Читать книгу The Italian Duke's Wife - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 7

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.