Issy tensed as she settled in the back seat.
No way was she going to think about old times. Especially her old times with Gio.
She snapped the seat belt on, determined to wipe every last one of those memories from her consciousness.
But as the car accelerated away from the kerb, and the familiar hedgerows and grass verges sped past on the twenty-minute drive to the Hall, the old times came flooding back regardless.
Chapter Three
Ten Years Earlier
‘I CAN’T believe you’re really going to do it tonight. What if your mum finds out?’
‘Shh, Melly,’ Issy hissed as she craned her neck to check on the younger girls sitting at the front of the school bus. ‘Keep your voice down.’
As upper sixth-formers, they had the coveted back seat all to themselves, but she didn’t want anyone overhearing the conversation. Especially as she didn’t even want to be having this conversation.
When she’d told her best friend about her secret plan to loose her virginity to Giovanni Hamilton two years before, it had been thrilling and exciting. A forbidden topic they could discuss for hours on the long, boring bus ride home every day. And it had had about as much chance of actually happening as Melanie’s equally thrilling and exciting and endlessly discussed plan to lose her virginity to Gary Barlow from Take That.
Gio had been completely unattainable back then. When she’d been fifteen and he’d been nineteen the four years between them had seemed like an eternity.
But it hadn’t always been that way.
When Issy and her mother had first come to live at the Hall, and Gio had appeared that first summer, the two of them had become fast friends and partners in crime. To a nine-year-old tomboy who was used to spending hours on her own in the Hall’s grounds, Gio had been a godsend. A moody, intense thirteen-year-old boy with brown eyes so beautiful they’d made her heart skip, a fascinating command of swear words in both English and Italian, and a quick, creative mind with a talent for thinking up forbidden adventures, Gio had been more captivating than a character from one of Issy’s adventure books.
Best of all, Gio had needed her as much as she’d needed him. Issy had seen the sadness in his eyes when his father shouted at him—which seemed to be all the time—and it had made her stomach hurt. But she’d discovered that if she chatted to him, if she made him laugh, she could take the sad look away.
At fifteen, though, when she’d first formulated her plan to lose her virginity to him, her childhood friendship with Gio had slipped into awkward adolescent yearning.
She’d been gawky and spotty, with a figure her mum had insisted on calling ‘womanly’ but Issy thought was just plain fat, while Gio had been tall, tanned and gorgeous. A modern-day Heathcliff, with the looks of a Roman god and a wildness about him that drew every female within a twenty-mile radius like a magnet.
At nineteen, Gio already had a formidable reputation with women. And one night that summer Issy had seen the evidence for herself.
Creeping down to get a glass of water, she’d heard moaning coming from the darkened dining room. Getting as close as she could without being spotted, she had watched, transfixed, as Gio’s lean, fully-clothed body towered over a mostly naked woman lying on her back on the Duke’s oak table. It had taken Issy a moment to recognise the writhing female as Maya Carrington, a thirty-something divorcée who had arrived for the Duke’s weekend house party that afternoon.
Issy hadn’t been able to look away as Gio’s long, tanned fingers unclipped the front hook of Maya’s black lace push-up bra, then moulded her full breasts. Issy had blushed to the roots of her hair at the socialite’s soft sobs as Gio traced a line with his tongue over her prominent nipples, then nipped at them with his teeth as his hand disappeared between Maya’s thighs.
Issy had dashed back to bed, her glass of water sloshing all over the stairs with her palm pressed against her pyjama bottoms to ease the brutal ache between her legs as her ragged breathing made her heart race.
She’d dreamt about Gio doing the same thing to her that night and for many nights afterwards, always waking up soaked in sweat, her breasts heavy and tender to the touch, her nipples rigid and that same cruel ache between her legs.
But Gio had never stopped treating her like a child. During that last visit two years ago, when he’d paid so much attention to Maya, he’d barely even spoken to her.
Then, the day before, something magical had happened.
He’d appeared at the school gates on his motorbike, looking surly and tense, and told her the school bus had been cancelled and her mother had asked him to give her a lift home. She hadn’t seen Gio in two long years, and the feel of his muscled back pressing into her budding breasts had sent her senses into a blur of rioting hormones. She’d spent today reliving the experience in minute detail for her starstruck classmates, but in reality she’d had to make most of it up, because she’d been so excited she could barely remember a thing.
And then this morning she’d caught him looking at her while he was having breakfast with her and her mother, and just for a second she’d seen the same awareness in those turbulent brown eyes that she had always had in her heart.
She didn’t have a schoolgirl crush on Gio. She loved him. Deeply and completely. And not just because of his exotic male beauty and the fact that all the other girls fancied him too. But because she knew things about him that no one else knew. Unfortunately, her attempts to flirt with him that morning had been ignored.
It was past time to take matters into her own hands.
What if Gio didn’t come back again for another two years? She’d be an old woman of nineteen by then, and he might have got married or something. Tonight she would make him notice her. She would go to his room and get him to do what he’d been doing to Maya Carrington two years ago. Except this time it would be a thousand times more special, because she loved him and Maya hadn’t.
But the last thing she’d wanted to do was discuss her plans with Melanie. It made Issy feel sneaky and juvenile and dishonest. As if she was tricking Gio. When she really wasn’t. She should never have mentioned the motorcycle ride. Because Melly had latched on to the information, put two and two together and unfortunately made four. And now she wouldn’t let the topic drop.
‘What will your mum say?’ Melanie asked in a stage whisper.
‘Nothing. She’s not going to find out,’ she whispered back, pushing aside the little spurt of guilt.
Up till now she’d told her mother everything. Because it had been just the two of them for so long Edie had been a confidante and a friend, as well as her mum. But when Issy had tried to bring up the subject of Gio as casually as possible after breakfast her mother had been surprisingly stern with her.
‘Don’t hassle him. He has more than enough to deal with,’ Edie had said cryptically while she pounded dough. ‘I saw you flirting with him. And, while I understand the lure of someone as dashing and dangerous as Gio Hamilton, I don’t want to see you get hurt when he turns you down.’
The comment had made Issy feel as if she were ten years old again—sheltered and patronised and excluded from all the conversations that mattered—and still trailing after Gio like a lovesick puppy dog.
What did Gio have to deal with? Why wouldn’t anyone tell her? And what made her mum so sure he would turn her down? She wanted to help him. To be there for him. And she wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed by a man who knew how, instead of the awkward boys she’d kissed before.
But everyone treated her as if she was too young and didn’t know her own mind. When she wasn’t. And she did.
She’d