The boy she tried to forget...
Now the boss her heart wonât let go
Neve Wilderâs past suddenly comes flooding back when she meets her boss, Davide Cortese. Can he really be that boy who stole her heart and then disappeared all those years ago? The intensity of their attraction hasnât changed, but everything else has... With so much at stake, can Neve allow herself to be captivated by her gorgeous Italian all over again?
ROSANNA BATTIGELLI loved Mills & Boon Romances as a teenager, and dreamed of being a romance writer. For a family trip to Italy when she was fifteen, she packed enough Mills & Boons to last the month! Rosannaâs passion for reading and her love of children resulted in a stellar teaching career, with four Best Practice Awards, and she also pursued another passion: writing. She has been published in over a dozen anthologies, and since retiring her dream of being a Mills & Boon writer has come true!
ISBN: 978-1-474-07800-9
CAPTIVATED BY HER ITALIAN BOSS
© 2018 Rosanna Battigelli
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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To Calabria, a land of resilience and enchantment that continues to captivate me.
And to all my Calabrese relatives and friends worldwide, starting with those in Camini, where my heart first began to beat.
CHAPTER ONE
WHEN NEVE SPOTTED the ad in the Vancouver newspaper in the second to last week of June, she felt a shiver of excitement run through her. It was an ad requesting applications from Canadian nannies for a position for the summer. In Italy. And Southern Italy, at that. A place she had visited with her mother when she was eighteen. Her parents had traveled through Calabria and Sicily on their honeymoon, and her motherâs nostalgia had drawn her back for what would have been their nineteenth anniversary.
Neve had loved the leisurely five-week tour through the seaside towns and mountain hamlets, culminating with the last week in ValdoroâValley of Goldâon the southeast coast of Calabria. It was the town where Neve had been conceived. Neve could still envision the shimmering, color-changing waves of the Ionian Sea. And the dazzling sun that rose at dawn, its face an orange-gold orb that soon took dominion of the cerulean sky. By 8:00 a.m., the temperature would register over thirty degrees Celsius, and Neve couldnât wait to head to the beach.
Her imagination had gone wild as they explored the ancient places she had read about in the works of British authors who had traveled to the area over a century earlier. Because of Greek colonization a thousand or so years ago, the area had become known as MagnaGrecia, or Great Greece. Neve had read the books her parents had discovered about the South, including George Gissingâs