TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

       AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

       STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

       PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

      All about the author…

      Julia James

      JULIA JAMES lives in England with her family. Harlequin® novels were the first “grown-up” books she read as a teenager, alongside Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier, and she’s been reading them ever since. Julia adores the British countryside—in all its seasons—and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. She also has a special love for the Mediterranean—“the most perfect landscape after England!” She considers both ideal settings for romance stories. Since becoming a romance writer, she has, she says, had the great good fortune to start discovering the Caribbean, as well, and is happy to report that those magical, beautiful islands are also ideal settings for romance stories. “One of the best things about writing romance is that it gives you a great excuse to take holidays in fabulous places,” says Julia, “all in the name of research, of course!”

      Her first stab at novel writing was Regency romances. “But, alas, no one wanted to publish them,” she says. She put her writing aside until her family commitments were clear, and then renewed her love affair with contemporary romances. “My writing partner and I made a pact not to give up until we were published—and we both succeeded! Natasha Oakley writes for Harlequin Romance®, and we faithfully read each other’s works in progress and give each other a lot of free advice and encouragement.”

      In between writing Julia enjoys walking, gardening, needlework, baking “extremely gooey chocolate cakes” and trying to stay fit!

      CONTENTS

      PROLOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      EPILOGUE

      PROLOGUE

      ‘WHAT do you mean, you’re retaining the chairmanship?’

      The voice that had spoken was harsh, and clearly angry. But out of respect for the man he had addressed, a man more than twice his age, Allesandro di Vincenzo kept the anger under control.

      ‘The situation has changed,’ the other man replied sombrely. He was sitting in his leather chair, in the library of his eighteenth-century villa in the depths of the Roman countryside.

      Allesandro drew in his breath sharply. His lithe body was clad in a handmade suit from one of Italy’s most stylish and fashionable designers, and his sable feathered hair was superbly cut, setting off a face whose features could have graced an Italian movie star, let alone the chief executive of a major Italian company. He had dark, long-lashed eyes, high cheekbones, a finely cut nose, planed jaw and a sculpted, mobile mouth which, at the moment, was drawn in a taut, forbidding line.

      ‘But it’s been understood you would step down in my favour—’

      ‘Only by you, Allesandro,’ the older man retorted. ‘I never gave any legally binding undertaking. You simply assumed that when Stefano died—’ His voice broke off a moment, then he recovered, and continued. ‘And, as I have said, the situation has changed. Changed in a way I could never have envisaged.’

      For a moment the sombre look left him, and he shook his head, looking suddenly every one of his seventy years.

      ‘I could have had no idea—none at all…’ His voice trailed off.

      Allesandro’s brows drew together impatiently. His long-fingered hands pushed back his jacket, indenting around his lean hips.

      ‘What is this, Tomaso? No idea about what?’

      The old man looked at him again. He paused a moment before speaking, his voice heavy.

      ‘Stefano hid it from me completely. I discovered it now, only when I was able to face going through his personal effects. What I found shocked me to the core.’ He paused again, as if collecting himself, then continued, still in the same heavy voice.

      ‘The letters are over twenty-five years old—why he kept them I do not know. It cannot have been sentimental attachment, for the last of them says that it will be the final letter—that the writer accepts, finally, that Stefano will not reply. But for whatever reason they survived. And the fact that they did—’ his gaze rested unreadably on the younger man again ‘—changes everything.’

      Allesandro’s expression was closed.

      ‘How so?’ he prompted. There was wariness in his voice, and suspicion. The old man was being evasive, and Allesandro was running out of patience. Ever since Tomaso’s forty-five-year-old son, Stefano, doggedly bachelor, had smashed himself up in his power-boat ten months ago, Allesandro had been earmarked to move up from being the energetic and highly successful chief executive of the company founded by his late father and Tomaso Viale to being chairman of Viale-Vincenzo—with full control. He had given Tomaso time to mourn—even though