha did.

She would do. Her pale brown hair was neat, her dress carefully ironed and her features unadorned by make-up. She looked efficient and unthreatening. The way she liked it.

Going bare-faced was a habit she’d gotten into when Sam was a baby, when she’d been terrified of being judged by other people more than she already had been. She had wanted to send out the message that being a struggling single mother didn’t mean she was sexually available.

Besides, Natasha had learnt that it was easier if you kept things simple. There were advantages to almost everything in life—it all boiled down to your attitude. No make-up meant more time in the morning—just as tying her hair back did. She looked just what she hoped she was—a respected and respectable member of Raffaele’s staff.

‘Natasha!’

She heard his peremptory summons couched in the distinctively accented voice as it carried down to the basement. Hastily, she picked up the tray and carried it upstairs to his study, but in the doorway she paused, her attention caught and arrested by the sight of him. Natasha frowned. Her instinct had been right—there was something wrong.

Raffaele de Feretti. Billionaire. Bachelor. Boss. And the man she had quietly loved from almost since the first time she’d set eyes on him. But who wouldn’t love him? Not loving him would have presented a greater challenge—despite his arrogance and that disdainful air he had sometimes, when he wasn’t really listening to what you said.

He hadn’t heard her now and was standing with his back to her, gazing out onto the drenched garden at the centre of the London square, where raindrops dripped down the trees like a woman’s tears.

Today the garden was deserted, but on fine days you could see nannies with their boisterous young charges running around the paths to the tiny playground section at the far end. Or mothers with prams, before they went back to work—as many of the mothers around this affluent part of the city seemed to do whether it was because they needed the variety or because they wanted the independence. Natasha could never quite work it out. She used to think that it would be bliss not to have to work, but that was probably because the option had never been open to her.

Natasha used to take Sam to the garden when he was younger—feeling very privileged to be able to do so, but slightly nervous, too, as if someone was about to move her on, to tell her she had no right to be there. Her son, of course, had been unaware of the exclusive location of his playground, but every time her beloved little boy had patted his bucket and squealed with delight as sand flew out, Natasha had thanked a benevolent fate for bringing Raffaele de Feretti into her life.

‘Raffaele?’ she said quietly.

But Raffaele didn’t look round. Not even when she put the tray down on his desk with a little clatter. His tall, lean body just remained there—as unmoving as a statue and as silent as a rock—and there was something so perturbing and so alien about his stance that Natasha cleared her throat.

‘Raffaele?’ she prompted again.

Her soft English accent filtered into his fractured thoughts and slowly Raffaele turned round, his eyes taking in her familiar face and the gentle concern in her eyes. He sighed. Natasha. As ever-present and unthreatening as the air he breathed. He frowned, brought back to the present with a jolt. He had been miles away. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve brought you your coffee,’

Coffee? Had he asked for any? Probably not—but he could certainly do with some. How like her to guess. He nodded, gesturing for her to pour some and then he sat down in the leather chair at his desk, running his fingertips along the dark rasp of his jaw, the way he always did when something was on his mind. It was usually a high-profile takeover of some big company, but today it happened to be something much bigger. His mouth hardened—because unlike corporate affairs, which he could practically deal with in his sleep, this particular problem was something he usually steered clear of. The personal.

‘Has anyone called this morning?’ he demanded.

‘Not a soul.’

‘No press?’

‘No.’ The tabloids had upped the ante ever since a reality-TV star had claimed that Raffaele had bedded her in a ‘Five Times a Night!’ romp, when he had barely met the woman. The matter was currently in the hands of his lawyers, and just the thought of it made Natasha feel quite sick, even though she knew it wasn’t true. She tried a joke, to try to help ease that terrible tension which was tightening the face she knew so well. ‘Well, no visible press—I guess, there could always be a couple of reporters hiding in the bushes. It’s happened before!’

But he didn’t laugh. ‘You’ve been in the whole time?’

Natasha nodded. ‘Except when I dropped Sam off at school, of course—but I was back by nine-thirty.’ Her mouth softened with concern. This close, she could see he looked somehow different. His brilliant black eyes were shadowed and the tiny lines which fanned outwards from them seemed somehow more pronounced. As if he had gone without sleep while he’d been away. ‘Why? Were you expecting someone?’

Not exactly expecting—because that might imply that he had invited someone, and there had categorically been no invitation issued. Raffaele gave a small shake of his head. He was a man who did not give his trust easily—his suspicions had been fuelled by a lifetime of mixing with people who wanted something from him. Sex or money or power—the magical trinity which he had in spades. With Natasha he had come pretty close to implicit trust—but he was still aware of the dangers of confiding in others except when absolutely necessary.

The more people you told, the weaker you became. Because knowledge was power—and, surely, this quiet Englishwoman already knew far too much about how he lived his life. For now, he had her loyalty, because she owed him a great debt—but what if greed reared its ugly head and persuaded her to sell out, as he had seen happen so many times in the past? What if she discovered that she could make enough to keep her in comfort for many years if she sold her story to the papers, who were always hungry to find out more about him?

‘No, Natasha—I wasn’t expecting anyone,’ he said, with blunt honesty.

‘You’re back from America early.’

‘I haven’t been in America. I flew to Italy, instead.’

‘Oh? Any special reason?’ She pushed the sugar towards him, knowing that she was being unusually persistent—but she had never seen him look quite so troubled before.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

But, because she loved him, Natasha chose to ignore the sudden dark, repressive tone of his voice. ‘Something’s wrong—isn’t it, Raffaele?’

Inexplicably, he felt the flicker of temptation for one brief moment, before his mouth curved with an aristocratic disdain he rarely used on her. ‘It is not your place to ask me such a question,’ he answered coolly. ‘You know that.’

Yes, she knew that—and mainly she accepted it. Just as she accepted so many other things about his life. Like the women who sometimes shared his bed, who would wander down to breakfast in the morning, all tousle-haired and pink-cheeked, long after he had left for the City. They would giggle as they demanded she make them French toast and orange juice and Natasha’s jealous heart would break into a thousand pieces.

It was true that there hadn’t been any of those interlopers for some time—in fact, he was probably gearing up for another any day now. Maybe that was what was bugging him? Was some woman giving him the run-around, for once—instead of the other way round? In which case, why didn’t he damned well tell her? At least, that way she would be able to steel her heart against the pain to come. Against the projected and mostly hidden fear that, this time, his affair might be serious.

But then Natasha felt ashamed at her self-seeking—for wasn’t there another part of Raffaele’s life which threatened to mar its near perfection? His beautiful half sister, who was nearly a whole generation younger than him. Could that be the reason behind his unscheduled trip to Italy?

She cleared her throat. ‘Elisabetta’s okay, isn’t she?’

Raffaele stilled, the coffee cup almost to his lips. He put it down with a clatter, untasted. ‘What makes you ask about my sister?’ he questioned, in a voice of dangerous stealth.

She could hardly say Because, in your charm-filled life, she seems to be the one area which causes 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.’

CHAPTER TWO

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 all evil.’

Raffaele’s mouth tightened. So this was what happened when you took someone like her into your confidence! His simmering rage was directed at Natasha now, his eyes sparking ebony fire. ‘You think to criticise me?’ he demanded. ‘You dare to do that?’

‘No,’ she replied patiently, ‘I’m just trying to help you see it more clearly, that’s all.’

‘She should not have been mixing with such lowlife!’ he stormed.

‘She is a young woman, Raffaele. You haven’t always—’

‘Haven’t always, what?’ he prompted dangerously.

‘You haven’t always displayed the greatest judgement with some of your choices of women, have you?’

‘What?’

She met the look of smouldering disbelief in his eyes without blinking, but somehow the thought of his doe-eyed half sister breaking her heart over some gold-digger gave Natasha the courage to stand up to him. ‘I draw your attention to the woman you’re currently suing.’

‘Madonna mia!’ he exclaimed. ‘I met her twice—and there was no intimacy. Am I to be held responsible for some lying actress who wants to use my money and my reputation to boost her career? And Elisabetta is my sister,’ he continued stubbornly. ‘It is different.’