has got to be a legal avenue we can take to override the trust,’ he said as the wine, splattered over the wall, obeyed the laws of gravity and trickled to the floor. He’d have to get it repainted before he got new tenants in, he thought absently. He owned the apartment in Pisa but his sister had lived in it for six years. Now she was marrying Felipe and moving to Rome, and unless he thought of an alternative he would be forced to marry too. ‘It’s archaic.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘We all know that. Pieta was working with the trustees to get it overturned but it isn’t as easy as we hoped it would be. The trust is cast-iron. It’ll take months, maybe years, to get that clause overturned and while we’re waiting, Matteo can marry Natasha and take the inheritance.’
The bloody inheritance. The family estate, which included a six-hundred-year-old castello and thousands of acres of vineyards, had belonged to the Pellegrini family and its descendants since the first stone had been laid by Principe Charles Philibert I, the original bad-boy Prince of the family. The family had renounced their titles decades ago but the castello remained their shining jewel. To keep the estate intact, primogeniture ruled and thus the eldest male descendant always inherited. This ruling hadn’t been enough to satisfy Principe Emmanuel II, a particularly cruel and mad prince from the nineteenth century, who had suspected his eldest son of being a homosexual and so had drawn up a ruling, still enforced to this day, that the eldest male descendant could only inherit if he was married. Principe Emmanuel must have had some insight to how social mores would evolve in the future because the marriage clause had specifically stated the spouse had to be female.
This archaic marriage clause had never been an issue. After all, everyone married eventually. It was what people did, especially those of the aristocracy. But times, along with social mores, changed.
Daniele had been a toddler when his grandfather had died and his own father had inherited the estate. Being the second son, Daniele had always known Pieta would inherit when their father died. He was comfortable with that. He didn’t want it. He hated the draughty old castello that leaked money as quickly as it leaked water, and he especially hated the idea of marriage. It had given him perverse satisfaction throughout his adult life to remain single, to be the antithesis of the dutiful, serious Pieta.
But now Pieta was dead.
For two months Daniele had clung to the hope that Pieta’s wife Natasha might be pregnant—if she was and the child was a boy, the child would inherit the estate and Daniele would be free to continue living his life as he’d always enjoyed.
It transpired that Natasha was indeed pregnant. Unfortunately, Pieta wasn’t the father. Before her husband was even cold in the ground, she had embarked on an affair with their cousin Matteo, the cousin who had lived with them as a sibling from the age of thirteen. The disloyal bastard himself had told Daniele that she was pregnant with his child.
Now there were two routes that could be taken. Daniele either found himself a wife and gave up all his cherished freedoms to inherit an estate he didn’t want, or their disloyal cousin inherited everything his father and brother had held dear.
He clenched his jaw and rolled his neck, thinking of his mother and her own love and pride in the family and the estate she had married into as a nineteen-year-old girl.
When it came down to it, there was only one route.
‘I have to marry.’
‘Yes.’
‘And soon.’
‘Yes. Do you have anyone in mind?’ Francesca asked quietly. She knew how much he loathed the idea of marriage. She had an even sharper legal mind than Pieta had done. If she couldn’t think of a way to overturn the clause without Matteo taking everything, then it couldn’t be done.
One day it would, he vowed. The next generation of Pellegrinis would never be forced into a deed they didn’t want, a deed that came with such a heavy price.
Daniele’s mind flickered through all the women he’d dated throughout the years. He estimated that of those who were still unmarried, approximately one hundred per cent of them would high-tail it to a wedding dress shop before he’d even finished proposing.
And then he thought of his last date. The only date he’d been on that hadn’t ended in the bedroom.
Unthinkingly, he touched his bruised nose. The steri-strips Eva had so carefully put on him were still there, the wound healing nicely. He remembered the distaste that flashed in her crystal-clear blue eyes whenever she looked at him.
She’d acted as a translator for him on his first trip to Caballeros a month ago. On an island surrounded by so much destruction, the prevalent colour brown with all the churned-up mud, she’d shone like a beacon in the gloom. Or her scarlet hair had, which she wore in a girlish ponytail. It was a shade of red that could only have come from a bottle and contrasted with her alabaster skin—she must lather herself in factor fifty sun cream on an hourly basis to keep it so colour free—so beautifully he couldn’t see how any other colour, not even that which nature had given her, could suit her so well.
Despite dressing only in scruffy jeans and an official Blue Train Aid Agency T-shirt, Eva Bergen was possibly the most beautiful and definitely the sexiest woman he’d met in his entire thirty-three years. And she hated his guts.
Daniele looked at his sister’s worried face and gave a half-smile. ‘Yes,’ he said with a nod. ‘I know the perfect woman to marry.’
When he left the apartment an hour later, he reflected that whatever else happened, at least his mother would finally be happy with a choice he’d made.
* * *
Eva queued patiently at the staff shower block, playing a game on her phone to pass the time. There was limited fresh water at the camp and the staff rationed their own use zealously. She’d become an expert at showering in sixty seconds of tepid water every three days. Like the rest of the staff, she experienced both guilt and relief when she took her leave, which was every third weekend, and she had the luxury of flying over to Aguadilla and checking into a basic hotel. There, at her own expense, she would laze for hours in sweet-smelling, bubbly, limitless water, dye her hair, do her nails and cleanse her skin, all the while trying to smother the guilt at all the displaced people at the camp who couldn’t take a few days off to pamper themselves.
One thing that wasn’t in short supply at the camp was mobile phones. It seemed that everyone had one, even the tiny kids who barely had a change of clothes to their name. The current craze was for a free game that involved blasting multiplying colourful balls. A technology whizz had linked all the camp players together, refugees and staff alike, to compete against each other directly. Eva had become as addicted to it as everyone else and right then was on track to beat her high score and crack the top one hundred players. At that moment, playing as she waited for her turn in the skinny showers, she had three teenagers at her side, pretending to be cool while they watched her avidly.
When her phone vibrated in her hand she ignored it.
‘You should answer that,’ Odney, the oldest of the teenagers, said with a wicked grin. Odney was currently ranked ninety-ninth in the camp league for the game.
‘They’ll call back,’ Eva dismissed, mock-scowling at him.
With an even wickeder grin, Odney snatched the phone from her hand, pressed the answer button and put it to his ear. ‘This is Eva’s phone,’ he said. ‘How may I direct your call?’
His
