feel on the softer smooth skin of her body. Would they catch and snare like a thorn on silk? Would they scratch or would they caress? Would they...?
She pulled back from her wayward thoughts with a hard mental slap. 'I'm going inside to say hello to Mrs Baker,' she said and swished past him to go to the front door.
'Mrs Baker is away on leave.'
Bella stopped as if she had suddenly come up against an invisible wall. She turned around to look at him with a quizzical frown. 'So who's doing the cooking and cleaning?' she asked.
'I'm taking care of it.'
Her frown deepened. 'You?'
'You have a problem with that?' he asked.
Bella blew out a little breath. She had a very big problem with it. Without Mrs Baker bustling about the place, she would be alone in the house with Edoardo. She hadn't planned on being alone with him. It was a very big house, but still...
In the past he had lived in the gamekeeper's cottage. But, since her father had left him Haverton Manor, he had the perfect right to live inside the house. He managed her father's investments and operated his own property-development business out of the study next to the library. Apart from the occasional business trip abroad, he lived and worked here.
He slept here.
In her house.
'I hope you don't expect me to take over the kitchen,' Bella said, shooting him another glare. 'I came to have a break.'
'Your whole life is one long holiday,' he said with a sneer that boiled her blood. 'You wouldn't know how to do a decent day's work if you tried.'
Bella gave her head a little toss. She wasn't going to tell him about her plans to help Julian fund his mission work with a good chunk of her inheritance. Edoardo could jolly well go on thinking she was a flaky airhead just like everybody else. 'Why would I need to work?' she asked. 'I have millions of pounds waiting for me to collect when I'm twenty-five.'
The muscle near his tightly set mouth started hammering again and his eyes turned to blue-green granite. 'Do you ever spare a thought for how hard your father had to work to make his money?' he asked. 'Or do you just spend it as fast as it's dropped in your account?'
Bella gave him another defiant look. 'It's my money to spend how I damn well like,' she said. 'You're just jealous because you came from nothing. You got lucky with my father. If it hadn't been for him, you'd be pacing a prison cell somewhere, not playing lord of the manor.'
His eyes glittered with sparks of acrimony. 'You're just like your gold-digging bitch of a mother,' he said. 'I suppose you know she was here a couple of days ago?'
Bella tried to disguise her surprise. And hurt. She hadn't seen or heard from her mother in months. The last time she had heard from Claudia was when she'd called to say she was moving to Spain with a new
husband - her second since her divorce from Bella's father. Claudia had needed money for the honeymoon. But then, Claudia always needed money, and Bella always felt pressured into giving it. 'What did she want?' she asked.
'What do you think she wanted?' he asked, that hard gaze glittering with cynicism.
Bella gave him an arch look. 'Maybe she wanted to check you were still managing my assets properly.'
A frown suddenly pulled at his brow. 'If you want a blow-by-blow inspection of the books, then all you have to do is ask,' he said. 'I've offered to meet with you more regularly but you've always refused. The last three meetings, you didn't even have the decency to show up in person.'
Bella felt a little ashamed of herself. She had no question over his management of her father's estate. The profits had steadily grown from the moment he had taken over the share portfolio in the months before her father had died from cancer. His street-smart intelligence and clever intuition had saved her assets where other investors' had been lost during the economic turmoil of the past few years.
A couple of times a year he would insist they meet so he could go through the estate books with her. At first she had suffered those meetings, all the while sitting silently seething at how he was in control of her life. But even in that large, swanky London office he had seemed a little too close to her. The last meeting