to university on Sunday, young lady,’ Lizzie told her kid sister firmly. ‘You will quit your part-time jobs and concentrate on your studies. I will ensure that you manage.’
‘You can’t marry the guy, Lizzie!’ Chrissie gasped in horror. ‘You simply can’t!’
Lizzie thought fast and breathed in deep before she sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Let me be honest with you. I’ve spent eight years working round the clock on this farm. I’ve had no time for friends and I’ve had very little social life. I have no decent clothes or jewellery and I don’t even know how to put on make-up properly.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you have to give way to Dad and make a sacrifice of yourself.’
‘Has it occurred to you that maybe I want to marry Cesare and have a child? He’s a very handsome man and you know how much I’ve always wanted a baby. I also would like to have enough money not to worry myself sick every time a bill comes through the letter box!’ Lizzie declared, her heart-shaped face taut with vehement composure as she watched Chrissie frown and suddenly look unsure of her ground.
‘I’m deadly serious,’ Lizzie continued with dogged determination. ‘I want to marry Cesare. It’s the best thing for all of us and, believe me, I’m not the sacrificial type.’
‘I never thought...I never dreamt...’ Bemused and uncertain of such an explanation from the big sister she had always loved and admired, Chrissie shook her head, frowning at her sibling. ‘Are you sure, Lizzie? Have you really thought this through?’
No, Lizzie hadn’t thought it all through and was determined not to run the risk of doing so before she had tied the official knot. Whatever happened she was going to marry Cesare Sabatino and miraculously sort out her own and her father’s and Chrissie’s problems. No other action now made sense. So, it would be scary and would entail deception—well, she would get braver and she would learn some new skills. My goodness, hadn’t she just told a barefaced lie to the sister she loved?
She walked into her bedroom and lifted the business card Cesare had left behind. Before she could take fright, she tapped out the number on her mobile phone and then studied the blank message space.
* * *
Will agree to marry you. Talk about the rest when we next meet.
Cesare blinked down at the text and then glanced across the dinner table at Celine, whose sleek blonde perfection had entranced him for longer than most women managed. In his mind’s eye, however, he was no longer seeing the French fashion model, he was seeing a slender platinum blonde with luminous green eyes surrounded by soft brown lashes. Surprise was cutting through his satisfaction, perhaps because he had had the weirdest conviction that Lizzie Whitaker would say no to the temptation of the cash he had offered. He wondered why he had thought that, why he had assumed she would be different from any other woman.
Women liked money and he liked women: it was a fair exchange in which neither of them need feel used or abused. Hadn’t he learned that a long time ago? Athene would be able to return to her childhood home for a visit at the very least. Was Lizzie Whitaker planning to meet the full terms of the will? Raw anticipation of an entirely different kind infiltrated Cesare and he frowned, bewildered by the flood of undisciplined hormones smashing his self-control to pieces. He was thinking about Lizzie Whitaker, only thinking about her and he was as aroused as a teenager contemplating sex for the first time.
‘You seem distracted,’ Celine remarked tentatively.
Cesare studied her without an iota of his usual lust, exasperated by the games his body was playing with his usually very well-disciplined brain. ‘A business deal,’ he proffered truthfully.
Goffredo would be overjoyed at the news of the upcoming wedding while Cesare was simply stunned at the prospect of getting married, whether it was a business arrangement or not. Married! The delicious food on his plate ebbed in appeal. Dense black lashes screened his gaze. It was rare for him to take a night off and somehow Lizzie Whitaker had contrived to kill any notion he had had of relaxing with Celine. What was it about her that unsettled him? After all she was a pretty standard gold-digger, willing to do virtually anything to enrich herself, and how could he criticise her for that reality when he had baited the hook?
‘I DON’T KNOW what the arrangements are likely to be,’ Lizzie told her father while she paced the kitchen, a slim figure clad in jeans and a sweater and workmanlike boots. ‘Look, I’ve got a few things to check outside. I might as well keep busy until Cesare arrives.’
‘What sort of a name is that he has?’ Brian Whitaker scoffed.
Lizzie dealt the older man an impatient glance as she put on her jacket because he had no excuse to be needling her or disparaging Cesare. But everything, she told herself in an urgent little pep talk, was good in her world. Chrissie had returned to university and soon she and her father would no longer need to worry about rent rises and bank debts they couldn’t cover. ‘It’s an Italian name, just like mine and Chrissie’s and Mum’s and it’s completely normal. Let’s not forget that Cesare is about to wave a magic wand over our lives.’
‘Even the Garden of Eden had the serpent,’ her father countered with a curl of his lip and his usual determination to have the last word.
Lizzie drank in the fresh air with relief and walked to the stone wall bounding the yard to check the sheep in the field. Lambing hadn’t started yet but it wouldn’t be long before it did. If she had to leave home before then, Andrew would probably take the ewes, she was reasoning in the detached state of mind she had forged to keep herself calm since she had sent that text to Cesare. There were no successes without losses, no gains without costs and consequences. In the middle of that sobering reflection while she watched the lane for a car arriving, she heard a noise in the sky and she flung her head back in the fading light to look up.
A helicopter was coming in over the valley. As she watched it circled the top of the hill and swooped down low to come closer and then noisily hover. For a split second, Lizzie was frozen to the spot, unable to believe that the helicopter was actually planning to land in a field with stock in it. The craft’s powerful lights splayed over the flock of fast-scattering sheep, which ran in a total panic down the hill. Lizzie ran for the gate, Archie at her heels, and flew over it like a high jumper while shouting instructions to her dog to retrieve the flock.
Heart pounding, she ran down the hill at breakneck speed but was still not fast enough to prevent the sheep from scrambling in a frantic escape over the wall at the foot and streaming across the next field towards the river. Sick with apprehension, she clambered over the wall and ran even faster while watching as Archie herded the frightened ewes away from the water’s edge. The noise from the helicopter unluckily intensified at that point because the pilot was taking off again and the sheep herded close together and then took off terrified again in all directions.
Someone shouted her name and she was relieved to see Andrew Brook racing down the hill to join her. Struggling desperately to catch her breath, while wondering anxiously where Archie had disappeared to, she hurried on towards the riverbank to see if any of the animals had gone into the water. Andrew got there first and she saw him stooping down in the mud over something, whistling for his sheepdog. One of the sheep had got hurt in the commotion, she assumed, hurrying down to join him.
‘I’m so sorry, Lizzie. He’s hurt. He was too little to handle them in a panic like that,’ Andrew told her.
Lizzie
