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    Promoted to the Italian's Fiancée
    Promoted to the Italian's Fiancée
    Promoted to the Italian's Fiancée
    Ebook200 pages2 hours

    Promoted to the Italian's Fiancée

    By Cathy Williams

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    About this ebook

    A fiery fling turns into so much more in this fake engagement story by USA TODAY bestselling author Cathy Williams.

    A fantasy fling…
    …until she’s wearing his ring!

    Heartbroken Izzy Stowe runs to sunny California to reconnect with her past—and immediately finds herself in a business standoff with tycoon Gabriel Ricci. The devastatingly handsome bachelor is ready to bargain—if she becomes nanny to his daughter!

    Despite their heart-racing encounters and rapidly growing connection, Izzy can’t risk another betrayal—she’s determined to keep her emotions at bay! Until she’s promoted from nanny to Gabriel’s fake fiancée! And accepting his proposal starts to blur the lines between passion and reality…

    From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds.

    Read all the Secrets of the Stowe Family books:
    Book 1: Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
    Book 2: Promoted to the Italian’s Fiancée
    Book 3: Claiming His Cinderella Secretary
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarlequin Presents
    Release dateApr 27, 2021
    ISBN9781488073465
    Promoted to the Italian's Fiancée
    Author

    Cathy Williams

    Cathy Williams is a great believer in the power of perseverance as she had never written anything before her writing career, and from the starting point of zero has now fulfilled her ambition to pursue this most enjoyable of careers. She would encourage any would-be writer to have faith and go for it! She derives inspiration from the tropical island of Trinidad and from the peaceful countryside of middle England. Cathy lives in Warwickshire her family.

    Read more from Cathy Williams

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      Promoted to the Italian's Fiancée - Cathy Williams

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘I’VE HAD A personal invitation.’

      Evelyn Scott pushed the handwritten note across the kitchen table to Izzy. The salad the elderly woman had prepared earlier, using produce from the vegetable patch at the end of her garden, had been eaten, the home-made lemonade drunk and outside a burning orange sky signalled the arrival of dusk.

      Here in Napa Valley, the horizons seemed limitless and the vast expanse of sky was a canvas upon which every shade of colour begged to be painted, depending on the time of the day and the vagaries of the weather. Izzy could have lain on her back in a field for hours, just appreciating its spectacular, ever-changing beauty.

      ‘A personal invitation?’ She reached forward to take the note and realised that, while they had been lazily conversing for the past hour and a half, while the older woman had listened and responded to everything Izzy had had to report, she had been busily hiding the fact that she was worried sick. And Izzy knew the source of that worry.

      She read the note.

      It was written on a piece of heavy, cream parchment paper, the sort of paper she associated with aggressive bankers calling in loans or hard-nosed lawyers threatening jail.

      The writing confirmed that first impression. Long, determined strokes issued an invitation to tea, during which the sale of the cottage could be discussed ‘face to face’. The invitation looked more like a summons.

      ‘It’s the first time I’ve been approached by the man himself.’ Evelyn rose to her feet and began clearing the plates and glasses, waving aside Izzy’s offer to help. ‘You don’t need to concern yourself with an old woman’s problems. That’s not why you came here in the first place.’

      ‘Evelyn, your problem is my problem.’

      It still felt weird after nearly a month to call the older woman ‘Evelyn’ instead of Nanny Scott, which was always how her mother had referred to her. To this day, Izzy had vivid memories of sitting in her mother’s bedroom, watching as Beverley Stowe brushed her hair and dabbed on lipstick, smacking her lips together to distribute the colour evenly, inspecting her face from every angle as she chatted away. Izzy had listened avidly. She’d thought her mother to be the most beautiful woman in the world and she had drunk in every single thing that had passed her lips with the fervent adoration only a child was capable of.

      There had been a thousand tales about Nanny Scott. Izzy had met Evelyn Scott for the first time on her one and only trip to California when she’d been nine, a year before her mum and dad had died in a plane crash. That holiday was etched in her mind because holidays with her parents had been few and far between. She could still relive the high-wire excitement of being with her parents for that heady, hot, lazy month in summer as though it had happened yesterday and not thirteen long years ago.

      So now, sitting here, seeing the worry on Evelyn’s face, Izzy felt anger surge inside her at the preposterous and intimidating antics of the billionaire who wanted to buy the cottage out from under the seventy-nine-year-old woman’s feet, and to heck with what happened to her after that. He had sent his minions, but the message had not been delivered to his satisfaction, so here he was, knife at the ready to cut an old woman loose for the sake of money.

      ‘No,’ Evelyn said firmly. She placed a plate of home-made pumpkin pie in front of Izzy and sat back. ‘You have enough on your plate without all of this nonsense. No one can force me to do anything.’

      ‘My plate is looking very clean and empty at the moment,’ Izzy returned.

      ‘So you finally took my advice and picked that phone up and spoke to your brother?’ Evelyn’s brown eyes sparked with lively interest, her own problems temporarily set aside. ‘I knew there was something you wanted to tell me. An old woman can sense these things.’

      Izzy reflected that this was exactly why she had no intention of returning to Hawaii until she had sorted out the situation here. No, she wasn’t obliged to, but where did decency and a sense of fair play go if you only did what was right because you were obliged to?

      Izzy had fled Hawaii after her heart had been broken. And she had fled to the place where her mother had grown up, feeling an overpowering need somehow to be close to her mum in the wake of her disastrous affair with Jefferson.

      The yearning just to feel that the spirit of her mother was close by had been silly, childish and irrational, but it had also been overwhelming enough for her to heed its insistence.

      She’d rooted out the tin that was stuffed with old photos, postcards and pretty much everything she had gathered over the years before her parents had died. She had pored over faded photos of the sprawling ranch where her mother had spent her childhood before she had left home at eighteen and begun a second life in England. She had squinted at pictures of Nanny Scott, the grandparents she had only met once and all the pretty young people who had crowded her mother’s teenage years. And then, heart swollen with sadness, whimsy and nostalgia, she had dumped all her responsibilities at the hotel where she had been working and quite simply fled.

      Of course, she’d felt guilty at leaving her brother in the lurch, but she had made sure that everything was up to date, and she’d known that Nat would be able to take over temporarily. She’d also known that Max would descend and everything would be sorted because that was what he did. He wielded a rod of iron, gave commands, issued orders and things got done.

      She’d felt far too bruised for any residual guilt about running away to anchor her in a place she no longer wanted to be, doing a job she hadn’t the heart to do, however privileged she might be to have had it in the first place.

      It was as if her wounded heart had made her face all those long years of living in a wilderness, learning how to manage a life without the love and input of parents, watching and envying her friends and the relationships they had with their parents.

      So often her youthful heart had twisted when friends had moaned, because at least they’d had a mum and dad to moan about. Max and James had both done their best for her but there’d been only so much her brothers were capable of doing. She had stared deep into the void left by her parents’ death and, in the wake of Jefferson and her bitter disillusionment, had been driven to confront it, to search for that missing something, which foolishly she had thought she might find if she went back to where her mother had lived.

      She’d known that the big house, as her mother had called it, had long been sold, along with the vineyards. She hadn’t gone there expecting to walk into her mother’s childhood home. But just being in the area was soothing and she had been over the moon to find that Evelyn was still there when she had visited the cottage.

      She’d half-expected her brother to ferret her out. He had sufficient clout to get someone to locate her within seconds, but he hadn’t, and it had given her a chance to really connect with Evelyn. And, over a couple of weeks, she’d heard about the problems she was having, trying to hang onto the cottage in the face of ever-insistent demands that she sell to the guy who had bought the big house, and the even bigger house that adjoined it, so that two medium-sized vineyards could be turned into one enormous one. Another greedy developer with no scruples.

      Evelyn had also been there to hear about her troubles and she had no intention of abandoning the older woman now, in her hour of need.

      Not if she could help it.

      ‘Well?’ Evelyn pressed. ‘I’m tired of thinking about my dreadful woes. Tell me some good news. And I know you’ve got good news! I may be old but my eyes are in perfect working condition. What did that brother of yours have to say? Gosh, my dear, I wish I had had the opportunity to meet all of you so that I could put faces to the names. I wish I knew what James and Max looked like in the flesh, and not just in those pictures you showed me on your phone.’

      Izzy surfaced from her thoughts. Obligingly, she told Evelyn about her phone call, which she had been hugging to herself for the past few hours. Yes, she had spoken to Max, after a lot of procrastination. He hadn’t hunted her down he had listened to Mia, thank God, and had chosen to hang back but, even so, he would only have done so reluctantly.

      Izzy had been terrified when she’d made that call to tell him that there was a chance she would be staying on in California because of a muddle with Evelyn’s accommodation.

      She had worried that he would be fuming. Silently, aggressively, scarily fuming. She’d expected him to order her back and had been geared for an argument. But he’d been great. He’d told her he’d been touring the islands, much to her amazement, because she couldn’t remember her brother ever doing anything that didn’t involve an office, a computer and an army of yes-men lining up to do as told. And he’d assured her that everything was covered. Had told her that when she did return they would talk about what she wanted to do instead of what he wanted her to do.

      Rather than ask Who? What? Why? and When?, and risk a change of heart, she had rung off and counted her blessings.

      She reached for the note again and gazed at it before looking at Evelyn.

      ‘You won’t be going to have tea with that guy,’ she said quietly but firmly. She reached across the table and held the older woman’s hands between hers. Evelyn was as thin as a bird and Izzy could feel the bulge of her veins under her transparently pale skin. She was strong enough, and got a lot of exercise tending to her garden, but it still felt as though a puff of wind might blow her away.

      ‘I’ve got to get it out of the way.’ Evelyn sighed.

      ‘No,’ Izzy said. ‘You don’t. I do.’

      Gabriel Ricci looked at his watch and frowned because the woman was running late.

      He had issued the invitation for five-thirty. He’d figured that that would be roughly when someone in her late seventies would probably be sitting down for a cup of tea, coffee or hot chocolate and a slice of cake, having had an afternoon nap of some sort. It was an assumption made on absolutely no concrete evidence because he hadn’t actually had a cup of tea with anyone elderly at five-thirty in the afternoon in his life before.

      Five-thirty was the very peak of his working day. Cups of tea and slices of cake were the last things on his mind. However, needs must. But it was still irritating to find himself waiting, because he had reached a position of such power and influence in his life that he usually never had to wait for anyone any more. He beckoned, and they duly appeared exactly when they were meant to.

      How life had changed, he reflected idly. He looked around the stunning sitting room with its pale colours, lavish artwork and its view of acres upon acres of vineyards outside, rows upon rows in perfect symmetry, marching in exquisite formation towards the horizon.

      He could still remember the cramped house he had grown up in—the dingy paintwork, the meagre patch of grass outside that had had to multi-function as back garden, vegetable plot and place to hang the washing on those hot summer days in Brooklyn. He and his parents had lived cheek to jowl with their neighbours, and life had been crowded and chaotic. It was a place where the toughest rose to the surface and the weakest were either to be protected or allowed to sink to the bottom.

      Against this backdrop, his devoted parents had managed to nurture the importance of education and the need to get out or go under. There were many times when Gabriel had resented the repeated mantra to ‘study hard and make something of yourself’. Because slacking off and having fun had been an irresistible temptation, especially when he’d known that he could have been the leader of the pack with the snap of a finger. He was big, he was street-sharp and he was fearless. But the mantra had sunk in and he had had too much love and respect for his hard-working Italian parents to walk away from their teachings.

      He’d studied. He’d worked hard. He’d ended up at MIT studying engineering, and after that at Harvard, doing a PhD in business. He hadn’t set his sights on climbing the ladder. Climbing wasn’t going to do. He’d set his eyes on soaring to the very top of the ladder. Soaring was something he was in favour of. He wasn’t going to replicate his father’s life, taking orders from people dumber than him but with money, lineage and connections. He’d raced to the top of the food chain and savoured the freedom and respect that came with great wealth and even greater power.

      He had politely turned away all the lucrative offers from the giants and instead, unannounced, had headed straight through the front door of a small, family-run investment company that was slowly being ground into the dust by the big boys in the business.

      Sitting here now, Gabriel could still smile at the memory of that small company, with whom he still kept in close contact, because that had been his springboard and he had chosen wisely. He had catapulted them out of gridlock, got them back on the race track and had seen them steer a course through the minefield of threatening competition all around them. When they’d sold the company two years after he’d joined, they’d made millions and Gabriel had made even more.

      The rest... Well, he was feared now. He had long ago said goodbye to that street-fighting Brooklyn boy who had never quite belonged because he’d been too ambitious, too smart, too focused on finding a way out. Life hadn’t been easy in the years since but it had been good, at least financially—better than good.

      Good enough not to sit here, at nearly six in the evening, waiting for the Scott woman to show up.

      He was standing up, impatiently moving to pace the room, when the door to the sitting room was pushed open and he looked round, seeing first Marie, his housekeeper, and then immediately behind her...

      Gabriel stopped dead in his tracks.

      He’d been expecting a woman in her late seventies. He’d known what she looked like. He’d had a photo of her emailed to him prior to this meeting.

      Instead, he was looking at a young woman, as slender as a reed with silvery white-blonde hair that tumbled in curls past her shoulders and down her back. Her skin was satin-smooth and her eyes cornflower blue—as clear as crystal.

      She was dressed in dungarees and one of the straps had slipped off her shoulder, revealing a cream vest underneath and the shadowy curve of a small breast.

      He was annoyed at

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