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CHAPTER NINE
HEMADEITHAPPEN.
Antonietta waited at the cottage while Rafe headed off to change. She would have loved to do the same, but apart from her red silk dress there weren’t many options.
She pulled on some tights, and her most comfortable boots for all the sightseeing ahead, and decided she would just have to do.
By the time Rafe returned, dressed in black jeans and a jumper topped with a fine grey woollen coat, his helicopter was out of the hangar.
Antonietta had only ever heard the choppers, or seen them arriving and leaving, but now she sat in Rafe’s private one, her stomach lurching as it lifted into the sky.
Capri was well known for the capricious nature of its weather, but it turned on the sun today, and the ocean was azure beneath them. She stared at the white cliffs as they approached the island.
‘There it is...’ Rafe spoke to her through headphones and pointed down to his yacht in Marina Grande—possibly the most exclusive marina in the world.
But Antonietta was not looking at it. ‘I’ve always wanted to see the Christmas decorations in Capri,’ she said, with her hands pressed to the window. ‘And to eatstruffoli. I can’t believe you’ve brought me here!’
They were not in Capri to see the Christmas lights and eatstruffoli, Rafe thought to himself. He had brought them here for the opulent privacy of his yacht and an awful lot of sex.
Yet his self-proclaimed cold indifference seemed to elude him around Antonietta, and he did not want to disappoint her.
As if his yacht had ever disappointed!
But Antonietta clearly thought they were here on some sort of day trip, so a word was had with his pilot in rapid French, and Rafe had to quickly rethink their day...
‘You’ll freeze in what you’re wearing,’ he told her as they sat in a sumptuous café and shared a plate of the famousstruffoli. ‘You need to get something warmer to wear.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘We’re going out to the Blue Grotto,’ Rafe said. He’d go anywhere if it meant getting her out of those appalling tights—and for once he wasn’t thinking about sex. ‘You’ll need to rug up.’
‘It’s closed in December,’ she told him, for she had heard the tourists on the next table grumbling about it.
‘It’s not closed for me.’
And so they headed to Via Camerelle, with its designer boutiques, and he sipped coffee and insisted that the pale grey woollen dress that hugged her slender frame required a coat, and boots in the softest suede.
‘And you’ll need a dress and shoes for tonight,’ Rafe told her.
‘I have to be back at work tomorrow,’ she told him.
‘And you shall be,’ Rafe told her. ‘Get a dress.’
He told her he had an appointment to keep, and suggested that while she waited for him she might as well get her hair done.
‘Rafe,’ Antonietta protested. ‘Please don’t try to change me.’
‘I don’t want to change you,’ Rafe said. ‘But I have never known a woman to turn down a couple of hours in a salon in Via Vittorio Emanuele just to wait in a car.’
The suited men were back. Hovering discreetly, but annoyingly present. And Antonietta could tell they were less than pleased with her.
So, yes, she chose to get her hair done—rather than sit in a car with a driver who looked at her through slightly narrowed eyes.
That was the very reason Rafe needed some time away from her. He headed to the private royal residence for a less than straightforward meeting with his aides and minders, who were all appalled that he had brought a woman onto shore. Not just that, the same woman who had been in the August Suite the other night.
‘She has not been vetted,’ his advisor warned. ‘And you still haven’t had her sign the NDA.’
Neither would he. For this was too precious. And he told them none too gently to back off, and that he would deal with the fallout that would inevitably come from a run-in with the King.
