Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,51

he would find increasingly less attractive?

‘Of course I want to go back to work,’ she said quietly.

Gianluca poured himself a cup of coffee. Should he have been surprised at her agreement? Disappointed, maybe? His mouth hardened. Of course not. Circumstances might have changed, but Aisling had not—and underneath it all she was still the ice-cool, ambitious businesswoman she always had been.

‘So we might as well hire a nanny, mightn’t we?’ he said smoothly, dropping a cube of sugar into his cup ‘N-nanny?’ she echoed.

He gave her an unfathomable look. ‘Sì, cara. With two working parents, there’s no other solution, is there?’ And he bent his head and began to read the business section of his newspaper.

Aisling stared at his dark head, feeling as if she’d just been wrong-footed—like a defendant in court who had just been tripped up by the prosecution. How tense he seemed this morning. Almost as if he wanted to pick a fight with her. ‘Gianluca,’ she questioned hesitantly. ‘Is something wrong?’

His smile was bland as he looked up at her. ‘Why should anything be wrong, cara? We have a healthy baby and have proved we can exist in relative harmony for most of the time. You have met many of my friends and you all seem to like one another. We argue intelligently about politics and films, there are enough staff here to ensure that life runs smoothly—and at night you become a sensual witch in my arms.’ And it felt like living in a damned vacuum. He raised his eyebrows in question. ‘What more could a man ask for?’

The undercurrent and the tension in the air were almost palpable. Aisling felt as if he were asking her some kind of trick question which she had no idea how to answer. ‘We’ll advertise for a nanny, then,’ she said stiffly. ‘That should help.’

They interviewed the prospective candidates together, even though Aisling would have preferred to vet them all by herself.

‘Isn’t this more my territory than yours?’ she asked him lightly. ‘Do you really want to be bothered with all this?’

‘Haven’t you seen those horror films where the nanny turns out to be a psycho?’ he queried acidly. ‘I’d rather have some say in the matter, if you don’t mind.’

She knew that made sense, since whoever they chose would inevitably be Italian and Aisling’s command of the language was very basic indeed. Nonetheless, she shocked herself by wanting to bin all the applications from any attractive woman under thirty. Correction. Any woman she thought might be eying up Gianluca—because there was a stunning widow of forty she found rather threatening.

Was she going to become one of those chronically insecure women who was always terrified that her husband was going to have affairs with other women? And would that be such an unreasonable fear, under the circumstances?

‘Perhaps you could explain your criteria for rejecting some of these perfectly good candidates?’ questioned Gianluca sardonically.

‘They just have to feel right,’ said Aisling stubbornly, thinking that if one more applicant slanted him a look from beneath her eyelashes, she would scream out loud. ‘It’s a woman thing.’

In the end they both agreed on Carmela, who was just twenty and sweetly serious. But she was the one who seemed most captivated by Claudio—though bizarrely Aisling found herself wanting her not to get too attached to her baby.

And she quickly discovered that having a nanny was different from having all the other people who worked in and around the vast estate for Gianluca. They tended to get on with their jobs and fade into the background, but a nanny was a fairly constant presence and Aisling found it inhibiting.

Not because she and Gianluca were constantly snatching kisses—they definitely weren’t, since all their physical affection never left the bedroom. But it was unsettling having someone else around as an unwitting observer. Or rather, it made her feel unsettled—and start to think that perhaps something did need to change. As if seeing the situation through an outsider’s eyes made her realise how unsatisfactory it all was.

Aisling went upstairs earlier than usual one evening and was trying on one of her suits when she heard the door open quietly, and then close again. She looked up from where she had been struggling to do up a skirt when she saw Gianluca standing there, watching her.

‘Those are your work clothes,’ he observed.

She met his eyes in the mirror. ‘That’s right,’ she said evenly.

‘You’re planning to go back?’

‘Suzy says there’s a job in Paris coming up and she’d