Gianni frowned, shapely ebony brows rising enquiringly as if she had asked an unexpected question. ‘A normal marriage.’
‘Normal?’ Jo questioned, her incredulity obvious, her eyes wide. ‘Like share-a-bed, have-children normal?’
‘What else?’
Jo flushed. ‘We couldfakeit...being married, I mean, and just do the surface show for the sake of appearances. Surely that would gain you just as much?’
‘I don’t do fake,cara,’ Gianni murmured softly. ‘I’m not keen to try celibacy and the alternative is to play away and take the chance of being exposed as an adulterer. In the current moral climate in which I work I’m not prepared to run that risk...’
Jo cut into her tender steak with determination. ‘I understand...’ she conceded reluctantly. ‘I was only trying to suggest a more workable version of what you proposed.’
‘A promise to keep my hands off you would—inevitably—be broken,’ Gianni told her frankly. ‘I’ve been attracted to you for a long time. I have to be truthful on that score. I wouldn’t be asking you to marry me if I didn’t find you attractive.Diomio, I assume that if we have reached the stage of discussing sex, you’re thinking about it...’
‘Of course, I’m thinking about it,’ Jo protested in a guilty, stifled undertone. ‘My family means everything to me, and we’ve all been working really hard to keep things afloat and yet, we’re still sliding down the slippery slope of debt at speed. Then you come along like some knight on a white charger...’
Gianni raised a lean brown hand at that point to silence her. ‘No. I’ll never be your knight on a white charger. I haven’t been in a relationship for a long time and I’ve no doubt that I’ll be challenging to live with. But I assure you that I will look after you and your family to the best of my ability.’
It was like a lifebelt being thrown to Jo just when she felt as though she were on the very brink of drowning. She had had a mad crush on Gianni when she was a teenager but half the girls at school had been equally keen to see Gianni Renzetti as a pin-up. That glimpses of him were rare had merely added to his mystique. Seen around the village only at weekends and holidays, Gianni, clad in designer jeans and driving a flash car, had been the perfect adolescent fantasy figure.
‘You’re staring...’ Gianni breathed. ‘What’s going through your mind?’
‘You don’t want to know.’ Jo shook her head as though to clear it and frowned at him as she pushed away her plate, ashamed that she could be allowing teenaged fantasies to influence her when all such nonsense was long since dead and buried. ‘I just can’t believe that you’re asking me to marry you.’
‘Get with the programme,cara,’ he urged, and that faint hint of impatience only gave his slight accent a smoky edge, an effect which was underscored by the gentle stroke of his forefinger across the back of her hand. ‘We’re way beyond that stage. We’re negotiating.’
‘Are we?’ Jo sighed. ‘You have unlimited confidence, Gianni.’
‘And secretly, you like that about me. If we set the parameters now there’ll be no room for misunderstandings,’ he asserted with remarkable optimism.
‘I haven’t said that I accept yet,’ Jo protested in dismay. ‘I need tomorrow to think about stuff. But misunderstandings will occur whatever we discuss beforehand. Perhaps what we really need is a time-limited agreement.’
His ebony brows drew together in a gathering frown as the dessert trolley arrived. ‘What sort of limit?’
Jo turned aside to order her dessert. ‘Six months?’ she suggested.
‘Why bother getting married in the first place?’ Gianni asked drily. ‘It’s nowhere near long enough and it wouldn’t fool anyone into believing I was settling down.’
‘A year?’
In response, Gianni simply frowned and shook his head in immediate dismissal.
He said that he disliked sweet things and had ordered coffee, which she knew for a fact he drank with a ridiculous amount of sugar in it. As in other fields, Gianni could be wildly unpredictable. Hadn’t she simply assumed that he would leap at the offer of a six-month marital stretch?
‘What if there’s a child to be considered?’ Gianni asked.
‘That’s why it might be wiser to leave the possibility of children out of the arrangement,’ Jo proposed, stifling a pang of disappointment at that prospect even if it was the more sensible option.
Gianni dealt her a frowning look of reproof. ‘If we’re planning to play house, we should do it properly. I don’t only partially commit to a new project. If we’re doing this, I want the whole shebang.’
Jo swallowed slowly and nodded.The whole shebang.A normal marriage, Gianni as a husband, Gianni in the same bed most nights. She burned as a surge of fantasy-induced heat washed through the most sensitive places in her body. There was no use pretending to herself that she wasn’t curious about whatthatwould be like. Her skin warmed. She couldn’t imagine being in bed with Gianni but she had had one or two totally wanton fantasies about him over the years. And yet tonight was the very first time he had truly touched her. She didn’t count that time he had saved her from drowning in the lake as a child.
Gianni wasn’t a touchy-feely type of guy and he was circumspect about not touching a woman unnecessarily. That was why every physical touch he had utilised since picking her up for dinner had very clearly underlined the change he now saw in their relationship. A tiny little shiver snaked through her taut frame. She liked that change, that revealing shift away from casual friendship. But he wasn’t ‘courting’ her, wasn’t offering her a wedding ring on the usual terms, she reminded herself irritably. He had utilised the wordnormal, but two people who were not in love opting to marry wasnotnormal, in her view, particularly when one of them was endeavouring to bury a scandal by putting on a public front of embracing respectability.
‘Let’s go,’ Gianni intoned a few minutes later when she had finished dessert. ‘Unless you want coffee as well.’
‘No, I don’t drink coffee this late,’ Jo muttered, torn in two by the conflicting reactions assailing her.
Without Gianni, her family would forfeit Ladymead and any security, for once the debts were settled, there would be little, if anything, left to support another life elsewhere. With Gianni on board, those debts and the worry caused by them would disappear.