Isabella started to cry, but all Scarlett could do was watch it float away, the ink turning the paper a watery blue, before it disappeared beneath the surface.
She pulled herself up and brushed the dirt off her front. ‘Stop it!’ she yelled at Isabella, who was sobbing. And before she could dampen the rest of the pages with her silly crying, Scarlett pulled them from Isabella’s fist and tried to smooth them out.
‘Page three is missing! Page three!’ She glanced back towards the stream, her face alive with panic.
Oh, why couldn’t it have been page two, with all the love-struck gushing and rambling? Romano would never have noticed. But it had been page three—the one with the really big secret.
‘What are we going to do?’ Isabella said quietly, dragging a hand over her eyes to dry her tears. More threatened to fall, but she sniffed them away.
Scarlett shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
The icy fear that had been solidifying her limbs suddenly melted into something much warmer, much hotter.
This was all Jackie’s fault! Why couldn’t she have taken the letter to Romano herself? Why had she involved her baby sister in the first place? Didn’t she know that was a stupid thing to do? According to everyone else, Scarlett couldn’t be trusted with anything!
She turned to Isabella, her mouth pulled thin. ‘We can’t give the letter to Romano like this.’Jackie would just have to do her own dirty work and talk to him herself. ‘And Jackie will kill me if I tell her what I did. There’s only one thing we can do.’
Isabella started to sniff again, mumbling something about it all being her fault, but Scarlett wasn’t listening; she was staring at the gurgling waters of the stream.
Slowly, she walked back to the very edge of the bank. Between thumb and forefinger, she lifted another page high and then, in a very deliberate motion of her fingers, let it go. Another page followed, then the envelope. It seemed an almost solemn procedure, as if she were scattering dirt on a coffin. Thick, funereal silence hovered in the air around them as they held their breath and watched Jackie’s secret float downstream.
No one else must see the contents of this letter, Scarlett.
Now no one ever would.
CHAPTER ONE
THE air conditioning of the limo was functioning perfectly, but as Jackie stared out of the tinted window at the rolling hills, at the vineyards and citrus groves, she could almost feel the sun warming her forearms. It was an illusion. But she was big on illusions, so she let it slide and just enjoyed the experience.
The whole process of coming home would also be an illusion. There would be loud exclamations, bear hugs, family dinners where no one could get a word in—not that it would stop anyone trying—but underneath there would be a wariness. There always was. Even the siblings and cousins who didn’t know her secret somehow picked up on the atmosphere and joined in, letting her keep them at arm’s length.
They became her co-conspirators as she tried to deny her Italian side and laced herself up tight in Britishness—the one thing her father had given her that she treasured. She had learned how to shore herself up and keep herself together, but then Jackie always excelled at everything she did, and this was no exception.
She hadn’t called ahead to let the family know what time she was arriving. A limousine and her own company were preferable at present. She needed time to collect herself before she faced them all again.
It had been a couple of years since she’d been home to Monta Correnti. And when she did come these days, it was always in the winter. The summers were too glorious here, too full of memories she couldn’t afford to revisit. But then her older sister had chosen a weekend in May for her wedding celebrations, and Jackie hadn’t had much choice. It seemed she hadn’t been able to outrun the tug of a big Italian family after all, even though she’d tried very, very hard.
She turned away from the scenery—the golds and olives, the almost painful blue of the sky—and picked up a magazine from the leather seat beside her. It was the latest issue from Gloss! magazine’s main rival. Her lips curved in triumph as she noted that her editorial team had done a much better job of covering the season’s latest trends. But that was what she paid them for. She expected nothing less.
The main fashion caught her attention. Puccini—one of Italy’s top labels. But she hadn’t needed to read the heading to recognise the style. The fashion house had gone from strength to strength since Rafael Puccini had handed the design department over to his son.
With such a man at the helm, you’d expect the menswear to outshine the women’s collections, but it wasn’t the case. Romano Puccini understood women’s bodies so well that he created the most exquisite clothes for them. Elegant, sensuous, stylish. Although she’d resisted buying one of his creations for years, she’d succumbed last summer, and the dress now hung guiltily in the back of her wardrobe. She’d worn it only once, and in it she’d felt sexy, powerful and feminine.
Maybe that was why the house of Puccini was so successful, why women stampeded the boutiques to own one of their dresses. Good looks and bucketloads of charm aside, Romano Puccini knew how to make each and every woman feel as if she were as essentially female as Botticelli’s Venus. Of course, that too was an illusion. And Jackie knew that better than most.
She frowned, then instantly relaxed her forehead. She hadn’t given in to the lure of Botox yet, but there was no point making matters worse. Although she was at the top of her game, Editor-in-chief of London’s top fashion magazine, she was confronted daily by women who wore the youthful, fresh-faced glow that she’d been forced to abandon early. Working and living in that environment would make any woman over the age of twenty-two paranoid.
Her mobile phone rang and, glad of the distraction, she reached into her large soft leather bag to answer it. The name on the caller ID gave her an unwanted spike of adrenaline. Surely she should be used to seeing that name there by now?
‘Hello, Kate.’
‘Hey, Jacqueline.’
Her own name jarred in her ears. It sounded wrong, but she hadn’t earned the title of ‘mother’ from this young woman yet. Maybe she never would.
‘Is there something I can help you with?’
There was a pause. A loaded sixteen-year-old pause.
‘Are you there? In Italy?’
Jackie’s gaze returned to the view beyond the tinted windows. It whipped past silently, the insulation of the limousine blocking out any noise from outside. ‘Yes. I left the airport about twenty minutes ago.’
There was a sigh—which managed to be both wistful and accusatory—on the other end of the line. ‘I wish I could have come with you.’
‘I know. I wish you could have too. But this situation…telling my family…it needs some careful handling.’
‘They’re my family too.’
Jackie closed her eyes. ‘I know. But it’s complicated. You don’t know them—’
‘No, I don’t. And that’s not my fault, is it?’
Jackie didn’t miss Kate’s silent implication. Yes, it was her fault. She knew that. Had always known that. But that wasn’t going to help calm her mother down when she announced that the child she’d handed over for adoption sixteen years ago had recently sought her out, that she’d been secretly meeting with that daughter in London for the last few months—especially when it had been her mother’s iron insistence that no one else in the family should ever know.