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Trip was staring at her hand. ‘Does it fit okay?’
She nodded and she wondered briefly how he knew what size to choose. ‘It feels strange,’ she said stiffly.
His gaze lifted to her face, the blue of his irises one shade darker than the stones in her ring.
‘You’ll get used to it.’ He hesitated as if he had something else to say, but then he turned and she watched him walk away. He stopped at the door to remove the key and then he was shutting the door and she waited for the click of the lock, but she heard nothing.
Because he didn’t need to lock her in. She wasn’t going anywhere and he knew it, and it was all too easy to hate Trip then. Only hating him didn’t change anything. He might have lied to her, tricked her, abducted her and blackmailed her. But she was still going to have to marry him.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WOULD YOU LIKE some more tea, signorina?’
Glancing up at Valentina, Lily shook her head. ‘No, thank you. I only ever have one cup.’
She shifted position in her chair and returned her gaze to where it had been fixed for the last twenty minutes to a point about an inch to the left of Trip’s maddeningly handsome face.
They were having breakfast outside beneath swathes of fragrant wisteria.
Beyond the formal gardens with their box hedging and parterres and half-hidden statuary was a rippling landscape of greens in every shade uninterrupted by anything man-made. Just paddocks of grazing horses, rows of olive trees and sloping fields of grape-covered vines and then finally the dark bosky hills that rolled up to meet the cloudless blue sky.
It was her first meal at the villa and the food was excellent, on a par with anything her parents’ housekeeper, Marisa, produced back in New York. She was still a little too tense to fully enjoy her breakfast of delicately scrambled eggs with curling ribbons of crispy pancetta, but that wasn’t Valentina’s fault. She seemed like a nice person and she wasn’t responsible for the actions of her capricious owner.
‘The eggs were wonderful, by the way,’ she said, glancing up at the housekeeper and smiling. ‘And the bread. In fact, it was all delicious.’
Yesterday, probably because of the stress and the leftover effects of anti-nausea pills, she had fallen asleep and unintentionally missed lunch. Waking in the late afternoon, she had showered and changed clothes and, drawn to the miraculous view from her window, she had decided to leave the sanctuary of her room.
Only then had she caught sight of Trip wandering in the garden, looking irritatingly relaxed and handsome, talking on the phone, and she had felt so furious that she had picked up her own phone to call her mother and tell her the truth.
But, swiping right, she had been confronted by the screensaver of her family and, gazing down into her brother’s sweet face, had felt her anger ooze away.
At some point, Trip had knocked on the door and called out her name softly and she had sat, muscles quivering, poised to dart into the bathroom, which at least had a key. He hadn’t come in and she had spent the next few hours alternately hating him and trying to come up with some way to extricate herself without causing collateral damage to everyone she loved.
She failed.
Later, she had watched Valentina set a beautiful candlelit table with a mounting sense of dread as the reality of what she’d agreed to had set in. Maybe Trip had read her mind because it had been the housekeeper who’d knocked on her door that time. She’d opened it and explained that she had a migraine and would not be joining Mr Winslow for supper.
It had felt like a minor victory, albeit in a war she had already conceded. But this morning, gazing out at the mist-covered hills, she had decided that she was done with hiding. She had spent so much of her life keeping her head down, trying not to be seen, not even for the things that she was good at, like her job.
And if anyone should be hiding away it was Trip. It was that thought that had propelled her downstairs and through the elegant sitting room with its marble-topped side tables and exquisite linen-covered sofas.
It was the right thing to do, she told herself. The warm, lemon-scented air was calming and, despite its elegance, the blush-pink house was a comforting backdrop. Hidden slightly by a hedge of paintbrush-tipped cypresses, a shimmering blue swimming pool glittered temptingly like a sapphire in the sunshine.
But the pool and the house were still overshadowed by the breathtaking beauty of its owner, she thought, watching through lowered lashes as Trip shifted back in his chair to squint up at the Tuscan sun that was partly to blame for that annoying but undeniable truth.
Given his behaviour, it should be hiding behind a cloud. Instead, the sun seemed determined to show Trip in his best light, illuminating the extraordinary sculpted angles and curves of his face like a master cinematographer.
Turning her face minutely away from the gravitational pull of his flawless features, she stared determinedly to where the horses, coats gleaming, were tossing their heads fretfully to dispel any curious flies. It looked exactly like—
‘It looks like a painting, doesn’t it?’
Trip’s voice cut across her thoughts and, pulse stumbling, she turned towards him, jolted that he could read her mind. Not that it was the first time. Only then she had wanted him to. Now it didn’t seem fair that he retained that power.
For Valentina’s benefit, she gave an infinitesimal nod of her head. ‘I suppose it does.’ She had no intention of letting him know that he could see inside her head. Or of making this easy for him in any way.
He had thought she would, of course. Coming downstairs this morning, he had acted just as if they were here on holiday. As if this trip were something consensual, something they had discussed with excitement together, when in reality she had been pushed into a corner, trapped into a year-long charade against her will.
Not that Trip cared, she thought, glancing across the table to where he was lounging in the seat opposite her, handsome in pale chinos and a fine pale blue shirt. Now that he had got his own way he seemed to have completely forgotten what he had done to reach this point.
