Boss’s Bride Price
Heidi Rice
To Natalie, a fabulous authorwho is always a pleasure to work with!
Chapter One
‘TALI, ALORENTICORPhelicopter landed in the back paddock five minutes ago!’
Tali Whittaker tugged out her earbuds, the old hip hop anthem still buzzing in her head, and propped the pitchfork against the worn wooden door of the horse stall.
‘What? Seriously?’ She pushed Gracie, the last of the estate’s once impressive array of carriage horses, to one side to join her head groom—well, Westwick’s only groom now—outside the stall.
She swallowed the bubble of hope as she dragged off her gloves.
Had she heard George correctly? Lorenti Corp had owned Westwick Hall for the past seven years, ever since the last Lord Westwick’s death. But his son Dario Lorenti had never used his title, or even his father’s surname, and had consistently refused to ever visit the estate when he was in the UK on business.
In fact, she’d never even received an acknowledgement to the many emails she’d sent to the company’s head office in Milan in the past two years to ask for more money—after she’d taken on the job of estate manager when the previous manager had quit.
In the past two years, her skeleton staff had worked their butts off to repair what they could and keep the place running on a shoestring. But the profit they made from the agricultural side of the business, the glamping field they opened during the school holidays and the house tours, tearooms and events they hosted each weekend were not enough to pay for the upkeep of the Hall itself. Six hundred rooms of history and grandeur, the Georgian stately home hadn’t seen any significant investment for a decade, and it showed. Her staff were depending on her to make Westwick a success, but she’d felt the weight of that responsibility ever since she’d come to work here as the last estate manager’s admin assistant as soon as she’d finished Sixth Form college, age eighteen. And the thought that she was failing them, and failing Westwick, had been keeping her awake at night now for months.
‘Yes! Lorenti was in it! He’s here,finally, Tali!’ George’s craggy face lit up with excitement. ‘I saw him and a number of suits get out of his chopper.’
The bubble of hope expanded and threatened to cut off Tali’s air supply.
‘He still has a limp,’ George said, because like Tali he had met Lorenti once before, when the Lord’s son had spent months recuperating at Westwick Hall after a terrible car accident which had nearly killed him. Tali pushed down the memories which still came to her in dreams sometimes. Visions of that surly, moody seventeen-year-old moaning in pain in the huge four-poster bed and shouting at her mother in Italian. Her mother had been responsible for the boy’s care as the new housekeeper—and had told Tali not to bother him.
But Tali had been eight and left to her own devices for most of that summer—plus she’d overheard her mother telling one of the maids she thought ‘the poor boy’ was lonely. So Tali had made it her mission to visit him over the following weeks, even though he’d shouted at her in Italian at first, too—the same way he’d shouted at everyone. He had fascinated her, like the wounded animals she brought into her mum’s cottage on the estate and tried to heal… Plus his dad didn’t seem to want him. He and his sister hadn’t even come to live in England until their mother died in Italy… And they’d never lived at the Hall until he had come to stay that summer.
In all those weeks, Lord Westwick had only visited him once. It gave them something in common, Tali had thought at the time—because her own dad hadn’t wanted her either, once he had his ‘new’ family.
‘You should go.’ George grabbed the pitchfork, still beaming, as a surge of panic joined the balloon of hope in Tali’s chest.
‘Crap.’ She stared at her jeans and flannel shirt. She was covered in horse manure. Did she have time to change? She wanted to make a good impression—she had so many things she needed to tell Lorenti about the estate.
‘You best hurry, Tali. He’ll want to talk to you first,’ George added, then hesitated, his voice becoming pensive. ‘Do you think he’ll remember you? You became such friends that summer.’
‘I doubt it, George,’ she said, not wanting to hope. They hadn’t been friends, not really. He’d been a teenager and her just a child. Plus, he’d been a captive audience, because until the very end of the summer he was too broken to even get out of the bed.
She knew he’d seen her as an irritation at first, then a useful distraction, her attempts to befriend him an escape from the pain of his injury—and eventually, a way to relieve the boredom of his long recovery.
Tali had heard the staff and her mother mentioning his only friend had caused the crash and then left him on the roadside to die. When she’d asked Dario if that were really true—because who did something so mean?—he’d growled something in Italian and then sulked for days. So, she hadn’t asked again.
That he’d never come to Westwick Hall since his father’s death seven years ago though, or replied to her emails, was also a pretty big clue that he didn’t remember the little girl who had hovered around him all summer trying to bring him out of his shell. She certainly didn’t intend to rely on their past association now to get him to invest in the Hall. Because that would be totally unprofessional.
She rushed out of the stable and raced across the courtyard and around the Hall’s main building, heading towards the annexe, which had once been the carriage master’s cottage, where the estate office and her tiny flat above were situated.
Finally, she had a chance to pitch all the ideas she had to Dario Lorenti to improve the Hall’s revenue and make everyone’s job here more secure—which had been her mission since day one.
Lorenti was a billionaire by all accounts. He had money to burn. And it made absolutely no sense to let his greatest asset rot, even if he didn’t want to live here.
She skidded to a stop when she rounded the corner, finding a short, older man standing at the office door with a scowl on his face.
‘Hi, I’m Tali Whittaker,’ she said, realising this must be one of the suits George had mentioned arriving with Lorenti.
‘Signora, I am looking for the estate manager. Signor Lorenti is waiting,’ he said in perfect if heavily accented English, his tone clipped.
‘Right, of course,’ Tali began, trying not to feel too disappointed about having to kiss her shower and power suit goodbye.
