had, in Alessandro’s eyes, been humiliating—reinforcing the fact that he was second best—and it had left him with a cynical belief that all women would make themselves available to the most successful man they could find, no matter what kind of commitment they had already made to someone else, and could therefore not be trusted. Especially around his charismatic elder brother.
That belief had marked a changing point in his life, Alessandro acknowledged. Aside from the fact that he had taken care to ensure that his future mistresses did not get to meet his elder brother, he had also come to recognise that if he did not want to spend the rest of his life fighting to prove that he was worthy of more than being labelled a second son, and thus second best, then it was up to him to break free of the shackles that fastened him into that unwanted prison.
He had left Sicily for Milan, where he’d started up a small air freight business—ironically initially transporting the products of the city’s designers to international shows. He had gone on from there to passenger flights and the separate luxury of first-class-only flights, so that now he had every aspect of the modern airline business covered.
He had even learned to use his second-son status to his own advantage. Membership of a titled family was something he used as cynically and deliberately as he used the powerful streak of sensuality he had discovered he possessed in the self-indulgent hedonistic months that had followed Sofia’s defection.
The shell of the personality he had constructed for himself as Alessandro Leopardi was simply an image he projected for business purposes—an outer garment he could remove at will. Only he knew that somewhere deep inside himself there was still a vulnerable part of him that was the ‘spare heir’—conceived only to fill that role, and of no value to anyone outside of that.
Alessandro could hardly remember their mother—she had died shortly after his younger brother Rocco’s birth, when he had been only two years old himself. Everyone who had known her said that she had been a saint. Too saintly by far for her husband, who had spurned her and humiliated her publicly, turning instead to his mistress.
Did that same dark tide from his father’s veins run within his own? Alessandro had no idea. He was merely thankful that, unlike his elder brother, he would never need to find out—because his own duty to the Leopardi name stopped well short of having to provide it with a future heir.
He removed a bottle of water from the suite’s well-stocked bar and poured some into a glass. He could feel the stiff, unyielding thickness of the formal invitation jabbing his flesh in exactly the same way in which Falcon’s stiff, unyielding determination that his brothers should pay their dues to their Leopardi blood jabbed his own conscience.
He and Rocco both owed Falcon a great deal. He had taught them and guided them, and he had protected them. Those were heavy duties for a young boy to have taken on, and it was perhaps no wonder that he had always imposed his own sense of duty on them—that he still did so now.
Alessandro didn’t need to remove Falcon’s letter from his pocket to remember what it said. Falcon never wasted words.
‘Alessandro Leopardi,’ he had written on the invitation, ‘and guest’.
A challenge to him? Alessandro shrugged away the sharp pinprick of angry pride.
He would have to go, of course.
He was never comfortable when he had to return to the castle in Sicily where he had grown up. It held far too many unhappy memories. If he had to visit the island he preferred to stay in the family villa in town. Home for him now was wherever he happened to be—although he had an apartment in Milan and another in Florence, and a villa in a secluded and exclusive enclave close to Positano.
He looked at his watch, a one-off made especially for him. He would be leaving by helicopter from City Airport soon, for his own private jet and the onward flight to Florence, where he would stay at his apartment in the exclusive renovated palazzo that had originally belonged to his mother’s family.
‘Look, Leonora, I really don’t think this is a good idea.’
Leonora gave her younger brother a scathing look.
‘Well, I do—and you promised.’
Leo groaned. ‘That was when I was halfway down one of Dad’s best reds, and you’d tricked me.’ He stood up, his brown hair tousled. He might be six foot three in his socks, but right now he still managed to have the frustrated look of a younger brother who had just been outwitted by his older and smarter sister, Leonora decided triumphantly.
‘You agreed that the next time you flew your boss into London in the private jet I could fly him back.’
‘Why? He hates women pilots.’
‘I know. After all, he’s turned my job applications down often enough.’
Leo’s expression changed. ‘Look, you aren’t going to do anything silly, are you? Like barging into his office, telling him you flew the plane and asking him for a job? You’d have as much chance of succeeding as you would have of getting into his bed,’ Leo told her forthrightly.
Leonora knew all about the stunning beauties the Sicilian billionaire who owned the airline her younger brother worked for dated, and she certainly wasn’t going to allow Leo to guess how much his comment hurt—as though somehow it was a given that she wasn’t woman enough to attract the interest of a man like Alessandro Leopardi. Not, of course, that she wanted to be one of Alessandro Leopardi’s women, but she certainly did want to be one of his pilots.
‘No, of course I’m not going to ask him for a job.’
Leonora crossed her fingers behind her back. She was in full jokey can-do Leonora mode now—even in the privacy of her own thoughts. It just wasn’t fair. She was every bit as good a pilot as her younger brother, if not better, and she just knew that if she proved that to Alessandro Leopardi he would offer her a job. His exclusive first-class service flew passengers all over the world, and she wanted to be one of that elite group even more than she had once wanted to work for someone like Alessandro himself as a private pilot.
‘You can’t possibly think you’ll really get away with this,’ Leo protested.
‘No, I don’t think it. I know it,’ Leonora told him promptly, going on firmly, ‘Since you let me fly the new jet when you were sent to collect it I’ve been having extra lessons in one, and I’ve probably racked up more flying hours than you have.’ She didn’t even want to think about how much it had cost her to get those flying miles in such an expensive craft, or how many lessons in Mandarin she had had to teach to earn the money.
‘Okay, so you can fly the plane. But you haven’t got a uniform.’
‘Ta-dah!’ Leonora said, opening her trench coat to reveal the uniform, and then producing her cap from the supermarket bag in which she had been carrying it.
Leo’s face was a picture. ‘You know if you get found out that I’ll be the one losing my job.’
‘Only wimps get found out,’ Leonora replied as she slipped off her coat and swept up her hair before cramming it under the cap
‘Captain Leo Thaxton at your service.’
Leo groaned again. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve stolen my uniform without stealing my name as well?’
‘No,’
