www.millsandboon.co.uk

      PROLOGUE

      JENNIFER looked at her reflection in the mirror. She had died and gone to heaven! Fantastic restaurant, fantastic food, even the ladies’ room was fantastic. Beige marble everywhere and delicate little hand towels, a basket of them, to be picked, used and discarded. Could things get any better? Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were glowing.

      She leaned forward and for the first time her physical shortcomings did not rush towards her in a wave of disappointment. She was no longer the too tall, too big-boned girl with the hair that was slightly too unruly and a mouth that was too wide. She was a sexy woman on the brink of the rest of her life and, best of all, James was out there, waiting for her. James, her date.

      Jennifer Edwards had known James Rocchi all her life. From the small window of her bedroom in the cottage that she had shared with her father, she could daily look out to the distant splendour of his family home—The Big House, as she and her father had always called the Rocchi mansion, with its sweeping drive and imposing acres of stunning Victorian architecture.

      As a kid, she had worshipped him and had trotted behind him and his friends as they had enjoyed themselves in the acres and acres of grounds surrounding the house. As a teenager, she had developed a healthy crush on him, blushing and awkward whenever he returned from boarding school, although, several years older than her, he couldn’t have been more oblivious. But she was no longer a teenager. She was now twenty-one years old, with a degree in French firmly behind her and a secondment to the Parisian office of the law firm in which she had spent every summer vacation working only days away.

      She was a woman and life couldn’t have felt any better than it did right now, right here.

      With a little sigh of pleasure, she applied a top up of her lip gloss, patted her hair, which she had spent ages trying to straighten and mostly succeeded, and headed back out to the restaurant.

      He was gazing out of the window and she took a few seconds to drink him in.

      James Rocchi was a stunning example of the sort of aggressively good-looking alpha male that could turn heads from streets away. Like his father, who had been an Italian diplomat, James was black-haired and bronze-skinned, only inheriting his English mother’s navy-blue eyes. Everything about him oozed lethal sex appeal, from the arrogant tilt of his head to the muscled perfection of his body. Jennifer had seen the way other women, usually small blonde things he had brought back with him from university, had followed him with their eyes as if they couldn’t get enough of him.

      She was still finding it hard to believe that she was actually here with him and she took a deep breath and reminded herself that he had asked her on a date. It gave her just the surge of confidence she needed to walk towards him and she blushed furiously as he turned to look at her with a slow smile on his face.

      ‘So… I’ve arranged a little surprise for you…’

      Jennifer could barely contain her breathless excitement. ‘You haven’t! What is it?’

      ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ he told her with a grin. He leaned back, angling his body so that he could stretch his legs out. ‘I still can’t believe that you’ve finished university and are heading off to foreign shores…’

      ‘I know, but the offer of a job in Paris was just too good to pass up. You know what it’s like here.’

      ‘I know,’ he agreed, understanding what she meant without her having to explain. Wasn’t this one of the great things about her? he thought. They had known each other for so long that there was hardly any need to explain references or, frankly, sometimes, to finish sentences. Of course, Paris for a year was going to be brilliant for her. Aside from her stint at university, which, in Canterbury, had hardly been a million miles away, he couldn’t think of a time that she had ever left here and, however beautiful and peaceful this slice of Kent was, she should be champing at the bit to spread her wings and fly farther afield. But he didn’t mind admitting to himself that he was going to miss her easy companionship.

      Jennifer helped herself to another glass of wine and giggled. ‘Three shops, a bank, two offices, a post office and no jobs! Well, I guess I could have thought about travelling into Canterbury… seeing what I could land there but…’

      ‘But that would have been a waste of your French degree. I guess John will miss having you around.’

      Jennifer wanted to ask if he would miss having her around. He worked in London, had taken over the running of his father’s company when, in the wake of his father’s death six years previously, the vultures had been circling, waiting to snap it up at a knock-down price. At the time he had barely been out of university but he had skipped the gap year he had planned and returned to take the reins of the company and haul it into the twenty-first century. London was his base but he travelled out to the country regularly. Would he miss having her around on those weekends? Bank holidays?

      ‘I won’t be gone for the rest of my life.’ Jennifer smiled, thinking of her father. ‘I think he’ll manage. He has his little landscaping business and, of course, overseeing your grounds. I’ve been working to get him computer literate so that we can Skype each other.’ She cupped her face in her hands and looked at him. He was only just twenty-seven but he looked older. Was that because he had been thrown into a life of responsibility at the highest possible level from a very young age? He had had little to do with his father’s company before his father had died. Silvio Rocchi had barely had anything to do with it himself. While he had carried out his diplomatic duties, he had delegated the running of the company to his right-hand men which, as it turned out, had not been the best idea in the world. When he died, James had been the young upstart whose job it had been to sack the dead wood. Had that forged a vein of steel inside him that had turned the boy quickly into the man?

      She could have spent a few minutes chewing over the conundrum but he was saying something, talking about her father.

      ‘And it’s just a thought but he might even enjoy having the place to himself, who knows?’

      ‘Well,