‘The lift is fine,’ she’d said coolly and, to prove the point, had stepped up to press the call button herself. Personally, she’d been quietly impressed with the way she’d stood calmly beside him while the lift took them to ground level.
Sandro hadn’t said a word, but what he had done was reach for her hand and raise it to his mouth in a silent praise as they’d waited for the doors to open. And even that small gesture had only managed to make her feel worse, because what had she done except overcome a silly obsession she should have combated years ago?
That was why she was tense__that was why she was silent and withdrawn and very uncommunicative. She was cross with herself because living with her was like living in a minefield—you never knew where the next explosion of panic was going to come from!
She couldn’t, in all fairness, put Sandro through that kind of madness a second time. He had to learn that it just wasn’t worth the effort he was trying to put into it, and the best way to do that was completely freeze him out again.
She could do it, she told herself grimly. She had done it very successfully once before, hadn’t she?
CHAPTER NINE
ORVIETO lay about halfway between Rome and Siena on the Umbrian-Tuscany borders. It was an area of breathtaking beauty, with lush and fertile rolling hillsides covered by row upon row of vine trees broken by thick clusters of woodland. Enchanting old towns capped incredible hilltops which seemed to rise out of the ground for no apparent reason.
Yet, picturesque as the area was, it was so obviously intrinsically rural that she began to wonder what it was here that had caught Sandro’s usually very urban eye.
‘The estate is just over the next hillside,’ Sandro said beside her. ‘Look now,’ he directed.
Her gaze drifted outwards, then simply stilled while she stared open-mouthed at the lovely valley that came into view. Despite her resolve, she responded, ‘Oh, Sandro!’ with a gasp of unrestrained pleasure. ‘This is lovely! How much of it belongs to you?’
‘To us,’ he smoothly corrected. Then, before she could react to that stunning correction, ‘As far as you can see,’ he answered her question, bringing a further gasp escaping from her parted lips.
He turned the car then, steering them in through a gap in the rows of vine trees. It was a private driveway, columned on either side by tall cypresses that led them towards the pretty villa she recognised from the brochure Sandro had shown her the day before.
As they came closer to the house itself the vines began to give way to thick fruit orchards, then the most beautiful gardens set in typically formal Italian style with terraces already blooming with well-behaved colour.
It was, Joanna decided, the most beautiful place she had ever laid eyes on, the house itself looking as though it had sat there for ever, with its red-tiled roof and its yellowing walls basking in the golden sunlight.
Sandro pulled the car to a stop on a tiny cobbled area just in front of the house. Off to one side, Joanna could see what she recognised as the stable block—again looking as if it had always been there. Behind that stood tall, narrow cypress trees, acting like windbreaks or more probably as a boundary line, planted to separate the private accommodation from the working estate.
Joanna climbed out of the car and stood gazing around her, too captivated to maintain the indifference she had been so determined upon.
‘Well?’ Sandro murmured quietly from the other side of the car. ‘What do you think?’
Think? She couldn’t think; this place was just too enchanting for her to be able to think. Feel, maybe; she could feel many things: pleasure, wonder, a yearning desire to belong to this lovely place.
‘Who in their right mind would want to sell this?’ she asked rather breathlessly.
‘The owner’s daughter married a Californian winegrower,’ Sandro explained, coming around the car to stand beside her. ‘They wanted to be close to her, so they put this place up for sale and moved to California. An expedient move on their side,’ he added sagely. ‘For this place may look picture-perfect but in fact it needs a lot of money spending on it to bring it up to New World standards in wine-growing and processing if it is going to compete.’
‘And you fancied taking on the challenge?’ Joanna began to understand at last. This was Sandro being Sandro, seeing a good investment.
But he thoroughly shocked her by saying quietly, ‘I did not buy this for the challenge, Joanna. I bought it for you.’
For her? Her eyes whipped around to stare at him in open-mouthed disbelief. ‘But why me?’ she asked in bewilderment.
He didn’t answer, just smiled a rather odd smile and said, ‘Come on. We may as well inspect the house first.’
Then he was striding off towards the house, leaving her to follow more slowly, with her mind thrown back into clamouring confusion because never, not once, had she ever voiced a desire to live somewhere like this!
So, what was he playing at with his clever word-games? she wondered frowningly. Then, reparation, she remembered, as she followed him into a large, cool entrance hall darkened by the wooden shutters pulled across the windows. Sandro was most definitely still a man on a mission, and that mission included reparation.
‘The house requires some renovation,’ he said, as she came to an uncertain halt just inside the open doorway. ‘But nothing too drastic...’
He was already moving to open the shutters, throwing them back from the long narrow windows to allow light to come streaming in, dust motes dancing in the sunbeams onto disappointingly bare stone floors, plain white walls and a huge rustic fireplace. There was a spiral stairway leading up from a central situation against the far wall and several closed doors flanking either side of it.
But that seemed to be all. ‘It’s empty.’ She voiced the absolute obvious.
‘Si,’ he acknowledged. ‘Which is going to give you a lot to think about as you plan the refurbishing of the whole house.’