The Italian's One-Night Love-Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

your bank balance than in your company.’
    Bethany’s stomach gave a nervous flutter but she was reassured by the fact that she knew she definitely wasn’t after his money. ‘Maybe you’re a little insecure.’
    ‘A little insecure?’ Cristiano looked at her with rampant incredulity. ‘No. Insecurity has never been a problem for me,’ he told her with satisfaction. ‘And please tell me that you aren’t going to spend the evening trying to analyse me.’
    ‘Where are we going to eat?’ Bethany changed the subject and when he named a restaurant which was as famous for its inflated prices as it was for the quality of its fare she gazed down at her jeans with dismay. Lesson one in how the super-rich operate. With a complete disregard for social convention. Cristiano clearly couldn’t care less whether she was dressed for an expensive night out or not. He, himself, was casually attired in a pair of dark trousers and a white shirt which would have looked average on any other man on the planet but which looked ridiculously sexy on him.
    ‘I’d rather not go there in a pair of jeans, flat shoes and a wrap,’ Bethany told him tersely. She also suspected that walking into a place like that on the arm of a man like him would make her the cynosure of all eyes and she had never enjoyed basking in the limelight, particularly now, when the limelight would have a very dubious tinge. And what if he introduced her to someone? The rarefied world of the rich and famous was notoriously small. In Rome, it was probably the size of a tennis ball. She would be revealed for the imposter she was in seconds flat.
    ‘You look…charming.’
    ‘Not charming enough to go to that particular restaurant.’ Bethany was feverishly cursing herself, yet again, for having succumbed to his invitation to dinner.
    ‘Don’t worry. I know the owner. Believe me when I tell youthat he won’t mind if I bring along a woman dressed in a bin bag.’
    ‘Because you can get away with something doesn’t give you the right to go ahead and do it,’ Bethany said, making sense to herself though not to him if his expression of bemusement was anything to go by.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because it’s important to have respect for other people,’ she told him, repeating the oft held mantra with which she and her sisters had grown up.
    Cristiano was looking at her as though she was slowly mutating into a being from another planet and Bethany blushed uncomfortably. She was well aware that she was probably in the process of contravening yet another unspoken dictum of the unbelievably rich, namely that she shouldn’t be blushing like a kid.
    ‘A socialite with principles,’ he murmured with a slashing smile that made her breath catch in her throat and put paid to all her niggling qualms about what she was doing. ‘I like it. It’s rare in my world to meet a woman who’s prepared to be vocal about her beliefs…’ In truth, the women he went out with generally didn’t give a hoot about what happened outside their own orbits. They were rich, had led, for the most part, pampered lives and their birthright was to accept the adulation of males and the subservience of everyone else.
    Not that they would ever have dreamt of setting one foot into Chez Nico unless they were dressed to kill. In actual fact, he doubted whether very many would have dreamt of going anywhere unless dressed to kill because appearance was all.
    ‘I’m not a socialite,’ Bethany said uncomfortably.
    ‘No? You just own a monstrously big apartment in the centre of Rome which you use as a holiday pad. You do fundraisers.You’re under thirty. Hate to tell you this, but that pretty much qualifies you as a socialite.’
    ‘I told you, things don’t work quite that way in…um…where I come from.’
    ‘And where’s that?’
    ‘Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of it,’ Bethany told him truthfully. ‘It’s a little place in Ireland…um…in the middle of nowhere…’
    ‘A little place