Читать книгу The Italian Duke's Wife - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 5

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.