The Italian Duke's Wife. Penny Jordan

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      CHAPTER ONE

      SHE was not going to do the girly thing and burst into tears, Jodie told herself, gritting her teeth. It might be growing dark; she might be feeling sick with that familiar stomach-churning fear that she had made a big mistake—and about more than just the direction she had taken in that last village she had passed through what seemed like for ever ago; tonight might be the night she and John should have been spending at their romantic honeymoon hotel—their first night as husband and wife…but she was not going to cry. Not now, and in fact not ever, ever again over any man. Not ever. Love was out of her life and out of her vocabulary and it was going to stay out.

      She winced as her small hire car lurched into a deep rut in the road—a road which was definitely climbing towards the mountains when it should have been dropping down towards the sea.

      Her cousin and his wife, her only close family since her parents’ death in a car accident when Jodie was nineteen, had tried to dissuade her from coming to Italy.

      ‘But everything’s paid for,’ she had reminded them. ‘And besides…’

      Besides, she wanted to be out of the country, and she wanted to stay out of it for the next few weeks during the build-up to John’s marriage to his new fiancée, Louise, who had taken Jodie’s place in his heart, in his life, and in his future.

      Not that she’d told her cousin David or Andrea, his wife, about that part of her decision as yet. She knew they would have tried to persuade her to stay at home. But when home was a very small Cotswold market town, where everyone knew you and knew that you had been dumped by your fiancé less than a month before your wedding because he had fallen in love with someone else, it was not somewhere anyone with any pride could possibly want to be. And Jodie had as much pride as the next woman, if not more. So much more that she longed to be able to prove to everyone, but most especially to John and Louise themselves, how little John’s treachery mattered to her. Of course the most effective way to do that would be to turn up at their wedding with another man—a man who was better-looking and richer than John, and who adored her. Oh, if only…

      In your dreams, she scoffed mentally at herself. There was no way that that scenario was likely to happen.

      ‘Jodie, you can’t possibly go to Italy on your own,’ David had protested, whilst he and Andrea had exchanged meaningful looks she hadn’t been supposed to see. It was probably just as well they were now in Australia on an extended visit to Andrea’s parents.

      ‘Why not?’ she had demanded with brittle emphasis. ‘After all, that’s the way I’m going to be spending the rest of my life.’

      ‘Jodie, we both understand how hurt and shocked you are,’ Andrea had added gently. ‘Don’t think that David and I don’t feel for you, but behaving like this isn’t going to help.’

      ‘It will help me,’ Jodie had answered stubbornly.