they had been introduced, following her parents’ move to the area. And Jodie, fool that she was, had been oblivious to all of this, simply thinking that Louise, as a newcomer, an outsider, was eager to make friends. Now she was the outsider, Jodie reflected bitterly. She should have realised how shallow John was when he had told her that he loved her ‘in spite of her leg’. She winced as the pain in it intensified.
She was never going to make the kind of mistake she had made with John again. From now on her heart was going to be impervious to ‘love’—yes, even though that meant at twenty-six she would be facing the rest of her life alone. What made it worse was that John had seemed so trustworthy, so honest and so kind. She had let him into her life and, even more humiliatingly painful to acknowledge now, into her fears and her dreams. No way was she going to risk having another man treat her as John had done—one minute swearing eternal love, the next…
And as for John himself, he was welcome to Louise, and they were obviously suited to one another, too, since they were both deceitful cheats and liars. But she, coward that she was, could not face going home until the wedding was over, until all the fuss had died down and until she was not going to be the recipient of pitying looks, the subject of hushed gossip.
‘Well, let’s look on the bright side,’ Andrea had said lightly when she had realised Jodie was not going to be persuaded to abandon her plans. ‘You never know—you might meet someone in Italy and fall head over heels in love. Italian men are so gorgeously sexy and passionate.’
Italian men—or any kind of men—were off the life menu for her from now on, Jodie told herself furiously. Men, marriage, love—she no longer wanted anything to do with any of them.
Angrily Jodie depressed the accelerator. She had no idea where this appallingly bumpy road was going to take her, but she wasn’t going to turn back. From now on there would be no U-turns in her life, no looking back in misery or despair, no regrets about what might have been. She was going to face firmly forward.
David and Andrea had been wonderfully kind to her, offering her their spare room when she had sold her cottage so that she could put the sale proceeds towards the house she and John were buying—which had not, with hindsight, been the most sensible of things to do—but she couldn’t live with her cousin and his wife for ever.
Luckily John had at least given her her money back, but the break-up of their engagement had still cost her her job, since she had worked for his father in the family business. John was due to take over when his father retired.
So now she had neither home nor job, and she was going to be—
She yelped as the offside front wheel hit something hard, the impact causing her to lurch forward painfully against the constraint of her seat belt. How much further was she going to have to drive before she found some form of life? She was booked into a hotel tonight, and according to her calculations she should have reached her destination by now. Where on earth was she? The road was climbing so steeply…
‘You, I take it, are responsible for this? It has your manipulative, destructive touch all over it, Caterina,’ Lorenzo Niccolo d’Este, Duce di Montesavro, accused his cousin-in-law with savage contempt as he threw his grandmother’s will onto the table between them.
‘If your grandmother took my feelings into account when she made her will, then that was because—’
‘Your feelings!’ Lorenzo interrupted her bitingly. ‘And what feelings exactly would those be? The same feelings that led to you bullying my cousin to his death?’ He was making no attempt whatsoever to conceal his contempt for her.
Two ugly red patches of angry colour burned betrayingly on Caterina’s immaculately made-up face.
‘I did not drive Gino to his death. He had a heart attack.’
‘Yes, brought on by your behaviour.’
‘You had better be careful what you accuse me of, Lorenzo, otherwise…’
‘You dare to threaten me?’ Lorenzo demanded. ‘You may have managed to deceive my grandmother, but you cannot deceive me.’
He turned his back on her to pace the stone-flagged floor of the Castillo’s Great Hall, his pent-up fury rendering him as savagely dangerous as a caged animal of prey.
‘Admit it,’ he challenged as he swung round again to confront her. ‘You came here deliberately intending to manipulate and deceive an elderly dying woman for your own ends.’
‘You know that I have no desire to quarrel with you, Lorenzo,’ Caterina protested. ‘All I want—’
‘I already know what you want,’ Lorenzo reminded her coldly. ‘You want the privilege, the position, and the wealth that becoming my wife would give you—and it is for that reason that you harried a confused elderly woman you knew to be dying into changing her will. If you had any compassion, any—’ He broke off in disgust. ‘But of course you do not, as I already know.’
His furious contempt had caused the smile to fade from her lips and her body to stiffen into hostility as she abandoned any pretence of innocence.
‘You can make as many accusations as you wish, Lorenzo, but you cannot prove any of them,’ she taunted him.
‘Perhaps not in a court of law, but that does not alter their veracity. My grandmother’s notary has told me that when she summoned him to her bedside in order to alter her will, she confided to him the reason that she was doing so.’
Lorenzo saw the look of unashamed triumph in Caterina’s eyes.
‘Admit it, Lorenzo. I have bested you. If you want the Castillo—and we both know that you do—then you will have to marry me. You have no other choice.’ She laughed, throwing back her head to expose the olive length of her throat, and Lorenzo had a savage impulse to close his hands around it and squeeze the laughter from her it. He did want the Castillo. He wanted it very badly. And he was determined to have it. And he was equally determined that he was not going to be trapped into marrying Caterina.
‘You told my grandmother I loved you and wanted to make you my wife. You told her that the fact that you were so newly widowed, and that your husband Gino was my cousin, meant that society would frown upon an immediate marriage between us. And you told her you were afraid my passion would overwhelm me and that I would marry you anyway and thus bring disgrace upon myself, didn’t you?’ he accused her. ‘You knew how naïve my grandmother was, how ignorant of modern mores. You tricked her into believing you were confiding in her out of concern for me. You told her you didn’t know what to do or how you could protect me. Then you “helped” her to come up with the solution of changing her will, so that instead of inheriting the Castillo from her—as her previous will had stated—I would only inherit it if I was married within six weeks of her death. As you told her, everyone knows how important to me the Castillo is. And then, as though that were not enough, you conceived the added inducement of persuading her to add that if I did not marry within those six weeks, you would inherit the Castillo. You led her to believe that in making those changes she was enabling me to marry you, because I could say I was fulfilling the terms of her will rather than following the dictates of my heart.’
‘You can’t prove any of that.’ She shrugged contemptuously.
Lorenzo knew that what she had said was true.
‘As I’ve already told you, Nonna confided her thoughts to her notary,’ he continued acidly. ‘Unfortunately,
