This was her cue to leave. She could read it in his expression. He’d allowed her to have her little moment but he’d known that his powerful argument would throw her, as it had.
‘I’m not scared of your threats, Mr Ricci.’ She rose to her feet to find that her legs still felt wobbly.
‘I seldom threaten. I find it’s a tactic that pays few dividends.’
Izzy stared at him. He was so ridiculously beautiful, and yet he chilled her to the bone, because there was nothing there that was warm or evenhuman.
The tense silence was broken by the sound of racing feet, and then the door to the sitting room was flung open and there, standing in the doorway, was a child.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ROSA!’
Gabriel registered his daughter’s breathless presence in the doorway at roughly the same time as he clocked the astonished expression on Izzy’s face. Both were a source of annoyance, in varying degrees and for different reasons.
His daughter, because she should be getting ready to wind down and go to bed.
What the hell was that dragon of her nanny doing? She was paid handsomely to make sure that his daughter’s routine went unchanged, even though Rosa wasn’t at her mother’s house in New York. She wouldn’t be slacking off. She might not be top of his Christmas card list but she was completely trustworthy when it came to his daughter...so what the heck was this all about?
And Izzy, because her presence under his roof had nothing to do with the personal side of his life. She was there to nit-pick over the business with the cottage, and in Gabriel’s world business was never allowed to push past any unopened doors. Rosa was his six-year-old daughter and he didn’t need the woman’s curiosity clouding the issue of why she was sitting in his living room.
And curious she was. Her aquamarine eyes were ablaze with curiosity and surprise.
‘What are you doing down here?’ Gabriel covered ground fast and now scooped up his daughter, who wrapped her legs around his waist while peering animatedly over his shoulder to where Izzy continued to stare with undisguised interest.
‘Who’s she?’ Rosa piped up by way of reply.
Gabriel frowned because he wasn’t inclined to get into a conversation about Izzy.
‘She...is about to leave,’ he said, heaving his daughter back to the ground and holding out his hand for her to take, which she did, while craning back to inspect Izzy. ‘And where is Bella?’
It never failed to amaze him that a name that translated as ‘beautiful’could apply to someone as ferociously unappealing as his daughter’s nanny.
Bella Esposito was in her mid-sixties and had been Rosa’s nanny for the past three years. A retired deputy head at an all girls’ school in downtown Manhattan, she had been brought on board by his ex-wife Bianca, and had approached the position with the zeal of a despot accustomed to being obeyed.
‘She is the only one I would consider for the job,’ Bianca had announced, at the time having dismissed the previous nanny with five minutes’ notice because she had failed to take the job as seriously as she should have. ‘She’s related and I trust her completely. Young girls do not have the required approach to discipline that Rosa needs!’
Bella was a cousin of a cousin of an aunt and, when it came to discipline, she had a first-class degree in instilling it.
There were strict rules to cover all occasions. Orders were barked, bedtimes were obeyed to the very second, snacks were banned and leisure activities were supervised with rigour.
Gabriel privately loathed the woman but what could he do? Aside from the fact that he worked so, as now, the time Rosa spent with him required the presence of a nanny, he was also in the position of having his hands tied.
Bianca would have enjoyed nothing better than making life difficult for him. Quibble over the nanny, and she would conspire to withhold his daughter from him, whatever the distribution of custody. As it stood, she was prone to changing dates with next to no notice and threatening to return to court for full custody if he complained. Would she? It was a risk he had no intention of taking, and neither was he prepared to antagonise his ex to the point where the axe of retaliation might fall upon his daughter’s unsuspecting head.
He had bitten down the urge to wield his influence so many times that he had lost count.
Right now, Rosa was with him for three weeks of her summer holiday, and on the horizon lay a fight that he could only contemplate with growing horror. Bianca, she had informed him only a fortnight ago, was intent on returning to Italy. Her mother needed her, she had piously declared, which was nothing short of a joke, considering she and her mother were as close as two combatants in a boxing ring.
Was she angling for yet more money? Or was she being serious? She didn’t stand a chance in hell of removing his daughter from his orbit, surely, but he wasn’t willing to take any chances. He would have to hang back, however much it enraged him, and use persuasion to woo her away from the idea of leaving New York.
Truthfully, he worked long hours and led a lifestyle that was not ideally suited to parenting a six-year-old child, even though all that work was fuelled by his driving need to make sure that his daughter got the very best. Every hour he worked was to give her everything he possibly could.
He did his utmost when Rosa was with him but sometimes deals could not be ignored and his ex-wife knew that all too well. As she knew about his love life. Who didn’t? He had been snapped on more than one occasion with some passing beauty on his arm gazing up adoringly, little knowing that she would soon join her predecessors as footnotes in his love life.
And on top of that...
Gabriel was at the very pinnacle of the pecking order. In the world of business, he ruled the roost, with fingers in many pies. He was the darling of theFinancial Timesand a past pin-up on magazines, from business to gossip.
