Читать книгу: «What a Girl Wants», страница 5
‘How can I have real feelings for him?’ I asked, burning up. ‘I only knew him for a week. And he didn’t really know me at all.’
It was a question I’d been asking myself a lot, only Amy and Paige didn’t realize it was rhetorical. I did have feelings for him – big, scary feelings that I didn’t understand and, in all honesty, did not want to. I’d always been so safe and secure in my feelings for Charlie but every time I thought about Nick, my stomach clenched and my hands made tiny fists and I wanted to hit something. Preferably him. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up with nothing but my über-crush on Charlie back the way it was. Everything would be so much simpler.
‘To be fair, you did lie to the man about your entire existence while merrily shagging him senseless,’ Amy said. ‘Even after he bared his soul to you. I might take a few days to call you back for a chat, to be fair.’
‘He bared his soul?’ Paige looked less than impressed. ‘You mean, he pulled out some of his cheesy old lines?’
‘There were cheesy lines in the beginning,’ I admitted, not wanting to come to his defence but entirely incapable of stopping myself, ‘but there was a certain degree of soul-baring after a bit. Maybe not baring, maybe it was more like soul-flashing.’
‘What a knob,’ she breathed, taking a big deep drink of her wine. ‘Him, not you.’
‘It’s starting to feel like it never happened.’ I flipped to the sent messages in my phone and saw his name over and over. I wondered what would give out first, his refusal to reply or my dignity. ‘Every morning when I wake up, it feels more and more like I was never in Hawaii, like he never existed.’
‘Don’t upset yourself over it,’ Paige said, shifting in her seat. ‘I’m sure it was all bullshit. I don’t know if that man is capable of anything other than trying to get into a woman’s pants.’
Paige had known Nick a lot longer than I had and I was fully aware that she had tried very hard to get into his pants, and not the other way around. And that didn’t make this conversation awkward at all.
‘Bottom line is,’ Amy shrugged and emptied her second glass of wine, ‘something is stopping you from moving on with Charlie. Something’s got you stuck. That something is Nick.’
‘Paige, can you come and check these shots?’ the photographer bellowed from the set below. With a very grumpy look on her face, Paige dutifully stood up and marched down the stairs.
‘Shout if the models need oiling. The male models,’ Amy yelled as she went before turning her attention back to me. ‘I know I haven’t been entirely Team Charlie when it comes to you two being together-together but if you tell me this is what you really, really want, I will shut my mouth, buy you a shit housewarming present and never say the “N” word again. But you have to be entirely honest before you get yourself into something you might regret.’
‘You really have got to stop calling him that,’ I sighed.
There it was again. What did I want? ‘I don’t want to ruin everything because of a holiday romance hangover.
‘Life isn’t a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, Amy,’ I said. ‘If I cock this up, I can’t just go back to the end of the last chapter and try something else.’
‘Oh, Tess,’ She smiled and hugged me, squeezing my shoulders tightly. ‘That’s exactly what life is: nothing is set in stone, nothing has already been decided. That’s where you’ve been going wrong all these years.’
‘Am I interrupting something beautiful?’ Charlie’s voice broke through our Kodak moment, making Amy jump and spill my wine before I could drink it. Which was probably best. ‘Don’t let me stop you, I always knew there was something going on with you two.’
‘Didn’t I tell you not to tell him where we were?’ Amy jumped to her feet, kissed him on the cheek and bounced off downstairs to the set. ‘Just because she’d rather be in bed with me than you. No need to be jealous, Wilder.’
‘Amy,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Always a pleasure.’
He clambered onto the settee, all arms and legs and coppery curls, looking like a sexy hipster Bambi man.
‘I see she’s taking this well?’ he said, pulling the strap of his man-bag over his head and setting it carefully on the cushion between us. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ I nodded with too much enthusiasm, not sure what to do. Normally we’d have hugged by now or I’d have taken the piss out of him for his jeans being too skinny or unfastened the second button of his T-shirt because one wasn’t enough and three would be too many. Instead, I put my wine glass down and sat on my hands. ‘You had a busy day?’
‘I played football manager for about three hours and then I remembered outside existed so I went out and got you this.’ He pulled a blue carrier bag out of his messenger bag and handed it to me with a flourish. ‘Sorry it’s not wrapped.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. I bloody loved presents. Surprises not so much, but presents? Yes, please.
‘Open it,’ he said, his smile almost bigger than mine. ‘I hope it’s right.’
Inside the bag was a box and inside that box, was a camera.
‘Oh, Charlie, you didn’t!’ I tore away the packaging as carefully as I could and pulled out a brand-new Canon camera. It was almost identical to my old one, lighter and shinier and with fewer bumps and bruises on the body, but the buttons were all in the same places and she fell into my hands as though I’d known her forever. ‘You can’t have!’
He inched over on the sofa and squeezed my knee, his huge hand covering half my thigh in the process. ‘I can and I did,’ he said in a low voice that made every inch of my skin prickle. ‘And you’re going to go to Milan and take amazing photos of Mr – I forget his first name – Bennett and his clothes and whatever else you want to take amazing photos of and you’re going to be amazing at it.’
‘But the pitch?’ I looked up at him and then at my camera, my beautiful camera; beautiful, beautiful Charlie. ‘It’s only a week away.’
‘Yes it is,’ he said as I reached out to unfasten his second button; I couldn’t look at it for a moment longer. Charlie covered my hand with his and I felt a warmth wash over my entire body. ‘But I don’t want to wake up next to you every morning, not knowing whether or not you’re wondering “what if?” because I know you’d never say anything. So I’m not giving you the chance to regret this. OK?’
Just when you thought you knew everything about someone, they had to go one better.
‘This is amazing,’ I said, cradling the camera in my lap and leaning over to give Charlie the biggest hug I could muster. ‘You’re amazing.’
‘I’m all right,’ he replied. ‘And let’s be honest, I’m just trying to warm you up for later.’
I looked away so he wouldn’t see me blush. We’d always flirted with each other but now I knew I was going to have to follow through, I couldn’t seem to keep the colour out of my cheeks.
‘I talked to my mate at Perito’s this morning,’ he said, squeezing my knee. ‘He’s going over to Portugal with his team on Monday and he asked if we wanted to go along, meet the founders of the company and all that.’
‘But Milan?’ I held my camera tightly. ‘And you hate flying?’
‘I told him you were already otherwise engaged,’ he said, fiddling with his newly opened button. ‘But I said I’d go. Double scotch and some positive thinking and I’ll be OK. It’s got to be a good sign, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s an amazing sign,’ I agreed, a twinge of jealousy in my chest that I wouldn’t get to go along. Not that I didn’t have an adventure of my own to worry about. ‘I’m really excited.’
Admittedly, I didn’t sound that excited but I was somewhat distracted by what was happening below us in the studio.
‘Is there any point in asking what’s going on down there?’ Charlie asked, nodding at the set downstairs.
Amy had done a fine job of making herself useful. I watched as she merrily rubbed moisturizer into the chest of one of the male models, bouncing from foot to foot, while Paige was on all fours on the bed, demonstrating a particularly uncomfortable-looking pose for the female model, who still looked bored. Gorgeous, but bored.
‘There is not,’ I replied, turning my back on it all and looking back down at my lovely camera again. ‘This really is amazing, you know.’
‘Doesn’t really feel like the right time to get all heavy …’ He gestured over to where Amy was now rubbing lotion into the chests of two men at once with her eyes closed. ‘But I wanted you to know I’m serious about this. And that I’m going to do whatever I can do to make you happy. It’s all I can think about, that we should be together. You’re what I care about.’
I still couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. ‘More than Arsenal?’ I asked, doubtful.
‘Let’s not go completely crazy.’ He ran his hand through his already messy hair and grinned. It was so fucking adorable, my heart almost exploded. ‘But getting there, at the very least. So, can we go?’
‘Go?’
‘Home?’ he said, taking the camera out of my hands and slipping it back inside the box. I fought the urge to slap his hands away – given that he had paid for it in the first place I supposed he was allowed to touch it. ‘I’ve cleared out two entire drawers. For you.’
Oh yeah, he’d asked me to move in. And while I hadn’t said no, I hadn’t said yes, either. In fact, if I recalled correctly, I’d said I needed time to think. I rested my hand on the camera box and breathed out slowly, confused by the thought that it might not be a lovely, thoughtful gift but a very expensive pat on the head. Had he just assumed I was going to move in? That I was going to say yes to joining the agency?
‘I said I’d stay with Amy tonight,’ I said. ‘She had a job interview today and it didn’t go very well and she’s stressing out so …’
‘She doesn’t look that stressed,’ Charlie said, disappointment all over his face. ‘Are you sure? I was going to cook for you.’
‘Now I’m definitely sure!’ I took the camera, safely back in its plastic bag, and gripped the handles tightly. My precious camera. My precious, emotionally loaded, symbolic camera. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken. I know I can’t cook for shit,’ he said with a shrug. ‘To be honest, I was hoping you’d take over halfway through anyway.’
‘Because I’m such a domestic goddess?’ I stood when he stood, leaning into a kiss that still felt strange. Lovely, but strange. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Will you though?’ Charlie pulled his Oyster card out of his bag and stuck it in his back pocket. ‘Because I’ve heard that one before.’
‘Odds are good,’ I confirmed. ‘I’d say better than fifty per cent.’
‘OK. Tess?’ He stopped halfway down the stairs and looked back up at me, all pale skin and big eyes and wide, happy mouth.
‘Charlie?’ I sat back down on the settee, happily stroking my camera. I was probably overreacting. He wasn’t trying to force me into a decision I wasn’t ready to make. That wasn’t Charlie at all. He wouldn’t do something like that.
‘I love you.’
My eyebrows shot up so high I assumed they were forever lost in orbit around the earth.
It was hardly the first time the ‘L’ word had left Charlie’s lips and found my ears but this was different. This wasn’t the same as when I brought him an Egg McMuffin because he had a hangover or called him an Addison Lee because he was too lazy to get the night bus from mine. This was a legitimate ‘I Love You’. This was my first ever ‘I Love You’. I had no idea what to do.
‘OK,’ I replied, nodding and trying not to be sick. ‘That’s brilliant.’
Charlie scratched his head and I knew he was waiting for me to say something else but my mind was completely blank. Charlie Wilder had told me he loved me and I had no words. None of them.
‘OK,’ I said again.
And then it was happening again. I felt myself leaving my body and floating up into the corner of the room, watching as I stared blankly at the first man to tell me he loved me.
This is where you’re meant to say ‘I love you too,’ my brain whispered.
And I knew that. I’d been waiting for this moment forever. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I smiled brightly and gave him a double thumbs up.
‘That’s brilliant,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he echoed, staring at me from the top of the stairs. ‘Brilliant.’
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I cannot believe you gave him a thumbs up!’
Out of everything I’d ever done, nothing had tickled Amy quite like this.
‘Double thumbs up,’ I corrected. ‘It was a double thumbs up.’
‘I’d take that if it were me,’ she said, heaving her first enormous suitcase off the luggage carousel at Malpensa airport, barely blinking at the fact it weighed almost as much as she did. Agent Veronica had assented to my bringing her to Milan as my assistant with only four ‘fuck you’s’ and one use of the ‘c’ word. It was as though she was starting to like me. ‘Charlie Wilder finally drops the L bomb and you give him the double thumbs up and say thank you. Thank you!’
‘I didn’t say “thank you”,’ I said, looking for my own sad little bag. A hasty patch-up job with duct tape meant it was very, very recognisable. ‘I said, “brilliant” and I haven’t heard from him since. Now, can we agree to never speak of it again?’
‘What did you expect him to do?’ she asked as she pulled up the suitcase handle and leaned forward, using it as a chin rest. ‘Propose? “Oh, I just told a girl I love her and she said ‘Brilliant’ so I should totes put a ring on it?”’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Yes.’
‘And you gave him a double thumbs up,’ Amy stretched her arms over her head and smiled. ‘Good job on getting the camera out of him first.’ The camera. He gave me a camera, told me loved me and I gave him the thumbs up. What a knobhead. ‘You can’t really be surprised that he’s pissed off, can you?’
I shrugged, eyeing my case as it rattled along the conveyor belt towards me. Half the size and a third the weight of Amy’s case; I couldn’t even begin to work out what she had brought with her.
‘No,’ I protested, grabbing my case and wrenching my still-sore shoulder as I pulled it from the belt. ‘Of course not. But I didn’t think he’d be so flippant about the whole thing.’
‘He isn’t being flippant.’ She pushed her hair out of her face and sighed. ‘He’s being hurt. This is what hurt looks like. Isn’t it obvious?’
Honestly, my hurting Charlie was an entirely new concept. I’d spent so long nursing my unrequited crush that the thought that I could actually damage his feelings was a bit of a mind-blower. But she was right.
We’d spoken on Saturday night when I called, determined to make things right between us before I left for Italy. Unlike a certain other man I would not name, Charlie answered his phone when I called it. But similarly to Mr Unmentionable, he wasn’t best pleased with me. I was met with a variety of one-word responses to my every question, and when I finally suggested we get together for dinner as I was leaving for Milan in the morning, he declined, citing prior plans for his mate’s birthday. Since I had been his social secretary forever, I knew it really was Robbo’s birthday, but I also knew when Charlie was pissed off. And above all else, I knew a man would never put the thirty-second birthday of a passing acquaintance above the opportunity for a shag. Not that I was planning to shag him, but clearly my track record of declining a sleepover wasn’t fantastic in these situations. After blowing me off, he switched to the pitch, telling me he was leaving for Portugal on Monday morning and that I should email him my stuff for the pitch so he could work everything up for Friday, then hung up. No ‘have fun’, no mention of us living together, no mention of his declaration of love, no mention of my appalling response to said declaration. He was all business.
As was quite obvious to everyone alive, I was not an expert in men but I was an expert in Charlie. He was clearly furious. The only time he’d been this cold to me in the last decade was when I accidentally washed a pair of his jeans that had tickets to the FA Cup final in the back pocket. That resulted in almost a week of stony silence but he soon came round when he needed help picking a birthday present for his then girlfriend. Suffering the indignity of trying on lingerie that was going to be worn by a woman who was sleeping with the man I believed was the only possible father to my future children felt like more than enough punishment for denying Charlie the opportunity to see Arsenal lose on penalties in extra time.
But knowing he was perfectly justified in his huff didn’t help me. It still felt overwhelming – starting a business, moving in together, the first ‘I Love You’ and a chicken cook-in sauce? Who did he think I was, Beyoncé? I was an organized person who liked a plan, and in my head I had always imagined these things happening in a timely, organized fashion. I’d waited ten years – why did they all have to appear at once?
‘This is good timing,’ I said, wiping away an errant tear that had crept out of nowhere before Amy saw. Stupid eyes. ‘This slows things down. We’ll both be so busy this week, we won’t have time to stew on stuff. And when I get back, it’ll all be OK.’
‘Totally healthy reaction,’ Amy said, shoving her passport in the back pocket of her hot-pink jeans. ‘You’re so on top of this.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ I replied, pulling her passport out of her back pocket without her even noticing and placing it safely into into my travel wallet with my passport. ‘I can make my own decisions.’
My suitcase was light to the point of embarrassment, compared to Amy’s gargantuan twosome. All I had packed were comfy jeans, a few T-shirts and shirts and a couple of jumpers in case it got cold at night, even though I had been soundly assured by Agent Veronica that Milan in July would be ‘fucking roasting red hot like the seventh circle of hell’ and that she would rather hang herself by her own ovaries than ‘spend a second in that shithole’. It wasn’t all boring though; I had been to M&S and bought two new packs of pants especially for the trip. It hardly mattered what I wore on my nether regions, since Amy was the only person who was likely to see them and, given my natural tendency to be a never-nude, that tended to be unplanned and against my will anyway.
‘So,’ Amy waved at a driver holding a board showing my name and waited for me to find my feet, ‘what would you do if you turned around and Charlie was stood on one side of the airport and Nick was on the other?’
‘Turn back around and keep walking?’ I said, still breathless. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, they’re not are they?’ I hardly dared move.
‘Well, Charlie isn’t,’ she shrugged. ‘And since you apparently managed to spend a week in playing photographer without taking a single bloody shot of Mr Miller, I don’t know what he looks like, do I?’
‘If you’re going to tell me you haven’t googled him,’ I nodded at the driver as we trotted towards him, overly excited to see my own name badly written in wonky black marker, ‘I’m going to call you a liar.’
‘Do you have any idea how many Nick Millers there are in the world?’ Amy said. ‘Not including a character in a very popular sitcom?’
‘A few?’
Secretly, I was pleased that she’d had a hard time finding him. If Amy had got so much as a peek at Nick, we wouldn’t be in Milan right now. We’d be wherever in the world he might be so she could hunt him down and force us down the aisle with a shotgun.
‘You’re a pain in my arse, Brookes,’ she muttered. ‘I never tell you a story without visual aids.’
‘Yeah, and if you could stop texting me pictures of your one-night stands while they’re sleeping, that would be brilliant,’ I replied.
With a big wide smile, Amy turned and gave me a double thumbs up.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s brilliant.’
‘Remind me again why I brought you with me?’ I asked my alleged best friend, fighting the urge to punch her in the face.
‘Because you love me,’ she said, weaving her arm through mine, as our driver piled our bags onto a trolley. ‘And you couldn’t possibly survive another adventure without me.’
‘Totally should have brought Paige,’ I mumbled to myself as we walked out of the air-conditioned airport into a heat that almost made me crumble to my denim-clad knees. So this was the seventh circle of ovary-hanging hell Veronica had talked about.
‘Warm out,’ Amy said, sliding on her sunglasses. ‘This is going to be fun.’
‘It’s going to be something,’ I replied, looking for my own sunglasses in my handbag and having a sudden flashback to leaving them on top of Amy’s dresser in the rush to get her out and into the taxi that had been waiting for us for twenty minutes. ‘It’s definitely going to be something.’
‘Oh my God!’
Amy hadn’t stopped talking since customs so it was a testament to just how impressive Bertie Bennett’s Italian home was that it had managed to shut her up so successfully. Even when I had explained that the clouds that looked so much like mountains were, in fact, mountains, she hadn’t stopped for breath so the look of dazed amazement that had come over her now was wonderful to behold for many reasons. From a best-friend perspective, I was happy to see her look so happy. From a human-being perspective, I could have cried with joy at the first moment of silence in over an hour.
As the car pulled off the road and a pair of huge iron gates swung open to allow us inside, I pressed my fingertips against the window of the car. When I’d arrived at Bertie Bennett’s house in Hawaii, I thought I had accidentally wandered into heaven. The wonderful modernist architecture, the sea, the sand, the way the air smelled so sweet and welcoming. But this was something else; this was like something I had only seen in fairytales. One moment we were on a perfectly normal-looking city street while Amy regaled the driver with tales of her latest urinary tract infection and the next we were sitting in complete silence and rolling into the courtyard of the most beautiful, stately building I had ever seen.
When I was sixteen, my entire class had gone on a school trip to London and I distinctly remembered being more than a little bit disappointed by Buckingham Palace. Not that it wasn’t impressive; but my imagination had been ruined by too many Disney movies, so it had too many corners and not enough turrets for my liking. But this place? Al’s Milan pied-à-terre made Buck House look like a two-up, two-down council house.
It wasn’t that it was enormous or sprawling or set in acres of artfully landscaped grounds, it was just impossibly beautiful. The house was elegant and simple with so many big, sparkling windows I couldn’t even count them all. Everything was symmetrical, which brought out the ecstatic OCD in me and I kept looking up to the top floor, expecting to see a princess combing out her hair on one of the balconies. Passing through the gate, the car came to a halt in the courtyard, a stone fountain bubbling away in the centre, more archways leading off to small but perfectly formed manicured lawns, decorated with trees and plants. Gorgeous to look at, but just like his super-modern home in Hawaii, entirely inviting. Nothing about this storybook palace said ‘do not touch’; it was far more ‘feel free to take off your shoes and run around barefoot and would you like a bottle of wine and a straw while you’re doing that?’
A white-glove-wearing footman opened the passenger door and I climbed out of the car, eyes still skyward, taking in each of the three levels of Al’s second home. Unlike Hawaii, there was endless activity behind each of the arched windows. I could see people rushing around from one room to the next, curtains pulled back and windows thrown open. Clearly, someone was in a rush to get ready for something.
‘Tess?’ Amy peered at me over the top of the car, wavering on her tiptoes. ‘Are we in the right place?’
‘I don’t know about you,’ I replied, watching the huge wooden double door creak open to reveal a familiar face. ‘But I’m pretty bloody sure that I am.’
‘My darling!’ A short, handsome man with coffee-coloured skin and impeccably parted jet-black hair rushed across the courtyard, barrelling past assorted staff members who were trying to go about their business, and scooped me up in an impressive hug. Mostly impressive because I was at least five inches taller than him. ‘Aloha!’
‘Kekipi!’ I hoped he wouldn’t find the fact I still had my feet on the ground as awkward as I did. ‘Aloha.’
Nestling his head into my boobs, he looked up at me and grinned. Apparently he did not find it awkward at all. ‘Now are we Tess or Vanessa today?’
‘Tess,’ I said quickly. ‘Today, tomorrow and until the end of the world.’
‘That could be tomorrow if things don’t calm down in there.’ He gestured back towards the house before turning his attention to Amy.
My bestie was vibrating with barely restrained giddiness and not for the first time since I’d invited her along on this trip, I wondered whether introducing the two of them was, in fact, an incredibly bad idea.
‘You must be Amy the Assistant.’ He decided to forego the formalities of introductions and planted two big kisses on Amy’s cheeks. ‘I like you already, you make me look tall.’
The first time I met Kekipi, it had been in an entirely official capacity and even though the pretence of professionalism fell by the wayside relatively quickly, something was definitely different this time. Gone was the black uniform he had sported as the estate manager of Bertie Bennett’s Hawaiian hideout, and in its place was a bright aqua-blue trousers and hot-pink shirt combo. In fact, Kekipi’s shirt coordinated with Amy’s jeans so well, you would have been forgiven for thinking they had planned their outfits together. Which I imagined would be happening daily from tomorrow morning.
‘We’re so glad you decided to come,’ Kekipi said, waving for two men in light grey trousers and white shirts, apparently the official ensembles of the Milanese Bennett household, to whisk our suitcases out of sight. ‘It’s been a very dramatic week. Senior and Junior have not been getting along at all and Senior is having what can only be described as one of his “artistic” moments.’
‘Is that good?’ I asked, following him into the entranceway of the house. Kekipi pursed his lips and shook his head.
I’d met Al’s son, Artie, in Hawaii and he was a curious man to say the least. There was a lot of tension between them, and while I loved Al with a fierce and fiery passion reserved for the very best grandpa substitutes the world had to offer, clearly something was up between father and son. Plus, Artie had a handlebar moustache, and given that he did not work at a circus, that made me immediately suspicious.
‘While I am pleased to see him so active after such a long time,’ he replied with an arched eyebrow, ‘he needs to calm down a little. He isn’t as young as he used to be and Mr Bennett the younger isn’t nearly as tolerant of his father’s whims as we might all like.’
‘Where is Al?’ I asked, trying not to trip over my feet as I tiptoed across the beautiful, intricately tiled floors, my shoulders unrolling as the air conditioning washed over me. ‘Is he here?’
‘We arrived yesterday,’ Kekipi confirmed. ‘He’s in his room, working, working, working. He’ll be at dinner later.’
When I finally forced my eyes off the floor, I saw that there were flowers everywhere. Every surface held vases upon vases of beautiful, freshly cut blooms, all of them in shades of white and peach.
‘Are these for me?’ Amy asked, plucking a white rose from a vase and placing it behind her ear. Reaching out to grab the banister of an elaborate, twisting staircase, I fought off a flashback. Nick, a single flower, the waterfall … ‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t,’ Kekipi said with unmistakable disdain. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I know the value of a good floral arrangement but this is all Domenico’s doing.’
‘Domenico?’ I asked.
‘Miss Brookes.’
A tall, slender man descended the staircase in the requisite grey trousers, a matching jacket and added slim black tie. How he was wearing a suit and tie in this weather was beyond me – I was sweating so much I looked as though I had entered a wet T-shirt competition. But while he looked every inch the perfect butler, his stiff demeanour felt at odds with the make-yourself-at-home atmosphere of Al’s palazzo.
‘Domenico,’ Kekipi said with a flourish. ‘The estate manager here in Milan.’
‘He’s the Italian you?’ I asked, wiping my hand on the back of my jeans and achieving nothing more than making a sticky situation stickier.
‘Please,’ Kekipi sniffed. ‘I’ve never been so offended.’
‘Miss Brookes.’ The tall man greeted me with three air kisses, very carefully avoiding touching any part of my actual being. Not that I blamed him but it did make things feel ever so slightly awkward. ‘I am Domenico, Mr Bennett’s number two here at the Palazzo Della Stelline; we are so pleased that you have arrived.’
He turned to Amy and gave her a small bow, no kisses.
‘And you are Miss Brooke’s assistant?’
She looked at me, looked back at him and shrugged. ‘I suppose I am.’
Uh-oh. Clearly not impressed.
‘Excellent. I have rooms prepared for both of you in Mr Bennett’s most beautiful guest apartments. I would be very happy to show them to you if you would be so kind as to follow me.’ Domenico gestured up the stairs with an elaborate flourish of his arm and a far-too-wide smile. I’d seen waxworks show more authenticity.
‘I’ll take the ladies to their rooms,’ Kekipi said, knocking Domenico’s hand to his side and sweeping his hair from his forehead. ‘What time is dinner?’
‘Mr Bennett has suggested the ladies dine with him in the grand salon at seven,’ he replied, bowing his head graciously. ‘If you require anything at all before that time, please do let me know. Pressing 1 on the phone in your room will connect you directly to housekeeping and they will be happy to help you with whatever you might need.’
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