SHE was going to have to give in and do that U-turn
she had sworn she would not make, Jodie admitted
unhappily to herself. She hadn’t a clue where she was,
and the bright moonlight was illuminating a landscape
so barren and hostile that she was actually beginning
to feel quite unnerved. To one side of her the ground
dropped away with dramatic sharpness, and on the
other it was broken by various jagged outcroppings
of rock.
Up ahead of her she could see where the narrow
track widened out to provide a passing place.
Determinedly she headed for it, and started to manoeuvre
the vehicle so that she could turn round.
Suddenly there was a loud noise, and the back
wheels of the hire car began to spin whilst the car
itself lurched horribly to one side. Thoroughly
alarmed, Jodie put the car in neutral and climbed out,
her alarm turning to despair as she saw that one of
the rear wheels was stuck fast in a deep rut and looked
as though it had a flat tyre.
Now what was she going to do? She certainly
couldn’t drive anywhere in it.
She went back to the car, massaging her aching leg
as she did so. She was tired, and hungry, and thoroughly
miserable. Opening her bag, she reached for
her mobile phone, and the wallet in which she had
placed all the details of her travel arrangements and
car hire.
As she picked up the phone her eyes widened in
dismay. Her phone was already on, and by the looks
of it there was no signal. Not only that, but when she
attempted to dial a number anyway the phone gave
an ominous bleep and the display light died. She must
have left it on, and now the battery was flat. How
could she have been so stupid? She needed help, but
what was she going to do? Stay here and wait for
someone to drive past? She hadn’t seen another sign
of life, never mind another vehicle, for miles. Walk?
To where? Back down the hundreds of kilometres to
the last village she had passed through what felt like
hours ago? The pain in her leg was gnawing at her
now. Should she walk on up into the mountains? She
gave a small shiver.
She hadn’t seen another driver in the whole of the
time she had been on this road, but someone must use
it because she could see tyre tracks in the dust. She
looked up towards the mountains, and, as though
somehow her own despair had conjured it up, she saw
the distant lights of another vehicle racing towards
her.
The relief made her feel almost giddily weak.
Savagely Lorenzo depressed the accelerator of the
black Ferrari, letting the powerful car take his anger
and turn it into a speed that demanded every ounce
of his driving skill as he negotiated the twisting road
in front of him.
Caterina had been very clever, working on his
grandmother in the way that she had. Had he been
here… But he had not. He had been abroad, visiting
the scene of the latest world disaster, helping to find
ways of alleviating the misery of those who had been
caught in it via his unofficial and voluntary role
within the government, unifying different charities
and providing hands-on administrative practical help
and expertise.
The severity of this particular crisis had meant that
he had not even been able to return to Italy for his
grandmother’s funeral, although he had managed to
find time within his meeting-packed day to go into a
local place of worship and add his prayers to those
of her other mourners.
A gentle, unsophisticated woman, who had once
told him she had hoped as a young girl to become a
nun, she had died peacefully in her sleep.
The Castillo had come to her through her first husband
who, in the way of things in aristocratic circles,
had also been the second cousin of her second husband,
Lorenzo’s own father, which was why the
Castillo had been hers to leave as she wished.
He had always been her favourite out of her two
grandsons, Lorenzo knew. He had spent his holidays
with her after the divorce of his parents, and it had
been his grandmother he had turned to when his
mother had announced that she was marrying her
lover — a man Lorenzo detested.
He had never been able to bring himself to forgive
his mother for that. Not even now when she, like his
father, was dead. Her actions had opened his eyes to
the deceitful, self-serving ways of the female sex, and
their determination to put themselves first whilst laying
claim to a sanctity they did not possess. His
mother had always insisted that her decision to divorce
his father had been taken to spare him the pain
of growing up in an unhappy home. She had lied, of
course. His feelings had been the last thing on her
mind when she had lain in the arms of her lover and
chosen him above her husband and her son.
The Ferrari snarled and bucked at the bad condition
of the road. Lorenzo ignored its complaints and
changed gear, hurling it into a sharp corner, and then
cursed beneath his breath as, right in front of him, he
saw a car blocking the road and a young woman
standing beside it.
Jodie winced as she heard the screech of brakes,
choking on the dust raised by the Ferrari’s tyres as it
skidded to a halt only inches away from the side of
the hire car. Automatically she had made herself stand
upright, instead of leaning on her vehicle for support,
the moment she had seen the other car.
What kind of madman drove like that down a road
like this — and in the dark, too? she wondered shakily,
holding on to the door of the car for support as she
watched him uncoil himself from the driver’s seat and
come towards her.
"Disgraziata!" A stream of Italian followed the
snarlingly contemptuous word he had already hurled
at her. But Jodie was not going to let herself be cowed
by him — or by any man — ever again.
"When you’ve quite finished…" Jodie interrupted
him, her own voice every bit as hostile as his. "For a
start, I’m not Italian. I’m English. And—"
"English?" He made it sound as though he had
never heard the word 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 non
existent 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 know the history of the Medici?" he shot at
Jodie.
"Some of it," she said neutrally, suddenly not wanting
any more argument with a stranger. She was beginning
to feel very tired and weak. "Look, I need to
get in touch with the car hire firm and tell them about
the car, but my mobile isn’t working. Could you possibly…?"
He must surely be going back through the
village she had driven through — there was nowhere
else to go. If he would take her there she might be
able to find a room for the night and telephone the
car rental people.
"Could I possibly what?" Lorenzo demanded. "Help
you? Certainly." She had just started to sag with relief
when he added softly, "Provided that you agree to
help me."
Instantly warning signals flashed their messages inside
her head, causing her to tense.
"Help you?" she repeated cautiously.
"Yes. I need a wife."
He was mad. Completely and utterly insane. She
was stuck on a deserted road with a madman.
"You…want me to help you find a wife?" she managed
to ask, as though it were the most natural request
in the world.
Lorenzo’s mouth compressed, and he gave her a
look of cold derision. "Don’t be ridiculous. No, I do
not want you to help me find a wife. I want you to
become my wife," he told her coolly.