The Italian Duke's Wife

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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…’