the name to herself as she followed Beatrice upstairs. It had an untrammelled, freedom-loving sound to it that she liked; it made her feel young and vibrant… it made her feel she was free of the burden of being the granddaughter of the Duca di Valeria, the rejected promised wife of Paolo di Calveri.
From her room she could see over the surrounding countryside. She felt curiously at home here in a way she had not expected. She liked her hostess, and suspected she would also like her host once she had got to know him.
Initially she had protested when her godparents had arranged this break for her, but she had been too listless to resist their plans. Now that she was here, though, she wondered that she had never thought of coming before. Here no one knew about her and Paolo, apart from her hosts. No one cared that she was the granddaughter of il duca… no one would ever call her ‘Francesca’ in that curt, disapproving tone of her grandfather’s that had so often chilled the warmth of her youth.
Here she was Chessie… a young woman just like any other, with enough qualifications to find herself a job should she so wish… with surely her whole future spread out in front of her, rather like her view of the pretty countryside.
A sense of eagerness and adventure she had not experienced in a long long time flowed through her. She started to unpack her cases, humming as she did so.
‘THIS DINNER PARTY, are you sure you do not need any help?’ Francesca asked gravely, with memories of her mother’s dinner parties and the days of anxiety and tension that preceded them lest she fell short of her father-in-law’s exalted standards in some way and called down his wrath upon her head.
Beatrice laughed.
‘No… everything’s under control. Most of the food was prepared last week before Henry left, and it’s in the freezer… as for the rest… well, our friends are very easygoing and quite happy to take pot luck.’
‘Pot luck?’ Francesca wrinkled her forehead and obligingly Beatrice explained the phrase for her.
‘But the silver—the crystal… You have no maid, and surely these will need to be cleaned?’
‘Henry and I did all that before she left. We live quite simply here, Chessie,’ Beatrice told her gently.
Immediately Francesca flushed, and Beatrice was quick to comfort her.
‘Please don’t be embarrassed. We know that you come from a very different and far grander background than ours.’
‘My mother says that the formality insisted upon by my grandfather is no longer necessary, but nothing anyone can say will make him change his ways. My mother says he takes pride in them. He is very arrogant.’
‘And you both love him and resent him,’ Beatrice guessed. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, to constantly strive for the approval and affection of someone who only seems to notice you’re there when you do the wrong things?’
‘Very,’ Francesca agreed bleakly. ‘So… if I cannot help with the meal, perhaps I could take charge of the children.’
‘No. What you can do is to make yourself so alluringly beautiful that none of my male guests will be able to take their eyes off you, and with their wives watching them watching you, I shan’t have to worry if my food isn’t up to scratch, shall I?’ Beatrice teased her, calmly accepting the change of subject and its implications. She had no intentions of putting any pressure on Francesca to discuss the past or her family with her; she simply wanted the Italian girl to feel at home with them. Sometimes she had such a look of taut constraint that Beatrice ached to tell her that what she was enduring would eventually pass, but she sensed that Francesca was too proud to welcome any intrusion into her personal pain, however well-meant.
‘Could you help us?’ Lucia had begged her in that unexpected telephone call four weeks ago. ‘We have a god-daughter, a charming, beautiful girl, who is simply fading away before our eyes. She needs a change of scene, a change of life-style…” And she had gone on to explain to Beatrice exactly what had happened.
‘It is not in her heart that she is hurt, but in her pride, in her belief in herself, and these can be even harder wounds to bear. But I think they will heal more easily if she is away from Italy, and more especially if she is away from her grandfather.’
And so Beatrice had readily agreed to invite Francesca to stay. And not just because of the debt she herself owed the Fioris.
It had been Lucia who had counselled her so wisely when she had thought her own love for Elliott to be hopeless—she had believed that it must be impossible for him to love her. But even without that debt she would still have wanted to help.
Elliott arrived home an hour before their dinner guests were due.
‘I take it Oliver’s still included in the guest list?’ he asked her, after mixing them both a drink, bringing them up to the bedroom, and telling her to sit down for five minutes and relax.
‘Yes.’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘Elliott, I’m not trying to matchmake, but it occurred to me that Chessie might be the ideal solution to Oliver’s research problem. You know he’s desperate to find someone to take over the Italian research on his latest book, and that he can’t get away himself. Chessie has a history degree.’
‘She also has a stunning figure, a beautiful face, and the kind of vulnerability that will make Oliver tear her to shreds if he gets the mood on him, and you and I both know it,’ Elliott warned her grimly, interrupting her, and then adding, ‘I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea… on the face of it. But Oliver’s lethal. He’s also a man and very human…’
‘Meaning?’ Beatrice questioned him uncertainly.
‘Meaning that to you, my dear wife, he may behave like a perfect gentleman, but where women less wrapped up in their husbands are concerned, he can be… well, let’s just say that he has all the usual male appetites and that he’s quite capable of satisfying them and then ejecting the woman concerned from his life with rather brutal efficiency.’
‘You think he’d try to seduce Chessie?’ Beatrice asked uneasily.
‘I don’t know. He’s one of those men who’s a law unto himself, and I wouldn’t like to predict what he might do.’
Beatrice’s eyes rounded in astonishment. Her husband was an astute judge of character and normally very crisp and to the point in giving his opinion of his fellow men.
‘Well, I only thought that tonight we could see how they get on, and then…’
‘Liar,’ Elliott interrupted her ruthlessly. ‘You intended to dangle Chessie in front of him like a very tempting piece of bait, in the hope that her expertise in Italian history will prove so irresistible that it will outweigh his legendary dislike of working with women.’
‘And do you think it will?’ Beatrice asked him slyly.
Elliott looked at her in their bedroom mirror and eventually said grimly, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Unfortunately for Oliver or for Chessie?’
‘Potentially, for them
