letting her find her own way back to England as best she could.
But in the space of time it took him to draw breath common sense had overcome his icy fury that she had believed she could make a fool of him—and, even worse, deceive his beloved grandmother.
To return to the villa now and explain everything to Nonna would be to deal her a severe blow. He couldn’t do it. Not yet. It would ruin the happiness she was currently enjoying. The company of her old friend—who hadn’t needed much in the way of pressure to agree to the last minute invitation to visit—and secure in the knowledge that her vibrant young companion was back in harness, her matchmaking tendencies surfacing again in her delight at his suggestion that he whisk her companion away to the island.
Nonna was old, she was frail and he loved her. Let her be happy for a little while longer.
His original intention to use the time on the island to solve the puzzle himself was now redundant. But he could amuse himself at her expense—she owed him a little light entertainment—and when she least expected it he would hit her with the fact that he knew the truth and hope to shock her sister’s whereabouts from her, assuming the Italian and English agents had drawn a blank.
‘You can get out now.’ Softly spoken, his condemning eyes on her delightful profile as he tried to read what went on inside that devious head.
The sisters were identical in face and body but this one—Milly—had an air of softness, almost vulnerability, about her that the other patently lacked. With her short blonde hair trailing soft tendrils against her tender nape and those startlingly green eyes she looked almost childlike. But there was nothing childlike about the full, pert breasts, tiny waist and luscious hips.
Gorgeous on the outside but inside they were, both of them, bent as corkscrews—she had to be just as devious and self serving as her much more in-your-face twin.
She gave no response, just the merest dip of her head to acknowledge she had heard him, her hands eventually straying with slow reluctance to the heavy-duty clasp of her seat belt.
Scared witless? As she had every right to be. Expecting him to bombard her with Italian, force her to confess she didn’t understand a word of the language and reveal her true identity. She would be quaking in her shoes, waiting for the axe to fall.
His smile was self-admittedly victorious as his feet touched the ground. He would gently erase the fear, lull her into a false sense of security. And then hit her with his knowledge. Not exactly ethical, he conceded, but Dio! Nobody treated Nonna like a cash cow or a dupe and got away with it—not while he had breath in his body!
It felt as though all the ants in the world were charging up and down her spine wearing spiked boots, Milly decided feverishly. In sickening mental turmoil, she watched as Cesare lifted down her old suitcase and shouldered his own rucksack. Reaching down for her case, he set off up the stony track at speed, leaving Milly with no option but to follow.
She had no idea why he had brought her here. Whatever his reason, it didn’t augur well for her, she acknowledged edgily. It certainly wasn’t for the good of her health!
He thought she was a thief, a common con-woman, and she, in her role as Jilly, hadn’t denied it and sought to clear her name as her maligned sister most surely would have done. She had just gone along with his dictates, seeing it as the only way to keep her sister out of his vindictive clutches and the cold hands of the law.
But she had the terrifying feeling that the deception would soon be discovered, laid bare before his contemptuous gaze. And then the hunt for the real Jilly Lee would be back on with a vengeance.
It wouldn’t take long. All he had to do was start conversing in Italian. Without his grandmother’s rules there was no reason why he shouldn’t use his native language and expect her to understand most, if not all, of it.
Knowing she had failed miserably and done her sister’s cause no good at all she was unable to concentrate on where she was going when her foot hit a rock and, emitting a sharp cry of alarm, she fell flat on her face and lay spreadeagled in the growing heat of the sun. Winded, humiliated, short moments later she felt herself lifted to her feet by two strong hands and her eyes sparkled like fine jewels with unshed tears of chagrin.
‘Are you hurt?’
Milly gulped for much needed oxygen and shook her head. Two displaced tears trickled down her pale-with-shock cheeks. He actually sounded as if he cared, his eyes narrowing with what looked suspiciously like concern as his gaze swept down the length of her shaken body.
His hands were on her slender shoulders now. They felt reassuring, comforting. She had the insane impulse to move closer to that strong, lean body, lay her troubled head against his broad chest and seek solace.
Hurriedly, she brushed the wimpy tears away and with them the weak need to be held by him. He was her sister’s enemy; therefore he was her enemy too.
In similar circumstances Jilly would swear like a trooper, brush herself down and make a joke of it. In the impersonation stakes she wasn’t doing too well.
She was going to have to try harder. Much harder. At least until he discovered that she wasn’t who she was pretending to be.
‘I’m fine.’ She forced a smile. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’ She lifted her chin, wondering what Jilly would say next, and hit on, ‘How much further? Isn’t there any transport on the island?’
Her sister hadn’t been known to walk if she could take a cab and rarely put herself in a situation where there wasn’t one within hailing distance. But at her most Jilly-like comment to date Cesare’s wickedly sexy mouth turned down at one corner as he drawled, ‘There is nothing on the island but one stone cottage. No people, no roads and no bright lights.
His hands dropped from her shoulders and he turned away, striding along the rough track to where he’d dropped the luggage, then waited until she joined him. ‘My father had it built when he bought the island many years ago. By all accounts he was a workaholic and came here at least once a year to recharge his batteries.’
‘You must have happy memories of childhood holidays,’ Milly responded to his totally unexpected mention of anything remotely personal, trying to act as normally as possible under difficult circumstances, doing her level best not to get too het up over the possibility of him leaving her here with no way of returning to the mainland once her deception had been uncovered. She certainly wouldn’t put that kind of action past him!
For a moment she thought he wouldn’t respond to her innocuous remark. She glanced up at his tanned, extravagantly handsome features and saw his mouth tighten with what she could only translate as scorn. ‘My mother never came here. She was a metropolitan creature. My father brought his mistresses here, he didn’t want me around. I only learned of the existence of this hideaway after his death.’
Biting back instinctive words of sympathy because she knew he wouldn’t want them, Milly concentrated on getting up the increasingly steep track that traversed the sun-baked hillside where herbs and wild flowers merged their perfume with the tang of the sea and the scent of the pines she could see ahead of them. Breathless with heat and effort—neither of which seemed to affect him in the slightest—her mind was busy.
If his father had taken mistresses openly enough for him to know about them then that would explain why, given such an immoral role model, Cesare took it as the norm to take a woman to his bed and throw her out of it when he got tired of her.
Poor
