before. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you on this road? It is a private road and leads only to the Castillo.’ The questions were thrown at her like so many deadly sharp stiletto knives.
‘I took a wrong turning,’ Jodie defended herself. ‘I was trying to turn round, but a wheel got stuck, and now the tyre is flat.’
She was pale and thin, her eyes huge in the exhausted triangle of her small face, her fair hair scraped back. She looked about sixteen, and an underfed sixteen at that, Lorenzo decided unflatteringly, as he swept her from head to toe with an experienced male glance that took in the droop of her shoulders, the hardly discernible shape of her breasts, the narrowness of her waist and her hips, and the unexpected length of the denim-clad legs attached to such a small frame. Was she wearing heels, or were they really as long as they looked?
‘How old are you?’ he demanded.
How old was she? Why on earth was he asking her that?
‘I’m twenty-six,’ Jodie responded stiffly, tilting her chin as she looked up at him, determined not to be intimidated by him despite the fact that she was already aware that he was so spectacularly good-looking she wanted to run away and hide before he realised how pathetically inferior as a woman she was to him as a man. Automatically, her hand went to her bad leg. It was really hurting her now.
Twenty-six! Lorenzo frowned as he looked down at her hands. No rings. ‘Why are you here on your own?’
Jodie was beginning to feel she had had enough. ‘Because I am on my own. Not that it is any business of yours,’ she informed him.
‘On the contrary, it is very much my business—since you have seen fit to trespass on my land.’
His land? Of course it would be his land; it possessed exactly the same harsh, arrogant inhospitality as he did.
‘And what do you mean, you are on your own?’ she heard him demanding. ‘Surely you have a…a husband, or a lover. A man, a partner, in your life.’
Jodie winced, and then laughed bitterly. He didn’t know about the still tender nerves he was brutalising. ‘I thought I did,’ she agreed angrily, ‘but unfortunately for me he decided he wanted to marry someone else. This—’ she gestured towards the landscape and the car ‘—was supposed to be our honeymoon. But now…’ Just saying the words still hurt, but strangely there was also a savage sense of relief in being able to vent her emotions instead of having to keep them locked inside her for the sake of others, as she had had to do at home.
‘Now what?’ Lorenzo challenged her. ‘Now you are travelling alone and looking for someone to replace him in your bed? The coastal resorts are the best hunting ground for that. Not the mountains.’
Jodie drew in her breath in outraged fury. ‘How dare you say that? I am most certainly not looking for anyone, let alone someone to replace him. In fact, that is the last thing I want to do,’ she found herself adding. ‘I shall never let another man into my life to hurt me. Never. From now on I intend to live by myself and for myself.’ Bold words, but she meant every single one of them!
Lorenzo frowned as he heard in her voice the passionate intensity of her determination.
‘You still want him so much?’
‘No!’ Jodie told him fiercely, without stopping to wonder why he was asking such a personal thing. ‘I don’t want him at all—not now.’
‘So why are you here—running away?’
‘I am not running away! I just don’t want to be there to see him marry someone else,’ she added defensively when she saw the way he was looking at her. ‘Especially when she’s all the things I’m not. Exciting, glamorous, sexy…’ Jodie lifted her hand to her face to rub away the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes. She had no idea why she was telling this stranger all of this, admitting to him things she had not even admitted to herself before.
‘It is the man who determines whether or not a woman is “sexy”, as you put it,’ Lorenzo decreed dismissively, as caught up in this strangely intimate exchange as Jodie. ‘A skilled lover has it in his power to create a full flowering of even the most tightly closed bud.’
A shock of tingling awareness quivered through her belly as Jodie absorbed the meaning of his astoundingly arrogant statement.
‘Not that many young women are tightly closed buds in this day and age,’ Lorenzo added sardonically, as he watched the colour come and go in the pale face that was so shadowed with tiredness.
‘Modern women have claimed the right to their own sexuality,’ Jodie responded fiercely. ‘They do not—’
‘It does not sound to me as though you have been very effective in claiming yours,’ Lorenzo told her derisively. ‘In fact, if I were to make an assessment of it, I would guess that your experience is extremely limited—otherwise you would not have lost your man to another woman.’
His sheer arrogant machismo both astounded and infuriated her. But she was forced to admit that nonexistent would have been a more accurate estimation of her sexual expertise. Painfully she released the pent-up breath his words had caused her to hold, in shaky relief that he had not added to her existing humiliation by somehow recognising that she was still a virgin. Not by choice, though. All those months in hospital, after the car crash in which her parents had been killed and she had been so badly injured that at one point it had been feared she would not survive, had stolen a large chunk out of her life.
‘Which, presumably, is why you are confusing physical lust with love—a word, an emotion, your sex has laid claim to and downvalued to the extent that is now worthless,’ Lorenzo continued harshly.
‘My sex?’ Jodie took up the challenge immediately, the gold-hued warmth of her eyes heating to an indignant dark amber.
‘Yes, your sex! Do you deny that women have now become as much serial adulterers as they once claimed only men could be? That their reasons for marriage are based on their own selfish and shallow emotions and needs—needs which in their eyes come before the needs of anyone else, even the children they bear?’
The bitterness she could hear in his voice momentarily shocked Jodie into silence. But she rallied quickly to defend her sex, pointing out, ‘If that is your consistent experience of women, then maybe you are the common factor—and the one to blame.’
‘I? So you believe that if a child is abandoned by its mother, it is the child who is at fault? A novel mindset—which only underlines what I have just been saying!’
‘No, that is not what I meant—’ Jodie began.
But it was too late. He was ignoring her words to demand autocratically, ‘What is your name?’
‘Jodie. Jodie Oliver. What is your name?’ she asked equally firmly, not to be outdone.
For the first time since he had stopped his car she sensed a momentary hesitation in him before he said coolly, ‘Lorenzo.’
‘The Magnificent?’ Jodie quipped, and then went bright red as he looked at her.
Il Magnifico. That had always been Gino’s teasing way of addressing him, claiming that it was no wonder he had been so successful when he carried the same name as one of Florence’s most famous Medici rulers.
‘You
