The Twelve Vitali Ch. 04

Once her hands were clean, she shrugged off her jacket. It was the one extravagance she had allowed herself out of her savings. She'd gone shopping for an outfit to wear when she met Mrs. Donati and had blown most of her budget on the jacket, but she knew as soon as she saw it that it was perfect for her. It hadn't taken much convincing from the salesperson for her to buy it, and she had gone bargain basement shopping for an outfit instead of sticking to her original plan of finding a designer outfit on sale.

With her face scrubbed clean, she towel-dried the long fringe of hair that angled across her forehead and pulled the band from her ponytail. She ran her fingers through her hair, settling for the shaggy look as the hair flowed well past her shoulders now. She'd been growing it for a while now, but, with her ever-present ponytail, she hadn't realised just how long it was until she had a friend trim it for her before she left. She fluffed it out, raking her fingers through it once more. New hair, jacket, town, new life, she had thought at the time. Had she been stupid to pack up her life so completely and quit her job with Vanessa? She wondered, and took a deep breath.

She pulled her jacket back on and tugged at her T-shirt and jeans, wondering how she would look to the man in the next room. It was a completely ridiculous thought, she scolded herself. She didn't even know him, and he had made no secret of the fact that he wasn't pleased that she had barged into his quiet evening. It wasn't as if she wanted or needed a man in her life, but a night of fun couldn't hurt, one of them would be moving out in the morning, and she need never see him again. He was very good looking, after all.

She opened the door and walked back out into the compact apartment. It would have been nice to stay here, if only for a week. Still, there was no way she was leaving tonight, so there was that. It was cold and rainy, not to mention late, and she couldn't believe that this man would make her leave with nowhere else to go, but then she'd never had any luck where men were concerned. The lateness was one of the reasons she wasn't keen to call and disturb Lucia or her benefactor Mrs. Donati, that and the fact that she didn't want to seem ungrateful. She walked back out into the living room with compromise in mind.

The man was no longer shirtless, and he was on the phone, so she wandered around looking at the apartment. She found she was suddenly hungry and, aside of a snack on the plane, really hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. She picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and took a bite. It was sweet and juicy, and she made a contented sound as the juice ran down her throat.

Matteo watched her walk out of the bathroom and back toward the living room while he listened to Dante's explanation of why she was here in the apartment with him. 'Well, well, well, didn't she clean up well,' he thought to himself. With the paint as a distraction, he hadn't noticed the other blue. The crystal blue of her eyes, and how they played against the raven blue of her black hair. She brought energy and movement to the room, and his eyes followed her as he tried to concentrate on the voice at the other end of his phone call.

Glad he had nabbed a T-shirt for himself before making the call, Matteo didn't think he had been in a room with someone who held that sort of aura about them before. True, he preferred docile, submissive types since Nik left him, but she seemed somehow different to the women he usually met. His eyes continued to follow her, and, when she caught him looking at her and raised an eyebrow, he mouthed the word, "Better?" to which she smiled and nodded.

The call to Dante was necessary, of course. With all of the upheaval and untoward happenings in the tables over the last couple of years, he knew that no matter how innocent someone seemed, there were many scammers and people who would do harm to him or his extended family. He was here to help Josh and Dante, as well as attempt to put his own life on track. He didn't have time for the distraction of an unusual young woman who had an incredible smile and aura about her.

"D. said he hadn't realised Peri had promised the place to you when he offered this place to me," he said as he ended the phone call. "I'll sleep on the couch tonight, it's too late to be booking into a hotel," he shrugged. "Did you eat already?" he asked, watching her take another bite of the apple. "I was thinking of ordering something."

"Who's D.?" she asked curiously. She had done a quick google search and thought Peri's husband's name was Joshua.

"Dante Donati," he said without further explanation.

"I thought this place belonged to Peri and her husband?" she frowned.

"It's complicated," he sidestepped the question. "So? food?"

"Food. Yes! Fabulous," she nodded, letting the question go. She went to where her bags still sat beside the door. It was too hot for the jacket now, and she reluctantly shrugged it off. Who was she kidding anyway; this guy was way out of her league, just like Ricco had always been. She tossed the jacket on the coat rack near the door and sat on the floor to tug off her boots and socks, trying to rid herself of thought of Ricco at the same time. This was her new beginning, her new life, and time to do something for herself. She smiled as she curled her toes into the plush carpet and sighed with pleasure. This really was a nice apartment, it was a shame she couldn't stay here after all.

"I'm Cat. Catriona Leone," she corrected herself. "And you would be?" she asked.

"Matt," he answered, opting for an easy answer, not wanting the connotations that came with his name, in case she knew it, to flavour their evening. He realised that he had been rude in not introducing himself when she had first walked into the apartment, but he hadn't been expecting someone like her to walk through the door. Or anyone, for that matter.

"Matt," she repeated. "Matt with no last name, I guess that could come in handy. Are you into the music scene like Madonna, Prince, Pink, Cher?" she laughed, trying to list as many people as she could that were known by one name only. "Or are you hiding out and don't want me to tell anyone where you're hiding? Witness protection program? Are you in some sort of danger I should be aware of?"

"Not that I know of," he shrugged chuckling. "Pizza good with you?" he asked, changing the subject abruptly and picking up his tablet again. He watched her nod enthusiastically as she chewed another bite of her apple. "Preferred toppings?" he flicked pages on his tablet intending to order sooner rather than later.

"Everything!" she said unequivocally. "Get one with everything!"

"Everything it is then," he chuckled, unable to help himself indulge her adorable enthusiasm. He tended toward mushroom with maybe sausage on it. He wasn't inclined to everything, but he uncharacteristically made the order. He guessed he owed her that much after being so rude, she had been invited here by Peri, after all.

"You're an artist, I take it?" he asked, finding an excuse to keep talking to her. "Come to the city to pursue fame and fortune?"

"Ha! Who wouldn't want fame and fortune," she laughed. "Who wouldn't want their work hanging in a gallery or museum..."

"I sense there's a but at the end of that," he prompted her to keep talking.

"What money I have made as an artist has been doing large scale corporate pieces that hang where no one sees them or takes much notice of them. The point of corporate art is to enhance the décor, not stand apart from it," she recited as if from a manual.

"Office art, lobby art, art for furnished apartments?" he asked, and again she nodded. Matteo was well acquainted with that kind of work; he'd spent hours upon hours with interior designers, mainly his sister, on the corporate buildings his company built. "The right pieces are vitally important to a unified decor, they announce the mood."

"A point of view," Cat agreed. "They tend to be safe and designed to pull elements of the room together. Few people actually notice them, let alone look at them."

"It sets the tone," he countered. "Those, for example," he pointed to two black and white nature shots on the wall they were near.

"Dull," she commented.

"Safe," he countered.

"Yawn," she giggled.

They both laughed in agreement and their eyes locked for a fraction too long, sending a spark between them before they looked away.

'How alive was this woman?' Matteo thought. He wasn't sure he'd ever met anyone like her. She was almost nothing like any of the women he knew. She said what she thought when she thought it without trying to curry favour. He considered her through surreptitious glances as she moved across the room carrying her luggage to the bedroom. She had been right, she wasn't leaving, he chuckled to himself. That thought was far less disturbing than he had believed it would be when she had first walked in looking like a stray puppy caught in the rain.

Matteo considered the young woman that he was sharing the apartment with for the night. The pressure was mounting for him to find a wife. He knew that his family, like the Donatis', were starting to ready themselves for the changing over of chairs to the next generation, and each of his brothers and cousins who were destined for a place at the table was beginning to settle down in their personal lives, except him. He knew that while he was still jetting around the country and the world, it seemed recently, that the changes he needed to make wouldn't happen. His brothers and fathers had both tried to gently prod him in the direction of finding a partner, a nice tabled woman who would bear him children and toe the family line. He had no intention of ever falling in love again, however, or putting his heart out there to be crushed by yet another woman, especially from the tables where their treachery seemed to know no bounds.

He had planned to find an actress to play the part of the doting fiancé, to have a long engagement during the changeover of chairs and eventually find some excuse to call it off when the time was right. He'd been planning on checking out some of the local talent agencies while he was here to find such an actress who could play the part. He could afford to be generous; his personal interests had gone from strength to strength as he had committed to his career rather than a relationship. He just needed to make sure that, even though any woman who would take his offer of a business partnership would be a gold digger, they would have to be to take up his offer, they would also need the skills to fool his family into believing it was love, not money that bound them together. Or the whole fake engagement would never make it off the ground.

"Do you mind if I take a shower while we wait for the pizza?" Cat finally broke into his thoughts, shattering the awkward silence that had enveloped them. "I got drenched on the way here, and I'd like to warm up a bit quicker with a shower."

He wasn't sure why she had asked, seeing as she was well on her way to doing just that, and his eyes followed her across the room until she disappeared into the short hallway. The words, 'If I can take it with you,' ran through his head before he quickly shut that thought down. Matteo ran his hands through his hair and frowned. It was as if the room had become dull and shadowed with the rain still pelting against the windows. He dismissed her from his mind and picked up the tablet again. He'd been thumbing through a talent agency website trying to make a decision about a suitable looking fiance when she'd arrived, and he reopened the web page.

Sierra Starr was a willowy red-head with green eyes that had the girl next door look. He knew his family would never buy that she was his type. He had a definite type, tall, sophisticated looking blondes, with big breasts and long legs who were seen with him but rarely heard to say anything of substance. He dated them and then discarded them before they could attempt to attach a relationship status to him. Cat was definitely not his type. He shook his head as the adorable image of her sitting on the floor and pulling off oddly mismatched socks came back to his mind. She was tall, he mused. Her gangly limbs had seemed to twist around her as she had removed both her boots and socks. She had dark hair, but it suited those big crystal blue eyes, her breasts, while not big, could not be discounted as small either.

He shook his head to dislodge the vision and concentrated on the tablet again. Mandy Perkins, a barracuda who looked like she could eat him alive stared back at him with cool blue eyes. Cat's crystal blue eyes hovered in his mind again for a second before he berated himself. 'You have known her for all of one minute. What are you doing?' He looked back down at the tablet and swiped across the screen considering several more actresses, and seemed unable to help comparing them to the woman who had unexpectedly waltzed into this apartment and his life with an energy and appeal that he couldn't deny.

It had been a long somewhat emotional day for him, and he was tired after talking with Dante, he told himself. He'd been working too hard lately. There was a myriad of excuses he gave himself as he tried to rid his mind of the images of Cat in the shower that kept spinning in and out of his mind.

His phone buzzed to life, and he grabbed it up quickly, thankful for the distraction.

*****

Cat stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a fluffy towel. It felt strange to be showering with a man she didn't know in the next room. She probably should have been afraid when she'd opened the door to find a total stranger in the apartment. She'd felt annoyed, maybe, or maybe something else entirely. It might have something to do with the fact that Matt looked like a bronzed Greek God. With his imposing height, lean muscles and his wavy brown hair that had just a few red flecks through it. He was the first man she looked at in that way in the two months since ending her relationship with Ricco. Maybe this change of scenery was the right thing, as Lucia had predicted.

His tone was bossy, but she guessed it was an even bigger surprise for him to have a drowned rat with blue war paint on her face barge into the room with a tattered duffel bag and an old suitcase with squeaky wheels. Now she was trapped here with him for the night. At least he had offered to take the couch instead of assuming she would take it, or thought she was an easy target for seduction. Would she have minded being seduced by the man who held those dark, soulful eyes? she wondered.

Still not completely comfortable with the man in the next room, despite her heated thoughts, Cat dressed quickly into comfortable yoga pants and a loose, lightweight sweater. She brushed out her hair and picked up the towel again, squeezing a little more water from the ends before walking into the next room to see if the pizza had arrived.

Matteo looked up as she walked in and considered her once again. If anything, she looked even better freshly scrubbed with a pink polish to her skin. He was tired, he told himself. She had surprised him here when he'd just discovered the horrific truth about the woman who had used and betrayed him for their own selfish reasons. His thoughts about Nik were closely followed by the two other women he had loved and been hurt by. 'Never again,' he vowed. Never again would he be tempted to fall in love, despite the attraction he felt. What he needed was a business agreement, nothing more.

"Pizza isn't here yet?" Cat asked, sitting on the couch near him but not close enough to crowd him.

"Not yet," he shrugged. "They said half an hour, and that was one of the quickest showers I've ever seen a woman have," he commented.

"I just needed to freshen up, really, the flight wasn't that long, but I feel like I was travelling all day," she continued to rub at the ends of her wet hair. "Plus, I was wet and cold from the storm," she added after a lightning bolt lit the sky outside. "A shower always helps when you've been stuck in the rain."

"It's definitely bucketing down out there now," Matteo agreed. "I'm glad you feel better." His phone buzzed to life and he grabbed it up, pulling his eyes away from Cat. "Let him up," he said curtly into the phone, and stood walking to the door. "Pizza is here," he announced, and opened the door, even though the delivery guy had not quite made it that far yet. Heat radiated from Cat's body, stirring sensations in him he hoped to deny... Fierce urgent sensations.

Normally he maintained a controlled world without surprises. A world that allowed him to keep the upper hand and manoeuvre as he saw fit because he was usually right about what needed to be done. He accepted the pizza from the delivery guy and signed the credit slip. Closing the door, he walked back to the living room to place the pizza on the table, lifting the lid. He grimaced, he was a thirty-five-year-old man who knew he liked a simpler mushroom and sausage pizza, this woman had barged into his life and spun his world off its axis. He looked at the pizza with everything and wondered if he had lost his mind. She had to be stopped!

Throwing the towel over the back of a green dining chair, Cat went to the kitchen to look for plates and napkins. Matteo joined her in the tiny kitchen, pulling two bottles of beer from the refrigerator. He could feel the heat from her again in the small space and moved away, quickly heading back to the table.

"Hope beer is okay," he opened the bottle and passed it to her. He wasn't about to open a bottle wine or make this dinner anymore awkward than it already felt. She was a stranger; she would be gone from his life tomorrow. He just needed to be civil for one night. Eat, send her to bed, and then he could rest and get on with his life.

"Beer's great," she said, and took the bottle from him. After taking a sip, she looked at him, wondering if he would think her ill-mannered if she dug into the pizza, and then deliberated why she cared what he thought of her. A man like him had no business with a girl from welfare alley. Not that she lived there anymore. She could create a new life and a new past for herself here where no one knew her. No one had to know she came from a place full of the long-term unemployed, drugs and crime. It wasn't a place you'd find a Greek God who was obviously very comfortable in the plush surroundings of this inner-city apartment.

"So how do you know the Donatis'?" Cat asked, as she helped herself to a slice of pizza. Her thoughts made her curious about the man with no last name that she found herself marooned with tonight.

"They are cousins, in a roundabout way," he said easily, watching her take a large bite of her slice of pizza. "I'm here to see Josh, but he got called away from the dinner we were supposed to have tonight. I will meet with him tomorrow. What about you?"

"I'm here for Lucia Battaglia's book launch, mostly, but I'm hoping that Mrs. Donati wants to offer me a job, because she has asked me to meet with her as well while I am here. I am meeting with her tomorrow," she said, and bit into the pizza again before he could ask her to continue.

"A job? Like a commission for a piece of art?" He asked, and when she nodded her head, having her mouth full of pizza he asked, "How did she know it was worth bringing you up here for a meeting then?"

"I'm not sure, to tell you the truth," Cat shrugged. "I doubt she's seen any of my installations," she frowned. "Maybe she liked my website, it has a lot of examples of my work and style."

"Right, a website. What is it? I'd like to see," he found himself genuinely interested.

"Catriona Leone dot com dot a-u," she said. Even if there was little else in her life to be proud of, her art was the thing that sustained her through a harsh childhood and an even harsher entry into adult life. It was her solace and her happy place, and she shared it with as many people as she thought might appreciate it. She was beyond grateful to Mick for creating the website for her and his constant updating from the newer pieces she had created during her time working for Vanessa, as well as the short lived affair and tough break up with Ricco.