way Ellie could be engaged in an attempt to blackmail his godfather about some dark secret, but even optimistic Beppe would hardly look forward so happily to the visit of a blackmailer. Furthermore Rio couldn’t imagine that Beppe had any dark secrets because he was the most open, transparent personality Rio had ever known. Yet Beppe had known great unhappiness and loss in his private life. His delightful wife, Amalia, had given birth to a stillborn son and had then suffered a severe stroke. From then on right up until her death, Beppe’s wife had endured precarious health and the confinement of a wheelchair. Beppe, however, had remained utterly devoted to his beloved Amalia and, although now pushing sixty, had evinced not the smallest desire to meet another woman.
Rio, in strong comparison, had never been open or trusting with other human beings. He was naturally suspicious and naturally complex. He had been abandoned in a dumpster at birth, born to a heroin-addicted mother and an unknown father and he had spent his formative years in an orphanage until Amalia Sorrentino took an interest in him. Through Amalia he had met her kindly husband, his benefactor. He knew very well that he owed almost everything he had become and everything he had achieved to the man seated by the fireside who had first recognised his intelligence and there was little he would not have done to protect Beppe from any potential harm. And Rio was absolutely convinced that in some way Ellie Dixon was a harmful threat.
Evil temptress? Gold-digging harpy? Hard-nosed feminist? Thief? Scam artist with the elderly? At Rashad’s wedding, he had been treated to giggly, amusing Ellie and enraged Ellie. He had also been led down the garden path right to the door of his hotel room and then assaulted. He hadn’t forgotten the experience. He hadn’t forgiven it either. Insults lingered with Rio. For too many years of his life he had been a nameless orphan, bullied and abused and dismissed as unimportant. And Ellie Dixon had cut him down to size as effectively as the most terrifying nun at the orphanage, Sister Teresa, who had struggled to overcome Rio’s stormy and essentially vengeful temperament.
No, Rio wasn’t the forgiving and forgetting sort. He still occasionally dreamt about Ellie twirling on the dance floor in her diaphanous green dress, her glorious mane of red curls tumbling round her animated face, and he would remember how he had felt and it stung him like salt in an open wound. He had felt that night that he would die if he didn’t have her. Lust multiplied by wine and wedding fervour, he dismissed now with still-gritted teeth. Now all he had to do was sit back and wait for Ellie and her character of many divergent colours to emerge into the unforgiving glare of daylight...
So, would she be the temptress, the prim doctor, the clever academic or the friendly, casual tourist? And just how long would it take for Rio to find out what her game was?
Whatever, it was still game on...
* * *
Ellie surveyed the vast cache of clothing in sheer wonderment.
‘Yes, your pressie has arrived,’ she confirmed to her sister Polly, with the phone tucked in her nape. ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’
‘I know you don’t do shopping, so I did it for you,’ Polly responded cheerfully. ‘You need a holiday wardrobe for Italy and I bet you haven’t had the time to buy anything... Am I right?’
On that score, Polly was right but Ellie, picking up a floaty white sundress with a designer label, was gobsmacked by her sister’s generosity. Correction, her sister’s embarrassingly endless generosity. ‘Well, I’m really more of a “jeans and tee” sort of girl,’ she reminded her sibling. ‘In fact, I think the last time I put on a sundress was when I was visiting you. You know I’m very, very grateful, Polly, but I wish you wouldn’t spend so much money on me. I’m a junior doctor, I’m not living on the breadline—’
‘I’m your big sister and it gives me a lot of pleasure to buy you things,’ Polly told her unanswerably. ‘Come on, Ellie... Don’t be stiff and stuffy about this. We never got much in the way of pressies and treats growing up and I want to share my good fortune with you. It’s only money. Don’t make it change things between us—’
But it was changing things, Ellie thought, suppressing a sigh. She might always have been the kid sister in their duo but she had also always been the leader and she couldn’t help missing that familiarity and her sister, who now lived half the world away in Dharia. Polly didn’t turn to her for advice any more. Polly no longer needed her in the same way. Polly had Rashad now, and a gorgeous little son, and unless Ellie was very much mistaken there would soon be another little royal prince or princess on the horizon. Her sister also had a pair of adoring grandparents in Dharia, who had welcomed her into her late father’s side of the family with loving enthusiasm.
And that was why Ellie was travelling out to Italy clutching the emerald ring gifted to their by her late mother, Annabel, whom she had never known. Annabel had died in a hospice after a long illness while her daughters were raised by their grandmother. Ellie’s mother had left behind three rings in separate envelopes for her daughters.
That there were three envelopes had been the first shock because until that moment Ellie and Polly had not realised that they had another sister, younger than they were, raised apart from them and most probably in council care. A sister, Lucy, completely unknown to them. In each envelope their mother had written the name of each girl’s father.
Polly had flown out to Dharia to research her background in the hope of finding her father, only to discover that he had died before she was even born, but she had been compensated for that loss by the existence of welcoming, loving grandparents. In the midst of that family reunion, Polly had married Rashad, the king of Dharia, and become a queen. As soon as she had married she and Rashad had hired a private detective to try to locate Lucy but the search had been hampered by officialdom’s rules of confidentiality.
Ellie had received an emerald ring along with two male names on a scrap of writing paper... Beppe and Vincenzo Sorrentino. She assumed that one of those men was her father and she already knew that one of them was dead. She knew absolutely nothing else and wasn’t even sure she really wanted to know what kind of entanglement her mother had contrived to have with two men, who were brothers. If that made her a prude, too bad, she thought ruefully. She couldn’t help her own nature, could she? And she didn’t have unrealistic expectations about what she might discover about her paternity in Italy. Neither man might have been her father, in which case she would simply have to accept living with her ignorance. But the discovery of any kind of relative would be welcome, she conceded sadly, because since Polly’s marriage she had missed having a family within reach.
At the same time she asked herself why she still cherished that idealistic image of ‘family,’ because the grandmother who had raised her and Polly had not been a warm or loving person and her mother’s brother, her uncle Jim, had been downright horrible even when they were children. In fact, recalling how the older man had treated her in the aftermath of his own mother’s death made Ellie flame up with angry resentment, which made her wonder if she would ever share that sad story with Polly. Probably not, because Polly preferred only to see the good in people.
In the same way Polly had blithely declared that her marriage would change nothing between the sisters but, in fact, it had changed everything. Ellie didn’t even like to phone her sister too often because she was very aware that Polly had far more pressing and important commitments as a wife, a mother and a queen. Ellie loved to visit Dharia, as well, but the long flights would eat up a weekend off and she often spent her leave simply catching up on sleep because junior doctors routinely had to work very long hours. At her most recent training rotation she had been working at a hospice and her duties and her patients had drained her both mentally and emotionally.
Indeed as she packed the new wardrobe Polly had had delivered to her into a pair of suitcases Ellie was too weary even to examine the garments and belatedly very grateful that her sister had saved her from
