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 di
d 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
THE ITALIAN DUKE’S WIFE Page 2