Jess's Promise. Lynne Graham

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      Even if he didn’t personally report her father to the police, Jason and Mark certainly would if they were questioned and implicated in the crime. Her cousins would be eager to spread the blame. The painting had been stolen and there was little hope of retrieving it without the whole sorry tale of its theft being told in detail. There would also be the matter of the insurance claim that would surely be made. Wouldn’t the insurers demand assurance that every possible step had been taken to apprehend the perpetrators? So how could Cesario protect her father from being held responsible for his actions?

      Letting her other, waiting three dogs out of their fenced run, Jess headed indoors. The cottage was cold and untidy. The old coal-fired kitchen stove had gone out and she sighed, hurrying off to change into clean clothes. She would grab something quick to eat and go out and tend to the animals’ needs first. Magic, her deaf Scottish black terrier, bounced round the room as though he were on springs, full of pent-up energy. In between getting changed and washed she repeatedly threw his ball down the hall for him to retrieve. Weed, a skinny grey lurcher, hovered ingratiatingly by the door. Years of loving care had failed to persuade Weed that he could afford to take his happy home for granted. Harley, a diabetic Labrador with a greying muzzle, lay quietly on the floor by the bed, just content to be with her again.

      Standing by the kitchen window, Jess ate a sandwich and drank a glass of milk before heading out into the fading light of a late spring evening to take care of the usual evening routine of cleaning, feeding and watering her charges. When she finished and went back indoors, she still had to relight the stove, which always took more than one attempt. Gritting her teeth, she got on with the task.

      The phone call came when she was getting ready for bed and so bone-weary that she had all the animation of a zombie.

      ‘It’s Cesario…’ He reeled off his name in that dark deep rich drawl of his as naturally as if he were in the habit of phoning her, when in actuality it was the very first time he had made a personal call to her.

      ‘Yes?’ she queried, cautious in tone as she swallowed back an instinctive urge to ask him angrily who had given him her mobile number.

      ‘Can you come back up to the house at nine tomorrow morning? I have a proposition to put to you.’

      ‘A proposition?’ Jess repeated, intense curiosity leaping high inside her to release a tide of speculative thoughts. ‘What kind of a proposition?’

      ‘Not the sort that can be discussed over the phone,’ he murmured crushingly. ‘May I expect you?’

      ‘Yes, tomorrow’s my day off.’

      Jess came off the phone, her face pale and still, and then she let out an explosive whoop that startled her pets and jumped up and down on the spot in a helpless release of the tension that had held her fast all day. Evidently, Cesario di Silvestri had listened to her! That phone call had to mean that he had listened to her and mulled over what she had told him. Now, in response, he had come up with a ‘proposition’, which was really just another label for that other word ‘deal’, which she abhorred.

      Acknowledging that truth, her ready sense of optimism and relief began swiftly to recede in the face of less comforting thoughts. After all, an eye-for-an-eye guy would be very unlikely to pardon her imprudent father in return for nothing. Hadn’t he said so himself? What would be in it for him? Was sex likely to be involved? With his reputation and the interest he had previously shown in her, it was difficult to believe it would not be. She winced in the cosy cocoon of her sensible pyjamas, thinking of the scars on her abdomen and back, shivering. It was little wonder that she had never been keen to strip to reveal those blemishes to a man or relive the horror of explaining what had caused them. Sex was out of the question. In any case, bearing in mind what she had read in the sleazier newspapers’ ‘kiss ‘n’ tell’ accounts made by his former lovers, she would never be able to measure up to Cesario’s exotic and adventurous habits in the bedroom.

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