The Italian Duke's Wife. Penny Jordan

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СКАЧАТЬ of time. You are far too proud to marry some little village girl of no social standing, and besides…’ She paused, then gave him a taunting look and said softly, ‘If necessary I shall tell everyone about the child I was to have had, whom you made me destroy.’

      ‘Your lover’s child,’ he reminded her. ‘Not Gino’s child. You told me that yourself.’

      ‘But I shall tell others that it was your child. After all, many people know that Gino believed you loved me.’

      ‘I should have told him that I loathed you.’

      ‘He would not have believed you,’ Caterina told him smugly. ‘Just as he would not have believed the child was not his. How does it feel to know that you are responsible for the taking of an unborn child’s life, Lorenzo?’

      He took a step towards her, a look of such blazing fury in his eyes that she ran for the door, pulling it open and sliding through it.

      Lorenzo cursed savagely under his breath and then went back to the table where he had dropped his grandmother’s will.

      He had been filled with fury and disbelief when his grandmother’s notary had finally managed to make contact with him to tell him of his fears, and how he had managed to prevent Caterina from having all her own way by deliberately removing her name from the will so that it merely required Lorenzo to marry in order to inherit, rather than specifically having to marry Caterina.

      The notary, almost as elderly as his grandmother had been, had apologised to Lorenzo if he had done the wrong thing, but Lorenzo had quickly reassured him that he had not. Without the notary’s interference Caterina would have trapped him very cleverly. She was right about one thing. He did want the Castillo. And he intended to have it.

      Right now, though, he had to get away from it before he did something he would regret, he reflected as he strode out into the courtyard and breathed in the clean tang of the evening air, mercifully devoid of Caterina’s heavy, smothering perfume.

      CHAPTER TWO

      SHE was going to have to give in and do that U-turn she had sworn she would not make, Jodie admitted unhappily to herself. She hadn’t a clue where she was, and the bright moonlight was illuminating a landscape so barren and hostile that she was actually beginning to feel quite unnerved. To one side of her the ground dropped away with dramatic sharpness, and on the other it was broken by various jagged outcroppings of rock.

      Up ahead of her she could see where the narrow track widened out to provide a passing place. Determinedly she headed for it, and started to manoeuvre the vehicle so that she could turn round.

      Suddenly there was a loud noise, and the back wheels of the hire car began to spin whilst the car itself lurched horribly to one side. Thoroughly alarmed, Jodie put the car in neutral and climbed out, her alarm turning to despair as she saw that one of the rear wheels was stuck fast in a deep rut and looked as though it had a flat tyre.

      Now what was she going to do? She certainly couldn’t drive anywhere in it.

      She went back to the car, massaging her aching leg as she did so. She was tired, and hungry, and thoroughly miserable. Opening her bag, she reached for her mobile phone, and the wallet in which she had placed all the details of her travel arrangements and car hire.

      As she picked up the phone her eyes widened in dismay. Her phone was already on, and by the looks of it there was no signal. Not only that, but when she attempted to dial a number anyway the phone gave an ominous bleep and the display light died. She must have left it on, and now the battery was flat. How could she have been so stupid? She needed help, but what was she going to do? Stay here and wait for someone to drive past? She hadn’t seen another sign of life, never mind another vehicle, for miles. Walk? To where? Back down the hundreds of kilometres to the last village she had passed through what felt like hours ago? The pain in her leg was gnawing at her now. Should she walk on up into the mountains? She gave a small shiver.

      She hadn’t seen another driver in the whole of the time she had been on this road, but someone must use it because she could see tyre tracks in the dust. She looked up towards the mountains, and, as though somehow her own despair had conjured it up, she saw the distant lights of another vehicle racing towards her.

      The relief made her feel almost giddily weak.

      Savagely Lorenzo depressed the accelerator of the black Ferrari, letting the powerful car take his anger and turn it into a speed that demanded every ounce of his driving skill as he negotiated the twisting road in front of him.

      Caterina had been very clever, working on his grandmother in the way that she had. Had he been here…But he had not. He had been abroad, visiting the scene of the latest world disaster, helping to find ways of alleviating the misery of those who had been caught in it via his unofficial and voluntary role within the government, unifying different charities and providing hands-on administrative practical help and expertise.

      The severity of this particular crisis had meant that he had not even been able to return to Italy for his grandmother’s funeral, although he had managed to find time within his meeting-packed day to go into a local place of worship and add his prayers to those of her other mourners.

      A gentle, unsophisticated woman, who had once told him she had hoped as a young girl to become a nun, she had died peacefully in her sleep.

      The Castillo had come to her through her first husband who, in the way of things in aristocratic circles, had also been the second cousin of her second husband, Lorenzo’s own father, which was why the Castillo had been hers to leave as she wished.

      He had always been her favourite out of her two grandsons, Lorenzo knew. He had spent his holidays with her after the divorce of his parents, and it had been his grandmother he had turned to when his mother had announced that she was marrying her lover—a man Lorenzo detested.

      He had never been able to bring himself to forgive his mother for that. Not even now when she, like his father, was dead. Her actions had opened his eyes to the deceitful, self-serving ways of the female sex, and their determination to put themselves first whilst laying claim to a sanctity they did not possess. His mother had always insisted that her decision to divorce his father had been taken to spare him the pain of growing up in an unhappy home. She had lied, of course. His feelings had been the last thing on her mind when she had lain in the arms of her lover and chosen him above her husband and her son.

      The Ferrari snarled and bucked at the bad condition of the road. Lorenzo ignored its complaints and changed gear, hurling it into a sharp corner, and then cursed beneath his breath as, right in front of him, he saw a car blocking the road and a young woman standing beside it.

      Jodie winced as she heard the screech of brakes, choking on the dust raised by the Ferrari’s tyres as it skidded to a halt only inches away from the side of the hire car. Automatically she had made herself stand upright, instead of leaning on her vehicle for support, the moment she had seen the other car.

      What kind of madman drove like that down a road like this—and in the dark, too? she wondered shakily, holding on to the door of the car for support as she watched him uncoil himself from the driver’s seat and come towards her.

      ‘Disgraziata!’ A stream of Italian followed the snarlingly contemptuous word he had already hurled at her. But Jodie was not going to let herself be cowed by him—or by any man—ever again.

      ‘When you’ve quite finished…’ Jodie interrupted him, her own voice СКАЧАТЬ