Читать книгу Bella Rosa Marriages: The Bridesmaid's Secret - Фиона Харпер - Страница 6

THE air conditioning of the limo was functioning perfectly, but as Jackie stared out of the tinted window at the rolling hills, at the vineyards and citrus groves, she could almost feel the sun warming her forearms. It was an illusion. But she was big on illusions, so she let it slide and just enjoyed the experience.

The whole process of coming home would also be an illusion. There would be loud exclamations, bear hugs, family dinners where no one could get a word in—not that it would stop anyone trying—but underneath there would be a wariness. There always was. Even the siblings and cousins who didn’t know her secret somehow picked up on the atmosphere and joined in, letting her keep them at arm’s length.

They became her co-conspirators as she tried to deny her Italian side and laced herself up tight in Britishness—the one thing her father had given her that she treasured. She had learned how to shore herself up and keep herself together, but then Jackie always excelled at everything she did, and this was no exception.

She hadn’t called ahead to let the family know what time she was arriving. A limousine and her own company were preferable at present. She needed time to collect herself before she faced them all again.

It had been a couple of years since she’d been home to Monta Correnti. And when she did come these days, it was always in the winter. The summers were too glorious here, too full of memories she couldn’t afford to revisit. But then her older sister had chosen a weekend in May for her wedding celebrations, and Jackie hadn’t had much choice. It seemed she hadn’t been able to outrun the tug of a big Italian family after all, even though she’d tried very, very hard.

She turned away from the scenery—the golds and olives, the almost painful blue of the sky—and picked up a magazine from the leather seat beside her. It was the latest issue from Gloss! magazine’s main rival. Her lips curved in triumph as she noted that her editorial team had done a much better job of covering the season’s latest trends. But that was what she paid them for. She expected nothing less.

The main fashion caught her attention. Puccini—one of Italy’s top labels. But she hadn’t needed to read the heading to recognise the style. The fashion house had gone from strength to strength since Rafael Puccini had handed the design department over to his son.

With such a man at the helm, you’d expect the menswear to outshine the women’s collections, but it wasn’t the case. Romano Puccini understood women’s bodies so well that he created the most exquisite clothes for them. Elegant, sensuous, stylish. Although she’d resisted buying one of his creations for years, she’d succumbed last summer, and the dress now hung guiltily in the back of her wardrobe. She’d worn it only once, and in it she’d felt sexy, powerful and feminine.

Maybe that was why the house of Puccini was so successful, why women stampeded the boutiques to own one of their dresses. Good looks and bucketloads of charm aside, Romano Puccini knew how to make each and every woman feel as if she were as essentially female as Botticelli’s Venus. Of course, that too was an illusion. And Jackie knew that better than most.

She frowned, then instantly relaxed her forehead. She hadn’t given in to the lure of Botox yet, but there was no point making matters worse. Although she was at the top of her game, Editor-in-chief of London’s top fashion magazine, she was confronted daily by women who wore the youthful, fresh-faced glow that she’d been forced to abandon early. Working and living in that environment would make any woman over the age of twenty-two paranoid.

Her mobile phone rang and, glad of the distraction, she reached into her large soft leather bag to answer it. The name on the caller ID gave her an unwanted spike of adrenaline. Surely she should be used to seeing that name there by now?

‘Hello, Kate.’

‘Hey, Jacqueline.’

Her own name jarred in her ears. It sounded wrong, but she hadn’t earned the title of ‘mother’ from this young woman yet. Maybe she never would.

‘Is there something I can help you with?’

There was a pause. A loaded sixteen-year-old pause.

‘Are you there? In Italy?’

Jackie’s gaze returned to the view beyond the tinted windows. It whipped past silently, the insulation of the limousine blocking out any noise from outside. ‘Yes. I left the airport about twenty minutes ago.’

There was a sigh—which managed to be both wistful and accusatory—on the other end of the line. ‘I wish I could have come with you.’

‘I know. I wish you could have too. But this situation…telling my family…it needs some careful handling.’

‘They’re my family too.’

Jackie closed her eyes. ‘I know. But it’s complicated. You don’t know them—’

‘No, I don’t. And that’s not my fault, is it?’

Jackie didn’t miss Kate’s silent implication. Yes, it was her fault. She knew that. Had always known that. But that wasn’t going to help calm her mother down when she announced that the child she’d handed over for adoption sixteen years ago had recently sought her out, that she’d been secretly meeting with that daughter in London for the last few months—especially when it had been her mother’s iron insistence that no one else in the family should ever know. To a woman like Lisa Firenzi, image was everything. And a pregnant teenage daughter who’d refused to name the father of her baby didn’t fit in the glossy brochure that was her life.

Jackie hadn’t even been as old as Kate when it had happened. Back then, every day when she’d come down the stairs for breakfast, her mother had scrutinised her profile. When she hadn’t been able to disguise the growing swell of her stomach with baggy T-shirts, she’d been quietly sent away.

She’d arrived in London one wet November evening, a shivering fifteen-year-old, feeling lost and alone. The family had been told she’d gone to stay with her father, which was true. He’d been husband number two. Lisa had managed to devour and spit out another husband and quite a few lovers since then.

So, not only had Jackie to reconcile her mother to the fact that the dirty family secret she’d tried to hide was now out in the open, but she had to break the news to her uncle and cousins—even Lizzie and Scarlett, her sisters, didn’t know. She was going to have to handle the situation very, very carefully.

Lizzie’s wedding would be the first time she and all her sisters and cousins had been together in years and she couldn’t gazump her sister’s big day by turning up with a mystery daughter in tow, and it wouldn’t have been fair to drop Kate into the boiling pot of her family’s reactions either. Jackie had absolutely no idea how they were going to take the news and the last thing her fragile daughter needed was another heap of rejection.

She drew in a breath through her nostrils, the way her Pilates instructor had taught her. ‘I know, Kate. And I’m sorry. Maybe next time.’

The silence between them soured.

‘You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you?’

Jackie sat bolt upright in the back seat. ‘No!’

‘Well, then, why won’t you let me meet my uncles and aunts, my cousins—my grandmother?’

There was no shyness about this girl. She was hot-headed, impulsive, full of self-righteous anger. Very much as her biological mother had been as a teenager. And that very same attitude had landed her into a whole heap of trouble.

‘Family things…they’re difficult, you know…’

A soft snort in her ear told Jackie that Kate didn’t know. That she didn’t even want to know. Jackie only had one card left to play and she hoped it worked.

‘Remember how you told me your mum—’ Your mum. Oh, how that phrase was difficult to get out ‘—found it difficult when you told her you wanted to find your biological mother, even though you weren’t eighteen yet? It was hard to tell her, wasn’t it? Because you didn’t want to hurt her, but at the same time it was something you needed to do.’

‘Yes.’ The voice was quieter now, slightly shaky.

‘You’re just going to have to trust me—’ Sweetheart. She wanted to say ‘sweetheart’ ‘—Kate. This is something I need to do first. And then you can come on a visit and meet everyone, I promise.’

Just like every other girl of her age, Kate was rushing at life, her head full of the possibilities ahead of her, possibilities that dangled like bright shiny stars hung on strings from the heavens. They tempted, called. If only she could make Kate see how dangerous those sparkly things were…how deceptive.

Something in her tone must have placated her newly found daughter, because Kate sounded resigned rather than angry when she rang off. Jackie slid her phone closed and sank back into the padded leather seat, exhausted.

She hadn’t realised how hard the reunion would be, even though she’d been waiting for it since she’d put her name on the adoption register when she’d been twenty. When she’d got the first call she’d been overjoyed, but terror had quickly followed. She and Kate had had a tearful and awkward first meeting under the watchful eye of her adoptive mother, Sue.

Kate had been slightly overawed by Jackie’s high-fashion wardrobe and sleek sports car. Sue had taken Jackie aside after a few weeks and warned her that Kate was dazzled by the fact her ‘real’ mum was Jacqueline Patterson, style icon and fashion goddess. Don’t you dare let her down, Sue’s eyes had said as she’d poured the tea and motioned for Jackie to sit at her weathered kitchen table.

Jackie was doing her best, but she wasn’t convinced she could make this work, that she and Kate could settle into a semblance of a mother-daughter relationship. They’d gone through a sort of honeymoon period for the first month or two, but now questions and emotions from the past were starting to surface and not everything that was rising to the top was as glossy and pretty as Jackie normally liked things to be.

Once she told her mother, Kate’s grandmother, the cat would be out of the bag and there would be no going back. But Jackie had no other option. She wanted…needed…to have her daughter back in her life, and she was going to do whatever it took to make a comfortable space for her, no matter how hard the fallout landed.

The limo swung round a bend in the road and Jackie held her breath. There was Monta Correnti in the distance, a stunningly beautiful little town with a square church steeple and patchwork of terracotta tiled roofs seemingly clinging to the steep hillside. It was currently a ‘hot’ holiday destination for Europe’s rich and notorious, but it had once been Jackie’s home. Her only real home. A place filled with memories, yellow and faded like old family photographs.

Before they reached the town centre, the limo branched off to the left, heading up a tree-lined road to the brow of the hill that was close enough to look down its nose on the town but not near enough to feel neighbourly.

The road to her mother’s villa.

Jackie tided the magazines on the back seat, made sure everything she needed was in her handbag and pulled herself up straight as the car eased through gates more suited to a maximum-security prison than a family home.

Romano opened the tall windows of his drawing room and stepped onto the garden terrace. It all looked perfect. It always looked perfect. That pleased him. He liked simple lines, clean shapes. He wasn’t a man who relished anything complicated or fussy. Of course, he knew that perfection came at a cost. None of this happened by accident.

In his absence, the low hedges of the parterre had been clipped by an army of gardeners, the gravel paths raked and smoothed until they were perfectly flat and unsullied by footprints. The flowers in the vast stone urns had been lovingly weeded and watered. And the attention hadn’t been confined to the garden. Every inch of the Puccini family’s old summer home was free from dust. Every window and polished surface gleamed. It was the perfect place to retreat from the grime and noise of Rome in the summer months. And Romano enjoyed it so much here he’d recently decided to keep it as his main residence, even in winter, when Lake Adrina was filled with waves of polished pewter and the wind was less than gentle.

Palazzo Raverno was unique, built by an ostentatious count in the eighteenth century on a small island, shaped like a long drawn-out teardrop. On the wider end of the island Count Raverno had spared no expense in erecting a Neo-gothic Venetian palace, all high arches and ornate masonry in contrasting pink and white stone. It should have looked ridiculously out of place on a tranquil wooded island in the middle of a lake—but somehow the icing-sugar crispness of the house just made it a well-placed adornment to the island. From what he knew of the infamous count, Romano suspected this had been more by accident than design.

And if the palazzo was spectacular, the gardens took one’s breath away. Closer to the house the gardens were formal, with intricate topiary and symmetrical beds, but as they rolled away to the shore and reached to the thin end of the island they gave the impression of a natural Eden.

Romano could resist it no longer. His wandering became striding and he soon found himself walking down the shady paths, stopping to listen to the soft music of the gurgling waterfall that sprang out of a rockery. He didn’t plan a route, just let his feet take him where they wanted, and it wasn’t long before he arrived in the sunken garden.

The breeze was deliciously cool here, lifting the fringes of the drooping ferns. Everything was green, from the vibrant shades of the tropical plants and the dark glossiness of the ivy, to the subtle sponginess of the moss on the walls of the grotto.

It was all so unbearably romantic. The island was the perfect place for a wedding.

Not his wedding, of course. He smiled at the thought. Nobody would ever be foolish enough to think the day would come when he’d pledge his body and soul to one woman for eternity.

A month or two, maybe.

He sighed as he left the leafy seclusion of the sunken garden and walked into the fragrant sunshine of a neatly clipped lawn. From here he climbed a succession of terraces as he made his way back towards the house. The days when this island had been a playground for the idle rich were long gone. He had work to do.

However, he was whistling when he headed into the ground-floor room he’d converted into a studio to collect the paperwork for his afternoon appointment. When a man had a job that involved dressing and undressing beautiful women, he couldn’t really complain, could he?

Before Jackie’s stiletto-heeled foot could make contact with the driveway, her mother flew out of the front door and rushed towards her, her arms flung wide.

‘Jackie! There you are!’

Jackie’s eyes widened behind her rather huge and rather fashionable sunglasses. What on earth was going on? Her mother never greeted her like this. It was as if she were actually overjoyed to see—

‘You’re late!’ Her mother stopped ten feet shy of the limo and her fists came to rest on her hips, making the jacket of her Chanel suit bunch up in a most unappealing manner.

This was more the reception Jackie had been anticipating.

Her mother looked her up and down. Something Jackie didn’t mind at all now she knew her mother could find no fault with her appearance, but once upon a time it had sent a shiver up her spine.

‘I don’t believe I mentioned what time I—’

‘The other girls arrived over an hour ago,’ her mother said before giving her a spiky little peck on the cheek, then hooking an arm in hers and propelling Jackie inside the large double doors of the villa.

What girls?

Jackie decided there was no point in reminding Mamma that she hadn’t actually specified a time of arrival, only a date. Her mother was a woman of expectations, and heaven help the poor soul who actually suggested she deviate from her catalogue of fixed and rigid ideas. Jackie had come to terms with the fact that, even though she was the toast of London, in the labyrinthine recesses of Lisa Firenzi’s mind her middle daughter was the specimen on a dark and dusty shelf whose label read: Problem Child.

Although Jackie hadn’t seen her mother in almost a year, she looked the same as always. She still oozed the style and natural chic that had made her a top model in her day. She was wearing an updated version of the classic suit she’d had last season, and her black hair was in the same neat pleat at the back of her head.

The excited female chatter coming from her mother’s bedroom and dressing room alternated between Italian and English with frightening speed. Three women, all in various states of undress, were twittering and cooing over some of the most exquisite bridal wear that Jackie had ever seen. In fact, they were so absorbed in helping the bride-to-be into her wedding dress that they didn’t even notice Jackie standing there.

Lizzie, who was half in, half out of the bodice, looked up and spotted her first, and all at once she was waddling across the room in a mound of white satin. She pulled Jackie into a tight hug.

‘Your sister finally deigned to arrive for the dress fitting.’

Jackie closed her eyes and ignored her mother’s voice. Dress fitting? Oh, that was what Mamma had her knickers in a twist about. She needn’t have worried. Jackie had sent her measurements over by email a couple of weeks ago and she knew her rigorous fitness regime would not have allowed for even a millimetre of variation.

‘We all know Jackie operates in her own time zone these days, don’t we?’

Ah. So that was it. Mamma was still irritated that she hadn’t fallen in with her plans and arrived yesterday. But there had been a very important show she’d needed to attend in Paris, which she couldn’t afford to miss. Her mother of all people should understand how cut-throat the fashion industry was. One minor stumble and a thousand knives would be ready to welcome her back as a sheath.

She wanted to turn round, to tell her mother to mind her own business, but this was neither the time nor the place. She wasn’t about to do anything to spoil the frivolity of her sister’s wedding preparations. She squeezed Lizzie back, gently, softly.

‘It’s been too long, Lizzie!’ she said in a hoarse voice.

As she pulled away she tried to file her mother’s remark away in her memory banks with all the others, but the words left a sting inside her.

‘Here, let me help you with this.’ She pulled away from Lizzie and walked round her so she could help with the row of covered buttons at the back. The dress was empire line, gently complementing Lizzie’s growing pregnant silhouette. And true to form, the bride was positively glowing, whether that was the effect of carrying double the amount of hormones from the twins inside her or because she was wildly in love with the groom Jackie had yet to meet, she wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, Lizzie looked happier and more relaxed than she’d ever been. If it was down to Jack Lewis, he’d better know how to keep it up, because Jackie would have his hide if he didn’t.

‘Thanks. I knew there was a reason why we had a fashion expert in the family,’ Lizzie said, smiling as she pulled her long dark hair out of the way.

Jackie concentrated on the row of tiny silk-covered buttons that seemed to go on for ever. ‘This dress is exquisite,’ she said as she reached the last few. Which was amazing, since it had to have been made in mere weeks.

Jackie stood back and admired her sister. Getting a dress to not only fit somebody perfectly, but complement their personality was something that even cold, hard cash couldn’t buy, unless you were in the hands of a true artist.

Isabella and Scarlett came close to inspect the dress and mutter their appreciation. Jackie turned, a smile of utter serenity on her face, and prepared herself to greet her fellow bridesmaids.

Isabella first. They kissed lightly on both cheeks and Isabella rubbed her shoulder gently with her hand as they traded pleasantries. Jackie kept her smile in place as she turned to face her younger sister. They kissed without actually making contact and made a pretence of an embrace.

She and Scarlett had been so close once, especially after Lizzie had gone to university in Australia, when it had just been the two of them and she’d felt like a proper big sister rather than just Lizzie’s deputy. She’d even thought vainly that Scarlett might have hero-worshipped her a little bit.

But that had all changed the summer she’d got pregnant with Kate. Scarlett had never looked at her the same way again. And why should she have? Some role model Jackie had been. Who would want to emulate the disaster area that had been her life back then—Jackie in tears most of the day, Mamma alternating between ranting and giving her the ice-queen treatment?

Not long after that Scarlett had moved away too. She’d followed in Lizzie’s footsteps and flown halfway round the world to live with her father. They’d never had a chance to patch things up, for Jackie to say how sorry she was to make Scarlett so ashamed of her. No more late-night secret-sharing sessions. No more raiding the kitchen at Sorella, one of them rifling through the giant stainless-steel fridge for chocolate cake, one of them keeping guard in case the chef spotted them.

Now they talked as little as possible and met in person even less. Jackie released Scarlett from the awkward hug and took a good look at her. They hadn’t laid eyes on each other in more than five years. Scarlett hadn’t changed much, except for looking a little bit older and even more like their mother. She had the same hint of iron behind her eyes these days, but the generous twist of the mouth Jackie recognised from their childhood tempered it a little.

Of course, Lizzie was far too excited to notice the undercurrents flowing around amidst the tulle and taffeta.

‘Come on, girls! You next. I want to see how fabulous my bridesmaids are going to look.’

Scarlett and Isabella had already removed their dresses from their garment bags. They were every bit as stunning as Lizzie’s. She’d been told that all three dresses would be the same shade of dusky aubergine, but she hadn’t realised that they would vary in style and cut.

Isabella’s was classic and feminine, with a gathered upper bodice, tiny spaghetti straps and a bow under the bustline, where the empire-line skirt fell away. Scarlett’s was edgier, with a nineteen-thirties feel—devoid of frills and with a deep V in the front.

Jackie appointed herself as wardrobe mistress and zipped, buttoned and laced wherever help was needed. When she’d finished, Isabella handed her a garment bag.

Jackie hesitated before she took the bag from her cousin. It had been a bad idea to help the others get dressed. Now they had nothing else to do but watch her strip off. She clutched the bag to her chest and looked for the nearest corner. Isabella and Scarlett just stood there, waiting.

Then she felt the bag being tugged gently from between her fingers. ‘Why don’t you use Mamma’s dressing room?’ Lizzie said as she relieved Jackie of the bag and led her towards a door on the other side of the room. ‘You can freshen up a little from your flight, if you need to.’

Jackie sent her sister a grateful look and did exactly that.

Lizzie had been the only one she’d confided in about her body issues. It had started not long after she’d given Kate away. At first, eating less and exercising had been about getting her shape back before she returned to Italy, removing all evidence that her body had been stretched and changed irrevocably. Mamma had been pleased when she’d met her off the plane, had complimented her on her self-discipline. But back in Italy she’d been confronted with the sheer pleasure of food, the sensuality of how people ate, and she’d shied away from it. Somewhere along the line the self-denial, the discipline, had become something darker. She’d sought control. Punishment. Atonement.

She’d liked the angles and lines of her physique and, when she’d finally escaped Monta Correnti at eighteen and moved to London to take the position of office assistant at a quirky style magazine, she’d fitted right in. Her new world had been full of girls eating nothing but celery and moaning that their matchstick thighs were too chunky.

It had taken her quite a few years to admit she’d had a problem. To admit that the yellowish tinge her skin had taken on had been more than just the product of her Italian genes, that the sunken hollows beneath her cheeks weren’t good bone structure and that it hadn’t been natural to be able to count her ribs with such ease.

Quietly she’d got help. Putting the weight back on had been a struggle. Every pound she’d gained had been an accusation. But she’d done it. And now she was proud to have a body that most women her age would kill for. It was meticulously nourished on the best organic food and trained four times a week by a personal trainer.

Even though she knew she looked good, she still didn’t want to be gawped at without her clothes on. It was different when she was in her cutting-edge designer suits. Dressed like that she was Jacqueline Patterson—the woman whose name was only uttered in hushed tones when she walked down the corridors of Gloss! magazine’s high-rise offices. Remove the armour and she became faceless. Just another woman in her thirties with stretch marks and a Caesarean scar.

With the dressing-room door shut firmly behind her, Jackie slipped out of her linen trouser suit and went through the connecting door to Mamma’s en suite to freshen up. As she washed she could hear her cousin catching Lizzie up on all the latest Monta Correnti gossip, especially the unabridged story of how Isabella had met her own fiancé.

When Jackie felt she’d finally got all the traces of aeroplane air off her skin, she returned to the dressing room and removed her bridesmaid’s dress from its protective covering.

Wow. Stunning.

It reminded her of designs she’d done in senior school for the class play of Romeo and Juliet. Like the other dresses, it was empire line, with an embroidered bodice that scooped underneath the gathered chiffon at the bust and then round and up into shoulder straps.

Not many people knew enough about fashion design to see the artistry in the cutting that gave the skirt its effortlessly feminine swell. Nor would they notice the inner rigid structure of the bodice that would accentuate every curve of a woman’s torso but give the impression that it was nature that had done all the hard work and not the fine stitching and cutting. She took it off the hanger and undid the zip. As she stepped into the dress there was a knock at the door that led back out into the bedroom.

‘Everything okay in there?’ Lizzie’s voice was muffled through the closed door. Jackie smiled.

‘Almost ready,’ she yelled back, sliding the dress over her hips and stopping to remove the bra that would ruin the line of the low-cut bodice.

She’d been right, she realised as she started to slide the zip upwards. If her instincts were correct, this dress was going to fit like the proverbial glove. She doubted it would need any alteration at all.

As she got to the top she ran into problems with the zip. Despite all the yoga and Pilates, she just couldn’t get her arms and shoulder sockets to do what was necessary to pull it all the way up.

‘Lizzie? Isabella? I need a hand,’ she yelled and dipped her head forwards, brushing her immaculately straightened hair over one shoulder so whoever rushed to her aid had easy access to the stubborn zip.

There was a soft click as the door opened. The thick carpet hushed the even footsteps as her saviour came towards her.

‘If you could just…’ She wiggled her shoulders to indicate where the problem was.

Whoever it was said nothing, just stepped close and set about deftly zipping her into place. For a second or so Jackie let her mind drift, wondering if it would look as dreamy as it felt when she raised her head and looked into the full-length mirror, but then she realised something was out of balance.

The fingers brushing her upper back as they held the top of the bodice’s zip together didn’t have Scarlett’s long, perfectly manicured fingernails. Lizzie was already getting too big with the twins to be standing quite this close and, at five feet five, Isabella was a good inch shorter than she was. This person’s breath was warming her exposed left ear.

Jackie stilled her lungs. Where fingers touched bare back, the pinpricks of awareness were so acute they were almost painful.

The person finished their job by neatly joining the hook and eye at the top of the bodice and then stepped back. Jackie began to shake. Right down in her knees. And it travelled upwards until her shoulders seemed to rattle.

Even before she pushed her hair out of her face and straightened her spine, she knew the eyes that would meet hers in the mirror would be those of Romano Puccini.