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, by the time he managed to alert me to what was going on, it was too late.’
‘Much too late—for you.’ Caterina smirked at him.
‘So you admit it?’
‘So what if I do? You can’t prove it,’ Caterina repeated. ‘And even if you could, what good would it do?’
‘Let me make this clear to you, Caterina. No matter what my grandmother has written in her will, you will never become my wife. You are the last woman I would want to give my name to.’
Caterina laughed. ‘You have no choice.’
Lorenzo had a reputation for being a formidable and ruthless adversary. He was the kind of man other men both respected and feared—the kind of man women dreamed excitedly of enticing into their beds. He was also a superb male animal, strikingly handsome, with a hormone-unleashing combination of arrogance and a predatory, very dangerous male sexuality—a sexuality that he wore as easily as a panther wore its coat. He was not just a prize, but perhaps the most coveted prize amongst the very best of Italy’s most eligible and wealthy men. All through his twenties gossip columns had seethed with excited interest, trying to guess which high-born young woman he would make his duchess. It certainly wasn’t from any lack of willing partners to share his wealth and his title, along with enjoying the sexual pleasure of mating with such a vigorously sensual man, that he had escaped into his thirties without making any kind of formal commitment to the women who had pursued him.
Lorenzo looked at his late cousin’s wife. He despised and loathed her. But then, he despised most women. From what he had experienced of them they were all willing to give him whatever he wanted because of what he had, what was outside the inner him: wealth, a title, and a handsome male body. What he actually was was of no interest to them. His thoughts, his beliefs, all that went to make up the man who was Lorenzo d’Este didn’t matter to them anywhere near so much as his money and his social position.
‘You have no choice, Lorenzo,’ Caterina repeated softly. ‘If you want the Castillo you have to marry me.’