Loe raamatut: «Will You Marry Me?»

REBECCA WINTERS, whose family of four children has now swelled to include five beautiful grandchildren, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the land of the Rocky Mountains. With canyons and high alpine meadows full of wildflowers, she never runs out of places to explore. They, plus her favourite vacation spots in Europe, often end up as backgrounds for her romance novels, because writing is her passion, along with her family and church.

Rebecca loves to hear from readers. If you wish to e-mail her, please visit her website: www.cleanromances.com.

CHAPTER ONE

BELLE PETERSON LEFT the cell phone store she managed, and took a bus to the law office of Mr. Earl Harmon in downtown Newburgh, New York. The secretary showed her into the conference room. She discovered her thirty-year-old, divorced sibling, Cliff, had already arrived and was sitting at the oval table with a mulish look on his face, daring her to speak to him. She hadn’t seen him since their parents’ funeral six months ago.

On the outside he was blond and quite good-looking, but his facade hid a troubled soul. He’d been angry enough after his wife had left him, but the deaths of their parents in a fatal car crash meant he was now on his own. Today Belle felt Cliff’s antipathy more strongly than usual and chose a seat around the other side of the table without saying a word.

Now twenty-four and single, she had been adopted fourteen years ago. The children at the Newburgh Church Orphanage had liked her, as had the sisters. But out in the real world, Belle felt she was unlovable, and worked hard at her job to gain the respect of her peers. Her greatest pain was never to know the mother who’d given birth to her. To have no identity was an agony she’d had to live with every day of her life.

The sisters who ran the orphanage had told Belle that Mrs. Peterson had been able to have only one child. She’d finally prevailed on her husband to adopt the brunette girl, Belle, who had no last name. This was Belle’s chance to have a mother, but no bonding ever took place. From the day she’d been taken home, Cliff had been cruel to her, making her life close to unbearable at times.

“Good morning.”

Belle was so deep in thought over the past, she didn’t realize Mr. Harmon had come into the room. She shook his hand.

“I’m glad you two could arrange to meet here at the same time. I have some bad news and some good. Let’s start with the bad first.”

The familiar scowl on Cliff’s face spoke volumes.

“As you know, there was no insurance, therefore the home you grew up in was sold to pay off the multitude of debts. The good news is you’ve each been given fifteen hundred dollars from the auction of the furnishings. I have checks for you.” He passed them out.

Cliff shot to his feet. “That’s it?” Belle heard panic beneath his anger. She knew he’d been waiting to come into some money, if only to make up delinquent alimony payments. She hadn’t expected anything herself and rejoiced to receive this check, which she clutched in her hand before putting it in her purse.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Peterson, but everything went to pay off your father’s debts and cover the burial costs. Please accept my sincere sympathy at the passing of your parents. I wish both of you the very best.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harmon,” Belle said, when Cliff continued to remain silent.

“If you ever need my help, feel free to call.” The attorney smiled at her and left the room. The second he was gone, an explosion of venom escaped Cliff’s lips. He shot her a furious glance.

“It’s all your fault. If Mom hadn’t nagged Dad for a daughter, there would have been more money and we wouldn’t be in this mess. Why don’t you go back to Italy where you belong?”

Her heart suddenly pounded with dizzying intensity. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. Dad never wanted you.”

“You think I didn’t know that?” She moved closer to her brother, holding her breath. “Are you saying I came from Italian parents?” All along she’d thought the sisters at the orphanage might have named her for the fairy-tale character, or else she came from French roots.

Her whole life she’d been praying to find out her true lineage, and she’d gone to the orphanage many times seeking information. But every time she did, she’d been told they couldn’t help her. Nadine, her adoptive mother, had never revealed the truth to her, but Belle had heard Cliff’s slip and refused to let it go.

He averted his eyes and wheeled around to leave, but she raced ahead of him and blocked the door. At twenty-four, Belle was no longer frightened of him. Before they left this office and parted ways forever, she had to ask the question that had been inscribed on her mind and heart from the time she knew she was an orphan. “What else do you know about my background?”

Cliff flashed her a mocking smile. “Now that Dad’s no longer alive, how much money are you willing to pay me for the information?”

She could hardly swallow before she opened her purse and pulled out the check. In a trembling voice she said, “I’d give you this to learn anything that could help me know my roots.” While he watched, she drew out a pen and endorsed it over to him.

For the first time since she’d known him, his eyes held a puzzled look rather than an angry one. “You’d give up that much money just to know about someone who didn’t even want you?”

“Yes,” she whispered, fighting tears. “It’s not important if they didn’t want me. I just need to know who I am and where I came from. If you know anything, I beg you to tell me.” Taking a leap of faith, she handed him the check.

He took it from her and studied it for a moment. “You always were pathetic,” he muttered.

“So you don’t know anything and were just teasing me with your cruelty? That doesn’t really surprise me. Go on. Keep it. I never thought we’d get that much money from the auction, anyway. You’re one of the lucky people who grew up knowing your parents. Too bad they’re gone and you’re all alone now. Knowing how it feels, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not even you.”

Belle opened the door, and had started to leave when she heard him say, “The old man said your last name was the same as the redheaded smart-mouth he hated in high school.”

Her heart thundered. She spun around. “Who was that?”

“Frankie Donatello.”

“Donatello?”

“Yeah. One day I heard Mom and Dad arguing about you. That’s when it came out. He said he wished they’d never adopted that Italian girl’s brat. After he left for work, I told Mom she ought to send you back to where you came from, because you weren’t wanted. She said that would be impossible because it was someplace in Italy.”

What? “Where in Italy?” Belle demanded.

“I don’t know. It sounded something like Remenee.”

“How did he find out? The sisters told me it was a closed adoption.”

“How the hell do I know?”

It didn’t matter, because joy lit up Belle’s insides. Her leap of faith had paid off! Without conscious thought she reached out and hugged him so hard she almost knocked him over. “Thank you! I know you hate me, but I love you for this and forgive every mean thing you ever said or did to me. Goodbye, Cliff.”

She rushed out of the law office to the bus stop and rode back to work. After nodding to the sales reps, she disappeared into the back room and looked for a map of Italy on the computer. She was trembling so violently she could hardly work the keyboard.

As she scrolled down the list of cities and towns that popped up, the name Rimini appeared, most closely matching “Remenee.” The blood pounded in her ears when she looked it up and discovered it was a town of a hundred forty thousand along the Adriatic. It was in the province of Rimini.

Quickly, she scanned the month’s schedule of vacations for the employees. They all had one week off in summer and one in winter. Belle was on summer break from college, where she went to night school. Her vacation would be coming up the third week of June, ten days away.

Without hesitation she booked a flight from New York City to Rimini, Italy, and made arrangements for a rental car. She chose the cheapest flight, with two stopovers, and made a reservation at a pension that charged only twenty-eight dollars a day. No phone, no TV. The coed bathroom was down the hall. Sounded like the orphanage. That was fine with her. A bed was all she needed.

Since she’d been saving her money, and roomed with two other girls, she’d managed to put away a modest nest egg. All these years she’d been guarding it for something important, never dreaming the money would ever help her to find her mother.

“Belle?”

She lifted her head and smiled politely at her colleague. “Yes, Mac?”

“How about going for pizza after we lock up tonight?”

“I’m sorry, but I have other plans.”

“You always say that. How can someone so gorgeous turn me down? Come on. How about it?”

Her new assistant manager, transferred in from another store, was good-looking and a real barracuda in sales, but he irritated her by continually trying to get her to go out with him.

“Mac? I’ve told you already that I’m not interested.”

“Some of the guys call you the Ice Queen.” He never gave up.

“Really. Anything else you want to say to me before you finish the inventory?”

She heard a smothered imprecation before the door closed. Good. Maybe she was an ice queen. Fine! So far she hadn’t seen examples of love in her personal life and didn’t expect to.

Her birth parents had given her away. Her adoptive parents had suffered through an unhappy marriage. Her adoptive brother was already divorced, and angry. He’d used her pretty mercilessly as an emotional punching bag. Belle always felt she was on the outside looking in, but never being part of a whole.

She thought about the single girls at the store, who all struggled to find good dates and were usually miserable with the ones they landed. Two of the four guys were married. One of them was having an affair. The other was considering divorce. The other two were players. Both spent their money on clothes and cars.

Her own roommates were still single and terrified they would end up alone. It was all they talked about when the three of them went running in the mornings.

Belle didn’t worry about being alone. That had been her state from the moment she was born. The few dates she’d accepted here and there outside the workplace had fizzled. It was probably her fault, because she didn’t feel very lovable and wasn’t as confident as she needed to be. Marriage wasn’t an option for her.

She didn’t trust any relationship to last, and cut it off early. Belle hadn’t met a man she’d cared enough about to imagine going to bed with. No doubt her mother had experimented, and gotten caught with no resources but the church orphanage to help her. Belle refused to get into that circumstance.

What she could depend on was her career, which gave her the stability she craved after being dependent on the orphanage and her adoptive parents. She was a free agent now. Her store had been number one in the region for two years. Soon she hoped to be promoted to upper-level management in the company.

But first she would take her precious vacation time to try to find her mother. If Cliff had gotten it wrong or misunderstood, then maybe the trip would be for nothing, but Belle had to think positive thoughts. Romantic Italy, the world of Michelangelo, gondolas and the famous tenor Pavarotti, had always sounded as delightful and as faraway as the moon. Incredible to believe she’d actually be flying there in ten days.

Tomorrow she’d see about equipping herself with a company GSM phone and SIM card, the kind with a quad-band. Once in Rimini, she’d find a local library and work from the latest city phone directory to do her research.

She was in the midst of making a mental list of things she’d need when Rod, one of the reps, suddenly burst in on her. “Hey, boss? Can you come out in front? An angry client just threw his cell phone at Sheila and is demanding satisfaction. He said it broke after he bought it.”

She smiled. “If it wasn’t broken, it is now. No problem.” No problem at all on the first red-letter day of her life. “I’ll be right there.”

* * *

It was seven in the morning when thirty-three-year-old Leonardo Rovere di Malatesta, the elder son of Count Sullisto Malatesta of Rimini, finally got his little six-month-old Concetta to sleep. The doctor said she’d caught a bug, and he’d prescribed medicine to bring down her temperature. It was now two degrees lower than it had been at midnight, and she hadn’t thrown up again, grazie a Dio!

After he’d walked the floor with her all night in an attempt to comfort her, he was exhausted. The dog ought to be exhausted, too. Rufo was a brown roan Spinone, a wedding gift from his wife’s father.

Rufo had been devoted to Benedetta and had transferred his allegiance to Concetta when Leon had returned from the hospital without his wife. Since that moment, their dog had never let the baby out of his sight. Leon was deeply moved by such a show of love, and patted the animal’s head.

There was no way he’d be going in to the bank today. Talia and Rufo would watch over his daughter while he slept. The forty-year-old nanny had been with him since Benedetta had died in childbirth, and was devoted to his precious child. If the baby’s fever spiked again, he could count on her to waken him immediately.

He kissed Concetta’s head with its fine, dark blond hair, and laid her in the crib on her back, out of habit. She never stayed in that position for long. Her lids hid brown eyes dark as poppy throats. She had Benedetta’s coloring and facial features. Leon loved this child in a way he hadn’t thought possible. Her presence and demanding needs filled the aching loneliness in his heart for the wife he’d lost.

After tiptoeing out of the nursery, he told Talia he was going to bed, then went to find his housekeeper, who’d always worked for his mother’s family. She and Talia were cousins, and he trusted them implicitly.

“Simona? I’ve turned off my cell phone. If someone needs me, knock on my door.”

The older woman nodded before Leon headed for his bedroom. He was so exhausted he didn’t remember his head touching the pillow. The relief of knowing the baby’s fever had broken helped him to fall into a deep sleep.

When he heard a tap on his door later, he checked his watch. He’d slept seven hours and couldn’t believe it was already midafternoon! He came awake immediately, fearing something was wrong.

“Simona? Is Concetta worse?” he called out.

“No, no. She has recovered. Talia is feeding her.” Relief swamped him a second time. “Your assistant at the bank asked if you would phone him at your convenience.”

“Grazie.” Leon levered himself off the bed and headed for the shower, surprised that Berto would call the villa. Normally he would leave a message on Leon’s cell. Maybe he had.

After he’d shaved and dressed, Leon reached for his phone. There was a message from his father asking him to join the family for dinner.

Not tonight.

Another message came from his friend Vito, in Rome. Leon would phone him before he went to bed.

Nothing from Berto.

Leon walked into the kitchen, where he found Talia feeding plums from a jar to his daughter, who was propped in her high chair. Rufo sat on the floor with his tail moving back and forth, watching with those humanlike eyes.

Concetta’s sweet little face broke into a smile the second she saw her father, and she waved her hands. Whenever she did that, it made him thankful he was alive. He felt her forehead, pleased to note her fever was gone.

“I do believe you’re much better, il mio tesoro. As soon as I make a few phone calls, you and I are going to go out on the patio and play.” It overlooked his private stretch of beach with its fine golden sand. Concetta was strong and loved to stand in it in her bare feet if he braced her.

Yesterday he’d bought a new set of stacking buckets for her, but she hadn’t felt well enough to be interested. Now that her health was improved, he couldn’t wait to see what she’d do with them. First, however, he phoned his father to explain that the baby had been sick and needed to be put down early.

When Leon heard the disappointment in his voice, he made arrangements for dinner the following evening if she was all better. With that accomplished he called his secretary at the bank.

“Berto? I sent you a text message telling you my daughter was ill. Is there a problem that can’t wait until tomorrow?”

“No, no. I’ll talk to you in the morning, provided the bambina is better.”

Leon rubbed the pad of his thumb along his lower lip. “You wouldn’t have phoned if you didn’t think it was important.”

“At first I thought it was.”

“But now you’ve changed your mind?” Berto was being uncharacteristically cryptic.

“Sì. It can wait until tomorrow. Ciao, Leon.”

His assistant actually hung up on him! Leon clicked off and eyed the baby, who’d eaten all her plums and seemed perfectly content playing with her fingers.

“Talia, something has come up at the bank. I’ll run into town and be back within the hour. Tell Simona to phone me if there’s the slightest problem.”

“The little one will be fine.”

He kissed his daughter’s cheek. “I’ll see you soon.”

After changing into a suit, Leon alerted his bodyguard before leaving the villa. He drove his black sports car into the most celebrated seaside resort city in Europe, curious to understand what was going on with Berto.

After pulling around to the back of the ornate, two-story Renaissance building, partially bombed during World War II and later reconstructed, he let himself in the private entrance reserved for him and his family. He took the marble staircase two steps at a time to his office on the next floor, where he served as assets manager for Malatesta Banking, one of the two top banking institutions in Italy.

Under his father’s brilliant handling as wealth manager, they’d grown to twenty-five thousand employees. With his brother, Dante, overseeing the broker-dealer department, business was going well despite Italy’s economic downturn. If the call from Berto meant any kind of trouble, Leon intended to get to the bottom of it pronto.

His redheaded assistant was on a call when Leon walked into his private suite of rooms. Judging from his expression, Berto was surprised to see him. He rang off quickly and got to his feet. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

Leon’s hands went to his hips. “I didn’t expect you to hang up so quickly from our earlier conversation. I want to know what’s wrong. Don’t tell me again it’s nothing. Which of the accounts is in trouble?”

Berto looked flustered. “It has nothing to do with the accounts. A woman came to the bank earlier today after being sent from Donatello Diamonds on the Corso D’Augosto.”

“And?” Leon demanded, sensing his assistant’s hesitation.

“Marcello in Security called up here, asking for you to handle the inquiry, since your father wasn’t available. The manager at Donatello’s told her she would have to speak to someone at the bank. That’s when I called you.

“But after I heard it was some American wanting information about the Donatello family, I figured it was a foreign reporter snooping around. At that point I decided not to bother you any more about it.”

Leon frowned in puzzlement. Someone wanting to do legitimate business would have made an appointment with him or his father and left their full name.

Was it one of the paparazzi posing as an American tourist in order to dig up news about the family? Leon’s relatives had to be on constant alert against the media wanting to rake up old scandal to sell papers.

Leon had seen it all and viewed life with a cynical eye. It was what came from being a Malatesta, hated in earlier centuries and still often an object of envy.

“When I couldn’t get you or your father, I tried your brother, but he’s out of town. I told Marcello this person would have to leave a name and phone number. With your daughter sick, I didn’t consider this an emergency, but I still wanted you to be informed.”

“I appreciate that. You handled it perfectly. Do you have the information she left?”

Berto handed the notepaper to him. “That’s the phone number and address of the Pensione Rosa off the Via Vincenza Monti. The woman’s name is Belle. Marcello said she’s in her early twenties, and with her long dark hair and blue eyes, more than lives up to her name. When she approached him, he thought she was a film star.”

Naturally. Didn’t the devil usually appear in the guise of a beautiful woman? Of course she didn’t leave a last name....

“Good work, Berto. Tell no one else about this. See you tomorrow.”

More curious than ever, Leon left the bank. A few minutes later he discovered the small lodging down an alley, half hidden by the other buildings. He parked and entered. No one was around, so he pressed the buzzer at the front desk. In a moment a woman older than Simona came out of an alcove.

“I’m Rosa. If you need a room, we’re full, signore.”

Leon handed her the paper. “You have a woman named Belle registered here?”

“Sì.” With that staccato answer he realized he wouldn’t be learning her guest’s last name the easy way.

“Could you ring her room, per favore?”

“No phone in the rooms.”

He might have known, considering the low price for accommodations listed on the back wall. “Do you know if she’s in?”

“She went out several hours ago and hasn’t returned.”

He spied a chair against the wall, next to an end table with a lamp on it. “I’ll wait.”

The woman scrutinized him. “Leave me your name and number and she can call you from the desk here after she returns.”

“I’ll take my chances and see if she comes in.”

With a shrug of her ample shoulders, the woman disappeared through the alcove.

Rather than sit here for what might be hours, he phoned one of his security people to do surveillance. When Ruggio arrived, Leon gave him the American woman’s description and said he wanted to be notified as soon as she showed up.

With that taken care of, he walked out to the alley and got in his car. He was halfway to the villa when his cell phone rang. It was Ruggio. Leon clicked on. “What’s happening?”

“The woman fitting the description you gave me just entered. She’s driving a rental car from the airport.”

“Which agency?”

When Ruggio gave him the particulars, Leon told him to stay put until he got there. On the way back to the pension, he called the rental agency and asked to speak to the manager on a matter of vital importance. Once the man heard it was Signor di Malatesta investigating a possible police matter to do with the bank, he told him her last name was Peterson, and that she was from Newburgh, New York. Leon didn’t often use his name to apply pressure, but this case was an exception.

He learned she’d made the reservation nearly two weeks ago and had rented the car for seven days. It seemed she’d already been in Rimini three days.

Leon thanked the manager for his cooperation. Pleased to be armed with this much information before confronting her, he made a search on his phone. Newburgh was a town sixty miles north of New York City. What it all meant he didn’t know yet, but he was about to find out.

He saw the rental car when he drove down the alley and parked. Ruggio met him at the front desk of the pension, where Rosa was helping a scruffy-looking male wearing a backpack and short shorts.

“She’s been in her room since she came in. She’s molta molta bellissima,” Ruggio whispered. “I think I’ve seen her on television.”

Marcello had said the same thing. “Grazie. I’ll take it from here,” Leon told him. If she was working alone or with another reporter, he planned to find out.

Once Ruggio left, he sat down. By now it was quarter after six. Without a TV, she’d probably leave again, if only to get a meal. If he had to wait too long, he’d insist Rosa go knock on Signorina Peterson’s door. To pass the time, Leon phoned Simona, and was relieved to hear his little girl seemed to be over the worst of her bug.

As he was telling his housekeeper he wasn’t sure what time he’d get home, a woman emerged from the alcove. Without warning, his adrenaline kicked in. Not just because she was beautiful—in fact, incredibly so. It was because there was something about her that reminded him of someone else.

She swept past him, so fast she was out the door before he was galvanized into action. After telling Simona he’d get back to her, he sprang from the chair and followed the shapely woman in the two-piece linen suit and leather sandals down the alley to her car.

He estimated she had to be five feet six. Even the way she carried herself, with a kind of unconscious grace, was appealing. Physically, Leon could find nothing wrong with her, and that bothered him, since he hadn’t been able to look at another woman since Benedetta.

“Belle Peterson?”

She wheeled around, causing her gleaming hair, the color of dark mink, to swish about her shoulders. Cobalt-blue eyes fringed with black lashes flew to Leon in surprise. If she already knew who he was, she was putting on a good act of pretending otherwise.

She possessed light olive skin that needed no makeup. Her wide mouth, with its soft pink lipstick, had a voluptuous flare. He found her the embodiment of feminine pulchritude, but to his surprise she stared at him without a hint of recognition or flirtatiousness. “How do you know my name? We’ve never met.”

With that accent, she was American through and through. He found her directness as intriguing as her no-nonsense demeanor. Some men might find it intimidating. Leon’s gaze dropped to her left hand, curled over her shoulder bag and resting against the lush curve of her hip. Her nails were well manicured with a neutral coating. She wore no rings.

If in disguise for a part she was playing—perhaps in the hope of infiltrating their family business in some way to unlock secrets—he would say she looked...perfect.

He pulled the note Berto had given him out of his suit jacket pocket and handed it to her.

She glanced at it before eyeing him again. “Evidently you’re from the bank. How did you get my last name?”

“A simple matter of checking with the car rental agency.”

Her blue eyes turned frosty. “I don’t know about your country, but in mine that information can only be obtained by a judge’s warrant during the investigation of a crime.”

“My country has similar laws.”

“Was it a crime to ask questions?”

“Of course not. But I’m afraid our doors are closed to all so-called journalists. I decided to investigate.”

“I’m not a journalist or anything close,” she stated promptly. Reaching in her shoulder bag, she pulled a business card out of her wallet.

He took it from her fingers and glanced at it. Belle Peterson, Manager, Trans Continental Cell Phones Incorporated, Newburgh, New York...

He lifted his head. “Why didn’t you leave this card at the bank with the security man you talked to?”

Without hesitation, she said, “Because a call to my work verifying my employment would let everyone know where I am. Since my whereabouts are no one’s business, I wish it to remain that way. The fact is, I’m on vacation and it’s almost over.”

He slipped the card into his pocket. “You’ll be returning to Newburgh?”

“Yes. I’ve talked to as many people with the last name Donatello as I’ve been able to locate in Rimini. So far I haven’t found the information I’ve been seeking.”