Jackie hadn’t even been as old as Kate when it had happened. Back then, every day when she’d come down the stairs for breakfast, her mother had scrutinised her profile. When she hadn’t been able to disguise the growing swell of her stomach with baggy T-shirts, she’d been quietly sent away.
She’d arrived in London one wet November evening, a shivering fifteen-year-old, feeling lost and alone. The family had been told she’d gone to stay with her father, which was true. He’d been husband number two. Lisa had managed to devour and spit out another husband and quite a few lovers since then.
So, not only had Jackie to reconcile her mother to the fact that the dirty family secret she’d tried to hide was now out in the open, but she had to break the news to her uncle and cousins—even Lizzie and Scarlett, her sisters, didn’t know. She was going to have to handle the situation very, very carefully.
Lizzie’s wedding would be the first time she and all her sisters and cousins had been together in years and she couldn’t gazump her sister’s big day by turning up with a mystery daughter in tow, and it wouldn’t have been fair to drop Kate into the boiling pot of her family’s reactions either. Jackie had absolutely no idea how they were going to take the news and the last thing her fragile daughter needed was another heap of rejection.
She drew in a breath through her nostrils, the way her Pilates instructor had taught her. ‘I know, Kate. And I’m sorry. Maybe next time.’
The silence between them soured.
‘You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you?’
Jackie sat bolt upright in the back seat. ‘No!’
‘Well, then, why won’t you let me meet my uncles and aunts, my cousins—my grandmother?’
There was no shyness about this girl. She was hot-headed, impulsive, full of self-righteous anger. Very much as her biological mother had been as a teenager. And that very same attitude had landed her into a whole heap of trouble.
‘Family things…they’re difficult, you know…’
A soft snort in her ear told Jackie that Kate didn’t know. That she didn’t even want to know. Jackie only had one card left to play and she hoped it worked.
‘Remember how you told me your mum—’ Your mum. Oh, how that phrase was difficult to get out ‘—found it difficult when you told her you wanted to find your biological mother, even though you weren’t eighteen yet? It was hard to tell her, wasn’t it? Because you didn’t want to hurt her, but at the same time it was something you needed to do.’
‘Yes.’ The voice was quieter now, slightly shaky.
‘You’re just going to have to trust me—’ Sweetheart. She wanted to say ‘sweetheart’ ‘—Kate. This is something I need to do first. And then you can come on a visit and meet everyone, I promise.’
Just like every other girl of her age, Kate was rushing at life, her head full of the possibilities ahead of her, possibilities that dangled like bright shiny stars hung on strings from the heavens. They tempted, called. If only she could make Kate see how dangerous those sparkly things were…how deceptive.
Something in her tone must have placated her newly found daughter, because Kate sounded resigned rather than angry when she rang off. Jackie slid her phone closed and sank back into the padded leather seat, exhausted.
She hadn’t realised how hard the reunion would be, even though she’d been waiting for it since she’d put her name on the adoption register when she’d been twenty. When she’d got the first call she’d been overjoyed, but terror had quickly followed. She and Kate had had a tearful and awkward first meeting under the watchful eye of her adoptive mother, Sue.
Kate had been slightly overawed by Jackie’s high-fashion wardrobe and sleek sports car. Sue had taken Jackie aside after a few weeks and warned her that Kate was dazzled by the fact her ‘real’ mum was Jacqueline Patterson, style icon and fashion goddess. Don’t you dare let her down, Sue’s eyes had said as she’d poured the tea and motioned for Jackie to sit at her weathered kitchen table.
Jackie was doing her best, but she wasn’t convinced she could make this work, that she and Kate could settle into a semblance of a mother-daughter relationship. They’d gone through a sort of honeymoon period for the first month or two, but now questions and emotions from the past were starting to surface and not everything that was rising to the top was as glossy and pretty as Jackie normally liked things to be.
Once she told her mother, Kate’s grandmother, the cat would be out of the bag and there would be no going back. But Jackie had no other option. She wanted…needed…to have her daughter back in her life, and she was going to do whatever it took to make a comfortable space for her, no matter how hard the fallout landed.
The limo swung round a bend in the road and Jackie held her breath. There was Monta Correnti in the distance, a stunningly beautiful little town with a square church steeple and patchwork of terracotta tiled roofs seemingly clinging to the steep hillside. It was currently a ‘hot’ holiday destination for Europe’s rich and notorious, but it had once been Jackie’s home. Her only real home. A place filled with memories, yellow and faded like old family photographs.
Before they reached the town centre, the limo branched off to the left, heading up a tree-lined road to the brow of the hill that was close enough to look down its nose on the town but not near enough to feel neighbourly.
The road to her mother’s villa.
Jackie tided the magazines on the back seat, made sure everything she needed was in her handbag and pulled herself up straight as the car eased through gates more suited to a maximum-security prison than a family home.
Romano opened the tall windows of his drawing room and stepped onto the garden terrace. It all looked perfect. It always looked perfect. That pleased him. He liked simple lines, clean shapes. He wasn’t a man who relished anything complicated or fussy. Of course, he knew that perfection came at a cost. None of this happened by accident.
In his absence, the low hedges of the parterre had been clipped by an army of gardeners, the gravel paths raked and smoothed until they were perfectly flat and unsullied by footprints. The flowers in the vast stone urns had been lovingly weeded and watered. And the attention hadn’t been confined to the garden. Every inch of the Puccini family’s old summer home was free from dust. Every window and polished surface gleamed. It was the perfect place to retreat from the grime and noise of Rome in the summer months. And Romano enjoyed it so much here he’d recently decided to keep it as his main residence, even in winter, when Lake Adrina was filled with waves of polished pewter and the wind was less than gentle.
Palazzo Raverno was unique, built by an ostentatious count in the eighteenth century on a small island, shaped like a long drawn-out teardrop. On the wider end of the island Count Raverno had spared no expense in erecting a Neo-gothic Venetian palace, all high arches and ornate masonry in contrasting pink and white stone. It should have looked ridiculously out of place on a tranquil wooded island in the middle of a lake—but somehow the icing-sugar crispness of the house just made it a well-placed adornment to the island. From what he knew of the infamous count, Romano suspected this had been more by accident than design.
And if the palazzo was spectacular, the gardens took one’s breath away. Closer to the house the gardens were formal, with intricate topiary and symmetrical beds, but as they rolled away to the shore and reached to the thin end of the island they gave the impression of a natural Eden.
Romano could resist it no longer. His wandering became striding and he soon found himself walking down the shady paths, stopping to listen to the soft music of the gurgling waterfall that sprang out of a rockery. He didn’t plan a route, just let his feet take him where they wanted, and it wasn’t long before he arrived in the sunken garden.
The breeze was deliciously cool here, lifting the fringes of the drooping ferns. Everything was green, from the vibrant shades of the tropical plants and the dark glossiness of the ivy, to