One Night: Red-Hot Secrets. Penny Jordan
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met her, walking on her own along the dusty road that led from the village to the castello, her head bare, her too-tight clothes revealing the sensual shape of her body, her eyes alive with wariness and intelligence. Her whole manner had been one of rebellious defiance against the old order of things and those who imposed it. She had been seen drinking beer from a bottle, laughing and dancing in the village square, encouraging the village’s young men to defy their parents.
She’d looked at him with such a clear-eyed assessing gaze that he had initially been amused by her boldness and then intrigued by Louise herself. No one, least of all a village girl, looked him directly in the eye like that.
He had asked her where she was going, and she had tossed her mane of darkly dyed hair and told him that there was nowhere to go and she couldn’t wait to get back to London. He had asked her how she would have been spending her time had she been in London, and she had surprised him by answering that she would have been visiting the National Portrait Gallery and preparing herself for the art degree she planned to start in the autumn term.
He had known even at that early stage exactly what kind of effect she was having on him. A twenty-two-year-old male’s body didn’t possess any subtlety. It knew what it wanted. And his had certainly let him know that it wanted her. Wanted her, but couldn’t possibly get involved with her. In London she might be a city girl, with all that meant, but here on Sicily she was a member of the community for which he was responsible. And yet even knowing that he had still invited her to go back to the castello with him, so that she could view his own portrait gallery.
She had blushed then, he remembered, suddenly looking so sweetly feminine and uncertain that he had immediately wanted to protect her.
‘You will come to no harm,’ he had assured her. ‘You have my word on that.’
‘The word of a duca and therefore of far more value than the word of a mere mortal?’ she had mocked him, with one of those lightning changes of response that had always managed to catch him off guard.
To have her taunting him like that, as though she was the one who was in control, had piqued him enough to have him exchanging the kind of sensually charged banter with her that, whilst perfectly acceptable, still held an erotic edge to it. And she had responded in kind, so that they had occupied their walk back to the castello like two expert duellists engaged in a verbal swordfight.
He had shown her the portrait gallery, and she had swiftly picked out those portraits painted by the great masters, surprising him by admiring his own Lucian Freud portrait and commenting that she was surprised that he had chosen such a modern and often controversial painter.
‘I bet Aldo Barado doesn’t like it,’ she had challenged him, and of course he had been forced to agree that she was right.
‘He is a good man,’ he had said in defence of the headman. ‘I value his advice and his knowledge.’
‘And his desire to keep his people locked into out-of-date customs—especially when those people are female? Do you value that as well?’ she had demanded.
‘He has his pride, and I would never want to damage that, but I can see that there are changes that need to be made—changes that I want and plan to make.’
Even now it still gave him a sharp shock of disbelief that he should have been able to confide in her so easily and so quickly. Even then there had been something about her that said she had an understanding of and a compassion for human nature that outweighed her years. Her choice of career had proved that.
It had been inevitable right from the start that he would take her to bed. Was it equally inevitable that she should have conceived his child?
His heart thudded into his ribs with truly ferocious blows.
It was simply because she had come to bed early that she couldn’t sleep, Louise assured herself as she stood on the balcony of the twin room she was sharing with Oliver, who was fast asleep in his own bed.
The gardens beyond the hotel sparkled with lights, in the trees and around the pools. Somewhere on the complex music was playing. From her balcony she could see couples strolling arm in arm. Couples. That was something that could never happen for her—being part of a couple. She’d always be far too afraid of somehow regressing to the needy, self-damaging girl she had been, and repeating her old mistakes. More important than that, though, was Oliver. She would never take the risk of introducing into their lives a man who might damage her son by letting either of them down.
Down on the ground below her a small group of teenagers passed by, reminding her of how she had been the last time she had come to Sicily. A teenager who had been punished so cruelly and so publicly. Louise could feel herself compressing her muscles against the savage bite of memories she didn’t want resurrected. Some things never stopped inflicting pain, no matter how much thick skin one tried to grow over the wound.
It had been midway through their holiday. Her father hadn’t spoken to her for three days because he was ashamed of her—both of how she looked and how she behaved.
Melinda, of course, had been looking like the cat who had got the cream, constantly drawing attention to Louise’s failings whilst making sure that her father saw how enchantingly pretty and well behaved her own daughters were in contrast. Pretty, self-confident little girls, who weren’t at all hesitant about begging sweetly for ice cream.
Since Melinda had come into her father’s life there had been a constant and—on Louise’s part—increasingly desperate war between them to win his loyalty. A war which Louise had felt deep down inside herself she was destined to lose—until she had met Caesar on the fateful solitary walk she had taken to escape from Aldo Barado’s son Pietro’s increasingly unpleasant attentions. She’d done nothing to encourage him. At least not in her own book. Yes, she’d initially enjoyed the fuss the local boys had made of her, feeling very grown up and streetwise compared with the village girls who had such cloistered lives. Yes, she’d broken an unwritten local rule by drinking beer in the village bar in the company of those boys, but she had never, ever given Pietro the kind of encouragement he claimed she had given him.
It was no exaggeration to say that meeting Caesar, realising who he was and accepting his invitation to the castello, had changed the whole course of her life. Not that she had guessed how radical that change would be on that first day. She had heard her grandparents talking about him, and knew the high regard, almost awe, with which he was revered, and had seized on what she had seen as an opportunity to outmanoeuvre Melinda via a relationship with Caesar. At eighteen she had been too naive to reason any further than that. It had been enough that Caesar had shown an interest in her.
By the time she had realised that being with Caesar was more important to her than winning her father’s approval it had been too late for her to pull back. She’d been in love with Caesar. When he’d visited the village she had made sure that she was there—even if that meant she had to frequent the bar and endure the unwanted attentions of the headman’s son to make sure she would bring herself to Caesar’s attention. She had hung on his every word, ignoring Pietro’s anger when the gang of boys who hung around with him made fun of him because he was being supplanted in her affections by their Duca.
‘You are a fool,’ Pietro had spat at her furiously. ‘He is not really interested in you! How could he be? He is a duca.’
It wasn’t any more than she had already told herself, but his unkind words had stung, making her determined to prove him and everyone else wrong. She hadn’t told him about those private ‘accidental’ meetings, when she had walked close to the castello, glancing up at the windows which Caesar had told her belonged to his private suite of rooms, and her persistence had been rewarded by Caesar’s appearance. Their walks together, the conversation they had shared, had been so precious to her. Caesar hadn’t laughed at her as others did.
It had only been a matter of a few very small steps for a girl of her emotional vulnerability to start creating inside her head a fairytale situation in which Caesar returned her love, and by doing so set her not just on a duchess’s throne but also a shining,