him back. Tell him that she would go to Italy with him. Now if he demanded it of her. Agree to anything he stipulated just so long as she could see Giorgio again. But he was already folding himself into the low sports saloon parked in front of her own favoured Porsche that he had spoken of so critically, and the next instant the powerful car was growling away.
Without even bothering to cream off her make-up, Libby packed up her few belongings and followed his example. The day, accommodatingly bright and cloudless for the shoot, was turning overcast as she headed back to the city and the rain had set in heavily before she had got very far. She tried to keep her mind on her driving, but even concentrating hard on the wet road through the double speed of the windscreen wipers couldn’t keep the bitter memories at bay.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE had still been at college when she had met Luca Vincenzo.
Motherless, with her father pensioned off early through ill health, she had been waiting tables at weekends and during term holidays in a chic little bistro in the Sussex village where she lived, eager to contribute in whatever way she could to their frugal finances.
She couldn’t deny that her unusually photogenic looks and striking red hair, which she accepted without a trace of vanity, helped to get her noticed with the customers, bringing in more than a fair share of tips from admiring male members of the clientele, from whom she always managed to pleasantly but firmly distance herself.
Luca had been the one exception to the rule. A handsome Italian boy with a daredevil attitude to life, he had dined there every night for a month, wooing her with his crazy Latin charm and that hint of devilry in his sparkling dark eyes until she took his threat of hiring a helicopter and lowering himself onto the top of Nelson’s column, where he promised to stay until she put him out of his misery and agreed to go out with him, as serious. It was only after she had laughingly consented to that she discovered exactly who he was; what a wealthy, respected and—in his own words—stifling family he had been born into.
Braking to allow a van to pull across into her lane, she remembered how much her father had liked Luca. As he’d liked Luca’s grandfather, Giovanni Vincenzo, she recalled fondly, whom he’d worked for, prior to his forced retirement, as head gardener on the man’s large country estate fringing the village. When Giovanni Vincenzo had died, it was Luca’s father, Marius, who inherited the family empire. Preferring to run his international enterprises from his native Italy, he had turned the house into a conference centre and country club and, with the exception of a few small properties, sold off the rest of the estate.
Earmarked for a responsible position in the family business, Luca had spent that summer getting experience at the conference centre that still remained in Vincenzo hands. At twenty-one and three years older than her, Luca had seemed like a man of the world, Libby thought, looking back. Well-travelled. Exciting. Although it was his warm humour and the feeling that he wasn’t wholly appreciated by a family who wanted to curb his adventurous spirit that had endeared her to him. A family, she thought disparagingly now, who were far too busy multiplying its millions to take much interest in anything Luca wanted.
Head over heels in love, when he had asked her to marry him after only a few weeks she didn’t even have to think about it, she remembered sadly, trying to focus on the road through the spray thrown up by the van in front of her. They had been married almost immediately in a small private ceremony in the local register office with only her father and another waitress from the bistro as witnesses. It had all seemed so exciting and romantic at the time. It wasn’t until her new husband had taken her to meet his parents in their restored castle in Italy that she had realised how strongly they’d objected to Luca’s marrying her. Regardless of her studies, she was just a part-time waitress with no money and no prospects, and in their eyes an opportunist and a gold-digger. Their unveiled coolness towards her could have been chipped at with an ice-pick, his mother’s unrestrained remark privately to Libby that she had anticipated a far more suitable match for her son leaving Libby in no doubt as to exactly where she belonged. Anywhere but in the close-knit Vincenzo family circle!
As she steered her car through the slow-moving, increasingly heavy traffic, it still hurt to remember her in-laws’ attitude towards her, even though she had tried desperately to win their respect. Because of the conditions his father had laid down, she had had plenty of opportunity. They were to live in the castle, he had stipulated unswervingly. Otherwise he would take it to mean that their son was no longer a Vincenzo.
Luca had been all for walking out, Libby recalled, until she had persuaded him against it. The last thing she had wanted was to be responsible for a break-up between her husband and his family.
‘They’ll come round. You’ll see,’ she had naïvely reassured him, unaware of how influencing him to stay only served to reinforce her in-laws’ derogatory opinion of her. After all, she thought with cutting poignancy now, if she had allowed Luca to oppose his father she would have been walking away from the fortune he would have eventually inherited, wouldn’t she?
The van in front of her stopped dead, causing her to ram on her brakes. Through her obscured vision she could just make out that there were traffic lights ahead.
Berating herself for her lack of concentration, she tried to steer her thoughts back to the present. But the floodgates of her past, blown apart by that earth-shattering visit from Romano, had unleashed a torrent of unwelcome memories and, now that they had free passage, nothing could stem the flow.
Romano had been working abroad, she remembered, when Luca had taken her to Italy, but had come home within a few days of their arrival, sent for, she was sure, to meet, vet and generally dissect his younger brother’s new wife.
At twenty-seven, Romano Vincenzo had already been a powerful player in the family’s global commercial empire. Where Luca was warm, witty and handsome, Romano Vincenzo was cold with a serious mind and an incisive intellect, linked with that raw animal attraction that transcended mere good looks. It wasn’t just the hard structure of his face and that athletically built physique that made one notice him, Libby accepted resentfully, watching the rain streaming down the windscreen. It was everything about him—and he had it in bucketfuls. Presence. Personality. Poise.
Standing there in the castle’s imposing drawing room, he had intimidated her from the first, asking her questions about herself, innocent enough on the surface but leaving her feeling as though he was testing her with every perfectly articulated syllable, while his richly accented English ran like honey off his well-trained, interrogative tongue! Consequently, nervous and awkward in his presence, she had cloaked herself in a confidence she was far from feeling.
Sometimes during that first trip home of his she’d glanced up to catch him watching her, the dark absorption in those penetrating eyes disturbing her as much as she was sure it had been his intention to, before he’d resumed whatever it was he had been doing and turned dispassionately away.
It was the day he was due to fly back to whatever area of the Vincenzo empire was calling him that stood out in her memory. Having said his goodbyes to the rest of the household, he had come out onto the terrace, where she had been emerging from the pool after seeking some relief from the strained atmosphere inside the house.
‘It’s been more than…interesting meeting you, Libby,’ he’d told her silkily, his dark, executive image doing untold things to her equilibrium as she’d stood there in nothing but her skimpy bikini. ‘In fact it’s been rather remiss of me, but I do believe I haven’t yet kissed my brother’s new bride.’
She’d held herself rigid as he’d placed his hands on her wet shoulders, heart thumping against her ribcage, back stiffening in rejection as his lips impinged in no more than a brotherly gesture on her burning cheek.
