JODIE tensed as she heard the sound she had been
lying awake waiting for. The now familiar click of
Lorenzo’s bedroom door being opened very quietly,
and then closed again equally secretively.
In two days" time they would be getting married,
but on no less than four occasions now Jodie had been
aware of Lorenzo leaving his bedroom late at night
and not returning to it for at least an hour. And
Caterina was still living at the Castillo, in Lorenzo’s
late grandmother’s rooms. If Caterina had made good
her threat to get Lorenzo back into her bed, then
surely she had a right to know about it? Even though
she was only going to be a temporary wife.
Getting out of bed, Jodie pulled on her robe and
slipped her feet into a pair of soft-soled shoes. She
was determined to confront Lorenzo with her suspicions.
Being a business arrangement wife was one
thing, but being the unwanted wife of a man who had
a mistress was very definitely another. And the kind
of humiliating situation she had no intention of allowing
Lorenzo to put her in.
She hurried along the landing to the top of the
stairs, and as she looked anxiously down them she
saw Lorenzo’s shadow moving swiftly along the hallway
below. Determinedly she hurried after him, wondering
why he had not simply used the upper corridor
that led to Caterina’s apartments.
Several narrow passageways led off the hallway
which linked the old part of the Castillo to this newer
wing, which had been added in the seventeenth century.
Which passage had Lorenzo taken? There was
a light burning on the stairs that led down to a lower
level. Exhaling nervously, Jodie turned down them.
The stairs were directly under Caterina’s apartment,
so perhaps—
She gave a small shocked scream as suddenly, out
of the shadows, a hand curled round her wrist.
"What the hell do you think You’re doing?"
"Lorenzo!"
He must have realised that she was following him
and waited to trap her.
"I wanted to know where you were going. This is
the fourth time I’ve heard you leave your room late
at night," she told him boldly, lifting her chin.
"You were spying on me?"
The narrow-eyed look he was giving her was making
her feel acutely uncomfortable, but she wasn’t
going to let him see that.
"If I’m going to marry you then I have a right to
know if You’re having sex with Caterina."
"What?"
"I won’t marry you if you are," Jodie told him
fiercely. "And I mean that."
"You mean You’re snooping around following me
because you thought you were going to find me in
Caterina’s bed?"
Put that way, he made it sound as though her behaviour
was verging on the bunny-boiling, Jodie realised
guiltily. How could she tell him that his rejection
of her, so closely mirroring John’s lack of sexual interest
in her, had not only heightened her own insecurities
but had also led to her wondering if, like
John, Lorenzo was actually finding sexual satisfaction
with someone else?
"You can’t deny that you and she have been lovers,"
she told him stubbornly.
"Have been, yes," he agreed tersely. "But that was
nearly twenty years ago, when I was a boy."
"She says you still want her."
"She may choose to think that, but it is most certainly
not true," Lorenzo told her firmly. His fingers
were still clamped round her wrist, and suddenly he
cursed beneath his breath, saying grimly, "You want
to know where I go? Very well, then — come with
me."
He was walking so fast along the narrow, tunnellike
corridor in front of them that Jodie almost had to
run to keep up with him. She could smell damp, and
see it too on the vaulted curve of the ancient stone
walls. She gave a small shiver, and then a shocked
gasp as they reached a heavy oak door and Lorenzo
told her emotionlessly, "The corridor beyond here was
once know as the via eternal, because it led to the
Castillo’s dungeons and torture chambers."
"The torture chambers?" Jodie could hear the horrified
revulsion in her own voice.
Lorenzo gave a dismissive shrug as he unlocked
and then opened the heavy oak door. "They were considered
a necessary part of warfare."
"In medieval times, perhaps," Jodie acknowledged.
"But—"
"No, not merely in medieval times," Lorenzo interrupted,
his voice and his expression both so savagely
forbidding that she shivered.
Beyond the door lay a large cavernous room with
a low, vaulted ceiling. Wine racks leaned emptily
against one wall, whilst moisture dripped onto the
floor from the ceiling.
"It’s all right," Lorenzo told her following her anxious
upward glance. "The ceiling is quite safe, and the
coldness of the air, although unpleasant, does have
certain merits."
"More torture for the prisoners?" Jodie suggested
sharply.
"My grandmother’s first husband was imprisoned
down here for a time."
The unexpectedness of Lorenzo’s low-voiced comment
sent a shock through her.
"He was against Mussolini and made the mistake
of saying so; for that he was imprisoned and tortured
in his own home. My grandmother never really got
over it. Oh, she remarried after his death, but her heart
wasn’t really in it. She often told me herself that,
given a free choice, she would have preferred to retire
to the contemplative life of a convent — but she had
promised him that she would provide his house with
an heir. Her marriage to my own grandfather was arranged
by her first husband as he lay dying from the
damage inflicted on his body by his torturers. They
stole many works of art from the Castillo — and emptied
the wine racks," he added grimly, nodding in the
direction of the empty racks. "But there was one treasure
they were not able to take."
Jodie looked round the bleak, cold underground
room in bewilderment.
"Down here?"
Lorenzo shook his head. "No. Come with me."
He led her over to a small door that opened onto
another set of stairs. "These lead up to the main salon
of what used to be the state apartments."
"Caterina’s rooms?" Jodie questioned him uncertainly.
"She sleeps in what was my grandmother’s room,
which forms part of the state apartments, yes — which
is why I use these stairs to reach the salon instead of
the main corridor stairs."
They had reached the top of the stairs and another
door.
"Through here, in the main salon, concealed by the
fabric which my grandmother’s first husband had specially
applied to the walls, is a series of wall paintings
by a pupil of Leonardo. Although, according to my
grandmother, family legend insists that the Master
himself had a hand in their execution."
As he spoke he was ushering her into a large elegant
room, its walls hung with green silk fabric. The
room was shabby and slightly neglected, with dust
motes hanging in the air along with the faint smell of
roses.
"The Duce was afraid that Mussolini’s men would
lay claim to the Castillo because of the paintings, and
so he had them covered up. It was his dream that one
day they would be fully restored. Our family is a large
one, and there are some members of it who feel that
the Castillo should be sold and the proceeds shared.
My grandmother wanted to leave the Castillo to me
because she knew I would fulfil on her behalf the
promise she made to her dying first husband."
"So why did she make it condition of her will that
you must marry?"
"That was through Caterina’s interference. My
grandmother was a gentle person who thought only
good of others. Caterina seized her chance after Gino
died and managed to convince Nonna that we were
star-crossed lovers and I wanted to marry her. She is
what one might term an adventuress, to whom marriage
to my cousin Gino gave social standing. She
had hoped to raise herself even higher by trapping me
into marriage with her. Money and social position are
all that matter to her."
Jodie frowned. Her instincts were telling her that
what he was saying was the truth, and that Caterina
had lied to her.
"Caterina knows how important the Castillo is to
me," Lorenzo continued. "Gino had told her of my
promise to our grandmother, and she thought she
could use that to force my hand. Fortunately for me,
my grandmother’s notary managed to conceal from
Caterina the fact that he had omitted her name from
the final signed copy of the will, so that it read merely
that I had to marry, instead of stating that I had to
marry Caterina. And, as if the situation weren’t complicated
enough already, she has been encouraging
some Russian syndicate to believe that the Castillo
will be available to buy. They wish to convert it into
a luxury hotel."
"But why do you come here at night?"
"Because I cannot do so during the day, when
Caterina is here, and because I have a need to commune
with the past, to assure the man who gave his
life to preserve it that I will do my best to fulfil his
dream." He gave a small shrug. "At the same time, I
have dreams of my own. I would like to see the
Castillo turned into a rehabilitation centre for the
young victims of war — a place where they can recover
physically and emotionally. I want it to be a
centre for young artists and artisans, gifted craftspeople
who will work on the restoration that is needed
and train their young apprentices to follow in their
footsteps. I want to banish from the Castillo, and from
the lives of young victims of war, at least some of
the shadows and dark places, and to fill them instead
with light and the pleasure of living. The meetings I
have been having in Florence are connected with my
plans for the Castillo. As soon as we are married, and
the Castillo is legally mine, my first and most important
duty is to put in hand the restoration of the paintings."
Jodie had to blink fiercely to disperse her foolish
tears, her earlier antagonistic suspicions of him swept
away by a sudden surge of admiration.
"It sounds wonderful — a truly noble enterprise," she
told him huskily, looking up at him, her admiration
warming her eyes.
Lorenzo looked back at her and Jodie caught her
breath as he took a step towards her, quickly disentangling
her gaze from his whilst her heart raced and
thudded.
"Caterina does not think so. She would far rather
the place was sold and my money was hers to do with
as she chooses. She drove my cousin to his death, and
even if I loved her rather than loathed her I could
never forgive her for that," Lorenzo told her harshly.
Jodie gave a small shiver.
"But you must have loved her once…"
"Why? Because I had sex with her?" Lorenzo shook
his head. "I was eighteen and driven by the desires of
my body, that was all." As he was being driven by
them right now, if he was honest, to take hold of Jodie
and take her back to his bed, so that he could finish
what had been started the night she had returned the
betrothal ring to him. There hadn’t been a single night
since then when he had not thought of doing so—
ached to do so. she’d got under his skin in a way that
no other woman had, mental images of her filling his
head and stealing away his thoughts whilst his body
raged and pulsed. Angrily he fought against the longing
taking hold of him.
Every bride felt nervous — it went with the territory,
Jodie assured herself as the alarmingly efficient stylist
the designer salon had insisted on sending to help her,
plus a seamstress and a dresser, bustled round her
bedroom.
Who would have thought that a small, quiet wedding
would involve so much strategic planning? A
little ruefully, Jodie suspected that it was her gown
rather than her that was the cause of the stylist"s relentless
insistence on overseeing every detail of her
wedding-day appearance — right down to the spa treatments
she had arranged for Jodie the previous day.
Now, massaged plucked, waxed and tinted to within
an inch of her life, Jodie tried to imagine how she
might be feeling if this was the real thing, a real wedding,
and she was standing here nervously being laced
into her corset in anticipation of making her vows to
a man she really loved and who really loved her.
But of course that was never going to happen.
Because she was never going to love a man, was she?
Was she? she repeated insistently, when her question
was met by a stubborn silence from the reassuring
inner voice that should have acknowledged and
agreed.
"No, you must pull it tighter," she could hear the
stylist instructing the dresser, and she winced as the
breath was squeezed out of her lungs.
Her hair had been arranged in an artless mix of
loose plaits coiled softly into an "up do" and then
threaded with invisible thread strung with diamonds
to complement the pearl and diamond embroidery on
her gown. A make-up artist had spent what felt like
hours working on her face to make it look as though
she wasn’t actually wearing any make-up at all,
merely a soft glow, although her eyelids had been
brushed with a subtle gold-green powder which made
them look enormous as well as reflecting the green
glitter of the emerald.
By the time the stylist was satisfied with the narrowness
of her waist, Jodie was afraid she might pass
out from an inability to breathe.
"Come and look," the stylist insisted, taking her to
stand in front of the full-length mirror.
The reflection gazing back at her was totally unfamiliar.
Huge gold eyes ringed with curling black
lashes looked at her, soft rose lips surely much fuller
than hers parted to show pearly white teeth. The
cream corset bodice of her gown revealed lushly
curved breasts and an impossibly narrow waist, whilst
silky fine cream hold-ups covered legs that seemed to
go on for ever, thanks to the height of the heels she
was having to wear.
"Bene," the stylist pronounced, beckoning to the
dresser. "Now for the skirt."
Heaven knew how she would have managed to
dress herself, Jodie reflected half an hour afterwards,
when both skirt and train had finally been arranged
to the stylist"s satisfaction, and the cream lace veil
and bodice had been slipped on to cover her hair and
bare skin.
There was a knock on the door, and some flurried
conversation out of Jodie’s earshot, and then the stylist
was handing her flowers and telling her urgently,
"It is time for you to leave…"