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‘She’s incredible.’ Even Phil, his engineer producer who had seen it all before and was never complimentary about anyone, was impressed.
They worked for nine hours straight, nine hours during which Matteo brooded and simmered. By the end of it she was still buzzing with energy.
‘That was so cool. Thank you.’ Virtually dancing on the spot, she gave Phil a huge kiss. ‘I will love you forever.’
Seriously unsettled by how much that innocent kiss bothered him, Matteo propelled Izzy out of the door with undignified haste and she looked at him in astonishment.
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘I assumed you were hungry.’ He was not jealous, he told himself. It would be irrational to be jealous and he was never irrational. ‘We missed breakfast and lunch. I’ve organized food.’
‘You mean you gave an order and fifty staff jumped into action.’
No one else dared to speak to him the way she did and it shook him because teasing was another dangerous step towards
intimacy and he had no intention of going down that path.
As she noticed the rug spread out on the grass next to the fountain, she stopped dead. Her eyes settled on the champagne in the ice bucket and Matteo had to concede that his staff had risen to the challenge of recreating fine dining outdoors.
He watched, fascinated by the delight that spread across her pretty face, and then tensed as she flung her arms round him.
‘Oh, thank you! This is perfect.’
The spontaneous display of affection caught him off guard. ‘It’s just a picnic. Not a Michelin-starred restaurant.’
‘But that’s just it—’ her voice was husky ‘—you knew I’d hate a Michelin-starred restaurant because I bet they have a confusing amount of forks. This is so much more romantic. Wow.’
Romantic?
He’d instructed his team to provide food outside. He hadn’t said anything about romantic. He’d prepared an evening he thought she might enjoy and the fact that she’d loaded the gesture with additional meaning sent him into rapid reverse. ‘I’d offer you champagne,’ he said smoothly, extracting himself from her hug, ‘but after seeing the effect it had on you the night of the party I’m not sure I’m ready to take that risk.’
His sudden withdrawal earned him a puzzled look. Then she smiled. ‘But this time you’re feeding me.’ She knelt down on the rug. ‘I bet your staff died of shock when you said you wanted to eat outside.’
‘They died of shock when I carried you upstairs to bed on the first night. Since then it has sadly become a common occurrence to see me behaving oddly.’ And if they could read his mind their shock would treble.
‘It isn’t odd, it’s normal.’ Picking up a fork, she helped herself to chicken. ‘You should relax more often.’
Having just made a conscious decision that he needed to relax less in her company, Matteo swiftly changed the subject. ‘Tell me more about your singing. Why did no one in your family encourage you?’
‘No one in my family is remotely interested in music.’
‘That’s why you entered Singing Star.’
‘It seemed like a great idea. I was seventeen.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘It seems as though we both made our formative mistakes in our teens.’
The brief reminder of his earlier confession was like a shower of cold water.
‘We were talking about you,’ Matteo said hastily, and she glanced at him briefly and then gave a shrug.
‘I naively thought they’d hear my voice and that would be it. Of course it was nothing like that. They weren’t interested in the voice, just the package and the fact that I was hopeless at hiding my feelings. There was so much footage of “Izzy losing it,” they didn’t know which bit to use next. There were a few grumblings in the press about me being exploited, but mostly people just thought I was awful and deserved everything bad that happened to me.’ Her light tone didn’t cover the hurt and Matteo felt a rush of cold anger towards the people who had used her in such an unethical way.
‘Where were your parents when this happened?’
‘Chantelle believes in letting a person make her own mistakes. And as for Dad—he loves us all but he’s very selfish and spends most of his time—’
‘Spends most of his time—?’
Izzy stabbed a piece of chicken with her fork, her cheeks pinker than before. ‘Having sex with his ex-wife. You can’t possibly be interested in all this. Can I eat this with my fingers or is that bad manners?’
