The Millionaire's Italian Invitation, page 1
The Kinley Legacy
From business to forever!
The Kinley company has been the prestige brand in British fashion for more than a century, but a series of bad investments has left the coffers nearly bare and the company in need of a miracle.
Now, to right the wrongs of their parents and save the Kinley name and legacy, the estranged Kinley siblings—Jonathan, Olivia and Caleb—will have to set aside their differences to come together and show the world what “family” really means.
Escape to the Cotswolds in Jonathan’s story:
Reunion with the Brooding Millionaire
Follow Olivia’s story in London and Paris:
Rules of Their Parisian Fling
Embark on a vacation to Lake Como in Caleb’s story:
The Millionaire’s Italian Invitation
All available now!
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the final installment of The Kinley Legacy. If you’ve been here since the start, THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for being with me on this journey. If you’re only just discovering this world, WELCOME! I’m so glad to have you here.
Writing these stories has been an absolute joy and wouldn’t have been possible without all the wonderful people cheering from the sidelines. I owe every single one of you a huge debt of gratitude.
I hope you fall for Caleb and Ally just as hard as I did.
Love,
Ellie Darkins
x
The Millionaire’s Italian Invitation
Ellie Darkins
Ellie Darkins spent her formative years devouring romance novels and, after completing her English degree, decided to make a living from her love of books. As a writer and editor, she finds her work now entails dreaming up romantic proposals, hot dates with alpha males and trips to the past with dashing heroes. When she’s not working, she can usually be found running around after her toddler, volunteering at her local library or escaping all the above with a good book and a vanilla latte.
Books by Ellie Darkins
Harlequin Romance
Holiday with the Mystery Italian
Falling for the Rebel Princess
Conveniently Engaged to the Boss
Surprise Baby for the Heir
Falling Again for Her Island Fling
Reunited by the Tycoon’s Twins
Snowbound at the Manor
From Best Friend to Fiancée
Prince’s Christmas Baby Surprise
Reunion with the Brooding Millionaire
Rules of Their Parisian Fling
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.
For all my readers
Praise for Ellie Darkins
“All in all, this is another enjoyable, heartfelt, emotional romance from Ellie Darkins with characters you care about, and look forward to following their journey throughout the book. A thoroughly enjoyable story...which will leave you smiling, and perhaps crying a few happy tears along the way. An excellent read.”
—Goodreads on Falling Again for Her Island Fling
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM MY YEAR WITH THE BILLIONAIRE BY RACHAEL STEWART
PROLOGUE
Ally: You’re never going to believe what my parents have done now!
Caleb: IDK? Smothered you with love and affection?
Well... Yes. Obviously. But you’re going to have to be more specific if you want to win the speedboat.
I already have a speedboat.
What? Really?! Of course you do...
Stop stalling.
Guess!
They... I don’t know...made you dinner?
Caleb, that’s not smothering. That’s normal parenting.
Maybe for people whose parents didn’t send them to boarding school and then leave the country...
*embarrassed emoji* Sorry, sorry. We don’t have to play. You already have a speedboat!
It’s fine. I was teasing. I want the boat. They...set you up on a date again? Even though you begged them not to after you broke that nice doctor’s heart?
I did *not* break his heart!
But was I right?
Sort of... Except it’s much worse. Hang on... Need to copy and paste:
Dear Ally, Welcome to the Single No More family! We can’t wait to welcome you on board for a trip of a lifetime. A cruise around the beautiful Scilly Isles with other vetted and background-checked singles. Prepare for romantic candlelit dinners, evening strolls around the decks and days relaxing by the pool...
There’s more, but you get the idea.
Ally...is this...real? Do they really want you to go?
Yes. I need to get out of it. Any ideas? Also, how’s the wedding going?
Excruciating. Rowan and Jonathan are besotted. Adam and Liv are barely keeping their hands to themselves. They glare at me every time I pick up my phone. How early is too early to leave?
You have to stay until they cut the cake. You can do it. I believe in you.
Easy for you to say. Can’t believe I have to go to Italy with them in a week. A whole seven days of family time. If you figure out the answer to getting out of awkward family stuff...
Cal?
...
CAL!
...
Cal, are you there?
Hey, Liv confiscated my phone. Have you packed for your cruise yet?
Don’t laugh, please? I have to get out of this.
Can’t you just tell them you don’t want to go?
Tried it. Didn’t take. So I did something that you’re probably going to be mad about...
What did you do?
I told Mum I had a boyfriend.
You said you’d already tried that?
I did. She didn’t believe me. Wanted to know who it was. Because apparently the only person I ever talk about is you. So I told her it was you. My boyfriend. I told her you were my boyfriend...
...
Cal? You still there?
CHAPTER ONE
THIS WAS FINE. He was fine, Ally was fine, and everything between him and Ally was fine.
There was absolutely no reason that he should be freaking out about the fact that her lying to her parents about them dating had somehow snowballed in the space of a week to him standing at the arrivals gate at Bari airport, waiting to meet his best friend in person for the first time. And then trying to convince his own family as well as hers that they were dating for real and didn’t need any further interference in their love lives—or lack thereof.
Caleb remembered how inspired he had felt when the solution to both their problems had struck him as he’d read Ally’s last message in the middle of the night. She’d needed to convince her parents to stop trying to find her a boyfriend. He could convince his siblings that he was perfectly happy with the life that he was living, and they could stop worrying about him and covertly staring at him between sessions of making out with their new partners in places that were way too public for his liking.
They had gone from subtly criticising the amount of time that he spent staring at a screen to full-on confiscating his devices. Somehow, his protestations that he was both working and talking to his friend hadn’t been enough to convince them that he was capable of making his own choices about living his life and that they didn’t have to worry about him any more. Perhaps they would be more understanding if they thought that he was sexting...
He’d been facing the prospect of a week of poolside ‘family time’—because somehow his brother and new sister-in-law, his sister and her boyfriend, had decided to crash his annual visit to the Italian villa that he had inherited from their grandparents—and if he didn’t want them to worry about him he was going to have to occasionally put down his phone and his laptop and spend time with them.
And what better way to convince them that he was ‘absolutely fine, thanks’ than by introducing them to the person that he had been spending all his time hanging out with—online—over the last year.
Instead of being dragged away by his family when all he really wanted to do was chat with Ally, he could just...invite Ally along. That way he wouldn’t have to justify the time that he wanted to spend talking to her. All that plotting and scheming aside, he’d love for her to come to Italy, for her own sake. For his. Because after all this time putting it off, the thought of actually spending a week with his best friend without a screen between them felt like too much of a treat to pass up.
They’d put this off—the meeting in person thing—for so long that he’d started to forget that it wasn’t the way that friendships normally worked. They lived in the same city. They could have jumped in an Uber and spent time together in the real world any time in the past year.
They’d met on an online role-playing game, started chatting as they’d played. When they’d realised that they’d spent more time chatting than playing, they’d moved their friendship off the platform and for the past few months had spent most of their days messaging one another with something that they thought would make the other laugh. The details of their day. Offloading about their families when it all became too much.
They could have just met for a coffee in London, where they both lived. That would have made so much more sense than doing this here, in a foreign airport, with his whole family waiting for him at the end of their short drive home.
But things had got to the point where they had gone so long with neither of them suggesting a coffee that the thought of doing it had become this big, insurmountable obstacle in their way. Ally’s friendship had become so important to him that he didn’t want to do anything that might risk her deciding that he really wasn’t worth the effort. So rather than tackle that obstacle, he’d let the pressure build up behind it until—poof—he was issuing invitations for a week in Italy with his family halfway through his brother’s wedding rather than suggesting an Americano in his local coffee shop.
The problem with wanting to get close to Ally was that...well, he knew what happened when someone got close to her—like that doctor who was absolutely not good enough for her. They got shown the door before they could get too comfortable. And he’d seen what happened when people got close to him—his parents had felt so burdened by their children that they’d upped and left them without a backward glance before he was even out of school. And Jonathan had inherited the responsibility for a teenager and had never quite managed to hide how much it had cost him.
If Caleb keeping his friendship with Ally solely online was what kept it alive, he’d been okay with that. But this... If they could do this without Ally getting freaked out and bailing on their friendship, without him feeling as though he was a burden to everyone who cared about him, they could hang out for a week to get their families off their backs, and then they could go back to hanging out online, as they had for the last year.
So why were his palms sweating?
It was just because the aircon in the terminal building was non-existent and Ally’s plane was late, so he’d been standing in the heat waiting for her for two hours. Probably his siblings still thought that Ally was going to turn out to be a figment of his imagination and stage another of those ‘don’t you think you should put down your devices’ interventions. It wasn’t as if he didn’t leave the house—he spent time outdoors, he travelled, he explored London. But he wasn’t exactly going to invite his family along when they’d just spend the whole time feeling as though they were responsible for him or something. And these days he preferred to have his phone or his laptop with him so that he could chat to Ally while he was doing it.
It didn’t seem to matter how many times that he told his family that he had everything he needed, friends and a social life included, they continued to worry. He wasn’t sure how much time a week pretending to date Ally would buy him, but he was willing to take what he could get.
When another stream of people began to pass through the arrivals gate, he watched as couples and families and lone travellers emerged from the corridor without any sign of Ally.
The stream of people petered out and he was resigning himself to waiting even longer when he saw her. She had her eyes on her phone screen, brows drawn together in concentration. She dragged behind her a shiny silver suitcase, and wore a bright orange sundress, almost the same colour as her hair, which had slipped a little to reveal a creamy-white shoulder and the strap of a halter neck bikini. She was going to burn in this heat, he thought. At that moment, she looked up, caught his gaze on her, and a smile spread from her wide mouth, up over rosy apple cheeks to sparkling dark eyes. She stopped in front of him without a shred of uncertainty.
‘Ally?’ he asked. She replied by wrapping her arms around his neck, squeezing tight and squealing in his ear.
‘Caleb! I can’t believe it’s you.’
‘You barely even checked.’ He laughed, holding her at arm’s length to get a proper look at her. She was...amazing. Bright colours and tumbling curly hair and curves everywhere, so tempting to the eye that he drew his eyes swiftly away and fixed them on her face instead, where he thought they would be safer. He was wrong, because she looked knowingly at him and laughed. ‘What if you’d got the wrong guy?’
‘Of course it was you. You look... I don’t know. Just like you. Have you been waiting long?’ she asked. He dodged the question and reached for Ally’s suitcase before she snatched it out of reach and pulled it along as they headed for the enormous sliding doors out of the terminal building. ‘How long will it take us to drive to your place?’ Ally asked as they climbed into the car.
‘About half an hour until my family embarrass me completely and you regret ever agreeing to this,’ Caleb told her, only half joking.
‘Come on, they can’t be as bad as mine. So, what have you told them?’ she asked as they pulled out of the airport car park and narrowly avoided being swiped by a dinged-up Fiat that seemed to have come out of nowhere.
‘About what?’ he asked, flicking on his indicator and gritting his teeth as he approached a roundabout. He’d only arrived in Italy yesterday and hadn’t quite acclimatised to the local driving yet.
Ally whacked his arm once they were on the road towards the villa.
‘So have you told them anything about who I am and why I’m here and everything like that?’
He glanced across at her before focusing his eyes safely back on the road.
‘I told them that I was bringing someone.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘That’s it? You didn’t tell them that we’re friends or how we met or that I lied to my parents and told them we were dating?’
He shrugged again, pulling out to overtake a slower car in front. ‘I didn’t want to overstep. We haven’t really talked about what’s going on and I wasn’t sure whether the pretending to be your boyfriend was just for your family or mine too.’ And even without that complication, he wouldn’t know how to explain their friendship to the others in a way that they would understand. It was only occurring to him now—in a way that made him realise how seriously he had had his head in the sand about this—that it would have made much more sense to discuss this before Ally had actually arrived.
He didn’t trust that his family would understand that Ally could be his best friend despite the fact that they hadn’t met in person before this weekend. If he’d thought about it he would probably have guessed that if he turned up with a woman that they’d not met before, then his family would assume that she was his girlfriend. But perhaps that was why he’d tried so hard not to think about it—had he wanted them to jump to that conclusion? What would that mean for his friendship with Ally, his feelings about her?
‘Well, I told my parents you were my boyfriend,’ Ally observed wryly, her eyes fixed firmly on the landscape ahead of them. ‘I probably overstepped for the both of us.’
He risked a glance across at her as he pulled out onto the highway. ‘If it helps, my family will probably just assume that we’re together,’ he told her, trying to keep his voice safely neutral.
‘And you’re okay with that?’ Ally asked.
He took a deep breath. ‘I think it will stop them bugging me about whether I have a girlfriend and shouldn’t I go out more and is it healthy for me to spend so much of my time working. For some reason they worry about me, and I don’t want them to. You’ll be doing me a favour if we go along with it. They’d probably just ask more questions if I told them that we’re only friends.’
He was aware of her looking at him for a few moments before she spoke again. ‘Well, okay. As long as we have our stories straight about this before I meet everyone.’
That surprised a laugh out of Caleb, an uncanny reminder that this was the same woman who made him laugh on a daily basis, only this was the first time that she was around to hear it. ‘Ally, we didn’t rob a bank. We don’t need to “get our stories straight”. It’s none of their business what we are to each other.’
‘Of course it’s not, but I don’t want to get caught out! I told my family that you were my boyfriend and that you’re whisking me away to your holiday home. They’re going to want pictures or they’ll think I’m making it up. And we can’t just say nothing to your family. It’ll be embarrassing, for one thing, and make them think you’re weirder than they already do, for another.’
