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PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Italian Duke’s Wife
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

SHE was not going to do the girly thing and burst into tears, Jodie told herself, gritting her teeth. It might be growing dark; she might be feeling sick with that familiar stomach-churning fear that she had made a big mistake—and about more than just the direction she had taken in that last village she had passed through what seemed like for ever ago; tonight might be the night she and John should have been spending at their romantic honeymoon hotel—their first night as husband and wife…but she was not going to cry. Not now, and in fact not ever, ever again over any man. Not ever. Love was out of her life and out of her vocabulary and it was going to stay out.

She winced as her small hire car lurched into a deep rut in the road—a road which was definitely climbing towards the mountains when it should have been dropping down towards the sea.

Her cousin and his wife, her only close family since her parents’ death in a car accident when Jodie was nineteen, had tried to dissuade her from coming to Italy.

‘But everything’s paid for,’ she had reminded them. ‘And besides…’

Besides, she wanted to be out of the country, and she wanted to stay out of it for the next few weeks during the build-up to John’s marriage to his new fiancée, Louise, who had taken Jodie’s place in his heart, in his life, and in his future.

Not that she’d told her cousin David or Andrea, his wife, about that part of her decision as yet. She knew they would have tried to persuade her to stay at home. But when home was a very small Cotswold market town, where everyone knew you and knew that you had been dumped by your fiancé less than a month before your wedding because he had fallen in love with someone else, it was not somewhere anyone with any pride could possibly want to be. And Jodie had as much pride as the next woman, if not more. So much more that she longed to be able to prove to everyone, but most especially to John and Louise themselves, how little John’s treachery mattered to her. Of course the most effective way to do that would be to turn up at their wedding with another man—a man who was better-looking and richer than John, and who adored her. Oh, if only…

In your dreams, she scoffed mentally at herself. There was no way that that scenario was likely to happen.

‘Jodie, you can’t possibly go to Italy on your own,’ David had protested, whilst he and Andrea had exchanged meaningful looks she hadn’t been supposed to see. It was probably just as well they were now in Australia on an extended visit to Andrea’s parents.

‘Why not?’ she had demanded with brittle emphasis. ‘After all, that’s the way I’m going to be spending the rest of my life.’

‘Jodie, we both understand how hurt and shocked you are,’ Andrea had added gently. ‘Don’t think that David and I don’t feel for you, but behaving like this isn’t going to help.’

‘It will help me,’ Jodie had answered stubbornly.

It had been John’s idea that they spend their honeymoon exploring Italy’s beautiful Amalfi coast.

Jodie winced as the hire car hit another pothole in the road, which was so badly maintained that it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable to drive.

Her leg was aching badly, and she was beginning to regret not having chosen to spend her first night closer to Naples. Where on earth was she? Nowhere near where she was supposed to be, she suspected. The directions for the small village set back from the coast had been almost impossible to follow, detailing roads she had not been able to find on her tourist map. If John had been here with her none of this would have happened. But John was not with her, and he was never going to be with her again.

She must not think of her now ex-fiancé, or the fact that he had fallen out of love with her and in love with someone else, or that he had been seeing that someone else behind her back, or that virtually everyone in her home village had apparently known about it apart from Jodie herself. Louise, so Jodie’s friends had now told her, had made it obvious that she wanted and intended to have John from the moment they had been introduced, following her parents’ move to the area. And Jodie, fool that she was, had been oblivious to all of this, simply thinking that Louise, as a newcomer, an outsider, was eager to make friends. Now she was the outsider, Jodie reflected bitterly. She should have realised how shallow John was when he had told her that he loved her ‘in spite of her leg’. She winced as the pain in it intensified.

She was never going to make the kind of mistake she had made with John again. From now on her heart was going to be impervious to ‘love’—yes, even though that meant at twenty-six she would be facing the rest of her life alone. What made it worse was that John had seemed so trustworthy, so honest and so kind. She had let him into her life and, even more humiliatingly painful to acknowledge now, into her fears and her dreams. No way was she going to risk having another man treat her as John had done—one minute swearing eternal love, the next…

And as for John himself, he was welcome to Louise, and they were obviously suited to one another, too, since they were both deceitful cheats and liars. But she, coward that she was, could not face going home until the wedding was over, until all the fuss had died down and until she was not going to be the recipient of pitying looks, the subject of hushed gossip.

‘Well, let’s look on the bright side,’ Andrea had said lightly when she had realised Jodie was not going to be persuaded to abandon her plans. ‘You never know—you might meet someone in Italy and fall head over heels in love. Italian men are so gorgeously sexy and passionate.’

Italian men—or any kind of men—were off the life menu for her from now on, Jodie told herself furiously. Men, marriage, love—she no longer wanted anything to do with any of them.

Angrily Jodie depressed the accelerator. She had no idea where this appallingly bumpy road was going to take her, but she wasn’t going to turn back. From now on there would be no U-turns in her life, no looking back in misery or despair, no regrets about what might have been. She was going to face firmly forward.

David and Andrea had been wonderfully kind to her, offering her their spare room when she had sold her cottage so that she could put the sale proceeds towards the house she and John were buying—which had not, with hindsight, been the most sensible of things to do—but she couldn’t live with her cousin and his wife for ever.

Luckily John had at least given her her money back, but the break-up of their engagement had still cost her her job, since she had worked for his father in the family business. John was due to take over when his father retired.

So now she had neither home nor job, and she was going to be—

She yelped as the offside front wheel hit something hard, the impact causing her to lurch forward painfully against the constraint of her seat belt. How much further was she going to have to drive before she found some form of life? She was booked into a hotel tonight, and according to her calculations she should have reached her destination by now. Where on earth was she? The road was climbing so steeply…

‘You, I take it, are responsible for this? It has your manipulative, destructive touch all over it, Caterina,’ Lorenzo Niccolo d’Este, Duce di Montesavro, accused his cousin-in-law with savage contempt as he threw his grandmother’s will onto the table between them.

‘If your grandmother took my feelings into account when she made her will, then that was because—’

‘Your feelings!’ Lorenzo interrupted her bitingly. ‘And what feelings exactly would those be? The same feelings that led to you bullying my cousin to his death?’ He was making no attempt whatsoever to conceal his contempt for her.

Two ugly red patches of angry colour burned betrayingly on Caterina’s immaculately made-up face.

‘I did not drive Gino to his death. He had a heart attack.’

‘Yes, brought on by your behaviour.’

‘You had better be careful what you accuse me of, Lorenzo, otherwise…’

‘You dare to threaten me?’ Lorenzo demanded. ‘You may have managed to deceive my grandmother, but you cannot deceive me.’

He turned his back on her to pace the stone-flagged floor of the Castillo’s Great Hall, his pent-up fury rendering him as savagely dangerous as a caged animal of prey.

‘Admit it,’ he challenged as he swung round again to confront her. ‘You came here deliberately intending to manipulate and deceive an elderly dying woman for your own ends.’

‘You know that I have no desire to quarrel with you, Lorenzo,’ Caterina protested. ‘All I want—’

‘I already know what you want,’ Lorenzo reminded her coldly. ‘You want the privilege, the position, and the wealth that becoming my wife would give you—and it is for that reason that you harried a confused elderly woman you knew to be dying into changing her will. If you had any compassion, any—’ He broke off in disgust. ‘But of course you do not, as I already know.’

His furious contempt had caused the smile to fade from her lips and her body to stiffen into hostility as she abandoned any pretence of innocence.

‘You can make as many accusations as you wish, Lorenzo, but you cannot prove any of them,’ she taunted him.

‘Perhaps not in a court of law, but that does not alter their veracity. My grandmother’s notary has told me that when she summoned him to her bedside in order to alter her will, she confided to him the reason that she was doing so.’

Lorenzo saw the look of unashamed triumph in Caterina’s eyes.

‘Admit it, Lorenzo. I have bested you. If you want the Castillo—and we both know that you do—then you will have to marry me. You have no other choice.’ She laughed, throwing back her head to expose the olive length of her throat, and Lorenzo had a savage impulse to close his hands around it and squeeze the laughter from her it. He did want the Castillo. He wanted it very badly. And he was determined to have it. And he was equally determined that he was not going to be trapped into marrying Caterina.

‘You told my grandmother I loved you and wanted to make you my wife. You told her that the fact that you were so newly widowed, and that your husband Gino was my cousin, meant that society would frown upon an immediate marriage between us. And you told her you were afraid my passion would overwhelm me and that I would marry you anyway and thus bring disgrace upon myself, didn’t you?’ he accused her. ‘You knew how naïve my grandmother was, how ignorant of modern mores. You tricked her into believing you were confiding in her out of concern for me. You told her you didn’t know what to do or how you could protect me. Then you “helped” her to come up with the solution of changing her will, so that instead of inheriting the Castillo from her—as her previous will had stated—I would only inherit it if I was married within six weeks of her death. As you told her, everyone knows how important to me the Castillo is. And then, as though that were not enough, you conceived the added inducement of persuading her to add that if I did not marry within those six weeks, you would inherit the Castillo. You led her to believe that in making those changes she was enabling me to marry you, because I could say I was fulfilling the terms of her will rather than following the dictates of my heart.’

‘You can’t prove any of that.’ She shrugged contemptuously.

Lorenzo knew that what she had said was true.

‘As I’ve already told you, Nonna confided her thoughts to her notary,’ he continued acidly. ‘Unfortunately, by the time he managed to alert me to what was going on, it was too late.’

‘Much too late—for you.’ Caterina smirked at him.

‘So you admit it?’

‘So what if I do? You can’t prove it,’ Caterina repeated. ‘And even if you could, what good would it do?’

‘Let me make this clear to you, Caterina. No matter what my grandmother has written in her will, you will never become my wife. You are the last woman I would want to give my name to.’

Caterina laughed. ‘You have no choice.’

Lorenzo had a reputation for being a formidable and ruthless adversary. He was the kind of man other men both respected and feared—the kind of man women dreamed excitedly of enticing into their beds. He was also a superb male animal, strikingly handsome, with a hormone-unleashing combination of arrogance and a predatory, very dangerous male sexuality—a sexuality that he wore as easily as a panther wore its coat. He was not just a prize, but perhaps the most coveted prize amongst the very best of Italy’s most eligible and wealthy men. All through his twenties gossip columns had seethed with excited interest, trying to guess which high-born young woman he would make his duchess. It certainly wasn’t from any lack of willing partners to share his wealth and his title, along with enjoying the sexual pleasure of mating with such a vigorously sensual man, that he had escaped into his thirties without making any kind of formal commitment to the women who had pursued him.

Lorenzo looked at his late cousin’s wife. He despised and loathed her. But then, he despised most women. From what he had experienced of them they were all willing to give him whatever he wanted because of what he had, what was outside the inner him: wealth, a title, and a handsome male body. What he actually was was of no interest to them. His thoughts, his beliefs, all that went to make up the man who was Lorenzo d’Este didn’t matter to them anywhere near so much as his money and his social position.

‘You have no choice, Lorenzo,’ Caterina repeated softly. ‘If you want the Castillo you have to marry me.’

Lorenzo permitted his mouth to curl in sardonic disdain.

‘I have to marry, yes,’ he agreed softly. ‘But nowhere does it say that I have to marry you. You have obviously not read my grandmother’s will thoroughly.’

Her face blanched, her narrowed eyes betraying her confusion and distrust.

‘What do you mean? Of course I have read it. I dictated it! I—’

‘I repeat, you did not read the will my grandmother signed thoroughly enough,’ Lorenzo told her. ‘You see, it stipulates only that I must marry within six weeks of her death if I want to inherit the Castillo from her. It does not specify who I should marry.’

Caterina stared at him, unable to conceal her anger. It stripped from her the good looks which had in her youth made her a sought-after model, and left in their place the ugliness of her true nature.

‘No, that cannot be true. You have altered it, changed it—you and that sneering notary. You have—Where does it say? Let me see!’

She virtually flung herself at him and Lorenzo retrieved the will he had thrown down onto the table earlier. Seizing it, she read it, her face white with rage.

‘You have changed it. Somehow you have—She wanted you to marry me!’ She was almost hysterical with fury.

‘No.’ Lorenzo shook his head, his face impassive as he watched her. ‘Nonna wanted to give me what she believed I wanted. And that, most assuredly, is not you.’

As Lorenzo stood beneath the flickering light of the old-fashioned flambeaux, the small abrupt movement of his head was reflected and repeated in the shadows from the flames.

The Castillo had been designed as a fortress rather than a home, long before the Montesavro Dukes of the Renaissance had captured it from their foes and then clothed and softened its sheer stone walls with the artistic richness of their age. It still possessed an aura of forbidding and forbidden darkness.

Like Lorenzo himself.

Dark shadows carved hollows beneath the sculptured bone structure he had inherited from the warrior prince who had been the first of their line, and his height and the breadth of his shoulders emphasised the predatory sleekness of his body. His mouth was thin-lipped—‘cruel’, women liked to call it, as they begged for its hardness against their own and tried to soften it into hunger for them. It was his eyes, though, that were his most arresting feature. Curiously light for an Italian, they were more silver than grey, and piercingly determined to strip away his enemies’ defences. His well-groomed hair was thick and dark, his suit hand-made and expensive. But then, he did not need to depend on any inheritance from his late maternal grandmother to make him a wealthy man. He was already that in his own right.

There were those who said, foolishly and theatrically, that for a man to accumulate so much money there had to be some trickery involved—some sleight of hand or hidden use of certain dark powers. But Lorenzo had no time for such stupidity. He had made his money simply by using his intelligence, by making the right investments at the right time, and thus building the respectable sum he had been left by his parents into a fortune that ran into many, many millions.

Unlike his late cousin, Gino, who had allowed his greedy wife to ruin him financially. His greedy widow now, Lorenzo reminded himself savagely. Not that Caterina had ever behaved like a widow, or indeed like a wife.

Poor Gino, who had loved her so much. Lorenzo lifted his hand to his forehead. It felt damp with perspiration. Caused by guilt? It had after all been by claiming friendship with him that Caterina had first brought herself to Gino’s attention.

Lorenzo had been eighteen to Caterina’s twenty-two when he had first met her, and was easily seduced by her determination. It hadn’t taken him long, though, to recognise her for the adventuress that she was. No longer, in fact, than her first hint to him that she expected him to repay her sexual favours with expensive gifts. As a result of that, he had ended his brief fling with her immediately.

He had been at university when she had inveigled herself into his kinder cousin Gino’s heart and life, and the next time he had seen her Caterina had been wearing Gino’s engagement ring whilst his cousin wore a besotted expression of adoration. He had tried to warn his cousin then, of just what she was, but Gino had been in too deeply ever to listen, and had even accused him of jealousy. For the first time that Lorenzo could remember they had quarrelled, with Gino accusing Lorenzo of wanting Caterina for himself, and she had cleverly played on that to keep them apart until after her and Gino’s marriage.

Later, Lorenzo and his cousin had been reconciled, but Gino had never stopped worshipping his wife, even though she had been blatantly unfaithful to him with a string of lovers.

‘Where are you going?’ Caterina demanded shrilly as Lorenzo turned on his heel and walked away from her.

From the other side of the hall Lorenzo looked back at her.

‘I am going,’ he told her evenly, ‘to find myself a wife—any wife. Just so long as she is not you. You could have seen to it that I was warned that my grandmother was near to death, so that I could have been here with her, but you chose not to. And we both know why.’

‘You cannot marry someone else. I will not let you.’

‘You cannot stop me.’

She shook her head. ‘You will not find another wife, Lorenzo. Or at least not the kind of wife you would be willing to accept—not in such a sort space of time. You are far too proud to marry some little village girl of no social standing, and besides…’ She paused, then gave him a taunting look and said softly, ‘If necessary I shall tell everyone about the child I was to have had, whom you made me destroy.’

‘Your lover’s child,’ he reminded her. ‘Not Gino’s child. You told me that yourself.’

‘But I shall tell others that it was your child. After all, many people know that Gino believed you loved me.’

‘I should have told him that I loathed you.’

‘He would not have believed you,’ Caterina told him smugly. ‘Just as he would not have believed the child was not his. How does it feel to know that you are responsible for the taking of an unborn child’s life, Lorenzo?’

He took a step towards her, a look of such blazing fury in his eyes that she ran for the door, pulling it open and sliding through it.

Lorenzo cursed savagely under his breath and then went back to the table where he had dropped his grandmother’s will.

He had been filled with fury and disbelief when his grandmother’s notary had finally managed to make contact with him to tell him of his fears, and how he had managed to prevent Caterina from having all her own way by deliberately removing her name from the will so that it merely required Lorenzo to marry in order to inherit, rather than specifically having to marry Caterina.

The notary, almost as elderly as his grandmother had been, had apologised to Lorenzo if he had done the wrong thing, but Lorenzo had quickly reassured him that he had not. Without the notary’s interference Caterina would have trapped him very cleverly. She was right about one thing. He did want the Castillo. And he intended to have it.

Right now, though, he had to get away from it before he did something he would regret, he reflected as he strode out into the courtyard and breathed in the clean tang of the evening air, mercifully devoid of Caterina’s heavy, smothering perfume.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE was going to have to give in and do that U-turn she had sworn she would not make, Jodie admitted unhappily to herself. She hadn’t a clue where she was, and the bright moonlight was illuminating a landscape so barren and hostile that she was actually beginning to feel quite unnerved. To one side of her the ground dropped away with dramatic sharpness, and on the other it was broken by various jagged outcroppings of rock.

Up ahead of her she could see where the narrow track widened out to provide a passing place. Determinedly she headed for it, and started to manoeuvre the vehicle so that she could turn round.

Suddenly there was a loud noise, and the back wheels of the hire car began to spin whilst the car itself lurched horribly to one side. Thoroughly alarmed, Jodie put the car in neutral and climbed out, her alarm turning to despair as she saw that one of the rear wheels was stuck fast in a deep rut and looked as though it had a flat tyre.

Now what was she going to do? She certainly couldn’t drive anywhere in it.

She went back to the car, massaging her aching leg as she did so. She was tired, and hungry, and thoroughly miserable. Opening her bag, she reached for her mobile phone, and the wallet in which she had placed all the details of her travel arrangements and car hire.

As she picked up the phone her eyes widened in dismay. Her phone was already on, and by the looks of it there was no signal. Not only that, but when she attempted to dial a number anyway the phone gave an ominous bleep and the display light died. She must have left it on, and now the battery was flat. How could she have been so stupid? She needed help, but what was she going to do? Stay here and wait for someone to drive past? She hadn’t seen another sign of life, never mind another vehicle, for miles. Walk? To where? Back down the hundreds of kilometres to the last village she had passed through what felt like hours ago? The pain in her leg was gnawing at her now. Should she walk on up into the mountains? She gave a small shiver.

She hadn’t seen another driver in the whole of the time she had been on this road, but someone must use it because she could see tyre tracks in the dust. She looked up towards the mountains, and, as though somehow her own despair had conjured it up, she saw the distant lights of another vehicle racing towards her.

The relief made her feel almost giddily weak.

Savagely Lorenzo depressed the accelerator of the black Ferrari, letting the powerful car take his anger and turn it into a speed that demanded every ounce of his driving skill as he negotiated the twisting road in front of him.

Caterina had been very clever, working on his grandmother in the way that she had. Had he been here…But he had not. He had been abroad, visiting the scene of the latest world disaster, helping to find ways of alleviating the misery of those who had been caught in it via his unofficial and voluntary role within the government, unifying different charities and providing hands-on administrative practical help and expertise.

The severity of this particular crisis had meant that he had not even been able to return to Italy for his grandmother’s funeral, although he had managed to find time within his meeting-packed day to go into a local place of worship and add his prayers to those of her other mourners.

A gentle, unsophisticated woman, who had once told him she had hoped as a young girl to become a nun, she had died peacefully in her sleep.

The Castillo had come to her through her first husband who, in the way of things in aristocratic circles, had also been the second cousin of her second husband, Lorenzo’s own father, which was why the Castillo had been hers to leave as she wished.

He had always been her favourite out of her two grandsons, Lorenzo knew. He had spent his holidays with her after the divorce of his parents, and it had been his grandmother he had turned to when his mother had announced that she was marrying her lover—a man Lorenzo detested.

He had never been able to bring himself to forgive his mother for that. Not even now when she, like his father, was dead. Her actions had opened his eyes to the deceitful, self-serving ways of the female sex, and their determination to put themselves first whilst laying claim to a sanctity they did not possess. His mother had always insisted that her decision to divorce his father had been taken to spare him the pain of growing up in an unhappy home. She had lied, of course. His feelings had been the last thing on her mind when she had lain in the arms of her lover and chosen him above her husband and her son.

The Ferrari snarled and bucked at the bad condition of the road. Lorenzo ignored its complaints and changed gear, hurling it into a sharp corner, and then cursed beneath his breath as, right in front of him, he saw a car blocking the road and a young woman standing beside it.

Jodie winced as she heard the screech of brakes, choking on the dust raised by the Ferrari’s tyres as it skidded to a halt only inches away from the side of the hire car. Automatically she had made herself stand upright, instead of leaning on her vehicle for support, the moment she had seen the other car.

What kind of madman drove like that down a road like this—and in the dark, too? she wondered shakily, holding on to the door of the car for support as she watched him uncoil himself from the driver’s seat and come towards her.

‘Disgraziata!’ A stream of Italian followed the snarlingly contemptuous word he had already hurled at her. But Jodie was not going to let herself be cowed by him—or by any man—ever again.

‘When you’ve quite finished…’ Jodie interrupted him, her own voice every bit as hostile as his. ‘For a start, I’m not Italian. I’m English. And—’

‘English?’ He made it sound as though he had never heard the word before. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you on this road? It is a private road and leads only to the Castillo.’ The questions were thrown at her like so many deadly sharp stiletto knives.

‘I took a wrong turning,’ Jodie defended herself. ‘I was trying to turn round, but a wheel got stuck, and now the tyre is flat.’

She was pale and thin, her eyes huge in the exhausted triangle of her small face, her fair hair scraped back. She looked about sixteen, and an underfed sixteen at that, Lorenzo decided unflatteringly, as he swept her from head to toe with an experienced male glance that took in the droop of her shoulders, the hardly discernible shape of her breasts, the narrowness of her waist and her hips, and the unexpected length of the denim-clad legs attached to such a small frame. Was she wearing heels, or were they really as long as they looked?

‘How old are you?’ he demanded.

How old was she? Why on earth was he asking her that?

‘I’m twenty-six,’ Jodie responded stiffly, tilting her chin as she looked up at him, determined not to be intimidated by him despite the fact that she was already aware that he was so spectacularly good-looking she wanted to run away and hide before he realised how pathetically inferior as a woman she was to him as a man. Automatically, her hand went to her bad leg. It was really hurting her now.

Twenty-six! Lorenzo frowned as he looked down at her hands. No rings. ‘Why are you here on your own?’

Jodie was beginning to feel she had had enough. ‘Because I am on my own. Not that it is any business of yours,’ she informed him.

‘On the contrary, it is very much my business—since you have seen fit to trespass on my land.’

His land? Of course it would be his land; it possessed exactly the same harsh, arrogant inhospitality as he did.

‘And what do you mean, you are on your own?’ she heard him demanding. ‘Surely you have a…a husband, or a lover. A man, a partner, in your life.’

Jodie winced, and then laughed bitterly. He didn’t know about the still tender nerves he was brutalising. ‘I thought I did,’ she agreed angrily, ‘but unfortunately for me he decided he wanted to marry someone else. This—’ she gestured towards the landscape and the car ‘—was supposed to be our honeymoon. But now…’ Just saying the words still hurt, but strangely there was also a savage sense of relief in being able to vent her emotions instead of having to keep them locked inside her for the sake of others, as she had had to do at home.

‘Now what?’ Lorenzo challenged her. ‘Now you are travelling alone and looking for someone to replace him in your bed? The coastal resorts are the best hunting ground for that. Not the mountains.’

Jodie drew in her breath in outraged fury. ‘How dare you say that? I am most certainly not looking for anyone, let alone someone to replace him. In fact, that is the last thing I want to do,’ she found herself adding. ‘I shall never let another man into my life to hurt me. Never. From now on I intend to live by myself and for myself.’ Bold words, but she meant every single one of them!

Lorenzo frowned as he heard in her voice the passionate intensity of her determination.

‘You still want him so much?’

‘No!’ Jodie told him fiercely, without stopping to wonder why he was asking such a personal thing. ‘I don’t want him at all—not now.’

‘So why are you here—running away?’

‘I am not running away! I just don’t want to be there to see him marry someone else,’ she added defensively when she saw the way he was looking at her. ‘Especially when she’s all the things I’m not. Exciting, glamorous, sexy…’ Jodie lifted her hand to her face to rub away the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes. She had no idea why she was telling this stranger all of this, admitting to him things she had not even admitted to herself before.

‘It is the man who determines whether or not a woman is “sexy”, as you put it,’ Lorenzo decreed dismissively, as caught up in this strangely intimate exchange as Jodie. ‘A skilled lover has it in his power to create a full flowering of even the most tightly closed bud.’

A shock of tingling awareness quivered through her belly as Jodie absorbed the meaning of his astoundingly arrogant statement.

‘Not that many young women are tightly closed buds in this day and age,’ Lorenzo added sardonically, as he watched the colour come and go in the pale face that was so shadowed with tiredness.

‘Modern women have claimed the right to their own sexuality,’ Jodie responded fiercely. ‘They do not—’

‘It does not sound to me as though you have been very effective in claiming yours,’ Lorenzo told her derisively. ‘In fact, if I were to make an assessment of it, I would guess that your experience is extremely limited—otherwise you would not have lost your man to another woman.’

His sheer arrogant machismo both astounded and infuriated her. But she was forced to admit that nonexistent would have been a more accurate estimation of her sexual expertise. Painfully she released the pent-up breath his words had caused her to hold, in shaky relief that he had not added to her existing humiliation by somehow recognising that she was still a virgin. Not by choice, though. All those months in hospital, after the car crash in which her parents had been killed and she had been so badly injured that at one point it had been feared she would not survive, had stolen a large chunk out of her life.

‘Which, presumably, is why you are confusing physical lust with love—a word, an emotion, your sex has laid claim to and downvalued to the extent that is now worthless,’ Lorenzo continued harshly.

‘My sex?’ Jodie took up the challenge immediately, the gold-hued warmth of her eyes heating to an indignant dark amber.

‘Yes, your sex! Do you deny that women have now become as much serial adulterers as they once claimed only men could be? That their reasons for marriage are based on their own selfish and shallow emotions and needs—needs which in their eyes come before the needs of anyone else, even the children they bear?’

The bitterness she could hear in his voice momentarily shocked Jodie into silence. But she rallied quickly to defend her sex, pointing out, ‘If that is your consistent experience of women, then maybe you are the common factor—and the one to blame.’

‘I? So you believe that if a child is abandoned by its mother, it is the child who is at fault? A novel mindset—which only underlines what I have just been saying!’

‘No, that is not what I meant—’ Jodie began.

But it was too late. He was ignoring her words to demand autocratically, ‘What is your name?’

‘Jodie. Jodie Oliver. What is your name?’ she asked equally firmly, not to be outdone.

For the first time since he had stopped his car she sensed a momentary hesitation in him before he said coolly, ‘Lorenzo.’

‘The Magnificent?’ Jodie quipped, and then went bright red as he looked at her.

Il Magnifico. That had always been Gino’s teasing way of addressing him, claiming that it was no wonder he had been so successful when he carried the same name as one of Florence’s most famous Medici rulers.

‘You know the history of the Medici?’ he shot at Jodie.

‘Some of it,’ she said neutrally, suddenly not wanting any more argument with a stranger. She was beginning to feel very tired and weak. ‘Look, I need to get in touch with the car hire firm and tell them about the car, but my mobile isn’t working. Could you possibly…?’ He must surely be going back through the village she had driven through—there was nowhere else to go. If he would take her there she might be able to find a room for the night and telephone the car rental people.

‘Could I possibly what?’ Lorenzo demanded. ‘Help you? Certainly.’ She had just started to sag with relief when he added softly, ‘Provided that you agree to help me.’

Instantly warning signals flashed their messages inside her head, causing her to tense.

‘Help you?’ she repeated cautiously.

‘Yes. I need a wife.’

He was mad. Completely and utterly insane. She was stuck on a deserted road with a madman.

‘You…want me to help you find a wife?’ she managed to ask, as though it were the most natural request in the world.

Lorenzo’s mouth compressed, and he gave her a look of cold derision. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No, I do not want you to help me find a wife. I want you to become my wife,’ he told her coolly.

CHAPTER THREE

SHE was being ridiculous?

‘You want me to be your wife?’ Jodie repeated slowly. ‘I’m sorry, but—’

‘You don’t want to marry—ever. Yes, I know,’ Lorenzo interrupted dismissively. ‘But this would not be an ordinary marriage. I need a wife, and I need one within the next few weeks. I have as little real desire for a wife as you have for a husband—although for different reasons. Therefore it seems to me that you and I could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. I get the wife I need, and you, after we have been married for twelve months, get a divorce and…shall we say one million pounds?’

Jodie blinked and shook her head, not sure that she had actually heard him correctly.

‘You want me to agree to marry you and stay with you for twelve months?’

‘You will be well reimbursed for your time—and it is only your time and your status as my wife that I shall require. Your presence in my bed will not be part of the arrangement.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Jodie told him flatly. ‘I don’t know anything about you, and I—’

‘You know that I am prepared to pay you a million pounds to be my wife. As for the rest…’ He gave an arrogant shrug of his powerful shoulders, and told her, briefly and dismissively, ‘There will be time later for me to explain to you everything you need to know.’

By rights she ought to be scared to death, Jodie decided. But, despite the fact that she was obviously in the presence of a madman, for some reason the main emotion that filled her was not fear but bemusement. Bemusement and a certain sense that fate had listened in to her secret thoughts and decided to take a hand in her life. Here was the opportunity—the man—her pride had ached for…

Was she mad? She surely couldn’t be thinking of accepting his ridiculous proposition?

‘If you want a wife that badly, surely there must be someone—’

‘Many someones,’ Lorenzo stopped her sardonically. ‘Unfortunately they would all want what I do not want to give—it is amazing how easily your sex claims undying love when money and social position are involved.’

‘You mean you would be targeted by fortune-hunters?’ Jodie guessed shrewdly. It was obvious, after all—not just from his car and his clothes, but more betrayingly from his manner—that he was wealthy. ‘Is that why you want to marry me, because a fake marriage will keep them at bay?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Then why?’

‘It’s a condition of my late grandmother’s will that I either marry within a certain time of her death or I forfeit…something that means a great deal to me.’

Jodie’s forehead crinkled into a small frown.

‘But why on earth would she do that? I mean, either she wanted you to inherit whatever it is or she didn’t.’

‘The situation is more complex than that, and involves…other issues. Let us just say that my grandmother was persuaded to do something that she thought was in my best interests by someone who was following their own agenda.’

Jodie waited for him to continue, but instead he reached for her hand. ‘Give me your car keys and—’

She gave a small, determined shake of her head. ‘No.’ If she wasn’t already totally off men for life, this man and his unbelievable arrogance would surely be enough to put her off them, she decided angrily.

But at the same time an insidiously tempting possibility had begun to form inside her head. What if she were to agree, on condition that Lorenzo escorted her to John and Louise’s wedding? With the whole village invited, two extra guests wouldn’t cause any problems…and, yes, she admitted it, there was a part of her that was sore enough and woman enough to want to be there, showing the world and the newly married couple that not only did she not care about their betrayal, but that she had a new partner of her own. Wasn’t there a saying, ‘Living well is the best revenge’? And how much better could a discarded and unwanted fiancée live than by showing off her new, better-looking and far more eligible man? A man, moreover, who desperately wanted to marry her!

She was wrenched out of this mental triumphant return to the scene of her humiliation by Lorenzo’s arrogantly disbelieving voice. ‘No?’

It was ridiculous that she could even contemplate doing something so shallow, and it showed the effect that just a few minutes in the company of a man like Lorenzo was having on her. She was not going to let herself listen to the urgings of her pride. Leaving it and her conscience to wage war on one another with an undignified exchange of inner accusations, she tried to do the sensible thing, and told Lorenzo firmly, ‘Even someone as…as arrogant and used to getting what they want as you seem to be must see that what you’re suggesting just isn’t—’

‘A million isn’t enough? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Her face burned. ‘The money has nothing to do with it.’ The cynical look he gave her at that made her burst out angrily, ‘I can’t be bought. Not by John, and certainly not by you.’

‘John?’

He hadn’t pounced so much as leapt on her small betrayal, and now he was looking at her as she imagined a large sleek cat might look at a mouse it was enjoying tormenting.

But she was not a mouse, and she wasn’t going to be either bullied or tormented by any man ever again.

She lifted her head and told him coolly, ‘My ex-fiancé. He offered me money, too, but he was offering it out of guilt, because he didn’t want to marry me, not as a bribe because he did. He wanted me to be the one to break off our engagement, so that no one could accuse him of dumping me. Obviously you both share the same male mindset. Like you, he thought that he could buy what he wanted, regardless of what I might be feeling.’ Despite her attempt to appear unaffected by what she was revealing, a mixture of sadness and cynicism shadowed her eyes. Her mouth twisted slightly as she added, ‘In a way, I suppose he did me a favour. Knowing that he thought so little of me that he would buy his way out of our relationship made me realise that I was better off without him.’

‘But, despite that, you still want him.’

The unemotional statement made her heart thud nauseatingly inside her chest.

‘No!’ she said quickly. ‘I do not “still want him”.’

‘So why have you run away, if it is not because you are afraid of what you still feel for him?’

‘I have not run away! I’m having a holiday, and when I go back…’ The small involuntary movement that caused her shoulders to droop as she contemplated returning home was more telling that she realised. When she went back—what? She had no job to go back to. Not now. And no home—she had, after all, sold her cottage, and even if she had not done so she doubted that she would have wanted to live there, with all its memories of her false happiness. But she could go back with her head held high and on the arm of a man she could truthfully say was going to become her husband, she reminded herself.

And then what? He had already told her the marriage was only to last twelve months.

Then she would shrug her shoulders and say, as so many others did, that it hadn’t worked out. There was far less shame in that than there was in being labelled as a dumped reject.

‘In twelve months’ time you could go back with a million pounds in your bank account,’ she heard Lorenzo saying, as though he had read her mind.

It was so tempting to give in and agree. And she resented him for putting her in a position where she was tempted. What had she promised herself about never being manipulated by a man again? Gritting her teeth, Jodie pushed herself back from the edge of giving in.

‘If you really want a wife,’ she told him crossly, ‘then why don’t try finding one without using your money? Someone who wants to marry you because she loves you, and believes that in you she has found a man who loves her back, a man she can respect and trust, and…’ She saw the way he was looking at her and shook her head. ‘Oh, what’s the use? Men like you and John are all the same. He only values the kind of woman he can show off, the kind of woman who makes other men envy him, and you only want the kind of woman you can buy so that you can control her and your relationship with her. Well, I am not that kind of woman. And, no, I will not marry you.’

As she turned away from him Lorenzo could feel the anger surging through him. She was refusing him? This…this too-thin nobody of a tourist—a woman who had been rejected publicly by the man who had promised to marry her? Didn’t she realise just what he was offering her or how fortunate she was? Marriage to him would transform her instantly from an unwanted dab of a woman into the wife of someone wealthy enough to buy her ex-fiancé a hundred thousand times over. She would instantly be raised to a social height most women could only dream of, she would be courted by the famous and the rich, and, if she was intelligent enough to capitalise on what he would be giving her when their marriage was over, she could find herself a new husband. Any amount of men would be only too willing to marry the woman who had been selected by a man like him. All she had to do in order to totally transform her life was agree to be his wife.

And yet, instead of recognising her good fortune, she was actually daring to take it upon herself to lecture him! Well, she was no loss to him. She wouldn’t have lasted a day, not even twelve hours once Caterina had got her claws into her, and he was a fool to have wasted his time on her in the first place. He could drive down to the coast and find a dozen women within one hour who would jump at the opportunity she had turned down.

‘Fine,’ he snapped, turning his back on Jodie as he strode back towards the Ferrari.

He was leaving her here? He couldn’t—he wouldn’t! Jodie’s eyes widened in mute shock as she watched him walk away from her.

‘No, wait!’ she called out, as she stumbled anxiously after him, gasping at the pain in her weak leg, her anger giving way to a fear that was only slightly alleviated when he eventually stopped and turned round. ‘I need to get in touch with the car hire firm and let them know what’s happened.’

‘They won’t be very happy about the fact that you have damaged their vehicle. I hope you have brought plenty of money with you,’ Lorenzo warned her coldly.

‘I’m insured,’ Jodie protested, but a cold, hard knot of anxiety gripped her stomach as she remembered her cousin warning her about the problems she would face if she were to be involved in an accident.

‘I doubt that will benefit you, especially when I inform the authorities that you were driving on a private road, and in doing so that you endangered not just your own life but mine as well. You are going to need a very good solicitor, and that will be very expensive.’

‘But that’s not true!’ she protested. ‘You weren’t even here when…’

Her voice trailed away as she saw the look in his eyes.

‘You’re trying to frighten me and—and blackmail me!’ she accused him.

He shrugged and continued to walk back to his car. She watched helplessly as he opened the door, whilst her emotions raged in impotent fury. He was the most hateful, horrible man she had ever met—arrogant, selfish, and the very last kind of man she would have wanted to marry for any kind of reason. But a logical, practical voice inside her head was pointing out that it was late at night and she was miles from anywhere down a private road, wholly dependent on the goodwill of the man now about to leave her here.

He had started the engine and was pulling out to drive past her. Panic filled her. She started to run towards the car, gasping at the pain in her weak leg as she flung herself at the driver’s door and banged on it.

Expressionlessly, Lorenzo opened the window.

‘All right, I’ll do it,’ she told him recklessly. ‘I’ll marry you.’

He was staring at her so impassively that she wondered if he had changed his mind. Her heart started hammering uncomfortably fast, making her feel slightly sick.

‘You’re agreeing to marry me?’

Jodie nodded her head, and then exhaled shakily in relief as he pushed open the passenger door of the car and said brusquely, ‘Give me your keys and wait here whilst I get your things.’

It was a warm night, but anxiety and exhaustion were making her shiver slightly, so that her fingers trembled against the impersonal hand he had stretched out for her car keys. A prickle of unwanted sensation raced up her arm, causing her to recoil from her physical contact from him. He had long, elegant hands, with lean, strong fingers—unlike John, who had had somewhat plump hands with short fingers. The knowledge that the stroke of those hands against a woman’s body would deliver a dangerous level of sensual pleasure pierced the thin skin of her defences, making her emotional recoil from it even more intense than her physical recoil from his touch.

Lorenzo frowned as he got out of the Ferrari and strode over to Jodie’s hire car, unlocking the boot. Her recoil from him had the hallmark of a kind of sexual inexperience he had imagined no longer existed. In fact, the last time he had seen a grown woman recoil like that from a man’s casual touch had been the last time he had visited his grandmother, when he had sat with her watching one of the old-fashioned black and white films she’d loved so much. He lived in a world peopled by the sophisticated, the blasé, the experienced, the rich and the aristocratic: a world driven by cynicism and greed, by self-interest and envy. Power did not go hand in hand with goodness, as he had every reason to know. Jodie Oliver wouldn’t survive a month in that world.

He shrugged away his thoughts. Her survival was not his concern. He had other matters, another kind of survival, to worry about, and she was merely the instrument by which he would achieve that. Had he genuinely wanted to marry her…His frown deepened. What kind of thought was that? He had no desire to marry anyone, much less a thin, wan-faced young woman who had ‘broken heart’ written all over her.

He glanced down at the small case he had removed from the boot of the car, and then went to check the interior of the car itself.

‘How long did you say you intended to stay away from your home for?’ he asked Jodie wryly as he carried her things back to the Ferrari.

Jodie flushed at the implication she could hear in his voice. ‘I have enough with me for my needs,’ she told him defensively, adding with angry dignity, ‘And there are such things as laundries, you know.’ She wasn’t going to tell him that she had chosen her small trolley case specifically because it was light enough for her to lift, and that the last thing she had felt like when she was packing had been bringing with her all the pretty things she had bought for her honeymoon.

She felt the increase in weight of the car as Lorenzo got back into the driver’s seat. There was a disconcerting intimacy about being in a machine like this one with a man who was so very much a man.

The scent of expensive leather reminded her poignantly of an afternoon she had spent with John, when he had gone to buy a new car and taken her with him. They had visited showroom after showroom as he admiringly inspected their top-of-the-range vehicles. But none of them, no matter how expensive, had come anywhere near being as luxurious as this car, she thought now, her senses suddenly picking up on the cool, subtle woody scent of male cologne mixed with the very sensual smell of living, breathing male flesh.

By the time she had finished absorbing the messages with which her senses were bombarding her, Lorenzo had reversed the Ferrari and turned it round.

‘Where are we going?’ she demanded uncertainly.

‘To the Castillo.’

The Castillo. It sounded impossibly grand. But five minutes later, when she saw its steep escarpments rising sharply up out of the rock face, she decided that it was more barbaric than grand—like something left over from another less civilised age. An age where might was more valued than right; an age where a man could take what he wanted simply because he chose to do so. An age surely well suited to the man seated next to her, she decided a little sourly.

They drove into the Castillo through a narrow arched entrance, so evocative of the Middle Ages that Jodie had to blink to dismiss her mental images of chainmailed men at arms and heralds announcing their arrival.

The empty courtyard was lit by the flames from large metal sconces that threw moving shadows against the imposing stone walls with their watching narrow slit windows.

‘What an extraordinary place,’ Jodie heard herself saying apprehensively.

‘The Castillo is a relic left over from a time when men built fortresses rather than homes. I warn you, it is every bit as inhospitable inside as it is out.’

‘You live here?’ She couldn’t keep the dismay out of her voice.

‘I don’t, but my grandmother did.’

‘So where…?’ Jodie began, and then stopped uncertainly as she saw the way his mouth was compressing. It was obvious that he did not like her asking so many questions. He had opened the door of the car and she wrinkled her nose as she caught the pungent smell of something burning. ‘Something’s on fire,’ she told him.

Lorenzo shook his head. ‘It is merely the mixture of wood and pitch that is used in the sconces. After a while you will grow so accustomed to it that you won’t even notice it,’ he added in a matter-of-fact voice.

After a while? Did that mean that she was to live here? Without electricity?

As though he had read her mind, Lorenzo informed her, ‘My grandmother preferred the old-fashioned way of life. Fortunately I was able to persuade her to have a generator installed to provide electricity inside the Castillo.’

When one thought of an Italian castle one thought of something out of a fairy tale, but this place was nothing like that. Bleak and brooding, it made her shudder just to look up at the granite walls.

‘Come…’

Sitting in the Ferrari had caused her weak leg to stiffen and seize up. Jodie could feel her face burning as Lorenzo waited impatiently for her to get out of her seat whilst he held the door open for her. The agonising pain that shot through her leg as she finally managed to do so made her bite down hard on her bottom lip to stop herself from betraying what she was feeling. John had hated anything that drew attention to her infirmity, insisting that she always wore jeans or trousers to hide the thinness of her leg with its tell-tale scars.

‘If you wear trousers no one is going to know that there’s anything wrong with you,’ he had told her more than once. Jodie could feel her throat closing with painful tears. She had wanted so desperately to hear him say to her that he didn’t care what she wore, because he loved her so very much that every part of her was equally precious to him. But, of course, men were not like that. Louise had said as much when she had explained to Jodie just why John preferred her.

‘The trouble is, sweetie, that men don’t like all that disfigurement stuff. It makes them feel uncomfortable. Plus, they want a woman they can show off—not one they’ve got to apologise for.’

‘You mean some men don’t,’ Jodie had corrected her, with as much dignity as she could muster.

‘Most men,’ Louise had insisted, before adding bluntly, ‘After all, how many men besides John have actually wanted so much as a date with you, Jodie? Think about it. And let’s not forget,’ she had added, pressing home her advantage, ‘any man is bound to worry about what he’s going to have to face in the future, with a wife who’s got health problems, from a financial point of view alone.’

‘I haven’t got health problems,’ Jodie had objected. ‘The hospital has given me a complete all-clear—’

‘Because they can’t do any more for you. You told me that yourself. Your leg is never going to be as it was, is it? You get tired if you have to walk any distance now—imagine how awful it would be for poor John if in, say, ten years you needed to be in a wheelchair. How would he cope? With the business booming the way it is, John needs a wife who is a social asset to him, not one who is going to be a handicap. You really mustn’t be so selfish, Jodie. John and I are trying to make this as easy for you as we can.’

It was the ‘John and I’ that had done it, igniting Jodie’s temper so that she had exploded and told her one-time friend in no uncertain terms exactly what she thought of both her and of John, ending up with, ‘And, personally, the last kind of man I would want to commit to is one so shallow that all he sees is what lies on the surface. To be honest with you, Louise, you’ve done me a big favour. If it hadn’t been for you I might have gone ahead and married John without knowing how weak and unreliable he is. You obviously aren’t as fussy in that regard as I am.’ She had finished pointedly, ‘But I should be careful, if I were you. After all, you won’t be young and glamorous for ever, will you? And, since you’ve said yourself that looks are so immensely important to John, you’re going to have to live with the knowledge that ultimately he may dump you for someone younger and prettier.’

She had been shaking from head to foot as she walked away from Louise. And when John had turned up on her doorstep less than an hour later, accusing her of upsetting Louise, she hadn’t known whether to laugh or to cry. In the end she had laughed. Somehow it had seemed the better option.

It was then she had gone out and bought herself the shortest denim miniskirt she could find. The accident had not been her parents’ fault, and she had fought long and hard to be able to overcome her own injuries. From now on, she had decided, she was going to wear her scars with pride, and no man was ever, ever again going to tell her to cover up her legs because of them.

For ease of travelling, though, right now she was wearing a pair of jeans—an old, faded pair of jeans that made her look totally out of place next to Lorenzo in his beautifully tailored suit, she thought, as he propelled her across the courtyard and into a cavernous baronial hall, his hand resting firmly on the middle of her back.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE room they entered was furnished with several pieces of intricately carved dark wooden furniture. A coat of arms had been cut into the stone lintel above the huge fireplace. The carpet on the stone floor beneath her feet looked worn and shabby, and she could see where the film of dust on a table in the middle of the room had been disturbed by something thrown down on it with such force that it had skidded through it.

A door in the far wall was thrown open, and a woman stood there, framed in the opening. Immediately Jodie forgot her surroundings as she focused on her. Tall and soignée, she was everything one imagined a wealthy and elegant Italian woman should be. Her dark hair was pulled back in a smooth knot to reveal the perfect bone structure of her face. Dark eyes flashed a look of triumphant possessive mockery towards Lorenzo—the same kind of predatory female look Jodie had seen in Louise’s eyes when she had looked at John. The other woman hadn’t even seen her, hidden as she was in the shadows. Who was she?

A sense of disquiet started to seep through her; an awareness of deep and dark waters driven by dangerous unseen currents that could suck her down into their icy depths if she wasn’t careful. Instinctively Jodie sensed that Louise and this woman were two of a kind, and that knowledge was enough to rub against the still painfully raw emotional nerves inside herself. She looked at Lorenzo. He looked relaxed, but she could feel his tension in the sudden increased pressure of his fingers, where they were splayed across her back. Something was going on here that she wasn’t privy to—but what? So many unanswered questions, and they were destined to remain unanswered, Jodie guessed, as she watched the full mouth thin, crimson with carefully applied lipgloss, and the delicate nostrils flare. A huge diamond flashed blindingly as the woman raised one hand to touch the deep vee neckline of the expensive black dress she was wearing in a deliberate gesture of enticement. What man could resist following with his gaze the scarlet glisten of the long nails as they rested briefly in the valley between the tight, high fullness of her perfectly shaped breasts?

Her dress moulded to a waist so small that Jodie guessed it must be the result of a tightly laced corset, before curving lushly over rounded hips. Its hemline revealed a pair of long, slender, warmly tanned legs, whilst her feet, with their scarlet-painted toenails, were adorned with the highest and most delicate pair of strappy sandals Jodie had ever seen. She looked like someone who was about to walk into the most sophisticated and luxurious kind of setting there was, instead of being here in this dilapidated fortress in the middle of nowhere.

A look of open triumph lit the Italian woman’s face as she sashayed towards Lorenzo. But her brown eyes lacked any kind of warmth, Jodie noticed, and as she walked, talking quickly, her voice sounded harsh and slightly flat, jarring against Jodie’s ears, rather than warm and musical as she had expected.

She had almost reached them when Lorenzo held up a commanding hand and said smoothly, ‘In English, if you please, Caterina. That way, my wife-to-be will be able to understand you.’

The effect of his words on the woman was cataclysmic. She stopped moving and turned to look at Jodie, who discovered that she was being propelled forward out of the shadows and anchored to Lorenzo’s side by means of his almost manacle-like grip on her wrist.

A furious, disbelieving female glare savaged Jodie where she stood, followed by an equally furious outburst of Italian.

‘This way,’ Lorenzo instructed Jodie, ignoring her.

‘No!’ The woman placed herself in front of them, and said in English, ‘You will not do this to me. You cannot! Who is she?’

‘I have just told you. My wife-to-be,’ Lorenzo answered her dismissively.

‘No. You cannot do this.’ The flat, metallic voice was filled with fury. ‘No. No!’ She was shaking her head from side to side so violently that Jodie felt dizzy, but not one single strand of the immaculately coiffed hair escaped. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘You will not make such a nothing your duchessa, Lorenzo?’

His duchess?

‘You will not speak so of my intended wife,’ she heard Lorenzo saying coldly.

Dear God, what on earth had she got herself into?

‘Where has she come from? What gutter did you—?’

Immediately a look of haughty rejection stiffened Lorenzo’s expression, but Caterina ignored it, grabbing hold of his arm and insisting, ‘Answer me, Lorenzo, or I will…’

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