“In a school. I’m a history teacher.”
Astonished dark eyes briefly landed on her face before he gave his concentration back to the road before them. “I no be rude, but you no look like no history teacher I meet before.”
For some reason, the exaggerated way he said this tickled her funny bone. “Met many of us have you?”
He laughed. He had nice teeth, another thought that struck her as weird. But he did. And he really was good-looking, or ‘gorgeous’ as she and Georgia would have described him in their teenage years. But he was that too. Very darkly, gorgeously handsome. Short, dark brown, messy hair. Thick stubble over a square jaw. Lively warm brown eyes. Enclosed in the confined space, she could smell his aftershave. It was nice.Hesmelled nice. Very nice.
He reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t for the life of her think who.
“When I at school, all history teachers were older than the times they taught.” He shot her another glance, and there was the flash of a wink before he added, “You can only be twenty.”
If this was the famous Italian charm in action, she liked it, Callie decided, and finally, she relaxed.
Let this be the calm before the storm she was going to create when she found Niccolo Martinelli and dropped her bombshell on him. “I’m twenty-six.”
“And not a wrinkle on your face,” he teased. “You must have good students.”
There was something about the driver that told her he’d have been one of those kids who always turned up a couple of minutes late for a lesson with his shirt untucked and with his homework having been eaten by a dog. “I have a very pronounced frown line on my forehead from all the death stares I throw at them.”
He tutted. “A nice young lady like you throwing death stares?”
“We’re taught them at teacher training college – I came top of the class in it.”
He laughed again. It was a really nice sound. But then, the driver had a really nice voice to match it, all deep and smooth, and as he chattered away in his Pidgeon English, throwing questions about her teaching career and generally just being fun, gregarious company, for the first time in so very long, little bubbles of awareness woke inside her.
She could laugh. All these years without the flicker of interest in any of the men her sister, friends and colleagues kept trying to fix her up with, and twenty minutes in a car with a complete stranger was proving she wasn’t dead from the waist down after all. Oh, the irony that she finally felt stirrings for a man who lived thousands of miles away from her and whom she would never see again… which was probably why she was feeling the little stirrings, she figured. Because the distance and her mission to save her sister from herself meant he was safe.
“It is Monday,” he said in that wonderfully deep voice. “Why you no work?”
“It’s the Easter Holidays. I’ve got two weeks off.”
“Lots of time for adventure then.”
She smiled and relaxed even further and, for the first time in a long time, imagined herself on the sort of adventure she’d long ago sworn off.
It wasn’t that Callie didn’t like men, it was that she didn’t like sex. It left her cold. The few times she’d tried it with her first boyfriend had been horrible experiences. She’d tried really hard to get into the right head space for it, to relax, to do all the things everyone said would make it enjoyable, but nothing had worked. When her boyfriend had lost patience at having a ‘frigid’ girlfriend and dumped her, she’d been toorelieved to feel upset. She’d tried again a year later with a nice, sweet, understanding man on the same teacher training course she’d attended, and the effect had been the same. She hadn’t sworn off men or anything after that, but the thought of having sex with any of them made her clench inside, and not in a good way. No doubt if the issues with Georgia didn’t exist and if her Italian Stallion taxi driver lived in England and was magically available to her, she’d be clenching inside in a not-good way for him, too.
Realising she could no longer see Mount Vesuvius, Callie craned her neck and saw that it was behind them. “Are we going the right way?”
“Si.”
“But I thought Vesuvius would be on our left.” And when had they left the motorway…?
“Not where we’re going.”
Before she could question this, he took a sharp turn, and suddenly she found herself being driven over a sprawling field with a structure so enormous and eye-catching that she barely registered the helicopter just a short way in front of it.
“What are we doing here?”
The driver parked close to the helicopter and faced her. “This is for the second part of our journey.”
“But I didn’t book a helicopter ride,” she said, confused.
Something that looked like sympathy flashed over his handsome face. “I know you didn’t. I don’t know how to break this gently to you, so I will just say it – my name is Dante Coscarelli, and I am a good friend of Niccolo Martinelli.”
Callie’s blood went from warm to freezing in a blink.
“That is my helicopter.” All pretence at Pidgeon English had been abandoned. “In a few minutes, it will be taking us to my home in Tuscany, where you will be staying as my house guest until Sunday.”
