Both Maria and Alberto were far too well bred to show any emotion and neither had he. It was as it was.
He was more concerned about Isabella. This marriage would have suited her but maybe, he’d thought, on his way back to his villa, it was fate. Perhaps she needed to find the courage to tell her parents about her sexuality instead of trying to hide behind a façade of a happy marriage.
He had, in fact, spoken to Isabella at length on the telephone on the way to her parents’. A face-to-face meeting was out of the question as she was holidaying with friends on the Riviera. He had smiled wryly at the relief in her voice when he had broken the news of his upcoming marriage to Cordelia. Let off the hook for the time being. Her congratulations had been sincere and heartfelt and when he had hung up, it had flashed through his head that neither Isabella nor Cordelia were what might be considered orthodox candidates for walking up the aisle.
One was relieved not to be doing so and the other was doing so only because all alternative exits had been barred. Money, it had to be said, definitely didn’t buy love. Just as well, considering it wasn’t something he was looking for.
That job over, here he was now, at ten the following morning, waiting at a chic café in the stunning city of Siena. He’d returned late the previous night to find Cordelia dead to the world in one of the guest bedrooms. He had left orders for her to be given whatever she wanted for breakfast and, at a little after six in the morning, he had taken himself off to his head office, where he had powered through key emails and filled various CEOs in on what might prove a temporarily disjointed work schedule.
A makeover for his reluctant wife-to-be was on the cards.
Then, once they were back at his house, a jeweller would be personally escorted on Luca’s private plane so that a ring could be chosen.
She had taken some persuading to agree to marry him and he wasn’t going to sit on his hands and hope she didn’t change her mind. Speed was of the essence and he intended to put his foot on the accelerator until she was bound to him, with all i’s dotted and t’s crossed.
Woolly nonsense about love not being on the agenda was not going to be a spoke in any revolving wheels.
His father had offered to return to Tuscany immediately so that he could meet the lucky bride and Luca had only just managed to dissuade him, pointing out that it would be far better to wait a couple of weeks until she was fully settled before bombarding her with yet more stuff to confuse her.
‘She’s from another...er...’ Luca had thought of her, her sinewy, purposeful body, her lightly freckled face bare of make-up, her hair hanging down her back in a riot of tangled curls, and the word planet had sprung to mind.
However, any such description wasn’t going to do, he’d acknowledged, because his father truly thought that at long last his hard-nosed son had traded his head for his heart, and Luca had been strangely reluctant to disillusion him on that front.
‘It’s like me and your mother,’ Giovanni Baresi had murmured in a trembling, emotional voice down the end of the phone line. ‘Same part of the world, even. Oh, my dear, dear son...’
Luca had found it astonishing that, after the many conversations they had had over the years on the subject of relationships and Luca’s outspoken disapproval of his father’s antics, his father could still be swept away on a tide of emotion at the unrealistic assumption that his son had somehow managed to dispatch his brain on a long-distance holiday, leaving him vulnerable to the one thing he had always declared he didn’t believe in.
Having allowed his father to think the wildly improbable, he had had to go with the flow. Likewise, for better or for worse, Isabella and her parents also nurtured thoughts of a love match. Isabella should have known better, considering they had discussed the suitability of a marriage of convenience, but there you had it.
Luca sighed and glanced at his watch.
Who believed what didn’t matter anyway, so dwelling on it was a waste of time.
She was late.
He dialled her number and opened, without hesitation, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cordelia responded breathlessly. Sitting in the back seat of Luca’s plush four-wheel drive, she could barely take in the splendid sights bypassing them as his driver whizzed along the deserted roads. Her head was moving left to right, her senses darting frantically so that she didn’t miss a thing. ‘I’m afraid I asked your driver to pull over a couple of times...well, maybe more than a couple, actually...’
‘You were sick? Is there a problem?’ Luca jerked into an upright position and wondered whether to video call her instead of talking down the end of a phone. So much more could be deciphered from looking at someone and Cordelia was certainly one of those people whose faces were as transparent as a sheet of glass. She wasn’t the complaining sort but was there some kind of medical problem happening? He wondered how fast he could get his consultant over to his house.
‘Oh, no,’ Cordelia responded airily. ‘It’s just that the scenery is so breathtaking that I wanted to take some pics on my phone.’
Luca sagged with relief, then he clicked his tongue impatiently.
‘My PA has set up appointments with the couturier,’ he drawled.
‘You never said.’
‘I didn’t think you would waste time stopping on the way for Kodak moments.’
‘I still don’t understand why I have to...have a change of wardrobe, Luca.’
‘You’re marrying me, cara. You will be entering a world that’s far removed from the one you have always
