Simone couldn’t imagine. Maybe that’s why he’d reacted like he had. Clearing her diary and giving Marchesa her job, albeit fleetingly. He’d been trying toprotecther, not control her.
‘What are you thinking of?’ Leo asked.
That she’d had a stunning realisation, but there was no time to dwell on it now.
‘They’re a family,’ she said. ‘That’s why you married me. Because they had trouble with you and your playboy lifestyle.’
‘Yes. They’re a deeply traditional Lombardi family, who’ve been textile makers for centuries. Where are we going with this?’
‘Then that’s what you have to show them,’ Simone said patiently. ‘You might have married me, but that didn’t really mean anything to them. With you, it’s been all about the business. You need to make it about family instead. Show them who you really are.’
Leo cocked his head. ‘I’m not sure how to do that.’
She understood him a little better now. Leo held back, always kept something in reserve. He was well-liked and on the surface seemed to connect with people, but deep down, there was something about himself he protected. Spaces he kept his own. Things locked deep inside he wouldn’t divulge. He was known as a consummate businessman, warm and generous with charities. Yet at their wedding, were there any real friends of his there? Allies, yes. But did they go any deeper? She wondered if he ever let anyone get close to him, at all. And that’s what he needed to do to gain Tessitore, if only Leo could let it happen.
‘Invite them here for dinner. To your home, not your office, not a fine restaurant. Here, where you can host them. It’s a place you’ve always kept private, so why don’t you show it to the Tessitores?’
She stood with her cup of coffee in hand and began walking around the terraced area, envisaging what she had in mind.
‘It can still be a business dinner, but something a little more casual. Maybe out here with a long table under the vines. It’s a beautiful space if the weather’s good. Maybe I could cook something?’
Leo raised his eyebrows. ‘My wife does not need to cook. I have a personal chef.’
‘Yes, yes…and he’s brilliant.’ Each meal magnificent, a refrigerator always full on the days he didn’t work. Details of each meal left behind, what was in it, how to heat it up. She felt spoiled, but having a chef wasn’t the same. ‘But there’s a soft power in real hospitality.’
At the back of the property was a vibrant kitchen garden with eggplant, tomatoes, radicchio, rucola and other vegetables and herbs. Had Leo’s chef and gardener not protected that patch of the home as their own domain, she would have made something with it all. Maybe in time…
She wasn’t sure where that random thought was headed.
‘We can use vegetables from the kitchen garden.’ She waved to the back of the property. ‘Eat—I don’t know—not fine food, but something a little more homely. Traditional from the region. I could make something, but maybe not so traditionally Italian, if you think they’d like that? It can still be about business, but with a more personal touch. You’ve been showing them Leonardo Zanetti, the empire builder. Maybe you need to let them get a peek of Leo Zanetti, the man behind it all.’
Leo cocked his head. He was thinking about it. Simone was pretty sure that it would work. ‘What would you cook?’
She thought back to her training in hospitality as a young woman and what made a good wife for a wealthy man. Whilst her parents had had a chef too, and her mother was renowned for her parties, she’d always said to Simone…
A woman should know how to mix one good cocktail, make one great hors d’oeuvre and have a signature dessert.
So Simone had learned to make a martini and smoked salmon canapes. As for dessert…
‘I make a mean caramel apple pie,’ she said. ‘I think I’d cook one of those. That’s my favourite.’
‘I enjoy sweet things.’
The way Leo looked at her in this moment, with such intensity. The vivid blue of his eyes, which should seem so cold, piercing through her like a hot poker. The man could inflame with a single glance.
‘So, what do you think?’
He downed the last of his coffee and stood, as if charged with a kind of fresh energy. The consummate businessman, hard, driven. Leonardo Zanetti at his best.
‘Nothing I’ve tried has made any real headway. I’ll get in touch with them. Arrange something and we’ll see.’ Then he looked down at her and smiled, something rare, precious and real. The type of smile Leo granted to only a privileged few. She finally felt like one of them.
‘You’re inspired, Simone. And I believe it might just work.’
It was an uncomfortable sensation inviting people into his Milan home, the one place in the world that he’d kept apart from everything else. Let lifestyle magazines and style bloggers wax lyrical over his other properties dotted for convenience throughout the world, the showcases to display his ‘expansive vision and impeccable eye’ as they liked to say. But this was the one place few strangers ever glimpsed. A private space where he could hide away and lick wounds he allowed no one else to see.
The first home he’d ever bought for himself.
Yet here, he’d shown Simone those wounds. Let her in. And now, watching her with the chef, his housekeeper, planning for this dinner, setting the table, dotting fresh flowers in empty corners, he realised that here, shefit. It left him feeling discombobulated, how seamlessly she had taken over his life.
